He Tried To Defend Numbers 31 It Went Horribly Wrong

Added: 2026-06-02

[00:00:00]Let's begin with the the prompt. God is evil. Can we get a definition for that?

[00:00:06]>> I mean, do we really need one? Like, can we not just understand that evil just means like sucky and not good?

[00:00:12]>> I think we need one just so we don't talk past each other, you know?

[00:00:15]>> Well, okay. So, I would say doing things of which we strongly disapprove.

[00:00:21]>> Strongly disapprove.

[00:00:24]>> All right. Now, is this an objective truth or is this subjective? it whether you strongly when you disapprove of something it's objectively true that you strongly disapprove of it but your disapproval itself is a value judgment which are defined as being subjective.

[00:00:40]So, >> so take that how you will.

[00:00:44]>> Well, yeah, it to me it sounds like it's just your preference. Yeah, just your own personal preference.

[00:00:50]>> All all value judgments, all value judgments and preferences. All statements about morality are expressing a preference, including yours. Whatever whatever positions you hold about morality are also preferences.

[00:01:03]>> I just uh would like to have a concession on the prompt first, which is what I want to work on. Well, you're trying to have a concession.

[00:01:11]>> Well, to have you guys concede to the point.

[00:01:14]>> The conversation about what we mean by words is so dull. Nobody is interested in hearing us have this conversation.

[00:01:21]And and in everyday life, if somebody is having a discussion about somebody's moral character, it doesn't occur to anyone to start asking, "What do you mean by good or bad?" It it this is always just a distraction. I would just like a concession on the prompt where you don't believe God is evil or good.

[00:01:39]>> You got a little hard on for a concession. I'm not sure what you're hoping to achieve here. I'm making I'm making a value judgment which I'm entitled to make. Now, you may not like my value judgment. That's absolutely fine. You're allowed to make a value judgment and I may disagree with yours.

[00:01:55]You're even allowed to make a value judgment about the fact that I maintain the right to make value judgments. And that's absolutely fine, too. If you're upset about the fact that I have an opinion and I'm expressing it, then you have every right to be upset about that.

[00:02:09]Every time we have this discussion, someone comes in and as Sean said, rather than wanting to talk about what a moral monster the God of the Bible is, they want to talk about what words mean.

[00:02:19]It's not interesting. It's not interesting for anyone.

[00:02:22]>> Yeah. Let's get into it because you just conceived. So, let's go into this philosophical debate. What >> No, just just just stop with the posturing. Okay.

[00:02:31]>> I could do exactly the same. I could do exactly the same. I'm going to say this.

[00:02:34]Look, look, I'm going to do what you're doing now, right? I'm going to say thank you for thank you for conceding that your request to talk about words was a ridiculous, childish waste of time. Now, let's get into a conversation about about God's character. Thank you for concinged that. Okay, so the God of the Bible is completely indifferent to human suffering. That's one problem, right?

[00:02:53]The God of the Bible could limit human suffering, but doesn't. But not only does he fail to limit human suffering, he imposes human suffering in unspeakable quantities to people who don't deserve it. This is kind of his hobby. He absolutely loves it. He is the biggest fan of collective punishment that you will ever ever see. And in our normal everyday society, if we come across a person who punishes innocent people for the actions of other people, we recognize that as being morally unacceptable. whatever words we choose to label it and whatever concessions we may feel we're entitled to as a result of using those words. It's the behavior that we focus on. It's not the terminology that people are using to describe the behavior. And the behavior is completely unacceptable. I can give you some examples if you want, but as a general principle before we even get to the examples, this is a moral problem because God is punishing innocent people for the crimes of others. So, I'm going to ask you a question. Do you think that justice includes punishing innocent people who didn't do a crime for the crime that someone else did?

[00:04:07]>> No.

[00:04:08]>> No. So, if we can demonstrate that God does this on a regular basis, would you agree that makes him unjust?

[00:04:17]>> Let's let's see. Yeah. Let's see the argument. Yeah.

[00:04:20]>> Right.

[00:04:22]>> Yeah. Yeah. So, so for for example, God is very upset with David for taking a census that he actually made him do, right? God, God influenced uh influenced uh David to take the census. And because David did this, God is insensed about the fact that David numbered the people of Israel. He doesn't punish David for it. He punishes the people of Israel for it.

[00:04:46]>> Yes.

[00:04:47]>> Right. none none of whom were were involved in that crime in that transgression.

[00:04:53]So that is a what we would call a miscarriage of justice, isn't it?

[00:04:57]Because innocent people were punished for a crime they didn't commit. And if that happened anywhere else, we would all recognize this as a catastrophic moral failure. Agreed.

