The Case for Killing Babies in the Name of God

Anti-abortion folks often equate abortion to infanticide.  Despite the fact that the vast majority of abortions occur long before the fetus is more than an inch or two in size, there’s still a kind of squirmy discomfort even among the most staunch pro-choice advocate, about the charge.  After all, when we think of fetuses, we tend to think of well-developed proto-babies (realistically or not), and it’s just difficult to not think of them as actual infants that we’re hardwired to defend.

Unless, of course, they have Evil Parents.

Greta Christina points out this article by Christian apologist (and debater-vs-atheists) William Lane Craig, wherein he defends the genocidal slaughter of Canaanites, including (of course) their children.

As Christina notes:

William Lane Craig is not some drooling wingnut. He’s not some extremist Fred Phelps type, ranting about how God’s hateful vengeance is upon us for tolerating homosexuality. He’s not some itinerant street preacher, railing on college campuses about premarital holding hands. He’s an extensively- educated, widely-published, widely-read theological scholar and debater. When believers accuse atheists of ignoring sophisticated modern theology, Craig is one of the people they’re talking about.

And reading Craig, he comes across as scholarly, faithful, even compassionate in some ways.  He’s no ranter or raver.  And his position in the article boils down to this:

I think that a good start at this problem is to enunciate our ethical theory that underlies our moral judgements.  According to the version of divine command ethics which I’ve defended, our moral duties are constituted by the commands of a holy and loving God.  Since God doesn’t issue commands to Himself,  He has no moral duties to fulfill.  He is certainly not subject to the same moral obligations and prohibitions that we are.  For example, I have no right to take an innocent life.  For me to do so would be murder.  But God has no such prohibition.  He can give and take life as He chooses.  We all recognize this when we accuse some authority who presumes to take life as “playing God.”  Human authorities  arrogate to themselves rights which belong only to God.  God is under no obligation whatsoever to extend my life for another second.  If He wanted to strike me dead right now, that’s His prerogative.

What that implies is that God has the right to take the lives of the Canaanites when He sees fit.  How long they live and when they die is up to Him.

[…] Isn’t that like commanding someone to commit murder?  No, it’s not.  Rather, since our moral duties are determined by God’s commands, it is commanding someone to do something which, in the absence of a divine command, would have been murder.  The act was morally obligatory for the Israeli soldiers in virtue of God’s command, even though, had they undertaken it on their on initiative, it would have been wrong.

God can do whatever He wants.  God is Good.  Therefore, whatever God does — or orders — is Good. Even if it doesn’t seem Good.

Not good, as in how the Canaanites were not good.

By the time of their destruction, Canaanite culture was, in fact, debauched and cruel, embracing such practices as ritual prostitution and even child sacrifice.  The Canaanites are to be destroyed “that they may not teach you to do according to all their abominable practices that they have done for their gods, and so you sin against the Lord your God” (Deut. 20.18).  God had morally sufficient reasons for His judgement upon Canaan, and Israel was merely the instrument of His justice, just as centuries later God would use the pagan nations of Assyria and Babylon to judge Israel.

Now, I’m a Theist.  And a Christian. I believe in a good God. And I from my beliefs, my reading, my reason, and from whatever inspiration the Holy Spirit might provide my conscience, this (quoted at length, apologies) doesn’t strike me as the Good that God commands of us.

By setting such strong, harsh dichotomies God taught Israel that any assimilation to pagan idolatry is intolerable.  It was His way of preserving Israel’s spiritual health and posterity.  God knew that if these Canaanite children were allowed to live, they would spell the undoing of Israel.  The killing of the Canaanite children not only served to prevent assimilation to Canaanite identity but also served as a shattering, tangible illustration of Israel’s being set exclusively apart for God.

Sort of like how the Klan thinks that God wants Whites to be set exclusively apart from Blacks.

Moreover, if we believe, as I do, that God’s grace is extended to those who die in infancy or as small children, the death of these children was actually their salvation.  We are so wedded to an earthly, naturalistic perspective that we forget that those who die are happy to quit this earth for heaven’s incomparable joy.  Therefore, God does these children no wrong in taking their lives.

