Preliminary reminders: typically it is the most militant atheist activists who look down upon everyone for not being as erudite as they who are, in reality, “faith”-filled-pseudo-skeptics who choose only to believe that which is self-servingly convenient.
Also, as a reminder; any and every atheist condemnation of any action whatsoever is merely the piling up of unfounded assertion, upon unfounded assertion, upon unfounded assertion until a tel is built of arguments from outrage, arguments from personal incredulity, arguments for embarrassment, etc.
The last reminder is that the only text that actually made reference to rape (both in word and action) is a text that evilbible.com’s author, for some odd reason, did not quote. It was a text in which only the rapist was punished and that by being put to death. Other instances have not had anything to do with rape and yet the little window on the mind of the author demonstrates a very troubled mind that imagines rape where there is none and all for the sake of justifying rebellion against God.
Thus, we come to the next text in the lineup 2nd Samuel 12:11-14,
Thus says the Lord: “I will bring evil upon you out of your own house. I will take your wives [plural] while you live to see it, and will give them to your neighbor. He shall lie with your wives in broad daylight. You have done this deed in secret, but I will bring it about in the presence of all Israel, and with the sun looking down.”
Then David said to Nathan, “I have sinned against the Lord.” Nathan answered David: “The Lord on his part has forgiven your sin: you shall not die. But since you have utterly spurned the Lord by this deed, the child born to you must surely die.” [The child dies seven days later.]
The bracketed comments were those of evilbible.com’s author who entitled this quote, “David’s Punishment – Polygamy, Rape, Baby Killing, and God’s ‘Forgiveness’” and commented thusly,
This has got to be one of the sickest quotes of the Bible. God himself brings the completely innocent rape victims to the rapist. What kind of pathetic loser would do something so evil? And then he kills a child! This is sick, really sick!
Let us review:
Polygamy: present.
Rape: absent.
Baby Killing: the author cannot seem to decide if it is “Baby Killing” such as in the tile or “The child dies” as in the brackets (or is it that the child dies from being killed?)
God’s “Forgiveness”: present (by the way, note that to the mind of the atheist this is a bad thing).
I suppose that if evilbible.com’s author wanted to condemn polygamy an attempt could be made-although, perhaps not from a Darwinian human as DNA-reproducing-bio-machine point of view.
The Bible specifically states to the Israelites that when “You shall set a king over you_Nor shall he multiply wives to himself” (Deuteronomy 17:15, 17). The fact is that while David and some other kings had many wives and many concubines they were actually breaking the Law when they did so. Thus, God is rectifying the situation.
Note that again, since rape is not mentioned evilbible.com’s author has to insert the idea. Just how does “I will take your wives while you live to see it, and will give them to your neighbor. He shall lie with your wives in broad daylight” amount to rape? Again, I am afraid that it is a, sadly, troubled mind at work.
Is the text not clear?David was not supposed to have more than one wife.He not only had many but, as the greater context states, he specifically had Uriah placed in the heat of battle so that he could take his wife Bathsheba.
These sins were now being exposed “in broad daylight” since he “have done this deed in secret, but I will bring it about in the presence of all Israel, and with the sun looking down.”
Now, if you know anything about David, particularly if you read the Psalms that he wrote, you know that reading him, his personality, is like listening to Beethoven. One minute you can barely hear a Beethoven piece and the next it is absolutely thundering. Likewise, with David’s emotions and his writings; one moment he is feeling sorry for himself and lamenting that so many people are out to get him and the next he is enthralled in the very heights of ecstasy proclaiming praises to God.
At this point, having sinned to such extremes his life and the lives of those around him were falling apart. No, it is not a pretty picture, it is not meant to be as it is reflective of the down in the dumps fallen human condition-which only God can ultimately redeem.
Next we come to Deuteronomy 21:10-14 which I quoted in parts 2 & 3 in order to refute the whole idea that female war captives were raped. Yet, the title to this text is, you guessed it, “Rape of Female Captives,”
When you go out to war against your enemies and the LORD, your God, delivers them into your hand, so that you take captives, if you see a comely woman among the captives and become so enamored of her that you wish to have her as wife, you may take her home to your house.But before she may live there, she must shave her head and pare her nails and lay aside her captive’s garb. After she has mourned her father and mother for a full month, you may have relations with her, and you shall be her husband and she shall be your wife.
However, if later on you lose your liking for her, you shall give her her freedom, if she wishes it; but you shall not sell her or enslave her, since she was married to you under compulsion.
Since it is obvious that there is no rape in sight evilbible.com’s author has to attempt to make you think in the image of a rape imaginer and comments thusly, “Once again God approves of forcible rape.”
I will merely reproduce my previous elucidation of the text, as the men were to:Provide the women with housing.Allow them one month to mourn.Then they may get married.And if they later divorce, they were to go free and not be mistreated (see Deuteronomy 21:10-14).No rape at all anywhere. Rather, cleansing after a war, the provision of a home, time to mourn, marriage and, if need be, freedom and protection from mistreatment.
The point about shaving her head and paring her nails may be related to cleansing (literally cleansing after a bloody battle) or it may have to do with the manner in which people in the ancient Middle-East mourned-other forms were wearing sackcloth and sitting in ashes, etc. Things that are simply odd to us.
That she was to “lay aside her captive’s garb” is an interesting detail as it is obvious from the text that she was being taken from a battle scenario and being given time to mourn, cleanse, and finally marry.
