So, what all that seems to boil down to–with respect to the “Can non-humans be people?” question, at any rate–is that, no, apes don’t have souls. Presumably neither would a hypothetical starfaring extraterrestrial. An extraterrestrial would just be a meaningless collection of atoms, no matter how clever that collection might be, because Jesus was the Son of Man, not the Son of a Little Green Man.
How about a Neanderthal? Or a Homo erectus?
Thnaks.
MEBuckner
I’m not an anthropologist, so I’ll have to turn the question back to you. What species was Jesus? That is the species that is the vessel for God’s Spirit.
Spiritus
Good one! 
In fairness to Lib, I think he is saying, “I cannot give you a deductive algorithm for the presence of spirit, but I know it when I see it.” (or spirit recognizes, perhaps.)
If so, then hypotheticals regarding species that he has never met would be undecidable.
Still no excuse for letting perfectly good pork chops go to waste, if you ask me.
Oh, and one other thing. I don’t know whether or not God has visited other worlds or if such worlds exist. But if He has, then the species on those worlds that He dwelt in are also vessels of His Spirit. I just know about the earth. Y’all know all about the other places.
Lemme get this straight: You went to all the time and trouble to learn ancient Greek so you could translate the Bible, a book you believe is “not the Word of God, but that Jesus is the Word of God,” as you said here. If the Bible is not the Word of God, how do you know God really did tell Abraham (or was it Moses?) “You tell them I AM sent you. That is who I AM.”? How do you know it wasn’t just some clever bit of dialogue (and philosophy) made up by the writer? How do you know it’s true? It’s certainly nothing a man could not have imagined on his own. A philosophy that a man can understand is a philosophy that a man could have conceived.
And then you come to believe Jesus is God just because Jesus is able to quote Scripture and claim He is God?
Did you ever think it was just the dope talking?
Now, what the hell does all this have to do with why God is so cruel in the OT? And don’t tell us again God did it out of love. No sane person kills what he loves (excepting euthanasia).
Well, Jab, if you would get it straight, I would be delighted. I would also be delighted if a million bucks fell in my lap right now.
When I started learning Greek, I didn’t know that Jesus is the Word of God. In fact, I knew about as much about Him as you do: a few contextless trivial facts mixed with a little misinformation. I won’t debate with you about whether Jesus is God. I know that He is. What you think of Him is between you and Him. As for the dope, I was the dope for being so blind and thick-headed when all God wanted was to love me.
God was not cruel in the Old Testament. You can think of it as euthanasia if you like. He expressed His love to Man and freed their spirits from oppression. Most men hated him in return and jabbed at Him relentlessly.
Just whose spirits did He free from oppression? The ones He killed or the ones He spared?
The man who refuses to debate is admitting he knows little about the subject at hand.
We shall all be freed soon enough. If you’re going to blame Him for one death, then blame Him for all of them — past, present, and future. He created us as mortals, after all.
And you’re right, I know nothing about God other than what He has said and I have heard. And those are not debatable. That’s why I called it witnessing.
Witnessing is observing.
Describing what you have witnessed is testifying.
You may think you have heard from God but that does not necessarily mean that you did.
cmkeller: *Or that the people G-d ordered slaughtered were themselves evil, and that G-d’s ordering of slaughter was an act of justice. Cruel to those who are evil, but saving those who are not from their influence. […] As I said earlier, if you’re going to believe the what the OT says about the genocide itself, then also believe that G-d had ordered it, and that the nation in question was so fundamentally corrupt that amongst them all there weren’t even ten righteous people. *
Libertarian: God was not cruel in the Old Testament. You can think of it as euthanasia if you like. He expressed His love to Man and freed their spirits from oppression. Most men hated him in return and jabbed at Him relentlessly.
What kind of depresses me about these interpretations is that in order to defend the consistent loving-kindness of G-d, we have to be so condemnatory about so many unknown human beings. Is it possible that G-d might even rather have us accuse G-d of cruelty, albeit unjustly, in order to be more charitable towards other people? Isn’t there something in the Talmud about that, cmk? I don’t remember it clearly but I think there might.
jab1: *Witnessing is observing.
Describing what you have witnessed is testifying. *
Yeah jab, but on this forum, and even in the forum definition, “testifying” and “witnessing” are interpreted pretty interchangeably. I know Christians who also wince at this sense of “witnessing” as a horrible neologism, but it is a pretty standard usage by now.