[00:05:09]>> Agreed. Can we agree that it's allegorical and that really that story of David and God, it's supposed to be symbolizing something besides the actual action. If you're a new Christian, I'm going to give you some advice. Be very careful about rushing to label things as allegorical. The the fall is just an allegory. There wasn't actually a fall.

[00:05:33]We don't actually live in a sinful world. That's just allegory. There's no need for salvation. That's just allegory. How are you deciding what's allegorical and what's really true?

[00:05:41]>> I'm with you guys where you need evidence, you know?

[00:05:44]>> So, why are you calling yourself a Christian then? There's no evidence for any of this nonsense. Why are you calling yourself a Christian?

[00:05:49]>> I call myself a Christian because I believe in the the tenants of Jesus Christ and I believe it's the greatest system this world has ever known.

[00:05:55]>> But you think it's allegorical. So, it's just a nice story. Just a like a like a bedtime story.

[00:06:00]>> Contradict what I about my beliefs and if this if I that's the system I want to promote. How does that contradict?

[00:06:05]Because if it's just allegorical, then nobody actually needs salvation. And therefore, telling people that they need it is lying to them.

[00:06:14]>> Well, that's symbolism. Again, salvation is just another way to have redemption.

[00:06:18]To save yourself.

[00:06:19]>> Save yourself from what?

[00:06:22]>> From other symbolic things that are just allegorical and don't actually exist.

[00:06:26]>> From evil. That that explicitly says what evil is in the Bible, >> right? It says it says God creates it, doesn't it?

[00:06:35]Even if you just look at this stuff as allegory, let's look at what it's allegorical for. It's allegorical for supporting collective punishment. It's allegorical for saying that children can be made into sex slaves. It's allegorical for telling people that they can own other people as property. It's allegorical for adv advocating genocide.

[00:06:57]It's allegorical for a lot of really really horrible stuff that we should all shy away from and that we should all into one example and >> we should all start.

[00:07:06]>> Let's do Numbers 31.

[00:07:10]>> Numbers 31. Let me pull it up.

[00:07:12]>> Sure.

[00:07:13]>> Okay. Numbers >> Yeah. I mean, you could you could I'd be interested to know if you think this story is allegorical and what what it could might be allegorical for. The Israelite army have been instructed to go and carry out a genocide on the Midianite people because some Midianite women seduced some Israelite men and there were and this upset everyone.

[00:07:34]There were some punishments as a result of it and this is deemed to have been a very terrible transgression. And so on the basis of this transgression, the Israelite army go with specific instructions to essentially ethnically cleanse and destroy the Midionite people. So they they go and do that and they come back and Moses greets them and finds out that they uh didn't absolutely finish the job and kill every last man, woman, and child. And Moses is very unhappy. So he sends them back to go and finish the job and says, "Now therefore, kill every male among the little ones."

[00:08:06]Cuz he heard there was some children left over from the massacre and he wasn't having that. So children left over, very bad in his world. So go back and kill the kill the kids. He basically says, "Kill every male among the little the little ones. Kill every woman who has known a man by sleeping with him, but keep all the young girls who have not known a man by sleeping with him.

[00:08:27]Keep alive for yourselves." In other words, go back and finish the genocide and kill every last human being apart from the young girls who you get to take home and do what you want with. What's the lovely allegory here?

[00:08:44]I'll let I'll let you know because just read from reading it just plain simple it does sound horrific.

[00:08:50]>> Yeah.

[00:08:51]>> But looking at it symbolically >> symbolically >> in the context God is punishing these wicked people or the ideology Were were the children were the young the young male babies wicked people? And were the young girls who were going to be taken home by the by by the soldiers were they deserving of of their fate too? The young children >> in this story everybody who who was wicked >> was evilized to worship.

[00:09:20]>> And you don't think that's morally stupid to identify an entire group of people in including the infants and babies and children.

[00:09:27]>> Yeah. But that wasn't the point of the the story. It was exactly the point of the story was was to >> exactly the point of the story was the kind of moral idiocy you see a lot in the Bible where an entire p people group are tred with they are wicked people.

[00:09:42]This is the moral reasoning of a seven-year-old. Right? When you become older and you understand that it doesn't make sense to label entire categories of people as being bad. Grown-ups understand that that's nonsense. When you grow up you'll understand it, too.

[00:09:57]But in the meantime, this is this is an idiotic way of looking at things.

[00:10:01]>> Can we both agree that this there's no evidence of this ever happening?

[00:10:04]>> Yes.

[00:10:05]>> What's the beautiful allegory with taking with taking young virgin girls as to be your sex?

[00:10:11]>> This is human nature being described as >> No, these are these are God's orders passed along by Moses. This is God ordering genocide and rape of young girls. Now I according to your objective morality because God can never be bad.

