The Ethics of the Jewish Scriptures

I have a growing concern about the possibility of reconciling the view of ethics found in the Jewish Scriptures with the one found in the Christian Scriptures (I’m talking about the Old and New Testaments for those of you who don’t have any Jewish friends). I’ll illustrate my point through a specific example. I just finished 2 Samuel, and chapter 24 is hard to digest. As summary, suffice it to say that David took a census of Israel, apparently to stoke his ego, and so he started to feel guilty (v .10). God told him that there would have to be a penalty, and essentially, David was given a choice: either God would punish David, or God would punish the Israelites. David decided that God should take out his wrath on the Israelites, and so over three days, God killed 70,000 Israelites (v. 15).

Evangelicals love talking about the Bathsheba stuff, but what about this? If a modern-day Christian leader condemned 70,000 to death to spare himself three months of uncomfortable living (v. 13), would we not call him the worst person ever? There are two answers I commonly hear from conservatives, and they are both insufficient:

1) “Well, God is variously harsh and then merciful in the Jewish and then the Christian Scriptures, so really there is no ethical difference between the testaments.” I hear Acts 5 about Annanias and Saphira trotted out as an example. Here are two people condemned to death because of something that seems to most of us like a “little white lie.” True, that’s a pretty harsh penalty from our perspective. But in that case, and everywhere else in the Christian Scriptures as far as I can tell, person A is punished for the ‘crimes’ of person A. But in the case of David cited above (and many other cases in the Jewish Scriptures), person A does the crime, and persons B, C, D, E, etc, do the time. That is a drastic ethical difference.

2) “Well, all people deserve hell, so really anything is justified.” Besides the fact that this sounds like something Dick Cheney would say, I regard it as insufficient for essentially the same reason as I reject the first justification. Usually, when we think about ethics, a person is given a punishment that is relevant to his or her crime. But why did those 70,000 people having sinful natures make them liable for a mistake made by David?

Does anyone have some good insight or some helpful references that speak to this issue?

What's Wrong with People Who Like Horror Movies?

The theme of last week’s edition of This American Life was “the fear of sleep.” One story was an adult remembering his two-years of fear-based insomnia after accidentally watching The Shining at the tender age of six. This is a fairly common experience – children being exposed to horror movies.

But is it simply a case of exposing a child to something for which he or she is not ready? Or is something deeper wrong with horror movies? I’m mature enough to acknowledge that not everyone has the same values as me, and it is obvious enough that many nice people enjoy that particular genre, but it all seems fairly disgusting. The nicest thing I can say about the writers, producers, and consumers of horror movies is that they seem to me to have something terribly wrong with their desires.

When I see a commercial for a horror movie, I often think of Paul’s admonishment to think about things that are beautiful and praiseworthy. Of course there is a time to face hard truths. I recently saw Slumdog Millionaire, and have thought a lot about the scene where the kid gets his eyes burned out so he will be a better beggar. This is horrible to be sure, but there is a fundamental difference between these sorts of movies and horror movies. In the former case, the problems are problems that we can hope to solve. We can give money to organizations like the International Justice Mission who break up this kind of human trafficking. Movies like Slumdog heighten our desire to lighten the suffering of others.

Horror movies, on the other hand, are usually about things that are imaginary. Hauntings, vampires, Freddy Kruger killing in dreams, blood rushing out of the elevator (that happened on The Shining, apparently). These are things that we can’t do anything about. It appears then, that lovers of horror movies love meditating on evil – not for the sake of conquering that evil (Slumdog), but because it brings them pleasure.

What can we say about someone who gets their jollies from meditating on horror and evil? I wish I could be nicer about this, but lovers of evil have always made me think of lovers of child pornography. In both cases, the lover has desires that have been twisted and are incomprehensible and sickening. I wonder how many children have been damaged by horror movies?

Sorry if I just called you a pervert. If you would like to talk about it, my cell is 555-555-1234.