*sniff* "But God is meaaaaaaaan..."

Sometimes I have to wonder at humanity's general capacity to look at the bigger picture. A lot of people who find themselves disliking the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob will do so on a basis that is, to say the least, based in immaturity.

Take for example, the reflexive RAGE at God's actions in the Old Testament. Whether it's smiting the Heathens in Egypt and Canaan or somewhere along the way, or causing the deaths of sinful Israelites, or making up rules that seem unfair and meant to deprive people of fun, you will find individuals who take their own ideas of morality and try to pigeonhole them into an era where their comfortable lives would be completely alien, and with predictable results.

Some will even make up or assume that God demanded Human Sacrifice, based on interpretations of passages that hold less water than a holey thimble. Seriously, if God desired actual human sacrifice, He'd have the priests slaughtering human beings on those temple altars, not cattle and other assorted livestock. God demanding that certain people receive the Death Penalty for their sins or atrocities does /not/ qualify as sacrifice.

There are instances where Israelites practiced (child) human sacrifice, but this was based upon pagan customs, not on anything God told them to do. In fact He got very upset with them when they did this. Anywhere this is mentioned, these things are done in relation to Moloch and other associated Canaanite deities.

So, then, why would God use Death to punish people? Why not just throw them in Jail? Well, especially during the Exodus, when the people were on the move, Jail was absolutely not an option. It would have required the construction of a sturdy structure meant to house people and keep them from escaping, which is just not going to happen On the Road. There is evidence that this infrastructure is not possible until Israel starts getting Kings (the first of which was Saul). You will notice that *&^% settles down after the first King is appointed. This is because the authority to deal with *&^% is passed in some way to the King, and it would be more practical for a King with the taxpayers' money at his disposal to start building things like prisons. Out in the wilderness, what options are there? Exile? That's a 90% death sentence right there--especially in a desert with hostile nomads at every corner (*coughcoughAmalekitescoughcough*). In the desert on the road, society was always "one paycheck away" from homelessness and chaos. In order to keep order and make it look like He means it, God would have to institute very harsh punishments. Any person stubborn or stupid enough to run afoul of such rules qualifies for a Darwin Award.

But was the Death Penalty justified? In a time where survival was not only paramount, but practically the only consideration, yes it was. Think of it like this: Imagine a situation akin to the "Nuclear Option." There is someone who wants someone else dead, and the only way to stop them is to kill them. Due to circumstances of legality, putting them in jail is not an option at all. Then, what is a person to do? What sort of actions would be justified to save the life of the person who's been threatened?

In short, all God's actions were to protect His people. He had not only to deal with outsiders that threatened the Israelites (i.e. Egyptians, Amalekites, Moabites, Midianites, Canaanites, etc) in various ways, He also had to deal with internal problems of various individual Israelites going bad on Him.

Unthinkingly reflexive objectors do not see this. They insist that God is capricious and a bloodthirsty war god without taking into account that God was doing what was necessary to make sure that Israel survived as a people and a country.

They also do not see how merciful and patient God actually is. When they rage about the Firstborn in Egypt dropping dead as a result of God sending out the hitman known as the Angel of Death™, they completely ignore the fact that God gave Egypt 400 years to smarten up on their own. But it didn't happen, so He smartened them up for them. He smartened them up so well, that they never used slave labor for building the Pyramids. Ditto the Canaanites--that 400 years that Israel spent in Egypt was also a grace period for Canaan and its own wickedness. But they ended up getting worse too, as evidenced by their practice of child sacrifice and other things that were not nice. And they had word ahead too; the Spies that Israel sent to Jericho found out from Rahab that pretty much EVERYBODY knew what the God of Israel had done to the Egyptians, the Moabites, and everybody else in between. So it's not like this came as a complete surprise.

Israel, of course, didn't actually doooooo everything they were supposed to do. They left some Canaanites around and soon got hooked into their practices, like a kid being introduced to crack for the first time. And like a crack addict, Israel's society started deteriorating to the point of near self-destruction. This is what God wanted to avoid.

You know people are borderline insane (or outright fruitloops flapjacks kooky) when they invest a great deal of mental and physical energy objecting to something which they don't actually believe really happened. After all, how many Star Wars "geeks" get truly viscerally angry at Darth Vader for obliterating the planet Aldebaran with the Death Star in Star Wars IV? I mean really, REALLY angry? So much so that they go on massive polemics about how mean Darth Vader is, despite the fact that Darth Vader does not exist? And if they do, do you question their mental stability? Of course you do! Because that's craaaaazy.