Well, murder is a sin afaik. And didn’t God kill off everyone on the earth (with a few exceptions) in a big flood or something? 
Not to mention what organizations like GreenPeace would think of all that environmental destruction.
So, yes…I’d say that by human yardsticks, God has sinned. Of course, perhaps God uses a different yardstick to measure his/her/its actions. Which begs the question…what gives such a being the right to judge us, if its so different? Hm…
-XT
Alas, that would make sin a morally empty concept, and God merely a tyrant.
Are you really claiming that a parent bossing their kids around for their own good is akin to a moral imperative to, say, not murder?
True, but you’d have to play so fast and loose with the definition of “murder” to absolve the Old Testament God of it that the word, just like sin, would lose all moral meaning whatsoever.
Of course not. That was simply my answer to the objection of God “not following” His own rules.
On the contrary…
Murder (by my definition anyway) is the unjustified killing of a human being.
Killing in self defense is killing, but it’s not murder. A common soldier killing in a war is killing, but is not murder. A legal execution taking place is a killing, but not murder.
Inasmuch as part of the definition of God that is commonly used (again, in Judaic circles) is that of Judge and One who determines when life should begin and end, then He is incapable of murder as all His ways are just. We may not be able to see the justness, as we are not privy to “God’s books” and His plan for the universe.
Zev Steinhardt
But, as you well know, it is not merely rules but claimed MORAL rules that are in question. Morals are supposed to be universal: they apply either to everyone, or to no one.
That is a mere tautology then: meaningless. Murder merely becomes an usurping of God’s authority, not a wrong in and of itself. We’re back to the tiresome tyrant.
If we are not privvy to it, then there is no way we can be assured that it is just. It might just as easily be extremely unjust, and you cannot present any reason why it couldn’t be, other than to present me with another circular definition.
Sin seems to me very much connected to this mortal world we are in. Whilst our experience is confined to within this world, sins such as murder seem gross and unforgivable. But outside the mortal world they are minor things of no real consequence.
Using a very geeky analogy, inside the mortal world we die, but outside our ‘greater self’ simply has to role a new character, or stop playing thismortal existance game. And God (the ultimate game master) may kill characters off for seemingly minor callous reasons but that is not a sin from a point of view outside this mortal world.
Damn.
If the bad of killing is merely illusionary, and we can realize this fact just as easly as God, then it isn’t wrong. We too are just “playing.”
You can’t have it both ways. You can’t both assert that killing someone does no real harm, and then turn around and pester people about not killing. Moral statements are universal statements: and if you wish to cripple them to excuse God, then the harm you do is to weaken morality itself, not strengthen the motives or goodness of God.
Well from our current standpoint (within the “mortal world”) we cannot realize with certainty that the sins we believe are grave are in fact merely illusionary. So we must morally act as if they are great things to be avoided. But from outside our viewpoint (from our souls viewpoint if you believe in such things) then they can be seen as illusionary, we no longer need to act as if they are moraly dreadful things. From God’s viewpoint life, death, pain, suffering, and joy may all be tiny things of no consequence, the ‘us’ that feel these things being either non beings, or parts of much greater beings that would also see the tinyness of life and death.
It could be a moral sin for an ant to kill another ant, without it being a moral sin for a Human to kill an ant.
Please note that the bible describes God in human terms. Those are the only terms we understand. If God is omniscient and knows that so-and-so is going to misbehave, why would He become “angry” if so-and-so misbehaves? In short, God doesn’t have emotions like humans do, but the only way that we can begin to understand God is to use human terms, like “angry” or “forgiving.”
As Polycarp noted, the Hebrew bible portrays God as the ultimate Judge. While the Judge is certainly subject to the same rules of morality, the Judge also has the right to execute judgement… a right that the judged do not have. That’s what judgement is all about – if you’re on trial, a judge can fine you, but you as the person being tried cannot fine anyone.
It’s pretty much the standard answer to “Why does God allow such injustices in the world?” If we accept that God is the ultimate and perfect judge, and we know that there is not perfect justice in the world, then there must be some after-world in which all wrongs are righted.
That’s very cool logic. C.S.Lewis does often have a great way of expressing things.
