Lib
Not so simple that I can reproduce it. Would you spell it out for me?
cmkeller
I am confused about this idea of judging societies. Does this mean that your God values association over individual morality? Don’t the stories of Lot and Noah run counter to this idea?
Opus1:
I’m answering your most recent post first rather than going back to where I had left off this afternoon, because doing that ends up killing a few birds with the same stone.
You have the right if you have the ability. While you might have the ability to come up with a complete and proper judgment on individual Nazis or even the Nazi army as a group, you would not have enough information to accurately judge every single Nazi-era German to determine if there are so few (less than ten adults) that it indicates an incorrectible corruption of the society. On top of that, the Third Reich, thank G-d (if you’ll forgive my use of the expression), lasted only twelve years. The Biblical societies in question were around for centuries, generations having been raised under those social systems, before any judgment was passed on them by G-d.
The OT contains clear guidelines for testing whether a claim of prophecy is true. Deuteronomy 13:1-5 and 18:16-22.
Not necessarily true. For one thing, the generation of Noah was not limited to Israel’s territory, but was deemed completely evil (according to the Bible). Amalek did not occupy Israel’s territory either. On the other hand, the Philistines and Sidonites were amongst the nations who did live in that territory and regarding which no Biblical commandment of annihilation existed.
He didn’t discover the existence of the Bible; what he discovered was an actual original scroll written by Moses, which had been missing for, well, I don’t know how long.
You’ll have to tell me more about that one; the Ezra I’m familiar with was faithful to the scriptures that existed in his time (granted, some books he wrote himself).
This question has two answers.
Answer # 1 is that the Jewish claim is not based on seeing a miracle…after all, the Torah acknowledges the existence of sorcery…but rather, is based on the actual communication with G-d. (See Deuteronomy 5:26) That is the standard against which other claims are judged.
Answer # 2 is: who did these five hundred people pass the story along to? Is there any Christian alive today who claims to be descended from those, to have a chain of transmission from those ancestors? Or is Paul the only one from whom we know about that crowd (much like the public miracles described in Mormon scriptures are known only from Joseph Smith).
Fine, although I thought I’d answered these. No, I would not defend any non-Biblical genocide. Yes, I’d probably debate the defenders thereof. Heck, would I hang out here if I weren’t up for serious debate?
Not that I expect you to place much stock in it, but, obviously, all the Jewish ones. The translations you’ve got there are far removed from the original Hebrew. They’re English translations of Latin translations of Greek translations of the original Hebrew, and they’re all done with an eye for the Christian point of view. A case in point is the infamous Isaiah 7:14, which Christians consider a reference to the Immaculate Conception. Every one of those versions you referenced (obviously from bibles.gospelnet.com, which I usually use for quick verse look-ups also) has the Hebrew word “almah” translated as “virgin,” even though this is inaccurate (“almah” merely means “young woman”, the Hebrew word for virgin is “bethulah”).
There are a number of good Jewish Hebrew-English Bibles around, although not on line. Soncino, Artscroll, Judaica Press, Koren and Metzudah are amongst the better-known ones. Suffice it to say that Jews have been teaching their kids Hebrew alongside the native language of whatever country they lived in for millennia, and for Biblical accuracy, Jewish scholars have no peer.
Not quite. First of all, I’ll discard # 2 as you have. # 1 is partially an answer, as reincarnation is not a concept foreign to Judaism (although I’ll admit you won’t find explicitly in the OT a statement that “all babies that die are reincarnations of sinners”). But no doubt that just sounds to you like another “apologetic” which is unprovable and sounds self-serving.
However, # 3 is inaccurately worded. When a society is so corrupt as to require (by the OT’s standards) total erasure from the history books, the totality of this (i.e., the fact that it includes children who could not possibly have sinned, unless the reincarnation thing is true) is not as a punishment for their parents’ sins, but rather, as protection for others. An example: Typhoid Mary, while under lifelong quarantine, gives birth. Due to the danger of breaking Mary’s quarantine, the baby is kept imprisoned as well. Not that the baby itself is a carrier of typhus…that’s irrelevant. Allowing the air in Mary’s cell to escape will endanger others around her (I know this isn’t really true of typhus; I’m only trying to construct an example here.). Is the baby being punished for its mother’s illness? No, the totality of the quarantine necessary for the protection of others.