[00:10:28]This would have to be good, right?

[00:10:30]>> No.

[00:10:31]>> Okay. So God is bad. Thank you.

[00:10:33]>> No.

[00:10:34]>> Thank you for conceding the point.

[00:10:35]>> You're missing the whole point.

[00:10:36]>> Thank you.

[00:10:37]>> I'll I'll accept your concession.

[00:10:38]>> Did God really command these people? Is that what you're saying?

[00:10:42]>> According to the Bible, Moses did on behalf on behalf of God.

[00:10:46]>> Why are you God really actually told these people to kill these people?

[00:10:50]>> Because because Moses was passing along God's commands. Most do you have proof of this?

[00:10:55]>> Do you have proof of that?

[00:10:57]>> Jesus, >> dude.

[00:11:00]You're sounding like you're sounding like you'd never heard of Christianity until last week. This is what you're sounding like at the moment. The narrative is an is a specific command from God via Moses to his people to enact a genocide on a particular group of people because God's unhappy with them. Right? Do you agree with that?

[00:11:21]>> No.

[00:11:22]>> No. So when go when Moses says go and do this, go and kill the kill kill the Midianites acting on behalf of God, you think he's lying.

[00:11:31]>> I don't think that ever happened, just like you guys.

[00:11:34]>> We're not talking about whether it happened. We agree it didn't happen.

[00:11:38]We're talking about the context of why this >> But hang on a second. You're flopping around. You're flopping around like a freshly caught fish on a deck at the moment. Okay, let's all agree it never happened. We're looking at the symbolism. We're looking at what moral teachings we can draw from it. Right?

[00:11:55]When we start looking at that, you immediately jump to but it never happened. We agree it never happened.

[00:12:01]We're looking at this as a moral failure in the book. You've asked, you came in asking why are we labeling God evil?

[00:12:09]We're giving you examples of how the behavior that God commands fits quite squarely into what I would call evil, Sha would call evil. And if you're not a psychopath, what you would call evil.

[00:12:22]We're giving you instances where God's behavior shows that he doesn't care about human suffering and that he likes human suffering in certain contexts. He commands it. He orders it. Because killing people and then taking the surviving young girls home and giving them to the soldiers to take home and do with what they want is evil. It's not nice.

[00:12:47]>> Right? We can agree that it's not it's not an aspirational moral standard that we should all be aiming for. Now, if your response to this is to say, "Yes, I agree with you. This is horrible."

[00:12:58]You're halfway there. Halfway.

[00:13:00]>> I think you're halfway there, too.

[00:13:01]>> The halfway there. The remaining distance you need to travel is to understand that at the same time as you agree that it's horrible, you have to you have to acknowledge who in the story has ordered this horrible thing. Who is demanding this horrible thing? And who's making this horrible thing happen? And in all cases, the answer points back to God.

[00:13:23]>> No. In my opinion, as a God loves he, then Moses's command is immoral. Do you agree?

[00:13:28]>> Yeah. Moses is immoral. Yes.

[00:13:30]>> Okay. And Moses is acting on the authority of God.

[00:13:34]>> You don't think Moses can get it wrong?

[00:13:36]>> If God if God hadn't if God hadn't wanted Moses to do this, do you think he had it in his ability to go, "Moses, no.

[00:13:45]Down, boy. Stop that. Stop that genociding. Mo Moses is God's appointed man on earth. And there are there are scriptures they I they escape my mind now. But there is a scriptural basis for God specifically granting Moses that mandate to speak on his behalf. So you cannot free will. So it's got nothing to do with free will. You cannot have it both ways.

[00:14:08]We're talking about this because you raised the quite ludicrous uh notion that when God was that when um God was giving his commands to the Israelites through Moses, it wasn't actually God.

[00:14:19]It was Moses freelancing and God was powerless to do anything to stop him.

[00:14:24]Even though, for example, in the in the laws of Deuteronomy and all the rest of it, it's liberally peppered with so sayaith the Lord and the Lord the Lord is, you know, so said the Lord and all stuff like that, right? your your notion, your idea that you're expecting us to to believe you are saying with a straight face is that all the time God is watching his appointed agent on earth going against his will, going against what God wants and is God is rendered powerless to do anything to to pro to to to provide any kind of correction to this because he's he's subject to some ludicrous rule of free will that you have invented in your own mind that that Yeah. that you have invented because the B the word free will doesn't appear in the Bible anywhere. This notion came about in in the 4th century, right? This whole free will thing, this whole free will comes centuries later.

