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Tanstaafl ~

T: "The punish the bad guys goes further than I would call reasonable... More like 'Hey Lord god, save our butts and wipe everyone of them out & their children too'"

Like I said: hyperbole.

T: "Shouldn't the inspired word of god be a bit beyond that level of maturity?"

I'm not so sure it's a matter of maturity as of stress and desperation. Just as facing an imminent threat of dismemberment and death -- or lamenting over the dismemberment and death of friends and family -- can provoke one to do desperate things, it can also provoke one to pray desperate prayers.

T: "God's inspiration is why those psalms are in the book, so it must reflect gods viewpoint on it."

Not necessarily. But I'd have to go a little bit more in-depth to explain the in's and out's of that. For now I'm trying to keep the focus on what's in the Gospel of Matthew.

T: "But despite loving them, they still wanted them and their families slain & humiliated."

Sometimes, but not all the time, as Psalm 83 shows. Dismantle the hyperbole, and the remaining sentiment is that the psalmists wanted to see justice done. In cases where the offense was mass murder or some other capital offense, yeah, inasmuch as they wanted justice, they wanted the perpetrator to die.

T: ... "but i guess the writers were just prophets recording wisdom for god."

When it comes to the Psalms, there's more than just the writers to consider. There's also the redactors/collectors.

T: "A means to an end? So means is justified by god's book as long as it achieves the end?"

No, but one's role and motive play a large part in defining the moral dimensions of an act. That's why a duly-deputized police officer who arrests someone and takes him to jail is not considered a kidnapper. (But this might be a tad tangential to the discussion of the text(s) at hand.)

T: "Certainly it seems that gods way of treating enemies is very and needlessly brutal."

I don't see any evidence of that from the texts under discussion. We just see the /desire/ of some psalmists to ruin/destroy their enemies, contrasted with the command from the Son of God to love our enemies, bless those who curse us, and so on.

T: "Certainly that on one hand god is saying turn the other cheek & love thy neighbour while also affirming its okay to make wives widows, and children homeless beggers with none to extend mercy for speaking ill sounds like a clear contradiction to me."

I think you're confusing the quantities involved. In the case of the imprecatory psalms, we have a record of the prayers of God's people. The point of inspiration for a given psalm is not necessarily the point of composition; it can also be the point of collection and integration into the Psalm-book. It's possible for a Psalm's intended significance to be not the interpretation which the author had, but the value and use which the redactor had. Meanwhile, in the case of Matthew 5:44, we have a piece of instruction from Jesus Himself, preserved by Matthew (and, in part, by Luke). It seems clear to me which texts should be regarded as vestigial, pinned to specific situations of the distant past, and which one we should be applying.

Yours in Christ,

Waterrock