I don’t like the idea of anyone, even God, killing people, but, to play [del]Devil’s[/del] God’s Advocate here, what if that’s just my biased perspective as a people? What if, morally, unliving objects are to us as people are to God?
You don’t think babies can be evil? Haven’t you ever seen Family Guy?
More seriously, I think the story makes more sense if you think of the people God wiped out as being somehow infected with evil, rather than guilty of committing evil. God had to wipe them out to purge the earth of the infection.
Or maybe we’re overthinking it, and we should just accept “Yep, they were all corrupt” as part of the story, the way we accept all those animals being able to fit into and survive in the ark.
It’s worse than that. At its worst–a nadir too often reached–it’s a deintellectualizing, dehumanizing work that allows its adherents to justify any behavior or action they like. Even at its best–as a solace in time of trouble or loneliness–it’s a crutch, full of bewildering inconsistancy and falsity, a pablum that can be used to prey on the unskilled by those who offer it in confidence.
But it’s quite a successful gig if you can stomach it, especially at the top levels. The longest running con job in history. They should have gotten Jim Thompson to write the forward to the New World Translation.
We aren’t talking about spice racks. We are talking about living, sensate, congicent beings.
Once again you are simply attempting to explain the problem away. Sure cruelty to people is evil. But when it’s God torturing people it’s OK.
The fact that God created people is a total non-sequitur. If torturing babies to death is evil then toprturing babies to detah is evil. Even if we do accept that cretaing a human being gives me the legal right to torture them to death that doesn’t make it moral.
At best God owning person gives him a legal right to torture that person. To argue that God owning a person gives him a moral right to torture that person is just a restatement of the position I already cristicied above. It doesn’t adsress my criticism. It doens; tdemonstrate your lcaim that I misunderstood your position. It just rephrases exactly the same position.
You haven’t clarified things one iota here. You have simply rephrased your position from “torturing chidlren to death is good if god does it” to “torturing children to death if morally right if God does it”. Nothing has changed. The position can still be used to justify any action taken by God, and used to justify any action ordered by God’s prophets.
Once again though, you are simply defining the problem away.
Once again you haven’t actually altered your position or adressed my criticisms. Once again I could use exactly the same ational to justify any behaviour ordered by God or anyone claming to be his prophet. Once again your position leaves us no way of separating the true god from Satan or from the ramblings of a demented lunatic.
And once again you haven’t actually addrressed Dawkins’ criticsm that God is cruel. If torturing a child to death is cruel then it is cruel. It doesn’t become less cruel because you might have some knowledge saying that the child deserved to be cruelly tortured to death. At best you are saying is that God is cruel to infants, but only to infants who deserve to be tortured to death. Dawkins is still quite justified in saying that God is cruel.]
Even we accept that some infants deserve to be cruelly tortured to death the argument makes no sense. God is omnipotent. No matter what the infant deserves he doesn’t need to be cruelly tortured to death. God cruelly tortured the infant to death even when there was no need to do so.
IOW he cruelly tortures infants to death because he knows the infant deserves to be cruelly tortured to death, Not because it is necessary in any way, since to an omnipotent being necessray is a meaningless word. He tortures infants because that is his concept of justice.
This doesn’t make God better. We both still agree hi actons are cruel. All this means is that he is also demonstrably unmerciful and unjust.
No, they aren’t.
Your argument idea that God torturing a helpless infant is morally OK because God owns the infant couldn’t possibly be considered to be in God’s favour to anyone not currently wearing a white coat with wrap around sleeves. Not a personal insult, simply pointing out that anyone who actually believes that is deranged.
You’ve simply magnified the immorality by asserting that an inherently evil act (torturing someone to death) is somehow mitigated by another inherently evil act (claiming ownership of someone against their will, ie slavery). It’s turtles all the way down in this one. Torturing someone is evil. It doesn’t make it less evil because God enslaved the people he tortured. And it doesn’t make it better if he bred an intelligent species so he could enslave them so he could torture them. Each step just shows more premeditation and geater depth of evil and depravity on the part of the torturer.
