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Re: matt's take

On Sat, 29 Dec 2001, J. Marie Hall wrote:
> but i'm going to play devil's advocate for fun: is violence inherently,
> 100% evil, biblically speaking or otherwise?  if it were, would god so
> feasibly order that whole communities of men, women, children _and_
> their animals be wiped out???  and i doubt it was by lethal injection.

Heh.  I once heard someone argue that God prescribed the death penalty so
that there would be a calm, dispassionate way of executing justice, and I
couldn't help chuckling, because whatever else you might say about stoning
people to death, I doubt very much that it was calm and dispassionate.

Incidentally, those passages in the Bible which talk about the Hebrews
wiping out entire villages (genocide? ethnic cleansing?) also talk about
the Hebrews "devoting" the villages to God, a term that had explicit
religious significance; essentially, it was a form of human sacrifice.

--- Peter T. Chattaway --------------------------- peter at chattaway_com ---
 "I detected one misprint, but to torture you I will not tell you where."
      Winston Churchill to T.E. Lawrence, re Seven Pillars of Wisdom

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