Gaudere, is there a rational materialist explanation for why a man is more significant than a pig?
All right then. Here’s an apparent inconsistency I already raised; if it has been addressed, I missed it:
I originally said the Amalekites were being annihilated for something their ancestors did two centuries earlier, and was told that actually they were being annihilated for something their ancestors did four centuries earlier.
Perhaps it will be responded that God knew that the every last one of the Amalekites of Saul’s day, babies and donkeys and all, were just as evil as their ancestors from centuries earlier. But even if so, shouldn’t he have said so to Samuel? Shouldn’t he have said “I will punish the Amalekites, not for what their ancestors did, for as I have said, ‘Fathers shall not be put to death for their children, nor children put to death for their fathers; each is to die for his own sin’; rather I will punish the Amalekites because each and every one of them who is alive today is a depraved, baby-killing, puppy-stomping, demon-worshipping idolater, or will inevitably become one if permitted to reach adulthood.” In order to properly instruct people in morality, that is; after all, God himself laid down the moral precept about not punishing children for the sins of their fathers. By telling the Israelites of Samuel’s day to wipe out an entire people for something their ancestors did centuries earlier, it would seem that God might be the author of a certain confusion in people’s minds about the rightness or wrongness of killing people for the crimes of their ancestors.
Dunno. I’m not sure I qualify as a rationalist materialist. But first I need to ask, “More significant to whom?” The universe? The world? A human? A pig? An ant? An acorn?
Gaudere and Opus: For what it’s worth, I also don’t see much likelihood of Orthodox Jews running amok and mass-murdering the idolaters based on these Old Testament stories and laws. I rather hope no one will ever use this stuff to justify genocide, and that this will all just be an academic question to raise in verbal debates between atheists and believers. However, if anyone ever does use Old Testament law and morality as a justification for mass murder, I would tend to imagine it would be some mutant fanatic Christian sect (Christian Reconstructionists, or Identity Christians, or some group which hasn’t been invented yet). For one thing, Orthodox Jews lack the “every knee must bow” universalism of Christianity, so they tend to see references to Canaanites or Amalekites as being specifically historic references to Canaanites and Amalekites, and not typological examples of idolaters in general throughout history, or coded references to “mud people”, or what have you. Whatever may or may not have happened to the Canaanites and Amalekites, they aren’t around today as identifiable groups, so no one is likely to try to hunt them down and kill them.
Opus1:
Only partially true. Yes, exactly what G-d was angry about is not explicitly stated in the OT. However, the fact that he was angry at them as a precursor to tempting David to do a census is explicit in the text of II .
Nor is that what I said. What I said was that the guys who attacked Laish had done so after worshipping idols, and had been wrong for doing so. G-d never ordered Laish attacked. And that, too, is explicit in the text of Judges 18.
This is where you’re wrong, wrong, wrong. Every “excuse” I mentioned, I gave actual, textual references for. Not an assumption.
Now this, you see, is out of place in the current discussion. Yes, it is possible to believe that the OT is a book written by men with post-facto justifications thrown in. You wish to believe that, I have my reasons for not believing that. However, the issue at hand here is, how can one believe that G-d, as described in the OT, is not evil when that document clearly describes acts of cruelty that he either did or commanded be done. And my point has been that that very same OT describes his motivations for those acts of cruelty as kindness to the world at large by ridding the world of a society that is thoroughly steeped in evil.
If I had genuine interest in understanding the appeal of it to the Whatever, then of course I would. How else would I come to understanding their mentality and beliefs?
The obvious parallel being the Talmud. I could spend some time going into the history of the Talmud, and the chain of transmission that leads back to Moses. But, of course, you’d just not believe it’s true, and anyway, it’s irrelevant. I gave you an actual, textual cite from the OP for the motivations behind all these genocides. Not the Talmud, the OT. So, if this newbie to Whatever-ism actually was reading the Book, and the Whatever was able to show him the accusations of idolatry and abomination in the Book itself, then yes, I’d take him seriously.