The idea that torture becomes acceptable because by God’s standard that someone deserves to be tortured is equally flawed. I know several people who deserve to be tortured by my standards of justice and morality. Would that make it moraly correct for me t do so? Note that they don’t need to be tortured, merely that I feel they deserve such a fate. All this shows is that God is compounding cruelty for needlessly torturing people with injustice and ruthlessness.
Yet you just attempted to argue precisely this: that God can needlessly torture people because that is his idea of what people deserve (and who else decides deserts but God?) That God can enslave peopel agiant their will, create races to be his slaves for eternity and then toryure them precisely because they are slaves, and yet stilll be just and forgiving and kind and good.
Consider this scenario: A future scientist creates a woman in a vat using DNA and raw material constructed entrely from inorganic sources. No pre-existing life whatsoever. This woman is mildly retarded, say the intelligence of an average 10 year old but otherwise phsycially normal. That scientist then enslaves this woman and tortures her frequently. He also creates a man via the same process and lets the man rape her. The scientist then enslaves all their children. He kills some children on a whim in front of thier mother and siblings because he feels they deserve it, or feels she deserves it. He also demands that the children rape, murder and torture each other while he watches. Any that refuse to so this to each other are totured by the man personally.
Is this man good? Is he just? Is he moral? Is he kind? Yet if we follow his argument then he is all those htings because a creator has those rights over his creation. And you claim that you aren’t arguing that this behaviour would be wrong of a human creator yet still right of God, because as you said God needs to be able to act as a role model for humans in these sorts of cases.
Even if that is true you still haven’t adressed any of the issues that Dwakins raises or that this thread is about.
Dawkins point sout that the same immoral and evil God of the OT who pratcies and condones slavery and torture is held up by many today as the standard by which we should live, as the standard of justice and morality. The Christian scriptures even say that people should "put off your old self, which is being corrupted … to be made new in the attitude of your minds and to put on the new self, created to be like God in true righteousnessEphesians 4.
This is the main issue in this debate and the main issue for Dawkins: that the majority of Americans belong to a religion that tells them that the God of the OT is the standard of righteousness (ie morality) and that they need to adjust their thinking and morality to reflect that of the OT God.
When that morality includes slavery, murder and rape do we really want the majority of Americans becoming like God in their minds?
The problem is that yo haven’t explained which example of God we should follow beyond “follow the good stuff”. The Jesus aspect of God said that he and the Father are as one. You can’t simply pretend that the evil acts commited by the Father aspect can be ignored by Christians.
Well, I disagree that that would always be an evil act, but that’s a different debate.
One of those unfortunate times when I have to agree with **Der Trihs ** on religion and triple-check what i’m thinking; my parents are my creators. They don’t have the right to destroy me. It’s a big leap from object creations to life.
You’ve suggested that in moral terms we may be as objects to God. The problem then is one of objectivity/subjectivity. Are we, sapient beings, as to objects in moral terms objectively? If so, we can do whatever we want to each other and still not be immoral. Are we as objects subjectively - only to God? Problem then is, if he cannot be said to be morally wrong if he kills us, he can’t be said to be morally right for helping us. I’m not bad if I destroy my painting, but i’m not good if I make sure it’s got a home to live in.
This implies that anyone who has received anything bad due to God is evil to the extent of the punishment. Going back to the Noah example, that makes everything in the world evil except one family and 2 of each other species. Including unborn kids, if we consider them sentient life. I find that kinda hard to believe. I’d talk about general evil today, but this is an OT conversation, and i’m trying hard not to stray into general boo-religion mode.
Judging wise, I don’t know that omniscience implies a perfect judge. An omniscient good being and an omniscient bad being would be very different. Judging depends on personality; reward and punishment depend on your sense of what is right and wrong. I’m not saying this is a bad argument, only that you would have to show God to be morally good before you went into the judgement angle.
