What you give with one hand, you take with the other. The issue then is, did God in fact order the extermination of an entire people, if rarely, due to their terminal moral degeneration (note that it is not seen that God ever did so simply because they worshipped false gods, but due to the iniquity that such was sanctioned), or did writers attribute Divine sanction to this action, ala Islam (and which even the RC commentators to the official Catholic Bible resort to).
Once you start sliding down that slope, then their is little stopping you, and the source ceases to have much authority, and thus it is a path which pro homosexuals travel.
However, that is why my first question was on authority, as unlike Islam, the God of the Bible did not just communicate by visions, etc., but abundantly manifested Himself by manifest miracles, in both the O.T. and the N.T., which served to establish His authority, and confirm His word and manifest His character (miracles were not just for show, but of mercy or justice). And He is still confirming His word, with signs of various types, (Mk. 16:20), though, as in Moses’ time, the devil, who seeks to operate at the same level as God, has his laying wonders.
As would be often declared in Israel, (Ps. 105; 106) so Nehemiah recalls of God, Thou “didst see the affliction of our fathers in Egypt, and heardest their cry by the Red sea; {10} And showedst signs and wonders upon Pharaoh, and on all his servants, and on all the people of his land: for thou knewest that they dealt proudly against them. So didst thou get thee a name, as it is this day.”
“Thou camest down also upon mount Sinai, and spakest with them from heaven, and gavest them right judgments, and true laws, good statutes and commandments:” (Neh 9:9-10,13)
Moreover, the N.T. refers to such accounts as historical events, (Mt. 12:40; Acts 7; 2Cor. 11:3; 2Pet. 2:16; Rev. 12:9)
Islam, by contrast, has no such, outside of some notable military victories, but nothing on the order of what Israel has seen. And yet its reliance is on the arm and the mind of the flesh, not that of the Spirit of God, by which and essentially only by which, true Christianity has grown.
Thus, going by the Bible, the source of the accounts at issue, it is according to your first premise that is the reality, and a just, and merciful one.
In addition, even on a finite human level, do unto others” presumes a sound mind, and if i was Hitler, and would raise up a thousands years of thousands of disciples like me, and who would die like myself, unrepentant, then i should, if rational, favor my own destruction as well as those who would carry on my legacy. (Forbidden planet?)
I appreciate your effort at trying to explain to me why it was okay for the children to be slaughtered in that manner, but divine manifestation or not, why couldn’t they have been eliminated just the way they various other places of immorality were zapped out of existence. Such an act would reinforce the authority of the divine entity’s sovereignty, and wouldn’t require the people to be the surrogate for the same. I shudder to imagine how it must have affected the people, to hack off at children and infants, in mass, like that. It would harden any heart to beyond the point of repair. It is plainly vile and contradicts everything that the New Testament is about.
The moral flaw which the others and I are unable to assimilate, is exactly the above. For the divine to be giving the authority to take life on such a massive scale, and that too when the victims are deliberately named - the children and infants - arouses suspicion in anyone with a rational mind.
Your justification is basically that the divine entity presented itself to the people in a very “real” sense. The only problem with that is you are resorting to the words of the source to justify the source. To that end, it requires blind faith, and its understandable.
However, I would have wished for a deeper justification than that. I tried to peruse through the other link that was posted in response, but all I got was evasive non-reasoning, coupled with this standard strategy: “Amalakites were vile, they were evil!... etc., so all had to be exterminated!”
But children and infants? Animals, too? There has got to be better explanations than all these.