Frank Turek's dishonesty concerning pagan child sacrifices

 This is my reply to a video by apologist Frank Turek entitled

Slaughter of the Canaanites 

Frank Turek Frank 

2,682 views 

Published on Oct 22, 2017  

Responding to why did God command the extermination of the Canaanites.

Tuesday, October 24, 2017

Edited Jan. 16, 2020

Frank at 0:55 ff first distracts the discussion by pretending the atheist has no sufficient standard of morality by which to legitimately judge the OT atrocities to be immoral. But most people think slaughtering children is immoral, so we only need to appeal to this general mindset to show that our critique of the bible-god's morality, being contrary to even normative Christian ethics, thus indicates the OT god's morality is more likely a reflection of the morality of the OT authors, as would be the case with any ancient writing from the ANE.  Does the Republican Christian hold off from criticizing the Democratic Christian all because of charges that one of them cannot sustain his ethics from the bible?  No.  So if Christians forge ahead with their convictions despite a fair chance such ethics might be completely subjective, the atheists should be allowed to do so as well.

Second, "that's just your opinion" might be true, but that hardly proves the opinion is disqualified. When your dad sent you to bed on a school night at whatever time he did, he couldn't ground that exact bedtime in any absolute moral source, and yet under Turek's logic, as a child you'd have been morally justified to dismiss this parental mandate because it was your dad's merely subjective opinion.  But most people would say you had an obligation as a child to obey your parent, even if the particularly chosen bedtime for your Christian household was not the same as required by the Christian father living down the street. Hence, obligation can be reasonable and rational despite being based on non-absolute ethics.  Hence, our disgust at infanticide can be rational and reasonable even if only premised on subjective ethics.

Third, Christians who disagree with each other on gun-control and capital punishment do not objectively and non-neutrally sit on the fence until these issues are fully resolved, showing that even the possibility that their ethical views contradict the bible, doesn't slow them down from setting forth their subjective views and demanding compliance.

Fourth, Turek at 1:35 ff responds to the "you Christians provide the standard which God fails, when you say the God of the OT is loving" critique by saying God gives reasons in the bible for his slaughtering of people in the OT. But that doesn't work either; as he is assuming God' is always correct in his ways, when in fact the anthropomorphic interpretation of Genesis 6:6-7 and Exodus 32:9-14 cannot be sustained on objective bases such as grammar, immediate context, larger context or genre, in which case we find the bible-god's imperfection to be just as literal as the other matters testified to in those contexts, and thus whatever "reasons" he gives for killing children, could just as easily be a case of him commanding now, that which he will literally regret later (Genesis 6:6).

Fifth, Turek is incorrect 2:15 ff to say the Canaanites engaged in many abominations and watched their babies sizzle to death. a) his god would have to be morally inconsistent to kill pagans who burn their children to death, since God commands this in the OT, Leviticus 21:9; b) Gwendolyn Leicke asserts that while Hittite law allowed for bestiality, “I do not know of any references to intercourse between humans and animals from Mesopotamian sources.” (“Sex and Eroticism in Mesopotamian Literature” Routledge; 2003 at 210).  As far as children being “burned to death”, Plutarch (110 AD) notes that the Carthaginians used a knife to slit the throat of the children first, so that only a dead body was placed on the burning statue’s arms. De superstitione, chapter 13.  Carthaginian scholar Shelby Brown assert the literary evidence does not support the notion that the parents of such kids were calloused and hardened (“Late Carthaginian Child Sacrifice”, Sheffiled Academic Press, © 1991, p. 174).

Worse, when Turek at 2:30 ff says the music players played loud with intention to drown out the screams of the  babies being “cooked to death”, this is a dishonest representation of the sources.  Plutarch in the only source that mentions this loud playing of music to drown out the crying, but makes clear it is the crying of the parents beingdrowned out so they would not reach the ears of the other people.

“…No, but with full knowledge and understanding they themselves offered up their own children, and those who had no children would buy little ones from poor people and cut their throats as if they were so many lambs or young birds ; meanwhile the mother stood by without a tear or moan ; but should she utter a single moan or let fall a single tear, she had to forfeit the money, 6 and her child was sacrificed nevertheless ; and the whole area before the statue was filled with a loud noise of flutes and drums so that the cries of wailing should not reach the ears of the people. Yet, if Typhons or Giants were ruling over us after they had expelled the gods, with what sort of sacrifices would they be pleased, or what other holy rites would they require?

Note also that Plutarch there says the child's throat was cut before being placed on the altar, obviously necessitating the conclusion taht the child was killed before being put into the flames.

