A Conversation about Judges 19-21

 Responding from a conversation at this page

divine atheist

Someone said this:
What is the most disturbing thing in the Bible that you have found as an atheist?

Has no one read Judges 19???This guy gives the rapers his wife/consort and they rape her to death. The next day, he takes her dead body, chops her up into 12 pieces and sends the pieces to the 12 tribes of http://Israel.Um….what?!?! Who thinks of these things?!
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In reply, someone offered this:

“Read 19 and 20. It explains everything. She died. A war broke out, because of the rape. There was no king. People did what they thought was right in their own eyes. No where does it say God approved of her rape, and the actions of her husband or the old man. Lot in Sodom and Gomorrah was going to do the same thing with his daughters, but the angels of the Lord wasn't going to let that happen. They struck blind all those perverts, and helped the family escape. In the old testament it told of what certain people did, like history. Look what Hitler did. God didn't approve. Look at Ted Bundy. God didn't approve him either. Read all context to come up with a reasonable explanation and understanding. You just read a few verses and go off, not understanding. Terrible things happen here on earth, and some of those atrocities are recorded in the Bible, and the actions done because of those atrocities.”

-Icey78
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My reply (to Icey78):

I just now went back and read the whole thing, all through to the end of the book.

There was technically no human king for anyone to get orders from.

But there were human leaders gathering and commanding the tribes.

All the while, those chapters claim that “The Lord” was commanding them personally.

So to say “there was no King” is trivial, when it comes to the issues of human leadership for that story.

Beyond that, it’s outright absurd to say “there was no King” right after the writers explains they were consulting “God” about what to do.

Moreover, to say “everyone did as they pleased” also directly contradicts the rest of the story.

The tribes clearly had an active (and effective) hierarchical command structure.

The writers describe this in some detail.

The writer even tells us about the punishments for anyone who disobeyed.

The writer also tells readers that only one tribe (one of the twelve super-violent roaming rape-gangs) dared risk doing as they pleased (by refusing to show up for more violent crime sprees).

The story is a hodgepodge of irrational and contradictory claims.

Even the opening scene of the story has contradictions.

After the old man give them a place to sleep for the night,
the writer(s) can’t make up their mind if the woman is a concubine or a wife.

The writer also can’t make up their mind if the woman collapsed in the doorway with one hand laying inside the threshold, or if she was completely outside with the door still closed.
 

The writer can’t even make up their mind if the body parts were sent with a message that explained the situation (why those body parts were being sent) or if the leaders of those armies had to wait and ASK what it was all about.

If they had to ASK (as the writers says),
then:
How much sense does it really make that they gathered all their armies together to do something about it … BEFORE they knew what situation they were supposed to do something about?

And why was it perfectly fine for the old man to GIVE his guest’s wife/concubine (Wifecubine? Concuwife?) to a local rape gang,
but yet BAD for them to do as the old man said?

I know what I think about it. But the writer is being morally inconsistent.

And can we really even be sure she was dead before her sortof/kindof-husband cut her into pieces?

According to the writer, the man didn’t even bother to make sure.

He merely describes a state where she might only be unconscious and in need of medical attention.

The psycho just eventually starts hacking her into pieces.

Also, why would the 12 tribes care?

She’s either disposable or not.

If she had any human value in their eyes, then they should have killed the men who sent her outside to be brutally assaulted in the first place; the same men who just went to bed like it didn’t matter.

Even the way the one man acted when he discovered her. It was like “oh yea. I forgot about this thing. Good thing I didn’t trip and fall. Oh well, I guess I better take this with me.”.

Meanwhile, you can say the “The Lord” never commanded her brutal assault. But that addresses a point nobody here ever raised.
 
Although, we could reasonably argue that by NOT condemning the act of sending her outside to be brutally assaulted by a roaming rape-gang, ...

"The Lord" signed off on it as A OK afterwards.  

Also, it’s a pretty lame flex, considering how the rest of the story says “The Lord” commanded hundreds of thousands of murders (even murders of children)
along with countless thousands of other kidnappings.
Subsequently, those girls (mostly children, to be sure) were to be trafficked into life-long sex-slavery.

"Our Lord is mad about a single senseless rape and murder.
It's something that happens every day around here.
But this nameless girl's death is a problem for some reason.

Or maybe he's upset for a different reason.
He isn't really saying what the problem is.
Nobody really is articulating what this is about for them. 
But he wants his favorite cult to kill and rape a shit-ton more of their fellow cultists in protest.

So I guess the real problem was ...
he was mad that there was only one local rape/murder on that one particular morning.

We aren't making our quotas!" 
 

The writer clearly regards girls and women like they were sub-human livestock.

They also clearly regarded all life as cheap and casually disposable.

And they clearly had a casually super-violent “Lord” who agreed.
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Show some self-respect.

Stop making excuses for those poorly written, unrealistic, contradictory, and psychopathic stories.

And maybe stop conflating it with reality. 

Any qualified historian will tell you that bible stories are heavily mythical. 

Even as laymen, it's pretty easy to tell that some of it's made up. 

Beyond that, ...

Here's how real life non-psychopaths reason:

If you sit and watch a violent crime against an innocent person 
without intervening, 
then you are complicit. 

If you don't feel capable to rescue anyone,
then go get someone who is.

Otherwise, you have then co-committed that crime by allowing it to happen.

If you show up in court with the defense "I didn't want to interfere with the criminal's free will", 
a judge is not going to consider that to be a reasonable defense.

In order to have a safe-as-possible society, 
and good-as-possible people,
we must hold ourselves and each other to a higher standard than that.

So if you see some grown man assaulting a little girl, you shouldn't reason "I value his freedom to do this bad deed ... more than I value the freedom of that girl to NOT have it happen to her.".
 
It would be insufficient to then think "but I'll make sure something bad happens to him later, to make him sorry". 



You can't un-rape the victim
later.
 You literally can't make it right.
Nothing anyone does later can undo the fact that such a horror has happened.

Nor would it be morally impressive to let the rapist off the hook  
if he arbitrarily decides to place a lucky bet about the true religion before his due punishment catches up with him.

Although,
a "God" can't really send anyone to the same Hell twice anyways.
So nobody's really ever going to be punished by the Christian god for anything specific they've ever done anyway, right?

 According to Christians,

any individual person is either totally off the hook for anything they've ever done,
or else they fry ... no matter what they've ever done. 

Meanwhile, it's entirely inconsistent to suppose a "God" whose own personal moral-truth/absolutes 
are to never interfere ... except randomly sometimes.
 Or for a God to think "It would be wrong for me to interfere. But I randomly sometimes order followers to interfere on my behalf". 

Bible writers couldn't decide what "God's" moral views/values were. So they kept switching it up.
I suppose that's why the most devout bible-fans can't decide what their own morality is either.