Numbers (31:17-18)

Perhaps they were all inherently evil and only evil would come from them.
Perhaps G-d was willing to give virgins the benefit of the doubt, even though they were also inherently evil and that most likely evil would only come from them. Perhaps there was a small possibility that some good could come from some virgins and that thereby, this portion of humanity would be redeemed.

 

In other words perhaps they were not actually human beings, but EVIL CREATURES!

Do you believe other groups of people are actually evil creatures?

 

No.
Do you?
Why would you think they were "EVIL CREATURES?"

 

You said 'Perhaps they were all inherently evil and only evil would come from them.'

I've never heard of human beings, as a group, of which that was actually true. I think that's a description of 'evil creatures,' not of human beings.

 

Given a history of 10 to 20 thousand years and the entire planet Earth to choose from, I suspect that there are many different groups of human beings that had inherent traits of which no one has ever heard.
Until the various minions of mass murderers such at Hilter, Stalin or Mao killed millions of people en masse, I suspect that no one thought that any group of people could do that.
It is for certain that no one thought that any group of people could simply fly jets into skyscrapers and government buildings for the sole purpose of killing as many people as possible including themselves.

Then again, it has been said that there are two types of human beings, the Decent and the Indecent. Perhaps your "evil creatures" are the Indecent.

In reality, Man as a species has always been capable of incredible Evil.
If you wish to call those folk "evil creatures," who could stop you?

What does that have to do with my possible answers to the question of the topic at hand?

 

If you read the first verse(s) its clear that their sexually promiscuous women were corrupting the Jewish young men.
The people of Midian together with Moab began to interact with the people of Israel. The Israelites were staying in (*)(*)(*)(*)tim and the Israelite men began to commit whoredom with the Moabite women.

Syphillus began to spread and the elders had no control over the younger men who were as addicted to sex as some people today are hooked on Crack.
The idea that Judaism was threatened by the seduction of those women who were protected by their men made them an enemy that threatened Israel as much as if they had swords, instead of STD and temptation.

Wiping them oiut with the diseases they carried was why only the virgins were spared.

 

That's a reasonable explanation from a human point of view. It begs the question of the male children however...

On the other hand - Perhaps they were all inherently evil and only evil would come from them.
Perhaps G-d was willing to give virgins the benefit of the doubt, even though they were also inherently evil and that most likely evil would only come from them. Perhaps there was a small possibility that some good could come from some virgins and that thereby, this portion of humanity would be redeemed.

 

I have never heard of a group of human beings that was not a mixture of good and bad. Fine, it's a big planet with a long history. You know what, it's a big universe too, and there may be lots and lots of planets. Does that mean anything you can imagine can be taken to exist somewhere sometime? Maybe, but I'd want a little more to go on than that.

Perhaps there is nothing especially evil about those societies that have done genocide, perhaps there was just a particular sequence of historical/cultural happenstance that put totalitarian, evil regimes in power.

Perhaps the terrorists who flew planes into buildings did not do it 'just to kill as many people as they could,' but to strike as hard as they could against a culture they believed to be the dangerous enemy of what they valued.

It's been said there are just two kinds of people, those who believe in false dichotomies, and those who don't.

And it all has to do with my questioning the totally speculative smearing, with nothing less than inherent evil, of some people of whom we know nothing, for the purpose of defending some stuff you seem to want to defend.

 

I am not so easily convinced that people like Mao were just evil.

It is certainly a sad situation that he eliminated 60 million people while he repressed the old system that had frozen China into a medieval age where those who had the station in life saw no reason for change while one billion starving serfs work hard just to eat.
For centuries, the Dowagers held all the wealth they had accumulated centuries before and used it live a kings and queens everywhere lived so well.

The educated class was content to do well while keeping the Status Quo for the other billion Chinese.

Mao realized that his changes as he would see them carried out would never take place quickly enough for him to do it himself, in his own life time, unless he dictatorially removed all opponent s to the plan for every Chinamen to leap forward.
While he was alive, using brute force could accomplish that which otherwise was a futile exercise in just one life time.

The question we must really answer is whether Chinamen today and in the future about to dawn are free now from that era frozen for centuries with out change.
Was the cost of 60 million weighted against the benefits to 1 billion, or a measure of 6% of the Chinese, the rich and well off opposition to any social change more important that the 94% which had no hope for 1000 years???

Tough call, indeed.

 

You've clearly never attended a UCC or Unitarian service....

 

Anyone else think "cupid dave" is the most ironically named poster on this forum?

 

Based on your dudgeon, it appears that you do not believe that the passage quoted was either commanded or written by G-d.
Okay.
Based on your belief system, that G-d did NOT command or write that passage of the Torah, then your logic appears correct.
Why would people do such things? Your viewpoint would be that those doing such things were evil.
Based on your beliefs - sounds right to me.

 

They could have been carriers of STD as we see young boys between 13-17 today infected with HIV/AIDS which has increased by 30% in the last year.

One of the problems Israel had in taking these steps against sexually promiscuous Gentiles was that by granting mercy to a part of the peoples they conquered, they left enemies for life intent on revenge forever after.

What I believe Moses was telling the Jews whom he taught ti be sexually prudent was break through we have not considered.
Since all other Nations before Moses worshipped the sun, moon, and the stars, they were all basically sexually irresponsible peoples and STD must have been rampant among them.

