Posted by
Jason Cunningham on Wednesday, February 04, 2009 5:07:39 PM
I was just reading Psalms, and I came across a verse in which the psalmist expresses a desire to see the babies of his Babylonian captors smashed on rocks. Sounds rather cruel, I confess, and I immediately asked God to help me understand it. After all, such verses are ones that atheists and other nonbelievers latch onto as reasons for rejecting the Bible and its God. Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, in particular, use such arguments, preferring to believe that a sound moral code exists independently of God and can be discovered without the aid of religion. They also presume that said moral code was available to anyone anywhere in the world at any point in history, and thus that the ancient Israelites were immoral for wanting to bash babies' heads and wage war against their Canaanite neighbors.
Hitchens, Dawkins, et al. make several mistakes, however. They first make the wrong assumption that this moral code is fully decipherable without the aid of God, the church or religion. They fail to realize, however, that they, despite choosing against God, were nonetheless raised in a society unmistakably saturated with and affected by Judeo-Christian morality. This affords them the opportunity to choose against God and be under the illusion that they "discovered" morality all on their own, never realizing that they can't completely escape the effects of growing up in a society influenced by Christianity.
Their second mistake is assuming, based on their first wrong assumption, that anyone throughout human history should have been able to fully decipher the proper moral code on their own -- and thus concluding that wishing harm on your enemies' babies should have been quite obviously wrong to any sane person. But what's wrong, as well as illogical, is to project a 21st-century understanding of morality -- culled from 2,000 years of Christian history -- onto a pre-Christian society. Not only does our basic understanding of morality today come from Christianity, but this standard had not yet been made manifest at that point in history. Thus, all they had to go on was the Law, with its eye-for-an-eye principle of "the punishment must fit the crime"; in other words, they had an incomplete understanding of mercy, compassion and grace. Combine this with the fact that survival was a daily struggle in those days -- because of limited resources, and constant warfare amongst groups over said resources -- and it's easy to see why your attack on my children would lead to my attack on your children.
Of course, with the advent of Jesus, we've been blessed with a full understanding of forgiveness, mercy, compassion and grace. This may be difficult, but try to imagine not having that understanding, not living in a society whose fabric is woven with the threads of Jesus' teachings, not living in a society where daily survival is thought to be a given. Makes for a different situation, doesn't it?