Add “that doesn’t exist” to your list of reasons not to worship and i’m with you.
We’re heading into NT territory here, so i’ll try not to get too off-topic. If i’m understanding you correctly, then Jesus would have had the same moral code as God, but his actions were those of a man following that code rather than a god. Thus we should emulate Jesus and not God. But the problem with that is that we all, effectively, have more power than Jesus did. Jesus had the power of a man of 2000 years ago, plus miracles. But we can give that power to anyone today. We can get people to walk on water, provide food for thousands of people, and so on. And we can communicate over thousands of miles in seconds, we can travel to the moon and survive there, we can look at the basic DNA of all life. If the difference between God and Jesus in terms of their moral acts is one of knowledge and power, and that explains why they may act differently yet still be moral; surely the difference between us and Jesus in terms of knowledge and power is also different enough that he is no longer an effective role model?
You know when I started reading this thread I toothought that Dawkins went overborard in his latest book in the way he portrayed Christianity as a threat to society.
Now that I read comments like this one I relaise I was wrong.
What else could you call a religion that exhorts its members to become “like in mind” to an enity that treats living human beings as unliving objects and to treat such a being as the ultimate standard of moarlity?
By arguing that treating a people as unliving objects (ie being able to saw them to pieces, burn them, have sex with them without consent and so forth) is a perfectly is perfectlymoal to God youu have reinforced everything that Dawkins has said. Such a God is a lunatic. Not a sadistic lunatic, just a psychopathic lunatic.
God had to?
An OMIPOTENT God had to?
Are you even reading what you type?
An OMIPOTENT God HAD to slaughter millions of BABIES to cure an infection.
Ahura Mazda on a Segway scooter, do Christians really think like this? Do they not see how crazy this shit is? Are they not able t see the mental hops they are jumping through tyring to justify this lunacy?
You are doing an extraordinary job of proving Dawkins’ point.
Christians teach we should just accept that some groups people, including infants are sometimes so evil they need to be tortured to death. Yep, we should just accept that. And we should all try to think like the person who said they all needed a good drownin’ too.
It’s astounding. I’ve always thought the vocal atheists on this board went overboard, and a search of some of my earlier posts will bear this out. But reading this sort justification for the most wicked, creul evil shit makes my fully understand why they are like that. If I had to deal with people like this in real life I think I would be the same within a week.
It sickens and infuriates me that anyone in the 21st century can actually believe that it is sometimes moral for some beings to treat other sentient beings as peices of meat. It is even more sickening that theyc an ‘just accept’ that some goups of humans can be so corrupt that they need to be sluaghtered, even the infants.
This may the first time that GD has actually changed someon’es opinion, but this has changed mine. Dawkins was right. Christianity of this sort is essentially morally bankrupt and major impediment to justice and social progress.
Well you know, just to warm up for that, God created creatures with a will to live and a need to eat in order to do so. Then He arranged things so that the only way they could eat was to chase down and kill other living things. And he endowed the creatures that were to be eaten with the will to live and the ability to feel pain and know fear.
Really? This is a doctrinal or theological tenet of … um, what Christian denomination exactly?
Examine closely the Nicene Creed:
We believe in one God,
the Father, the Almighty,
maker of heaven and earth,
of all that is, seen and unseen.
We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ,
the only Son of God,
eternally begotten of the Father,
God from God, Light from Light,
true God from true God,
begotten, not made,
of one Being with the Father.
Through him all things were made.
For us and for our salvation
he came down from heaven:
by the power of the Holy Spirit
he became incarnate from the Virgin Mary,
and was made man.
For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate;
he suffered death and was buried.
On the third day he rose again
in accordance with the Scriptures;
he ascended into heaven
and is seated at the right hand of the Father.
He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead,
and his kingdom will have no end.
We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life,
who proceeds from the Father and the Son.
With the Father and the Son he is worshiped and glorified.
He has spoken through the Prophets.
We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church.
We acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins.
We look for the resurrection of the dead,
and the life of the world to come. Amen.