It is clear that the wailing is being done by somebody other than the children whose throats were previously cut, and even if we trifled the kids were wailing because their throats were cut, that does not constitute parental wailing while kids burn to death, nor does it constitute the wailing of children as they themselves burn in the fire.

Turek's emotional remark that the children were screaming as they sizzled "to death" arises from his desire to make the Canaanites appear to modern minds to be far more vile than they really were, and constitutes dishonesty on his part.  The historical sources neither express nor imply that the children were alive as their bodies burned.  They obviously wouldn't cut the child's throat, if they wished for fire to be the efficient means of death.

Sixth, Frank says God’s ordering the Israelites to slaughter the Canaanites was a case of God stopping evil, and yet those who ask why God doesn’t stop the evil in the world, are still complaining about it.  Yes, we do because your bible-god has the telepathic ability to successfully convince even pagans to do whatever he wants them to do, no bloodshed required (Ezra 1:1), so that God could have stopped the alleged Canaanite atrocities with a wave of his magic Dale Carnegie wand, but no, he prefers to solve the problem with more bloodshed than necessary.  Sort of like you solving the problem of lacking rent money by robbing a bank.  In both cases, the problem was likely capable of less violent resolution.

Seventh, Copan, Flannagan and other Christian apologists try to make God look more politically correct to modern sensibilities by saying God’s infanticide orders in the OT were cases of mere war-rhetoric and exaggeration which was common in the ANE of those days. At 4:15 ff Turek says those arguments for hyperbole are compelling, because the bible forbids intermarrying with the group that it just said in a prior verse were to be “wiped out”, so the only way to avoid the contradiction of possibly marrying dead Canaanites is to assume the text was hyperbole.  

First, doesn’t matter if it was; the “hyperbole” defense does not even imply that there was NO infanticide or killing of non-combatants, so the moral outrage will not go away even with the "hyperbole" defense.  

Second, and worse, the cities of the promised land often fought amongst themselves, so if all Joshua intended to do was “dispossess” them, that means pagans fleeing to parts unknown, outside the promised land, with the kids and not much to survive on, and likely to be turned away whatever pagans were already there, while not knowing exactly how far they must go to get free of the Hebrew attacks.  One could say merely "dispossessing" the Canaanites subjected their children to a slow death from starvation, thirst, disease, attacks by other pagans, which is worse than simply putting them to the sword immediately.  So that the "dispossession" hypothesis of Copan/Flannagan ironically makes God out to be a greater moral monster than he was in just ordering such kids to be immediately killed.

And some Christians would argue that just because it was PAGAN convention in those days to exaggerate war victories, doesn’t mean the Hebrew authors would have found such literary convention appealing.  When you say you worship a god who cannot lie (Hebrews 6:18, Titus 1:2), you are necessarily implying that when God inspires you to write in the style of straight narrative history, he is not permitting you to “exaggerate” what really happened in history.  Copan appeals to the bizarre and convoluted theories of Wolterstorff to justify trivializing the yucky parts of the bible while still somehow saying those parts were still “inspired by God”, but this is nothing but semantics run amok.  Sure is funny that nobody in the church in its 2,000 years of history ever suspected the "kill'em all" passages of being mere hyperbole.  Will you still uselessly insist that God was "still somehow" guiding the church as it taught error for 20 centuries?  Then I suppose God can inspire the Mormon uprising too, since stupid error doesn't seem to preclude God playing a part in it.

Pagans also told stories about their gods that were pure fantasy…should we presume OT authors likely did something similar?  Or does your god’s inability to lie sort of argue that he likely wouldn't wish his human subjects to imitate dishonest pagan literary convention?  And if you had to ask where the pagans got their idea that it was permissible to exaggerate what 'really' happened, how must the Christian answer?  John 8:44, the devil is the father of lies.

Eighth, Turek says God is the creator of life and thus can take it whenever he wishes (3:15 ff), but would you continue to think a man was free from mental illness, if he intentionally destroyed all of his possessions and burned his house down once per year, with no criminal intent?  No.  Well why not?  Isn't it true that this father had the "right" to destroy those things as often as he wished?.

Ninth, Turek says if Christianity is true, people don’t die, they just change location, but that’s a pretty big IF.  It is far from clear that the OT supports the notion of an afterlife, and groups like Seventh Day Adventists and Jehovah Witnesses make compelling arguments that the NT doesn’t even support the idea of a literal afterlife.  Once again Turek’s apologetics here appears geared away from convincing atheists of the error of their way, and more geared toward helping Christians feel good about the bible they already infuse with a great amount of trust.  If that is the case, prepare to be decimated in your own debates with atheists if you take Turek’s comments here and try to use them in actual debate.  