With this in mind the next text is simply explainable as more troubling imaginations of rape Judges 5:30,
They must be dividing the spoils they took: there must be a damsel or two for each man, Spoils of dyed cloth as Sisera’s spoil, an ornate shawl or two for me in the spoil.
Evilbible.com’s author could not muster a commentary this time, hopefully it was becoming obvious that this exercise in Freudian self-reflection was all but failed; the quote was entitled, “Rape and the Spoils of War.”
In a refreshing change of pace evilbible.com’s author makes no reference to rape in quoting Exodus 21:7-11,
When a man sells his daughter as a slave, she will not be freed at the end of six years as the men are. If she does not please the man who bought her, he may allow her to be bought back again.But he is not allowed to sell her to foreigners, since he is the one who broke the contract with her. And if the slave girl’s owner arranges for her to marry his son, he may no longer treat her as a slave girl, but he must treat her as his daughter.
If he himself marries her and then takes another wife, he may not reduce her food or clothing or fail to sleep with her as his wife. If he fails in any of these three ways, she may leave as a free woman without making any payment.
No assertions as to rape but the author did charge the Bible with enjoining “Sex Slaves.” Yet, in the troubled mind of evilbible.com’s author the text-which mentions “slave” on the one hand and “sex” (actually marriage) on the other-gets mixed up into something at which the text does not even hint “Sex Slaves.” No comment was mustered for this one.
As to the use of the word “slave”; is an unfortunate and outdated term to employ in this sort of context. It certainly is self-servingly convenient for people such as evilbible.com’s author to play into a malevolent, malicious and inhumane concept of slavery because when one responds by pointing out that here being sold into “slavery” referred to a “maidservant” and was beneficial for the daughter as well as the whole family, we simply and emotively recoil. In fact, I thought to look up the word for “slave” in this text and found that it is ‘amah and was instantly reminded that in Spanish we refer to a maid as an ama (could also be a nursemaid, nanny, etc.).
Note that the daughter is being sold to live in a household that would care for her. To begin with, this form of servitude was not for life, or till death, but expired in the seventh year. In fact, Exodus 21:5 refers to a servant wanting to stay and would “plainly say, I love my master, my wife, and my sons. I do not want to go out free.” Why would Kunta Kinte not want to leave the white devils who cut half of his foot off? Again, we are not dealing with the same concepts. In fact, this was a system whereby rather than falling into poverty the family could send their daughter to work as a maidservant for some time.
Furthermore, note the restrictions placed upon dealings with maidservants:
“she shall not go out as the menservants do” (v. 7).If her “master” agreed to marry her but does not then he had to “let her be redeemed” and could not “sell her to a strange nation” because “he has dealt deceitfully with her” (v. 8, consider that carefully: he was not allowed to deceive her).If she was to marry the son then the “master” was to treat her as his own daughters (v. 9).If the “master” married her and then practiced polygamy she was not to enjoy any less goods (food, clothing, etc.) than before, she was to remain well cared for (v. 10).
Finally, if the “master” did not marry her, and therefore did not care for her as a wife, or if his son did not marry her, and therefore was not cared for as a wife and daughter, or if she became part of a polygamous marriage and was not cared for properly, she was free to leave the household (v. 11).
We now come to the last text promulgated by evilbible.com as indicative of the Bible and its God’s encouragement of rape Zechariah 14:1-2,
Lo, a day shall come for the Lord when the spoils shall be divided in your midst. And I will gather all the nations against Jerusalem for battle: the city shall be taken, houses plundered, women ravished; half of the city shall go into exile, but the rest of the people shall not be removed from the city.
This time the title was “God Assists Rape and Plunder” and again a comment was not provided.
Considering the overall context of the text, which we consider so as to not take a text out of context to make a pretext for a prooftext, it appears to be envisaging a eschatological event (an end-times occurrence).It seems of the utmost importance to draw a distinction between:
1) Something that God foreordains on the one hand.2) The actions that people choose on the other-even within the foreordained event, lest we forget free will.
3) And God’s overall reaction-His original purpose for foreordaining the action-on still another hand.
How is this relevant? The text clearly says that God purposefully wanted men to rape women. In fact, “God Assists Rape”!
Well, if evilbible.com’s author would have read as far as one more verse, indeed, all the way from the quoted verses 1-2 to verse 3 the answer would have been evident as that verse states,
Then the LORD will go forth.And fight against those nations,
as He fights in the day of battle.
Thus end the great evilbible.com as a scholarly resource for refuting the God, Bible, Judaism and Christianity experiment.It has been clearly shown that evilbible.com demonstrates a great lack of knowledge of the very issue they seek to discuss.When the texts do not say what they would like them to say they attempt to get you to imagine it by inflammatory and emotive titles and comments.The one text that makes the Bible’s position on rape crystal clear was, for some odd reason, neglected.What evilbible.com appears to present is a window into the mind of the anti-theist atheist-God in the hands of an angry sinner.It presented us with examples of just how darkly and drearily clouded the mind of someone in open, loud and proud rebellion against God can become-to the point where they:
Virtually lose the ability to simply read a text and understand what it is stating.Lose the basic cognitive abilities involved in reasoning and discerning.Demonstrated an utter lack of honest scholarly skepticism.Make it clear that all they can see is hatred or that hatred is like goggles on their eyes which taint everything they see.
And that by imagining rape where rape is not even hinted at they present the stuff of which Freudian dissertations are made.
In the end, by going about criticizing the Bible in the manner that they did evilbible.com is discredited while the Bible and its God remain unscathed.