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Luke_A_Somers comments on In Defense of Tone Arguments - Less Wrong
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A: worked on me. I thought, "Okay, I realized I don't know that much about my religion. What's the deal?" So during church I'd actually read the bible. It didn't take long.
B: Well, I once was on a discussion board that was primarily for evangelical Christians. In the natural course of discussion, I mentioned the tribe of Benjamin. You know, the one with clearly-God-sanctioned mass murder and rape.
Some of them came up with some pretzel logic justifications. The rest of them backed away quietly.
Incidents like that were a big contributing factor to why the site was shut down.
Wait, what? The Book of Judges in general and this part in particular has a lot of problems, and may well help to cure people of Christianity. (Perhaps I should say, 'stop them from annoying me with Christianity,' since without this factor I would feel inclined to leave them alone. Or at least focus on the ones smart enough to do something useful.) But the specific rapes that I think you refer to here occur right before the last verse of Judges:
I'm pretty sure the author saw that as bad.
This whole "Destruction of Sodom" fanfic seems to condemn breaches of the rules of hospitality, rather than rape as such. But I do think the original audience would consider the rape of other Israelites, who didn't have permission from their fathers to be raped, a heinous crime.
This was a long time ago so I'm not fresh on which passages are which. I suspect I misremembered the context. Perhaps it was a discussion of how easy interpreting the will of god is supposed to be ('just read it! It's all there!' they say).
The author may have seen it as bad, but it seemed far more connected to lack of a king than the lack of the LORD - they were trying to do god's will in incredibly stupid and immoral ways through that episode. And in this particular case, there were definitely people in that crowd who tried to justify it anyway, saying that the men were evil anyway, and the women would be so glad to be free of them and hitched to good, god-fearing men, that it wasn't rape.
I wish I were making that up.
Anyway, there are god-sanctioned massacres - the Canaanites in particular get it really rough.