Finally, I give you Gandalf’s quote (well, paraphrase): The One who creates life can take it, because He can bestow it. Thus, when God intervenes in history to kill evil people, we acknowledge a justificiation that humans cannot have.
Universal to us, but not necessarily to God.
There is a Midrash that states that when Moses went up to Mt. Sinai to receive the Torah, the angels didn’t want God to give it to them. “Human beings are liars, swindlers and murderers,” they argued. They weren’t worthy to receive it, went the argument. “Keep the Torah here with us angels,” they requested.
Moses turned and cited the laws on eating kosher. “Do you eat?” asked Moses. He turned to the laws of the levirate marriage “Do you marry? Do you die? Do you have brothers?” Moses demanded of the angels.
Moses showed that the Torah was meant for human beings and not meant to be kept in Heaven. They were rules that were meant for us, human beings, to keep - not angels, not even God Himself.
Maybe from a human perspective. But the bottom line is that we cannot judge what He does. If you posit that God is good and that everything he does is good and just, then by definition, He cannot murder.
I agree with you that we have no assurance that God judgement is just. And I likewise concede that my argument boils down to “because I believe it.” But that’s the angle with which I started stating my comments to begin with.
Zev Steinhardt
The problem is that God does not equal man(kind). Like when God says ‘you (or thow) shall not murder’ God is using the 2nd person, which exempts the speaker.
Hmm, it’s interesting because from this, I might extrapolate that if humans ever figure out a way to create life (i.e. play God), we shouldn’t have to feel bad about snuffing it out. To make a geeky Trek analogy, Data should be deactivated in Measure of a Man.
An even looser interpretation might even justify infanticide.
Either it’s sinful or it isn’t to kill an ant. You don’t get special permission depending on who you are. That isn’t a morality, just a set of rules set up to privalege some over others.
That may be your understanding, but the Bible doesn’t spell any of that out. Instead, it pictures a god that gets pissed off, then calms down, repents of doing this or that, get’s appeased, etc.: a god who tells a man to eat cow shit and has to be corrected when told that that would violate one of God’s own rules. A God that pays soldiers in young virgins who have just had their families slaughtered by those same soldiers, and so on.
Of course, at least it’s not like the Book of Mormon, where God overlooks the fact that humans have to breathe and has to be corrected on it.
Except, of course, to judge him good when convienient.
I’m sorry, but I don’t think it’s moral or excusable to abdicate your moral judgement merely because you don’t know someone’s reasons. If I come over to your house and kill your sister, it’s probably a good first brush to figure that what I did was wrong, instead of assuming that maybe I just had a really good reason that I refuse to tell you beyond hinting that it’s all for the best.
But God isn’t human. How could you possibly attribute human misgivings to an all-powerful supreme creator?
On the contrary. Circumstances are everything. There are times when it’s permissible to kill person, let alone an ant; and there are times when it is not permissible. There are times when it may be permissible for me to do a certain act but forbidden for you. Circumstances determine everything – there are few, if any rules, that are so ironclad that there are absolutely no exceptions in the universe.
I’m not abandoning my moral judgement - I’m acknowledging that I don’t have all the facts. I don’t know all the factors that go into why God does the things He does - neither does any other human being. I can try to fathom the reasons why a person does what he does and make a determination - because we’re on the same “plane.” I, being a human, know what motivates a human and know that human motivations are not beyond my ken.
The same does not apply to God. I can’t understand God’s motivations for doing things. No human truly can.
I was asked on these boards a while ago about why God lets children die from illnesses. What was their crime that they deserved such punishment, I was asked. Why would God do that to them. The answer I gave was that I didn’t have all the answers. I don’t have God’s Excel spreadsheet open in front of me where I can see everyone’s accounts and His plan for the world. So, why does a child, who has no guilt or crime die? I can only posit several possible explanations, which people are free to accept. Maybe this child was meant only to touch and affect the lives of his parents. Maybe this child’s death will inspire some doctor to find a cure for his malady for future patients. Maybe the child’s purpose in life, whatever it was, was finished at an early age. There are any number of possible explainations. It would be wrong of me to try to judge God, as it were, and say to Him “what You did was wrong.” How do I know that? Only God truly knows all the factors that went into deciding what happened. It would be morally wrong of me to presume that I knew all the details, when in fact, I don’t. Sure it may seem “evil” to me. It certainly seems wrong to me that children die. But I understand that I don’t know everything – and as such, until (and if) I ever know all the details, I will withhold judgement.
