Not necessarily so. Why can’t a perfect God intentionally create imperfect people?
If God had wanted automotons, he would have created automotons. The fact is that God created people with free will. With free will comes the possibility of doing evil. If you don’t have the possibility of doing evil, then you don’t really have free will.
Likewise, jab1, if God created people who could resist temptation every time, then those people don’t really have free will. They are simply doing what is instinct (as an animal in heat, for example). If God wants to reward us for doing his commandments, then there should be some real inducement to not doing them. Otherwise, why reward someone for something that s/he does instinctlively?
A perfect person is not an automaton. A perfect person, when fully aware of the consequences of doing wrong, chooses not to do wrong. A perfect person would do something wrong only if he or she lacked some essential knowledge. Acting out of ignorance is not evil no matter what the action is.
No. It is not instinct. The person is fully aware of what he or she is doing and is acting consciously, not unconsciously or instinctively.
Not merely about the defendant’s guilt, but about the actual amount of damage the defendant inflicted.
Let’s say there were a device called the Pain-O-Meter, with which we can accurately measure how much the victim of a crime suffered, physically and mentally. Would you agree that the defendant would deserve to receive, as punishment, the degree of pain he inflicted?
If, say, Tim McVeigh’s victims, in total, received 500 KiloSades of pain as measured on the Pain-O-Meter, and to execute him by lethal injection would only inflict 10 KiloSades on him, is killing him in this relatively painless way a fitting punishment?
In the absence of such a mythical device, human governments err on the side of inflicting less pain than possibly deserved rather than more pain than possibly deserved. In my opinion, this is an excellent moral decision. However, it is necessary only due to our inability to ascertain the precise degree to which a criminal should be punished.
Do you enjoy putting words in my mouth? All I said was that they were kids who were not incapable of understanding Moses’s warning or heeding it. I don’t know the precise age of Dathan or Abiram’s children, but 6-10 is certainly within the range of both the “little ones” designation and being capable of understanding and deciding to heed a warning from Moses.
See above.
When understood in the context of the Biblical value system, yes. But as long as you insist that modern Western culture is the ultimate culmination of moral development, it would be a waste of keyboard-breath to even bother going into it.
Abimelech’s behavior was quite different from Pharaoh’s, in two different ways.
Pharaoh, in attempting to obtain Sarah, did not merely take her; he attempted to acquire her from Abram by exchanging gifts for her (see Genesis 12:16). Abimelech, in contrast merely took her outright…a kidnapping.
On the other hand, in Pharaoh’s palace, she was in immediate danger of rape, whereas in Abimelech’s, she was untouched.
Thus, in Egypt, Sarai needed protection from Pharaoh and his palace staff, although they did nothing deserving of punishment…hence, a skin rash rendering sex uncomfortable. From Abimelech, on the other hand, she did not need such protection, but he was punished for kidnapping her. However, G-d informed him that merely by returning her, the punishment would be removed, which it was. Oh, so cruel.
Of course, you instead prefer to attribute the most petty of motivations to those who the Bible deems righteous…
Except, of course, Sarah had been barren for her entire life, and she even thrust her maid at her husband in order that he beget a child through her.
Context, dear sir, context. Maybe you ought to get someone more knowedgeable than a skeptic to annotate your bibles.
It might help matters if you were as mindful of G-d’s word as Abraham was. Another thing folks like you so often leave out of the Biblical context is that not only are evil-doers punished, but good-doers are rewarded as well. Of course, it helps maintain your view of Biblical religion by only reporting one side of the equation.
Actually, that was Elisha, Elijah’s disciple.
And no doubt, you’d prefer to compare a group of more than forty-two young men living in Baal-worshipping territory harassing a prophet of G-d to a Boy Scout troop. You have this persistent bias of ascribing dishonorable motives to those the Bible considers righteous and honorable ones (or at least neutral ones) to those the Bible considers evil.
Jab1:
But is such a person “good” for making what is, essentially, a no-brainer? Such a decision can only become an issue of good or evil if some point of information is a leap of faith. Choosing good over evil when the consequences are clearly different displays nothing about one’s moral character.
I must once again commend you on hitting an important theological issue.
No, I wouldn’t. I believe that punishment should be designed primarily for rehabilitation, general deterence, specific deterence, and incapacitation. The idea that people should receive a punishment equal to the pain they inflicted is known as “retribution,” and it is a relatively primitive emotion, inspired by a desire for vengeance, not justice. As Gandhi said, an eye for an eye and the whole world goes blind.
