Biblical Genocide

It is far from uncommon to find that someone who objects to Christianity dislikes the accounts of divinely authorized genocide contained in the Bible.  These accounts of genocide are often misunderstood, yet they are presented in a very direct manner.  Genocide on strictly racial or national grounds violates the repeated Biblical opposition to discrimination against people solely because of their ethnicity or nationality (Genesis 1:26-28, Exodus 22:21, and Leviticus 24:22, for example), but no one can read the Bible and soundly conclude that it does not condone specific mass killings.  However, even most Christians are unwilling to concede this and are usually embarrassed to even talk about the issue.

This reluctance is ultimately derived from a petty sense of moral confusion rooted in emotion.  Rather than rationalistically examine the matter of Biblical genocide, Christians (and non-Christians) tend to make moral judgments based on the arbitrary whims of conscience.  Furthermore, if God were to demonstrably call for another blatant genocide, many who identify as Christians would almost certainly not comply.  There are those who would even claim that God would never demand another genocidal event, and yet the "God of the New Testament" is synonymous with the God of the Old Testament (Malachi 3:6).  Thus, on the Christian worldview, it is folly to pretend like genocide is universally evil, as God himself blatantly authorized it--in very particular scenarios.

This establishes a significant point that is almost entirely neglected by Christians.  If God instructed his followers to carry out a genocide in the past, it necessarily follows that it is possible that he would do so again.  After all, the claim that genocide always contradicts the righteousness of God's nature (even though most Christians mistakenly think mercy is an inherent component of righteousness) conflicts with verses like James 1:17, which clearly say that God's moral nature never changes.  If God does not change, then it is inane to claim that he would never demand another genocide because of his loving character.

Any Christian who supposes that the "New Testament God" would never command humans to commit genocide again fallaciously assumes that their consciences have some ultimate authority, supposing that they can be more just than the deity their own religion claims is morally perfect.  While the divinely sanctioned genocide of the Old Testament might be subjectively disturbing to some people, though certainly not to all readers, to object to the Bible on grounds of conscience is to simply object because of emotional reasons.  People are often at least selectively against appeals to emotion when other issues are concerned (such as science), and yet appeals to emotion are the ultimate foundation of opposition to Biblical killings.

Genocide, like any other action, is not right, wrong, or amoral because an individual or group of people wills it to be so.  Moreover, its morality is not determined by the subjective feelings of conscience, no matter how many consciences scream out one way or the other.  As soon as one realizes that conscience is completely irrelevant to moral epistemology, one must be prepared to accept the possibility that even subjectively offensive things are objectively just and that seemingly innocent things are heinous.  Moral feelings are useful only for restraining one's own behaviors and for revealing one's own preferences and perceptions.  When it comes to moral epistemology and metaphysics, conscience is without any value.