Why does religion make us so uncomfortable.

[matt]

Max Torque made a very good point on page one which nobody addressed.

If your moral standards stem from a deity, do your moral standards change if that deity hypothetically changed them?

e.g. if God said murder was good, does murder then become good? If it doesn’t, then your moral code is independent of God. If it does, then your moral code is arbitrary.

[MEBuckner]

Out of all the deities that are claimed to be non-human created, which of them revealed rules that we can infer an objective moral code from? Out of those, which are not either contradictory nor untruthful? Out of those, which has these rules recorded accurately and in a timely fashion* (so as not to let legend creep in)? When I conducted my search, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob was the only deity able to withstand the scrutiny. I suggest that you perform your own search because, after all, mine is a subjective view.

I would have to say that I haven’t found the purported revelations of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob to be particularly non-contradictory or free from error. That, however, is a whole other debate.

My conclusion is that the Midianites must have been an entirely wicked society for a complete destruction of their males.

I suppose the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites, Jebusites (Deuteronomy 20:16-18), and Amalekites (1 Samuel 15:2-3) must have been even worse, then.

And lest you wonder if Christians will run around the U.S., killing sorceresses or those who sacrifice to another god, we are subject to the laws of governments as well.

and

For my answer to the question, if a person in a society of the objective morals of the Bible were to worship a false god, then yes, that person deserves death according to the laws of Exodus. Shocking to us (including myself) today, because we are conditioned by our particular society to believe that a person is free to worship whatever he wants.

Does this mean, though, that Christians should be seeking to reform society’s laws to make worshipping a false god punishable by death?

[john_14_six]

I would have to say that I haven’t found the purported revelations of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob to be particularly non-contradictory or free from error. That, however, is a whole other debate.

Fair enough. Like I said before, I’m not the type to pester anyone about things; I respect your decision. However, I would like to know if I have based my faith on something that is possibly false. If I missed a lie or if all the available evidence for it were not known when I conducted my search, then I should be upset. Could you please tell me why your decision fell your way? Perhaps we don’t have to turn it into a debate; merely a passing of information.

I suppose the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites, Jebusites (Deuteronomy 20:16-18), and Amalekites (1 Samuel 15:2-3) must have been even worse, then.

I did say I had (and have) problems with it, but this is where my trust in God/faith steps in. Is it contrary to evidence? If it was, then my trust in God would be unwarranted. Most of these cultures had religious celebrations involving the sacrifice of children, making them evil according the laws of God. But this begs the question, “What is the difference, then, between these pagans killing their children and the Israelites killing their children?” (I told you I had problems with it.) Perhaps the difference is that these children were being sacrificed for false gods, whereas the killing of them by the Israelites was a kind of cleansing of the false doctrine. But this is merely speculation, and I will not pretend to have a definite answer.

Does this mean, though, that Christians should be seeking to reform society’s laws to make worshipping a false god punishable by death?

Absolutely not. This is not our duty as Christians. Rather, it is to be witnesses of Jesus (Acts 1:8). Think of Paul’s visit to Mars Hill (Acts 17:19-34). Did he attempt to change the local laws to conform to God’s Standard? No, he simply preached the gospel message.
As stated before, I think that Exodus 22:20 is a law for God’s nation, a nation dedicated to a witness of God. And, while I’m sure that some other Christians will disagree with me, I believe that God Himself (Jesus for us) will return to setup His new kingdom as described in Revelation 21:1-4. It will be a work of God, not that of man, so I don’t think that Christians should take it upon themselves to try to change America to consider capital punishment for the worshiping of false gods. Hope it helps.

[MEBuckner]

And yet in Old Testament Israel it was clearly proper(according to the Bible) for humans to establish God’s laws, including the death penalty for worshipping false gods, not to mention the death penalty for violating a Sabbath which was later changed around to a completely different day of the week. Somehow this immutable, eternal, objective moral code always seems to wind up producing wildly different results in different times and places. I mean, I can see that you can’t literally apply the rule about putting a fence around your roof to countries where they get a lot of snow in the winter and the roofs are all peaked and no one entertains guests up there, but you’d think a thing like “exterminate the worshippers of false gods” vs. “protect the religious liberty of all” would have a more clear cut answer than that.

And I suppose one just has to have faith that the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites, Jebusites, and Amalekites were uniformly wicked right down to the last infant, and it was therefore okay to exterminate them, but the Germans in 1945 were presumably not all evil right down to the last infant, and it would have been a monstrous crime for us to have annihilated the entire German nation, in spite of what Germany had just done. What one does if someone else comes along and expresses their faith that God has told them all of the Jews or the Tutsis or the Armenians are evil, and it’s proper to exterminate them, I don’t know.

