‘said pretty much’, prettily said, whatever.
I think Gaudere used the argument that a materialist would choose people over pigs because people are like us, which is a line of reasoning familiar to white supremicists. But I believe she also said that a materialist might sometimes choose a good pig over an evil man, without qualifying exactly what makes a pig good or a man evil. And what about evil pigs? For that matter, why must the whole business be homocentric? Why not let the pigs decide?
I am going to approach this from a completely atheistic point of view, so for those I am about to offend, I will apologize beforehand.
People use gods, whichever ones they may create, to give them what is most important to them. For a peaceful agraian society, their gods might be the sun, or the earth…that which gives them what they need to bring in their crops, or to make their crops plentiful. The people who would be Jews were a nomadic desert people. This was not an easy life folks. Constant moving around, constant battles with other tribes…basically a rough time to be had for all. These people needed a kick ass god. So that is what they made. They made him a bad ass mother who wouldnt take shit off of nobody…a lean mean fighting machine who demanded total obedience. Most likely because this was a value they respected. Here was a god they could sink their teeth into.
Times change…societies evolve…and as they do so, the things that are most important to a society change as well…hence the evolution of god. As people’s day to day lives became easier, they had more time to think of other things besides survival, and perhaps didnt need such a kick ass god anymore. So they started thinking about the things they might LIKE not so much the things they NEED. So then we find the god starting to talk about love…everlasting life. (the whole life after death is the kicker…if people could get around the need for something after death, religion would fade very quickly).
As people and societies change and evolve, so do their gods. A god is no more and no less than what those who create him need him to be at that time.
Okay…I am done rambling now. Rip me to shreds…I am ready. Have my boxing gloves out, and am organizing reference material even as I type.
Siren
You sound to me pretty much like the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher.
The God of Christians’ Bible is the same God of Islam’s Hadith - Shaytan(Satan)'s greatest work.
Now to profess my ignorance, ;j s please enlighten me as to the Talmud and the Christian Old Testament.
I ask because my mentor in Islam once lectured me on how all evil in the world was because of ;j s. I could only sit with mouth agape. After all I was Old South taught that Israel could not be beaten 'cause they were The Chosen.
Arabs see a lone Israelite atop a hill and send a squad after him. They chase the Arab over the top and are never seen again. The Israelite shows himself again atop the sand dune and the Arabs send a platoon… The platoon is never heard from again. Once again the Israelite shows himself alone atop the sand dune. The Arabs send a division. One lone soldier comes staggering back. He warns, “It’s a trap! There are two of them.”
If Arabia with its natural resources and Israel with its human resources ever got together they would put the Pacific Rim into Third World status.
It’s a different sort of “like” than one white supremacists use. Not the trivial similarities of skin color or accent, but the important similarities: Sentience. Capacity for morality. Capacity for similar emotions. These are what we generally use to accord a creature the status of “personhood” that our morality keys off on. These are the things that let us say of a sentient pig, or a human, or a Ferengi that “you are a person”. A pig does not share the first two (unless he is a very special pig), and it is rather doubtful that he can truly be said to share the third, given the gulf between us. A pig is unlikely to appreciate a work of art, or a sunset, or the tragedy of death in any way even vaguely close to the manner we do. Any creature that shares our level of sentience, has a conception of morality, and has feelings similar enough to us for us to be able to understand it will likely be accorded the moral rights of a human. If it comes down to the choices between the life of a sentient nonhuman and a human, the choices will likely be just as difficult as between the choice between the life of two humans. It’s like the game you play where there’s a lifeboat with only four seats and there’s eight people. Do you choose the young woman over the Nobel prize-winning scientist? The sickly infant who will die in a year or two or the healthy middle-aged man? And so on. When you get into very fine differences of the “value” of a human, the choices are very difficult and very individual. So it is hard for me to say whether I would save a sentient pig or a man until the choice is actually in front of me, and there is enough “room” in the moral valuation of each life that either choice a person makes could be moral.
Well, seeing as pigs are currently apparently not capable of making moral decisions, or if they are they are utterly unable to communicate such decisions to us, and we literally have the power of life and death over them (unless you’re Phil and feel a moral obligation to let pigs live without coercion), it’s kind of up to us to muddle along as best we can.
[Now that I think of it, “capacity for morality” and “capacity for similar emotions” may have to be struck from the ckecklist for personhood; I can think of bizarre alien races who are utterly incomprehensible to use but are still sentient and should be accorded personhood status. So I may stick with straight “sentience” as the deternminer.]