::Hypothetical pig and man situation interrupted by a flock of sheep trouncing over the hill just off the animal farm::
“Four legs bad, two legs good!”
“Four legs bad, two legs good!”
Sorry, just had to post that… Carry on.
The problem with all this is that morality is subjective.
Let’s suppose a body of followers of some religion receives a mandate from God to kill off everyone of a nearby nation - in modern times, say next month for example.
To make it less abstract, let’s say that it’s a fundamentalist Islamic sect commanded to kill Americans - which in some cases may not be that far off base. You see, the US is evil because our women dress immorally, or because we gamble or whatever.*
Substitute a biblical nation and another cultural difference instead and you have the OT. See? Or I could invoke Godwin’s Law to describe other facets of history.
Is that good? Not from behind my desk, and I somehow doubt if even the most devout among us would meekly submit “Oh well, we’re being invaded and slaughtered. Must be God’s will…” A more likely outcome is that both sides feel a moral imperative (perhaps even a divine one) to defend/attack respectively and war ensues. Somebody wins, perhaps catastrophically so.
I think trying to justify killing in the name of religion is the worst sort of evil there is, on any scale. That’s all I have to say.
*(This is hypothetical - I actually admire the Islamic religion. Just making a point)
Kimstu wrote:
Now Kimstu, you should know better than that! These people aren’t “unknown” at all. The Bible tells us quite clearly that they were all evil and deserving of death. And we know that the Bible is correct because Moses had a revelation at Sinai, which somehow makes all of the Torah accurate down to the letter! It’s just that simple, really.
cmkeller wrote:
This is a very faulty chain of logic. Let’s go through all the stages, shall we?
Firstly, you state that the prophet Samuel told the people that they should attack the Amalekites. This is true, at least according to the Bible.
Now, you ask how we know that Samuel was telling the truth. You state that his words passed the test of Deuteronomy. But the “prophet” test in Deuteronomy is incomplete. It simply states that if a prophet’s predictions do not come true, then his words do not come from God. This is logical enough, but hardly useful. I predict that the Mariners will end the season with more wins than the Devil Rays. Am I a prophet? Of course not. Isn’t it possible that Samuel observed that the Amalekite army was much smaller than the Israelite army, and decided that this would be a good time to attack? Why would someone need any prophetic abilities to be a good military leader? And, isn’t it possible that Samuel never claimed any divine order to attack the Amalekites, but that these words were put into his mouth by a later author, who assumed that God must have ordered the genocide, because the Israelites were so successful?
But putting aside these problems, you state that the entire nation witnessed the divine trust granted to Moses at Sinai. I won’t argue this point here, but you seem to be stating that because Moses received a revelation at Sinai, the entire Torah must be true to the syllable. I don’t see how this follows. Allow me to present an alternative history:
Do you really think that the people would notice such changes? Do you think that fathers passed the entire Torah down orally to their children, down to the very word? What if, for example, a later scribe, copying the story of Noah, realized that God looks like an awful bastard killing everyone in the flood. So he adds in a line about how all the people were evil and deserved to die, which later becomes Genesis 6:5. Who would notice such a small change? Remember, according to Jewish tradition itself, Jews had an “oral Torah” dating back to Sinai as well. Perhaps the Israelites, in telling the story of Noah, always mentioned that the people were evil, even though this was absent from the Torah. So, a scribe finally took it upon himself to add in this detail.
Now, I’m not saying that this actually happened. I’m of the opinion that the entire Torah was written by multiple authors well after the time of Moses. That is a point I’m prepared to argue in another thread. But you must admit that at least some editing of the Torah occurred. How else do you explain anachronisms such as the name “Dan” in Gen. 14:14? What do you make of Jeremiah’s comment that people do not know the law because it has been corrupted by the “lying pens of scibes”? To argue that we must believe every detail in the Bible because of the revelation at Sinai seems ill-founded.
I can’t remember this being asked yet or not, so I will.
Why is it valid to use the subjective morality we as humans came up with as an objective moral conduct. It would seem that if our morality is so dependent on our perceptions, that it would be pretty easy for G-d to not need to follow them. After all, G-d isn’t human.
I see no particular reason why Jesus would only come to a single species. It is possible that there was a chimp-Jesus, torn to pieces by a chimp jealous of the threat to his power. Or a pig-Jesus, sent to the slaughterhouse by his piggie rivals. If a human who does nothing but evil all his life (due to a flawed brain) may yet be a vessel for God’s spirit, or a human in a coma, or a human born without a brain, is it wise to discount the possibility of a spirit in our animal kin?
