jab1:
Some famous Catholic theologian (Aquinas, maybe) argued that part of the joy of Heaven is being able to watch sinners burn in Hell. I’m sure someone can give you the exact quote if you want it.
cmkeller:
We’re definitely getting off-topic talking about the origins of the Torah. I’ve also forgotten that I’m arguing to convince the audience, not you. This is why I posited the idea of minor changes to the Torah, rather than my own beliefs, which are that the Exodus account in the Bible is highly fictionalized and that the Torah was written centuries after the events it describes (most likely during the reigns of Rehoboam, Hezekiah, and Josiah) by multiple authors and pieced together during the second temple period. I was hoping that you’d be more sympathetic to the idea of minor editing of the Torah, but it appears as though you believe that God dictated the entire Torah to Moses down to the syllable, including the two creation stories, the two flood stories, the two stories of Joseph being sold into slavery ( http://www.infidels.org/library/magazines/tsr/2000/5/205moses.html , scroll down to bottom), the two stories of Moses striking the rock at Meribah, the two multitudes of quail, the two stories of passing through the land of the Edomites, the disagreements over who could be a priest, the anachronisms, contradictions, and the dozens of other problems in the Torah.
Like I said, I will be glad to debate this in another thread, but here I would like to stick to the subject which started this thread: the acts of Yahweh in the OT. IIRC, you’ve only answered 2 of the 7 problems I’ve posted. It’s up to you whether you think anyone will be convinced by your apologetics. I’m fairly satisfied with simply presenting Yahweh’s OT deeds and letting them speak for themselves, without presenting anymore specific arguments as to why running through pregnant women with swords is a Bad Thing.
You, a free moral agent, are attacking people whose brians already exist. You are not establishing their initial potential, but are damaging it. They were peacefully minding their own business, and you initiated force. Even so, God does not hold them accountable for what you did.
On the other hand, if an amoral circumstance leads to a restraint of the Spirit’s will toward motor control, there is no coercion. If God held those with brain damage to the same standard — vis a vis moral decision manifesting into motor action — that he holds those with healthy brains, then he would be coercive. But God considers our abilities and circumstance. Thus, the widow who gave a single coin gave more than the rich man who gave a thousand coins.
Sure. I’ve tried to make that clear all along. Nature is just amoral stuff. It’s just a mis-en-scene. We use our brains to take the moral decisions we have been given to decide what we will do with that stuff.
Woah, Nellie! Hang on… Let’s plow on through, since there was no break for continuity… But we gotta come back to this…
Why should the Spirit be distressed when the Spirit made the decision not to microwave the baby? If someone else forces you to microwave the baby against your will (given totally arbitrary circumstances with infinite assumptions), then the immorality is that person’s and not yours. Either way, you haven’t killed the baby.
At last, the topic sentence!
And you know, I found that so hard to believe that I went on one of those dreaded Straight Dope searches. I really don’t have hours to spend, but there are a couple of very early threads, going back to March 2000, where I said things like:
I guess it just has not come up in that context. For whatever reason, the whole context of nearly every discussion has been about the output rather than the input. I could have sworn I had said something before about how the brain feeds the Spirit perception, which perception the brain interprets amorally, but the Spirit interprets in accordance with its morality. In any case, it only makes sense. These are the ingredients: the environment, the brain, and the Spirit. The Spirit must have “data” to make its moral decisions. I know that I’ve given examples of seeing a little old lady and deciding whether you will help her cross the street or whether you will mug her, and how she is amoral scenery for you, and you are amoral scenery for her. Search and you’ll find those.
At any rate, I find myself as frustrated as you do. I suppose we’ve fixated on the output side because what we almost always discuss is what happens after the moral decision is made. That fixation is to be expected when we are talking about the morality of our own actions. Likewise, the fact that the brain cannot give the Spirit enough perception to make moral judgments about others speaks to this, as does the whole notion of a limited reference frame.
I can understand your point and your quandry. But your quandry arises only when you are attempting to do what I have advised that we cannot do, namely, assess a moral scenario without an absolute frame of reference. You have described nicely why “playing God” is a futile effort. Thus, we “play the game” against par, and not against the other players.
All that matters is that your will is free. You cannot remove obstacles by your will; you cannot judge others by your will; all you can do with your will is make a decision. Decide that you love the girl. Command your brain to do everything in its arsenal to carry out your will. If your will is trumped by no other, then you have made a free moral decision. Otherwise, you suffer anguish.
True, we’re getting off-topic. However, my belief that the Torah is divine was central to my response to your question of why I’d be unwilling to justify any non-Biblical genocides.
In addition, I’m not going to let your assertions go unchallenged. As you said, we’re here to convince an audience (although I’m guessing that’s quite hypothetical at this point as this thread has become a pair of debates between us and between Libertarian and Gaudere), and when you make statements which attempt to undermine my point, I’ll give others to support my own.
Just for example, in the paragraph in which you declare that this issue is off-topic and shouldn’t be discussed further, you off-handedly bring up “evidence” of the multiple-authorship theory in the form of what your favored scholars see as duplicate stories. I’m supposed to just go on to addressing the original point, leaving our hypothetical audience with the impression that I’m either blind to such “evidence” or have no response to it, and therefore you’re correct on that issue? Great debate tactic, Opus1.