Tenth, Turek says the Canaanites, without extermination, would otherwise have corrupted the Israelites coming into the promised land.  While the threat of corruption is stated in the bible, this argument creates more problems than it solves:  Most of today’s atheists don’t feel the least bit of compulsion to get into New Age crap, spiritism, the paranormal or palm reading or any of the things you say are spiritually false.  As atheists, they don’t have the weapons of warfare the NT says Christians have to fight such things, such as the shield of faith...yet they do little more than just laugh at the idiots who promote such things.  So apparently, unless you are willing to say the ancient Israelites were more stupid than today's atheists, or more prone to sin than today's atheists, it is highly unlikely that the Israelites would give in to the mindless idolatry of their near pagan neighbors anymore than the big-city atheist would give in to the spiritualist operating in the store below him. So its seems false to say that the pagan threat was so severe as to justify extermination.  The fact that evolution is taught in schools to Christian kids today greatly increases the odds that your child will believe evolution is truthful science.  So...why doesn't god's perfect plan for keeping the israelites pure from sin and error, continue to be a perfect plan for the rest of his kids today?  Or did you suddenly discover that even god changes his ways through the years?

So it is not likely that the Israelites, had they experienced God in reality exactly as the bible says, should have found pagan practices directly contradicting the most basic level of Hebrew ethics, to be the last bit enticing.  This "need" to kill the pagans was nothing more than a false excuse to justify the desire of Moses and Joshua to steal land from its rightful owners.  Every fucking fool back then believed that his "god" was inspiring him to make whatever wars he wanted to make.

What makes more sense of Israel’s alleged continual fall into idolatry on nearly every page of the OT is that they had no real-life reasons to think their Yahweh was any more “true” than the Molech or Chemosh or idols worshiped by the pagans.  And apparently God’s motive for killing the Canaanites (to prevent them from corrupting the Israelites) didn’t work, since on nearly every page of the OT, the Hebrews are giving in to polytheism.  Yup, there's lots of serious problems with the biblical excuses for the divine atrocities.  God has about as much "need" to kill kids as YOU have to rob a bank.  If the person had ability and opportunity to solve the problem with less bloodshed than they did, we call them sadists and maniacs.  We do not say "their ways are mysterious, we can never know whether they were doing things the more bloody way for the sake of a greater good".  But you DO turn off your brain like that when it comes to this non-existent concept called 'god', which you continue visualizing in your brain.  Welcome to all the reasons why it is so difficult to evangelize the "cults".  They are just as convinced as you that there is just no other way...is it any mystery why the prioritize their own mental comfort above objective consideration of the obvious?  They probably learned to be that narrow-minded from YOU.  So give yourself a pat on the back for teaching the rest of the world how wonderfully you can insulate yourself from reason.

Eleventh, Turek says God allows people to make free choices (3:55 ff), but according to Ezra 1:1, God can successfully motivate even pagans to do his will, and in Ezekiel 38-39, the metaphor of “hook in your jaws” is used to describe the degree to which God causes pagans to sin, then punishes them for doing what he forced them to do.  So again, God’s respect of freewill is about as stupid as the parent “respecting” the freewill of a disobedient daughter to take a gun from the house with intent to shoot others at school.  True love will always force the loved one against their will to protect them from disasters about to be caused by their own choices, and there’s no denying that the parents who engage in “tough love” after the teen leaves home, obviously love their children just a bit less than they did when the kids were just toddlers.  You do NOT “love” the person whom you allow to destroy themselves, when you have ability and opportunity to prevent the evil without creating greater evil, and yet you just stand around watching and doing nothing.  Clearly a mother’s “love” for a toddler and a man’s “love” for his 23 year old gangster son are not the same thing.  In Psalm 5:5, God’s hatred is not toward the works, but the “workers” of iniquity (i.e.,, the people themselves).  So perhaps part of the problem between Christians and atheists is that Christians are arguing from a premise of God’s love that doesn’t even work biblically.  God's "love" for sinners is nowhere the "love" that a man has for his own kids.  A man will not allow his child to be raped if he can help it.  But god will allow somebody to rape your kids despite his ability to prevent it.  If Christians had a more biblically justified idea of divine "love", 90% of the disagreements about god could probably have been avoided.  What we should be debating is whether it is reasonable to label the divine will toward us as "love", when that "love" allows for violations that no type of genuine human "love" would ever allow.  

