After perusing Henry B. Smith Jr's attempts to deny that the Pentateuch has God ordering the Hebrews to commit genocide, I emailed the following challenge to him:
This was Mr. Smith's reply:
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First, my argument was simple: How can the Copan/Flannagan thesis of "dispossession only" make God look morally superior to the popular "literal genocide" thesis adopted by so many conservative Christian scholars, when to flee the promised land was to end up arriving in inhospitable waterless land that would surely cause Amalekite children's deaths to be prolong with the suffering of hunger and thirst? Wouldn't a war of absolute genocide have been the lesser of the two evils to inflict on Amalekite children?
Second, Mr. Smith says he suspects that his dialoging with me about this subject nwould result in endless back and forth, but why should this bother an apologist, who surely knows that Christianity itself is nothing but one big collection of ceaseless back and forth in-house debates about God's allegedly perspicuous word? Why would Smith take the strong fundamentalist stance he does on his publicly accessible website? Does he think his arguments are so conclusive that any back and forth arises solely from the willful ignorance of the atheist choosing to debate him?
Third, how else could I have worded my specific challenge so that Mr. Smith wouldn't think it likely to result in endless back and forth? Should I have said the bible doesn't exist? Would he have felt comfortable believing debating that proposition with me wouldn't result in too much back and forth?
Fourth, why did Mr. Smith bring up his belief that my denial of God's existence leaves me no justifiable grounds for my moral arguments? What does an atheist's ability to ground their moral beliefs, have to do with the biblical data which indicate God's intent to dispossess the Canaanites would have caused more suffering to the Canaanites than a quick death on the battlefield?
Smith seems to be arguing that if I am an atheist, then I can have no reasonable or rationally justified moral objection to ancient tribes who force others to die slowly from starvation, thirst and exposure.
I think Smith has misunderstood the point of my argument: When one takes the geographical realities into account (at least those involved in Saul dispossessing the Amalekites in the particular circumstances at play in 1st Samuel 15, God's "allowing" them to flee to outside the borders of the promised land would be to "allow" them to live in waterless desert regions already inhospitable to life, and to there endure threats from existing pagans who previously snapped up the few places that had water or vegetation.
So the apologists who think the Copan/Flannagan "dispossession only" thesis successfully defends God from the charge of being a moral monster, only think so because they never thought about what fleeing to outside the borders of the promised land would entail.
To dispossess the Canaanites in the circumstances described in the bible, is to send them running for their lives, leaving behind most of their food and water and farmland and cattle, and end up forcing them and their kids to live in territory that is far more inhospitable to life, whose few areas of vegetation/water would already be jealously claimed and guarded by other pagans who had previously been "dispossessed" by the Israelites.
Mr. Smith will have to excuse me if I believe I have good grounds for saying that his alleged fear that the conversation would result in endless "back and forth" was a bullshit excuse, and his real problem was a genuine fear that he cannot refute my argument that the "dispossession, kill only those who stay behind and fight" thesis makes God to be a more sadistic monster than the thesis that God ordered absolute genocide.
As far as my ability as an atheist to justify my moral belief that causing children to die slowly is a greater immorality than just killing them immediately, that is the belief held by Copan/Flannagan and their followers. I'm merely pointing out that the Copan/Flannagan thesis ironically has God desiring the kind of result that these modern Christians themselves would have to agree involves more suffering of children than the quick death required under the absolute genocide thesis.
If Christians don't like the idea of their God commanding the immediate death of children, they likely think God would be more cruel if he wanted to force those pagan kids into circumstances that would prolong their suffering from starvation and thirst.
Since the moral problem detected by Copan and Flannagan is only exacerbated by their "dispossession" thesis, that is sufficient to critique them for it. Exactly how an atheist could justify the moral belief that causing children to suffer is immoral, is utterly irrelevant. I do nothing more than point out the irony that Copan and Flannagan's efforts to make god less brutish, ironically achieve the very opposite. Such scholars would suffer defeat under that critique even if we assume atheism cannot allow rational justification for any moral viewpoint.