That would be more convincing if God actually, y’know, mentioned that in context. As opposed to, say, Deut. 10:10-17

¹⁰ When you march up to attack a city, make its people an offer of peace. ¹¹ If they accept and open their gates, all the people in it shall be subject to forced labor and shall work for you. ¹² If they refuse to make peace and they engage you in battle, lay siege to that city. ¹³ When the LORD your God delivers it into your hand, put to the sword all the men in it. ¹⁴ As for the women, the children, the livestock and everything else in the city, you may take these as plunder for yourselves. And you may use the plunder the LORD your God gives you from your enemies. ¹⁵ This is how you are to treat all the cities that are at a distance from you and do not belong to the nations nearby.

¹⁶ However, in the cities of the nations the LORD your God is giving you as an inheritance, do not leave alive anything that breathes. ¹⁷ Completely destroy them—the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites—as the LORD your God has commanded you. ¹⁸ Otherwise, they will teach you to follow all the detestable things they do in worshiping their gods, and you will sin against the LORD your God.

So children in the more distant cities can be taken as slaves.  The children in the cities that (the Israelites record) God is giving the Israelites are to be killed. No  mention of moral justification — just kill ’em.

So whom does God wrong in commanding the destruction of the Canaanites?  Not the Canaanite adults, for they were corrupt and deserving of judgement.  Not the children, for they inherit eternal life.  So who is wronged?  Ironically, I think the most difficult part of this whole debate is the apparent wrong done to the Israeli soldiers themselves.  Can you imagine what it would be like to have to break into some house and kill a terrified woman and her children?  The brutalizing effect on these Israeli soldiers is disturbing.

But then, again, we’re thinking of this from a Christianized, Western standpoint.  For people in the ancient world, life was already brutal.  Violence and war were a fact of life for people living in the ancient Near East.  Evidence of this fact is that the people who told these stories apparently thought nothing of what the Israeli soldiers were commanded to do (especially if these are founding legends of the nation).  No one was wringing his hands over the soldiers’ having to kill the Canaanites; those who did so were national heroes.

So, it’s all okay to kill the Canaanites because the parents were evil (and evil people can be killed) and the children would cause amalgamation (Holy Lester Maddox, Batman!), and besides, the children were Innocents and therefore went straight to heaven (unless you believe Jonathan Edwards). Besides, they were all brutal and savage back in the day, so nobody gave it a second thought.

At least, nobody writing the account of cleansing Canaan in the Bible.

Now, I don’t pretend that I understand all of God’s ways. I don’t.  And I’m willing to accept that there are things I don’t understand in my limited knowledge and reason.  I’m not God.  (Thank God.)

But while there are things I’m willing to accept as confusing, I still think I’m called to try to understand, to reconcile to my beliefs, and to learn or change what I believe in based on them. I may not succeed, but not trying is not an option.

This all reminds me of a debate I got into many years ago on the Belief-L listserv about the Sacrifice of Abraham.  That’s another great ol’ Old Testament story.  God tells Abraham to take his firstborn, Isaac, up onto a mountaintop and sacrifice him.  As in “drive a dagger into his heart and kill him.” Abraham isn’t real thrilled, but, being a faithful type, he goes through with it — right up to the point where he’s about to do the deed, at which point God says, “Psych!” and lets Abraham and Isaac off the hook. (He provides a ram instead to be sacrificed, since knife and altar were already prepped.)

We had a long debate over whether this was a moral act on Abraham’s part.  On the one hand … GOD!  And it’s not just (as in the case of Canaan) God speaking through his local rep.  Abraham was talked to by GOD and told to do this thing.

When God gives you an order, who is a human to say, “Um … say what?”

On the other hand … there’s doubt.

If you’re told by God to do something that seems antithetical to what you understand God to be about … does it make most sense to believe that God is saying something that doesn’t sound God-ish?  Or that you’re not actually hearing God?

I came down in the latter camp.  Perhaps it is lack of self-confidence, but I think of it as a certain measure of pragmatism: Occam’s Razor seems to tell me that if God is not acting like God, then He isn’t God, but a delusion.

In other words, if God appeared before me and told me to sacrifice my daughter to Him, I wouldn’t assume that God was revealing some new, great truth, but that I was suffering a mental breakdown and really needed to be locked up before I hurt someone.