Zev Steinhardt
True, but the burden of proof is HEAVILY on the killer. Killing is, in itself, an evil. It can only be justified by necessity for a greater good.
Which is why it is an abdication to simply beg off the moral quandries present when God, for all appearances, callously deals death or even rape (can’t imagine that the “virgins” of Moses’ conquests exactly WANTED to have sex with the people who just slaughtered their pregnant sisters).
All of which make life into a mere puppet show God is putting on. But if God can pull strings without explanation for why, why not the rest of us? We can, after all, be cryptic too. Why, Osama could inspire someone to develop a new flavor of coffee bean! In this by definition best of all possible worlds, how could it NOT be destined to be!
Again: the long and the short of it is that ALL these explanations cripple any possibility of there being meaningful moral imperatives, or anything being good or bad. The potential “deeper meaning” of any act, no matter how seemingly horrible, is essentially limitless.
That’s simply not what decent people do when confronted with wonton and seemingly pointless cruelty. The burden of proof is on the agent that dealt it out, and no amount of acting all mysterious is an excuse. The only serious biblical ultimate answer god gives in the Bible is: because I’m jealous and powerful. But that’s worse than no justification at all.
First of all, explain in what sense God is “not-human.” That is, people through around a lot of terms like omniscience and all-powerful so forth: but these terms are essentially semantic subterfuge: they define negations, not positive elements (i.e. no lack to power, no lack to knowledge, etc). They aren’t useful for explaining how God is different from humans on a moral or emotional level, because they don’t really say anything about what God is.
Second of all, I’m not attributing misgivings to God, but rather to the person whose sister he knocked off. “I’m not going to tell you, neener neener” isn’t something that anyone should take seriously as a defense of killing.
This may be a bit of a tangent but . . . .
I think that those who say that killing is wrong because God instructs us not to kill have it backwards. If there were no more to right and wrong than what God arbitrarily decides, then you couldn’t call God a good being. He can only be good if he’s making the right choices, meaning there’s some pre-existing set of right choices. If you believe God really is a good being, I think you ought to say that God tells us killing is wrong because it actually is wrong, not that killing is wrong because that’s what God tells us.
Like I said, that may be off the topic a bit, but the thought kind of just occured to me as I was reading this stuff, and I figured I might as well mention it.
Actually, much as I’d like to think that God is “good”, I’m not sure “good” and “bad” are applicable to God at all – but not because he’s in charge and he’s making the rules, as some people have said. I’m not sure we can call God good or bad because whether someone is good or bad depends on the choices they make, and I’m not sure that God makes choices in the same sense that human beings make choices. I mean, if he really does know everything that’s going to happen before it happens, then surely he must know his own decisions before they are made too, right? So how can these truly be considered choices if he knew ahead of time what he was going to choose?
I’m not even sure there is such a thing as “ahead of time” to God. I picture him seeing all of time laid out in front of him. At any rate, it’s hard to say how “right” and “wrong” would apply to such an entity.
For the record, I’m kind of a religiously unaffiliated monotheist – I don’t really know if the way I picture God is at all typical of Judaism, Christianity, or Islam, although I definitely have been influenced by them. What I mean is, the Bible (for example) uses a lot of words to describe God that don’t seem applicable to God as I picture him, but I’m not any good at telling when the Bible is trying to be literal.
I’m with *Apos. If God has the power to kill a child to inspire someone to seek a cure for some disease then He surely has the power to do the inspiration directly with using a foil. Or He has the power to eliminate the disease directly. And it doesn’t do any good to insist that the disease came about because of Original Sin. I don’t think mankind has improved all that much over the last 6000 years that the disease sould have been allowed to persist all that time but should be eliminated now.
Same objection to the example of the child’s purpose in life. God could achieve that purpose directly and in the early days did. The parting of the Red Sea, manna, and many other miracles are described. God, for some reason, has abandoned direct miracles and gone to working His wonders through agents?