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Originally Posted by alatar
And if you'd like a harder question, in the same vein as above, well...Let's assume that God had just cause to wipe out everything that breathed air on the planet. He's God, He has a reason for killing off the animals as well as mankind, okay. Later, when the Hebrews are moving to the Promised Land, they are called to wipe out a peoples, men, women and children (Deuteronomy 2, 3 and especially 1 Samuel 15:1-3). The common apologetics that I hear is that these people were very evil, and like a cancerous tumor, must be excised completely to protect others from being infected. Presumably even the infants were so genetically evil that sparing even these babes was a danger, as they would grow up to pollute the community.
That's a bit hard to accept.
Worse, to me, is that God did not call down fire or whatever to terminate these people in a humane fashion. He had them butchered, which is bad, but worse is that He used other humans as His sword. Can you even imagine what it would be like to be in Saul's army, having just exterminated a city, men, women and children? What does that do to one's soul, and if that's to be to the greater glory of God...
And with that, I'll end by pointing to Jonah 4:10, where suddenly God has pity on a city and its cattle.
At least orcs are not humans, and maybe that's why I don't feel for them when they are obliterated. Is that why ME and Eru is more palatable?
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Well, yes. More palatable to people like us who seem to have developed a different mindset toward such things than those who lived as late as the 17th century. Not that I agree with people of pre-18th century!
But to the answer. This is going to seem somewhat off-beat in terms of traditional Christian apologetics, but so be it. It has to do with Genesis 6 and references following thereupon. Perhaps you're familiar with the famous passage about the sons of God producing offspring with the daughters of Man? ... and how this seems to have been a direct cause of the Flood? Well, there are two theories (I'm aware of) as to what this was about. (1) The sons of God refers to the descendants of Seth, Adam and Eve's surviving son, such that this is about the morally pure line of Seth corrupting itself by mixing with unclean sinners. I think that this particular reading is incorrect (spurious tripe, really). (2) The sons of God are fallen angels who have taken bodily form .... and the Hebrew being patriarchal, it glosses over the likelihood that there were probably "daughters" of God and 'sons' of Man. Now, the theory is that Satan and his fallen angels's purpose is to sabotage the the prophecy of God in Genesis 3, and the way to do that is to corrupt the seed of all humanity. And we are told in Genesis 6 that only Noah's family remained pure. Thus, all other humans must die off so as to protect the prophecy so that the seed of the woman can bring forth Jesus. So the Flood. That, however, was not the last of this attempt to corrupt the seef of humanity. Look for references to the Nephilim and the Rephaim, and (instead of rolling your eyes at references to Giants) consider that the people who populate Canaan when the Hebrews arrive there are in fact completed corrupted by the seed of fallen angels. Thus, they must be destroyed if this is to be the promised land where the promised savior is to be born, for how can the line remain uncorrupted if Satan's efforts to destroy its purity have such a strong foothold in the very "land of promise"? Whether you accept this or not is your call, of course, but it seems to take the most of those weird, odd, inexplicable passages, into account, and gives a more believable and understandable context for the "genocide" commanded by God in Canaan.
As an aside, I've always found it intriguing that Grendell in the
Beowulf story is supposed to be from the lineage of Cain. Not entirely to the point, but not completely unrelated.