Is it Rape or Not

Rape is not explcitly stated but it seems to be a likely fate.However, I find the supposed defence rather more disturbing. The passage in question states that an Israelite can forcibly marry one of the captives. Presumably the idea is that there can be no rape in marriage even if the bride is forced into marriage and then forced into sexual activity. And the only penalty for divorce here is that the man can no longer sell his ex-wife as a slave - a financial penalty of course, but hardly a benefit for the woman who could simply be expelled with nothing and could even be worse off than if she were kept as a slave.So the passage from Deutronomy is both disturbing because it does condone what I would consider rape and because the person proposing it also apparently condones those acts.

Or Iano ? I wonder if he'd say that it isn't rape if the woman is "unrighteous".

Firstly Deuteronoym 21 was offered to supposedly show that Numbers 1 did not permit rape. You don't address that.Secondly your quote is inconsistent - it claims that the woman would be permitted to mourn by growing her nails - but Deuteronomy 21:12 says that she should be made to cut them.And thirdly it indulges in quite shameless spin:

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she was to be free to go where her inclinations led her.

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Which means "thrown out with nothing" . Is that what you call "humanity and kindness" ?Edited by PaulK, : Last lines cut off for some reason

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The idea being expressed on this thread is apparently that forced marriage is itself rape, since the passage is not talking about rape as such, without any legal protection whatever.

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That is incorrect. You are ignorign the fact that Deuteronomy 21 was inrtoduced to argue that there was no rape. But saying that a man has the right to force his captive into marriage does not mean that there is no rape occurring. Even the argument that marriage implicitly gives consent to sex (itself a despicable point of view) cannot apply in a forced marriage.

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In Numbers 31 God was punishing the Midianites for leading Israel astray, specifically by sexual seduction. This is the reason for ordering the killing of the women who were the agents of this seduction, and God was angry with Israel because they did NOT do this. The punishment is limited to those who had had sexual experience as committers of this particular sin against Israel.

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Except that it did not. Did it spare the elderly who were too old to have been involved ?
And it is not just that the virgin girls were spared - it was that they were to be kept by the victors.

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Deuteronomy 21 then gives the law for dealing with women taken as captives that Israelite men want to marry, which would also apply to the Midianite women who were spared.

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Obviously it would only apply to those that their captor wished to marry. To argue that it applied to all of them is obviously incorrect. And as I have pointed out it does not preclude rape since a man can rape his wife.

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Sorry, then let me address it by saying that I agree that Deuteronomy 21 shows that rape was not being proposed in Numbers 31.

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OK. So you are now insisting that it is impossible for a man to rape his wife, even in the case of a forced marrriage. Aside from the absurdiity of that claim you still have to deal with the issue of those women who were taken captive and yet not taken as wives. Neither passage states that they cannot be raped.

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Spared death, that's all that was meant or said.

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That is NOT all it says. As I state the victors were to keep these women for themselves. And what were they going to do to them, if they did not marry them ?(On the issue of rape within marriage)

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According to modern law, not ancient law.

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So you're going to retreat to legalisms to defend immoral behaviour now. You're going to argue that an absurd legal definition of "rape" is to be used - probably one you've invented since I very much doubt that you've got any actual references - rathew rthan deal with the issue.Edited by PaulK, : No reason given.

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I don’t think we should project our morality onto these ancient cultures and then use that to make god to look like a bad guy.

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That only makes sense if you assume that the passages in question were the product of Israelite culture and not commands from God.Are you claiming that that was the case ?

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Couldn't an argument be made that God did not create the specific reality you are discussing? A theist could seemingly show that God created Eden. That was his intention.
He gave humans a choice, and they chose the consequent reality (the Fall). By the time of Deuteronomy God was constructing laws to fit the realities humans created for themselves.

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If you're prepared to limit God that might work, but if God is omniscient and omnipotent then it wouldn't be possible for humans the thwart His intentions. He would have to deliberately choose to make a universe that worked out the way that it did. If He had wanted it otherwise He would have made it otherwise.

We are responsible for the consequences of our actions to the extent that we could reasonably forsee them. To refuse to consider the consequences is not a valid defence. SO it cannot be simply a case of refusing to know the future, the future must be made unknowable. If libertarian free will were logically possible you might be able to argue that Adam and Eve (and nobody else) was given libertarian free will and their decisions were made unforseeable However I don't think that that is the case so I see no hope for a valid defence on this side.To give up omnipotence is far less promising. That would simply have God voluntarily deprive Himself of the ability to make the universe He wanted, to instead make a universe that He didn't want. That does not absolve Him of any responsibility - and it seems a perverse thing to do.