Do children get killed as a consequence of their parents’ actions? Sadly, they certainly do…sometimes even direct consequence (i.e., infanticide). However, that is different from punishing the child for his parents’ sins.
Now, on to other posters…
Spiritus Mundi:
Not at all. The whole point was that these societies were so corrupt that they couldn’t even produce ten righteous individuals. Thus, in those cases, the few righteous ones were saved due to their individual morality, but the socities that failed to produce more of the same had to (according to the OT) be wiped out so their influence didn’t infect other societies (or, in Noah’s case, future societies).
pepperlandgirl:
Because sometimes folks are so evil, others need to be protected not only from their actions, but even from their influence.
Icerigger:
Can I turn the question back on you? If G-d told you to do that…and I mean that you genuinely believed that this was the creator of the universe, the power behind all that exists, Lord of the heaven and Earth told you to do that…would you really refuse?
I certainly wouldn’t do such a thing on less than G-d’s say-so…after all, he is the one who said “do not murder” in the first place…but actually hearing “the Voice” command such a thing…how could one not?
quixotic78:
Because unlike your JFK example, there’s no evidence outside the Bible that the genocide occurred or even that the Canaanites existed. Yes, these days we have unearthed some artifacts that we attribute to the Canaanites, but it’s oinly on the basis of the Bible that we identify the people who had lived there as such. Otherwise, we probably would have just thought it was the primordial ancestors of the later Israelites.
It’s late. To be continued tomorrow.
Chaim Mattis Keller
Chaim:
Here is the information on the Hebrew scroll. I refer to Strong numbers, since we can’t do Hebrew characters on this board. Two words comprise the phrase: 03068 07797. The first word, 03068, is the word for “God”, or “Jehovah”, which itself is a derivative of the word for “to be”. Jehovah means literally “the existing One”. The case here has to be nominative, unless you allow that 03068 is the object of “to multiply”, which is not likely. The second word, 07797, appears in twenty-six other passages on the scrolls, which you can access by clicking the word’s number at the link I provided you. It is a Qal pattern verb, which is the commonest pattern, occuring in 19,884 other passages. It is in the imperfect mood, meaning not that there is a flaw in the verb, but that the verb expresses a process that is not yet complete. The imperfect mood can imply almost any tense, but in this passage, it is sensible to translate it as the future tense, since it is contrasted with the perfect mood, past tense form of the same word just before it in the same passage.
Thus “God will rejoice”, or equivalent variants thereof, is the most reasonable and least problematic translation.
It is a myth that Christian scholars translate from sources far removed from the Hebrew scrolls, though they do admittedly have a bias, as does anyone, including Orthodox Jews. It is just as important to a pious Christian scholar that his bias does not influence his work as it is to your own Rabbis. There have been some translations in the past that drew from the Latin Vulgate, particularly when access to the scrolls was problematic, but the modern translations are not among them.
As to Isaiah 7:14, which you raise as a case in point is not a very good case in point. It is Strongs number 05959, which is translated variously as “virgin”, “damsel”, and “maid” in the seven instances where it appears. As a derivitive of 05958 (“young man” or “stripling”) it appears to connote a certain naivete, and could reasonably be considered, if nothing else, to mean a young woman of very limited experience.
You’re doing a fine job defending your view of God’s Old Testament actions. Please don’t stoop to such diversionary tactics as blaming Christian scholars for producing an overall misunderstanding based on a possible gnat here and there. Opus’s complaint is not based on whether the mood of a particular verb is perfect or imperfect, or whether its tense is past, present, or future. Her complaint is based on an overall image of a God Who destroys flesh at will. For her, it is a camel that is hard to swallow. It would behoove us all to follow Jesus’ advice that we ought not to strain gnats and swallow camels.