I might decide that anyway, but it wouldn’t be for lack of internal consistency leading me to think that Whatevers are a bunch of nutcases, it would more likely be because my own personal beliefs and preconceived notions of morality are too incompatible with Whateverism for me to be personally comfortable thinking of that as G-d.
I don’t know why I bother with atheists who ask questions but refuse to accept any answers because they made up their mind beforehand that any answer will be inadequate, and ignoring the fact that the solutions we provide, satisfying to them or not, are not drawn from thin air, but from the text itself.
No, I’m lying. I spend my time doing this not in the vain hope of convincing already-sold non-believers, but so that those who have not yet developed an opinion in the matter will hear both sides rather than just the anti-Biblical one. So people like myself are not viewed as ignoramuses blindly and dumbly accepting the words of some slick Rabbi or preacher, but so that even those who disagree with us will see that our positions are internally consistent and thoroughly thought out. You and others on this board have heaped some pretty heavy insults on the intelligence of “Fundies,” and not in the Pit, either. We may disagree with you, but we can think quite well, thank you, and darned if we’re going to let you folks set that kind of stereotype for us.
On the contrary, the OT itself is equally hard on the Israelites, telling them what kind of tortuous punishments we could expect to receive if we sinned. Check out Leviticus, chapter 26 and Deuteronomy, chapter 28 for some pretty graphic descriptions of what we were warned would happen to us if we, as a society, became sinful. Pretty shocking stuff, eh? So I’d say there’s a consistent belief in the OT that G-d punishes evil societies in order to set the world in general on an even moral keel. Darned if that sounds to me like post-facto justification for Israelite-induced atrocities.
No, I don’t spend my time “inventing” justifications. I spend my time learning about the ones that existed millenia before you or I were born.
Chaim Mattis Keller
Say, Libertarian, is there any reason why, in light of this post, you care about such ephemera as the right to bear arms, or the alleged injustices visited upon believers by scientists, or the injustices of racial prejudice and bigotry (and false accusations thereof)?
To you.
I don’t believe in any “right” to bear arms. Hardcore convinced me that my fear of scientists was irrational. And though I despise a racial bigot, I would not deny him his rights.
Chaim, I disagree with your take on this matter, but I respect the heck out of you, for what it’s worth. God go with you always.
Well, why do you care about any social issues at all? The point is not whether or not your fear of scientists was rational; the point was, if scientists were persecuting believers, why would you care?
I suppose I probably qualify as a “rationalist materialist”. I know I’m a conscious, thinking entity, and that I experience pain or unhappiness, including from non-physical things like deprivation of liberty. I can not only experience suffering, I can know that I am experiencing suffering. I have every reason to believe, and no reason not to believe, that my fellow human beings are the same as I am in that respect. I’m pretty confident that rocks and stars and other similar collections of atoms are in no way whatsoever sentient. Things like amoebae and trees are alive, but also not sentient. I’m pretty sure insects are basically automatons. I would have pretty serious reservations about killing, say, chimpanzees purely for human convenience, or even if we had fairly compelling reasons for killing them. In between insects and chimpanzees is a big broad range of living things about which I have somewhat conflicting thoughts; maybe for most of that category “no cruelty” is sufficient (i.e., a distinction between killing and torture), but where the line is drawn is blurry. This actually makes perfect sense to me; since fully conscious, self-aware people evolved, ultimately, from utterly non-sentient single-celled organisms, I would expect the lines to be blurry. There is no sharp line between “god-like humans” and “brute beast animals”.
Only in my personal feelings on morality. Just becasue I believe that something or someone isn’t as moral as something else is my determination about them correct?
Only in my opinion. Whatever the pedophilic god would happen to say was good and evil would be good and evil.
Well…yea, that’s pretty much precisely it.
I do not believe that there is an innate moral superiority. I do, however, believe that if there is a being that has the power to create the universe, and has the power to fill it with life, than his descisions on morality carry more weight than mine.
BTW, thanks for fixing my post.
FWIW, Opus and cmkeller, you may not be convincing each other of anything, but I am sure learning a lot.