If libertarian freewill is logically impossible (and I see no way to save it) then you are left with either a genuine random element or a simple failure to see the inevitable consequences. The latter is obviously useless and the first does not absolve God of responsibility. Even if the actual outcome was out of His control He chose to make it so and chose to allow the actual outcome as one of the possibilities. It makes God a gambler with human life and wellbeing - would you have any respect for someone who gambled with someone elses money and lost, and blamed the roulette wheel ?In your answer to my point about onimpotence your reply seems more related to omniscience:

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He knows that in his "perfect" home he wants kids, and that means the fun of their unpredictability

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That would really require permanently giving up omniscience - keeping omniscience and losing omnipotence would not produce unpredicatability, it would simply limit the number of completely predictable options that are available.

As I've stated I view libertarian freewill as self-contradictory. Without libertarian freewill you only have chance or compatibilist freewill (or no free will at all). None of these options save God from responsibility.If it is chance that makes the difference then God has gambled with the wellbeing of others - and lost.If it is compatibilist freewill then it is all ultimately down to God - all human actions are entirely forseeable.

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Think of it this way. You build a house, you have kids, you instruct them in how you believe they should conduct themselves, but they ultimately will make choices. Is it reasonable to consider you the gambler with the lives of your kids?

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What you are saying here is that if we assume that God has the same limitations as a human parent he can't be considere ay more responsible. However this is a red herring because the whole argument has been predicated on the idea that God is omniscient and omnipotent - and human parents certainly are not. Even assuming that God chose to limit Himself does not deal with the issue because that decision itself is must be considered. And your comparison above completely ignores that.

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We can agree that these things did happen, so they must have happened. We are disagreeing that, if these are commands from god, then ... what? What position are you taking?

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I am arguing that IF these are commands from God then they are valid data that we could use to help us determine God's nature - we cannot simply write them down to ancient culture as you suggest.

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Well the scenario I described was God giving up omniscience, as such he should end up in the same position as parents... he would know what is possible, but not what will happen.

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But parents don't have the option of giving up omniscience so that aspect has to be considered. And I've already argued that giving up omniscience doesn't help.

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It was my understanding that you were saying in that situation God would be responsible

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Because God is God and not a human parent. A human parent who took unnecessary risks with their child would be criticised. A human parent doesn't have the same options in avoiding risks so risks that might be judged acceptable for a human parent would be unnecessary to God.

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Let me put it this way. God gets two choices: Whether to limit his powers and so allow others to choose results which could be negative, and if he chooses that whether to go ahead and create people capable of making such free ranging choices.

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And this is where the failure of libertarian free will comes in. Without it either the "choices" are due to random elements (themselves introduced by God) and therefore the gambling I described earlier or they are entirely foreseeable and God is simply refusing to look at what will happen.

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They can be used to help us determine god's nature. But, the data is as revealed to an ancient culture. We can't apply them directly to modern culture to demean god's nature

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Genocide is still genocide and rape is still rape and "marrying" a captive - who has seen most of her relativees butchered - and then throwing her out with nothing if she isn't satisfactory is still vile. Is it demeaning God to say that God openly condoned these actions ?

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lso, I don't think we can say that becaues god has some omni- ability, then he must use it.

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If God chooses to do less than he is capable of then He is responsible for doing so. It is generally accepted that it is wrong to let others come to harm through negligence or from failing to take actions that are easily within our power.It is agreed that we are morally responsible for the forseeable consequences of our actions. If we refuse to adequately consider what will result from what we do then we are still responsible for those consequences. Willful blindness does not absolve anyone of responsiblity.

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Rape is forcing sex on someone, against the person's will. I see no place in the scripture passages under consideration where this is condoned or expected or likely to happen, as I believe I've explained a number of times by now.

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Then I guess that the problem is that you refuse to consider the passages.In Numbers the Israelites are permitted to keep virgin girls as booty. Considering the nature of armies rape WOULD be expected - and there is no command against it.Deuteronomy makes it worse in that it authorises forced marriage of captive women. The women are not given any option of refusal. And once "married" they are fair game to be raped by their husbands. By endorsing marriage in these circumstances rape is not only expected but condoned.I guess that the problem is that you don't really like the Bible.

OK I think I've got your position.We shouldn't even consider the possiblity of rape here. Just because the verses describe situations where rape is extremely probable is no reason to think that it might happen.Anyway those little Midianite virgins were probably gagging for sex with the men who butchered their families.And if any of them were raped, then it's alright because they were Midianites and God cursed the lot of them