Episode Details

In this explosive Based Camp episode, Malcolm & Simone Collins dive deep into one of the most uncomfortable topics in Christianity: the Biblical commands to kill infants and civilians during conquest — and why they might actually reflect a coherent (if brutal) longtermist moral framework.

From 1 Samuel 15 and the total destruction of the Amalekites, to Deuteronomy’s rules for Canaanite cities, to Jesus’ teachings on mercy — Malcolm argues that modern “peace at all costs” Christianity has cherry-picked the Bible and is actively destroying Western civilization. They explore how true Biblical mercy often looks like decisive action, not endless tolerance of predators and parasites.

This is a raw, unfiltered discussion about civilizational morality, the dangers of naive pacifism, and what “love your enemies” actually meant in context.

Tract 12: Sociatal Morality & A Genocidal God

[00:00:00]

Malcolm Collins: Hello Simone, I’m excited to be talking to you today. Today we are going to be digging into morality as the Bible and Christian faith relate to it. Because I am getting really sick of all of these Christians out there that we see within like the wider Christian media influencer ecosystem talking about how Christianity is like the religion of peace and we need to always be peaceful.

And if you’re going to, for example make a blanket rule against dropping bombs on schools in a warfare scenario, then all of a sudden terrorists are going to put their headquarters under schools and make society net negative for children.

Simone Collins: Oh, you’re not, you, this is purely hypothetical of course.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. If, if at a, a societal level, right, we did something like just always gave out food whenever somebody was hungry you would have groups begin to evolve or [00:01:00] move in close to you that evolve entirely predatory off of this, right? And somebody could be like, “Well, maybe the Bible didn’t predict all of these things, or didn’t really think through difficult moral decisions.”

And the reality is is that’s not true at all. The Bible all over the place has God telling people to kill infants. And so we are going to go, because I think that this is one of the clearest, I mean, I could go into the instances where God’s like laying out the rules for selling your daughters into slavery or rules on how to treat slaves.

But in this episode, that we’re gonna go more on in the next one, ‘cause this is gonna be a bit of a two-parter. But on this one we’re going to go deeper into specifically where, why, and when does God say it’s okay to kill infants? Because I think it’s through these scenarios we can get a broader understanding of how Christianity should [00:02:00] understand morality.

Speaker 6: You know, maybe I was wrong about this pacifism thing.

Speaker 8: Are you insane? Pacifism works like a charm as long as you button it.

Malcolm Collins: Right?

Simone Collins: Isn’t it broadly understood, though, that one of the reasons Christianity got so much early adoption in the in the Roman Empire was because the Christians didn’t kill the babies, and people kinda liked that. Like especially women.

Malcolm Collins: Did, yeah. And so what I’ll also point out is I do not, I think that there was a period of history where Christianity was meant to be understood as this ultra-peacenic religion because that helped it grow.

We’ve done an episode where we look at the morality of early Christians and show that them being willing to help each other during times of plague, them not killing their infants th- this helped their population grow at a significantly larger rate than pagan populations and lowered the persecution that they might have otherwise gotten during their period of growth.

But once they