God wasn’t going to punish Abraham for failing the test. God’s going to accept that Abraham’s only human and isn’t perfect. Abraham was conflicted between the duties of obeying God and the moral imperative not to kill. He chose incorrectly but he chose what he thought was the right action.
Moses (and Aaron) didn’t have any excuse like that. When the Israelites began complaining about God, Moses and Aaron were afraid to speak up and defend God. But they had no moral confusion for what they did as Abraham had. They knew what their moral duty was but were afraid to do it.
Therefore, Moses’ and Aaron’s sin was more serious than Abraham’s. Abraham failed to figure out what he was supposed to do. Moses and Aaron knew what they should do but were afraid to do it.
There’s also the strange incident with Zipporah at the inn. It’s a confusing text but God clearly states he is there to kill somebody. But Zipporah stands up to God and God stops. As I said, it’s one of the least clear passages in the Bible. But the sequence of a divinely ordained death being averted by human defiance and the human defiance being accepted to God is fairly clear.
Again, the significance of this incident was perhaps added by later writers who said this passage was supposed to show the importance of circumcision. But I think the significance of the incident may again have been misunderstood. I think it’s possible Zipporah passed the test Abraham had failed. Zipporah knew what God was saying was wrong and she refused to accept it.
If God doesn’t even have the power to intercede on one’s behalf after making a deal with Satan, then how could one believe God “has the power to save you from this world”?
Baal is just a honorific, used for a great number of gods (some of whom, possibly, had children sacrificed to them). There is no single “Baal, god of child sacrifice”.
Der Trihs, his mother or father, his employer, his friends…his neighbors…his advanced College instructors…seem unable to get ‘through’ to him.
Is he 60? Is he 16? Who can tell?
All we know is that he values his own judgments against any other value that could be called God.
Outstanding! (Lets me think he is closer to 16 Y/O than 60 Y/O.)
Der Trihs, prove you have Knowledge far greater than any Scientist (many of whom believe in God wholeheartedly) and I shall believe all of your coherent and incoherent BS.
John Polkinghorne and John Lennox are two physicists that come to mind.
John Lennox, for instance, has 3 (THREE!) Doctorates, and he not only believes in Christ, but feels sorrow for those who don’t. And you have?
Hate. I guess.
A mysoginistic view of women, I guess.
A need not to be bound by any code, moral value, religion, jingoistic or hegemonic value of any Country on the face of the Earth.
That is not why Moses and Aaron were not allowed into Israel.
This was after God told Moses to speak to the rock to get water, but Moses struck the rock twice instead.
I especially like this passage as a refutation to those who say God no longer shows up because having evidence of his existence somehow reduces ones faith. Here he commanded Moses to do something that would be stronger evidence than what Moses did, and Moses was punished for it.
The way I see it the issue wasn’t that Moses struck the rock instead of speaking to it. The issue was that the crowd of Israelites were complaining about God and Moses and Aaron didn’t say anything in God’s defense.
When God told Moses he wouldn’t see the promised land, he said “This is because both of you broke faith with me in the presence of the Israelites at the waters of Meribah Kadesh in the Desert of Zin and because you did not uphold my holiness among the Israelites.” (Deuteronomy 32:51)
Next time bring argument.
This attitude is typical amongst a large proportion of those that believe.
“Who are you to question [ enter person of Authority here ] !!!”
Here’s a clue you really, really, should pick up: People with [scare quotes] ***Authority ***[/scare quotes] are not superbeings. They are still people. People that can be wrong. People who make mistakes.
It is the argument that counts.
Of course I will trust an known expert on biblical history more than someone off the street, like a mathematician.
In stuff pertaining to the bible, plus he will still have to able make his case.
He will have to prove me wrong!
Without God–i.e. an authority external to this world–there isn’t any such thing as evil, pure or otherwise.
You could characterize Abraham’s behaviour as psychotic, or socially unacceptable, but the concept of right and wrong against absolutes, and the concept of good and evil, are nonsensical without God.