Cmkeller:
I notice you skipped the part of my question about the Nazis? Have you ever sat down with a neo-Nazi in an attempt to understand his mentality and beliefs? I’m sure Nazis have some very good apologetics for why 6 million Jews had to die. I actually posted some of them earlier in this thread.
But I don’t want to get too far off topic. Instead, let’s tackle a small number of Biblical cruelties which I do not believe are justified by standard human morality. These are not the injustices which I think are necessarily the worst of the Old Testament God, but rather those that I think are the least defensible.
- The plague of the first born.
God is quite specific that children are not to be punished for the sins of their parents:
“The fathers shall not be put to death for the children, neither shall the children be put to death for the fathers: every man shall be put to death for his own sin.” (Dt. 24:16)
“The soul that sinneth, it shall die. The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father, neither shall the father bear the iniquity of the son: the righteousness of the righteous shall be upon him, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be upon him.” (Ezek. 18:20)
So, we should never see an instance in the Bible of God killing people who did not personally sin. And yet, in Ex. 4:22-23, he says to Moses:
Then say to Pharaoh, ‘This is what the LORD says: Israel is my firstborn son, and I told you, “Let my son go, so he may worship me.” But you refused to let him go; so I will kill your firstborn son.’"
Now, this seems pretty cut and dry to me. Pharaoh has done wrong (by not letting the Israelites go), so God will kill his son. How is this not an instance of God committing a moral atrocity and violating his own rule?
Of course, the death toll ended up being much worse than just the Pharaoh’s son:
Every firstborn son in Egypt will die, from the firstborn son of Pharaoh, who sits on the throne, to the firstborn son of the slave girl, who is at her hand mill… (Ex. 11:5)
Why did he kill all of the firstborn sons? Did they all sin? No. The Bible is quite clear. God killed them because of what the pharaoh, not his citizens, had done. If this wasn’t bad enough, the reason that the pharaoh didn’t let the Israelites go is because “the LORD hardened Pharaoh’s heart” (Ex. 11:10). He did this, of course, so that he could perform “miraculous signs,” to give the Israelites something to tell their grandchildren about (Ex. 10:1-2).
- God hardens Sihon’s heart.
It has been argued that God can not interfere to relieve suffering on Earth, because that would hamper free will. But we see that not only does God not mind restricting certain individuals’ free will, but that he does so in order to cause, not prevent suffering.
“But Sihon king of Heshbon refused to let us path through. For the LORD your God had made his spirit stubborn and his heart obstinate in order to give him into your hands, as he has now done.”
God went out of his way to harden a king’s heart (just as he had done with Pharaoh in Egypt), so that he could allow the Israelites to slaughter all of his people, including women and children.
- God delights in suffering
Dt. 28:15-62 contains a number of curses for disobedience. Some of them are particularly disturbing. Parents will eat the flesh of their own children (Dt. 28:53-57). Prolonged disasters and lingering diseases will fall upon the people. (Dt. 28:59)
Now, I’m sure the Bible-believers will be quick to point out that these would befall the Israelites only if they misbehaved horribly. That’s why I’m not objecting to them here. Instead, I’m objecting to Dt. 28:63:
And as the LORD took delight in doing you good and multiplying you, so the LORD will take delight in bringing ruin upon you and destroying you; and you shall be plucked off the land which you are entering to take possession of it.
I believe that it is morally wrong for God to “delight” (or “rejoice” or “be pleased” depending upon the translation) at bringing such ruin upon a people that parents are forced to eat their own children. Such a situation should grieve any morally sensible people, regardless of how bad the Israelites had behaved.
- Joshua’s slaughter of millions.
This is another famous Biblical incident which has been defended by arguing that those killed were evil, and deserving of death. But this argument fails for several reasons. Firstly, we know that the infants and unborn children were not sinning. By ordering their deaths, God is being immoral and violating his own laws. Secondly, the crimes charged to the slaughtered tribes were never explicitly forbidden. In the law which he gave to the Israelites, God forbids adultery, bestiality, homosexuality, and incest. But nowhere in the Bible does he forbid the non-Israelites from these acts! As such, it is immoral to punish a people for something they did not know was forbidden to them.
