Reza Aslan: Sam Harris and "New Atheists" aren't new, aren't even atheists
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Anonymous
Tell that to the editors of every major news outlet, even Fox. Also, it’s cute that you edited out yet part about atheist victimhood. |
Anonymous
Lol, sure you did. |
Anonymous
+1 |
Anonymous
| The commies are murderous no question about that, but if you look back at Exodus you can see God and his soldiers Moses and Joshua were probably the most genocidal, despicable people in history. Pol Pot doesn't come close to the sheer brutality of the Israelites when they got to Canaan. I can cite it chapter and verse if you want but it's too revolting to read even in this day and age. |
Anonymous
Go back a few pages and read the stats. Did Moses if Joshua kill tens of millions of people? No? Then you’re ignorant. |
Anonymous
Well the number of people in Canaan in 1400 b.c. or thereabouts made "tens of millions"of deaths impossible. But on a percentage basis it was probably greater than the commies in the last century. Truly revolting. I mean that. Pol Pot wasn't even that murderous. |
Anonymous
Some people in the middle east have a very long memory. The "Crusaders" may have been 500 years ago, but these stupid invasions are not easily forgotten even today. We're still dealing with the consequences of these religiously motivated assaults on the middle east (although acquiring booty was a big incentive too  ).
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Anonymous
Pol Pot: The Cambodian Genocide took place between 1975-1979 by a political party named The Khmer Rouge, their leader was Pol Pot. They led a four year reign of terror in Democratic Kampuchea, the name for Cambodia during the regime. Throughout the country, the Khmer Rouge made 167 prisons in which they tortured millions of people. In the 343 killing fields, a quarter of Cambodia’s population were murdered (nearly 3 million people). The rest of the world didn't know what was happening in Cambodia, so no one did anything to help. Pot was born Saloth Sar in 1925 in Prek Shauv, outside the village of Angkor Thom, Siem Reap. His family lived as Khmer but were of mixed ethnicity, Khmer and Chinese. His father was a prosperous farmer and the family were considered moderately wealthy for their time. They were devout monks and when the young Saloth Sar moved to Phnom Penh, he became a novice monk for a few months. Pol Pot would later have all monks murdered. He was educated at some of Cambodia’s elite schools and was an intelligent man listening intently to teachers and professors during his education. Under his regime, he would kill these same people as he was paranoid, he didn’t want anyone alive whom he considered more intelligent than him. Peasants were his heroes, and it was farmers, boys and teenagers he appealed to, recruiting them for his army with promises of a better life, a steady job and equality. Pol Pot joined the Communist Party Khmer Rouge, which was founded on the policies of Maoism. The Khmer Rouge Party translated means “Red Khmer”, the word red stood for communism. He later became its leader, and eventually the Prime Minister of Democratic Kampuchea taking his country to war with Vietnam. He idolised Chairman Mao, and used Vladimir Lenin in his quotes. His vision was to create “a new Cambodia” where everyone was equal. No rich, no poor, no one was better than anyone. He wanted a pure communal self-sufficient society. If you have read George Orwell’s “Animal Farm” you can already see the parallels. The Killing Fields People were forced to work sowing rice, however any harvests were taken away from them causing wide spread starvation. They were told the food was for front line fighters, they need it more than you. Most people died of starvation but that was part of the plan. Starvation and malnutrition was cheap and easy. Orphans were trained as child soldiers, taught how to use guns, how to fight, to crush Vietnam, their enemy. They were made to plant landmines, thousands and thousands which lay like a ticking time-bombs when the war later finished. Anyone they thought were against the regime, or were thought to know people who opposed it were put into prison, tortured and starved. High ranking officials were interrogated over and over, day after day. Some died, others were taken to the killing fields. Pol Pot killed anyone he believed to be cleverer than him. If you looked intelligent, wore glasses, spoke another language, were a classical or popular singer, you would be put to death. Prisoners’ hands would be checked, if they were soft it would be assumed they were intelligent and sent to the Killing Fields. His paranoia knew no bounds, he even killed members of his own family. Towards the end of the revolution, paranoia was rife and people within the regime started to turn on each other. To make it easier to round up prisoners, people from the countryside were tricked into coming along. They believed they were coming to help; doctors, lawyers, teachers, nuns, monks, people with trades all travelled from their homes thinking they could help victims. Unbeknown to them, they would become victims themselves. In the early years, two to three trucks would arrive every few weeks and most prisoners were killed that night. From 1978 trucks would arrive daily and there were too many people to dispatch in one evening, so some were taken to a holding area overnight and killed the next day. As many as 300 people were killed every day. In this one killing field, 20,000 were murdered. It is thought that some people were relieved at the thought of death. They had suffered enough. Each morning, a messenger was sent to inform the guards how many people were coming so they could dig the appropriate sized graves. When a truck full of people arrived that evening in the dark, executioners were waiting by the graves. The lights were turned on and prisoners were asked to kneel down in front of the pit. The killing tree – the worst story was yet to come The most horrific stories were still to come. A farmer was digging for potatoes and uncovered a mass grave. When he looked around, he saw a tree covered with hair, brain and blood stains. This tree was used to kill babes in front of their mothers. Their heads were smashed against the tree and tossed into the pit. Women were stripped naked and thrown in, many had been raped. One grave held more than 100 women and children. 