I’ll do us both the favor of returning to the original intent of this debate. Anyone who wishes to question how I see the Biblical portions that Opus1 provides as proof of his multiple-authors theory may do so in a separate thread, but let no one be left with the impression that these issues are unanswerable by me and other believers in the OT as the work of a single G-d, dictated through a single scribe (with the possible exception of the eight final verses, describing that scribe’s death).
Yes, you are satisfied with presenting the acts of G-d as presented in the OT without giving it any context, in the same way as you’d present the act of Tim McVeigh’s executioner (assuming it goes Monday as currently planned) without giving it the context of his conviction by a jury of 168 murders. Or the act of bombing Hiroshima without mentioning Pearl Harbor and the Bataan Death March.
I do recall a point in this thread where you cited some specific examples of the cruelties that you found unjustified, pretty much all boiling down to the issue of children being included in the cruelties. Then, before I got around to addressing them all, you (or someone else) asked for an explanation of how the killing of children can be reconciled with Deuteronomy 24:16. I figured that once I had answered that, it pretty much answered the more incident-specific questions you had asked earlier.
If there were any that were not covered thereby, could you please repeat them?
I’ve looked at both of them. As I said at the beginning of this post, those are meaningless in my eyes, because they are completely lacking in context.
So if I use genetic manipulation to alter an egg before the sperm reaches it so that the resultant child will have severe brain dysfunction, I have not coerced anyone, since I put the wheels in motion before the brain existed and established the child’s initial potential?
I don’t believe so, unless you have redefined coercion from your initial deifntion of “an active moral agent that prevents a Spirit from using its body and brain as it would desire.” If God held the brain-damaged responsible for their acts (particularly since he made brains that are capable of being damaged in the first place!), he would be unfair, but I don’t believe unfairness is the exact same thing as coerciveness. My coerciveness (I think it’s coercive, anyhow) in my example above is still coercive, even if I don’t hold the resultant child responsible for their actions–I have still impeded their will. I would just be sadistic if I gave someone brain damage and then didn’t make an allowance for it; that’s like cutting off someone’s hands and then beating them 'cause they can’t juggle.
Apparently, the spirit suffers, not due to coercion, but due to perception of coercion. However, the perception of coercion is drawn solely from our amoral eyes and brains, which may or may not be functioning properly. Isn’t it better phrased, then, to say that our spirit suffers whenever its brain perceives coercion? So this:
…is not strictly correct. If my will is trumped by no other, I have made a free moral decision. But if I think my will has been trumped, I will suffer anguish. If my will is trumped, I have not made a free moral decision. But if I don’t think my will has been trumped, I will not suffer anguish. So the spirit’s suffering is not truly due to its will being forced at all, but only to the perception that it is forced, which may or not have any relation to the Spirit’s actual will being forced. It does not seem in accordance to your beliefs, to me, to have the Spirit suffer due solely to faulty biomechanics. The Spirit of a person whose brain chemistry induces him to paranoia will suffer endlessly, for no purpose and in complete non-accordance with reality, simply due to being born wrong! Can this be just?
Does the Spirit suffer only when it is coerced, or does it suffer when other Spirits are coerced too?
You said, “Coercion is an immoral resolution, a decision by a moral agent to trump the will of another moral agent.” Is coercion always immoral?
Did you mean to say your gas would prevent “.2% of the population’s Spirits from being able to transmit their desires properly to their body”? Or were you trying to say the gas would improve their Spirits’ ability to communicate with their brains?
Knowing Lib, he probably thinks trying to help people against their wills is coercion, so the point is probably moot.
Lib, if a person’s brain causes his body to put a baby in a microwave even though his Spirit didn’t want to do such a thing, why wouldn’t that mean his brain is stronger than his Spirit?
I find your arguments, as a whole, reasonable and compelling. I am going to have to re-examine my own understanding of the nature of spiritual suffering.
Jesus said, “God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in spirit and in truth… The Spirit gives life; the flesh counts for nothing. The words I have spoken to you are spirit and they are life.”
There are many passages wherein Jesus is “troubled in spirit” (which I think we may equate with what we mean here by spiritual suffering) as well as passages where His spirit is “filled with joy”. Gibran would be another excellent reference. Please allow me time to study these, pray, and listen for the voice of God.
People like you are why Straight Dope is such a wonderful place. God does not wish His people to be ignorant. You serve as His instrument by challenging our preconceptions. By the time I come to an understanding in this matter, it will likely merit a new thread, “Spiritual Suffering” perhaps. It is important for this purpose that I approach God with no prejudice to insure that I seek His Truth and not my wish, in other words, that I hear His voice and not my own.
Thank you, my precious Sister, and God go with you always.
Eh, she was just teasing, Libby. And I look forward to yor treatise on Spiritual suffering, one you get around to it (and don’t think I’ll let you forget about it, either! <grin> ).
