Monday, April 18, 2005

Nobody Can Do it Like God Can

Dear Internet Diary,

The Sixth Commandment:
Thou shalt observe the feast of weeks, even of the first fruits of the wheat harvest, and the feast of ingathering at the year's end.

The Pentacost recalls God's revelation of the Torah to the Jewish people. For this festival, the Lord clearly commands, in his inerrant, absolute commandments, that we must bake two loaves of special bread and burn nine perfect one year-old lambs, a goat, a ram and a bull. Then you have to harvest the grain around your field and leave it there. When God became a man, he changed his unchanging mind, perhaps because he realized what a bitch it all was. At least, that's the excuse I'd give if I were a christian.

This is the commandment Christians prefer over the original one:
Thou shalt not kill.

This commandment remains the same whether it's Catholic, Hebrew, or Protestant, but remains a hotly contested and re-interpreted commandment. This is because we rather like our governments to kill us, we love wars, we like to defend ourselves, and we happen to be meat-eaters. We like to pretend that "thou shalt not kill" doesn't apply when it's legal. We don't like to think of the 377,000 + non-flood corpse people God personally killed in the bible. That's because when God does it , it's good. After all, it says "thou" shalt not kill.

Actually, the Ten Commandments verses are just about the only passages in the bible where "good" killing doesn't happen. It's like comic relief. Perhaps that's why we like to focus on it.

But thanks for listening, diary.

3 comments:

Aaron Kinney said...

Ive heard many thiests, including Matt Slick, insist that the word is not "kill" but "murder" as if this somehow helps their argument.

Using the word murder instead of kill only makes things worse. For what is murder? The unlawful killing of someone. Well who makes it unlawful? Humans! So if it is "murder" as Matt Slick and others insist, then we can make all killing legalized so that nobody can EVER break that commandment! Or we can make murder mean the killing of a Christian, or for that matter, a white person. We can make "murder" into any narrow or broad definition we like.

So much for absoluteness! Either way, the Chrisitan loses. If the word is kill, then there is no context and the Christian is either a hypocrite because he needs to kill to eat, or the Christian dies because he refuses to kill to eat (vegetarians are not safe either: plants are alive and are killed when eaten).

But if the word is "murder," then it all becomes relative to whatever humans define as "murder" since it just means the unlawful killing of a person, and we can make those laws to say whatever we want.

Hellbound Alleee said...

Then these folks would have to agree that abortion is ok. Unless they want to contradict themselves and use their own secular reasoning to say that Abortion is Murder, even though it is lawful. The bible does not say so anywhere. The Ten commandments cannot be used, if they insist is says "murder."

Aaron Kinney said...

Excellent conclusion, Alleee.

Check and mate, as they say :)