I cannot believe a thinking human being typed the words “Pol Pot wasn’t even that murderous.” |
Anonymous
It’s amazing what people will defend. |
Anonymous
Then you haven't read the book of Joshua. try 6:21, 24. Then try 8:18-29. Or Joshua 10:10, and 25-26. And on and on. City after city, all of the souls killed. Everyone, man woman and child. See Joshua 10: 28, and 30 (Libnah), 31 (Lachish), 33-35 (Eglon), 38: (Debir). So, sorry, yeah I reiterate Pol Pot wasn't nearly as murderous as Joshua. |
Anonymous
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According to the Old Testament, the Canaanites and other tribes in the land widely practiced child sacrifice, incest, bestiality, and other behaviors that almost everyone in history, including today, rightly regard as unspeakably, grossly immoral.
The Canaanites worshipped a deity called Molech, to whom, according to the Old Testament, the local pagan peoples sacrificed their children in burnt offerings. John Day’s study, published by Cambridge University Press, argued convincingly that Molech was the name given in Canaanite religion to the god of the underworld. He showed that the same deity is mentioned in the Ugaritic writings (MLK), the Mari tablets (Muluk), and in Akkadian records. In 1978 an Egyptologist reported that relief pictures on an Egyptian temple showed Canaanite children being sacrificed while their cities were under attack. That the Phoenicians, who at one time controlled Canaan, sacrificed children to their gods is well documented. “Archaeologists have recovered the gruesome evidence not only at the great Phoenician city of Carthage (in modern Tunisia), but also in Sicily, Sardonia, and Cyprus.” It is now clear to biblical scholars that the Old Testament really does refer to child sacrifice and that it really did occur. 6Wherewith shall I come before Jehovah, and bow myself before the high God? Shall I come before him with burnt-offerings, with calves a year old? 7Will Jehovah be pleased with thousands of rams, or with ten thousands of rivers of oil? Shall I give my first-born for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul? 8He hath showed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth Jehovah require of thee, but to do justly, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with thy God? (Micah 6:6-8) Israelites sometimes did practice human sacrifice, including the sacrifice of their children. At least two kings are reported to have done so (2 Kings 16:3; 21:6). According to the book of Isaiah, the Lord condemned Israel for sacrificing children to their idols (Is. 57:5-9). Jeremiah accused the Jews in Jerusalem of setting up idols in the temple and sacrificing their children in a nearby valley (Jer. 7:30-32; 19:5-6; 32:35). Ezekiel cited the practice as one of the reasons that Judah was plunged into the Babylonian exile (Ezek. 16:20-21; 23:36-39). The Old Testament does not teach that genocide has any sort of general justification. There is no teaching here along the lines of saying that if a nation is wicked enough then anyone has the moral justification to go wipe them out, including men, women, and children. Rather, the Old Testament claims that it was necessary to completely wipe out certain peoples in order to stop the cycle of perversity from repeating generation after generation, in order to protect Israel from succumbing itself to the madness (an apparently accurate description of Canaanite culture). This drastic measure was necessary to create a nation that retained at least some knowledge and worship of the true God alone and some recognition (however limited) of his moral standards. Archeology gives some hints about what the Canaanites did. On one High Place, archeologists found several stone pillars and great numbers of jars containing remains of newborn babies. When a new house was built, a child would be sacrificed and its body built into the wall to bring good luck to the rest of the family. Firstborn children were often sacrificed to Molech, a giant hollow bronze image in which a fire was built. Parents placed their children in its red hot hands and the babies would roll down into the fire. The