"arguing to take historical context into account is mindlessly simplified to "for genocide.""
I will ask again, as I did all those times we debated this--
WHAT "historical context" (and, as always with the Bible, I use that term loosely) justifies genocide?
The fact the Amalekites attacked them previously? So?
If the British attached the French today, would the French really be justified in slaughtering (and again, this is important) "every man, woman and child."
How is it ever, ever, EVER justified to kill innocent civilians in war, let alone CHILDREN?
There's absolutely no historical context which makes it OK to exterminate an entire population, which is what that passage is.
I reiterate that anyone who lived through genocide would likely take issue with someone saying that a passage advocating genocide is moral...
There's absolutely no justification for that, historical or otherwise.
You've never ONCE given an effective argument as to why its moral to slaughter the elderly and the children of a population.
The closest anyone's ever had was an asinine argument that leaving them alive would create a "Conan the Barbarian" Situation, which
1. Is pretty damn absurd,
2. Reduces empathy over mass murder to the level of an early Schwarzenegger movie,
3. Would seem to imply that populations think like hive minds,
4. Gives yet ANOTHER reason why murdering civilians and thus orphaning kids is bad,
5. Seems a flimsy justification for putting babies to the sword, and
6. Even if we DID assume those kids would want revenge, that STILL doesn't justify murdering them as, well, you can't murder someone over what they MIGHT do...it's not as if we went in and killed every last kid in Nazi Germany for fear they'd start a Fourth Reich someday.
You cannot justify killing civilians and certainly can't justify killing children and babies, and that passage calls for that as well as the genocide of an entire people...
And I'd have to hope that anyone who's ever lived through the horrors of a genocide would never, never, NEVER want that sort of horror inflicted upon someone else and WOULD be ashamed of someone who found a passage advocating such a passage to be moral under ANY circumstances.
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NFL Week 5: Pick 'em--Wherein, Hey, There Are Actually a Lot of Good/Interesting Games!
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