[Edited by Gaudere on 05-28-2001 at 09:46 PM]
(And I still have no idea how this relates to the OP. It appear to be pretty far away from an argument as to the moral/immoral behavior of a omnipotent deity.)
Hey, I’m God, right? If they try again, I make their weapons vanish again, and zap their armies back over the border again. I figure if I take away their expensive toys a few times, and maybe drop their armies back into the middle of the capital naked and painted blue the second or third time around, they’ll get the point.
Of course, Shortie’s point; that “Intervening only on occasion would seem to combine the worst of both, and lead to a truly confused society at the receiving end” is a good one. If I did have God-like powers, I should really probably just impose some sort of Prime Directive on myself. And before you claim that that’s what the God of the Bible has done, by allowing us free will, the Bible clearly portrays him as an “intervening only on occasion/worst of both worlds” kind of deity.
This is a fairly silly statement. Surely you can see that the differences between people and amoebas, or between people and carrots, and even between people and pigs, are of an utterly different order than the trivial differences between humans of different ethnic or “racial” groups.
Do you treat all living things as morally equal? Or do you make some sort of moral distinction between people on the one hand, and at least some other living things on the other? I assume it’s the latter; even a strict vegetarian eats plants. If a flying saucer landed, and some totally outlandish, obviously nonhuman creature walked (crawled, slithered, etc.) out and said “Take me to your leader”, what moral category would you put it in? Would you shoot it and eat it? Would you step on it? And what would be the basis for your decision?
Actually, historically, the relationship between Jews and Muslims have been pretty good. Jews and Christians both have the status of Dhimmi, and are people of the book, allowed, under Muslim law to practice their religion without provocation. Your teacher was misguided, and probably influenced by the current troubles in the middle east.
What do you want to know about the Talmud or Bible?
How is a life sentence without the possibility of parol different from a death sentence? They both end at a common point, the person who has been sentenced to one fate or the other dies. One is far less painful and takes less time, the other can be agonizingly slow. To say that forcing a person into isolation and allowing them to die slowly of old age is much worse then getting it over with.
If God happens to decide that a whole group of people needs to be wiped out, then that means that there is no chance of salvation for them, no matter how much time they have to ponder over their situation. A life sentence to one of these groups of people is a long and drawn out torture, only prolonging their descent into hell for maybe a few decades. If you ask me, a swift anihilation is much prefered to and is much more humane than any other option.
OK, you point out the error in my ways. A stupid request to be sure. Never mind what I said about natural.
The God in the OT gave his people free will. That doesn’t, however, mean that he’ll let events turn out however fate has them. He gave us the free will in our choice about wheter to believe in Him or not, not as to how we were supposed to live.
You just bought three puppies, they have free will, but do you let them do whatever they want? I wouldn’t. If one of the puppies were to do something that he wasn’t supposed to, I would punish him. That’s what God did, he punished those people that were not following as He commanded.
If God had intervened at every point in time with every “injustice” then surely free will would not have existed as it was considered wrong to not believe in God.
I refer to the puppies again. Do you control every aspect of their lives? No, but you do set down rules. They live their lives happily as long as they follow your conditions, but they aren’t exactly confused, now are they?
IF the society was truly bent on conquering the world don’t you think they’d keep trying, hoping that this time you wouldn’t be watching?
So tell me, please, what would your Prime Directive be?
First this:
We are discussing what morality is, and on what basis it can be said whether a being is moral or not. I can think of nothing more pertinent to the topic of whether God behaved morally in the Old Testament. If someone is going to pin immorality on God because He killed a thousand people, he’d damn-well better be able to explain why people killing a thousand pigs is not immoral. The nutshell version of what I posted to you originally is that God was reclaiming the bodies He had loaned to the people, and having done so, allowed them each to decide whether they (the essential they, their Spirits) would be with Him in His presence or be without Him. If killing a pig in order to devour its flesh is moral, then I cannot fathom what is immoral about God killing flesh to free a Living Spirit.
The notion that pigs are any less sentient than people simply because they cannot communicate their sentience to us is absurd and arbitrary. Such a basis for morality would have us consider severely retarded and autistic children, who also cannot communicate their sentience, to be creatures that are morally underneath people who are more eloquent and expressive. By the way, are human fetuses and newborn infants sentient? How do we know?
