Tuesday, February 18, 2020

Cultural genocide

@RandalRauser
Conservative Christians tend to be among the fiercest critics of cultural relativism ... except when it comes to the cultural relativism that says genocide is morally abhorrent today but it was a fine way to deal with the Canaanites.

i) Progressive Arminian theologian Randal Rauser never misses a chance to remind the world that he's 3/4 atheist and 1/4 nominal Christian. 

ii) God promised the descendants of Abraham a homeland. The Canaanites had forfeited the right to live their due to gross depravity. God held the Israelites to the same standard. If they desecrated the Promised Land, they'd be deported or exiled. God made the Promised Land an emblem of holiness. 

Under the new covenant, no piece of land is an emblem of holiness. If, however, the same conditions prevailed today that justified God's original policy, it would not be morally abhorrent to follow God's orders. 

I follow the definition recognized in international law:

any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

i) OT holy war wasn't committed with the intent to destroy the Canaanites due to their national, ethnic, or racial identity. They weren't executed because they were Canaanites. To the contrary, OT pagans were invited to convert to the one true faith. 

ii) Canaanites in the Promised Land were free to self-evacuate. The only Canaanite military targets were those who chose to stay behind and fight. 

iii) There's nothing sacrosanct about religion. Religion can be true or false, good or evil. Depends on the religion. 

There's a sense in which Christian missionaries commit cultural "genocide" when they convert Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, animists, and witches to Christianity. Some ideologies ought to be destroyed (e.g. Nazism, Communism). That doesn't single out any particular means. In some cases it can be peaceful. Rational persuasion.   

4 comments:

  1. --Conservative Christians tend to be among the fiercest critics of cultural relativism ... except when it comes to the cultural relativism that says genocide is morally abhorrent today but it was a fine way to deal with the Canaanites.--

    I see he's imputing inaccurate definitions that his targets do not actually hold, once again.

    Conservative Christians don't uphold 'cultural relativism' whether with modern contexts or the Conquest.

    Our standard is "If God said it, we back it". God said abortion/homosexuality/pre-and-extra-marital sex are wrong, God also said He as the author of all life and owner of the world wants the Canaanites out or executed.

    How is that 'relativism' in any sense?

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  2. After the walls of Jericho came tumbling down, any smart canaanite would have known the jig is up. And high tailed it out of Canaan. Staying and fighting would be futile.

    Rauser doesn't seem to accept God's sovereignty.

    Also, the history of the Israelites show they had many self inflicted wounds because they didn't follow God's command to drive them out.

    As a lawyer, I kill myself laughing when someone refers to "international law".

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  3. Yes. Referring to international law as the fulcrum for deciding what is right or wrong only demonstrates 1 cor 2 and the foolishness of man's wisdom.

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    1. It also makes the West-centric assumption that JudeoChristian values are accepted and affirmed by other cultures and religions.

      They are flatly not.

      'Universal humanism' is nothing of the sort, what atheistic liberals assume to be 'basic human rights' are a result of the Christian heritage of the West. Tom Holland (https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/religion/2016/09/tom-holland-why-i-was-wrong-about-christianity and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7eSyz3BaVK8) and Richard Dawkins have been on a roll recently pointing this out.

      (Such infuriating irony, then, when those same secularists turn around and accuse the Bible of trampling human rights!)

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