Well, it depends on whether you believe the Bible as a whole is the inerrant word of God. Most Christians on this board believe that is true. I guess since you appear to be a Catholic then maybe that does not apply to you.
I don’t know, do you believe that God commanded Joshua to do all the things the Bible says he did? If so, then since, by definition, everything that God commands is good and righteous then that means there is a written example of how sometimes genocide, rape, and slavery are justifiable.
I must admit to be ignorant of what Catholics believe about these events, and I would be happy to be enlightened.
Well, Catholics most certainly do believe that the Bible is the inerrant word of God. So we don’t differ one iota from the Evangelicals on that score.
I’m not gonna lie to you tyke, those passages you cite—yeah, they are bang-your-head-against-the-wall difficult to understand. Why would God command the slaughter of the men and women of Ai? I’m happy to be a devout Catholic for 10 years now, and it doesn’t make a lick of sense to me either.
But no Christian is allowed to interpret these passages however he wants. So if I see what Joshua did and say “well God did this, so I can too!”—I am WAAY off base with 2000 years of Christian teaching.
This is why I’m asking you to consider what has the official Church taught about these passages...has it taught the morality of rape/murder/genocide or not?
And there you will find that no major Christian body—Catholic or Protestant—has ever used those passages to justify the morality of those actions in the present. They may be in the Bible, but they are there as history, not as example....and I have no qualms in saying that if any Christian does these things, they are headed straight to hell.