Why is G-d so cruel in the OT?

Great Debates
241

Quix

Thank you! Gratefully, I accept your apology.

I try to make the point often, but maybe I should include it as a signature. Our consciousnesses are closed to one another. Your moral journey is very different from mine and is no less valid. We all find what we seek, and we all store what we treasure in our hearts. Often, we’re all just talking past each other with amphibolous misunderstandings due, in large part, to the ambiguities of language.

Whatever your morality, whether you’ve derived it yourself from your interpretations of nature, or whether God has placed it in your heart, I do not hold that mine is any better than yours if for no other reason than that you might have derived His by reason alone while I might have misinterpreted His revelation. Although He is Perfectly Good and therefore Morally Perfect, I ain’t.

Chaim

The difference between the Son and the Father is authority. Jesus carefully and frequently disclaimed Himself by asserting that His authority comes from the Father. “The Son can reveal nothing but what the Father has revealed to him.” — Jesus

You used the term “aspect” which is dead on accurate. There is One and only One God, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

Amedeus, Phoenix Dragon

If I wasn’t being serious, then neither were you! You gave me nothing to work with but nature: people doing this and that here and there. What morality that is not arbitrary can be drawn from nature? If nature does supply a morality, then you must describe it scientifically and put it through the rigors of the scientific method. You must show its measurement on a gauge.

You described nothing more than brains making motor decisions to run, to shoot, to hide, to speak. You spoke of an emotional love, not a metaphysical Love. Brains are a part of nature, as are the decisions they make. From my perspective, I cannot draw a moral judgment from your scenarios because I am not privvy to the unabridged life-long experience and moral journey of every participant involved. I can no more trust my moral assessment of your scenarios than I can trust the assessment of intelligence among races from The Bell Curve authors.

Neither can you. And even if you were to list the unabridged perceptions of each participant, what have you told me about their interpretations of their perceptions? If you wish to apply psychology to get at their motives, then which school of psychology is correct? Shall we use the Nicene declarations of political groups of psychologists? Can neurologists help us? Will we all agree? Not likely. Will we assign an arbitrary authority to the majority? Then we will commit a logical fallacy. Will we let the smartest person decide? Oops, now we have to decide who’s smartest. What about the best credentialed? We would need to assure that those credentials were earned by merit and not politics.

There is a simpler way. Leave God to judge morality. Let’s establish an arbitrary code of ethics that govern our behavior, and let that Which is Morally Perfect make the moral judgments.

Gaudere

But I’m not talking about an emotion; I’m talking about a metaphysical state. The point is that this state of hatred does not differentiate between an ant and a human. Its only restraint in behavior is what it can get away with and save its own hide. You can establish laws that stop people from putting babies in microwaves, but you cannot establish a law that will stop people from hating babies. God is concerned with the hatred, because He is a metaphysical Being. Hatred is death; Love is Life. Hatred, as a metaphysical state, is morally wrong in and of itself because it murders the Spirit.

If you believe that rape is about penile insertion, then there is little I can do to convince you. As I explained in some detail in the post you overlooked:

Your body is God’s Temple. Your Spirit is His presence in it. Your brain might not wish this or that, but YOUR BRAIN IS NOT YOU. Your Spirit, WHICH IS YOU, is not concerned with either penile penetration or the cessation of cellular replication. Many people suffer physically even while their Spirits rejoice; and many people have healthy bodies even while their Spirits are in anguish. The Spirit is concerned with itself.

What a wonderful question! The Spirit suffers when it is not free, by the definition of freedom that I gave to Xeno.

242

A materialist morality is no more arbitrary than your own. While you have explicitely acknowledged that in some posts, much of what you write glosses over that reality. However you intend your posts to be received, they give me the impression of a man who believes he has found an absolute morality. Arbitrary, in this sense, does not mean inconsistent, casual, unexamined, or whimsical. It simply menans the starting point is cannot be securely differentiated from other possible starting points. I am sure you are aware of this, but that sense is not always clear in your usage, and I think it is important to make the distinction.