Twelfth, Turek then gets preachy at 5:20 ff and says we do evil every day, which contradicts Luke 1:6 and other texts that say sinners managed, without becoming perfect, to satisfy God’s commands upon them to the point of being righteous in his sight.  Apostle Paul thought he obeyed the law in "blameless" fashion back when he was a non-Christian Pharisee (and he likely said this while being mindful of the obvious legalism spouted in Psalm 18:23-24, see Philippians 3:6, he was blameless "regarding the Law").  That's pretty difficult to reconcile with Turek's "we break the law every day" crap.  Hey Turek, have you ever met anybody in your life who was "blameless as to the righteousness in the Law"?  Besides Paul?  NO.  Back to the drawing board for you.

As far as Turek’s trifle about how God’s love is manifested: God also killed the baby born to David and Bathsheba (2^nd Sam. 12:15-18), and Turek would be foolish to ask the atheist to first take sides with him in Christianity’s in-house debate about original sin, so Turek could persuasively argue that the baby, infected with original sin “deserved” to die.  If Christians had the law of God in their heart, they’d never cry about the death of a loved one, because the deceased had always “deserved” to die no less than the pedophile convicted of raping a little girl to death.  So the fact that even spiritually alive people violently disagree with god’s ways, justifies spiritually dead atheists to think they will never make sense of this religious confusion, and to thus avoid entering the fray.  If the math teachers cannot even agree on how to do algebra, exactly why should the students give two shits about the subject?

Finally, Turek argues that an atheist cannot justify atheism on the basis that the god of the OT is evil, which is technically true (i.e., atheism no more suggests any moral code than sharks suggest shaving) but the more developed atheist argument is that the evil and ways of the OT god are so close to the evil of the pagans in the ANE (except of course for the monotheism which doesn’t go back to the people as much as it goes back solely to a handful of idealistic OT authors), that it is more likely the OT authors didn’t speak about their god with any more truth than the Moabites did when speaking about Chemosh.

For all these reasons, Turek is not saying ANYTHING that makes biblically informed atheists, like me, feel the least bit threatened.  His efforts at making the Canaanites appear horrifically vile were based on his intentionally false understanding of the ancient sources.  And since Turek is a "smart guy", he doesn't have the option of pretending he got this wrong "by accident".  So atheists are reasonable to charge this error of his as intentional.  He knew there was no historical evidence saying Canaanites used fire as the means to kill their kids.  Hell, none of the bible's "pass your son through the fire to Molech" references indicate fire was to be the means of death:

 10 "There shall not be found among you anyone who makes his son or his daughter pass through the fire, one who uses divination, one who practices witchcraft, or one who interprets omens, or a sorcerer, (Deut. 18:10 NAU) 

 3 But he walked in the way of the kings of Israel, and even made his son pass through the fire, according to the abominations of the nations whom the LORD had driven out from before the sons of Israel. (2 Ki. 16:3 NAU) 

NAU 2 Ki. 16:3  But he walked in the way of the kings of Israel, and even made his son pass through the fire, according to the abominations of the nations whom the LORD had driven out from before the sons of Israel. 

NAU 2 Ki. 17:17  Then they made their sons and their daughters pass through the fire, and practiced divination and enchantments, and sold themselves to do evil in the sight of the LORD, provoking Him.
NAU 2 Ki. 21:6  He made his son pass through the fire, practiced witchcraft and used divination, and dealt with mediums and spiritists. He did much evil in the sight of the LORD provoking Him to anger. 

 10 He also defiled Topheth, which is in the valley of the son of Hinnom, that no man might make his son or his daughter pass through the fire for Molech. (2 Ki. 23:10 NAU) 

NAU 2 Chr. 33:6  He made his sons pass through the fire in the valley of Ben-hinnom; and he practiced witchcraft, used divination, practiced sorcery and dealt with mediums and spiritists. He did much evil in the sight of the LORD, provoking Him to anger. 

 35 "They built the high places of Baal that are in the valley of Ben-hinnom to cause their sons and their daughters to pass through the fire to Molech, which I had not commanded them nor had it entered My mind that they should do this abomination, to cause Judah to sin. (Jer. 32:35 NAU)
NAU Ezek. 16:21  "You slaughtered My children and offered them up to idols by causing them to pass through the fire. 

NAU Ezek. 20:26  and I pronounced them unclean because of their gifts, in that they caused all their firstborn to pass through the fire so that I might make them desolate, in order that they might know that I am the LORD."' 

NAU Ezek. 20:31  "When you offer your gifts, when you cause your sons to pass through the fire, you are defiling yourselves with all your idols to this day. And shall I be inquired of by you, O house of Israel? As I live," declares the Lord GOD, "I will not be inquired of by you. 