So let’s get back to the slaughter of the Canaanites — man, woman, and child.  Through that whole period, we have God acting in a way that seems antithetical to how, later, Jesus taught us to live. Jesus preached against violence, against hatred, against killing. He did not justify the Jews or Israelites being able to do anything they wanted in God’s name, but sought to engage everyone.

If we’re to take Christ’s teachings seriously, then it seems to me that there are two conclusions:

1. God’s will and commands are portrayed in the Old Testament accurately, and we just have to assume (or laboriously figure out a rationale, as does Dr. Craig, to justify it) that this represents some sort of counter-intuitive Good.
2. God’s will is not accurately described in these passages in the Bible; instead, the Israelites justified their bloody conquest by attributing it to God’s command. (This option includes the possibility that there is no God, but that’s not the debate we’re having here.)

To me, #2 seems much more likely.

Now, ironically, Dr Craig considers this option. But this is what drives him to find some tortured justification.

In fact, ironically, many Old Testament critics are sceptical that the events of the conquest of Canaan ever occurred.  They take these stories to be part of the legends of the founding of  Israel, akin to the myths of Romulus and Remus and the founding of Rome.  For such critics the problem of God’s issuing such a command evaporates.

Now that puts the issue in quite a different perspective!  The question of biblical inerrancy is an important one, but it’s not like the existence of God or the deity of Christ!  If we Christians can’t find a good answer to the question before us and are, moreover,  persuaded that such a command is inconsistent with God’s nature, then we’ll have to give up biblical inerrancy.  But we shouldn’t let the unbeliever raising this question get away with thinking that it implies more than it does.

I’ll set aside Dr. Craig’s implication that Christians assume Biblical inerrancy (or that those who don’t go along with Biblical inerrancy are “unbelievers”). But he never seems to consider the idea that God’s will is simply being misrepresented; instead, he suggests a parallel straw man that the Israelites did not actually do any of this. Nevertheless, even this (though it avoids the moral conundrum) must be refuted. And Dr. Craig does so by simply saying, “Well, if God said it (and the Bible says He did), then it must be okay.”

It really seems like there are two ways of approaching this, if one assumes that God is Omnibenevolent (if beyond Human Understanding).  Either:

1. Good is defined by whatever God is saying at the moment (“Love your neighbor!” “Sacrifice your son!” “Feed the poor!” “Slaughter the Babies of the Canaanites!”),
   … or …
2. If what God seems to be saying (or is claimed to be saying) at a given moment doesn’t seem to match what God has elsewhere said is Good, then maybe the seeming (or claim) is incorrect (mistaken or deceptive).

Now, there are conveniences to #1, and dangers to #2.  Human morality is terribly slippery and subject to wishful thinking. It’s far too easy to say, “Um, yeah, I think God really wants my happiness above all things, so if I have the sense that God is telling me I shouldn’t sleep around on my wife with this really sexy blonde here … well, obviously it’s not really God telling me that.”

But maybe that gets into my personal kink about the purpose of life (where, to be sure, my wife is the really sexy blonde).  I don’t think we’re here to learn to obey.  I think we’re here to figure out what we should do. If all that was wanted was obedience, then why free will? Why intellect? Why reason?

So we try to figure out what’s right. What’s moral.  What, to frame it as Jesus did, demonstrates love of God and love of neighbor.

Anglican Christianity has a tradition of a “three-legged stool” for trying to figure things things out — scripture, tradition, and reason.  In other words, scripture provides some guidance, and then tradition represents the conclusions of previous generations, and then reason is the  personal component — the personal responsibility to figure things out for oneself.

Simply put, blind obedience seems highly overrated to my mind.  It make no sense to me to create free, reasoning creatures that are expected, as an end-state, to simply do what they are told.

Dr. Craig then segues into the (logical) question of why it’s okay for the Israelites to wage holy war against the Canaanites, but not for Muslims to wage holy war against other unbelievers.

Now how does all this relate to Islamic jihad?  Islam sees violence as a means of propagating the Muslim faith.  Islam divides the world into two camps:  the dar al-Islam (House of Submission) and the dar al-harb (House of War).  The former are those lands which have been brought into submission to Islam; the latter are those nations which have not yet been brought into submission.  This is how Islam actually views the world!

