Maybe a storm striking Hawaii is also serving that same purpose and the people there just happen to be in the way?
Writer David Gerrold (“The Trouble With Tribbles”) once told this joke at an SF convention:
People shouldn’t take hurricanes personally. (And note that God’s reply, “You’re a schmuck,” is NOT the reason Job suffered. Job was picked at random to prove that someone, anyone, could love God even after suffering terrible calamities.)
**
Not if you believe in a God who does everything with a purpose. A purposeful God does not allow random events to happen. I don’t want to open up another can of worms here, but, just to illustrate, I’m willing to entertain the notion of evolution of species. However, I would attach the provision that if evolution did happen, it was not random, but directed by God. Nothng happens at random.
Zev Steinhardt
I must give credit to Zev for his openness and honesty regarding traditional Jewish theodicies. But I think I speak for most of the contributors in the thread when I say that only those who have already completely embraced the Biblical worldview could possibly be convinced by them.
For example, the deaths of millions of innocent Egyptians is explained by wild speculation about how they may have wished the Hebrews ill. No evidence is given for this assertion, because none exists. This is standard practice for apologetics. God must have some good reason for this, even if he had the perfect opportunity to tell us what it was, but failed. In fact, given the chance to state his reasons for the plagues, God tells us:
So that he can perform miracles (Ex. 7:3)
To give the Israelites something to tell their grandchildren about (Ex. 10:2)
To gain glory for himself (Ex. 14:4)
Nowhere does he state “because all the Egyptians have committed some sin deserving of such punishment.”
A standard atheistic critique of the “unknown reason” argument is the “good landlord” analogy. Imagine a building with hundreds of tenants, all living in squalor. There is no heat, light, or running water. Rats and cockroaches overrun the place. The residents, when questioned as to why the conditions are so squalid, explain that they have never seen the landlord, but that he must have a good explanation for not adequately maintaining his building. They have no evidence that this is so, instead offering up unsupported speculation. They do not consider the possibility that no such landlord exists or that he exists but is evil; his existence and goodness must be taken as a given.
We would find such tenants irrational to the extreme. The evidence from the conditions screams out for the interpretation of “bad landlord” or “no landlord” rather than “good landlord with mysterious reasons that we have no hope of understanding.”
It all started with incest. Even if someone tries to rationalize their way around that for Adam and Eve et al, you’ve still got the great flood to deal with. Remember that? Noah takes his * family* and two of every animal on board, and the flood kills everything else. We had to start all over by boinging our first cousins.
And consider Lot and his daughters. After thay escaped the destruction of Sodom, they were stuck living in a cave in the wilderness with no eligible bachelors around. The daughters hear their biological clocks ticking, so they decide to get dear old dad drunk and boing him. Thus began the 12 tribes of Isreal.
Of course elsewhere in the Bible (the Deuts, I’m sure) we are told that such people should be stoned to death in the village square. But somehow that’s not a contradiction either.
MEBuckner wrote:
The real problem is, even Hebrew scholars can’t tell for sure which tense is correct, because Hebrew had no pluperfect tense. The phrases “God formed” and “God had formed” would both be rendered identically in Hebrew. Hebrew scholars have to pick up on which tense the author intended from context.
My understanding is that Hebrew scholars’ best guess, based on comparing the grammatical structure of this sentence with the many others like it, is that this clause was intended to be rendered in the simple past tense, i.e. “Now the LORD God formed out of the ground all the beasts…”. But there’s always that nagging little 0.01% doubt that biblical literalists can use when they want to insist that the bible contains no contradictions. “Hey, there’s a teeny tiny chance that it could mean ‘had formed,’ so we’re safe!”
[major nitpick]
The 12 tribes of Israel did NOT come from Lot and his daughters.
[/major nitpick]
Zev Steinhardt
**
Thank you.
**
You are correct in certain respects. There exists no evidence for my assertion. I offered it as a possible expaination, nothing more. Please note, however, that the reasons you cited for the plagues are not mutually exclusive of each other or exclusive of any other reason God may have had for bringing the plagues (whether it be national guilt, individual guilt for other sins they commmitted [surely you don’t think all the Egytians were saints]), or any other possible reason.
