Religious Absurdity: Sanitizing Genocide To Make It Palatable For Children

My wife and I run a Facebook group where we try to get Christians to actually read the entire Bible from beginning to end, going through two chapters a day (it’s a whole lot harder than you’d think to get people to read their own religious text, but that’s a whole other blog post in itself).  We recently reached the book of Joshua, which details the title character taking over leadership of the Israelites from Moses and carving a swath of death and destruction (and don’t forget about the post-slaughter looting!) across the land they believe belongs to them due to a divine edict.

What’s that you say?  God commanded the *genocide* of entire groups of people? But that doesn’t happen in the Bible!

Another one of the atheist members of our Bible reading group recently posted up a blog called The Things They Don’t Tell You,  which dealt with how Christianity is displayed as a fluffy religion of love suitable for children, while its adherents gloss over or just simply ignore all the parts of the Bible in which god commits, commands, or condones such abhorrent actions as genocide, rape, slavery, and the slaughter of even young children and infants.

In that blog there was a brief mention of the Veggie Tales episode “Josh and the Big Wall,” which translates the story of the fall of Jericho (as detailed in the early chapters of the book of Joshua) into a cute animated edition meant for kids.  I’m (unfortunately) quite familiar with that particular show, as we frequently watched it at the Christian school I attended, and many of the families who sent their kids to that school had Veggie Tales going non-stop on their home televisions.

For anyone who hasn’t seen the show, you can check out the first part of the “Josh and the Big Wall” episode here, or stream the whole thing through Netflix.

Each episode of Veggie Tales starts with a question asked by a viewer about a problem they are experiencing, and then the adorable animated vegetables act a story from the Bible to explain how a Christian should behave.  “Josh and the Big Wall” deals with the subject of obedience, and in a totally bizarre and (as you will soon see) completely contradictory way.  A child named Victor has told the veggies he was hit by a school bully, and he wants to hit the bully back. The vegetables of course want him to be nice to his bully, and explain that we have to be obedient to god’s will even when his commands don’t make sense. How does the talking tomato show that we should be obedient to god and nice to bullies who hurt us?

By acting out a tale of how the Israelites were able to successfully commit *genocide* by following god’s nonsensical orders.

This is probably the most misplaced Bible story for this particular situation I can possibly think of.  It’s almost like the creators of the show went out of their way to find a situation which illustrated the exact opposite of the point they were trying to make.

For anyone not familiar with this particular story, Joshua has recently taken over command of the Israelites after the death of Moses.  God wants them to cross the river Jordan and go live in the promised land on the other side, but there’s a catch – it’s already inhabited. 

Now what’s the loving and forgiving Christian deity to do to resolve this situation? Does he magically poof the current inhabitants to another location without any violence being required?  Does he create a different land for the Israelites that isn’t already inhabitated? Does he show the Israelites how to peacefully coexist with other cultures and accept the differences between people? 

No, no, and one big hell nah, son! God’s “solution” to this problem, and his perfect divine plan, is to kill everyone living there and steal their stuff, of course!

The book of Joshua depicts all the slaughters of the various peoples inhabiting the land, but the episode of Veggie Tales only deals with one city that gets utterly destroyed – Jericho.  In this tale, god commands his followers to march around the city each day for six days, and then march around it seven times on the seventh day.  The Israelites do so, and god rewards them by destroying the city’s walls so they can rush in and kill absolutely everyone, with the exception of the traitorous prostitute Rahab, who sold out her fellow city dwellers and helped the Israelites in to begin the slaughter.  Joshua 6:17 lays out what god wants done with the people of the city by saying, “Jericho and everything in it must be completely destroyed as an offering to the LORD. Only Rahab the prostitute and the others in her house will be spared, for she protected our spies.”

Keep in mind here that it clearly says “everything in it.” This includes pregnant women, the elderly, infants, and children.  This isn’t the first time god has issued this particular edict either, and he’s even directly specified that children be killed in other instances.  For example, take Deuteronomy 2:33-35, which says, “the LORD our God delivered him over to us and we struck him down, together with his sons and his whole army.  At that time we took all his towns and completely destroyed  them—men, women and children. We left no survivors.  But the livestock and the plunder from the towns we had captured we carried off for ourselves. “

Or there’s Deuteronomy 20:16-17, which states, “However, in the cities of the nations the LORD your God is giving you as an inheritance, do not leave alive anything that breathes. Completely destroy them - the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusite - as the LORD your God has commanded you.”

Or then there’s my (least) favorite, Hosea 14:16, which says, “The people of Samaria must bear their guilt, because they have rebelled against their God.  They will fall by the sword; their little ones will be dashed to the ground, their pregnant women ripped open.”

God wants you to dash this baby to pieces.  Don't pussy out, or he'll be mighty pissed and curse your descendents.

How anyone thought this story was suitable for children in the first place is beyond me, but even more baffling is that people are ready and willing to rationalize the slaughter of an entire group of people as an acceptable action.   More than acceptable, Christians believe this action was morally good because it was a part of their god’s “perfect plan.”

Some have tried to rationalize the slaughter of Jericho (along with all the other cities and peoples that get killed throughout the book of Joshua after that) because back in Deuteronomy 12:29-31, god claimed all the people living on the other side of the Jordan river burned their children alive as sacrifices to their gods. 

