Comatose:
Scully I don't understand your question. You think it's okay to punish a child for its parents sins?
It was more of a rhetorical question. I certainly did NOT say that it's okay to punish a child for its parents' sins.
And how does it demonstrate JUSTICE to execute an innocent child for the sins of its parents?
Jehovah is supposedly the example of true justice... yet, instead of holding people accountable for their own choices (aka, "sins"), he takes out his form of "justice" on a newborn child who doesn't even have the capacity to understand right from wrong. That isn't justice, it's barbaric.
Although, as an atheist, my personal take on what actually happened (if the story has any truth to it at all) was that the child died and David interpreted his newborn son's death to be god punishing him for taking another man's wife and having schemed to have that man killed when she became pregnant with the child.
In my line of work, newborn babies sometimes die, although thankfully with much less frequency than they did thousands of years ago. Still, when it happens, parents beat themselves up over things they may have done or not that "caused" their baby to die. They have a hard time accepting that such a terrible thing was nobody's fault. I can see David and Bathsheba going through the same sort of thought process, with or without the proclamations of a so-called prophet.