A brief explanation of how I approach the many parts of the Hebrew scriptures which claim that Yah commanded genocides, directly wiped out millions of people, etc. In short, I see these as the ideas of people who ascribed to certain views of deity which were the norm in their times. Gods were seen as vengeful and violent so these folks naturally came to see Yah in that way too. There are also some different traditions within the scriptures themselves about these things. The fact that these traditions are preserved in the scriptures shows that the Israelites (or at least the ones who compiled the texts) were fairly comfortable with some diversity of opinion about Yah and his dealings with people. They didn’t apparently hold to a view of the scriptures as being totally innerant and harmonious as modern Western Evangelical Christian traditions do.
In the last section of the video, I briefly discuss some ideas around the current (as of May 2020) worldwide #coronavirus pandemic. I suggest that if you take the genocide texts in the scripture as being the literal word of Yah, then it would make sense that you would think that coronavirus is something that Yah has brought upon us for some reason (punishment, teaching, etc). I’m leaning more to seeing Yah as *not* able to unilaterally bring about events. Rather, He works with people (and perhaps the rest of creation) to influence us toward good. He didn’t bring about this virus, and He can’t unilaterally make it go away.
References:
“The Best Way of Getting out of the Whole Canaanite Genocide Thing, and It Comes Right from the Bible (But You May Not Like It)” – Pete Enns
https://peteenns.com/the-best-way-of-getting-out-of-the-whole-canaanite-genocide-thing-and-it-comes-right-from-the-bible-but-you-may-not-like-it/
” God’s will and the Coronavirus” – Thomas Jay Oord
http://thomasjayoord.com/index.php/blog/archives/gods-will-and-the-coronavirus
Concepts touched on in this video: #Processtheology, Theodicy, Purpose of prayer, #predestination, doctrine of inspiration, open theism, deconstruction, biblical criticism,
An African Theist 