Finally, these historians were Rabbis, you know, guys who make their living reading and interpretting this stuff, so they weren’t just pulling it out of their butts.
I’d like to make one more point. God specifically states that he wants the Amalekites dead for what they did to the Hebrews as they made their exodus from Egypt. Exactly how many generations was that before the reign of Saul? Surely, not a single Amalekite living was part of the party that “waylaid” the Hebrews. Again, it gives lie to the whole “sons will not be killed for their fathers’ sins” law.
Read Flatland. Then tell me if this makes sense:
God: What is that shape you see?
Flatlander: A circle.
God: Actually it’s a sphere.
Flatlander: What’s a sphere?
God: You’re just going to have to trust me on this one.
I most certainly did read those passages. They merely said that the animals were to be sacrificed to Yahweh. They most assuredly did NOT say that “the Amalekites and their animals were sacrificed to God.”
You yourself quoted verse 21,
It merely says that the sheep and cattle were to be a sacrifice. It would be intellectually dishonest to assert that the human beings were intended as a sacrifice as well.
Gr8Kat you also cited the following footnote to verse 3 in supposed defense of your claim.
However, this footnote refers specifically to the word “destroy” in verse 3. Let use examine that word in its proper context.
Clearly, the context shows that the Israelites were to sacrifice everything that belonged to the Amalekites. In other words, it was the Amalekites’ possessions that were to be sacrificed – not the Amalekites themselves. The Amalekites were to be executed, but they were not part of the sacrifice – not part of the “irrevocable giving over of things or persons to the Lord.”
In other words, this footnote does not truly support your conclusion. Quite the contrary; it shows a definite distinction between the animal sacrifices and the execution of the Amalekite tribe.
emarkp made some remarks about Flatland. Maybe the dialog should have gone more like this:
Flatlander: Looks like a circle from here.
God: No, actually it’s a sevensided purple triangle, with
feathers and a tuxedo. Trust me on this.
Flatlander: If you’re going to make looney statements like
that, why should I trust you?
God: Because if you don’t, I’ll smite you.
I was traveling last week, so I haven’t had an opportunity to participate in this thread. I would like to address some of the points that have been made:
Why not? I’m glad you used the scare quotes to emphasize that you are insisting that God logically must conform to your notion of those words. The essential inconsistency is not between God’s words and actions, but between your interpretation of God’s words and your interpretation of God’s actions. Are you certain that you have the priveleged reference frame required to make all other interpretations invalid?
I’m not trying to be antagonistic. I think you have assumed something about God in order to find your contradiction. I would not dream to tell you that I knew that your assumption was incorrect, but I wonder why you believe that it is, and why we should accept it?
Never seen a wicked baby. Never seen an entire race of people who are totally evil. Never seen a wicked ox. Do not believe rape is a viable supplement to genocide (or that genocide is moral).
However, have we ascertained that I can accurately and precisely determine wickedness? Is it valid for me to extrapolate from the tens or so of babies I’ve seen to all babies? Do we believe that my failure to see a wicked baby (hell, my failure to even be able to conceive of it) guarantees that such a thing does not exist?
I’m not claiming there are wicked babies or races or oxen. I do not believe that. But if you want this to be your contradiction, you need to make the case for others to accept these assumptions. I’m already on board with you, Qwertyasdfg.
Right. You called Christianity evil because of the uses that some might put it to. In fact, though, you said that nobody in this thread believed that and that you had a lot of biblical literalists in your family and they didn’t believe that either.
So what’s the point? It’s a little like if I popped into a thread about how atheists could have morals in the absence of God, and said that I believed that all atheists had intercourse with goats. Well, OK, not the ones in this thread, and not any of the ones I know about, but still, they could interpret atheism that way. And any philosophy that allows one to believe that goat intercourse is acceptable is evil. You would probably think I’m a fruitcake.