Fair enough. Like I said before, I’m not the type to pester anyone about things; I respect your decision. However, I would like to know if I have based my faith on something that is possibly false. If I missed a lie or if all the available evidence for it were not known when I conducted my search, then I should be upset. Could you please tell me why your decision fell your way? Perhaps we don’t have to turn it into a debate; merely a passing of information.

Well, a couple of the more concrete ones would be the creation accounts in Genesis, or the genealogies of Joseph the husband of Mary in Matthew 1:1-17 and Luke 3:23-38. Either of those would probably be a subject for a whole thread in its own right, and if you do a search (remember to reset the date function to “Any Date”) you’ll probably find that it has been.

[Gaudere]

You are assuming that to lie would be the only way to protect the Jew. I think another way could be found without violating the Objective Moral Code–keeping silent, perhaps.

You are a young husband and father, the sole breadwinner, hiding Jews in your basement. A Nazi stops by and demands to know if you know of any Jews in the area and exactly who and where they are (the implied threat that he will kill you if you prevaricate). What do you do?

Of course the American form of slavery is fraught with stories of mistreatment, rape, and murder. As for the difference, these are clear violations of the Biblical moral code.

The Bible was used to justify the enslavement of blacks. Obviously, large groups of people did not see the “clear violation”, and as for rape being immoral, please see the passage I cited before. Is beating someone nigh unto death is not mistreatment?

[Exod 21:20] When a man strikes his slave, male or female, with a rod and the slave dies under his hand, he shall be punished.

[Exod 21:21] But if the slave survives a day or two, he is not to be punished; for the slave is his money.

Leviticus 25:44-46, “You may acquire male and female slaves from the nations that are around you. Then too, out of the sons of the sojourners who live as aliens among you…they also may become your possession. You may even bequeath them to your sons after you, to inherit as a possession forever”

Slavery is slavery; a hired servant may quit at any time. A slave may not, and even the children of slaves were enslaved. Even if the slavemaster is kind and gentle, if the slave is not willing to be a slave, I consider it morally wrong. Do you?

My conclusion is that the Midianites must have been an entirely wicked society for a complete destruction of their males.

An infant child can be so evil that he merits the death penalty? If God tells you your little baby cousin is evil, fated to be evil, and deserves to die, would you kill him?

It reads more like a special case scenario (If there is a captured prisoner that you want for a wife, then these are the rules).

So today, if there is a captured POW that you desire for a wife, you may morally take her, have sex with her, and if she has not pleased you enough to be your wife, you then release her, and that is perfectly objectively morally correct behavior? You are arguing simultaneously for the existence of hard-and-fast rules, and then that “special circumstances” mean that something we find morally abhorrent today was moral then. Is forced sex with a prisoner moral, at any time?

Many modern day philologists attest to the likelihood of such an origin for the world’s languages. Alfredo Trombetti says he can trace and prove the common origin of all languages. Max Mueller also attests to the common origin. And Otto Jesperson goes so far as to say that language was directly given to the first men by God.

Hm…not that they say nothing about the date that this common language started, presumably about 2000 BCE if you are going by the archeological evidence you cited in order to make the Tower of Babel a historical reality. Languages having a common origin==possible (though some, like Navaho, appear to have nothing in common with other languages. I would be inerested to see how this is explained). Languages having a common origin 4000 years ago==extrordinarily doubtful and I’d like to see some cites that show reputable linguists beleive this.

If Exodus were recorded any later than when it happened, why does it include the details of a portable tabernacle, including exact measurements and materials? (Exodus chapters 25-27)

I don’t really see the argument here. My Imaginary Box is 23 and 3/4 inches wide and 12 and 7/8 inches long, made of maple and detailed with inlaid mother-of-pearl. Do you now believe the box exists, just because I have described it so accurately? I hope McDowell has better arguments than that one.

Time: Forty years of wandering in the wilderness/desert would be ample time to write the Pentateuch

40 years in the desert, and not one potsherd that indicates that a huge group of slaves was in the desert for that long. McDowell is making a mistake here, IMHO, to argue for the inerrence of the Bible in this instance; I know of no reputable Biblical archeologists who believe Exodus happened exactly as described. Better to argue what the archeology does support.

Extrabiblical evidence: If uneducated slaves were recording their histories on tunnel walls of Egyptian turquoise mines, it is doubtful that a well-educated man not record the details of an epoch like the Exodus

It’s amazing, then, that the Egyptians have no records of a mass slave exodus of any of the plagues (and no masses of little infant boy coffins all dating from the same day).