I’ll grant you, sacrificing children (to absolutely any god) is a morally abhorrent action and something that definitely requires intervention.  The problem with this rationalization is that god commanded that *everyone* in these cities be killed – including the children. 

Yes, that’s right, after getting upset that people were sacrificing children to other gods, the Christian god then commands that those *same* children be put to the sword.  Now remember when god explained that everyone needed to be killed, he said, “Jericho and everything in it must be completely destroyed as an offering to the Lord.”  So he’s literally doing exactly the same thing he originally said he detested. Apparently it’s OK to sacrifice children if you do it to the right god?  (Heh, insert Abraham and Isaac joke here…)

Another rationalization I’ve seen from the Christian camp is that the Israelites had to wipe out all the indigenous people, because otherwise their religious practices and “false” gods would pervert the “true” religion and lead people away from the “real” god.  Besides being nothing more than a thinly veiled rationalization for extreme xenophobia, this whole argument is absurd of course.  If this god character were all-powerful and all-knowing, why would people even have the possibility of thinking other gods might exist?  Why didn’t this god character show up to the other groups of people, as he did to the Israelites, and clearly proclaim his existence?  It should be obvious that books like Joshua are tales of tribal desert warfare in ancient times, with superstitious people believing their gods were the real ones and all the other gods were fake, and not a real description of events from a divine being.

While the story itself is already abhorrent, and definitely isn’t something that should be taught to young children, the main moral of this particular Veggie Tales episode is itself disturbing and dangerous. Always doing what “god” tells you to has led to some amazingly terrible actions.  For instance, actor Michael Brea cut off his mother’s head with a sword because he believed his mother was possessed by a demon and god wanted him to kill her.  The worst part about this example is that I’ve actually seen a Christian actively defend Brea’s actions.  One of the individuals who provided their conversion story for me on my blog about personal testimonies actually told us we can’t condemn that action if it was inspired by a command given from god.  I asked this person repeatedly if he would kill his own mother if “god” told him to, and he (very disturbingly) refused to answer. This is the sort of behavior bred, and exacerbated, by unwavering belief in the supernatural.

This is by no means the only example of people following god’s orders even when they don’t make sense.  There are those mothers who kill their children because god told them to,  or the man who killed a four year old because he thought the child might be gay,  or those people in the Phillipines who crucify themselves once *every single year* on Good Friday (pictured below),  or those parents who let their children die because they think god wants them to use prayer instead of medicine, or many other examples if anyone bothered to look long enough.

This guy loves Jesus a whole hell of a lot more than you do

It’s horrifying to watch people try to justify the genocide of Jericho as acceptable (such as at the apologist websites Jewsuswalk or Rational Christianity) while still somehow believing they have the moral high ground.  Religion in general, and Christianity in particular, forces people to overlook, rationalize, and even accept absurdly immoral actions in order to make their supernatural worldview jive with reality.  How on earth can someone consider themselves to be a good and moral person, while being willing to rationalize *genocide* as an acceptable practice?  I submit to you that such a person cannot be considered either moral or good, no matter how nice they are, or how much time they spend volunteering, or how many church bake sales they attend.

This is a fantastic example of how Christians do not, as they claim, have absolute, objective, universal morals.  They have subjective morals that are subject to change, as they believe that genocide is acceptable when ordered by god, but unacceptable under other circumstances, such as when it was carried out by Adolf Hitler.  It’s amazing how often the religious are directly guilty of the exact things they accuse others of doing.

Another common rationalization for all the violence and terror ordered by god in the Bible, such as in the Jesuswalk link provided above, is that “we can’t judge their culture because genocide happened all the time then.”  People’s willingness to accept such a blatant cop-out is honestly terrifying to me.  Consider the implications of such a statement – are these people saying that genocide would be O.K. in modern times if it were to become a more prominent part of our culture?  This rationalization is also especially weak in light of the Christian belief that god is all-knowing and sees all times – past, present, and future.  If this was true, this god character would have been well aware than in the year 2011 people reading this supposedly “holy” book would be disgusted by genocide.   Why didn’t god put a ban on the practice back in the days of the Israelites instead of waiting thousands of years?  There’s also the issue of how Christianity claims that god is the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow.  If god doesn’t change, then he must just as equally find genocide to be an acceptable resolution to problems today as he did back in Biblical times.

Since the Christian god is supposedly perfect and all-knowing, he could have made a perfect society back then and not required genocide or violence of any kind.   It’s very telling that god behaves exactly like an iron age man during these passages of the bible.  Clearly god had nothing to do with the situation at all.  This was simply men making up a god to justify their horrendous actions, and for some reason gullible people in modern times are still falling for it hook, line, and sinker.

Consider for a moment if the Hittites or the Amorites (or any other group that Joshua’s followers slaughtered) had won out and killed the Israelites. Then let’s say their descendents wrote a book that became part of a worldwide religion. The same Christians who are currently justifying the genocide of Jericho would be worshipping the god of the Amorites and instead justifying their genocide of the Israelites as a necessary and acceptable action to defend the promised land from heathens.

At the end of the day, if you find yourself making excuses for why *genocide* is acceptable in some circumstances, you need to realize you are the bad guy in the story.  It can be glossed over with feeble excuses, or turned into a cute story told by a digitally created piece of broccoli, but genocide is still always wrong. Even worse is trying to sanitize it to make it palatable for impressionable children. 

The next time a Christian asks me why atheists are so angry, I think I’ll just send them a copy of “Josh and the Big Wall.”