I suspect cmkeller will bring up the Talmud, which states that God made a covenant with Noah, which applies to all of humanity, and which does forbid all of these things. But again, there are several problems with this. Firstly, we know that the story of Noah is a myth. There never was a time when there was only eight people on Earth. Secondly, this requires us to believe that an oral tradition continued from Noah to the rabbis, for 4000 years. But since no other culture in existence has the myth of a Noahide covenant, we also have to conclude that the Israelites were unique in their excellent memory, and that every other culture in the world forgot about this covenant. And, assuming this to be the case, we’re still left with the issue of fairness. If the ancestors of the Jebusites, Hivites, Hittites, etc. had forgotten about the Noahide covenant centuries ago, and their descendants were therefore not following God’s commands, how can they be blamed?
- The slaughter of the Amalekites.
Another instance of God violating his own rule. He tells the Israelites to slaughter all the Amalekites, including the children and animals. Based upon God’s own standard, the only justification for such an action would be if every single member of the Amalekite society was sinning.
But God does not say that. In fact, the attack is not based upon the Amalekites’ behavior at all. Rather, God is quite specific as to why he is ordering the genocide:
This is what the LORD Almighty says: 'I will punish the Amalekites for what they did to Israel when they waylaid them as they came up from Egypt. (1 Sam. 15:2)
Quite clear that the reason for the massacre is to punish the nation for something their ancestors did. God could have said:
I will punish the Amalekites because they are practicing human sacrifice and idolatry, which displeases me.
But he did not. In his Holy Writ, the justification he chose to give was to punish a nation for its ancestors’ sins. This is both immoral, and a violation of his own rules.
- God kills David’s son.
Again, let’s remember that God isn’t supposed to punish people for others’ sins. And again, God does not follow his own rule. In dealing with David, God punishes both his wives and his son for his affair with Bathsheba.
“This is what the LORD says: 'Out of your own household I am going to bring calamity upon you. Before your very eyes I will take your wives and give them to one who is close to you, and he will lie with your wives in broad daylight.” (2 Sam. 12:11)
Clearly, this is meant as a punishment for David. But it is David’s wives who are given to other men.
Next, God says to David:
“You are not going to die. But because by doing this you have made the enemies of the LORD show utter contempt, the son born to you will die.” (2 Sam. 12:13-14)
We might let God off the hook here by saying that this was merely a prophecy: he was just telling David that his son would die, not actually killing him. But in the next verse, we learn that “the LORD struck the child that Uriah’s wife had borne to David, and he became ill.” (2 Sam. 12:15) (The child dies seven days later.)
I believe that God’s action of striking David’s child dead is immoral and contradictory to his own laws.
These are just a handful of what I consider to be the most indefensible acts of God in the Old Testament. There are many more. For example, I think it is wrong for God to kill 70,000 people because David had a census. Even if the nation of Israel had committed a sin worthy of death, the Bible does not state that the 70,000 who died were those who had sinned. I do not include this in my list because the Bible doesn’t say that those who died were innocent (although David did), so it’s susceptible to easy apologetics. I also think the crimes requiring the death penalty are unjustifiably harsh, but since this can be construed as a matter of opinion, I’ll omit these as well.
Although cmkeller believes it is out of place in this conversation, I have one brief comment about the punishments listed in Dt. 28 and elsewhere. While I’m sure he will disagree with this, most scholars are of the opinion that such verses were added in after the fall of the Southern Kingdom. As such, they, like the justification of Joshua’s slaughters, are after-the-fact explanations for atrocities which have already occurred.
Finally, I’m still looking for the answers to two of my questions:
- Would anyone even consider defending any act of genocide not in the Bible?
- Would anyone spend anytime debating a defender of any act of genocide not in the Bible?
(Just saw pepperlandgirl’s post. Thank you. I do hope this debate on Biblical genocide is enlightening to those who may not know the Old Testament very well. I think my best chance at any sort of “victory” at this point is to simply post Biblical atrocity after atrocity, and let the readers decide for themselves whether these are justified or not.)