You can claim it’s all a fiction, even a fantasy. Personally, I have some deep doubts about most of it. But there is nothing in it about killing children or torturing innocents. And this is the grieveous error Dick Dawkins makes – for all the man’s brilliance, he is unable to separate a theological doctrine from a handful of its malicious adherents.
Dick Dawkins now? Well, since you know him so well, your understanding of what he says must come from personal communications over pints, right? I would suggest that you are off the mark by about 100 cubits here. He is quite well able to separate those things and to comment thoughtfully about them.
I would suggest that historically, a bit more than a handful of harm has been done by religious adherents - not all of it rises to the level of careening planes into skyscrapers.
To borrow from Dennis Miller, your quote does not, like ecclesiastical white-out, remove the issue of the OP, or of Dawkins’ observations. Since the primary response to the OP, to the extent that any has been made, is that one has to overlook or reject the sections of the Bible that depict such evil behavior, I would like to see folks take a stand against those depictions. Come out in favor of a revised Bible. Rewrite it to be more appropriate, more peaceful, less crazy, less psychotically violent. I would not be any more convinced that we need to appeal to a sky god to figure out how to be kind or do good things, but if it served to cut down on the use of “The Good Book” for evil in the world, I’d be all for it.
Blake. Calm down, please. I counted 23 uses of the word “torture” in your reply. I haven’t been thinking in terms of torture at all.
If I were making a film of how I imagine the Noah story, my film would be PG at worst. It might be a cartoon. It certainly wouldn’t have any torture scenes in it.
And maybe that’s wrong of me. Maybe that’s a failure of my imagination. Maybe I should be thinking of the horrible implications. But, for what it’s worth, I am reading that particular story as a myth, a fable, a “once upon a time” story, not as a historical narrative. And, I’m wondering whether my way or yours is closer to the way the original tellers and hearers and readers of the tale would have understood it.
But, more generally, here’s where I’m coming from:
Dawkins’s idea that the God of the Old Testament is an evil S.O.B. is not a new one (Google “God of the Old Testament is evil”; you’ll find several references to Gnosticism), but it is a minority view. For centuries, Jews, Christians, and others, many of them very familiar with the Old Testament, and many of them good, moral people themselves, have been thinking of the OT God as good, not evil. And so have I. Apparently, either they/we’ve been misreading the Bible, or Dawkins has. (Or else there’s room for more than one legitimate interpretation.) And what I’ve been trying to do here is to figure out and to explain how someone could read the OT and think of the God depicted (if imperfectly and inconsistently) therein as good. I haven’t been trying to sell any one particular understanding (of the Noah story or of the OT and its God(s) in general), but to try to find out what all the possible legitimate readings might be.
Well, in the case of the Exodus passage, we already discussed the whole “Egyptians are evil for oppressing the Jews” thing. Leviticus 26:22 doesn’t describe an actual event. It’s part of the general contract between the Israelites and God…it’s laying out the terms (which are basically, if the Israelites follow God’s laws, he’ll reward them, and if they break them, he’ll punish them.)
As for the the deaths and rapes in Numbers, they were on the land that God promised the Israelites he’d help them take.
Look, in school, I’m sure you read the Illiad. The Greek gods are always coming down and helping either the Greeks or the Trojans, killing or wounding people, intefering with their plans. At one point, Apollo strikes the Greek camp with plague. Earlier, Agammemnon had to sacrifice his daughter Iphiginia to get favorable winds. Are you as morally outraged about the behavior of the gods in the Illiad as you are of the god of the bible? I somehow don’t think so.
That’s the way people work. It’s the same reason that people learn about Thomas Jefferson writing the Declaration of Independence and being president, but not about the whole “children with his slave mistress” thing. People take the stuff they like and edit out the morally troubling parts.
How often do people try to claim the Greek Gods were the fount of all morality ? I’ve never seen it; quite often I see them portrayed as jerks or outright evil.
There is a term for when someone inflicts an unecesary and totally avoidable slow and painful death on someone: torture.