In terms of providing perfect retribution, no. But as I pointed out earlier, other considerations exist.
Would you agree to some light torture for those who have committed certain crimes? Why draw the line at no torture? Clearly, some people commit crimes which cause great pain. Consider James Brady, who do to Hinckley’s actions now experiences constant pain for the rest of his life. Ignoring the potentially mitigating factor of Hinckley’s mental state for the moment, it’s clear that we could hold lit cigarettes to his skin for hours on end and shove bamboo shoots underneath his fingernails a few times, and we would still not even approach the amount of pain that Brady feels. We would still be well within the margin of error. Would you consent to this type of punishment?
No, I don’t enjoy putting words into your mouth. The ones you put there yourself are better than anything I could possibly come up with. You expect 6-10 year old children to abandon their parents because of a warning from Moses? And you think that it’s fair to punish them with death if they decide to stand by their parents? Most kids that age think that their parents can do no wrong, and I wouldn’t expect them to change their minds based upon one warning from Moses in regards to a theopolitical situation which they could not possibly understand.
I do not believe that modern Western culture is the culmination of moral development, but it sure is a hell of a lot better than that of the Bible. Humans have struggled for thousands of years to develop fair and appropriate systems of morals and justice. We still have a long way to go, and we may never get there.
But God, in his infinite wisdom and goodness, should be able to devise perfect moral laws, which do not become obsolete and barbaric with the passage of time. If the laws I quoted were human laws, I would be more understanding, since humans are limited by their culture and environment. But God should be able to formulate laws that do not make people 3,000 years later aghast at their primitiveness and cruelty.
I see. All’s well that ends well. But you fail to address the question. God closed the wombs of the women in Abimelech’s household because of Abimelech’s sin. Thus, God punished Abimelech by doing something to someone else, which I contend to be unfair.
And by the time that Abraham and Sarah went to Gerar, God had already promised Sarah that she would have a child. But how is this relevant?
This may surprise you, but I don’t get my information from that website. I simply refer anyone who may be interested to it. I get my information from reading the Bible itself, as well as numerous scholarly commentaries.
Here’s one more question on this incident. God threatens in Gen. 20:7 that if Abimelech didn’t return Sarah that “you and all yours will die.” Had Abimelech not returned Sarah, would God have killed everyone in Abimelech’s household?
So you maintain that the mauling of the boys was justified? Do you think that the pain they received from the bears was equal to the pain they caused by calling Elijah a baldy?
And yes, when I read the Bible, I look at what the characters actually do, (and what extra-Biblical evidence indicates) rather than the theological spin that the Bible puts on it. For example, while the Bible claims that David never sinned except in the matter of Bathsheba, his slaughter of 18,000 Edomites and willingness to turn over seven of Saul’s descendants to the Gibeonites to be killed speak otherwise. Likewise, while Hezekiah is praised as a great king whose piety saves Judah, the evidence indicates that his decision to rebel against king Sennacherib of Assyria was foolish, and cost Judah numerous important cities like Lachish and Azekah. And his son, Manasseh, while condemned for rebuilding the high places, actually fostered a great economic resurgence in Israel. His decision to rebuild the high places was one of political necessity, as he required the cooperation of the traditional networks of villages in the countryside to restore Judah’s prosperity. The claim that Hezekiah saved Judah while Manasseh led to its ultimate destruction is pure Yawhistic, theological interpretation. If we still had the records of the Baalist camp, I’m sure they would claim that Sennacherib’s assault against Judah was due to Hezekiah’s abandonment of Baal worship, and that its re-legalization under Manasseh is what helped rebuild Judah. So yes, I don’t instantly buy the Bible’s claims about all of its central characters.
Though you and I do not see eye-to-eye on the matter of God and His OT actions, one thing I greatly admire is your ethical consistency. It occurs to me that you surely must be a libertarian. If, like me, you will not allow that God may impose His will upon His own creation, then it is inconceivable that you would advocate any political philosophy that allowed humans to impose their will upon one another. Am I correct?
Well, in such a circumstance, I’d guess the only people who would choose evil are those actively seeking, for some reason, to rebel against G-d. But no one, in the definition you set up, would ever succumb to temptation, and they would fail to do so not out of loyalty to G-d’s word, but merely as a simple cost-benefit calculation.