God has only loaned me my body, you say. Does he therefore have the moral right to do whatever he desires to my body?
Even if animals do not possess a Spirit, do our actions towards them have any moral weight? If so, can you give an example of how?
[Edited by Gaudere on 06-02-2001 at 10:18 PM]
Well, our subjective human morality is all we’ve got. Plus, the Bible says that man was made in God’s image. Why would God make our moral sense so completely different than his? If we as humans can come to the conclusion that torturing babies and committing genocide are Bad Things, then it stands to reason that God programmed us so as to feel that way, which likely implies that God feels that way himself.
The problem of judging God gets even worse when we’re talking about alleged acts of God, rather than universally agreed upon acts.
Opus1:
continuing Friday’s response to your prior post before responding to your latest one:
Right.
Certainly he has that ability. However, your recommendation that is based on the assumption that there are no other factors he needed to consider in carrying out this operation. No doubt you’re familiar with the saying about a buterfly’s wingbeat affecting the course of a hurricane aacross the globe. G-d (as defined in the OT) operates on a universal scale. Elsewhere in this thread I raised the issue of free will, and how it would be impossible if it was always clear that the guilty suffered and the righteous prospered, especially if this occurred through miraculous means. That’s one example of a consideration G-d might have figured into the equation of “how best to remove this evil society’s effects from the rest of the world.” I don’t mean to sound like I’m bringing in the much-hated “mysterious ways” factor, but in trying to come up with more examples of “why G-d did it/ordered it done one way and not another,” any guess would be merely a guess, and at best, only a partial one. My point is, that although you can’t think of what harm it might have done to do it your way, you can’t prove that without knowing all the factors that had to be considered in making the decision.
And I will probably never convince you otherwise, either. However, just to make a point: is it not true that unliving monuments of past societies have drawn not merely interest, but imitation as well? One good example would be Stonehenge. We know very little about the ancient Celtic (or is that Pictish?) druids…heck, we don’t even know with certainty that they were the ones who built it or for what purpose it was built…but mere fascination with Stonehenge has spawned a “modern druids” movement with a sizable following, performing their best attempts to imitate ancient Druidic rites (although admittedly not the worst ones the ancient druids were accused of).
If an unliving monument could bring about the revival of such ancient and barely-known practices, can you tell me logically why a living, surviving monument would not be liable to bring about a revival of practices of a much more recent and better-known (to the ancient Israelites) religion?
First of all, let’s stick to the children; the sins of the nations in question were not limited (in the Biblical account) to their armies. Secondly, it’s not “their own problem” from the perspective of G-d, as he’s portrayed in the OT. He is clearly concerned with the moral/spiritual well-being of the Israelites (and the world at large). As such, not telling them of traps that would lead to temptation of serious sin would be rather counterproductive.
I think this point is addresses by my response to your first point.
As a matter of fact, you’re somewhat correct about this. If Israel was going to be a nation, complete with such sometimes-cruel-to-individuals-but-good-for-the-greater-society necessities as executing justice, winning wars (even of the non-genocidal kind, e.g., the Philistines), they’d have to toughen up.
I don’t think so. I’d like to offer the following Biblical quote, which seems counter-productive to any attempt at post-facto justification: Deuteronomy 9:4-6 (Moses speaking to the Israelites) - “After the LORD your God has driven them out before you, do not say to yourself, “The LORD has brought me here to take possession of this land because of my righteousness.” No, it is on account of the wickedness of these nations that the LORD is going to drive them out before you. It is not because of your righteousness or your integrity that you are going in to take possession of their land; but on account of the wickedness of these nations, the LORD your God will drive them out before you, to accomplish what he swore to your fathers, to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Understand, then, that it is not because of your righteousness that the LORD your God is giving you this good land to possess, for you are a stiff-necked people.”
Yes, it says the nations they’re driving out were wicked, but why, if they were trying to justify, wouldn’t they have made their ancestors out to be righteous?
You say that flippantly, as an exaggeration, but it points to the idea of limited scope that I raised in response to point one. Would you take an idea for, say, nuclear disarmament from a 5-year-old? Of course not. Because it’s simplistic and doesn’t take into account the complexities of international relations. We are not privy to every bit of knowledge G-d possesses. When he figures out the best course of action, our ideas are, to him, like those of a 5-year old.
Will respond to your most recent post tomorrow.
Chaim Mattis Keller