In God at War, Arlandson attempts to simultaneously discredit the violence performed in the name of the God of Islam as grave and unjust atrocities, while upholding the dignity of Christianity by defending similar violence perpetrated by the Christian God in the Old Testament.
He delivers two quotes, one from the Old Testament and one from the Qu’ran, both record God inciting bloodshed. The one from the Qu’ran, he says, is doubly hard to accept as “Christ showed us a better wayâ€Â. Such a bias is hardly conductive to the academic argument he thinks he is proposing. Obviously Muslims do not believe that the means of salvation were changed by the death of Jesus, so it should have no bearing on his argument.
His first point of defense of is that “the historic span of the Bible and Qu’ran must be consideredâ€Â, in which he asserts there is a considerable more percentage of violence in the Qu’ran when one considers it was written in ten years and the Bible in 1400. The Bible, when considering the time span, comes out peaceful while the Qu’ran, more violent. I don’t think it is quite clear as to how this, in any sense, justifies the actions of God in Canaan. The Old Testament gives us the picture of a God who commits genocide, who deliberately attempts to wipe out a race of people. A time span is absolutely irrelevant as to whether or not an act is justified. I suppose he is trying to say that the bible is much more realistic, in that it has times of peace and times of war, but whether the bible comes across as more authentic or not is irrelevant as to whether or not violence in the name of God is justified. And when one considers the supernatural claims of the Bible, the notion of what is “realistic†seems rather moot.
His second point is that the “Canaanites were beyond hope†but the pagan Arabs could have been saved. Firstly, the only evidence that the Canaanites were beyond hope lies in the Bible. While it is acknowledged that the moral practices of the Canaanites were somewhat distorted, this does not preclude any hope of eventually changing. As in the case of Nineveh, the people are described as “inventing ways of doing evil as a pastime’, yet God still sent them a prophet. One must wonder why it is that the people of Canaan were never sent prophets and asked to convert, why God never invited them to join his covenant. When compared to Muhammad, who gave all people he killed the opportunity to convert, the Christian God seems more so malicious. Arlandson also comments that, biblically speaking, God never destroys a place where the righteous can be found. But we are talking about an entire nation of people. This position ignores the reality of human character. Can we say today that there is nation in the world where every single person is evil with no hope of repentance? Why are the Canaanites unique in the thoroughness of their immorality and evil? While it can be asserted that their culture was immoral, it is ridiculous to assert that every single person was beyond hope. In fact, in the case of Jericho, we find that there are in fact righteous people that escape the city. It is not reasonable to say that they are the only ones. Yet some may say “Indeed, Rahab and her household were the only righteous people in Canaan†and that, though divine providence, God spared the righteous people. Yet Muslims could argue that God guided Muhammad and the Muslims to kill only those who were unrighteous, that through a similar act of divine providence, God spared the righteous Arabs. In the end it seems that Muhammad was more merciful than the God of the Old Testament, for he gives all the Arabs the opportunity to convert before killing them. The Canaanites were afforded no such opportunity, they were just killed.
His third point is ludicrous to the point of being humorous. He asserts that God was very specific about who should die, where as Allah was just haphazard about killing people. God, Arlandson holds, only has the nations within Canaan killed. This, more than anything, shows that the authors of the Old Testament were attempting to justify their conquest of the holy land with divine approval. God intends to clear a very particular area of sinners so that he can establish Israel to further his divine plan. Christians argue that to spread Islam by the sword is immoral, but for God to institute his divine plan by the sword would then be equally as wrong. It makes no difference whether God was decisive or meticulous about murdering a nation of people. The holocaust was one of the most thoroughly and well documented genocides in history, yet this gives it no justification. Again, Arlandson is trying to appeal to a sense of realism. He is supporting the faulty premise that if the Bible portrays a more realistic God than the Qu’ran, than the Bible must be true. This, however, does not answer as to how these murders can be justified. Secondly, the Old Testament was written hundreds of years after the events they record, where as the Qu’ran was formed as these events occurred. Obviously one would seem haphazard, as the biblical authors were not reporting events as they saw them happen, but hundred of years later.
In his fourth point, he attacks Muhammad for dehumanizing the Jews so he can justify their killing by calling them apes and pigs. Obviously this ignores Yahweh’s own propaganda campaign, deeming the Canaanites so vile they were beyond redemption and worthy of slaughter.
His argument fails to confront the issue of children, who could not possibly be guilty and worthy of death. Surely, if God could have spared a prostitute, he could have spared the children. He could have commanded the Israelites to take the children they found and have every family adopt one of them, at least this would have considerably reduced the death toll. Or God could have taken all the children up to heaven, sparing them the terrifying slaughter.
Lastly, he fails to confront other situations in the Old Testament. Particularly the destruction that is committed in Egypt. Here God deliberately hardens Pharaoh’s heart so they he will refuse to let the Israelites go, and then massacres the first born of every Egyptian in order to get Pharaoh to change his mind. Surely, God could have never hardened his heart, and surely the deaths of the first born of EVERY Egyptian were not necessary.
http://www.answering-islam.org/Authors/ ... s_wars.htm
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