Just how long do you think it takes a baby to die from drowning? Do you think it’s painless? Or from exposure? What else do you call it when a child watches all her family being killed and is then dragged off to be repeatedly raped for the rest of her life? That is torture, and that is what God has done according to the OT.
The fact that you haven’t been thinking in terms of torture tells us that you haven’t been thinking about this at all. You may wish to indulge a Bowdlerised verison of the OT, but the death by drowning and sexual slavery are not pleasant things and are by no means morally justifiable.
And once again you simply duck the issue. If the story never happened then why is it in the Bible? And if the Bible is filled with stories that never happened presented a fact then why believe any of it at all? Why use it as a standard by which to live our lives or run our country?
You are simply ducking the issue, but every time you do you dig a deeper hole and make the whole situation even more sordid.
And the only way you can do that is by ducking the issues, raher than adressing them. So far we have:
It’s good simply because God does it, even if it would be abhorent for a human to do it.
The crime of slavery justifies torturing the slave.
It never happened.
An omnipotent God could only cure a disease by killing all the carriers slowly and painfully.
None of these makes any sense and not one of the adresses the concerns raised by Dawkins. All they do is make them more pertinent and act as perfect exmaple sof the kind of knotted up amoral thought processes Christians indulge in.
So you are saying that an 8 week old Egyptian infant was evil and opressing Jews? Because if you aren’t then you have totally avoided my point.
You can’t claim that God ignored everyone who wasn’t doing bad things to the Jews because God killed infants in all sorts of horrible ways. You can only justify that if you seriously expect us to buy that an infant wss persecuting someone.
I notice that you also chose to ignore the point that your position is self-referential.
And? What exactly is your point?
My point is that God was sluaghtering and torturing infants. Little babies. That is in direct contradiction to your position that only people who mistreated Jews were harmed by God.
I am not morally outraged by the behaviour of Jehovah either, I don’t believe it actually happened.
I, and Dawkins, are morally outraged that Christians hold the barbaric and cruel behaviour to be a standard to which they should aspire and the standard by which our nationshould be run. They believe we should try to become like Jehovah in thought, even though he thought that torturing, raping and enslaving people were just Jim Dandy.
If someone told me that they thought the behaviour of Apollo was the standard by which we should try to live our lives and run our nation I would indeed be morally outraged.
By “it” do you mean the Bible or the Nicene creed?
Becuase if you mean the Bible then there is indeed a lot in it about killing children and troturing innocents. I have alreads provided chapter and verse for many incidents.
And if you mean the Nicene creed then WTF is your point? We are talking about the God of the OT. Not the God of some apocryphal document that is not even part of the Judeo-Christian scripture.
I have seen some baffling red-herring typ posts in this thread but this is probably the most mystifying so far.
If you can’t think of at least one possible good answer to this question, then I think that’s part of the reason you’re having such a hard time understanding where I’m coming from.
But was the Noah story “presented as fact”? Were we supposed to believe it actually happened as desrcibed? Was that the writer’s intent? I already said, I’m not so sure of that. I know fundamentalists read it that way; you can argue this point with them as you want.
Believe me, I’m not trying to.
I have never claimed this. I have in fact denied claiming it.
But I still don’t think you understand the thought processes of Christians well enough to pass judgment on them.
(And what about Jews? It’s too bad we don’t have any Jewish contributors to this thread; the “God of the Old Testament” is their God. I’d love to see the Jewish point of view on this.)
If I go to court to testify, is someone going to ask me to put my hand on a copy of the Illiad and ask me “Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you Agammemnon?” :rolleyes:
You’re a bit confused. The second story you refer to comes from the Book of Judges. It lead to the tribe of Benjamin, where the gang-rape occurred, being attacked by the other eleven tribes and almost totally wiped out. To avoid extinction, the surviving Benjamites were allowed to raid a neighboring village who had not assisted in the invasion and take their comely women-folk, presumably for more raping. God is not mentioned in the story.
