A Commandment with So Many Exceptions
23 HOURS AGO
“Thou shalt not kill” is a commandment with many exceptions.
Pete Hegseth and the Pentagon want to livestream a military execution by firing squad. We can all watch! Even some Republicans are aghast and Trump says he’ll make the final determination. But Trump is no opponent of capital punishment.
Some moral clarity can be seen from the Catholic Church, as with this statement:
Archbishop Paul S. Coakley, the president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, called the planned livestream “a barbaric promotion of a culture of death” and warned it would harm the country.
“The public execution even of one who has done grave harm will only further undermine the moral fabric of our nation and be a blight on the conscience of its people,” he said.
A culture of death, indeed. The United States leads the world in mass shootings, weapons exports (“the merchants of death”), and threats of annihilation (Trump has threatened Iranian civilization with obliteration at least six times).
So much for “Thou shalt not kill”!
Seriously, there was a whole lot of killing in the Old Testament, where God was often quite wrathful and his “chosen” people were encouraged to smite their enemies. As a boy I learned the saying that “the beginning of wisdom is the fear of God.” You never knew when God might demand a human sacrifice (a son?) or encourage you to smite the Amalekites.
1 Samuel 15:3 King James Version
Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.
God was kind of a dick here. What did he have against camels and donkeys?
With Jesus Christ a New Testament came along that encouraged tolerance, turning the other cheek, putting down swords, and blessing peacemakers as children of God. Those pacific pleas didn’t bother many Americans who prefer instead to think of Jesus as loving warriors armed with guns or flaming swords, looking something like the Dark Lord Sauron in Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings.”
That is an image very much at odds with “Thou shalt not kill.”
If one murderous death is bad, surely weapons with the ability to murder millions are infinitely worse. Yet the U.S. military is once again embracing genocidal nuclear weapons. Of course, the Pentagon doesn’t speak openly of murdering millions or possibly billions of people. It speaks of “investing” in nukes, of “modernizing” them, of “recapitalizing” the nuclear arsenal.
I must say I prefer the honesty of the King James Version of the Bible about smiting and killing. God didn’t obfuscate that his chosen people should modernize their spears or recapitalize their knives or invest in more swords before annihilating Amalek.
Just as Americans are exceptional at violating the sixth commandment against killing, so too was the god of the Old Testament. He was a jealous god, the superpower of his day, THE exceptional one, with global reach and global power over life and death.
We’ve learned a few lessons from the Bible, but not the wisest ones.
Once again, I’m led to believe that despite all advancement in civilization over the millennia, somehow the entire thing still seems to come down to an experiment on one giant Petri dish – a fight for nutrients, for survival, nothing more.
A couple of footnotes… I’m not entirely sure on the dates, but I believe lynchings of Blacks in the Deep South took place as recently as the 1950s, and public executions of criminals, mostly by hanging, witnessed by tens of thousands into the 1930s. Not so much as a admonishment as entertainment?
On Oct. 28, 2023 Netanyahu took to the podium to express his self-righteous outrage and vengeance upon Hamas and the Palestinians. In his near frothing-at-mouth spewing forth, he made reference to the Amaleks, virtually quoting the 1 Samuel 15:3 King James Version. I was shocked at the utter erasure called for in that passage and what Netanyahu said, indeed extending even to “cattle, donkeys and camels”? Note: this is exactly what the Israelis are doing not only to Palestinian lives, but also to their history, culture, and future. It further amazed me that Netanyahu was not only making this Amalek reference from 3,000 years ago, but was implying that they were still lurking in the shadows, out to get him and the Israelis. NDS, “Netanyahu Derangement Syndrome,” but wholly justified?
And then there’s this. I’m not especially up on my Biblical references, but seeing as I’ve never heard of the Amaleks or Amalekites before Netanyahu, although they seem to occupy such prominence, I decided to run online searches. Turns out there is no archeological record of their ever having existed. In other words, another fable, a myth, a fabrication upon which the Israelis/Zionists have built their phony nation. In still other words, those of George Gershwin,
“It ain’t necessarily so
It ain’t necessarily so
The t’ings dat yo’ li’ble
To read in de Bible,
It ain’t necessarily so.”
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