Sethbag wrote:In The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins discussed some moral impulses that people seem to have irrespective of whether they are believers in religion. He talked about some studies that have been done where people were asked questions in ethical dilemas.
In one question, there's a trolly car with 5 people on it that is out of control and you see there's a track disruption up ahead and it's sure to derail and kill the five people onboard. You see that there's a siding that you can divert the trolly onto, but there's a guy standing on the tracks on this siding and he'll be killed if you divert the trolly onto it. So, is it OK to divert the trolly onto the siding and kill the man there? Most people said yes, it's ok, regardless of whether they believed in a religion or not.
They then asked another question, which is almost the same thing in concept, but differs in a crucial way. Five patients are in the hospital, and are about to die if they can't get some critical organ transplant. Somehow it is discovered that there's a man sitting in the waiting room whose organs would all be a match for these five patients. Is it OK to seize the man and kill him, and take his organs to save the five other people? Most people answered no, whether they had a religion or not.
The crucial difference here seems to be that most people find it ethically OK to do something that accidentally kills one person if doing so will save more people, but people have an ethical block against the idea of purposefully killing a person in order to use them, against their will, to save more people. Even if death is certain for that person in both cases, there's a difference in peoples' minds between the death being incidental and unfortunate, and the death being specifically used on purpose. I'll have to go look up the description Dawkins used, because it sounds better than my retelling of it, but you get the idea hopefully.
It's interesting to think about this Laban story now, with this in mind. Would you all agree with me that Laban's story is more like the second case, and less like the first? That Laban's death wasn't just incidental, but in fact Laban was specifically killed in order to achieve the "greater good" of the people who would not dwindle in unbelief?
ps: IMHO the biggest defense, besides "the Lord commanded him" to the slaying of Laban, was reminding people that Laban had ripped off the family treasure, and had his guards chase off Nephi and his brothers and potentially kill them. It's as if hey, Laban deserves it. This may have worked back in the 1800s in frontier people, who would hang cattle rustlers and people who committed adultery and whatnot. The thing is, our current social mores don't support the death penalty for something like theft or fraud, so people have a hard time justifying Laban's murder the way they used to.
Come to that, why couldn't Nephi have simply gagged and trussed up Laban? There was no reason to kill him: a. they were eventually found out anyway, so killing him didn't help keep his deception a secret after the fact, b. he only needed Laban's clothes temporarily, so subduing Laban for a time would have been sufficient, c. he wouldn't have had to explain away all the blood on the clothes.
Killing Laban was entirely superfluous.
God . . . "who mouths morals to other people and has none himself; who frowns upon crimes, yet commits them all; who created man without invitation, . . . and finally, with altogether divine obtuseness, invites this poor, abused slave to worship him ..."