That humans are intelligent or sentient does not create good and evil, and the conscious destruction of a human is no more innately “evil” than the conscious destruction of a cockroach or a carrot. Good and evil were concepts invented by religion, and in the modern world we have tried to port them over to a secular world. However the secular concept of evil is entirely different, representing a cumulative opinion for managing society, and not an absolute standard.
From a judeo-christian perspective, the absolute here–the biblical lesson–is that blind obedience to God is more important than a human’s analysis of what is appropriate. I do not argue that this is not nutty, but basically you don’t get to argue something is good or evil once you get rid of God.
You’re left with a bit of a catch 22. The thing that makes Abraham’s sacrifice “wrong” is based on absolutes grounded in the concept of God and religion. Get rid of God and it’s not wrong anymore; just nutty or socially maladjusted or something.
“Evil” is a stronger and more concise word than “socially maladjusted” or any other description of a dysfunctional approach to intra- or inter-groups relationships. I’ll give him a pass for using a philosophically loaded word for brevity’s sake.
That being said, I believe that any authority figure, deity or otherwise, who orders one of its followers to kill his own son with no better reason given than “Because I Say So” fits both the theological and social meanings of “evil.”
God or gods are simply irrelevant to the question of whether or not something is evil or not.
[ul]
[li]Just because a god says something is right or wrong doesn’t make it so. Obeying an evil god is an evil act.[/li]
[li]Being powerful or “outside this world” doesn’t make a creature any more an authority on morality.[/li]
[li]God as typically depicted is vastly morally inferior to the average human being; not something to be followed even if it was real.[/li]
[li]If there is an absolute right or wrong it’s right or wrong regardless of the opinions of any gods.[/li]
[li]Regardless of whether or not they exist, there’s no agreement on what any gods want and no way to get their opinion on anything, so even if a god IS always morally correct we can’t get that information from them.[/li][/ul]
Oh, please. That’s just another example of the defenders of religion baselessly giving religion the credit for something.
The religious concept of evil is less absolute than the secular version, not more. At least the secular version tends to be partly based on facts; religious “morality” is based on fantasy. On baseless religious claims that the believers themselves can’t even agree on.
On the contrary. In order to meaningfully talk about right and wrong it is that absolute authority of God that must be rejected, not accepted. Mindlessly following the orders of someone else, god or not is amoral, not moral.
I look at it this way. There are moral/ethical codes that are built on a few basic principles; people’s lives have value, compassion is good, needless suffering is bad, freedom is desirable etc. There are also incompatible systems built on principles such as other people’s lives having no value, mercy is a weakness, cruelty is acceptable, compassion is pointless, etc. It doesn’t really matter if they are “absolute” in some objective sense. I think that the former is desirable, and anyone who follows the latter system is by nature my enemy and likely to cause me harm if they can. You can call them “good” and “evil”, “ethical system A” and “ethical system B”, or “Norgism” and “Morgism”; names don’t change anything. Some ethical systems are simply incompatible with each other; you might as well call them “good” and “evil” instead of twisting yourself into knots coming up with euphemisms.
All this wringing of hands over whether or not some particular set of morality is “absolute” is pointless. We have no way of knowing what that “absolute morality” is, so we can’t follow it if we wanted to. And there’s no guarantee we’d want to follow it if we knew what it was; I note that people always assume that any “absolute morality” will just happen to match their morality, but if it’s really absolute and independent of humans there’s no reason to assume it wouldn’t be something totally alien and undesirable to us.
Personally, I don’t buy the idea of absolute morality in the first place. Right and wrong is heavily tied to human nature, not physical laws.
There is still the fact that the Bible, like all writings, teachings, thinkings are of human beings. It is a matter of what human we choose, or desire to believe!
Er, no. Without God, humanity collectively is the ultimate source of morality in the universe, and we get to decide what “evil” means. Yeah it’s utterly subjective, but so are a lot of things.