This is likewise arbitrary. Edlyn and I visited Charlotte’s Mint Museum of Art last week. I appreciated some of the works she didn’t, and she appreciated some of the works I didn’t. How can which of us is more or less moral be derived from this, even if we thought the whole collection was crap? Further, we don’t think our grandson’s death was a tragedy in any but the most trivial sense. Does this make us unworthy of a materialist’s morality?
In other words, you would perceive the atoms as an amoral context or a mis-en-scene, and attribute whatever morality there might be in the circumstance, not to the quantum burps and farts, but to a motivation that leads to a moral decision? I have offered this for months, and you have always, as best I can recall, argued against or dismissed it.
People killing a thousand pigs may very well be immoral. And you yourself draw a line between people and piggies; at least, I haven’t seen you concerned about the coercion of peaceful honest piggies anytime lately. So you do not believe pigs have the same moral weight as humans, so saying that if killing pigs is OK, then killing humans is OK too is an argument you don’t believe either.
I believe you were trying to argue that atoms are “not-Real”, therfore killing humans or pigs is not immoral since all you are doing is destroying meaningless flesh. But your argument that we aren’t concerned about pigs is the entirely wrong way to go about it, since those of us who do think that atoms are real think that pigs have some moral value. However, then you shifted to the argument that, not that the killing of humans was meaningless, but that it was neccessary and did no Real harm, which would be a valid moral argument in any circumstance (any attack on it is based, not on that such reasons do not give you moral authority, but that it was UNnecessary, or DID do harm.) So the piggie argument again is unneeded.
If I believed pigs were simple lumps of flesh, your analogy would have worked, but not a single person agreed with you that killing a pig was a meaningless act. Arguing that God had good reason to kill and it did not harm anything “real” is an entirely different arguement than arguing that killing any living being is morally neutral.
Very well. Argue that it is likely pigs are just as sentient as we are. And if they are as sentient as we are, why do you not accord tham the rights of humans? What if an alien comes to earth–is anything “not-human” of no moral value? How do you determine what has the rights of a human, and what does not?
You are looking, again, at trivial differences. The difference between two people’s perception of art or the meaning of death is nothing compared to the gulf between a human and a nonsentient animal, so far as we can reasonably deduce. A pig can never comprehend art, nor can it comprehend it’s own inevitable death. And anyway, I think I’m laying the burden of personhood at the door of sentience, as I noted in my post.
I cannot be certain what moral decision I will make until I am in a position to make it. That is all I said. I am rather hesitant about agreeing with you here since I so rarely really know what you are talking about. 
Gaudere, what on earth are you talking about? This is worse than a wet bar of soap in a hurricane.
Libertarianism is a political philosophy, and as such is concerned with people (see the Latin root for “politics”), and not pigs.
All I can gather from that unparsable assertion is that you’re confusing politics with theology. Pigs do not have the same moral weight as humans because they are not temples for God’s Spirit. God is the singular nonarbitrary assignment that is possible for morality. Morality is what God values.
Rights are an attribute of property, and accrue to any being that is capable of giving meaningful consent to transfer title with respect to its property. What does this have to do with anything here?
Oh, please. I cannot imagine how I could be more plain.
Without an absolute, nonarbitrary basis for morality, there can be no moral distinction drawn from the very set that presupposes itself to contain not only its own elements, but its own rules. Whatever exists in the universe is amoral, and therefore is not a candidate for any sort of moral implication. You see? It’s a simple application of Godel.
OK, Lib. ::sigh:: Please tell me: does your moral code see any difference between killing a pig for food (under non-starvation conditions, with adequate vegetarian food nearby for eating) and between killing a man for food (under non-starvation conditions, with adequate vegetarian food nearby for eating)? If a pig and a man fall into a pit, and you can only rescue one of them, which should you rescue? If an alien comes down from outer space, and falls into a pit with a man and you can only save one, which should you rescue? If the alien falls into a pit with a pig, which should you rescue? Are you obligated to not kill sentient aliens for food (under non-starvation conditions, with adequate vegetarian food nearby for eating)?
You cannot draw a moral conclusion from anything in the universe. Not a man, not a pig, not a vegetable, not an alien. This we have established.
However.
There is a component of the man that is not of this universe. That component carries a moral connotation. That component we must neither kill, judge, nor usurp in any manner.
This is the exact treatment established by God in the Old Testament, and was therefore moral and not cruel.
