The Story of the Amalekites

This is one of the most troubling stories for me, and has always stood as a barrier between me believing in God. It has become an infamous story in the Hebrew Bible and one I'm not sure I'll ever understand.

"This is what the Lord Almighty says: ‘I will punish the Amalekites for what they did to Israel when they waylaid them as they came up from Egypt.  Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.’"  1 Samuel 15: 2-3 

God is commanding his chosen people to not simply kill the soldiers or those who are attacking, but to commit genocide on an entire race of people, killing even the innocent children and infants. When you take this and compare it to descriptions of God see in Psalms or his commandment to love your neighbor as yourself in Leviticus it becomes quite clear this is a contradiction. How does a loving, merciful God then order the genocide of a neighboring group of people? If your moral arbitrator is responsible for the deaths of children, is that someone you really want to follow? There may be a God but this is where the brazen truth and harsh reality sets in for me - if there is a God and this is what he is like that's still a God I don't want any part of.

Purpose

For the past four months I have been taking a Religious Studies class at the University of British Columbia. The course is titled "Scriptures of the Near East" and is intended to introduce students to the scriptures of Judaism, Christianity and Islam and we have devoted our time to reading and analyzing the texts of the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament and the Qur'an. I was raised in a Christian home and attended private religious secondary schools so my knowledge of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament was more than most, yet I hardly knew anything about the Qur'an other than what you hear about Jihad and terrorism on the news. I knew that my relation to a religious text and terrorism was a very ignorant viewpoint, and the main reason that I desired to take the class. At the beginning we were asked to consider coming up with a 'personal intellectual project' - something that we wanted to gain from the class and the study of the three texts. This blog serves as a means of exploring my personal project. As an admitted hopeful agnostic I want to understand religion. I feel this is a universal cause - whether or not you believe in a god or or, religion has deeply impacted and created the world in which you live. I want to understand how people gain merit from the commandments of those who have authorized genocide, degrade women, and are against homosexuals.

These musings are my own, and would love to hear any thoughts you have to help me and others in the search for truth and authenticity in life. Eric Schmidt the Executive Chairman of Google once said "None of us is as smart as all of us" and this is so true. Blogs are awesome because of the way in which knowledge and ideas can be exchanged so freely.  I shall leave you with an another quote (at least this way if you don't learn anything from my quest, you can hear what some smart people have to say ;) that exemplifies my search and why it is important to understand the texts.

"It means nothing to be open to a proposition we don't understand" Carl Sagan