And if I wanted to claim over and over that atheism caused one to engage in goat intercourse, you would expect me to demonstrate that there was a higher incidence of goat intercourse among atheists than non-atheists. And that the causal relationship proceeded from atheism to goat intercourse, and not vice versa.
Failing that, you would be justifiably peeved if I repeatedly insisted in the dabate that the fundamental problem with the moral philosophy of atheism is that it encourages goat sex. It’s not that it’s offensive, dj. It’s just not a very honest debate tactic. If I want to win, I can convince myself that I won. If I care to learn anything about atheism, I lost. And if I’ve got big problems with goat sex, I should attack that problem directly, rather than atheism.
You might actually be quite interested in a discussion of how Christians seem to manage to maintain a prohibition against child murder and genocide in the face of OT biblical stories. But you don’t seem to want that conversation, because you’ve already decided the answer.
And frankly, I don’t understand how your claim that Christianity is evil and should be eradicated as a belief is anything other than an insistence that my beliefs are wrong and yours are right. That I should relinquish my beliefs at your insistence. The first part I understand, everyone thinks their beliefs are right and (probably) at least some others are wrong. But the second part, that I must give up my beliefs? I’m still interested in how you differentiate this from “religious intolerance”. Is this a fundamental contradiction? Should you not reject your philosophy as well?
Well I claimed that I didn’t believe any of those, so you should certainly not interpret them as damning to a biblical literalist’s position. In any case, I am not trying to defend “that book”. Rather, I am trying to defend others’ ability to interpret it differently than you do.
Certainly, and aren’t you?
Well, I would imagine that most Christians pretty much by definition believe that Jesus was the literal son of God, though the son-father relationship needs some theological clarification. And I think most Christians believe that he was resurrected, though not all believe that he literally got up in his body and started walking around.
As for how you know which parts are true? There is usually some authority outside the bible that must guides its interpretation: the Catholic church, Luther, Calvin, or your own personal experiences. The latter is the most interesting. Some things in the bible have a sense of spiritual veracity. They make sense. Loving your neighbor, that does. Killing infants, that doesn’t. I suppose, without any such intuition, the process appears indistinguishable from picking and choosing. But really, if one picked and chose exactly the pleasant parts of the bible, is there any harm in that?
Depends completely on who the antecedent of “you” is. I predicted as much way back on page 1.
Gee, you’ve got us there. A city full of wicked babies, all of which deserved the death penalty, a revelation that I was using something called “scare quotes”(damn, I did it again, didn’t I?), the realization that there is no definition of good and just so it can mean whatever we want it to mean, and finally the conclusion that picking the nice parts out of the Bible to believe makes it the right religious manuscript to follow.
As far as your “prediction”(I just can’t stop it!) goes, here’s one for you-you will not give a direct answer to the question.
I guess I wasn’t aware that a question had been asked of me. Perhaps you’re mistaking me for someone else?
I’m afraid that you would not find my response helpful, since a) I do not believe that there is any reason that would justify the death of infants and b) I do believe that the bible contains some inconsistencies and some downright mistakes.
Let me ask this: is there any explanation that you would accept as explaining this inconsistency? How is insisting that it must be an inconsistency different from insisting that it cannot be an inconsistency?
A) The burden of proof is on the idea attempting to be proven. With a name like Newton-meter, you should know that.
B) Every attempted justification/excuse/ I’ve seen thus far that I’d reject involves assumptions, and/or inference.
C) If god was using a definition outside of that which is commonly accepted, he should clarify, or just say what the hell hes talking about, not speak in riddles.
Imagine this scene:
God: I won’t kill that guy.
<god kills the guy>
Newton-Meter: He wasn’t using the conventional definition of “kill.”
