God also lies to Abram (later Abraham) at least once. God has told Sarai (the eventual Sarah) that she will bear a child, and she laughs aloud, saying that Abram is too old for to father a child. Relating this conversation to Abram, God claims that Sarai said she was too old. Somebody (Elie Weisel?) wrote that this story shows that we’re not meant to be stupidly or cruelly honest.
Bull. You can make that assumption for the purposes of argument, to frame the terms of discussion. Refusing to do so from the very onset is discourteous and snippy: basically threadshitting. It’s no different than entering thread entitled, say, “What team do you want to see in the Superbowl this year?” and saying, “Football is a complete waste of time, so I don’t care who reaches the championship, and neither should anyone else.”
Nice clip job there. The full paragraph (emphasis added):
I included the first sentence to introduce the bolded portion, a way to contrast the difference between arguments about God’s existence (where the burden of proof is commonly assigned to theists) and morality (where, IMO, the burden of proof is on atheists, since it’s generally agreed morality in some form exists). There have been a few arguments raised in this thread pointing out the apparent contradictions in assigning moral authority to God. Since morality clearly exists, such arguments IMO beg the question: What serves as moral authority if it isn’t God (or his wisdom/power)?
The question in the OP is explicitly aimed at theists. Hell, it’s explicitly aimed at Christians and Jews. It’s an attempt to elicit their opinions. If one is not capable of stipulating for the sake of argument the basic premise, then why come into the thread in the first place? Why not start your own thread?
This I know; we’ve discussed it before. But you answered the question rather than bashing theists, for which I thank you. I will now cease this hijack of my own thread.
I didn’t accuse you or anyone of bashing theists. I accused you of introducing irrelevancies into the discussion and hijacking the thread.
I’m taking this to mean you would like me to erase the “For a good prayer, call SecondJudith” I spraypainted on t he walls of of the local cathedral, aye?"
A black man spraypainting a synagogue could be misinterpreted, dear. I’m okay with being a misanthropic creep, but not with the impression that my hatefulness is directed at just one branch of man-the-kind.
You haven’t thought this through. If the local cantor or rabbit or whatever sees me spraypainting the synagogue they’re likely to sic a golem on me and I’ll be ripped to pieces before I can explain. That’s how my uncle Silas died.
If you’re talking about my comment to SecondJudith before I gave up on the thread and started trading wisecracks with her, here is what I wrote:
Scanning through the thread, I see that my charging with you said hijacking did not occur. I remember typing it out, but I must have edited them out in an attempt to avoid further hijacking by arguing about whether you were hijacking the thread, so it’s easy to see how you’d not realize the accusation had been made. But rest assured it was there. There was profanity and mockery and reference to Buffy the Vampire Slayer threads and a long screed slandering the entire town of Sinope that if the mods had read it would surely have gotten me accused of hate speech along with the usual complaints about bad jokes and repetitive comments and refusal to use commas when the sentence clearly calls for them. Anyway I didn’t want to be banned.