[00:15:20]This is not biblical. So, you have to decide whether you want to be biblical or whether you want to just make up and pull it out of your backside and then come to the Bible with that perspective cuz that's what you're doing right now. You're making a claim which is asinine and ludicrous which is that Moses that which is that Moses was moonlighting and doing his own thing contrary to God's intentions and that God was just incapable of intervening.

[00:15:44]That's a massive claim to make consequences by the way. But but if he's not incapable then he's choosing not to which is tacit approval of Moses's actions. So either way you're screwed in the argument. You're either saying he approved of Moses's actions, or you're saying he didn't approve of them, but didn't want to say anything about it or couldn't.

[00:16:05]>> Moses tells the guys, >> "I got you, man. You can't tell me."

[00:16:07]>> No, no, no. Hang on a second. Hang on a second. God God generally No, you haven't got anything. You You You really haven't got anything. You've got your thumb up your own backside right now.

[00:16:16]So, in the Old Testament, in the Old Testament, God generally doesn't make a habit of directly speaking to people. He has an appointed person who does it and that's Moses. So for example, God didn't directly tell people thou shalt not kill. He didn't directly tell people anything about the commandments. He gave them to Moses and Moses imparted them onto the people. Right? He appointed Moses to speak on his behalf. And that's what the Mosaic law is. Funnily enough, that's why it's called the Mosaic law.

[00:16:45]God uses Moses as his mouthpiece to the people of Israel continually in the book. This is the late motif of the Old Testament is Moses being the mouthpiece for God. Your asinine and ludicrous claim is that when it suits you, when it becomes inconvenient to grapple with the things that Moses said, your escape shoot is to say in those moments alone, he actually isn't the mouthpiece of God.

[00:17:11]In those moments of alone, he's just doing his own thing and it isn't actually what God wants. But God is incapable of interfering or doesn't want to interfere.

[00:17:22]>> Either of those in either of in either of these scenarios, God is equally culpable for the statements that Moses makes. Because if Moses is making bad orders and claiming they're from God, and God doesn't think they are, then it would be morally incumbent on God to intervene and say, "No, please don't rape the little girls. I don't want you to do that." But he doesn't do that. And your and your counter to that was, "Oh, free will, free will." But we've showed you many places in the Bible where God disregards people's free will in favor of his own agenda, such as on multiple occasions with Pharaoh. And in First Kings, when he sends a lying spirit into the mouths of prophets to make them say things that they otherwise wouldn't have said. And in Proverbs 21, when he said, "The king's heart is in the hand of the Lord. He turns it wherever he will."

[00:18:15]He's not shy to interfere with the free will of people when it suits him. So your claim that the one day he found himself incapable of doing this is when his own guy was giving orders against his will is so laughable as to win the award for the single stupidest apologetic I've heard in months. Now what were you saying about you've got us now? Numbers 31 again is the verse in which God's chosen people are commanded by his representative on earth with his tacit approval to commit genocide and the rape of children. And that is the reason summing up for the jury right now why I maintain that God is evil because he could have intervened in this horrendous order and chose his silly rules about in your paradigm not wanting to interfere with anybody's free will.

[00:19:04]He could have just given a clarification. He could have he could have is issued an addendum to Moses's orders. He could have left Moses's free will completely untouched, but just appeared to all Israelite soldiers and said, "Sorry guys, when he said rape, he meant not rape." Or he could have parted an ocean and allowed the young Midionite girls to get away.

[00:19:25]>> Or the all knowing God could have picked a messenger who's not going to like, "Hey, I want you to go out." And when God says, "I want you to go out and I want you to hand out puppy dogs and lollipops and stuff like that." And then that guy turns around and says, "Kill all the children and rape the little girls."

[00:19:44]>> Right?

[00:19:45]>> He chose a if if if his if his if his apologetic holds up, God chose him knowing that Moses would constantly get it wrong. I'm telling you all things.

[00:20:01]You guys are getting the narrative. the narrative. This is the stupidest apologetic any of us have heard in months. This is not a time for you to say exactly now you're getting it. This is a time for you to stop and retool.

[00:20:13]>> Honestly, I'm going to give you some advice here.

[00:20:16]>> You could, but you'd be wrong. This is the single stupidest conversation I've had about grappling with.

[00:20:24]>> Yes, of course you do. In your fantasy land, you've got points that people can argue. Your points have been your points have been substantially rebutted because they have been asinine to the point of being comedic. Uh, honestly, dude, >> study up some more. This is not solid apologetics. These are not hermeneutics.

[00:20:42]This is a comedy routine. A comedy routine. I've I've heard I've heard sounder apologetics from Fruit. So, um, I'm going to say thank you for calling in. Go and think about this stuff some more. Uh, honestly, don't make a fool of yourself like this again. It's not pretty. It's awful. Um, but feel free to call us back when you got some better arguments.