Monday, June 17, 2013
But Who Is the Victim?
The key to reading biblical texts from the standpoint of the victim is identifying who the victim is. This comes down to believing or disbelieving the Bible. If we make the Bible's villains out to be the victims, we are merely choosing to side against the Word of God when it decides the identities of people.
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There's a passage in Numbers where a man is brutally stoned to death for gathering wood on the Sabbath. If you haven't seen a video of a stoning, you should. It's not a quick death.
ReplyDeleteIf I'm forbidden from having sympathy for such a person, what am I supposed to feel towards people who do worse things than "picking up wood"? It doesn't leave much room for empathy for anyone, does it?
That's the point I was making. You paint the victim as the criminal who is basically flipping off God and destroying the faith of the entire community. You don't understand what the man was saying by ignoring the Sabbath. It was a denial of God and His kingship, and an act that proclaimed that God was not capable of controlling chaos and delivering His people through it. It was, therefore, a traitorous act against God and man. But that is the way the Bible presents it. You can choose to see the criminal as the victim or God, Israel, and all of mankind. You can choose to see the crime as not as bad, but that's only because you don't see the offense to the victim (i.e., God and His people) as anything serious. If you saw it from the perspective of God, which is what you get in the Scripture, you wouldn't see it as some lighter crime.
ReplyDeleteYou should feel sympathy with God and the victim. Only in our flip-flopped culture does the abuser/oppressor/destroyer receive more sympathy than the abused/oppressed/destroyed.
"because you don't see the offense to the victim"
ReplyDeleteSix million Jews thrown into ovens in Nazi Germany, thousands killed by tsunamis, earthquakes and floods every year, children dying of starvation and AIDS across the globe. None of this "threatens the faith" of fanatical fundamentalists in the supposed goodness or omnipotence of their deity.
A man picking up sticks on the "wrong day" of the week does, however.
This doesn't strike you as inconsistent, perhaps even insane?
Another award winning argument from James. There is a reason why you believe the way you do, and it's not because you reason well.
ReplyDeleteYou're fallacy is primarily in this statement: "None of this 'threatens the faith' of fanatical fundamentalists in the supposed goodness or omnipotence of their deity."
Every evil "threatens the faith," but what you don't get is that all evil begins with a rejection of God's Kingship. The other evils you mentioned would not be possible without the committing of the same type of sin that the man ignoring God's commandment, concerning the observance of a day where His Sovereignty is acknowledged, committed. The desire to rule ourselves is given to us when we reject God's rule, so get used to tsunamis, earthquakes, floods, starvation, and AIDS, because it's what we asked for. You want to be God. You deal with all of that without Him. You want to live in a world without all of that, then you need to submit to His Sovereignty and be a part of the world to come. But arguing that somehow this is "no big deal" is the same as arguing that living in chaos without God is no big deal, and that is exactly what the man rejecting the Sabbath was teaching people.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_DFbw4IW-s
ReplyDeleteSaw the movie a long time ago. It was horrible that an innocent was killed in such a way. But would you feel the same if I showed you a picture of Hitler being stoned? You fail to see the absolute evil in the man's actions, and by doing so, prove the point I made above. You identify with the criminal because you are the criminal. You do not identify with the victims of his crime, even though you are one of them as well, because you do not see as God sees and use your own finite and rebellious judgment to determine what is really good and what is really bad.
ReplyDeleteIronically, without revelation from God, you have no ability to do so. It's just your arbitrary opinion based on the standards by which others have raised you inside of your cultural box. You should have no more disdain for the stoning of an innocent as you would the act of giving to the poor. What is your objective standard of judgment for determining that what is ordered in Scripture is wrong? What is your objective standard of judgment for determining that the stoning of an innocent, like Soraya, was wrong?
Innocent? That's the problem though. It doesn't seem you think anyone is innocent. *Everyone* deserves the death she received by vicious men, no matter what their transgression. If picking up sticks on the Sabbath is a crime worthy of death, what do the rest of us deserve? Why should we feel empathy for anyone?
ReplyDelete"You do not identify with the victims of his crime"
I certainly do. The willingness of an entire nation to see the mass extermination of millions of people boggles my mind. The photos of piles of dead bodies bulldozed into ditches sicken me.
I don't know what to do with people who commit such crimes. Should they be separated from the rest of us, locked away and imprisoned so that they cannot inflict their evil on others? Of course. I'm not going to play a part in taking their lives, though. I cannot see the life of someone ebb away at my own hands without feeling that my own soul has been tainted, even if the person in question is by all definition a "bad person".
There is difference between spiritual innocence before God and civil innocence. No one is spiritually innocent, but there are plenty of people who are civilly innocent. So everyone does deserve death before God, but everyone does not deserve death by the civil magistrates, mobs, etc.
ReplyDelete"I certainly do. The willingness of an entire nation to see the mass extermination of millions of people boggles my mind. The photos of piles of dead bodies bulldozed into ditches sicken me."
I wasn't commenting on your feelings toward it. I know it sickens you. It sickens me. But I have a standard of morality that goes beyond my subjective cultural box. It didn't sicken Hitler and many of his Nazis. What makes your moral compass better than theirs? Without revelation from God, you have no basis for judging their actions as evil beyond your own personal views and the views of the cultural in which you have been indoctrinated to view such things as sickening.
"I don't know what to do with people who commit such crimes. Should they be separated from the rest of us, locked away and imprisoned so that they cannot inflict their evil on others? Of course. I'm not going to play a part in taking their lives, though. I cannot see the life of someone ebb away at my own hands without feeling that my own soul has been tainted, even if the person in question is by all definition a "bad person"."
That's your liberal cultural speaking. You would have the victims pay for their criminal's living expenses. That is the exact opposite of biblical justice, which has the criminals pay for the financial survival of their victims or victim's family. For murderers, for the most part, the community was to execute them in an effort to communicate that such was unacceptable to the entire community. The entire community cannot behead someone, but they can stone them. The removal of a chaotic agent who murders is a good act, and any unwillingness to do it is a condemnation of the victims. Your justice is upside down.