In the animal kingdom, among many animals eg lions, the dominant male will often kill off the offspring of his predecessor. Is that infanticide justified? Are these animals being cruel?
Don't be silly. I see that you're trying to justify disgusting activity as being essential for the survival of the human race. I also see that some ancient priest - when faced with the option of telling his flock to rape for volk en vaderland, and seeing his volk starve in the desert - might go with the rape angle.
I just wonder if anyone back then bothered to ask the women what they thought about such a plan.
You seem to not understand that. Remember these are not instructions, they are historical accounts.
Fluff again. Except in this case, it's fluff given an almighty (pardon the pun) dose of credence by way of being in a holy book. And you seriously can't expect anyone backward enough to want to rape *anyone* to sit down and differentiate between historical accounts and religious edicts before he goes about his odious ways.
The concept of love and respect for everyone comes mainly from the NT - from Christ.
And it's a good one, too. Makes you wonder what all that Old Testament stuff is still doing there.
That's the key message of the Bible. If you don't have that, well the rest may as well be fluff.
Hrm. Umm. Christ wanted everyone to practice love and respect/We should worship Christ so that we can try to emulate him.
So the key message is that Christ is awesome and look at all the awesome things he did? I would hope that somewhere in there is the idea that we should also try to emulate Christ's awesomeness (otherwise what would be the point), and when we get to that point we realise that we don't need Christ at all. We can look to plenty of other sources for guidance and most of them will say much the same thing, viz that being nice to other people is awesome.
You don't need to follow
anyone to live by that ideal.
[Law about not eating pork]
Which Christians don't follow.
See? Fluff!
I could say everything is fluff. Dawkins is fluff. Obama is fluff. You think I don't laugh at the BS I hear every day?
Of course it is! It's fluff which conveys the message in a way that will be understandable to its audience. Same as the fluff in the Bible - it helped convey a message to a select audience. A desert tribesman 4000 years ago isn't going to have much truck with socialistic economic theories, but when it comes to great big beards in the sky hitting his foes with rocks, he knows where he stands.
Thing is - this is the present. The message hasn't changed much, but the presentation is more concerned with backing up the message with rational thought, rather than a more primitive directive of "I say it, you do it." We may demand more advanced fluff these days, but it's fluff nevertheless. Humans find it difficult to think in purely abstract terms.
However, seeing as modern fluff can't fall back on fictitious gods, it needs to stand up on its own.
I don't think that rape thing has been used since ancient Israel.
I don't give a rat's ass. It's still there and it still has religious credibility. That is the problem.
That's why the Catholic Church has been interpreting the Bible, as has the Anglican, Russian Orthodox, Methodist etc. Reading the Bible alone is not enough, you must understand it in context.
You read this bit, right?
"...I bet you if you ask him to point to the precise verse which said it was okay, he wouldn't be able to without having to put a LOT of stuff into his own horrible context."
If you put bits of the Bible - most religious texts, actually - into a certain context, you can get them to say whatever you want them to say. Just like this chap did.
That is how the Catholic Church etc manages to take a book full of laws about shellfish and stories about first-borns being slaughtered because a king was being a twat, and turn it into something for moral guidance and spiritual upliftment. (Allegedly.) Similarly, others can take a book concerned with the praise and worship of a guy who was really rather top, and contextualise it their way to say - for example - that Jesus don't like doctors who do abortions so it's okay to kill 'em back.
I know it's an extreme example. So is this rape story. But in light of these examples -- which keep coming, by way way -- we have to ask ourselves whether or not the excuse of "but they took it out of context!" actually holds any water any more. Personally, I don't believe it does.
So we've come to the point where all that ancient fluff is really just causing misunderstandings and harm. If the Bible wasn't a religious relic, I'm sure no-one would have any problems with leaving all that nasty whacked-out **** out of the latest edition. But you can't change something written by a god because that would blasphemous... Are you seeing the problem?
I've said this before but it's worth saying again: Religion ultimately fails because it fails to evolve. Stories like this - extreme and (hopefully) isolated as they are - just help accelerate that failure.
And the crux of the matter is that you can live a fulfilled and happy life without having to follow a god. You really, really can.
