This poll is for those posters who have strong faith in your religion, i.e. you know in your heart that your god exists and he is the supreme ruler of the universe.
If you received a message from your god telling you to, would you kill seemingly innocent people? I’m not talking a simple voice in your head, which might be rationalized away as a sign of some form of mental malfunction, I mean a message that you know without a doubt comes from your god…let’s say it’s accompanied by some un-fakeable miracle that only you witness, and you are told you have been chosen to carry out this task.
I remember a great debate on this topic, primarily between CM Keller an Orthodox Jew, Ben & Opus1. The discussion included atrocities in the bible and the killing of innocents as commanded by God. CM Keller stated he would kill children if God told him to do so after all the order comes from God. I am sorry I can’t find the thread.
I am a Christian, and I’ve been taught that when you “hear” God, you must judge whether its Him by his message. The message must be in line with the commands contained in the New Testament. God wouldn’t tell you to kill innocents, i.e. the message did not come from God. Similarly, Satan tried to trick Jesus into disobeying God, even quoting scripture. But Jesus knew God (and scripture) better than that. So no, I wouldn’t. Ever.
Not trying to witness here, just attempting to explain. I hope I did it adequately.
I’ve heard the voice of God before (no, really), but he’s only ever told me to do things that were specifically positive and (turned out to be)helpful, however, to answer your question in the spirit it was asked, I don’t think I’d trust myself(that I’d really heard the voice) to act on any instruction to commit violence without substantial and cast-iron independent corroboration (I think I’d need God to explain why innocents needed killing too).
I think I’d rather accept that I was insane and hearing imaginary voices.
Kill innocents? If beyond a shadow of a doubt, none whatsoever, it was a given command, I can’t honestly say what I would do. Would they be spared a greater evil? There are people in the world begging to die, because of circumstances they find themselves in; horrors that they are living with that makes life almost unbearable. But they will not take their own lives. Something to think about. Good question.
well, first my god/goddess has to give me the reasons why. i mean, come on. why kill without reason? i don’t wanna get arrested…
(ps. i’ve got my own religion, and i’m pretty lax about it too. how did you know? :))
I think mug and Mangetout have pretty much got it down. After all, we Christians already have (courtesy of the New Testament) instructions from God that preclude the killing of innocents. It’d take a lot more than “some un-fakeable miracle” to change my mind about that. (In fact, witnessing a “miracle” - in the current modern sense of a violation of natural law - would cause me to re-evaluate a lot of my beliefs… and I would start by asking “Why is God resorting to cheap magic tricks?”)
OK, is it just me., or am I detecting a bit of a fallacy here. By judging according to the message whether it’s God or not, aren’t we using our own set of values to determine the source? . This logic could be used to justify any set of beliefs: ie., if the message doesn’t jibe with our already existing picture of the deity, it must not have come from him. Not to dismiss anyone’s belief system, but logically, it seems like a Catch-22.
My God wouldn’t tell me to do that. If something told me to do that, it wouldn’t be my God. If this seems to be head-in-the-sand avoidance and escapism, so be it. That’s one of my primary reasons for my (rather limited) faith.
No, because as ETHILRIST states, the premise is fallacious. My God wouldn’t ask me to do that, without justification. And god who would ask that of me is not my God.
I realize Abraham is given great credit for attempting to do this very thing, but the unthinking faith so lauded in that passage of the OT is not the type of faith I have been given. As Galileo said, “I do not believe a God who would endow me with brains and reason would expect me not to use them.”
No logical fallacies here. mug did say that we should hold up what we hear to what we already know and examine it for consistency. We already have God’s will in the form of His Word. The Bible is all we have available, outside our own hearts, to tell us what He wants of us. And because of our own weaknesses as humans, we are to use the Bible as the final statement on any such matters. If what we hear does not jibe with what is already known of God’s will, then we should pray for His wisdom and guidance to help us know the truth. If, after we’ve done this, we still feel as though we are being led to do something that seems to be against God’s will, we should resist the temptation to do it.
BUT, to swing it back around to the OP, remember the story of God commanding Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac. Abraham, strong in faith to God, did as he was commanded, until God stayed his hand at the very last moment.
My faith says that, since God put his servant to this test once, He will not do so again. We have the example of Abraham to show us how deep our faith should run, the example documented in Genesis, therefore the lesson is learned and God has no need to put one of His children through it again.
So I suppose the answer for me is “Yes, I would if He commanded it.”.
But my faith gives me absolute certainty that He won’t.
Davesink, it may seem this way at first glance. But according to my faith, the scriptures were written to reveal what was already known about God. And the scriptures claim also that God is unchanging. Therefore, if I hear a voice or see another being (even performing miracles) that commands me to do something that is in direct opposition to his written Word, then that is how we judge if it is really a message “from God”. (After all, it’s not like we have a portrait of Him anyplace to recognize Him by, is it?)
Therefore, the question, even hypothetically, is impossible. If you put my back up against the wall, though, I would still say that I would refuse. I would say, “Look Lord, you clearly state in your Word ‘Thou Shalt Not Kill’. I intend to obey that command. So I’m not going to kill those people. Do as you like with me.” If God punished me after this, then he would not be the God I now worship, and indeed (as others have pointed out) he would not be worthy of it.
Who are you to judge God, though? He may have very good reasons that he won’t or perhaps can’t share with you. As for his asking you to break commandments - that’s very common. As an example, God asks his followers to follow the law of the land they live in, yet Jesus interfered with the business of temple moneylenders in a way that was surely illegal. He also changes the rules - yeah, there WERE (and still are) people who basically said ‘I can’t believe my God would tell me it was OK to eat pork’ - but the religion that believes that God can take back some of his old commandments has a lot more followers.
We are not in a position to judge God. We are, however, able to try to understand Him, and to act in accordance with that understanding. And a big voice from the sky saying “Steve Wright, thou shalt take thy chainsaw and go unto the kindergarten, and there do harm unto the innocent children of men” is inconsistent with my understanding. So I wouldn’t do it.