sacrifice was invalid if a parent displayed grief. Mothers were supposed to dance and sing. The Israelites later copied this practice in a valley near Jerusalem called Gehenna. Hundreds of jars containing infant bones have been found there. There was a great deal of sexual sin among the Canaanites. They believed that cultic prostitution was important to encourage their gods, Baal and Ashtoreth to mate so that the land would be fertile and rain would come. VD may have been rampant. Many young people forced into prostitution were abused to the point of death. Even the surrounding pagan nations were appalled by Canaanite religious practices. Yet God did not hurry to judge the Canaanites. In Genesis 15:16, God tells Abraham: In the fourth generation your descendants will come back here, for the sin of the Amorites has not yet reached its full measure. God gave the Canaanites 400 years while Israel was in Egypt. After Israel passed through the Red Sea, He waited 40 more years while Israel wandered in the wilderness. The people of Canaan knew Israel was coming, and that God had given the land to them, according to the Rahab, a Canaanite, in Joshua 2:9: “I know that the LORD has given this land to you and that a great fear of you has fallen on us, so that all who live in this country are melting in fear because of you." Jericho had six additional days to repent while Israel did laps around it. The day judgment finally came to Jericho, Israel marched around the city seven times. God judges swiftly when He finally acts, but He patiently warns and allows time for repentance. Families who wished could have migrated out of the land and settled in nearby areas. God said repeatedly that he would drive out the inhabitants of the land before Israel. Those who wished to leave had time and opportunity. The point was to destroy the evil Canaanite culture rather than the individual Canaanite people. Only individuals who stubbornly refused to leave were destroyed with military force, along with their children, who could not have survived without parents. God gave no instructions to hunt down and kill Canaanites who left the land peacefully. Later in the Bible, Canaanite individuals like Uriah the Hittite show up as righteous characters. Rahab herself was a Canaanite harlot who repented before Jericho was destroyed. She is an ancestor of Jesus Himself. God’s judgment was not based on racism or favoritism. Scholars have called the Canaanite cult religion the most sexually depraved of any in the ancient world. They had given themselves over to every kind of sexual depravity, including incest and even bestiality. At their worst, their orgiastic worship of idols even included human sacrifice—both of children and adults. There’s imagery of their cult sexual practices of bathing themselves in blood. |
Anonymous
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Life was hard on Canaanite children because, among other things, the Canaanites committed two types of sins which damaged their children. Archaeological evidence shows that the Canaanites were an incestuous people. Sexual molestation is a horrible crime in our society—and it should be—but in Canaanite society their god, Baal, raped his sister while she was in the form of a calf “seventy-seven, even eighty eight times.” ((Albright says that in “the light of several Egyptian accounts of the goddess, unquestionably translated from an original Canaanite myth” that Baal raped his sister Anath while she was in the form of a calf. W. F. Albright, Yahweh and the God’s of Canaan: A Historical Analysis of Two Contrasting Faiths (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1968), 128-129. )) In other words, Baal raped her a lot. Baal also regularly had sex with his daughter Pidray, ((Albright, Yahweh and the God’s of Canaan, 145. )) and at his father’s urging Baal had sex with his mother Asherah to humiliate her. ((For the story of Baal having sex with Asherah see: “El, Ashertu and the Storm-god” Albrecht Goetze, trans., James B. Pritchard, ed., The Ancient Near East: Supplementary Texts and Pictures Relating to the Old Testament (Princeton: Princeton University, 1969), 519.))
