Posted on 01/30/2003 8:13:32 AM PST by shortstop
I know the Bible was a long time ago, but sometimes it has a point.
Like this Moses guy.
He was a Hebrew, some kind of Jewish guy, and his people were slaves to the Egyptians. Only he wasn’t a slave, he had some kind of special deal.
Anyway, he’s walking down the street one day, and he sees this Egyptian guy just beating the living hell out of some Hebrew guy. Just ripping him apart.
So Moses looks one way, then he looks the other, and then he goes over there and kills the Egyptian guy.
He kills him.
Just turned him flat off. Then he hid his body in the sand and went on his way.
That’s pretty extreme. But it worked. And that Egyptian didn’t beat any more Hebrews, and the one he was beating got a second chance at life.
But word got out and Moses had to lay low, so he went off to some other place, where he tended sheep. And he was doing that one night and he saw this bush on fire and he went over to see what was going on and God spoke to him out of the bush.
Which means he must have been cool with God.
Which means that if God had been too ticked off about that dead Egyptian he probably would have found someone else to talk to out of the burning bush.
But he didn’t. He picked Moses, the Egyptian killer.
To me, that says that sometimes it’s OK to kill people. Specifically, sometimes it’s OK to kill people if you are doing so to defend other people who can’t defend themselves.
See where I’m going with this?
All the way to Baghdad.
The people we rescue by taking down Saddam Hussein don’t live in the Midwest, they live in the Middle East. The primary beneficiaries of any action we take against Iraq will be Iraqis.
And Kuwaitis and Saudis and Israelis and Iranians and Kurds and, far less directly, Americans.
When Moses attacked the Egyptian, he was engaged in an act of mercy and service. Ditto for any American action against Saddam Hussein. We are not going there motivated by self-interest alone.
Certainly, cutting off the armorer of Al Qaeda will protect American lives, but not as much as it will protect the lives of those who live in Saddam’s neighborhood.
Because this guy is bad.
All these thousands of chemical bombs he had, the ones that make your skin fall off and paralyze you and leave your lungs a pussey open sore, those thousands of bombs he used to have, the ones that aren’t mysteriously unaccounted for, were used against his people and his neighbors.
He dropped chemical bombs on unarmed desert people because they weren’t his race.
That’s pretty bad. That’s a lot like beating a Hebrew, only worse, and magnified tens of thousands of times.
In recent years, experts say, a million and a half Iraqis have starved to death. Not because of drought, not because of sanctions, but because the Saddam Hussein government – which can sell oil to buy food – let them starve. Because it was more interested in funneling the money into more presidential palaces and more weapons systems.
He is a bitter and evil man who kills for fun and tortures to pass the time of day.
And that would be bad enough if it were just a figure of speech, some glib overstatement of the case.
But it is neither. It is fact.
And this guy deserves to be buried in the sand.
I don’t know which way the president will go, I’m not sure what’s what.
But if the president says it’s time, I’m going to believe it’s time. I’m going to believe that clobbering this guy is the right thing to do.
I’m going to believe that American warriors are going to be as justified in this war as they were in World War II while they liberated Korea and France and Japan and Italy and Germany. Tyrants happen, little people get pushed around and dominated. And then a big guy comes along and settles the score.
It’s time to settle the score on Saddam Hussein.
It’s time to take him out. Peacefully, or not so peacefully. We freed ourselves, we freed the slaves, we freed the French and we freed the Bosnians. Now we’re going to free the Iraqis.
And I figure God’s going to be cool with that.
I figure that God wanted Moses to kill that Egyptian that day. I figure that God doesn’t like it when people are tyrannized and oppressed.
And so he raises up a power big enough to fix things. A power like Moses, or a power like America.
So maybe it’s not the United Nations we should be listening to.
Maybe it’s our conscience, and our history and heritage, and our sense of calling. Maybe it’s God.
Moses was put on that street that day for a purpose, prepared and disposed to render aid and deliver those who were bound. He was raised up by God for a reason.
Just like we were.
I think He will, too.
Moses and those with him were Israelites, not Jews.
Being trained in Judaism, she immediately admitted that I was correct.
(Interestingly, the partitioning of the Old Testament kingdom of Israel into Israel and Judah after the death of Solomon actually moved the identifier "Israel" away from Judah. Israel became [so to speak] the group which would later be the Diaspora!
Alas, I never got a chance to follow up with the Jewish girl about the eschatological implications of this.)
I've always wondered what "looking Jewish" looked like. (Maybe like Clinton appointee from Arkansas General Wesley Clark?)
All I can say is that Charlton Heston did look very human in a "Planet of the Apes" movie that I inexplicably found myself watching last night - May God have mercy on my soul.
Cordially,
Uhhh, I'm not trying to point out things to upset others, but God wasn't okay with it. As a matter of fact, He did not allow Moses into the promised land because of that killing. What are we supposed to gather from that?
Americans may very well equate certain Slavic features with ethnic Judaism. It's all pretty confusing. All I know is that ethnic prejudice is out of bounds. (This is why I took issue with the Jewish girl's joke in the first place. She made it in the context of exalting the Mosaic Law Code just to scoff at Christians. [And heck, I wasn't even a Christian at the time. I was just a plain old Gentile. But I did know some Bibical-historical facts which she had swept aside.)
I had to look this up.
"When the person impeached is condemned, he is either severely whipped, violently tortured, sent to the galleys, or sentenced to death; and in either case the effects are confiscated. After judgment, a procession is performed to the place of execution, which ceremony is called an auto da fe, or act of faith. "
I don't know which is worse, an auto-da-fe , or watching a Planet of the Apes movie.
Cordially,
I did not know that was the reason -- can you provide Book, Chapter & Verse that says this? Thanks!
Not correct. It was for his disobedience in striking the rock when he was commanded to speak to it.
Numbers 20:7-12, 24.
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