NAU Ezek. 23:37  "For they have committed adultery, and blood is on their hands. Thus they have committed adultery with their idols and even caused their sons, whom they bore to Me, to pass through the fire to them as food.

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There's also biblical evidence that "pass through the fire" did not mean "use fire to kill the child":

In 2nd Kings 16, King Ahaz is said to have caused his "son" (singular) to "pass through the fire" (v. 3).  

Nothing in the rest of the chapter expresses or implies that Ahaz ever had anymore than one son.  Yet v. 20 casually claims that after Ahaz died, his "son" (singular) Hezekiah took the throne:

NAU  2 Kings 16:1 In the seventeenth year of Pekah the son of Remaliah, Ahaz the son of Jotham, king of Judah, became king.

 2 Ahaz was twenty years old when he became king, and he reigned sixteen years in Jerusalem; and he did not do what was right in the sight of the LORD his God, as his father David had done.

 3 But he walked in the way of the kings of Israel, and even made his son pass through the fire, according to the abominations of the nations whom the LORD had driven out from before the sons of Israel.

 4 He sacrificed and burned incense on the high places and on the hills and under every green tree.

 5 Then Rezin king of Aram and Pekah son of Remaliah, king of Israel, came up to Jerusalem to wage war; and they besieged Ahaz, but could not overcome him.

 6 At that time Rezin king of Aram recovered Elath for Aram, and cleared the Judeans out of Elath entirely; and the Arameans came to Elath and have lived there to this day.

 7 So Ahaz sent messengers to Tiglath-pileser king of Assyria, saying, "I am your servant and your son; come up and deliver me from the hand of the king of Aram and from the hand of the king of Israel, who are rising up against me."

 8 Ahaz took the silver and gold that was found in the house of the LORD and in the treasuries of the king's house, and sent a present to the king of Assyria.

 9 So the king of Assyria listened to him; and the king of Assyria went up against Damascus and captured it, and carried the people of it away into exile to Kir, and put Rezin to death.

 10 Now King Ahaz went to Damascus to meet Tiglath-pileser king of Assyria, and saw the altar which was at Damascus; and King Ahaz sent to Urijah the priest the pattern of the altar and its model, according to all its workmanship.

 11 So Urijah the priest built an altar; according to all that King Ahaz had sent from Damascus, thus Urijah the priest made it, before the coming of King Ahaz from Damascus.

 12 When the king came from Damascus, the king saw the altar; then the king approached the altar and went up to it,

 13 and burned his burnt offering and his meal offering, and poured his drink offering and sprinkled the blood of his peace offerings on the altar.

 14 The bronze altar, which was before the LORD, he brought from the front of the house, from between his altar and the house of the LORD, and he put it on the north side of his altar.

 15 Then King Ahaz commanded Urijah the priest, saying, "Upon the great altar burn the morning burnt offering and the evening meal offering and the king's burnt offering and his meal offering, with the burnt offering of all the people of the land and their meal offering and their drink offerings; and sprinkle on it all the blood of the burnt offering and all the blood of the sacrifice. But the bronze altar shall be for me to inquire by."

 16 So Urijah the priest did according to all that King Ahaz commanded.

 17 Then King Ahaz cut off the borders of the stands, and removed the laver from them; he also took down the sea from the bronze oxen which were under it and put it on a pavement of stone.

 18 The covered way for the sabbath which they had built in the house, and the outer entry of the king, he removed from the house of the LORD because of the king of Assyria.

 19 Now the rest of the acts of Ahaz which he did, are they not written in the Book of the Chronicles of the Kings of Judah?

 20 So Ahaz slept with his fathers, and was buried with his fathers in the city of David; and his son Hezekiah reigned in his place. (2 Ki. 16:1-20 NAU)

Now before you jump out of your skin to defend a biblical inerrancy doctrine that you couldn't defend to save your life, take a breather and think for a second:

Why are you so powerfully in favor of the Canaanites using fire to kill their kids?  Is it because if the Canaanites weren't this evil, then your bible-god's "reason" for slaughtering them would accordingly be less convincing?  That is, you need to make sure they were as horrifically evil as possible so that God's ordering their slaughter will seem to have greater moral justification in the eyes of modern western individualist Christians?

Don't you think you need to first make sure the ancient sources on Canaanite child sacrifice really did state that the children were cast alive into the fire, before you so blindly assume your god is the neatest thing since sliced bread?

Or did I miss that bible verse that says the more your zeal departs from common sense, the more "spiritual" you'll be?