Why would I forget something so important? For you, it is an interesting intellectual exercise, akin to a white liberal pondering racism. But I am like the Cherokee who wants to know what his ancestors felt as they walked at gunpoint from Georgia to Oklahoma.
And incidentally, why would anyone tease a man who is merely doing what was asked of him? Perhaps we are all pee-shy in our own way, and teasing is not always appropriate.
Remember, too, that Hume and Godel didn’t have Lib’s genius to draw on, and so they made fatal errors which are childishly obvious to Lib. Plus, there are all those logicians and mathematicians that go mad because they don’t understand their own work as well as Lib does. Instead of the SDMB, Lib needs a tachyonic antitelephone, so that he can send his wisdom back in time and steer the great minds of history away from their silly, silly mistakes.
(Admittedly, I’m not exactly a disinterested observer here )
I do apologize for continuing the debate over the inspired nature of the Torah after I said it should be ended. That wasn’t nice. I’ll start a separate thread about it at some later date.
The Bible is the context. I invite everyone to read it see the context for themselves. If anything, you appear to be inventing nonexistent context to justify God’s genocides. For example, regarding the slaughter of the Amalekites, you wrote that:
I see no evidence of this interpretation in the Bible, nor does it even make sense to me. You state that attacking the Israelites in the desert pushed the Amalekites past some threshold of absolute evil, such that they merited total annihilation. But the actual people being killed lived 400 years later! None of them had actually attacked Israel! Imagine if some Indian tribe were to attack us today for what we did to them in the 1800’s. How logical would they sound if they said that by attacking them in the 1800’s, the U.S. had met a threshold of evil, which required the destruction of the descendants of those who had sinned?
The problem with your analogies is that God is omnipotent; man is not. If the U.S. were omnipotent during WWII, I think that we would have found better ways to win the war than killing millions of innocent people.
Now, as far as killing children goes, it still boggles my mind that someone can justify this as a moral act by an omnipotent deity. In fact, it reminds me a lot of the man you keep bringing up, Timothy McVeigh, who justified the children he killed as “collateral damage.” Your argument boils down to the idea that an entire society can be so corrupt that the society as a whole needs to be destroyed, innocents be damned. If you feel that this is an intellectually justifiable position, sobeit. It strikes me (and hopefully others) as morally repugnant. You’ve already admitted that you would not defend any non-Biblical genocide, which basically means that you’re engaging in special pleading. All of your arguments as to why genocide is justified apply only to the genocides in the Bible, and no others.
But not all of my complaints about Yahweh’s injustice came down to the brutal slaughter of innocent children of other tribes. I also mentioned the incident with David and Bathsheba. Here it is again:
I don’t recall ever getting a reply to this. If I did, please repost.
I also have lots more Biblical injustices that I’d like to post. I’m sure you and the rabbis have defenses for all of them, but I think they’re worth debating about anyway. The problem with most of the injustices I find in the OT is that they are to some degree subjective. Some people might find it appropriate to execute those who practice other religions, homosexuals, prostitutes, and Sabbath-breakers. I find these punishments a little harsh. Some probably have no problem with the idea that a woman who tries to stop her husband by fighting by grabbing his genitals should have her hand cut off and be shown no pity. So instead, I’ll stick with punishments of the truly innocent.
Abram in Egypt:
In Gen. 12:10-20, Abram and his wife Sarai travel to Egypt during the famine. Abram fibs and says that Sarai is his sister (which she is, but he says this with intent to deceive). As a result of this false information, Pharaoh takes Sarai to be his wife. God is displeased and inflicts “serious diseases on Pharaoh and his household because of Abram’s wife Sarai” (Gen. 10:17). I believe that this was an unfair thing for God to do. Firstly, Pharaoh sincerely believed that Sarai was available due to Abram’s statement. Secondly, even if Pharaoh did sin in some way by marrying Sarai, it is wrong for God to punish the rest of his household for his sins.
Test for an unfaithful wife:
Num. 5:11-31 relates the test a man can make his wife take if he suspects her of infidelity. Basically, it is a trial by ordeal, as is evident in verses 27:28. But we know that trial by ordeal does not work. Whether a woman’s belly swells and her thighs rot away (or she has a miscarriage; the text is unclear) is not dependent upon her guilt or innocence. It is unfair for God to enact a law which does not work.
It seems to me that “density” is exclusively the province of the material world. You can’t have Area 1 that has more things in x amount of space than Area 2 with less things in x amount of space if there is neither space nor things. I think using the term “density” in terms of a nonmaterial entity would be highly confusing.
I don’t know; I’m not sure what concept you are going for. But if you are not certain if a word is appropriate to describe the concept you are going for, I would suggest that you simply attempt to explain the concept as best you can rather than use a term that does not perfectly descibe what you want. Go for clarity and thoroughness and accuracy first, then brevity.
Libertarian: And incidentally, why would anyone tease a man who is merely doing what was asked of him? Perhaps we are all pee-shy in our own way, and teasing is not always appropriate.
Sorry Lib, my bad. Gaudere is right, I was just teasing, and I didn’t mean to really hurt your feelings by it. My apologies.