CMKeller, please please I implore you to answer this question, what post-biblical genocides did you agree with? What circumstances would be necessary for you to approve of genocide today? If God told you to kill all homosexuals, would you do it?
As stated above, the Orthodox believers in God are defending mass murder and the so called evil atheists are condemning genocide.
CMKeller, Friend-of-God and others like you, DO YOU REALLY UNDERSTAND WHAT YOU ARE DEFENDING.
Stupid agnostic bangs his head against the wall.
Ok. ::shrug:: So your personal belief, which states that raping children is wrong, is meaningless. Rape of children is good if God chooses to do it. A God that cruelly tortures his creation should be praised and revered as joyously as one who loves and cares for them. Gotcha.
I don’t really understand this perspective. Suppose I were to say to you, “JFK was shot in Dallas. He was shot because he was selling children on the Black Market.” You go and you check many, many newspapers, and you find that yes, JFK was shot in Dallas, but you can’t find anything about the selling of children. But, bound by your logic, you have to accept the entire statement; you can’t just accept one part. Why can’t a rational person examine each fact, independent of the others? Why does it have to be all or nothing?
Now, suppose I were to tell you the bit about JFK being shot in Dallas, and then suppose I were to tell you that I hated JFK with a passion. Maybe I claim that he sold my child, I don’t know. Now, are you still bound by your logic of having to accept either all or nothing of what I say?
The way you justify this killing spree with the “even then, only the firstborns” frightens me. What are you saying? That it’s not so bad? That the Egyptians shouldn’t even have complained?
**
This is circular reasoning. You assert they were evil. How do we know? Because God smote them. Why did God smite them? Because they were evil!
**
Ok, fair enough, having an open mind is good. My question is: do you play fair? Is there anything God could do that you DON’T think is justifiable? What would it take for you to go, “Woah, hold on a second… something isn’t right here. think for a few days, months, years No, I can’t see how this could ever be right.” I mean, if genocide is justifiable in your book, that doesn’t leave much room for “worse than genocide,” does it?
**
You’re absolutely right, it was C K Dexter Haven who asked that. Sorry.
**
Sort of a reiteration of my question earlier, but what the hell. Have you ever decided that God was wrong? If so, what did you use to reach that decision? If not… well, it seems like dirty pool to me. You’re open minded, but you’ve only ever voted one way.
I think you asked me once about where God encouraged rape. I’m backing off on that one. If you don’t think it’s in the OT somewhere, then it’s probably not in there. I probably misinterpreted something along the lines of “and the soldiers can have the women” to mean rape, when you’ve already said that there is a procedure to prevent the women from becoming sex toys.
Libertarian
**
Huh? When the hell did you ask this question the first time? Regardless, you clarified this question to Gaudere to mean “How do I [Quix] justify that a [person] is more important to me [Quix] than a pig, without God?” So I’ll address that one. I think I can re-phrase your question as “Suppose you were in some situtation where the best way out, unarguably the only way out, is to have either a pig or a human stranger killed. You’ll probably pick the person, but why?” Well, let’s go back to the two bases of my morality: society and conscience. So I would think to myself, “Look, if your positions were reversed, you’d expect the person to choose to save you. Why should you do anything less? Besides, if I chose the pig, I’d essentially be killing the man, and my conscience wouldn’t allow me to live with that. Killing a pig would be sad, but I could learn to cope (and, regretably, probably cope pretty quickly).” I don’t need to have any concern for the person’s Spirit to justify saving his/her life.
Quix
CMKeller, let me say that I think you’ve hit upon an important point, but I don’t entirely agree with your elaboration of it. I think this thread has been frustrating for us (you, me, Opus, etc.) because we’ve been approaching it at cross purposes: each of us is trying to prove different things about the OT, but what we’re trying to prove is similar enough to lead to confusion.