Spiritus:
You can read a translation of Godel’s original paper for yourself. Of particular interest here (and in other set theory models) is Godel’s footnote number 14:
Within any universal set, including the universe, there are axioms or axiomatically suggested principles (like gravity waves) that are “incomplete”, that is, they cannot be said to be provable or decidable without the introduction of new axioms or systems, which do nothing more than expand the set, where Godel’s theorem still holds and you have to start all over again. As shown above, this indemic nature of tautology is not limited to number systems, but to any system of rules of knowledge, including physics.
Until physics discovers morality waves, the notion of a morality derived from any property or axiomatic principle of the universe is undemonstrated. We can appeal only to some set other than the universe, a set whose axioms and axiomatic principles does not consist of those that can be added to those already extant, in other words, a set that is not an extension of the universe. Godelianly speaking, this is a problem for the pantheist, but not for the theist. God is not a superset of the universe, and morality is not derivable from any axiomatic principle that is an element of the universe.
Gaudere:
I might not have expressed this before, so let me state for the record that the universe and its atoms are amoral.
There can be no morality derived from a “circumstance” that is nothing more than an arrangement of electromagnetic waves in gravity fields. As a person arguing on behalf of the materialists, the onus is on you to demonstrate otherwise. As a person arguing on behalf of theists, I am exempt from drawing moral implications from mere scenes (hypothetical or otherwise) where men and pigs are in ditches. Morality, for me, is that which comprises God’s own values. In a scenario where I am to decide whether to save a man or a pig, the moral significance is drawn from whatever God values, and not from what either I, the man, or the pig value. As spritual beings, created in God’s own image, our moral decisions are “right” when and only when they are congruent with God’s own values, and are “wrong” otherwise. God most values love.
Thus love, and not empathy, is the motivation that is truly moral. You might feel sorry for the man if he was the victim of severe child abuse or has some brain fart that causes a psychosis such that he fell in the ditch as he was in full gallop toward raping your daughter at knifepoint. Both he and your daughter are moral considerations (outside their atomic makeup) and both are spiritual beings who will judge themselves ultimately by God’s own presence. But if you love both the man and your daughter, you must kill the man, if necessary, to stop him from raping your daughter. Not atoms, but spirits, are required for weighing morality. The atoms are nothing but back-drops.
If you ever have dinner at our place, I assure you that you will have nothing to fear unless you fear gushing.
Why is the onus upon me? Are you saying that the entire circumstance you find yourself in that requires you to make a moral choice is completely irrelevant, that there is no moral difference between killing a man and a pig?
Why? I don’t know any theist who would not be able to answer my pig-and-pit queries with ease.
Ok. So, what choice would God value in these instances (or tell me, explicitly, that there is NO difference between eating/saving a man or a pig):
The example you gave was too easy; I am not talking about killing someone to save your child from harm. I want to know, why, if the flesh is meaningless and death means nothing but release from the fake world, one should choose to save the flesh of a man over the flesh of a pig. You seemed to think it ridiculous that atheists considered pig’s mortal lives to have moral value, and even more so that people’s mortal lives had a greater moral value. So I wonder why you seem to shy away from saying that there is no difference between killing a man for food and killing a pig for food.
Until the materialists posit something existing other than the universe, then I am afraid they’re stuck with using whatever is in it.
I’m saying that the data are insufficient. No moral data are given. There is simply talk about men and pigs. No moral principle can be derived from speculations about their DNA or other arbitrary natural properties. Tell me about the Spirit of the Man and the relation of his spirit with God.
That is unfortunate. They would have to presume comprehension of data outside their own frame of reference. Otherwise, they are doing nothing more than the materialist would do, which is to draw morality from rotten meat. Recall the dichotomy Jesus drew between treasure that is stored on earth and treasure that is stored in Heaven.
Various amalgamations of molecules are stuck in gravity depressions. I see nothing of moral value in any of it. Tell me about something relevant, like the spirits of the men. The pig is as irrelevant as the bodies of the men, unless you tell me what spiritual motivation the men have toward it.
