It seems to me "Thou shalt not kill" is pretty clear and unambiguous.
All I can say is history is inevitably determined by the sick fucks that rise to the top.
All I can say is history is inevitably determined by the sick fucks that rise to the top.
It’s only an assumption that the mis-translation was unintentional. It could have been quite deliberate. Do not be too eager to deal out death in judgment.
Also, while I know the quote, that’s not the same as never dealing death and judgement. Tolkien was not a pacifist, but a soldier.
"When a foreigner resides among you in your land, do not mistreat them."
Leviticus 19:33... So I of course responded that there are a lot of verses that they don't agree with in chapters 18-20 related to the death penalty.
YouTube subsequently shadow banned me.
The word "kill" here is famously a translation issue. The original Hebrew word means something closer to (but not precisely) "commit murder".
Don't assume that the King James translation would capture the kind of nuance you are asserting is absent.
In isolation, and if that was what it said in the source language, sure.
When the same source (either of the books of the Bible containing -- slightly different -- versions of the decalogue) also includes lots of specific commands to kill from the same origin as the "Thou shalt not kill", it gets murkier, and when also the "Thou shalt not kill" is arguably closer in the source language to "do not murder", well...
(Which is not to defend the practice at issue, just to point out that the decalogue is not, alone, necessarily a great way to make the point that it should have been clearly wrong within the religious framework it nominally sought to server; I think there are good arguments, both within and without that framework, just not that one on its own.)
"Thou shalt not kill" isn't a sin because human life is inherently valuable to God (reading the OT, it clearly isn't) but because humans are God's property, and so only God, who created humans, has the right to decide when and how they die. Under the particularly cruel and brutal Bronze Age ethics from which the Abrahamic God as a concept was derived, killing is perfectly justifiable when God wills it, and is only a sin otherwise because it defies God's will.
...which shouldn't even be possible if God is omnipotent but that's a whole other can of worms.
On that note, who is being cruel here: A God who imposed rules on how he wants his creatures to behave to his other creatures; or a creature who hurts his other creatures, and then calls God cruel for stopping it?
Edit, to your reply:
> I know what omnipotent means. The contradiction is that it shouldn't be possible to violate the will of an omnipotent God.
You will have to provide some citations for such an axiom that aren’t based on an atheist stereotype of “omnipotent” and “will.”
TLDR of a Christian perspective:
God is love. Love does not exist outside of God. Love is defined as willing the good of another person. As such, love is fundamentally a choice. As such, humans must have a choice to love. To do otherwise, would make a human a robot. God knows what choice we will make, but does not force it. (A parent who knows the teen will not resist the cake on the counter, does not force the teen to eat cake.) It does not follow, that if humans refuse to love, God should nullify all consequences.
On that note, Hell was not made for humans but for Satan, and we as humans have only the ability to choose love (God) or absence of love (Hell). A person who has chosen to not love, logically cannot live with love itself. Viewing it as humans choosing to damn themselves by refusing to love, would be a more accurate perspective.
You can invoke "free will", but that's just another layer of abstraction for the same problem. If free will truly exists, then God isn't omnipotent. If He does, free will cannot exist.
>On that note, who is being cruel here: A God who imposed rules on how he wants his creatures to behave to his other creatures; or a creature who hurts his other creatures, and then calls God cruel for stopping it?
God isn't cruel for imposing rules, God is cruel for allowing evil to persist and for punishing humans with eternal torment for a state of sin they cannot absolve themselves of. The God of the Bible is very obviously not good, or just, or even self-consistent. More than once He just lets humans into heaven because He likes them.
But yes humans are cruel, too.
This doesn't seem logical to me, but perhaps I'm missing something. Can God not be all powerful and yet decide to allow humans to make decisions for themselves?
Just thinking about my own children, while I am not all powerful, I certainly am powerful enough to force them to comply with most of my instructions. Yet I do not, since part of raising them is giving them the freedom to make mistakes and (hopefully) learn from them and do better.
You can't be omniscient and omnipotent on one hand, and blame your creature for anything it does on the other. Because you are effectively in charge.
Like any parent with babies.
While you don't _know_ all about how they function, you learn to get a grasp of it, and you control most of their environment, and most of their very own, at first. They are babies. You job is to allow them to make decisions for themselves by teaching, supporting, caring for, loving them, and letting them grow, become autonomous, emancipate, and live their life. And live it without you because ultimately, that's what happens.
And as you do, you become less powerful, less all-knowing towards them (if you didn't, you'd keep full responsibility for everything they do).
So, come back to God, if He's omniscient, omnipotent, He's also all in charge. The creatures may have some will or not, whatever they do is already known in advance.
Here is another Christian (Catholic even) perspective.
> God is love. [...] God knows what choice we will make, but does not force it. > It does not follow, that if humans refuse to love, God should nullify all consequences.
If the omniscient, omnipotent God knows what choice we will make, He may not have forced it, but He did set the conditions and dynamic systems for this choice to happen, as He already knows, ahead of time. It's basically the same. There lies the contradiction (or let's call it paradox) of that argument.
> On that note, Hell was not made for humans but for Satan, and we as humans have only the ability to choose love (God) or absence of love (Hell). A person who has chosen to not love, logically cannot live with love itself. Viewing it as humans choosing to damn themselves by refusing to love, would be a more accurate perspective.
That is why Hell/Heaven is likely more a matter of (changing) perspective (how do I live/act with what I have) rather than a definitive objective place. Hell/Heaven is not some mythical afterlife meritocratic estate, it's firstly right here, right now, in each of us, the sum of all our actions and relationships.
And that is consistent with what is in the scriptures, what psychology and neuroscience tells us, and what common daily experience shows.
This is also why the "God is love" mantra is a good thing as long as it's not tweaked into a bizarre reverse way to justify that non-believers/observants of a specific ruleset of a specific religion have chosen to not love, or are "unsaved" and should therefore either be converted or suppressed.
There are other commandments that are characteristic of christianity, but this is not one of them. "Thou shalt not" commandments are basically the same in all cultures. The "thou shalt" commandments are not.
The Middle Ages spanned hundreds of years across countries that had very different views from each other. If you can think of something strange, it probably happened. Just one example: Women might not be able to own property in one town, but can literally vote alongside princes in another (abbesses in Medieval Germany). Stereotypes are rarely directly applicable to the whole period, any more than me digging up a stereotype of an 1850s Californian would be applicable today.
Secondly though, it downplays the likelihood that the majority of priests, bishops, and cardinals, did labor in good faith and, at least on paper, viewed the rules imposed as equally applicable to themselves. Whether they followed them or not, even the serf believed God would avenge. I would say a more accurate comparison for the nuanced authority and love-hate relationship might be our modern police.
Indulgences, crusades, excommunication, infallibility of the popes and only God knows what else. These are not stereotypes, they are facts. The belief that God would avenge is a Biblical fact, all the others was pure fantasy, used as controlling tools. That is history.
Facing reality is never easy, just necessary for avoiding future calamities. Here in the states, we avoid truthful history all the time, hopefully not to an eventual disaster.