It seems to me that you’re trying to state, if I’ve read you correctly, that taking the OT as a whole, God is good, because his actions are justified. Regardless of whether one believes that the Bible is an accurate historical record or merely a work of fiction, if you’re going to ask about how God acts in the OT, then you have to use the OT as your framework.
Opus seems to be approaching it a little differently. In part, at least, he seems to be saying, “Assuming that the divine command theory is false, does the God of the OT meet objective standards of morality- or does God behave in a way so radically different from anything we would call ‘morality’ that calling God ‘good’ would render the term meaningless?” In part I think that Opus is asking, “Do the rationales given for God’s behavior hold up, or do they sound like the hollow rationalizations that an evil person would give in his own biography?” And thus if the OT says that the Amalekites were all demoniacally evil, Opus asks whether it’s possible for any society to be so evil, and whether history bears out the idea that evil can be passed down. I think that in part this is motivated by a fear of what people might do with their interpretation of the OT as literal truth. If evil isn’t really passed down, but fundamentalists believe it is, then they might go killing children based on an inaccurate view of the dynamics of history. (FWIW, I mentioned earlier that the Amalekites were used as a justification for later genocides. I’ll address that more later.) Opus, feel free to correct me, because I feel like I’m not being particularly articulate here.
My own view has been, in part, that if you take the OT as a whole (for example, as a work of fiction,) and ask how the character of God is portrayed, God comes off as a bad person. Let me use the example of Arthur Conan Doyle’s story “The Final Problem,” which famously ends with Sherlock Holmes falling over Reichenbach Falls as he wrestles with Moriarty. As is, the story portrays a noble, desperate Holmes sacrificing his life in order to destroy the evil Moriarty in the only way possible. But suppose a small change were made in the story: at an earlier point, Holmes discreetly passes up an opportunity to safely alert the police so that they can arrest Moriarty. Under those circumstances, Holmes’ death would no longer be a noble sacrifice, but would instead look, if you read between the lines, like the result of a self-destructive quest for revenge. Arresting Moriarty wasn’t enough, and he had to find a way to meet Moriarty away from the police and kill him.
Similarly, I think that if you look at how God is portrayed in the OT, then God had plenty of ways to deal with the Amalekites without using the Israelites as instruments of genocide. I realize that you’ve answered my attempts to elaborate on this point, and I’ll respond in more detail later. Let me also reiterate that I am afraid of the ways people will (and have) misused the stories of genocide in the OT, so this isn’t merely a literary question for me.
As for incidences of people using the story of the Amalekites and Midianites as excuses for their own behavior, I read a passage from Cotton Mather in which he practically glowed (in mellifluously purple prose) over how great it was that God had delivered the “new Amalekites” (ie, Native Americans) into their hands for wholesale slaughter. While I haven’t read this page:
http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/guido_deimel/judaism.html
a quick skim shows that it seems to go over the relevant information on the Amalekites/Native Americans connection.
There’s an additional case in which an Israeli rabbi apparently wrote a letter to a young Israeli soldier assuring him that the Palestinians were the “new Amalekites,” and that God wanted him to kill all of them, even the babies. (Apparently this letter was selected for inclusion in an army manual, but was withdrawn at the last minute.) I’ve found a couple of references to this story on the web, but nothing I would consider to be evidence for it. (At the time I read about it, the book presented evidence- but I don’t have the book on me. If it’s important to you, I can try to get it.)
Let me also point to a possibly tangential, but nonetheless relevant, fact. The “Phineas priest” movement is a movement among racists to exterminate people in mixed-race relationships, based on Moses’ command to do so. For that matter, my fellow students in high school told me that they thought that Whites and Blacks shouldn’t date, because of the Phineas story.
Let me also be the first to point out that just because someone misuses a Bible story, that doesn’t invalidate the Bible’s take on things. It does, however, make it very important to figure out what the right stance on the OT story is. (For that matter, I would argue over how much people are, in fact, misusing the stories.)
-Ben
Sheesh, did I actually write all that? I hope there were actually enough ideas there to justify the length…
Anyway, I forgot a critical point: I’m arguing here that God should have been aware of how his actions would be misused, and therefore chosen other methods that would have been less open to misinterpretation.
