Oh, Coldfire, lighten up. This spate of posts from you was nearly as bad as the spamming. The LBMBer’s who’ve stuck around have been decent enough; I’m willing to overlook the day’s worth of BibleQuoteSpam we got from a few angry members.
Condemnant qui non intelligent
Libertarian – the context you assign for the actions of God is no likelier than any other. You posit that God is just and merciful and that his actions must be interpreted in that light. I posit that the stories of the Bible should be judged upon their face and that the God they reveal is neither merciful nor just.
You claim that the slaughters commended by God should not be judged by a human context because God still has to deal with the souls. Now, since we are talking about sould before Christ and since they were very definitely not of Gods “chosen people”, what possible reason would we have for asuming that those souls were treated more kindly in the afterlife.
I find it interesting, also, that you choose appeal to pity and hasty generalization as the fallacies in these presentations. The appeal to pity is, what, “murder is wrong”? Now, where would anyone have gotten that idea. The hasty generalization is, I assume, that an entity who acts in an evil and cruel manner cannot be judged perfectly Good and perfectly merciful? It seems to me that the generalization runs the other direction and that people have been providing (abundant) counterexamples.
The argument that the context of humanity is irrelevant when judging God is quite familiar (yes, I remember the story of Job). I believe the fallacy is generally titled “Argument from Authority”.
Nice point about arents and children. Of course, sometimes parents are cruel, and sometimes their deeds are evil. When that is the case, the child is justified in his belief.
The best lack all conviction
The worst are full of passionate intensity.
*