**
Granted. I said at the start that I was working from the assumption of a Fair and Just God. However, for a serious discussion of biblical events, that is an assumption you have to make. If you don’t believe there is a God, then you don’t believe the Biblical Exodus happened as written. It then logically follows that any discussion of God’s bringing the plagues on the Egyptians is meaningless.
Zev Steinhardt
Yeah, Lot’s offspring by his daughters eventually became the Moabites and Ammonites. Since Lot was the nephew of Abraham, this geneaology recognizes a kinship between the Israelites (descendants of Abraham’s grandson Jacob/Israel) and the Moabites and Ammonites (a closer kinship than just being descendants of Adam, say). On the other hand, the Israelites did not get on well with the Moabites and Ammonites, historically speaking, so you can see why the Israelites would be repeating a story like this about the ancestry of their kinsmen/enemies.
You’re right. Where did I get that idea, anyway? Hmmm… must’a read it on some other message baord.
I don’t know about that. This thread is about Biblical contradictions. The Bible a.) says God is just and good and b.) says God has performed actions which are unjust and evil (in many instances even by standards of justice and goodness which are stated elsewhere in the Bible; i.e., the question of whether or not children are punished for the sins of their fathers). Surely these sorts of questions are more profound contradictions than the number of chariots in Solomon’s army or whatever it is.
jab1 have you never heard of the concept of Practice, practice, practice. It makes for perfection
Good one, kniz!
You’ve just thrown the Uncertainty Principle out the window.
Of course not. We’re saying that the saints should not have been punished along with the guilty. If it says ALL of the first-born of Egypt were killed, then that would include the ones who had nothing whatsoever to do with the Hebrews’ slavery. That would include those who had been born that very day. Why did infants and children have to die in the plagues?
We’re explaining WHY we don’t believe the Exodus happened as written.
I’m reading the 2nd Book of Kings, and I just noticed another contradiction – one that even got missed on the big list of 300 contradictions at http://skepticsannotatedbible.com/contradictions.html!
2 Kings 14:16-23
16. Jehoash died and was buried in the royal tombs in Samaria, and his son Jeroboam II succeeded him as king.
17. King Amaziah of Judah lived 15 years after the death of King Jehoash of Israel.
18. Everything else that Amaziah did is recorded in The History of the Kings of Judah.
19. There was a plot in Jerusalem to assassinate Amaziah, so he fled to the city of Lachish, but his enemies followed him there and killed him.
20. His body was carried back to Jerusalem on a horse and was buried in the royal tombs in David’s City.
21. The people of Judah then crowned his 16-year-old son Uzziah as king.
22. Uzziah reconquered and rebuilt Elath after his father’s death.
23. In the 15th year of the reign of Amaziah son of Joash as king of Judah, Jeroboam II son of Jehoash became king of Israel, and he ruled in Samaria for 41 years.
What’s my point? It’s this. These passages establish that:
A) Amaziah died 15 years after Jehoash died.
B) Jeroboam II became king of Israel when Jehoash died.
C) Uzziah became king of Judah when Amaziah died.
Therefore:
D) Uzziah would have to have become king during the 15th year of Jeroboam II’s reign as king of Israel.
This follows logically, right? Well, not if you’re the author of the Book of Kings, it isn’t! Take a gander at this verse:
2 Kings 15:1
as far as your post goes tracer…my head hurts… keeping track of all the names and countries for even 30 seconds was too much… heh… Somehow i don’t think this is gonna spell the end of Christianity as we know it…
then about the “nothing happens at random” thing… I’m really not familiar with the uncertainty principal except that it deals primarily with quantum particles (i hope)… and what zev is talking about deals more with human events… I think its fair to say that all the decisions we make and things we do are not in any way random, but are based on all the observations we’ve made and the actions of other people… this is of course off-topic, I just had to put that in there
Kaje wrote:
Ah, but the neurons in the human brain communicate with each other via electrical impulses. These electrical impulses are carried by ions (electrically-charged atoms or, at most, very small electrically-charged molecules). These ions are small enough that they are subject to quantum-mechanical behavior. The uncertainty principle definitely does play a role in how they interact.