I have never seen a respected modern archeologist that argued that the Bible was inerrent in its descriptions of history. If you can rustle up a cite by an established archeologists that says the Bible is totally inerrant and fully supported by archeological research regarding Exodus/Joshua’s conquests, I’d love to see it. I think McDowell is being highly misleading if he gave the impression that modern archeology supports a claim that Exodus and the Conquest happened exactly as described in the Bible.

Look at this description of a meeting of biblical archeologist, from all viewpoints, and see what they agree upon. http://www.bib-arch.org/barma00/not_much.html
"No one at the conference argued that he had any archaeological evidence of an Israelite presence in Egypt. Nor did anyone argue that he had archaeological evidence of an Israelite Exodus from Egypt. There was considerable discussion, however, regarding the Israelite settlement in Canaan. The Book of Joshua describes it as a kind of blitzkrieg, one Canaanite city after another falling to the Israelite attack. Archaeologists have excavated a number of these Canaanite cities. And, apart from a couple
of exceptions such as Hazor, either there was no evidence of destruction or there was no city whatsoever at the time of the supposed Israelite conquest. Again in the words of Sommer, ‘The Conquest Model … has suffered grave criticisms since the early 1970s and few scholars continue to espouse [it].’
“William Dever examined the evidence derived from Israeli surveys of West Bank sites and originally published by Israeli archaeologist Israel Finkelstein.(5) The finds indicate that a new people inhabited the highlands of central Canaan beginning in about 1200 B.C.E., the period of the Israelite Judges in Biblical terms. Professor Dever would not go so far as to call them Israelites, but he would denominate them “proto-Israelites,” the people who would later become Israel, according to him. But the
interesting thing is that Dever agreed with Finkelstein that these people did not come from Egypt. Indeed, he agreed with other scholars such as George Mendenhall, Norman Gottwald, Keith Whitelam and Thomas Thompson that they did not even come from outside of Canaan. They started out as indigenous Canaanites. The pottery assemblages of these proto-Israelites were the same as their Canaanite fathers. Perhaps a few, he suggested, came from Egypt, but these could not be identified in the archaeological record. So much for the Exodus and Conquest.” --Phillip Davies, What Separates a Minimalist From a Maximalist? Not Much, Biblical Archological Review

Josephus’ Antiquities

Josephus’ Tesimonium Flavium

Um. What passages does he cite from Josephus? There is one passage regarding Jesus that is widely regarded as a forgery. I would be dismayed if he used that one.

Tacitus’ History,

Pliny the Younger’s writings and letters to Emporer Trajan

I believe both these passages simply speak of early Christians and what they believed, though I could be wrong. No one disputes that the early Christians existed, but it is hardly evidence that Jesus existed. Now, I do have a mild belief that Jesus did exist, I simply don’t think he was God or was ressurected. You could prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that Jesus existed (and certainly his existence is not as well supported as, say, Caesar’s) and that does not mean he is/was God. I am simply disputing that the “evidence” for JC is completely ironclad.

Thallus’ work (c. 52 A.D.) is lost, but is quoted by Julius Africanus in 221 A.D. and Paul Maier’s Pontius Pilate (1968) both reference a noontime darkness on a day in 33 A.D.

Julius was Christian, and so may have been tempted to put his own “spin” on it, and as you noted the original is lost so we cannot check. There was an eclipse in Nov 29CE, so even a minimal fudging of dates and you have “darkness in the land”. Nor is the date of Christ’s birth completely established, so he may not have been actually crucified in 33CE, though I will defer to any more expert in the matter in this case, if someone wishes to correct me. And, um, why are you quoting a 1968 source about something that happened 1,935 years previous?

Jesus’ life is sparingly (as expected) mentioned in the Talmud

Eh, even this one is somewhat doubtful. For one thing, they say the man they are speaking of was stoned, not crucified. And one Jesus reference places him in 100 BCE, another even later. And the Jesus in the Talmud was executed by the Jews, not the Romans. Yeshua was not that uncommon of a name back then, and I don’t believe any of the parts of the Talmud that are supposed to refer to him jive completely with the Christian account.

I do think Jesus likely did exist. But I don’t like tenuous and sometimes contradicting secondhand scraps portrayed as rock-solid evidence. No insult intended to you, but to Strobel.

Disciples were willing to die for their beliefs (Acts 7:54-60, 12:1-2, 15:19-20, see also Jesus Freaks by d.c. Talk)

So too were the Mormons, or the Fauln Gong, or the Heaven’s Gater’s, or any other number of religious sorts. Does that make their religion true?