With out the CDC and penicillin, those ancient societies must have been dying like flies and suffering otherwise from every possible STD, which over time, surely had a cost that cut manpower to the bone.

Eliminating STD required killing the carriers under such conditions, and eliminating infection required strict sexual prudence thereafter.
These measure seem harsh to us today, but image if the Homosexuals had no clue about AIDS since 1986 when they brought that disease to America.
Imagine the diseases they carried into Israel if the Jews let them out of the closet in those days.



Philadelphia -- "The life span of gays is 20 years shorter than the life span of heterosexuals."

So said Dr. Paul Cameron of the Family Research Institute, a Colorado-based think tank....
(Full Story —
The Negative Effects on Health of Homosexuality

By Timothy J. Dailey. An overview of studies examining the state of health of homosexuals. (Off-site) Full Story

By a wide margin, the state of health of homosexuals is not as good as that of heterosexuals. Here is an excerpt:

Reduced Life Span. A study published in the International Journal of Epidemiology on the mortality rates of homosexuals concluded that they have a significantly reduced life expectancy:
In a major Canadian centre, life expectancy at age twenty for gay and bisexual men is eight to twenty years less than for all men. If the same pattern of mortality were to continue, we estimate that nearly half of gay and bisexual men currently aged twenty years will not reach their sixty-fifth birthday. Under even the most liberal assumptions, gay and bisexual men in this urban centre are now experiencing a life expectancy similar to that experienced by all men in Canada in the year 1871.

Robert S. Hogg et al.,
"Modeling the Impact of HIV Disease
on Mortality in Gay and Bisexual Men,"

 

Nope. Not a tough call.
As donquixote99 pointed out - without G-d, Man who murders millions or even 1 person at his personal whim - is evil.
And, as donquixote99 pointed out, Man can justify anything he wants as he destroys This World in the Name of His Beliefs...

Now, as you, cupid dave, clearly do not hold the same secular viewpoint as donquixote99, I suspect that you believe G-d does, indeed, know more than mere mortal Man.
And, G-d did, indeed, pronounce Murder as evil.

I do not believe that Mao ever claimed to receive his murderous instructions from G-d.

 

This is fine from a secular point of view.
But you don't even need the STD justification from that viewpoint. They were at war with the Midianites and they wiped them out and took their virgin women. That's what folk did for the last 5,000 years up until tonight...
Which means it's not news... nothing to see here... move along.

The question, quoted from the Torah, implies that G-d commanded the Jews to perform these actions.
If so, there would have been easier ways to wipe out STD's or even the Midianites than simply having the Jews kill them.
As I believe that the Torah has reasons for telling us what G-d commanded us to do, I was speculating on the reasons that He might have had for not totally eliminating the Midianite nation but rather saving those that could not been involved in their particular sexual plague and perversions.

 

Perhaps the moon is made of green cheese.

 

But if you're with G-d and murder millions it is not evil?

 

It takes a dirty mind to see rape in that passage. God told Moses to kill all the males, and non virgin females. Why do you think that was? Simple, it was about wiping out the tribe. Males carry on the family line. Females that were not virgins were not pure. But the virgin females could eventually be incorporated into the tribes of Israel. That would wipe out the medianites from existence.

In Chapter 25 of Numbers, we see the reason for God's decree. The tribes of Israel were camped at (*)(*)(*)(*)tim. There they were seduced by the Medianites to turn from God, and to bow down and make sacrifices to Baalpeor. This was a violation of the First Commandment. So, God brought a plague against the tribes of Israel. The plague killed 24,000 of the tribes of Israel. But one of the tribes brought a Medianite woman into the congregation. The Grandson of Moses' brother Aaron chased the man and woman into the man's tent and killed them with a javelin. This satisfied God's rage against the Jews, not against the Medianites that had seduced the Jews into breaking the Commandment. This is why he called upon Moses to wipe out the Medianites.

 

What kind of a mind does it take to imagine a God who becomes enraged and wants a whole tribe wiped out?

 

A Christian Mind?

 

OK. And based on your belief system, I gather, the passage quoted was either commanded or written by G-d. So it is sort of a problem. One solution is to speculate that the Midianites were evil to a very unusual degree.

Another solution, of course, would be to speculate that perhaps not everything in the Torah was either commanded or written by G-d.

 

No need to single out the Christians. I'd say a rather ordinary religious mind, using religion in a usual way.

As Moishe3rd was pointing out, there's nothing unusual about the war to wipe out the Medianites. People do that sort of thing a lot in history. It's the thing to do if you're a tribe that lives by hunting/gathering and herding, you want to expand into a neighboring tribe's land, and you can't just chase them away (other tribes in the way, probably).

The bad news for the Medianites is they weren't conquered by a more developed agricultural state, that had more use for slave labor, or by a multi-ethnic empire, that would have been happy to just leave them in place and get tribute from them.

 

Finally a point. Context is everything. This event hapened because the Midianites enticed Israel to sin, Balaam was a false prophet who knew what God had told him that Israel was blessed by God. The Israelites were told to wipe them out as an act of vengence from God, because they sought to entice Israel to sin. The Midianites worshipped false gods and immoral lives and Gods judgment was complete.

 

A secular atheist mind?

 

Of course.
Speculation is a great human pastime.
However, from what appears to be your point of view, why pick and choose whether G-d wrote or commanded something. What priorities do you use to decide? Why bother?