It is said that wars are started by trivial things. World War 1 was triggered by the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand. We also know that the opportunity to assassinate Archduke Ferdinand would not have happened had he not gotten lost and driven down the alleyway where Gavrilo Princip was lurking. When he became lost, how did he decide to turn down that particular alleyway? He could have turned in any old direction. What thought process, what firing of neurons in his brain, happened which caused him to make that fateful Wrong Turn, and not to make some other turn? Maybe the neuron for “turn left” was firing just a tad more strongly than the neuron for “turn right.” Maybe the only difference the “turn left” neuron needed to win the argument with its competitor was one extra ion in one of the impulses it generated, undergoing minor quantum tunnelling (via the uncertainty principle) to appear just a bit farther ahead of the rest of the ions in the impulse it belonged to.
It is entirely possible that a whim of the uncertainty principle caused World War 1.
Regarding “free will”, which has come up often in the proceedings so far, I thought it might be interesting to note that, as popularly understood in the West, “God” cannot have “free will”. (Sorry for the dreaded quote marks, but I very much doubt that either “God” or “free will” exists. Consider the quote marks as read in what follows…)
The traditional Western view of God is of an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent deity. Clearly, such an entity cannot possess free will, since for every decision facing such a God, It would always be morally obligated to make the most moral choice (omnibenevolent), would always know what the most moral choice is (omniscient), would always be able to implement it (omnipotent). It’s status as omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent eliminate the possibility that God could make a less-than-optimal choice. Ergo, God has no free will.
If one follows this logic, it can be seen that the Bible cannot possibly represent God, as it is replete with stories of God making poor, often morally bankrupt choices. This is sort of a meta-contradiction of the Bible.
(Of course, this logic is specious in reality because there is no reason to suspect (let alone believe) that any God has any of the attributes commonly ascribed to it by believers or in fact even exists.)
In any case, if one does choose to believe in God, considering the intractable Problem of Evil, it seems clear that one must logically believe in either a bipolar God, or duality akin to the Zoroastrian model.
ambushed: I might add that your suspicions have been confirmed as you can read here: http://www.theonion.com/onion3716/god_diagnosed_bipolar.html
But that aside, I think you could certainly suspect that a God would be omnipotent/omniscient. If it is responsible for the creation of the universe (by instrumenting the big-bang, perhaps, or then there’s the boring creationist view), then it could easily follow that God would have the power to do whatever he “wanted” to the universe, much like I can make a sand castle and then fuck it till I turn blue.
Omniscience might follow if that same God either planned out all the properties of the materials he was creating, and thereby was somehow able to track what everything was doing and thereby what everything was going to do in the next instant. Or in the very least it could be suspected that this God could know all the thoughts currently of its creations…
Omnibenevolence would not necessarily follow, however. While it is possible to suspect that God DOES bestow upon us an inate sense of morality, it is equally arguable that we created this sense out of our own motivations for preservation and that sort of thing. If this is the case, then there’s no reason to believe that a God would have any sense of morality of its own (except that it might know that its creations think along these lines), or if it did have some kind of moralilty, there’s no reason for it to assuredly be along the same lines as our own morality.
In Matthew, Mary and Joseph live in Bethlehem. Joesph is a bit upset about Mary being pregnant, but an angel tells him to get over it. The wise men follow the star and Herod hears that a king is born. He orders all male children under the age of 2 to be put to death. Joesph packs up his family and heads to Egypt and when they come back they move to Nazareth. (1st birth story)
In Luke, it all starts with Zacharias and how his wife, Elizabeth gets pregnant, with John the Baptist. Then God sends the angel Gabriel to tell Mary that she too will be having a baby. She goes and lives with Zacharias and Elizabeths unborn recognizes Mary’s unborn. Then Mary goes home and she and Joseph go from Nazareth to Bethlehem for the census. There is no room in the inn. A bunch of shepards show up, but no wise men. The baby lies in a manger. Then Joseph and Mary take Jesus to Jerusalem to get his pencil sharpened and return to Nazareth. (2nd birth story)
Most people just take and combine the two and think it is just one story.
This explains everything
http://www.theonion.com/onion3716/god_diagnosed_bipolar.html
Can that be treated with drugs? If so Bush better get senior citizens pharmacy cards in a hurry.