Guadere, Xeno, Quix, etc.
Lib does not believe the morality of a situation/action/decision can be described by the material components of the context. It is pointless (and potentially quite frustrating) to present him with hypothetical material scenarios and expect a “straightforward” answer. Unless, of course, you recognize that “insufficient data” is a straightforward response.

From what I understand, the implications of Libs’s position include the fact that he feels unqualified (by nature of isolated reference) to pass moral judgment upon any scenario according to the only standard that he recognizes. Even his understanding of the imperatives of his own “spirit” are limited by the imperfections of material perception.

To me, this view of morality is funtionally useless. It amounts to saying that, “we will never know whether an act/decision/inspiration is moral.” Of course, functional disutility does not make it inconsistent or incorrect.

I fell similarly about the reasoning behind Biblical accounts of mass slaughter at the command of God. While I understand the chains of reasoning which allow some to find perfect morality in such accounts (and I thank you, chaim for explaining your position so patiently), I lack the faith necessary to suspend my personal judgment and accept that such acts can be accorded with perfect good and maximal freedom for individual choice. This is, of course, a reinforcing cycle.

I find the decisions immoral.
Therefore I cannot (even should I come to accept His existence) find faith that such a God is perfectly good. Therefore I cannot trust in the goodness and wisdom behind seemingly cruel acts.
Therefore I cannot suspend my personal moral evaluation.

243

Right. I think I got that. So I was correct is thinking that the state of hatred is immoral, and it is equally immoral regardless as to whether the object of the state of hatred is an ant or a human? Or do you think hatred does not have an object, it is just a state of “evilness”?

Amazing that you know this about my Spirit, and yet I, who apparently am this Spirit, do not. :wink: If my spirit is not concerned about penile penetration, why can’t God morally rape me? How do you know that my Spirit recoils from the sexual use of my body without my desire, and so doing so is coercive, and does not equally recoil from the destruction of my body without my desire?

How can my spirit be coerced? My Spirit is free to make moral decisions, which is apparently all it does, and I don’t see how anyone or anything (in your philosophy) could prevent the Spirit from making whatever moral choice it wishes to make. No one could force me to hate or love (as I understand your beleifs), so how can my Spirit be coerced?

244

Spiritus

You will never know how deeply you have affected my thinking on these boards. Remember eta? :wink: I don’t mean to sound like a broken record, but I have learned that I must put aside my apprehensions when I read your posts, else I will miss jewel after jewel of good sense and wisdom.

For what it’s worth, I am delighted to report that I think I finally made a substantive post, explaining something in a way that didn’t upset anyone. Please see Lib’s Ten Commandments for debating against creationists. Even MEBuckner agreed with me there. I’m proud of the post, and believe that it will meet your high standards, and will demonstrate that I am capable of doing better than I’ve done here.

Right you are! Once I’ve explained that I am speaking from my personal closed reference frame, I then proceed to speak from that reference frame without continued disclaimers. I can see where, especially when someone drops in afterward (who the heck is going to read 3 prior pages to get caught up?) and just sees me saying things like, “No moral judgment can be drawn…” I should say, “I personally cannot draw a moral judgment…” Is that better?

Right again (with a small but important correction)! It is functionally useless to me … right now … in this place, but it is definitively useful to God Whom I believe to be morality’s Guardian, and it will be useful to me when I AM joined with Him in Paradise.

245

Lib, I’m working on an OP which will attempt to examine ethics, morality and coercion in more detail (possibly to be posted this weekend), but this remark intrigues me a bit. If I understand you correctly, when you recommend an “arbitrary” code, you’re saying that ethical behavior need not be based on shared moral beliefs. And by commending all moral judgements into the hands of the Morally Perfect, you deny the relevance of shared moral beliefs in any case. This raises the usual array of fascinating questions.

Other than a common morality, what are the possible bases for any code of ethics? The natural imperatives of physics, biology and economics? A “designer ethic” based on arbitrary social philosophies? The desires of the King?

If ethics are to govern our behavior, and our actions must be within the bounds of our morality, how then can moral persons base their ethics on anything except their morality? And if an ethic must be commonly followed, how can the moral basis be anything except a common moral basis?