Opus1:
I didn’t think I had ducked it; I had included it in the answers I gave earlier. Since it had apparently gotten lost within there, though, I’ll summarize here quickly the two points of difference:
-
No human being is capable of judging an entire society. This is not a matter of authority, but a matter of information; the standard of evil G-d set for wiping out an entire society is extremely high (ref: my comments on Sodom)
-
The authority Jews place in the Torah as the word of G-d does not derive from the say-so of a single individual (such as a neo-Nazi would claim of Hitler) but from the combined experience of an entire nation, several million people corroborating one another’s accounts.
Now, on to your other issues, in order of ease of explanation (bolding mine):
This, quite simply, is a mistranslation. In Hebrew, the bolded phrase is not written in the subjective case, but in the objective case (I hope those are he proper grammatical terms), meaning “the LORD will bring delight**,” e.g., part of the punishment of Israel will be seeing that their enemies will be able to enjoy Israel’s downfall.
As I’ve said earlier, when a nation reaches a certain threshold of evil, it becomes clear that that nation must be wiped out in its entirety for the sake of the moral fiber (sorry for using this hackneyed phrase, but I think it best approximates the idea I’m trying to convey) of others in the world (or at least the immediate region). With the Amorites (Sihon’s folks), that threshold had been reached long since, and G-d’s hardening Sihon’s heart was merely the vehicle for delivering the already-deserved punishment, not the cause for the punishment. Regarding the Amalekites, the verse you quoted describes the reason the nation was deemed to have met that threshold, not the reason why this particular bunch was being killed.
I’ll get to the rest later; I’ve got to leave for now.
Chaim Mattis Keller
So, Lib, what would you do? No fair putting me in moral quandaries and then being a conscientous objector. You are a moral being, and I am asking you to make a moral choice in a hypothetical circumstance, which I am sure you are capable of doing.
Or are you saying there is nothing moral OR immoral about killing a man for food, or saving him from death? :eek: Remind me never to have dinner at your place!
So I have no right to judge Nazi Germany? Or the Khmer Rouge?
Interesting. What do you make of the unsubstantiatable verses in the Bible, including those outside of the Torah? For instance, there certainly weren’t a million witnesses to God telling Saul to slaughter the Amalekites, or tempting David to number Israel. It’s entirely possible that these events occurred (i.e., the slaughter and the census), but that a later author imparted a theological spin on it. No one would be able to contradict such a claim.
And what about the verses describing the genocided societies as completely evil? Surely the entire nation of Israel couldn’t have inspected millions of Amorites, Hivites, Amalekites, etc. and determined them to be evil to the one? Couldn’t Moses, or Joshua, or Saul have simplytold the armies that the people they were slaughtering were completely evil? Perhaps they even really believed it themselves!
Like I said earlier, I’m highly suspicious that the only completely evil societies in the history of the world all existed within a small tract of territory that the Israelites would wind up taking, and that they were all conveniently genocided, so that we have no way of checking the Bible’s story.
Also, as far as the Bible’s accuracy based upon shared experience, what do you make of Josiah’s “discovery” of the Book of Law in 622 BCE? Virtually every Biblical scholar considers this to be the book of Deuteronomy, which would mean that a handful of people pulled over a giant hoax over on an entire nation? What about Ezra’s clear tampering with the Torah, which he virtually admits himself?
How about the overwhelming evidence of multiple (and late) authorship and divergent traditions in the Torah? Does it unsettle you in the slightest that an allegedly divine book shows works of multiple hands, each with its own ideological agenda? Look at some of the links I posted in a previous thread for analysis of the OT.
What about Paul’s claim in the NT that 500 people saw the resurrected Jesus? Is not 500 people enough to substantiate a claim?
I realize that this is far off-topic, but your argument essentially comes down to Jewish apologetics. Sure, every religion has its holy books, but ours is the real one because millions of people witnessed it, unlike those other holy books. If this is the argument you wish to make, I’d love to debate it in another thread.
Finally, I’m looking for one word answers, not paragraphs. I still don’t think the questions have been answered adequately. Would anyone ever waste time debating someone who defends any non-Biblical genocide? Would anyone defend a non-Biblical genocide? Simple, yes or no questions.
Well, I don’t know Hebrew. But lots of people do, and they all disagree with you:
Deuteronomy 28:63
"It shall come about that as the LORD delighted over you to prosper you, and multiply you, so the LORD will delight over you to make you perish and destroy you; and you will be torn from the land where you are entering to possess it.
