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Originally Posted by concheet
Also, the implication of your words are that God gave Asa a reward (35 years of peace) in exchange for killing the unbelievers. I don't think the verses uphold your interpretation.
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I'll note that you're using a different version of Chronicles than I am. But in any event, what you have is Asa swearing an oath to God, including promising to kill all nonbelievers. "All of Judah" rejoiced at the oath", and the Lord rewarded them for their devotion.
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Not a commandment, no way. A narrative written by an unknown Chronicler who put his own moral tags in.
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Well, that's one way to rationalize ignoring unpleasant things in one's holy book.
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God's commandments are generally clear to most religious Jews and killing the unbelievers is simply not included.
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Like I said, I fully agree that modern Jews and Christians generally ignore such passages. But if one wanted to make the case that it's okay to kill unbelievers, one certainly has plenty of good starting points on which to build the argument -- the intervening centuries of contrary analysis nothwithstanding.
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Well you may suspect these laws were executed with regularity some 4000 years ago by Jews, but you don't have any real evidence of it... no supporting history as far as I know... Maybe they were and maybe they weren't.
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Oh, please. Leviticus is a listing of laws. There's every reason to think they were enforced. Especially because, as I said, it's not like the laws would have been unusual for the time.
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While we don't know for sure what Jews did 4000 years ago, what we do know for sure is that there are Muslims today that follow similar rules, and call it Sharia. Saudi Arabia executes people for sexual offenses, Iran stones adulteresses.
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Agreed. It's an extremely conservative, medieval, tribal culture.
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I would answer that violence is a much much greater part of the Koran than the Bible. Over and over again Allah excoriates the unbeliever. Another difference with Islam is that Mohamed is seen as the ultimate to emulate, much like Christians believe in emulating Jesus. Mohamed's life is therefore studied as a model of pure behavior. But his life corresponded to his teachings. When a Muslim studies the life of Mohamed he sees a man who raided and plundered, who broke his word, who married girls as young as 7, and who killed those who disagreed with him.
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Fair enough. Yet the world over, you see plenty of Muslims who don't think it's okay to marry 7-year-olds, kill, steal, etc. Where are such practices even partly condoned? In areas dominated by conservative, medieval, tribal cultures.
I'll grant that the Quran is more violent, in quantity if not in quality. But that doesn't mean that the violent parts must rule or dominate, and be emulated literally, any more than similar passages in other religions cannot be tamed. It's easy enough to read the Quran as the story of a warlord who spread a religion, not a religion that requires war.