Opus1:
And I agree, in theory that retribution for retribution’s sake is primitive and barbaric. But there are certainly good reasons other than that for punishing evil to the exact degree that it is committed. Reasons that fall into the very categories you mentioned. For example:
[ul][li]General Deterrence - One of Tim McVeigh’s (he’s such a great example) favorite statements following his being sentenced to death was that “The final score will still be McVeigh 168, USA 1.” Another famous statement is Nathan Hale’s “I regret I have but one life to give for my country.” (Of course, we Americans see Hale as having been a hero, but look at his acts from the British royalist perspective, as that was the legal system/society he lived in.) Had human justice systems the ability to accurately punish to a greater degree, it could conceivably deter such flippant martyrdom.[/li]
[li]Specific Deterrence - Let’s say someone committed murder. He’s on the verge of being caught, and if caught, he’d be sentenced to death. Without the ability to accurately punish according to the degree of the crime, that person might very well commit several more murders in his attempts to avoid being caught. After all, he has nothing to lose; he’s already condemned to the worst punishment the society can dispense. Had human justice systems the ability to accurately punish to a greater degree, he might not risk making his punishment worse in order to avoid being caught.[/li]
Is it justice that a murderer of 50 should receive no less punishment than a murderer of 500?
[li]Rehabilitation - In religious terms, this would be repentance. First of all, feeling the degree of pain to which one’s victims had been subject is very much more of a spur to regret, and thus, repentance, than not. Unless one fully understands the magnitude of what he did, the repentance would be incomplete at best. Secondly, in the case of someone whose crimes greatly exceed the degree of his punishment, could the repentance really allow him mitigation of his punishment? Let’s say Tim McVeigh had repented his actions to a degree which makes up for 100 of his murders, but not yet for the other 68. He’d still be just as deserving of the quick, painless death by lethal injection as if he never repented. Is that any spur to repentance/rehabilitation? On the other hand, if his punishment could in fact accurately reflect the degree of his crime, then any degree of repentance has some mitigating effect, making this mode of punishment more amenable to rehabilitation, not less.[/ul][/li]
Not to put down Gandhi, but the facts just don’t bear this out. In Saudi Arabia, they chop off peoples’ hands for theft. Do they have a society with a significant number of amputees? This statement of Gandhi’s that you have quoted completely denies (or at least ignores) the deterrence effect of punishment, which even you admit to.
If we ignore the mitigating factor of Hinckley’s insanity? In other words, if we are certain that Hinckey inflicted that amount of pain on Brady with full intent and understanding? Heck, yes. For the types of reasons mentioned above.
I certainly think so, though not in the way you mean it.
Two answers:
Yet despite all this, Korah’s children (admittedly, their ages are not known) managed to break away.
Moses was not, even to these kids, merely an opposing politician. These kids saw Moses up there on Sinai, while they heard the voice of G-d. Moses’s face glowed with divine light. This was not a case of some ordinary stranger telling them to move away from Daddy; they were fully aware, at the very least, of just who Moses represented and who their parents were opposing.
People have the free choice to decide whether they trust G-d/the Bible as to such unprovable concepts as good and evil and ultimate justice or not to. Whether or not one is aghast is directly related to such trust.
Denying Abimelech progeny was a punishment for him, not for anyone else.
It’s relevant because of your out-of-nowhere idea that G-d would deny others progeny in order to not make Sarah jealous, and it shows your bias for interpolating petty, small-minded motivations into those who the Bible considers righteous, even though such a motivation is inconsistent with other stories involving those people.
It does surprise me, since you list that web site as “Your home page” on your SDMB profile, and you’re the moderator of 9 out of 13 (9 out of 12, if counting only those that have moderators at all) of the forums on that site’s discussion board. Clearly its scholarship is a source you place great stock in.
A bit ambiguous. It could mean “you and all who are with you”, i.e., involved in the kidnaping. It might also mean that his line will die out, albeit naturally and eventually, but leaving him no lasting legacy.
Yes, I maintain it was justified. Possibly not by the harassment of Elisha (not Elijah) alone; in fact, it seems from the verse in question that the harassers included more than the 42 who got mauled, which would clearly indicate that those unspecified others, who also participated in the harassment, did not deserve such punishment. More likely those 42 deserved such pain for various sins committed during their lives, and this was G-d’s way of protecting Elisha from harm by mauling those who deserved it and scattering those who didn’t, while simultaneously spreading word amongst Baalists that Elisha was the legitimate successor to Elijah, and not one to be trifled with (after all, the bear-mauling came in response to Elisha cursing them).
That’s certainly your option, but by approaching from such an angle, you create by yourself many of the contradictions and cruelties that you decry in the Bible…not getting them from the Bible itself.