-Ben
It’s a red herring only to the extent that we’re asking different questions. If you want to ask whether the God of the OT is evil, then you have to remember that according to the OT, homosexuality is evil. Of course, one could make the same argument with regard to other genocidalists: can you name a single genocidalist who, by the standards of his own apologists, was evil?
But let me stress that while I think your point is perhaps a bit circular, it’s an entirely legitimate one to raise, given the point of your OP. I just think that Opus and I are arguing a subtly (but significantly) different point, and bringing up homosexuality is critically important to what we are trying to say.
Libertarian’s formulation of this is a lot more problematic:
**
FWIW, Pldennison makes much the same comment in the Pit thread, in a much more accusatory fashion:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=71973
**
Of course, this is just silly. What if a defense lawyer had said this:
“Of all the things my client does, the prosecutor has decided to fixate on the fact that he likes to kill people. He likes a lot of other things, too, like eating meat. Why doesn’t the prosecutor take up the vegetarian banner? Because he knows that that won’t fly as well as fixing on murder. And that’s not arguing fairly.” (If you object that murder is illegal and eating meat isn’t, substitute “shoplifting” for “eating meat.”)
Or how about a Neo-Nazi defending Hitler thusly?
“Hitler killed a lot of people: Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals- in Nazi Germany, they even executed murderers. But you just want to make Hitler look bad, so you don’t focus on the executed murderers. You focus on the Jews, because you know that will be more effective in getting people riled up.”
As I already explained, I personally was most disturbed by CMKeller’s explanation that it was ok to kill the people in question because, in part, some of them were homosexuals. That stance is particularly problematic in light of the constant threat of violence that out homosexuals live under. If you think that I should refrain from speaking out against anti-gay rhetoric, particularly rhetoric that I think could contribute to a climate of violence, purely because you think you deserve to be pitched some softballs… well, I can’t help you there.
-Ben
Quix
In this post:
“But from my view, these are nothing but atoms that we’re talking about here. Collapsed waves. Burps and farts in the fabric of space-time. Nothing of consequence. Mortal things happening to mortal stuff. In the context of an amoral universe, when a man is killed, whether by the hand of Hitler or by the hand of Joshua, an amoral sequence of events is set in motion, wherein electromagnetic particles discharge into fields. It’s the same phenomenon physically as a pig running headlong into the sharp edge of a rock. Man dies. Pig dies. Same same. Any morality that is applied to this, derived from the stuff that the man and pig are made of, is patently arbitrary. Is the man any better than the pig? Is the pig any better than an ant? Is an ant any better than an amoeba? Is an ameoba any better than the dirt we trample under our feet? Is life something sacred?”
But why would your conscience restrict you? What moral quality of the man is not equally a moral quality of the pig? I have seen atheists here on these boards utterly appalled that Jesus sent demons from a man into a herd of pigs. They used the story as an example to illustrate the callous disregard that Jesus had for the lives of those “innocent creatures”. Am I to infer from your response that you defend this action by Jesus?
Gaudere
'Mkay… Apparently my question to you will go unanswered. No problem. I’ll address this instead:
[Non sequitur sirens blasting all over the place…]
I thought you were the one who defends the notion that what is logically impossible may not be required of God. And I’m not even talking about implausibility, as when I declare that a gross weakness of majoritarianism is that the majority might approve gang rape, thereby setting in motion the mechanism to legalize it. I’m talking about morality. Raping a child (or anyone else, for that matter) is a coercion by definition. In the very word “rape” is the implication that one entity has imposed its will upon another. Coercion is an immoral resolution, a decision by a moral agent to trump the will of another moral agent. No one is ever a willing victim of rape. No one says, “I cannot abide life with you; therefore, rape me.”