{NAS)
Deuteronomy 28:63
And as the Lord took delight in doing you good and increasing you, so the Lord will take pleasure in cutting you off and causing your destruction, and you will be uprooted from the land which you are about to take as your heritage. (Basic English Bible)
Deuteronomy 28:63
And it shall come to pass, that as Jehovah rejoiced over you to do you good and to multiply you, so Jehovah will rejoice over you to cause you to perish, and to destroy you; and ye shall be plucked from off the land whereunto thou goest to possess it. (Darby)
Deuteronomy 28:63
And as the Lord rejoiced upon you before doing good to you, and multiplying you: so he shall rejoice destroying and bringing you to nought, so that you shall be taken away from the land which thou shalt go in to possess. (Douay-Rheims)
Deuteronomy 28:63
And it shall come to pass, [that] as the LORD rejoiced over you to do you good, and to multiply you; so the LORD will rejoice over you to destroy you, and to bring you to nought; and ye shall be plucked from off the land whither thou goest to possess it.
(KJV)
Deuteronomy 28:63
And it shall come to pass, that as the LORD rejoiced over you to do you good, and to multiply you; so the LORD will rejoice over you to destroy you, and to bring you to naught; and ye shall be plucked from off the land whither thou goest to possess it.
(Webster’s)
Deuteronomy 28:63
It shall happen that as Yahweh rejoiced over you to do you good, and to multiply you, so Yahweh will rejoice over you to cause you to perish, and to destroy you; and you shall be plucked from off the land where you go in to possess it.
(World English Bible)
Deuteronomy 28:63
'And it hath been, as Jehovah hath rejoiced over you to do you good, and to multiply you, so doth Jehovah rejoice over you to destroy you, and to lay you waste; and ye have been pulled away from off the ground whither thou art going in to possess it;
(Young’s Literal)
28:63 This is what will happen:101 Just as the LORD was delighted to do good for you and make you numerous, he102 will be pleased to destroy and decimate you. You will be uprooted from the land that you are entering to inherit. (NET)
28:63
Just as it pleased the LORD to make you prosper and increase in number, so it will please him to ruin and destroy you. You will be uprooted from the land you are entering to possess.
(NIV)
28:63 It shall happen that as the LORD rejoiced over you to do you good, and to multiply you, so the LORD will rejoice over you to cause you to perish, and to destroy you; and you shall be plucked from off the land where you go in to possess it. (HNV)
28:63 And it shall be, that just as the Lord rejoiced over you to do you good and multiply you, so the Lord will rejoice over you to destroy you and bring you to nothing; and you shall be plucked from off the land which you go to possess.
(NKJV)
These are all the Bibles I can find online (I will e-mail someone who knows Hebrew when I get home for one further confirmation). Not a single one translates the phrase as “the Lord will bring delight” (to your enemies). Would you mind showing me how many scholars support your translation?
Again, I think you’re dodging the issue. God specifically stated that children are not to be punished for their parents’ sins. You don’t address this. By God’s own rule, it is inappropriate to destroy an entire society for the sins of some. So, unless you want to argue that:
- Unborn children and 1 month old infants were sinning.
or - The societies that God ordered killed didn’t have any innocent young children, because they had all already been killed in human sacrifices.*
or - It is okay to kill children for their parents’ sins,
I’m afraid you’re stuck here. Look, I’ll make it easy on you. I’ll stipulate for the sake of the argument that all the societies that God ordered slaughtered were as bad and sinful as the Bible and the rabbis describe them to be. So forget the adults–they deserved to die. Your job is to explain why it is justified to kill infants for their parents’ sins, when God has specifically and directly stated (several times, mind you) that it is not.
I really don’t see a way out of this. The argument that destroying the entire societies is necessary might have worked, had not God declared that punishments should be delivered on individuals, not groups.
*Yes, I’ve had fundies use this one on me before. Does their creativity know no bounds?
Well, if I’m God, I really think I can outlast them. And if I’m God, there wouldn’t be a time when I wouldn’t be watching.
Well, you know, the Star Trek Prime Directive. Noninterference. (Which I suppose I would probably follow about as well as Captain Kirk always did.)
So, would language-using extraterrestrials be “temples for God’s Spirit”? What about a fully self-aware Artificial Intelligence? How do you determine if an entity counts as a “temple for God’s Spirit”, anyway; do you have to wait for a special divine revelation for each case?