However, you are to destroy other nearby villages completely, leaving nothing alive that breathes, human or animal.ħ Their little ones are to be dashed to pieces before the eyes of their parents.Ĩ Greatly honored will be the warriors who actually seize these little ones and dash them to pieces against a rock.ĩ Fearless Thuluka warriors are to plunder all houses and ravish the wives and show no pity for children or women with child.ġ0 Captured warriors of the enemies are to be thrust through with a spear. But of all the female children who are virgins, spare them for yourselves.ĥ If you desire a beautiful woman among the captives, take her home as a wife for yourself.Ħ Some villages you may simply take captive, if they submit to your offer of peace, and take them to your home to serve as forced labor. It would be difficult to find a purer expression of depravity, so I consider it the depravity baseline.ġ The great war god Natuka will deliver many tribes before you, and you shall defeat them and utterly destroy them and show no mercy to them.Ģ You shall consume all the people Mutah delivers to you, and your eye shall not pity them.ģ This is to be done so they do not teach you to perform their detestable practices, because you are a holy people.Ĥ You shall kill every male among the little ones and every woman who has known a man intimately. In these documents, reproduced here with their original numbering, Prof Vögler detailed what he believed was the essence of what inspired the Thuluka to be so warlike.
They had a great psychological advantage as well, because they were absolutely certain their great god Mutah would intervene directly to give them victory every time. And they demonized their enemies to justify exterminating them and taking their land. The rewards for loyalty could be great while the penalties for disobedience were ruthless, usually death. They enforced absolute loyalty to their god Mutah’ s demands. Vögler documented the simple but effective control-strategies Thuluka chiefs and shamans used on the rest of the tribe. They differed from most tribes, however, in the pattern of glorifying their own hatred for their enemies and the brutality they inflicted upon them. They took Mutah’s special Salbennungenheit (Prof Vögler’s word - the best translation is probably ‘anointing’) as a mandate to pillage, plunder and destroy all the neighboring tribes to give themselves greater living-space. The Thuluka, like any primitive tribe, had their own tribal god, Mutah, who they believed created the world and chose them above all other tribes to be his people, putting themselves, as primitive tribes do, at the center of the universe. Tales of their savagery were known for some time through the legends of neighboring tribes, but only recently did these particular papers come to light, along with some relics, weapons and ceremonial items, at Prof. Inspired by its warlike god, this violent and ruthless tribe, the Thuluka, either killed off or enslaved most of the other tribes of the northeastern interior of Borneo. Some time ago documents were discovered that were prepared by German anthropologist Prof Heinrich Vögler as part of his detailed description of a primitive, cannibalistic tribe that flourished in the jungles of Borneo in the mid-19th century. I believe most civilized people will acknowledge this as an acceptable reference point, so comparisons can then be drawn by referring to it. While pondering where to begin to answer to such a question, I ran across something outside the biblical context that helped me quite a bit by establishing what I refer to as a depravity baseline.
As difficult and subjective as this is, attempting to do so would seem to be an essential exercise, especially given the biblical god’s demand for a human sacrifice and his threat of eternal punishment.
To assess the morality of an individual or culture, one must determine the point at which that person or culture crosses the line from simply bad behavior into rank depravity. Does the Bible’s God Cross the Depravity Baseline?
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