Yes Yahweh put an end to Canaanite child sacrifice by having Joshua's army slaughter all the children - bible god is a genius!
Well, cofty, has it been your experience that great wickedness is often removed except with violence? American slavery wasn't ended through a strong argument, it was ended by a very grim fellow cutting a swath through Georgia and "making the south holler." Nazism wasn't ended by protests, but by psychos like Patton and the Russians, who raped their way through the eastern part of Germany. Your complaint reads more like somebody who is disappointed that God isn't Sky Wizzardy enough to get stuff accomplished except through whatever political structures happen to exist at the time.
I'm genuinely not sure what sort of argument you are making whan you point out that Joshua wasn't converted, first, into Ghandi before attempting to end child sacrifice (among other goals) among the hyper-violen people of Caanan. What mechanism, exactly, were you hoping to see?
We are living in the here and now Sulla. Now that science has answered some of the scary questions, and we ALL understand that human sacrifice really doesn't win wars or bring good harvests, we need to ask a basic question---which you keep ignoring.
I doubt very much that we all understand this, NC. But that is a conversation for some other day. But let's not ignore your question.
Today---this culture---does it make sense to defend a god that ordered genocide, slavery, subjection of woman, stonings and human sacrifice? This is not a question of whether it made sense thousands of years ago---this is a question of does it makes sense today? With the accumulated knowledge of a couple of millenia---does it make sense? Who would support it today? And why do they do so?
Well, I'm not sure I've defended those actions. What I have tried to do is to contextualize them to some degree. And I have simply tried to point out that, in the Hobbesian nightmare that was the late bronze age middle east, progress is a relative concept -- the same way it is a relative concept today. Establishing 21st century Sweden seems not to have been an option for Joshua, even if he could conceptualize such a political order. And so the question is, given a brutal society that practices child sacrifice and a brutal society that does not, which one do you like better?
The concept shouldn't be so tough to grasp: we do it all the time. Given a society that tolerates Jim Crow laws and excludes citizens from the ful protection of the law and a society that slaughters Jews by the million, which one do you like better? Is it somehow a cosmic failure that the US wasn't made perfect prior to the time it destroyed the German state? Of course not. So, where is your sense of proportion?
Finally, Good Friday is not a celebration of death. It is a rememberance of the worst day in history, when we killed God. But you are not grasping the idea of it: He didn't need to die so much as we needed to kill him. You are working from a framework that asumes we are not profoundly broken, so the entire story can't make sense to you.
Let me try to go at it from this direction and see if this helps. Here is the thing: in all those cultures where humans were sacrificed, in all those cultures where some human scapegoat was required to keep a population from tearing itself apart, whenever this sort of thing goes on, one thing is always true in the minds of the people doing it. That thing is this: the sacrifices and scapegoats are all guilty. None of the victims were innocent from the perspective of the people doing the killing.
