The Tenth Plague controversy

The complaint that God justifies killing babies in the bible.

The ownership issue

The first and most prominent defense in these kinds of attacks is to note that the proposition is essentially 'why should I join your religion since your God justifies killing babies?' i.e. 'I do not condone infanticide and I will not worship a God who condones killing babies either.' The complaint itself presents itself as the ownership issue.

As an ownership issue problem the connundrum the accuser faces is that we, the actual religious people, don't condone infanticide, and we don't believe, nor do we teach, that God does so either. Therefore the accuser faces a category error problem; no one from within the tradition teaches that God endorses infanticide; so why does the accuser? In all such cases the error is an error of lack of information – the accuser is speaking out of ignorance or misinformaiton

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