246

Gaudere

Yes! [dancing with rapturous joy…]

That’s right. That sort of hatred does not take an object, it takes a predicate nominative. It is an identity. It is merely “I HATE”. (That’s how I see it.)

My brain doesn’t know it either. (That’s from my perspective.)

Your Spirit is concerned about spirtual matters, such as the moral decisions it will make. It is not concerned about evaluating the moral decisions others have made. That is why Jesus said that, to be morally perfect, there must be no end to our forgiveness. (That’s speaking from my own axiom set.)

By usurpation of free-will. It is your Spirit, and not mine, that ought to feed your brain the moral command by which it will make its motor decisions. Though I cannot tell you whether Peter commits an immoral act when he shoots you, I can tell you that when Peter holds a gun to your head or tricks you in a flim-flam and forces your brain to make a decision it otherwise would not, your Spirit will experience anguish. No one morally trumps your property, except for He that loans it to you. And if you have been given property free and clear, then even the Giver may not morally claim it. (This interpretation is my own cross to bear, and not yours.)

247

Xeno

Wow, what a great thread that will be! You will be dealing with such things as majoritarian ethics and why it can be oppressive to minorities, etc. I look forward to it.

What drew me arbitrarily to select the noncoercion ethic as the one I would defend is that, when I examined it, I found it to be a recapitulation of God’s own Absolute Morality. (I was a Christian before I was a libertarian.) I see His choice as necessary, but mine as arbitrary. I find that I can describe God effortlessly in libertarian terms, e.g., He is the Owner of the heavens and the earth; He has loaned us property in the form of our bodies; He evaluates our stewardship over His property as any owner would; He does not coerce our will; He holds us accountable for our decisions; He is the source of our rights (think property); He secures our liberty. “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.” — Jesus (That’s my own view through my own prejudice.)

248

Absolutely, I’ll look at the problems with majoritarianism.

And thanks for giving your personal perspective. -Remember that many theologians have effortlessly described God in authoritarian terms as well. Although I like your libertarian God better, either view is only relevant if one bases one’s political philosophy on one’s moral precepts. If ethics are completely arbitrary, then the congruency is interesting, but pointless.

249

Hmmm – nope. I remember many interactions with you over the past year+, but “eta” does not ring any bells. Regardless, I am happy that you no longer feel I make it a point to disagree with anything posted beside your name simply because it is beside your name. It only seems that way because you are wrong so often. :wink: [sub]Okay, it probably seems that way because share passions for many subjects, but we approach those subjects from drastically different perspectives. But where’s the punchline in that?[/sub]

I did like your “10 commandments” post. It seems like it is good adice for any debate. Certainly I could often do with the reminder to repect my opponents when the epithets start flying.

Works for me.
Like you, I tend to drop the qualifications after I feel they have been explicitely established. When exchanges prolong, though, it is sometimes helpful to refresh folks memory about what you are actually saying instead of what you apear to be saying.

Consider youself black, Mr Kettle.

Ah, but I was stating my position, not yours. Your correction depends upon assumptions which I do not share.

250

Why? Because he has not mentioned my name in any of the posts he’s made on this page after the one I made yesterday at 2:55 PM PDT.

Nevertheless…

Morality is an abstract concept. Science can determine nothing about abstract concepts. We must leave it to the philosophers.

You mean you have to know a person’s biography before you can know if a single, given act is moral or not? I think you just don’t want to answer the question and you’re desperately fishing for a reason.

And if there is no God, we just can’t make moral judgments at all? If there is no God, morals don’t exist? Further evidence you don’t believe atheists are moral.

251

This does not appear to answer my confusion regarding your statement that rape (sexual contact against my will) is coercive, but killing me against my will (well, if God does it) is not coercive. Unless you are stating that your Spirit knows that my Spirit doesn’t like sexual contact against my will, but doesn’t mind destruction of my body against my will, or that my Spirit desires to keep my body free from undesired sexual contact but doesn’t care about utter destructuion of said body.