But there was a worse evil than molestation and rape, and that was offering a child to Molech. Molech was a Canaanite underworld deity represented as an upright, bull-headed idol with human body in whose belly a fire was stoked and in whose outstretched arms a child was placed to be burned to death. ((John Day, Molech: A god of human sacrifice in the Old Testament (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1989), 62.)) Plutarch reports that during the Phoenician (Canaanite) ((“The word ‘Canaanite’ is historically, geographically, and culturally synonymous with ‘Phoenician,’ the title immediately becomes more impressive, since it also deals with the role of the Phoenicians in the history of civilization” (W. F. Albright, The Bible and the Ancient Near East: Essays in honor of William Foxwell Albright, G. Ernest Wright, ed. [Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1965], 438).)) sacrifices, “the whole area before the statue was filled with a loud noise of flutes and drums so that the cries of the wailing should not reach the ears of the people.” ((Plutarch, De Superstitione 13 as quoted in Day, Molech, 89.)) And it wasn’t just infants; we know that children at least as old as four were sacrificed. Kleitarchos says the Phoenicians and especially the Carthaginians who honoured Kronos, whenever they wished to succeed in any great enterprise, would vow by one of their children if they achieved the things they longed for, to sacrifice him to a god. A bronze image of Kronos was set up among them, stretching out its cupped hands above a bronze cauldron, which would burn the child. As the flame burning the child surrounded the body, the limbs would shrivel up and the mouth would appear to grin as if laughing, until it was shrunk enough to slip into the cauldron. ((Kleitarchos, Scholia on Plato’s Republic 337A as quoted in Day, Molech, 87. See Albright, Yahweh, 234-244 for a significant discussion of the nature and archaeology pertaining to child sacrifice.)) Oxford professor John Day wrote: “In fact, we have independent evidence that child sacrifice was practiced in the Canaanite (Carthaginian and Phoenician) world from many classical sources, Punic inscriptions and archaeological evidence, as well as Egyptian depictions of the ritual occurring in Syria-Palestine, and from a recently discovered Phoenician inscription in Turkey. There is therefore no reason to doubt the biblical testimony to Canaanite child sacrifice.” ((John Day, “Yahweh and the Gods and Goddesses of Canaan” Journal for the Study of the Old Testament (Sheffield, England: Sheffield Academic, 2000), 211-212.)) U.C.L.A researcher Shelby Brown writes: “The longevity of child sacrifice and the tenaciousness with which Carthaginians and other Phoenicians adhered to the practice despite their frequent contacts with neighbors who abhorred them for it suggests that the ritual was crucial to Phoenician religion and to the well-being of a city and its inhabitants.” |
Anonymous
| God was unhappy with David for basically stealing Uriah the Hittite's wife, Bathsheba, by sending him into battle and a certain death. Then when David took Bathsheba as his wife, and they had a child together, the Lord displayed his displeasure by killing the child. See 2 Samuel 12-14. This is child sacrifice -- Truly, the Lord moves in mysterious ways. (and of course he had long before killed all the first born children in Egypt.0 Child sacrifice is bad except when the Lord does it I guess. |
Anonymous
While David's son died as a result of David's sin (see 2 Sam 11 and 12:1-25 for the full story), the effects ended there; he would not be punished for his father's sin in the afterlife (Ezek 18:19-20). 2 Samuel 12:14 implies that the death of David's son was meant to be a lesson to others who were disobeying God. When word got around that David had committed adultery and murder, some Israelites would probably have said to themselves, "If the king can do those things and not face any consequences, why can't I?" People in other nations who heard of it wouldn't see it as reason to follow Israel's God, but if they heard of the consequences they would know that God saw and dealt with David's sin. It's possible that his son's death also ensured that David's repentance was permanent, for he would always remember his son and the effects of his adultery. Child sacrifice is the ritualistic killing of children in order to please or appease a deity. God was not pleased to take David’s child. God does a lot of “uncomfortable” things that simply must be done in a world of sin. But the fact is that God never intended for us to be comfortable with sin and its outfall (which includes its punishment). We should be bothered by the effects of sin. Mature Christians understand this, but it doesn’t make living in a fallen world any easier. At the same time, we recognize that, even when we come to understand God better and accept some of His “harsher” actions, there is no relief from the visceral response we get when a child dies. Everyone should be hurt and appalled at the death of a child. God’s intention in taking the infant in death was to punish David. After a brief illness, the child was gathered up into the arms of God—as all innocents are. God is not a nodding elderly grandfather who ignores our sin and rubber stamps our “goodness.” He’s the grandfather who loves you enough to tell you when you are wrong and isn’t going to shield you from consequences just because He loves you and cares about you. He wants you to do better. He still loves and cares for His Creations. |
Anonymous
^ All well and good, but why punish an innocent child for the actions of his father? There had to be others ways to punish David for his actions without taking the life of an innocent child. That's just mean. Anyway, I do appreciate the time you take to address these questions. |