Malice Aforethought

I finished another book!  At this rate, my year of reading god should not take more than another 20 or 30 years!

Old Testament

Book Four: Numbers

Israel in the Plains of Moab (cont’d)

Chapter 33:  A review of Israel’s itinerary from Egypt to the lowlands of Moab

Chapter 34:  Israel’s itinerary (cont’d)

Chapter 35:  Levitical cities and cities of refuge

Chapter 36:  An appendix on women’s right to receive property

This was actually fairly entertaining.  Islamophobia has been dramatically on the rise in the last few years, and I periodically get in an argument with someone on youtube about it.  The latest thing relates to Sam Harris’s racist comments about Islam.  Harris is racist for saying “Islam is the mother lode of bad ideas” but his fellow racist Americans really hate to hear that.  So, whenever one of these arguments flares up, I try to get them to narrow down precisely what criteria they use to make such a dumb proclamation.  All of the criteria are, of course, chosen because they demonstrate what they want to prove.  But it is amazingly difficult to get one of these people to see that it’s all arbitrary, no one religion is better or worse than the other.  The real reason they think Islam is worse is because brown people follow Islam, and that allows these people to think things about them that they could never think about an American.  They literally think the Arabs are less human, less intelligent, more violent, whatever, and so, when presented with some dumb idea, they are more susceptible to it than they white Americans would be.  It’s idiotic.  It is equally idiotic to believe in any of them, the only difference between Arabs and Americans is the situation they are living in at the moment.  If the war-torn country was Christian, guess what, it would be in Jesus’ name that the atrocities were being done.  (See Bosnia, Ireland, the second American Iraqi war, the KKK, all done in the name of Christ.)

Anyway, one guy I’ve been talking to recently, his belief is that people try to minimize cognitive dissonance.  Seriously?  We’re talking about religion!  So, he says, being peaceful is more discordant with the Koran than it is with the Bible.  There’s a point here.  The four chapters I just read started with a summary of the Israelis’ journey from Egypt to Canaan.  It has forty stages, to match the forty years promised by God.  Here’s the thing, the summary dramatically contradicts earlier descriptions of the same events.  Here at the end of Numbers the authors purposefully twisted and edited the history in order to make it fit what they want to say.  This is right there IN THE BIBLE, and these people say some religions have more cognitive dissonance than others!  If you don’t start any analysis of any religion by acknowledging that belief requires 100% cognitive dissonance at all times, then you are being dishonest (i.e. dissonant) and blind.

Oh yeah, and once they get there, God tells the Israelites they need to kill all the Canaanites in order to take over!!!  It’s so ABSURD that the Koran is more violent than the Bible.  Then God describes exactly what he wants the boundaries of Israel to be.  I really believe one of the most monumentally stupid things human beings ever did was to put the displaced Jews in Israel after WWII.  If they had found a nice jungle in Thailand or India or the coast of Africa, or an area of Siberia, we simply would not have had the last 40 years of middle eastern strife.  Amazing.

Then chapter 35 was interesting.  The Levites don’t get an area of Canaan like everyone else.  They are given cities throughout Israel.  It’s kind of weird.  Then the rest of the chapter is about how some of those cities have to be refuges for murderers!  There’s this whole interesting discussion about how if a person kills someone with malice aforethought then the family has the right to avenge that killing.  But if they were killed without intent, then the person should not be killed, and can take refuge from the family in one of these cities.  Yes, six whole Escape from New York cities for the murderers of Israel.  One really interesting detail is that, if I understand right, the family is justified in killing the one responsible for the death even if it was an accident, so it is the duty of the community to protect the killer from the vengeance of the family.

All this had a very familiar ring to our understanding of criminal justice today.  Not as refined, but in particular it was interesting that the concept of mens rea (intent) was front and center of this discussion.

The entire book of Numbers ends with a discussion of women’s right to inherit.  It didn’t go well.  It was yet another example of the people arguing with God and convincing him to change his mind.

--bibletoenail