Chaim defends the killing of people by citing their intransigence with respect to the will of their Creator. He sees killing in that context as a punishment, not as a murder. I won’t defend his view (though I will defend him as a man of good character) because I don’t agree with it. I defend God’s actions in a very different way. If you rape a man, it is not merely a sexual assault (i.e., an assault on his person), but an assault on the will of his Spirit. Penile penetration is in itself trivial: you could as easily rape a man by kissing him, or lovingly licking his penis, or holding him in your arms and caressing his nipple — if you must tie and bind him to effect your desire. This is why God does not impose Himself on those who are unwilling to receive Him. It is not enough that the man says, “Kiss me”. If you begin to kiss him and he recoils nonetheless, you must stop trying to kiss him. His words were not the desire of his heart. Likewise, a person who calls out to God, “Love me”, but leaves his heart closed is not giving any permission to God. Calling Jesus “Lord” is not sufficient unto faith. “Many will call me ‘Lord’, saying ‘Have we not performed miracles in your name?’ And I will say, ‘Get away from me, you evil-doers! I never knew you!’” — Jesus
A man is not in essence his body; a man is in essence his Spirit. His brain is not the executor of his moral will but of his motor will; his Spirit is the executor of his moral will. The destruction of a man’s brain by the Agent Who created it is trivial; but were an agent to destroy the man’s Spirit, as by rape, that agent would be a murderer. The cellular activity that comprises a man’s “life” is absolutely amoral, whereas the Spiritual activity that comprises a man’s True Life is the whole of the man’s moral context. Not one Spirit finds itself without God, save that it has decided of its own free will that God may not invade its “space”.
If an Agent comes back to you to reclaim His property that He has loaned you, it is understandable that, as others see Him fading into the unknown sunset with your body, they are berieved and distressed, particularly with their own emotions, that they might miss you and what you do for their own psyche. But they do not see where the Agent takes your Spirit, the essential you, as you fall in love with Him on the journey to your home. They do not see that, shed of your mindless cells, you are now the whole of your effluence. You now know all things. You now understand what you could not understand before, just as a man can now understand what he could not understand as a child.
This is how we look at our grandson, Dawson. We do not see God’s reclamation as a travesty of justice, but as a testament to His boundless Love. Dawson is now whole. God has healed him in the very most real sense that a person can be healed. Dawson now has wisdom and understanding surpassing the accumulated wisdom of all men on earth. And he is now free of the calamitous chaos of the amoral atoms.
If God snuffed out cells that replicate DNA, he liberated those who love Him. And all children love God, just as you do, without knowing anything about Him intellectually. God cannot be known by the intellect, though our intellect might lead us to a perception of God, just as a man might lead a horse to water. But once at the trough, it is the Spirit, and not the brain, that drinks. In wiping out evil, God liberates goodness. When 50,000 pass on, each of them individually makes a decision with his Spirit, that he will go to the light or that he will go away from it. All children love the Light, as do all who have loving hearts. Each Spirit exercises its own free will. God judges no one. We judge ourselves.
MEBuckner
I don’t care about social issues. I care about moral issues. For example, I like libertarianism, not because of its social implications, which are irrelevant, but because of the moral implications of its inoffensive noncoercion ethic. While other political philosophies concern themselves with the ends, i.e., how society will be affected by its implementation, libertarianism concerns itself with the means, i.e., which means are ethical and which are not. Others say, “Arrange the chips this way, no matter what means are required.” Libertarianism says, “Use these means, and let the chips fall where they may.” Get it?
I’m only about ¼ into reading this thread, but I just had to stop and say I had a good chuckle when I saw this:
I think a basic premise of the OP (whoever posted it, I’m still not sure) is that if you can pick and choose your “evidence” then the book as a whole can’t have much value. Either the bible is the word of absolute law from cover to cover, or it is not.
To me, opening the bible at random places and pointing to some passage while saying “See there? There is evidence that after Josiah’s death, they slipped back to the idolatrous ways of Manasseh.” … is like opening The Canterbury Tales and pointing to the bit about the Nun not having any food fall from her lips as “evidence” that she was a slob for having food on her lips (instead of in her mouth) in the first place.
But that smacks at the whole “evidence = proof and proof denies faith” argument which is another thread entirely.