“a God who could make good children as easily as bad, yet preferred to make the bad ones; who could have made every one of them happy, yet never made a single happy one; who made them prize their bitter life, yet stingily cut it short; who gave his angels eternal happiness unearned, yet required his other children to earn it; who gave his angels painless lives, yet cursed his other children with biting miseries and maladies of mind and body; who mouths justice and invented hell – mouths mercy and invented hell – mouths Golden Rules, and forgiveness multiplied by seventy times seven, and invented hell; who mouths morals to other people and has none himself; who frowns upon crimes, yet commits them all; who created man without invitation, then tries to shuffle the respoonsibility for man’s acts upon man, instead of honorably placing it where it belongs, upon himself; and finally, with altogether divine obtuseness, invities this poor, abused slave to worship him!”
-Mark Twain, in “The Mysterious Stranger”
Theists in general, and Xians and Jews in particular, apparently believe that Absolute Morality exists. I suppose most of you would include murdering children, by hacking them to death with dull bronze swords, as one of the actions that could be called absolutely wrong. (I could point to at least a couple of people on this board that don’t agree, but not now.)
As I understand the term absolute, (and the dictionary agrees)
it means “without exception or qualification”. If you can acept that there might be some circumstances in which murdering children is fine, if only we knew all the facts, so long as some god has commanded the murders, then the term absolute doesn’t apply. And if “Thou shalt not slaughter defenseless babies because of some sin their greatgrandparents committed” isn’t
an absolute, then what is?
Are all you theists ready to accept the postmodernist view that all morality is subjective and situational? If not, why not?
Hey, I could acept the fact that a baby could be wicked enough to be killed by a dull bronze sword, or drowning, or burning, providing someone can tell what exactly a baby can do to receive such judgement.
So Czarcasm, you aren’t willing to consider for the purposes of this discussion that death is not the ultimate destruction? You judge God without considering the afterlife? Why are you (and others) ignoring that question?
Frankly I’m tired of all the two-bit hate-filled atheists who are so offended by God that they can’t see straight. I’d invite them to join together to rant about How Evil God Is[sup]tm[/sup] somewhere else, and leave the discussion for those willing to actually discuss.
I don’t have time for an exhaustive reply right now. In fact, I had rather hoped that General Cornpone would find time to answer these questions, as he had hoped to do. However, I would like to re-emphasize a few things that the critics keep neglecting.
emarkp is correct in pointing out that God’s actions should not be judged by normal human standards. Killing an entire tribe is something that we should ordinarily view with revulsion; however, is it not conceivable that an omniscient, prescient God would have morally sufficient reasons for such an event? He may know, for example, that their culture is so corrupt that the young children would be inevitably corrupted as well, if the tribe continues to exist. In contrast, if the infants die before they reach the age of accountability, then the blame for such evil would not rest on their shoulders.
In fact, theologian Norman Geisler offers that view. He likens the execution of the Amalekites to amputating a leg so as to prevent gangrene from spreading. The amputation is terribly unpleasant – horrid, even – but it is medically necessary. Now, a hardened skeptic might scoff at such an idea, but we cannot simply rule these possibilities out.
A prescient God would also know what acts these children would commit, if they were to live to adulthood. We know that the Amalekites and the Canaanites practiced infant sacrifices and other abominable acts. It’s hardly unreasonable to think that God would know of their future deeds, and would thus act to prevent these acts – and to simultaneously prevent these children from reaching the age of corruption.
Various posters also mentioned that Yahweh – the giver of life – would have more latitude to determine when life should end. This is not a decision that mere human beings should ordinarily make, but the omniscient giver of life should presumably have more freedom to decide when each life should end… and end, they all must. It is thus disingenuous to insist that God should be bound by mere human rules, when it comes to matters of life or death.
That is the most nonsensical answer that I have ever heard from a “loving” Christian. So you put forth that:
It is possible that in an entire city(worse yet, the entire world, using the Flood as a horrific example) every single baby was destined to be so wicked that they deserved to be put to death before they committed any acts at all, and
Your god doesn’t stop such people as Hitler and Jeffrey Dahmer because Man is supposed to chart his own course without interference and yet again
God has a different definition of good and evil, so we are not to question any actions or inactions on his part!
