Yesterday, I posted the following tweet.
Genocide apologists insist the Canaanites needed to be slaughtered in toto because they sacrificed their children. But herem slaughter to Yahweh is itself a form of *human sacrifice*, one that included children. It's like killing a man's dog to punish him for killing his cat.
— Tentative Apologist (@RandalRauser) September 10, 2021
My tweet garnered the following reply:
You chafe at the thought God would judge the guilty by removing them from physical reality. Yet men, filled with God’s Spirit & innocent were permitted by God to be ripped alive by lions, burned at the stake & boiled in oil in His name. Brother, that doesn’t seem consistent.
— Robert L Wall Jr (@RobertLWallJr1) September 11, 2021
I see this a lot: people who cannot tell the difference between commanding x and allowing x for some greater good.
Let me explain with an example. In WW2, the Brits broke the Nazi Enigma codes and thereby had advance warning of the planned German bombing of Coventry. However, they did not give the town advance warning, for if they did that would tip-off the Luftwaffe that the code had been broken. And so, the Brits allowed one of their own towns packed with civilians to be bombed for the greater good of winning the war.
You can disagree with their decision. But you should be able to see that having a morally sufficient reason to allow a civilian town to be bombed is not the same thing as commanding the bombing of a civilian town. Nor does God’s allowing atrocities entail God can command those atrocities.
