Hi Liberty,
Enjoyed your post. You said:
"After years of reading the Bible it was clear to me that the Hebrews were instructed by their God to kill on a consistant basis anyone they deemed as unfit to live including women,children, babies, and pets."
This is an interesting topic. My father fought in Viet Nam and along with his plane crew killed hundreds of North Vietnamese so I have thought about this issue a lot. Is killing sometimes a good thing?
The Isrealites were surrounded by hostile tribes and cultures. A look at the history of that time reveals a more savage, violent world than we have today. I don't see how logically a base for the birth of Christianity could be established without violence, considering the cultures around the Isrealites were equally bloodthirsty and violent, and sacrificed their children to their Gods.
As to the killing of women and babies and pets, my country, the USA, had no problem bombing civilians in World War II (Dresden, Germany)
when we fought the Nazis. We certainly killed many women, children and pets when we dropped two atomic bombs on Japan. I see the above actions as extremely distasteful, but utterly logical. In the case of Japan, it ended the war and made unecessary an invasion by land.
This saved American and Japanese lives.
You used the phrase "innocent animals." I feel that way toward the pets I've had, my cats. I have felt animals are anything but innocent when I had a run-in with a bear in the middle of the night deep in the Yosemite forest, or when scuba diving and coming across a shark or large barricuda. Watching the Discovery Channel, I get the impression there is little that is innocent about animals, especially after I watched "The Trials of Life" series. If anything, animals are more savage than the worst of mankind.
As to Job's children being killed, the Bible states that God allowed it, but did not do it. Satan murdered them by causing a windstorm to collapse a house on top of them. If the Bible is true and these children are resurrected to eternal life in complete peace and happiness, do you think they will really care what happened to them in their previous life?
As to God's own son, it was men who murdered him. If the Isrealites hadn't done it by coercing the Romans to do it, somebody else would have had him killed eventually. He was too powerful a person and that threatened the established religious/political power structure.
The fact is, Jesus wasn't stupid. He saw many Jewish radicals crucified in his time, I'm sure. He knew what would happen to him too if he persisted in his teachings.
You made reference to a pattern in the Bible. I see one in world history. Man dominates man to his injury. History seems like a succesive group of men who gain power and then try to keep it at all costs, much to the misery of the general population. This is political as well as economic power. The Bible says this pattern will not end until God intervenes. I don't agree with everything in the Bible, and don't claim to understand it all, but this seems to be an irrefutable truth. As long as any kind of fear exists in this world, there will be violence. There is nothing about the history of mankind that gives me any confidence that we can establish a harmonious world system that works before we destroy ourselves through religious fanaticism, political fanaticism, or struggling for political/economic power. Unfortunately the world possesses the means to quite capably wipe out every human being off the face of the planet in one short nuclear exchange.
Just my two "sense."
