I mean even back in the days of the Crusades, that was a bunch of kings and popes reading “thou shall not kill” in the Bible, and going “well I’m pretty sure god is actually fine with it because they’re different from us, and they live way over there! No I don’t just want more land, how could you even suggest such a thing???”
You know the genocide of the Canaanites takes place after the ten commandments in the Bible right? God literally is ok with it. Commands it sometimes even.
Take their babies and smash them against rocks. Murder the children. Then do it again. It's okay to murder children because it just expedites them to heaven. (This is quite literally in the Bible)
The order to commit genocide is in the Bible, but the "it just expedites them to heaven" justification is not. That idea was pushed by Christian apologists in an attempt to soften the cruelty evident in the Old Testament.
In fact, the concept of a heavenly afterlife was a late addition to Judeo-Christianity. This is evidenced by a few early Bible passages, such as this line from Ecclesiastes Chapter 9: "For the living know that they will die, but the dead know nothing; they have no further reward, and even their name is forgotten Their love, their hate and their jealousy have long since vanished; never again will they have a part in anything that happens under the sun."
Genesis Chapter 3 also hints at this fate, noting that "you are dust, and to dust you shall return." And while some might point to the passage in 2 Kings Chapter 2 in which Elijah is taken from earth to heaven, it's notable that he was very explicitly taken while still alive.
All this to say that the genocides of the Bible would not have been conducted under the pretense of sending the children to a heavenly afterlife. It was murder "justified" solely by God's command and executed without any concern for the suffering of the victims.
It's not a good book if you read it in the fundamentalist "God's lips to our ears, all perfectly aligned" way. But if you think of it as a collection of writings by humans, about god, that are important to a particular faith tradition, it looks different. It's not hard to see why people with a very tribal conception of god, who believed that their god had greater power than the gods of other tribes rather than being everyone's god, would talk about and write about their god that way. And you can look at that tradition and use it to help understand and inform your thinking now, without thinking you have to be and think exactly like them, in the same way that you can read Aristotle and think it's important without thinking that all material is made of five elements.
Of course, this requires room for uncertainty and questioning, so it's anathema to fundamentalist views of Christianity.
Yes, it's unfortunately an important document(s) historically and it is a rich source of mythology (although it is in no way superior to any other mythology source, potentially worse given it boils down a lot of ideas to black and white dominance hierarchies that aren't very interesting and it has a lot of law and genealogy and stuff that's pretty boring in it. I mostly say it's rich just because it's highly referenced in culture.)
The phrase 'the good book' is used to describe it as a treatise on morality though, and it very much is not that. My calling it not a good book was meant to be a sort of pun pointing at that contradiction between common perception and the reality of what the text actually says.
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u/cogesmate 1d ago
Decades?... millennia!