I heard that Einstein was asked once, “Do you believe in God?” to which he replied, “Which one?”
Today was a pretty typical Sunday for me. I spent roughly three hours in church; singing songs, praying prayers, and reciting incantations. The lesson for today was found in the book of Joshua. I believe the point of the lesson is that Joshua was a great man of God, who didn’t wine, did what he was told to do, and got stuff done. They didn’t really go into exactly what he was getting done. I’m kind of glad they didn’t, seeing that there were small children present.
The book of Joshua is one of the bloodiest books in the Bible. It was the beginning of Israel’s conquest of Canaan, and it is loaded with graphic accounts of wholesale slaughter. Basically, it paints a clear picture of one nation’s systematic and unprovoked genocide of an entire region. They slaughtered men, women, and children – all at the command of their God. It’s some pretty brutal stuff, and unless you can watch a Saw movie on a full stomach… I wouldn’t recommend it.
The ironic thing that I saw in all this is that this message was being preached in a self-proclaimed ‘black church.’ I remember when I was studying the emerging slave trade in Africa, one of the big motivators/rationals for enslaving the natives and treating them horribly was that they were like the inhabitants of Canaan, and God had given Africa to them just as he gave Canaan to Israel. It worked as a great justification for engaging in all manner of cruelty and inhumanity.
In my humble opinion, I don’t believe a God that was good would issue commands to murder, rape, pillage, and enslave entire civilizations.