By contrast, the conquest of Canaan represented God’s just judgement upon those peoples.  The purpose was not at all to get them to convert to Judaism!  War was not being used as an instrument of propagating the Jewish faith.

It seems odd to me that Dr. Craig gives a pass to the Israelites because they weren’t trying to convert, but to annihilate.  Or that, conveniently, the nastiest nations around that deserved judgment and destruction just happened to be right where the Israelites wanted to settled down …

Moreover, the slaughter of the Canaanites represented an unusual historical circumstance, not a regular means of behavior.

Everyone always thinks they are an exception, or have some particular, unusual circumstance that  justifies their breaking the normal rules.

Nor is it clear why the Canaanites was a particularly unusual historical circumstance.

The problem with Islam, then, is not that it has got the wrong moral theory; it’s that it has got the wrong God.

Well, I’m glad we have that settled.

If the Muslim thinks that our moral duties are constituted by God’s commands, then I agree with him.

On the assumption that you have God’s commands right.  After all, any number of nations and psychopaths have been convinced that God was telling them to do one particular horror or another.

But, then, if you are convinced that God is talking to you, then if you are simply obedient, you will do whatever the voices tell you to do. Because, after all God defines what is Good, and therefore what you think God is saying must be a moral imperative.

But Muslims and Christians differ radically over God’s nature.  Christians believe that God is all-loving, while Muslims believe that God loves only Muslims.

It seems to me that the all-loving God that Dr. Craig, as his brand of Christian, believes in, was willing to exercise savage temporal judgment (and capital punishment) on the “debauched and cruel” Canaanites.  There’s no sign of God loving  the Canaanites, no regret or sorrow or concern expressed in Scripture.  Nor is there any promise of salvation for the innocent Canaanite babies. The judgment is final and brutal — kill them all (except for the ones that are occasionally allowed to be enslaved)  and let God sort them out.

Allah has no love for unbelievers and sinners.  Therefore, they can be killed indiscriminately.

That also seems to be the case for the Israelites’ Yaweh.

Moreover, in Islam God’s omnipotence trumps everything, even His own nature.  He is therefore utterly arbitrary in His dealing with mankind.  By contrast Christians hold that God’s holy and loving nature determines what He commands.

Except that Dr. Craig would argue that God’s supposed omnibenevolence trumps everything, so if He seems arbitrary in His dealing with mankind, it must be because we simply don’t understand how His commands are holy and loving. We know God’s commands are loving, even when they seem not to be, because God’s commands are always loving, so we need to redefine what loving is to match them.

As opposed to our simply misunderstanding (or distorting) what His actual dealings (and commands) are.

The question, then, is not whose moral theory is correct, but which is the true God?

Or, if you’re willing to let go of Biblical inerrancy, where are we actually hearing what the true God wanted?

So, to summarize Dr. Craig’s position:

1. The Canaanite adults were bad, so they deserved to be killed. (Or at least that’s what the Israelite propaganda would indicate.)
2. The Canaanite children (to some age point, undefined, but presumably including babies, unless one believes in the principle of Infant Damnation) were innocent, so if they were killed as collateral damage (to avoid any Canaanite Cooties on the Israelites), they were not actually harmed by being killed (whew!) because they all went to Heaven. (We don’t have any Scriptural basis for believing this, but Dr. Craig assures us it’s true.)
3. God said to do it (and we know that because we know that the Bible is completely true because the Bible says that God says it is), so it must be the Good thing to have done.
4. The Israelites were Only Following Orders.

Honestly, that doesn’t make me feel much better about a bunch of babies being killed.

Though it does make me wonder (to bring it back to the beginning of the post), if, as Dr. Craig argues:

Moreover, if we believe, as I do, that God’s grace is extended to those who die in infancy or as small children, the death of these children was actually their salvation.  We are so wedded to an earthly, naturalistic perspective that we forget that those who die are happy to quit this earth for heaven’s incomparable joy.  Therefore, God does these children no wrong in taking their lives.

Then on what basis does the Religious Right condemn abortion?

(via Thomas Holt)