Would’t it be simpler for you to answer all religious questions with a stock answer of, “I don’t know-because God says so, I guess.”
-Czarcasm, an atheist who is so “hate-filled” that he cannot for the life of him contemplate striking others, let alone religious genocide.
So in other words, JThunder, there isn’t any such thing as free will? An omniscient god knows in advance what some children are going to do when they grow up, so the children deserve to be murdered before they can do it? They have no chance to change because everything is predetermined?
I seem to remember that a number of theists on this board have passionately defended the compatibility of omniscience and free will. I believe that all their arguments are based on fallacies, but I wasn’t expecting such a straightforward admission from a Christian.
I think JThunder was saying that if a community were wicked enough, a child might never have the opportunity to learn of righteousness and hence exert his agency to choose good or evil.
However, both Czarcasm and Mapache are still avoiding the question: will you take the afterlife into consideration of God’s being good and just?
I understand burden of proof. I think you didn’t express it as well as you could have. The burden of proof of a claim is on the person making the claim.
Usually when someone brings up burden of proof in an informal argument, they do it to try to sneak in an unproven counter-claim. Person A makes a claim, without proof (actually, it’s usually one of their assumptions, which is a perfectly valid proof). Person B says, “you didn’t prove it, so the opposite must be true”. This is a counter-claim. The purported proof of the counter-claim is the “burden of proof”, but that’s a fallacy. Neither claim is proven.
In this case, Czarcasm has repeatedly said “God is loving, God kills babies, that’s a contradiction”. I understand his argument and his assumptions. In fact, I agree with his argument. Still, it’s a claim that requires proof, and he has yet to admit that the proof is “true by assumption”.
All of logical discourse involves assumptions and/or inference. What do you think is wrong with that? Again, this is a fallacy of informal argument: the opponent assumed things, so their argument is invalid.
No, every valid argument contains assumptions and inference. To make this fallacy work, it must be coupled with the absolute insistence that the claimant has not made any assumptions at all.
I find this to be a dishonest debate tactic. Informal debate is not sufficient to establish new truths. All the truths are contained in the truths of the assumptions (and the validity of the inferences). The purpose of informal debate is exactly to make the assumptions explicit. Thus, if you accept an arguer’s assumptions and the validity of their reasoning, you can accept the validity of their conclusions. What’s dishonest is hiding your assumptions; it thwarts the entire purpose of informal logical debate.
In order to reach his contradiction, Czarcasm has assumed that God exists, the bible is literally true, God does not lie, the meaning of the properties “just” and “loving” are invariant for all objects, that the maker of moral rules is bound by those moral rules, and that infants are morally incapable of carrying guilt for sin. He has also assumed that contradictions are impossible in the actual world.
This is fine, these are reasonable assumptions. I agree with all but the literal truth of the bible and the impossibility of actual contradictions. However, the debate would proceed much better without the necessity of his opponent inferring the assumptions.
You assume an awful lot about God. You assume that if God exists, he conforms to your imagination. Why should anyone else accept your imagination as definitive? You engage in the very behavior that causes your opponents’ arguments to be considered invalid, which is another fallacy.
This seems to be a perversion of what I believe and what I would say. That’s known as a “strawman”. I’m not sure how to address it other than by ignoring it; but you should not interpret that as an implicit endorsement of the truth of your claim. That would be your fifth logical fallacy.
Not at all. emarkp explained this quite well. People still have free will, but this does not preclude God – who knows our hearts and our desires – from knowing what we will actually choose.
A loose analogy would be a situation wherein a father knows that his son is planning to skip school, simply because the father knows the child so well. The father knows what the child will do, but it’s still the child’s free choice. This analogy is admittedly imperfect, since the human father is not omniscient and could be wrong, but I think it does illustrate how foreknowledge is not imcompatible with free will.