Skeptics were converted (James, Jesus’ brother; Saul (Paul))

Skeptics are converted to other religions other then Christianity all the time. Skeptic have been known to be converted to belief in ghosts, psi power, etc, as well. Simply pointing to skeptics being converted is not evidence; only evidence is evidence.

Jews (over 10,000) were willing to give up or alter five specific God-given social structures that they were raised to believe have great importance (sociologically and theologically) The implication is that something was happening

The majority of Jews were not, to my knowledge. Do you have evidence for that 10k number, by the way? Preferably extrabiblical evidence. Were 10k Jews converted to some apostate religion around 30 BCE, I reckon the highly literate Jews would record such an event.

Claimed that “to be an upstanding member of society by merely keeping Moses’ Laws”

Huh? Orthodox Jews are still bound by the Mitvot. Gentiles are bound only by the Noachide laws, as ever (according to Judaism). Christians follow their own interpretation of God’s laws. What are you/McDowell arguing here?

Even before the death of Jesus, Jews were worshiping him as God, a heresy of the highest degree to their kind of monotheism (Matthew 2:11, 8:2, 9:18, 14:33, 15:25; Mark 5:6; John 9:36)

Some few Jews did so, and violated the tenets of their religion by doing so. Simply because someone is willing to do very painful/distressing things is not evidence that it is true, simply evidence that the person believed very strongly. And people have believed very strongly about all sorts of things. See my previous comments about Mormons, Heaven’s Gaters and Falun Gong.

The first Christians saw Messiah as someone who suffered and died for the sins of the world, whereas Jews had been trained to believe that Messiah would be a political leader who would destroy the Roman armies

True. So?

Question raised: Why would so many Jews give up in a short time these five key practices that had served them sociologically and theologically for so many centuries, especially at the risk of their well-being and their souls if they were wrong? Not because of simply better ideas, but something had to have happened that they could not explain and forced them to see the world in a different way.

So many? Christianity started as a small cult, and indeed aimed at gentiles more than Jews, IIRC. Do you have any hard evidence to support your claim?

Odd that followers of Jesus did not celebrate his teachings or how wonderful he was. They celebrated that he was publicly executed in a grotesque and humiliating way! Something akin to people that really like President Kennedy getting together to celebrate his murder.

Given that the theological explanation is that He died to save everyone, that’s hardly surprising. Kennedy didn’t purposely die to do anything; it was just a tragic instance. Celebrating that would be odd, but it’s not the same circumstance at all. And the followers of Jesus do celebrate his teaching and how wonderful he was, all the time.

In the New Testament, people were baptized in the name of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. Implication: Jesus had been elevated to full status as God. New Testament baptism was a celebratory symbol of Jesus’ death (going under) and resurrection (coming back up)

Um, yeah. They were Christians. I have never heard of baptism as being a part of Judaism (it is a part of Mithraism), either; do you have evidence that it is one? All you’re establishing here is that some early Christians believed he was a God, not that he was God. (And some didn’t believe he was God, too.)

One would not bet on the ragtag bunch who were being persecuted by the Romans and whose primary message was that a crucified carpenter from an obscure village had come back to life. But which has lasted?

I wouldn’t have bet on the Mormons, either, and certainly not the Scientologists! (No offense intended, Monty, Snark, p-girl) Yet they’ve lasted. Astrology and Tarot and belief in witches and ghosts have lasted even longer than Christianity. Should I believe in them, then, since they have lasted? Or should one believe based on the evidence, rather than how many people you can get to believe in something?

The main argument seems to be “well, a lot of people believed this strongly”. True. But people believe in ghosts, witches and other religions equally strongly. Some people have died becuase they were so certain a witch had cursed them that they got sick and keeled over. And nearly every religion has its share of martyrs.

As far as homosexual acts are sins, my only response is to refer to the earlier discussion of the Cartesian plane. It is either a subjective morality or an objective morality. There will be at least one situation that we will not agree with God’s standard of perfection. It doesn’t mean that He is wrong.

Once slavery was moral, and forced sex with a captured woman. Now you (presumably) say they are not. Why are they now immoral, yet homosexuality couldn’t possibly be moral now? What is the purpose of God’s morality? Are they arbitrary rules? Are they for our own good?

Romans chapter 13 says that Christians are to be subject to governments, and there must be a tradeoff, something for the citizen. This is it: the woman should use the governmental resources and contact the police. Is enduring a beating the easiest option? Certainly not, but no one has ever said that Christianity would be easy (John 15:18-25).

It is entirely possible that a person might just beat you to death before you have a chance to contact the authorities. What if it is the husband who is attacking the wife, and there is a young daughter? Is it perfectly moral for her to allow him to kill her, even if the daughter will be left motherless?