Randal Rauser

Home of progressively evangelical, generously orthodox, rigorously analytic, revolutionary Christian thinking (that's what I'm aiming for anyway)

biblical violence

Driving Out the Canaanites? On a failed attempt to re-brand biblical genocide

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The heart and foundation of Christianity is belief in a God who is worthy of worship: in the words of Anselm, that being than which none greater can be conceived. And so, when the Bible depicts God as acting in a manner that appears to be less-than-perfect, this creates a challenge for the Christian reader. […]

An Update on My Biblical Genocide Book

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I began writing this book one month ago today: December 26, 2020. I am now at 85,000 words and hope to finish the final two chapters in the next ten days or so. My special contribution to this debate is captured in my subtitle: “Biblical Genocide in the Light of Moral Intuition“. (I will announce […]

My Biblical Violence Book: A Quick Update

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My blog has been relatively quiet of late and the most significant reason is that I began writing a new book on December 26. As of today, January 16, my manuscript on biblical violence is 68,000 words. My goal is to have the manuscript ready for copy-editing and typesetting by the end of the month […]

My New Biblical Violence Book

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I’ve been thinking about the problem of biblical violence since I wrote a critique of Paul Copan in 2008 (published in 2009). Over the last twelve years, I delievered a conference paper on the topic, I have devoted chapters to the imprecatory psalms and violence of Torah in my books What’s So Confusing About Grace? and Conversations with […]

Is the Christian God Worthy of Worship? A Debate with Dan Barker

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Dan Barker is a former fundamentalist preacher-turned-atheist, author of many books including Godless and God: The Most Unpleasant Character in All Fiction, and co-president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation. In this informal from December 22 2020, we addressed the question “Is the Christian God Worthy of Worship?”

Atheist Polemic for Pastor Dan: A Review of God: The Most Unpleasant Character in All Fiction

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Dan Barker. God: The Most Unpleasant Character in All Fiction. New York: Sterling, 2016. At the beginning of chapter 2 of his bestselling book The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins infamously describes God as “jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, […]

Quick Thought on Canaanite Genocide and the Brutalizing Effects of Violence

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You can’t hire a guy to work 9-5 in a slaughterhouse and not expect that to affect how he interacts with animals outside the workplace. The same principle applies in war. People can only sustain the cognitive dissonance introduced by combat situations for so long before it affects their character generally. The history of war […]