OK, so when another spirit causes a brain to make my brain do something it wouldn’t do save for the other’s brain’s actions, my Spirit experiences anguish. So if I am a coward and I don’t want to jump into a river and save a drowning child, and someone forces me to do so at gunpoint, my spirit suffers. Is this correct? Or if a Nazi is looking for a Jew, and I deceive him to prevent him from doing what his Spirit would normally command his brain to do, his spirit suffers. Is this correct? And yet if I am “forced” by hunger, brain damage, poverty, etc. to do something I wouldn’t do save for that circumstance, my spirit does not suffer, right? Why? Why is it the thing that is acting upon the brain that determines whether the spirit suffers or not, rather than simply being forced, for whatever reason, to do something you wouldn’t otherwise do?

Let’s say that I am trying to save a child trapped in a crevasse. I go to save him, but a rockfall blocks my way and I cannot. My spirit does not suffer. But if someone had caused the rockfall, my spirit would suffer?

[Edited by Gaudere on 06-06-2001 at 04:39 PM]

252

Your “reference frame” as you call it, is not totally closed. Any time you speak the truth, we know what’s on your mind. If you lie, we at least know you are a liar. In fact, I would say that your “reference frame” would be totally closed only if you were totally and irrevocably insane.

253

Might I add that if what you appear to be saying does not match with what you intended to say, it means you are not expressing yourself very well.

You never have explained what “morality waves” are.

254

Gaudere

(Aside: Why are so many of your posts edited lately?)

Point blank: rape is not sexual contact against your will; rape is using your helplessness to satisfy his will. You are not concerned with sexual contact. You can’t even have sexual contact. You don’t have sexual organs. (This references the real you and is an expression of my viewpoint only.)

I don’t know why it should so difficult for such a brilliant mind to wrap around such a simple concept as the duality of man. Perhaps you’re over-reaching. Look at it more simply, the way Cecil Adams does. He understands, for example, in what context sin is deadly: “They don’t mean deadly in the sense of putting you in physical danger, muttonhead, they mean destructive of your immortal soul.” Except, of course, that I wouldn’t call you a muttonhead.

Yes, if you are not allowed to choose evil of your own free-will, your spirit suffers in anguish. For most people, this is an everyday familiar experience.

(The above is how I see things, and not necessarily how you ought to see things.)

It likely happened often. (Ibid)

Impossible to say. As I’ve said before, if your brain is damaged and you shoot Peter, we cannot know but what your Spirit is crying out in anguish, “Oh, how I loathe what I have done!” Ambiguity is necessary for free-will. (Ibid)

From what I know of you, if you were blocked from saving the life of a child, your Spirit would suffer unspeakable anguish. But then, I might not know you at all. (My viewpoint only.)

255

I’ve been a bit sloppy with typing (“usurp” I misspelled about three times in one post), but so anal I don’t like to see typos/not exactly perfect phrasing hanging around. It is one of the few perks of my position. :smiley: If you’ll notice, the edit is usually only about three or five minutes after the post, which means I saw it as soon as I submitted. I type out all my stuff beforehand and review it before submitting, but things still sneak through. I’ve never substansively changed a post I submitted.

Ok, so if someone uses my lack of or insufficient power to do something to me that I do not desire, that is coercion?

Is it moral to cause evil spirits spiritual anguish, but not moral to cause good spirits spiritual anguish, or should you just refrain from coercion altogether?

Let me go over our exchange so far:
Lib: Coercion is an immoral resolution, a decision by a moral agent to trump the will of another moral agent.

Lib:…the only suffering that is morally significant is spiritual suffering.

Me: How the the Spirit suffer, anyhow?

Lib: The Spirit suffers when it is not free, by the definition of freedom that I gave to Xeno [“Freedom is the absence of coercion.”]

Me: How can my spirit be coerced?

Lib: By usurpation of free-will.

Me: And yet if I am “forced” by hunger, brain damage, poverty, etc. to do something I wouldn’t do save for that circumstance, my spirit does not suffer, right?

Lib: Impossible to say. As I’ve said before, if your brain is damaged and you shoot Peter, we cannot know but what your Spirit is crying out in anguish, “Oh, how I loathe what I have done!” [So apparently you can have spiritual suffering caused by a noncoercive agent…i.e. brain damage, unless brain damage is now defined as coercive.]