If someone asks me, “what is x/0,” and I answer that it is undefined, I’m not shying away from anything. I’m answering the question. I’m not making blanket statements about actions — which flesh should be saved or destroyed — precisely because they mean nothing without their moral context, which context is not supplied by anthing whatsoever that is offered by the universe.
I am familiar with godel’s theorem, thank you. What I am not familiar with is the chain of logic which allows you to laep from some moral propositions will be undecidable to no moral distinctions can be drawn. I do not believe Godel ever proposed a theorem stating that no valid statements could be made in a consistent formal logic.
Of course, to even apply the correct stricture of Incompleteness you would first need to demonstrate both that non-absolute moralities are necessarily consistent, representable, decidable, and sufficiently complex to allow for a Godel statement. Now, I think the first three are probably required for any morality that most of us would consider “acceptable”, but since I am also certian that most of us would find some absolute moralities “unacceptable”, so I am not certain you can use such a test to restrict the choice of possible moralities. Even granting those criteria, though, leaves the problem of formulating a godel statement which applies generally to any moral set. Since you morality as restricted to the context of spirit, I am not at all certain that you will be able to do so.
Yes, but I am unaware of any moral antinomies that hold generally.
cmkeller
I understand what you are saying, I think. My question really focuses on the idea of “infection”. Does your faith teach that children inherit a moral valuation from the actions of their parent even if they never know who their parents are? In the case of Noah and Lot your God chose to save isolated pockets of “innocents” among the multitudes destroyed. If proximity is damning, then certainly Noah and Lot were as “infected” as any newborn infant?
::diddley-oop dream sequence music::
Lib is walking cheerfully along the road. He sees a deep pit ahead, and a rope lasso nearby. He peeks over the edge of the Pit, and sees a man and a pig trying to claw their way out of rapidly rising water.
“Hullo, there,” sez Lib. “Please tell me, man and pig, are either of you in possession of a spirit that relates to God? And how does it relate to God? I must know this before I can decide what to do about your lumps of flesh.”
“Hwoinch!” says the piggie.
“Luy shjiuw bvalkj cndk!” says the man.
“I cannot tell what would be a moral act in this circumstance,” sez Lib. “I would have to presume comprehension of data outside my frame of reference. Otherwise, I would be drawing morality from rotten meat! So I need more information about the state of your Spirit, so I can determine hat action would be in line with God’s values.”
“Hwoinch! Hwoinch Hwoinch Hwoinch Hwoinch!” says the piggie.
“Asf kjhoiu hjoiunt di nadvt shidog! HUI GU, hus Histh-i-cu-GIUTHY!” says the man.
“I’m sorry, but I cannot determine the moral significance of preventing your rotting mortal forms from expiring. At any rate, the atoms are not real; only the spirit is real. So if either of you have a spirit, you will simply be freed from your fleshly chains. This is simply various amalgamations of molecules stuck in gravity depressions; I cannot make a judgment here without more context. So could one of you tell me how your spirit relates to that of God, so I may know what to do?”
“Glug glug,” says the piggie.
“Glug glug,” says the man.
“Hm, some atoms that formed nerve tissue have ceased carrying electrical impulses and the tissues they formed have stopped moving! How very interesting. An event of absolutely no moral significance.”
Lib walks cheerfully along the road.
“I say, sir!” someone hails him from a nearby field. “I am a mite peckish, and I was wondering, should I eat this chicken, or this typical newborn babe?”
“Hm.” sez Lib. “They are both lumps of flesh. I need to know the moral context of this act before I can tell you anything. Tell me, how does God’s spirit align with this…”
::diddley-oop dream sequence music::
So, I take it you’ll refrain from characterizing the idea of the redistribution of wealth through taxation as immoral or unethical in the next libertarianism-vs.-other-political-philosophies thread? Or, if not, does that mean you recognize that a moral context can be determined situationally?
This is GD, not MPSIMS or the PIT. I am supposed to be able to read these threads without fear of snorting embarrassingly in front of my coworkers. It’s lunchtime – nothing to see, here. Go back to your mindless droning.
I have half a mind to report you to the mods for abuse of forum decorum. Unfortunately, I think that was the half that splattered across my keyboard. I hope you’re happy.
Because its all a load of BS.
[Wagnerian horns wail quietly…]
Gaudere is skipping along a trail in the wood, gathering petals of roses into her basket. She comes upon a ravine, where a man and a pig struggle helplessly to escape the rushing water. Her synapses jerk her mind to attention as she covers a gasp with her shaky fingers.
“Oh, my!” she exclaims. She whips out a jar and pisses in it, then drops in a crucifix. “Which of you can appreciate this?” she inquires.
“Why, that’s horrible!” cries the man.
“Slurp slurp yum yum!” cries the pig.
Presently, she is skipping along the trail again, with her new piggy on a leash, when she spies a man just ahead.
“I say,” the man hails her, “ought I to eat this chicken or this newborn infant?”
Her neurons fire furiously as she manufactures a morality out of nothing more than what she sees before her.
“Good sir,” she replies, “I think you ought to eat the chicken.”
“By golly, I knew it!” said the delighted man, as he broke the infant’s neck and tossed it into a nearby ditch. “I will eat the chicken. By the way, should I eat you or your pig, little girl?”
[Wagnerian horns crescendo…]
Xeno:
The ethical determination about wealth redistribution is not situational. There is no need to set up any scenarios with men or pigs or giant squids to make a determination. Coercion is antithetical to love.
Spiritus:
Neither have I.
You know, by your familiarity with Godel’s Proposition XI, that the consistency of any complex deductive system, that is, any system that accepts a modus ponens inference, is neither provable nor disprovable within the system itself. It must rely on intuition or else external confirmation of certain propositions, particularly any that address internal consistency. Ought a system of moral inferences to be inconsistent? Is either the punishment of innocence or the reward of hatred ever acceptable?
Oh, I am quite certain that I will not, assuming that you mean by the powers of my brain. The only possible consistent morality is that which is predicated on God’s own perfect morality. Recall the moral imperative given to us by Jesus: “Be perfect”.
1:1 — drive-by
2:1 — ceratonin overload
5:1 — Madalyn Murray O’Hair’s fan club president
100:1 — Navigator’s sock puppet
1,000,000:1 — Gaudere’s sock puppet
Coercion is antithetical to love? Really?
Three situations:[list=1][li]1971. My schizophrenic sister is placed in a mental health facility, despite her impassioned pleas to all of us to stop coercing her. Our only defense was our own selfish desires to see her not prostitute herself or overdose on street drugs, and for her to stop mutilating herself.[]1992. Through extended use of nefarious behavior modification techniques, I coerced my two year old son to begin crapping into a ceramic plumbing fixture in our apartment, rather than in his diapers. (Nine years later I’m still employing behavior modification techniques. For some reason, the kid loves me too.)[]2001. Peter, a resident of Atlanta, GA, USA, works approx. 45 hours per week. Much of his pay is withheld from him and given to various agents of his state and federal governments, who use some of Peter’s money to send Paul, another resident of Atlanta, GA, USA, to a technical college. (Paul, who incidentally is a giant squid, wants to be a tool and die maker, just like his dad.) Some of the people who coerced the money out of Peter also use some of that money to keep in operation the local fire station, which came by and extinguished Peter’s kitchen fire last year, saving the rest of his house.[/list=1][/li]
By the way, please explain to me how Gaudere’s scenario is “situational” but our national milieu is NOT situational. Also, if you can, please show me where it was that Gaudere indicated she prefers to use “art appreciation” as her standard for resolving ethical dillemas. I must have missed it.
quixotic78:
No, that was a response to pepperlandgirl’s question of why G-d can’t think of a more “original” way to punish sinners than to wipe out entire nations of them. My main point in that statement was to focus on non-genocidal punishments that G-d had been shown to use.
No, we know they were evil because the Bible said they were evil, not merely inferring it from the fact that G-d smote them.
Granted, the only source for the evil is the Bible, but the only source for the smiting was the Bible as well, a point I made in my prior post.
I’ll plead guilty to this one, with a specific caveat: I never took anyone else’s scriptures and accused those believers of stupidity or evil, either. If you’re going to ask questions, you should expect answers. If you’re not looking for answers, you’re not asking questions, you’re just ranting.
If I have questions, I have books to look in and Rabbis to ask. I’ll grant you that I’m probably pre-disposed toward trusting their answers over just rejecting my entire upbringing and that of my ancestors going back three milennia as a total sham. However, if their answers do not seem to me to either settle the question or to fit the source they claim to be quoting, I’ll challenge that until I’m satisfied. That’s the process by which the Talmud and all its descendants were constructed, and it seems, to me, to have produced masterworks of logical thinking and ethical behavior.
Ben:
[Cotton Mather/Amalekite stuff snipped]
Hadn’t realized that. Thanks for enlightening me.
Complete agreement.
There’s a story that addresses exactly that in the Talmud, that goes like this: When G-d was dictating the Torah to Moses, Moses balked when they came to Genesis 1:26, in which it says “And G-d said, ‘Let us make man.’” “G-d,” he asked, “won’t people use this to claim that you’re not the only G-d?” G-d responded, “The fact that I am one is clear enough from this Torah. I have lessons to teach, which will be most effective in this form. People who wish to make a mistake will find a way to do so anyway; I do not wish to dilute the effectiveness of my message by worrying about those.”
By the same token, G-d, in ordering the Israelites to destroy the Amalekites and Midianites gives specific reasons why those nations are deserving of this punishment and gives specific instructions for more humane treatment for nations other than those specifically named. Those who wish to err, like Cotton Mather, will find a way to do so no matter what.
Attrayant:
So, who’s doing that? I’m not picking and choosing.
Libertarian:
First of all, thanks for correcting me regarding the translation issue. Perhaps modern Christian translators do reference Hebrew scrolls, but certainly the King James version, which had become the Christian standard in English over the past few centuries, was Latin-based, and most modern translations seem to hew pretty closely to it. (Oddly enough, though, I usually find that the KJV is closer to the Jewish understanding on many verses than the NIV is. Go figure.)
Forgive me if I find your use of numbers in place of Hebrew a bit confusing (and my attempts to use your link have failed), but to put it as simply as I can, I think the grammatical analysis is off. The word used in Hebrew is “Ya-sis.” The actual form that would indicate “G-d will rejoice” would, I think, be “Ye-sos.”
Thanks. However, diversionary or otherwise (and personally, I think it was a relevant point for him to raise), we here at the SDMB are in the business of correct information, aren’t we? Sure I could blow that specific sub-question off, but it was based on misinformation, so why shouldn’t I correct it?
Spiritus Mundi:
It is not proximity that is damning, but rather, the potential for revival of the sins. The OT warns in Deuteronomy 12 that leaving behind tangible remnants of the Canaanite societies will cause people to wonder, “How did those nations serve their gods? Maybe I should try doing the same.” This potential exists in living remnants as well as unliving remnants.
Lot and Noah did not fit this mold. Lot was not a native Sodomite, but was identified by most people through his relationship with Abraham. With Noah, he (and his family) were all that were left of the prior world. There was no “third party” who could possibly be reminded of the prior society by looking at them.
Chaim Mattis Keller
Xeno
I pray that it is not beyond hope that you will refrain from turning Chaim’s thread into a debate about libertarianism. I will give you brief answers to your questions that you ought to have been able to extrapolate for yourself.
Mental incompetence implies the inability to give meaningful consent.
Two principles: (1) a parent is obligated to discharge the responsibilities he has with respect to the unary contract with his child, and (2) the home is your property, whereupon rights are accrured to you, including the right to decide where your children and guests may crap.
A mugger could have as easily done the same thing, robbing Peter at gunpoint and handing over a portion to the fire station. In fact, that is exactly what happened.
If you have Internet Explorer, press CTRL-F. Then search for this: “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.”
Chaim
Sorry the link didn’t work for you. You can access the scrolls by going to http://www.blueletterbible.org and selecting your scripture.
Lib, that is one fantastic reference site! Thanks!
Chaim Mattis Keller