As I mentioned before, Doug Wilson and I seem to agree on everything these days.
Here, for example, is what he said about God's killings in the Bible (emphasis mine).
More than one Israelite man went to worship the golden calf because there was a good prospect there for getting laid. It sort of gave the 'golden calf theology' that little extra appeal. God struck twenty-three thousand of them down because of it. We should be well acquainted with God's treatment of them, along with His destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, His judgment in the Flood, and so forth. These things were written for us as examples, and apparently God thinks them to be effective examples. We must know them and meditate on them.
Doug says that believers should know and meditate on God's killings, yet he conflated two of God's more impressive killings in his post and got the number of victims wrong.
First God killed 3000 people by forcing friends and family members to kill each other to punish them for dancing naked around Aaron's golden calf in Exodus 32:27-28. And then, in a completely separate mass murder, he killed 24,000 (not 23,000) with a plague because some Israelites had sex with Midianite women in Numbers 25:1-9.
Still, I like the way he's thinking. Bible believers should know and meditate on God's killings.
To help them out with that, I've made a list and written a book. I hope they find them useful.
4 comments:
and my copy sits proudly on my coffee table !
Thanks, Doug; it was meditating on the particular killing at the end of Judges that really made me question, and ultimately reject, my belief. ;-)
I wonder: If someone today wrote a fictional account of Hitler and the Holocaust, full of allegory, religious contradiction, and supernatural 'special effects', could we then travel two millenia into the future and find a society based around it?
@Matthew Blanchette: It would be interesting to see the results of a comprehensive survey of what passage or passages in various 'holy' books led to a rejection of the beliefs contained within. I'd be willing to wager that the 'problem of evil' is at the core of most rejections. I know it was with me...
Speaking of Doug Wilson, have you heard of this fellow's blog?
http://www.poohsthink.com
I was a member of the Kirk for a decade. While in the Kirk, I published five articles in the Kirk’s printed cultural journal Credenda Agenda and co-authored an introduction to The Oresteia for Veritas Press. I mentored with DOUGLAS WILSON [MY EMPHASIS] one-on-one for a year and was a minister in training under Wilson in Greyfriars’ Hall, a program of Christ Church, when I began my psychological and social journey out of the Kirk. This journey was primarily accomplished through the use of this blog in its former life: Pooh’s Think, Part 1. The online database, containing hundreds of posts from December 2005 up till 2008, was recently hacked and destroyed (I do have indirect access to most the content for research purposes).
By the time I had finally left Idaho with my family to reflect and heal in Cardiff-By-The-Sea, California, I had presented a paper at Florida State University’s philosophy conference and received an M.A. in philosophy from University of Idaho. My wife has been supportive of the book I am writing and a source of strength.
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