Me: Let’s say that I am trying to save a child trapped in a crevasse. I go to save him, but a rockfall blocks my way and I cannot.

Lib: From what I know of you, if you were blocked from saving the life of a child, your Spirit would suffer unspeakable anguish.

Ok, so first you say the spirit suffers when it is coerced, then you say the spirit suffers when it is prevented from doing what it would normally do by brain trauma, random rockfalls, etc. (occurances normally defined as “non-coercive”, since I believe your defintion of coercion requires an active moral agent to do the coercing). So it seems that either your defintion of “spritual suffering” should be “anytime when the spirit is prevented somehow from carrying out the action its metaphysical state would command the brain and body to do” (in other words, drop the strict coercion requirement) OR “coercion is anything that prevents the spirit is prevented somehow from carrying out the action its metaphysical state would command the brain and body to do.”

256

Gaudere

Wow, fantastic! One of your defintions likely is right. Help me to “think through” whether nature is coercive. We are tantalizingly close to a breakthrough in understanding one another.

(No one else need opine as I do.)

257

Nature Being Coercive
It actually seems reasonable to propose that nature is coercive, given your defintion of coercive and a belief that God created all of the universe–therefore there is an active agent (God) upon which to assess the impediment to the Spirit’s desires. God does, in his creation of the world, appear to be coercive. He created a situation (the universe) where he knew aspects of it (brain damage, insufficient supply of food, etc.) would prevent Spirits from being able to impose their will on their body and brain due to “outside constraints”. If I create a gas that I release on the whole world knowiong that it will cause .2% of the population’s Spirit from being able to transmit their desires properly to their body, I assume you would say I am coercing these Spirits to do something they wouldn’t otherwise do. If God created a world where brain damage is going to occur, he has created a world where restraint of the Spirit is inevitable–he created inevitable coercion (which he presumably could have prevented, by preventing brain damage from being possible).

However, since I think you take it as axiomatic that God is not coercive, I don’t think you can agree that nature is. This does seem to me to result in having different rules for God-spirit and man-spirit, but perhaps you can find a way around it.

Nature Not Being Coercive
One way to get around this is to define everything God does as noncoercive, therefore when He prevents the Spirit from exercising its will upon the body it is not coercion, it is only coercive if another Spirit does this (however, this is rather troublesome considering that all Spirits are God, therefore it doesn’t seem possible to say that when God-spirit does one thing, it is noncoercive, but when Me-spirit does something, it is coercive.) Perhaps you could argue that since God knows all, he knows the “right” degree of impediment to put on each Spirit’s capacity to control its body, so any other additional impediment is “wrong” (though this again runs into trouble with the Spirit being God too, as well as the “then are we interfering with God’s will if we prevent brain damage” quandary).

If God and nature are noncoercive, and the spirit only suffers from coercion, then I think you would have to argue that I would feel no spiritual anguish when a child is trapped by a natural rockfall. My brain and emotions would be very upset, and my emotions would be indistinguishable regardless as to whether the rockfall was natural or not. However, my Spirit would have to somehow know the difference between a natural rockfall and one started by another Spirit, and be unmoved by the former and traumatized by the latter, while not communicating one iota of that knowledge to my body and brain. Again, I think you would have to argue that the natural rockfall was somehow “right”, and the “unnatural” one was “wrong”, even though both prevent my Spirit from taking the action it wished to take.

258

Thank you, Gaudere! The following was most meaningful to me, and so I’m skipping straight to it:

Hmmm. God Himself is not coercive because He has chosen not to coerce. He simply doesn’t take to evil. His moral decisions are perfect, and therefore He will (as opposed to must) always choose goodness. We likewise are free moral agents and, though made of the same “stuff” that He is made of, likewise choose whether we will coerce. We are not morally perfect, and therefore might sometimes coerce and might sometimes not.

I do not hold that nature recapitulates God, nor that God is to be found anywhere in nature per se, though I believe that nature gives evidence that He does exist. I believe that nature is amoral, and makes no moral statement one way or the other. Therefore, I’m sure that I would say that nature does not coerce. It is merely a stage upon which many different plays may play out. Also, I do not believe that nature is even potentially coercive as it has no intention toward your will one way or the other.

