“Why didn’t the Christian God ever explicitly and clearly condemn slavery?” This was John Loftus’ question in his book, Why I Became an Atheist: A Former Preacher Rejects Christianity. He posed it after sharing the following chilling account of slavery as practiced in the antebellum American south, He took her into the kitchen, and stripped […]
Entries Tagged as 'Old Testament Ethics'
Contra Mundum: Slavery and the Old Testament
April 3rd, 2010 33 Comments
Tags: Contra Mundum · Investigate Magazine · John Loftus · Old Testament Ethics · Slavery · Theology
Sunday Study: Joshua and the Genocide of the Canaanites Part II
January 10th, 2010 45 Comments
In my previous post, Joshua and the Genocide of the Canaanites Part I, I mentioned the position suggested by Alvin Plantinga and endorsed by Nicholas Wolterstorff that the passages in Joshua that appear to record the carrying out of genocide at God’s command, such as, “putting all the people to the sword”, “leaving no survivors”, […]
Tags: Alvin Plantinga · Canaanites · Genocide · K Lawson Younger · Kenneth Kitchen · Nicholas Wolterstorff · Old Testament Ethics · Sunday Study
Sunday Study: Joshua and the Genocide of the Canaanites Part I
January 3rd, 2010 52 Comments
Critics of Christianity often claim that the book of Joshua teaches that God commanded genocide. Raymond Bradley for example states, In chapters 7 through 12, [the book of Joshua] treats us to a chilling chronicle of the 31 kingdoms, and all the cities therein, that fell victim to Joshua’s, and God’s, genocidal policies. Time and […]
Tags: Alvin Plantinga · Brevard Childs · Canaanites · Genocide · Hermeneutics · Joshua · Kenneth Kitchen · Nicholas Wolterstorff · Old Testament Ethics · Raymond Bradley · Sunday Study · Theology · Walter Sinnott-Armstrong
Sunday Study: The Bible and Rape – A Response to Michael Martin
September 27th, 2009 9 Comments
A little while ago I wrote a post criticising Michael Martin’s contention that the Bible commands a rape victim to marry her rapist, Does the Bible Teach that a Rape Victim has to Marry her Rapist? To summarise briefly, Martin cited Deuteronomy 22:28-29 and interpreted it as, Here the victim of rape is as treated […]
Tags: Bible · Ethics · Hermeneutics · Michael Martin · Old Testament Ethics · Rape · Sexual Morality · Sunday Stu · Sunday Study · Theology
Sunday Study: Interpreting the Sixth Commandment Part II
September 13th, 2009 11 Comments
In a previous post, Sunday Study: Interpreting the Sixth Commandment Part I, I discussed some translations of the sixth commandment of the Decalogue. I began with the King James Version (KJV), “thou shall not kill.”[1] I looked at problems with this translation most famously raised by Augustine. The New International Version (NIV) and New Revised […]
Tags: Augustine · Ethics · Old Testament Ethics · Sunday Study · Ten Commandments · Theology
Sunday Study: Interpreting the Sixth Commandment Part I
September 6th, 2009 5 Comments
One of the most well known biblical commands is the sixth commandment of the Decalogue (according to protestant enumeration). This commandment occurs in the 20th chapter of the book of Exodus and the fifth chapter of the book of Deuteronomy. In its most well-known rendition, the King James Version (KJV), this commandment states “thou shalt […]
Tags: Old Testament Ethics · Sunday Study · Ten Commandments · Theology
Sunday Study: Does the Bible Teach that Children Should be Executed for Swearing?
August 23rd, 2009 3 Comments
One command in the Old Testament which is frequently lampooned by sceptical readers is Leviticus 20:9, If anyone curses his father or mother, he must be put to death. He has cursed his father or his mother, and his blood will be on his own head. Some contend that that this passage commands the courts […]
Tags: Capital Punishment · Hermeneutics · Old Testament Ethics · Sunday Study · Swearing
A common objection to belief in the God of the Bible is that a good, kind, and loving deity would never command the wholesale slaughter of nations. In the tradition of his popular Is God a Moral Monster?, Paul Copan teams up with Matthew Flannagan to tackle some of the most confusing and uncomfortable passages of Scripture. Together they help the Christian and nonbeliever alike understand the biblical, theological, philosophical, and ethical implications of Old Testament warfare passages.
