We’ve been going through a rough stage with Fr. Mike. It’s stoning, stoning, stoning. I finally got sick of screaming into the wind and joined a discussion group to talk about it.

I struggle greatly with all these passages about stoning. Why would God command such a brutal and barbaric method of execution? I wish Fr. Mike would address that. Thoughts?

People responded, but they tended to be the same thing. Later, more stoning, so I posted again:

Today’s reading was the most shocking thing I’ve ever encountered in the Bible. Stoning your own children because they’re incorrigible?! Does anyone really think there’s any way to defend this command? I think this is the last straw for me.

I’ve heard the same argument so many times now that it’s almost predictable: “But God was dealing with barbaric people in barbaric times.” It’s the justification believers make for the barbaric passages in the Old Testament that so upset our modern moral sensibility. People are commanded to stone rebellious children, stone people who break the sabbath (including a man who was simply picking up sticks), stone women who don’t scream when they’re raped, and genocides are demanded time after time. All those verbs were in passive voice to reflect what seems to be happening in believers’ brains. There is a strange bifurcation that happens that prevents believers from seeing what is startlingly incorrect in their argument.

Their suggestion is that we can’t judge these passages by modern standards because God was working with a barbaric and backward people. He was civilizing them step by step. This argument would be applicable if the passages in question read like this:

Now the Israelites sought a method of punishment for adultery, and they decided that stoning was an adequate deterrent. God saw these things and was displeased at their decisions but understood that it was an improvement over the barbarity they had been displaying. He said, “I will allow this for a time, but know that there are more humane ways of living. I wish to raise you to the highest moral standard, and you will not behave this way forever.”

In other words, it would work if these were acts of free will, acts the Israelites committed of their own volition, acts which God was simply allowing.

But they’re not.

These are God’s commands to the Israelites. These are God’s statutes, God’s requirements, and God’s prescribed punishments. This is God saying, “You shall do this.” What’s more, the god of the Old Testament says over and over that these commands to be kept in perpetuity.

And I’ve yet to see anyone really confront that directly.