Therefore, neither God (by choice) nor nature (by design) coerce, leaving the only possible coercers to be we against each other. This leaves no conclusion except that I was wrong. And as I think of it (wow!), this relieves for me a great gnawing at my intellect that I’ve had for quite some time. How can I, as a loving and compassionate being, help but feel sorry for those who choose Hell over Heaven? In other words, wouldn’t it “spoil” Heaven if I were to be sad for the circumstances of others inasmuch as Heaven is definitively eternal joy? And the answer is, yes! It would! Therefore, my Spirit feels no anguish for what others have freely chosen. (Pondering the Prodigal Son… hmmm… no wonder I am delighted to see my brother!)

Soooo…

Revisiting your scenario, I would have to say that, for your Spirit to suffer anguish, you would have to encounter an opposing moral will in your effort to save the child. But if a man had put the obstacle before you without your knowledge, you will have made a wrong moral judgment (about the situation per se) but not a wrong moral decision, assuming we can take your attempt to save the child as an action commanded by your Spirit. This is yet another reason why God, from His perspective, unencumbered by a space-time cone, can morally judge the situation as a whole, having seen both what the man did and what you tried to do, and why you, when you see God will run to Him because your Spirit loves Goodness, and why the man, when he sees God, will run away, as he does not want his black heart to be seen in the Light of Truth.

What say you?

(Note: the above are my opinions only, and are not to be construed as infallibly correct.)

259

Sounds like we’re back to the question that started all this. If God never takes to evil, then the massacres He ordered and the natural and supernatural disasters He caused are, in the long run, looking at the VERY big picture, were all Good Things.

I don’t buy it.

Well, no rational, reasonable person would choose Hell over Heaven, assuming said person believed those places really exist. But I don’t believe Heaven and Hell exist. I have not chosen to go to Hell by believing that God does not exist. It’s no more meaningful than saying I have chosen to go to the Klingon homeworld instead of Tattoine.

Even if it’s your wife or children? Would Heaven still be Heaven without them at your side? Or would God cause you to forget they are in eternal fire just so you’d be happy?

260

Are you simply taking this as axiomatic, or can you explain the difference between these two scenarios:

If I create a gas that I release on the whole world knowiong that it will cause .2% of the population’s Spirit from being able to transmit their desires properly to their body, I assume you would say I am coercing these Spirits to do something they wouldn’t otherwise do. If God created a world where brain damage is going to occur, he has created a world where restraint of the Spirit is inevitable–he created inevitable coercion (which he presumably could have prevented, by preventing brain damage from being possible).

But of course, we can use nature to coerce–like we can use a stick or a rockfall to coerce someone. Just making that clear.

So if I don’t know a person blocked the path, my Spirit is not distressed by being unable to save the child. If I think a person blocked the path, my Spirit will be in anguish. However, this seems to put the Spirit’s state as being a result of our human perception, rather than the other way around as you’ve mandated. For example, you have held that that spiritual state is independent of brain state; that a loving spirit is loving even if the brain makes the body put babies in microwaves (and would not be distressed at all if the person did so, apparently, so long as no person made it do so). Yet in this case, flawed human perception changes the very state of the spirit–if a person has taken a drug that makes him paranoid, he will perceive a perfectly natural rockfall as being the work of a malicious person, and his spirit will suffer anguish becuase of this faulty perception. Or if a loving spirit, one that would suffer great anguish if it saw a person being beaten, would not feel any pain at all if its perceptions were altered and it saw the people doing the beating as ravenous wolves. You have never before held that the very state of the Spirit can be changed by our biochemistry–are you making an exception in this case?

The spirit would also have to know that it is another unencumbered spirit that is preventing it from acting as well. If we simply see a person cause a rockfall, we do not know whether it is their Spirit commanding this (which would be coercive and cause our spirit anguish), or whether it is an imbalance in their brain chemistry (which is natural, and therefore the person is not being coerced or coercing, it is just as if the rocks had fallen naturally). It seems the Spirit will hardly know what it is supposed to feel, what with relying on all these potentially faulty perceptions! :smiley: