The Old Testament Evil
I have been trying to be fair and open-minded to the Christian view of the New Testament as the new covenant and the Old Testament as the old covenant; but I am finding the choices and actions God makes in the Old Testament to be littered with blatant atrocities. I would like to get other peoples' opinions on it.
First I need to elaborate what moral theory I am operating under to say these choices and actions of God in the OT are immoral, as this is an external critique. To be brief, I hold that:
1. Goodness is the equality of a thing's essence and esse;
2. God is perfectly good because His essence and esse are absolutely identical;
3. His essence and esse being identical (viz., Divine Simplicity) entails that He is purely actual;
4. He is the creator and purely actual, which entails that He cannot fail to order His creation perfectly (viz., He must be all-just);
5. It is unjust to directly intentionally kill an innocent person (viz., it is wrong to murder);
6. It is unjust to own a person as property; and
7. It is unjust to rape someone.
Of course, the above is overly brief and I am happy to dive into the details if needed. For now, let us assume the above is true. There are many verses which seem to contradict the above truths; three of which I will give now: (A) the Great Flood, (B) the Attack on the Amalekites, and (C) the Exodus Rules for Slavery and Indentured Servitude.
So that I am not accused of quoting out of context, I want to note I will be using snippets of the full story and I encourage everyone to read the entire account themselves. In an effort to encourage that, I will link the verses with the quotes.
A: THE GREAT FLOOD
ACCUSATION
It is highly implausible that there were no children, including babies not developed enough to even be capable of sinning yet, on the earth when God flooded it intentionally; and Him drowning these innocent children was a means towards His end of cleansing the earth (to start over with Noah). Thereby, He directly intentionally killed innocent persons and murder is the direct intentional killing of innocent persons; therefore, God committed murder.
However, God is all-just and it is unjust to murder; therefore, this "God" who flooded the earth was not truly God Himself (viz., the purely actual, perfectly good creator of the universe).
B: THE ATTACK ON THE AMALEKITES
ACCUSION
As noted in accusion A, directly intentionally killing an innocent person is murder and God cannot commit murder. God commands Saul to attack the Amalekites and explicitly to murder infants and children (among presumably others, like innocent men and woman); but God cannot do this (as noted above) and therefore this "God" cannot be God.
C: EXODUS SLAVERY AND INDENTURED SERVITUDE
This is talking about beating slaves (or perhaps indentured servants) as permissible:
This is talking about raping women, selling women into sex slavery, and the implicit permissibility of polygamy (although I will keep the whole passage so not to misconstrue the other parts)(emphasis added):
All of these can be found <here>.
ACCUSATION(S)
Rape, slavery, and indentured servitude are unjust and God cannot commit an injustice; so Exodus cannot be Divinely inspired.
OBJECTIONS
Since this is getting long, I will omit a cross-examination of objections and rejoinders except one (for now). One rejoinder I have oftentimes heard is that Christianity is about Christ and therefore the OT has to be analyzed through the purview of Christ and His teachings. Consequently, the OT is seen as a stepping-stone progression towards Christ Himself: the Divine Revelation of God's Love and Mercy.
The problem with this rejoinder is that it reduces God to a consequentialist. E.g., He codifies rules about slavery because no one would have listened to Him if He spoke the ethical truth that it is wrong; He wipes out nations similarly to what was custom for wars back then because He was guiding Israel like a wise teacher and wise teacher's give their students the truth in bite-size pieces so that they can digest it properly; He allowed humanity to become so immoral and Himself to commit mass genocide with the Great Flood because it was necessary for human's to see the depth of their sin and need for grace.
God cannot be a consequentalist: an action's permissibility can be influenced by the circumstances, but some actions are clearly bad or good in-themselves and actions like murder, rape, etc. are bad in-themselves. He cannot tip the scales of an immoral act because the consequences of doing it would be a greater good: God does not weigh actions on a scale of the most good for the most people.
What do you guys think?
First I need to elaborate what moral theory I am operating under to say these choices and actions of God in the OT are immoral, as this is an external critique. To be brief, I hold that:
1. Goodness is the equality of a thing's essence and esse;
2. God is perfectly good because His essence and esse are absolutely identical;
3. His essence and esse being identical (viz., Divine Simplicity) entails that He is purely actual;
4. He is the creator and purely actual, which entails that He cannot fail to order His creation perfectly (viz., He must be all-just);
5. It is unjust to directly intentionally kill an innocent person (viz., it is wrong to murder);
6. It is unjust to own a person as property; and
7. It is unjust to rape someone.
Of course, the above is overly brief and I am happy to dive into the details if needed. For now, let us assume the above is true. There are many verses which seem to contradict the above truths; three of which I will give now: (A) the Great Flood, (B) the Attack on the Amalekites, and (C) the Exodus Rules for Slavery and Indentured Servitude.
So that I am not accused of quoting out of context, I want to note I will be using snippets of the full story and I encourage everyone to read the entire account themselves. In an effort to encourage that, I will link the verses with the quotes.
A: THE GREAT FLOOD
I am going to bring floodwaters on the earth to destroy all life under the heavens, every creature that has the breath of life in it. Everything on earth will perish. But I will establish my covenant with you, and you will enter the arkyou and your sons and your wife and your sons wives with you. You are to bring into the ark two of all living creatures, male and female, to keep them alive with you(The Holy Bible, NIV, Genesis 6:17-19)
ACCUSATION
It is highly implausible that there were no children, including babies not developed enough to even be capable of sinning yet, on the earth when God flooded it intentionally; and Him drowning these innocent children was a means towards His end of cleansing the earth (to start over with Noah). Thereby, He directly intentionally killed innocent persons and murder is the direct intentional killing of innocent persons; therefore, God committed murder.
However, God is all-just and it is unjust to murder; therefore, this "God" who flooded the earth was not truly God Himself (viz., the purely actual, perfectly good creator of the universe).
B: THE ATTACK ON THE AMALEKITES
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. Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy[a] all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.(The Holy Bible, NIV, 1 Samuel 15:2)
ACCUSION
As noted in accusion A, directly intentionally killing an innocent person is murder and God cannot commit murder. God commands Saul to attack the Amalekites and explicitly to murder infants and children (among presumably others, like innocent men and woman); but God cannot do this (as noted above) and therefore this "God" cannot be God.
C: EXODUS SLAVERY AND INDENTURED SERVITUDE
This is talking about beating slaves (or perhaps indentured servants) as permissible:
When a man strikes his slave, male or female, with a rod and the slave dies under his hand, he shall be avenged. But if the slave survives a day or two, he is not to be avenged, for the slave is his money.
This is talking about raping women, selling women into sex slavery, and the implicit permissibility of polygamy (although I will keep the whole passage so not to misconstrue the other parts)(emphasis added):
When a man sells his daughter as a slave, she shall not go out as the male slaves do. If she does not please her master, who has designated her for himself, then he shall let her be redeemed. He shall have no right to sell her to a foreign people, since he has broken faith with her. 9 If he designates her for his son, he shall deal with her as with a daughter. If he takes another wife to himself, he shall not diminish her food, her clothing, or her marital rights. And if he does not do these three things for her, she shall go out for nothing, without payment of money.
All of these can be found <here>.
ACCUSATION(S)
Rape, slavery, and indentured servitude are unjust and God cannot commit an injustice; so Exodus cannot be Divinely inspired.
OBJECTIONS
Since this is getting long, I will omit a cross-examination of objections and rejoinders except one (for now). One rejoinder I have oftentimes heard is that Christianity is about Christ and therefore the OT has to be analyzed through the purview of Christ and His teachings. Consequently, the OT is seen as a stepping-stone progression towards Christ Himself: the Divine Revelation of God's Love and Mercy.
The problem with this rejoinder is that it reduces God to a consequentialist. E.g., He codifies rules about slavery because no one would have listened to Him if He spoke the ethical truth that it is wrong; He wipes out nations similarly to what was custom for wars back then because He was guiding Israel like a wise teacher and wise teacher's give their students the truth in bite-size pieces so that they can digest it properly; He allowed humanity to become so immoral and Himself to commit mass genocide with the Great Flood because it was necessary for human's to see the depth of their sin and need for grace.
God cannot be a consequentalist: an action's permissibility can be influenced by the circumstances, but some actions are clearly bad or good in-themselves and actions like murder, rape, etc. are bad in-themselves. He cannot tip the scales of an immoral act because the consequences of doing it would be a greater good: God does not weigh actions on a scale of the most good for the most people.
What do you guys think?
Comments (325)
He was a bit of an asshole.
No
From what I can tell reading your posts you are a good man Bob.
An immediate adjustment here is to humbly accept that the above rules apply to you and me, not God. The commandments say THOU shalt not murder. God was telling us. Jesus followed all of those laws as a man, but who knows if he has to as God, the creator of mankind and our universe. So immediately we can recognize that maybe we are not in a position to judge the goodness and badness of Gods actions.
We are told God is all good, by God. And if we have faith, we believe, and rely, on this. Keep that in one hand held close to your heart as you ask these questions.
So when God floods the earth and kills the innocent (another judgment of others we may not be in a position to make accurately), we can rightly trust that justice is for God to ultimately decide, and so we will have to ask God and expect Him to answer, but not now in the meantime think He cant explain it.
So you and me cant murder, and you and me can expect God to justify all things, and you and me cant judge another as innocent (as to God) or sinful (as to God) and should just focus on ourselves and our actions and ask what laws God has for us (what is His will).
But all of that said - God can justify death in afterlife. It may not be murder when God takes life - meaning both who are we to judge God a murderer, and who are we to know Gods ways and plans?
I believe Jesus, the Father and the Holy Spirit are one God. And Jesus, the Son, referred to the God of the OT as his Father. So there is no difference between the God of the OT and the NT. If you look hard you see Jesus and the Father share the same Holy Spirit. Jesus made hard decisions and caused pain and division and inevitable death, and the God of the OT showed tenderness, mercy, forgiveness, and love.
Its all there and worth looking for and understanding better, for all of us, for all time.
This discussion, to me, is not really for a philosophy forum. Because the best answers is to read the Bible and study it and pray over it with other people who love God. God will reveal himself to you more readily in that than what will likely happen here on the forum. Nothing against the forum, and I love the fact that you ask this question, but I have some trepidation.
This is a good question. It came up last year in quite a few places, and Jimmy Akin gave a broad-brush overview of some of the different approaches. I myself would follow Fr. Stephen De Young, who has written and spoken on the topic at some length.
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I will come back to this, but to begin let's simply acknowledge your objection, particularly with respect to the Amalekites.
I think that's your argument, no?
IMO, the Flood is the first real moral juncture point in the Bible. It's the first time God truly wreaks mass destruction on humanity. The explanation is that mankind is evil, but this seems questionable. After all, as you mention, there are children and animals.
So it's easy to question God. We can even imagine ourselves as God answering, "How would I have solved world evil?" Remember, we can't infringe on free will. What should we do as God? Offer classes on moral virtue to those who are wicked? But who should teach it? Maybe the angels? But what if the evil don't want to attend? My point is that once we start trying to play God to rectify the issue, things quickly become absurd.
We must accept that God has the right to give and take life as he sees fit. To question this - to assume that we know better - is to take on the role of God ourselves. The question of ultimate justice for the individual is beyond the horizons of our cognition. The author of Ecclesiastes notes that whether one dies at 1 or 100, everything goes to the same place.
As for Samuel, it is worth noting that God in this book is entirely conveyed through the prophet Samuel. It is not God directly communicating to Saul.
Hello, friend!
I've heard this rejoinder before, but the issue I take with it is that it absolves God of any moral responsibility. God is a person and persons are moral agents.
Moreover, God is perfectly good with perfect knowledge of His own perfect goodness; so He not only cannot sin but He always chooses not to....but this presupposes that He is capable of moral accountability!
If we take your argument with fervent seriousness, then I would say that the principle here is that "that which is the creator can do anything it wants to that which was created".
On the contrary, if God is perfectly good, then it would either have to be good for Him to have committed these alleged atrocities being no atrocity at all or it was not God (or did not happen).
What do you think?
Sounds good and I will listen to that video.
Yes, your summary of my argument is correct. I am curious what your thoughts are on it.
Yeah, I see what you mean: I think that is the point of Job. However, I don't think we need to be able to give an account of what the perfectly good way to treat things is in order to know that certain treatment cannot be the perfectly good way to treat them. If we accept natural law theory, then we can look at the way God ordered things and know that murder is wrong and I don't see how God is exempt from that. Do you believe that which is the creator can do whatever they please with that which they created?
What you have described is one of the primary arguments used by anti-religionists against Christianity. How can you worship a God who does such terrible things? I don't have the knowledge or the inclination to give an answer to that question. I'm not an atheist or a theist, although I went to a Methodist church with my family when I was a kid. I will note the difference between your seven moral imperatives and the 10 commandments. The Old Testament God seems to have had a different understanding of morality than you do.
I wasnt clear. Im not saying God isnt a moral agent and that because He is God he gets to do evil and have it not called evil.
God has revealed that He is all-good, all-just and never evil. Im saying how that is the case, I dont think we can just do some math, use our reason, and figure it out.
Im saying all moral agency exists under an authority. I know my authority - it is God. My duty is to follow the will of God. I know I am moral most perfectly to the extent I know I am doing what God tells me to do.
But Gods duty and who is Gods authority, is himself. I only know God by revelation. God hasnt revealed to me HOW what He does is all-good and always justified and never evil. God knows these things. God can explain them to me. And God will explain them if/when I seek them.
And God has a lot of explaining to do about our suffering.
But I dont think we people, even if we were all philosopher saints, can figure this out ourselves. It has to be revealed.
If a man kills another person can you tell if he is an evil murderer without knowing his heart, his reasoning and his intention? I would answer this question no. This is why Jesus tells us not to judge our brothers and to leave justice to God.
We cant even fairly judge each other - how can we conclude God is evil?
Are there any deaths of anyone that are not Gods plan? God sent Adam and Eve out to die and all of their offspring, all of us unable since the moment of conception to return to eternal life. Why pick certain stories from the OT to chastise Gods actions? None of us are Adam or Eve, but we have all been punished for original sin? Arent we innocent of the crimes that led us to know death?
Im not saying this is not an important conversation. Its the problem of evil, written about since Job and and since Adam and Eve. Why was Abel allowed to be murdered? Im saying this is a theological question, mot a philosophical question. Its a personal question we have to take up ultimately with God.
And if we find the answer in this life, the answer is not going to be found absent revelation - basically, we all need to ask God why have you forsaken me? I personally believe he will show me how, despite my days in this desert, I was never forsaken and will be satisfied (so long as I seek Him).
But left to my own wits, does God ask any one of us, or anyone in the OT to undergo anything Jesus (God) would not undergo willingly if asked by the Father? Is there any injustice done to my body if it is done because God asked me to do it? Is there any glory and honor that can be fashioned out of hard work, even unto death?
I think you can find that:
1. We cannot know the reasoning and will of God except only when he tells us (much like all persons, although we men and women are more predictable in our weakness). So we cannot judge Him, at least we must withhold judgment, (allow Him His day in our court so to speak). This is why we cannot judge each others sins, and why we can boldly demand forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us.
2. God is not the direct agent of injustice, because there are no innocents as each of us relates to God (except where God makes us innocent) - we all have already earned death for ourselves so much so that any particular death might be an act of mercy for all we will one day know.
3. We will one day know justice.
These are the better conversations there are on this earth. But they are not merely philosophical, if they are philosophical at all. The best way to find these answers is to love God, to read of his mercy and goodness and know that the all-powerful creator loves you, Bob, in particular, so much so that he would die for you, and did so on a cross - that is the person we are here asking to explain His deeds. And he will explain them to you because he loves you.
But I dont think our human calculations will adequately sort out the flood, the killing of the first born in Egypt, etc, etc.
One of my favorite passages is John 15:15 No longer do I call you slaves, for the slave does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, because all things that I have heard from My Father I have made known to you.
God has a lot of explaining to do if this is how he treats his friends, but I have faith we will have our explanation and it will be better than we could ever devise ourselves.
That your analysis of the text doesn't reflect the practice of those who rely upon it.
You can certainly say the text says X and X is immoral, but it's a different matter to say that the text says X and therefore those who rely upon the text are immoral unless those who so rely apply the text as you've interpreted it.
This is the argument that appears here every few months if not more often. A literalist interpretation is used to show the horrors and uselessness of the text, and then it is pointed out that not everyone accepts these literal interpretations and not everyone who relies on the Bible relies solely on the Bible for all direction. Some think that makes sense, but others keep resisting. There are two plain issues: (1) the Bible says what it literally says, and (2) the various religious interpret their texts and practice their religions as they do. You may believe there is no way to make those two compatible. Others disagree. Regardless though, exceedingly few religions do (2) as (1) says.
Those who practice according to the Old Testamant, those who practice according to the New Testament, and those who rely upon no text at all for some reason pretty much lives their lives the same morally. That is something worth considering.
The idea of an omni-benevolent, omni-potent god is logically inconsistent, leaving the believer to struggle with various philosophical bandaids for the problem of evil.
So there are two ways out:
1. Reinflate one of the solutions to the problem of evil.
2. Stop believing that God is moral, but rather the fountain of universal creativity from which both good and evil take shape.
Didn't realize you were a Marcionite, but it makes sense now.
Quoting Bob Ross
We don't know the soul's journey. Perhaps death is simply a soul being called back to its source. Perhaps suffering can be purposeful. When you shift the focus to the soul, instead of the material body, God becomes more sensible.
I actually wouldn't agree with either of these claims.
Regarding the first claim, namely that religions do not generally interpret their texts according to the literal sense, I would say that most religious, philosophers, and linguists recognize that the literal sense is the foundational sense of a text, upon which any other senses must be built. The question that sometimes comes up is not whether the literal sense is important, but what the literal sense is. If by "literal sense" one means "interpreting an ancient text according to modern idioms," then we are not talking about the bona fide literal sense. In that case we are talking about contextless misinterpretation.
Quoting Hanover
Well, every few months we get bad faith attacks on religion. I don't think @Bob Ross is doing that. I think he is open to different interpretations and different ways of looking at it.
The very fact that there are so many differing interpretations of such passages lends weight to the idea that they are difficult passages. I am guessing there are different Jewish groups who would disagree vehemently over the interpretation of some of these stories.
OP's question is both philosophical and theological. His assumptions #1-7 are clearly philosophical, while the application of them to the three Old Testament episodes is theological.
I agree with OP's assumptions 1-3 and 5-7, but I have a quibble about
Quoting Bob Ross
It seems to me that for every level of perfect ordering of the creation, there might be a more perfect possible ordering, so that ordering the creation perfectly (i.e., most perfectly) would be impossible. However, I agree that God must be just, and that is the main point.
I hope to be able to respond to some of the other issues later, as time permits.
I appreciate the clarification! I think that the fundamental disagreement between us lies in our approaches. You seem to be basing most, if not all, of your epistemic chips in God as Divinely Revealed and deducing from that how God is; whereas, I base most, if not all, of my epistemic chips in natural theology and deduce how God is from that.
This is a good example, as you think God is all-good and all-just only because God has revealed this to us; whereas I think we know God is all-good and all-just because we can reason about His nature from His effects.
Of course, if you believe that God exists solely because of the historical accounts in that the verses in the OP should be read in a manner where God did do those things, then I understand how you would arrive at the conclusion that God can do the same thing that we have done and it wouldnt be immoral. The problem lies in the fact that we can know, through natural theology, that God cannot do those things because they violate His very nature.
I think you are conflating absolute certainty with sufficient evidence.
I dont believe Jesus teaches that we should never judge each other; and based off of your example, then, wouldnt you need to hold that Jesus is teaching that you shouldnt convict murderers on earth but rather leave it to God?
I am not making a problem of evil argument, in the sense that that phrase refers to, because I am noting that God cannot contradict His own nature; and it contradicts His nature to commit murder.
The problem of evil, IMHO, as typically understood, isnt that problematic to me. God allows evil for the sake of higher goods; but, crucially, He does not partake in evil. So if the OP is right, then God cannot do such acts because it would be evil for Him to do so.
Yes, but I would also argue that people with original sin seem to be innocent in the stereotypical sense we are discussing. This gets at another example to the point of the OP: is it morally permissible for God to do generational punishing for sins those generations did not commit but not permissible for North Korea to do?
I think you would say that God has a sovereign standing to do it and this is the differentiating factor; but, then, you are committed to saying generational punishment, like North Koreas, is not always morally impermissible or unjust. Thats a bullet I am not readily receptive to biting (:
I have deep sympathy for Christ; but the Bible has to make sense to me to accept him as the Son of God because Christ clearly relates Himself to the Old Testament God as if He is the Word of that God in flesh. So if the OT God is doing things that God cannot do because it would contradict His nature and Jesus is relating himself to that God, then Jesus cannot be the Son of God.
It just all seems blatantly wrong, by objective standards, and to dismiss it as a question we can ask God later seems problematic to me: it questions the integrity of the Bible itself, so I would argue we need to hash it out. I think most Christians throughout history would agree since there seem to be a great body of literature on it.
What do you think about Divine Hiddenness? Why did Jesus, if he is the Son of God, always speak cryptically, omit revealing most of ethics, came in an ancient time knowing we have technology that would greatly help solidify/safeguard the evidence of his existence as God, and avoid revealing himself to everyone?
I know thats a separate topic, but Divine Hiddenness is another interesting topic.
Yes, but the stereotypical arguments you are describing are low quality. If it is an internal critique, then a Christian could bite the bullet and say it isnt unjust for God to do those things; and if it is an external critique from moral anti-realism, then who cares?
I agree!
It is an external critique of the OT from the perspective of my view as a nuanced, classical theist. I am not commenting on whether or not Christians themselves live moral lives or not: I am pointing out that the OT seems to suggest that God is doing unjust acts.
I think the vast majority of Christians believe that one should interpret the text relative to what the author meant to convey; but what they meant to convey can be tricky. Its not a debate in Christiology about whether we should abandon interpreting the texts literally.
I partially agree insofar as I do think ethics evolves over time as we learn; but I do think most Christians would hold that we are not going against the Bible or abandoning it in that process: we are refining our understanding of the original meaning meant to be conveyed in the texts.
If this is true, it has no bearing on whether or not the OT portrays God in a manner that contradicts His nature; and, by extension, whether or not one would be justified in rejecting the Christian faith on those grounds.
I understand your point though: people tend to behave relative to the norms of their day. That is true of everyone.
How is it logically inconsistent? What logical contradiction arises from the two? I believe that.
This OP isnt an argument for a problem of evil in the sense that phrase usually refers. I am arguing that Gods nature contradicts the actions attributed to God in the OT; and so that cant be God doing it.
This completely misunderstands classical theism. The catholic church, the OG church, holds classical theism to be true.
I definitely am not trying to argue in bad faith and am genuinely interested to hear what Christians have to say on this. I listened to Jimmy's video, and it was good: I could see that as a semi-viable solution to the conquest of Canaan. However, the fact that, taking my verse as an example, the author specifically noted that God commanded them to wipe everyone out seems to incohere with the idea that the author is not meaning that literally; and the fact that it was hyperbole does not plausibly resolve the issue since there's usually a bit of truth to hyperbole: viz., when the author says they killed all the children as hyperbole it suggests they did kill at least some children.
However, to push back here, there are many examples of verses that I could use that are immune to this kind of rejoinder. E.g., the rules about slavery, mistreatment of women, etc. A divinely inspired outlining of rules for Israelites to follow isn't plausibly meant to convey anything other than those rules for Israelites to follow.
Genuinely, they could hardly be further apart.
A child could ask you why Christ preached compassion and turning the other cheek, while the God of the Old Testament goes around commanding child sacrifice and genocide.
I would be interested to hear @Leontiskos response to this. I am inclined to agree; but I think Christians would say that the Old Covenant paved the way for the New Covenant. Jesus is God revealing Himself as love and mercy; and the OT is revealing how sinful and damned we are.
Can you elaborate on this?
I would say that there has to be a best ordering to creation because the thing that has a property the best is the one that has it 100% (even if there could be multiple beings with it 100%); goodness then is said to be the most of something when it is 100% good; the ordering of things that is best is relative to how well they and their relations resemble what is 100% good; and what is 100% good is univocal (viz., there cant be two different ways to be 100% good just like there are not two different ways to be 100% soft, clear, circular, etc.).
I think you would be implying (by saying there are possibly two most best orders of things relative to any given quality) that there is a way to be 100% of some property and not be 100% of some property (because there is a different way to be 100% of that very property).
Kinda strange, considering Jesus prayed to the God of the Bible and seemed to hold the Law in high regard. The gospels record him attending synagogue and reading Torah to the congregation. Or was it all an elaborate ruse?
Okay. Can you remind me of the view that he takes? It's been awhile since I watched that, and I was trying to use it to highlight some of the different approaches on offer. I don't recall his specific view.
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Quoting Bob Ross
There was a time, particularly in the 19th century, when the "academic" approach to Christianity was very ahistorical. During that time there was a common trend wherein it was forgotten that Jesus was himself a Jew, and that in order to understand early Christianity you really need a historical understanding of Judaism - particularly the Second Temple period. Marcionism is common among those who retain an ahistorical approach to Christianity.
Christian fundamentalism with its empahsis on literalism began in the 19th century. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_fundamentalism
The idea that there is universal agreeement among the billions of Christians as to what the text means is obvioulsy not true.Quoting Bob RossThis sentence makes a different point, which I had not considered. You are trying to make a correspondence argument, asking if God is accurately portrayed in the Bible. I had not considered that. I was considering the Bible as a work that had certain usages, none of which are consistent with the way the Bible is literally written, as in, no one dashes the heads of babies on rocks.
But to the extent you know what God really is like and to the extent you don't see that as written in the Bible, then I'll defer.
Reminds me of one of Hitler's early portraits. Aryan Jesus.
There probably were political reasons for why there was an effort to wed Christianity to the Old Testament, but the blatant contradictions remain and that should give any honest thinker reason for pause.
We feel evil, it hurts us to the bone sometimes! Where does the evil come from if it is not a part of creation? Evil creatures like evil! So, the God you are arguing is false!
Okay, good. I was trying to revisit some of Fr. Stephen De Young's work, and I noticed that he did an interview yesterday. He begins talking about the Amalekites at 57:12. I plan to listen to that section when I have time (57:00-1:15:00), but just given the first few minutes it seems like it will bear heavily upon this thread.
I want to at least listen to those 18 minutes to refresh my memory, but I will set out the basic argument after I get around to that.
If you are secular, I would drop the "Christ" and just call him Jesus. Christ is a title meaning Messiah, not a last name. He's a first-century rabbi whom you take a liking to.
Well God's nature conflicts with a flood in Texas killing a bunch of teenage girls. God supposedly has the power to stop it, but he just stands around picking his nose.
Quoting Bob Ross
It wouldn't be a misunderstanding. It would a rejection. Absolute rejection and condemnation of the Catholic Church has been a thing for about 500 years. It's fine. Nobody cares anymore.
:up:
Here, it is useful to recall that God's purposes in giving commands is not always apparent to us. For example, at first glance Genesis 22:2 appears to be demanding that Abraham sacrifice his son Isaac to God. We later discover that this was not God's true intent. God spares Isaac. The episode is perhaps a test of Abraham's faith, perhaps a way for God to reveal things about God's naturereadings vary quite a bityet the goal of the command is certainly not what it first seemed.
Likewise, the Canaanites are not all killed in the Book of Joshua. The prostitute Rahab and her family are spared on account of her righteousness (Hebrews 11:31, James 2:25, Joshua 2). Likewise, the Hivvites fear God and attempt to make peace with Israel, rather than trying to destroy them. In turn, the Hivvite cities are spared (Joshua 9). More to the point, those who are "destroyed" show up later, having obviously not been placed under the ban, else they wouldn't exist. Nor are the Amalekites actually extinguished, even after Israel secures its borders. One, Haman, shows up to play a very important role in the Book or Esther, which takes place much later.
Thus, it is clear both that we do not always know the purpose of revelation and that we are called on to try to uncover these purposes through questioning. For example, consider how Abraham questions God about sparing any righteous souls who live in Sodom and Gomorrah (Genesis 18:16-33). Here, Abraham himself has experienced a seeming disconnect between Natural Law (his own grasp of the Good), and God's revelation of Providence re the destruction of those two cities. In turn, God offers new revelation, assuring Abraham that the righteous will not be punished (thus putting Natural Law and Divine Law back into harmony).
On the question of the command to "utterly destroy," the Canaanites, this is an interesting article: https://www.detroitcatholic.com/voices/did-god-command-joshua-to-utterly-destroy-the-canaanites#::text=In%20fact%2C%20it%20appears%20that,the%20win%20was%20only%20temporary . It talks about the use of hyperbolic writing in the Bible, which can cause problems in interpretation to modern eyes, particularly in a Sola Scriptura context that is alien to how the texts were originally received (e.g. Jewish sources outside Scripture shed light on these events). A similar problem shows up when Malachi 1:3 is taken literally and in isolation, and extrapolated into a sort of unexplained hatred of God for Esau (and so perhaps other individuals). Esau seems to do quite well in Genesis, and his descendent Job is one of the few people directly called righteous in the Old Testament, so there seems to be more going on here.
From the article.
It's common is modern commentaries to see some sort of choice between allegory and history, as it the two are mutually exclusive. But this is often the result of a rigid understanding of how Providence "must" work. The same sort of thing shows up all the time with causality vis-á-vis free will, e.g. "God hardening Pharaoh's heart," or giving people over to their corrupted desires, etc. The entire dichotomy of natural, i.e., "man does it subsistently himself" and supernatural, i.e., "God magically forces it to happen," is alien to the tradition. More to the point, it treats God as one being among many. (On top of this, the Flood example has the added interpretive difficulty of the Nephilim).
So to the OP, I'd ask, would it absolve God if some false prophet had invented those commands and God simply allowed them to be carried out by omission? Or wouldn't God be just as guilty (by commission) for what God does to Israel and Judah (consider Lamentations) in using foreign peoples to destroy them? Or would God be guilty by omission for any the myriad similar acts that occured across the scope of human history? On this last question Elie Wiesel's "The Trial of God," is quite good, and a short play that can be read in a single sitting (it is allegedly based on a real trial held for God during the Holocaust).
Anyhow, if you treat God as a person, or as something like a very powerful, magical alien, then even the Binding of Isaac will seem very troubling indeed.
Firstly, even if that contradicts Gods nature, it is not a logical contradiction. Secondly, it does not incohere with Gods nature to allow evil to happen, like I noted before, because it is necessary for higher goods.
You are presupposing that what is supremely good is to create a world where privations cannot happen (i.e., evil), and this is not only metaphysically impossible but negates the possibility of the virtues, free will, natural laws, etc.
There is a difference between doing evil and allowing evil.
To think that God can will badness is metaphysically impossible under classical theism, and for good reasons. God is purely actual and a creator; so He must be fully realized as a creator; and this entails that God must create things in a way that perfectly orders them (otherwise He has the potential to be a better creator and thusly implying He is not fully realized as a creator). A part of perfect ordering is willing the good, relative to its part in creation, of that thing in creating it (and willing its existence); which entails that God cannot will the bad, a privation of the good, of a thing relative to its nature within the hierarchy of things.
Thank you: I will take a look!
I never suggested that, but historical there is a predominant interpretation that even fundamentalists agree with. The vast majority of Christians agree that the texts should be read literally; the dispute is what did the author mean literally. Taking something literally does not mean that you take it at face value.
:up:
Don't you feel pain sometimes? We have two alignments namely, good and evil. Good and evil are also features of our experiences. How could you deny the existence of good and evil in our lives?
He explained that there are three main categories of responses:
1. That the text should be read at face value (i.e., literally in the strictest sense) and that there is nothing wrong with it (as God cannot do unjust things and He did those things so they must not be wrong). The example he gave was William Lane Craig and Divine Command Theory.
2. That the text should be read spiritually (symbolically) and ignore the literal sense.
3. That the text should be read in a literal sense but as it relates to the whole Bible.
His take was a modified version of 2: he emphasized that he does not think we should ignore literal sense of the text but that the literal sense when understood contextually is a spiritual lesson (in the case).
He noted that the text is using hyperbole, that the author was not writing to the generation who fought in the war, and that the war was a just war over the evils the Canaanites were doing (like child sacrifice): this author existed way later. He argued that it mostly likely was a spiritual lesson meant to teach the later generation to avoid evil at all costs (similar to how Jesus says to cut off your arm if it causes you to sin hyperbolically).
Like I noted before, it seems somewhat plausible but still has issues.
Jesus explicitly reveals himself as related to the god of the OT as his son: that's the chasm in your argument. Jesus made it clear he is fulfilling the OT.
But how would you respond to the three examples I gave in the OP?
The OP doesn't treat God as a 'magical alien': it treats God as God in the classical theistic sense---the neo-platonic sense.
Good stuff. As usual, saying what I am trying to say, but more rigorously.
@Bob Ross, I would just add something about method and approach with these questions. I find we can approach questions about God in three ways. We can be biased against him, biased for him, or attempting to be unbiased. And I think one needs a bit of bias for God in order to even recognize the evidence.
Unbiased is the purely philosophical way. But we are talking about a Creator of the universe and miracle worker, so I find that we are constantly using evidence and reasoning that is not really observable or from the natural world.
When Peter told Jesus he was the Son of the living God, Jesus didnt congratulate Peter for figuring this out himself since Peter had seen all of Jesus miracles and because it certainly made sense - Jesus said that the Holy Spirit revealed this in Peter. And if you think about getting to know who any person is, all of our observations are only evidence of something we believe, and that could only be confirmed by the person saying yes, that is me, because we are all spirits. The observable is outward sign of the invisible that is thereby revealed. The evidence we seek to evaluate in determining how an all-good God commanded the killing of children, will only be found in spirit. Our natural, unbiased powers will be helpful, but never enough. This is something Count points to.
So that brings us to the approaches that are biased. If we are biased against God, why would we believe or understand his revelations and creative and miraculous powers? So we can not really make progress questioning God if we are able to doubt major premises about God. If we start with the conclusion therefore God has done evil in the OT we are biased against the premise God is all good and would never do evil.
So this brings us to the right approach to me. I know that God is all-good. I am biased in favor of God. So when I see horrible acts in the OT leading me to conclude God is doing evil I immediately think something is wrong with my reasoning and my conclusions and my understanding of the OT, because God can never sin.
So the question you are asking, to me, is not how is God able to do such horrible things, it is simply what am I misunderstanding about these things. So during the time I misunderstand these things, I am not anxious that my reason will ever conclude that therefore God is sinning. The temporary situation and question is always my understanding of the OT. I am anxious that I have not understood why God did what he did, not who God is.
So here:
Quoting Leontiskos
That seems sound and the reason we are concerned is because our definition of God (unstated in the argument) is that God would never be unjust.
So the point is, since no one here wants to redefine God or find that God can sometimes be unjust, the argumentation and education will always be about how we define justice and sin and the acts themselves. God has already revealed himself to us as all-good. We arent questioning that. We arent even questioning what good itself is. God is goodness. Nothing we conclude with our reason will ever be settled on God is unjust.
So the process Count is pointing to to figure this all out HAS TO call into question your (our) understanding of what God meant to show us by his deeds, not call into question the righteousness of Gods deeds. This is about our understanding, not about judgment of God.
Bottom line, to me, we are asking God to justify his actions and intentions to us, and the only truly humble way of doing this is to start the question knowing absolutely that there is a justification, and that God remains all good and never sinful. We use our reason and gather the evidence retaining faith in the conclusion we already know - God is always good and loves each any every person.
Maybe I didnt need to say any of this.
And as I said before, seeking to understand God better is what life is all about, so, with a humble approach, your OP is certainly doing a good thing.
(Although because I am admitting my bias, I think I am also confessing this isnt really doing philosophy - its theology, and better than that, its prayer and asking God to come to reveal himself to our understanding. And there are some good folks around here who can be vessels of such revelations.)
So if a child is on fire and I have a fire extinguisher, it's ok for me to withhold help? Just stand there and let her scream? That seems moral to you?
Great, thank you for the synopsis. :up:
That helps jog my memory. William Lane Craig had proffered a strong version of option (1), which is what ignited a lot of these discussions last year.
I agree with your conclusion regarding Akin's view, "Somewhat plausible but still has issues."
Quoting Bob Ross
Okay, so let me try to sketch Fr. Stephen De Young's approach. Note that he gives lengthier treatments elsewhere and especially in his book God Is a Man of War: The Problem of Violence in the Old Testament.
The basic idea is that
Why were the Amalekites evil? Because they engaged in human and child sacrifice, rape, cannibalism (and this was all related to their worship of demons, temple prostitution, etc.). There are lots of groups that God did not put under the ban, given that they were not irremediably evil in these ways. We see the contrast in texts like Deuteronomy 20:10-18 and Deuteronomy 21:10-14.
The Amalekite argument always finds its strongest point in the notion that innocent children were killed. But for now I will just leave it at a general level and see what you think. Before thinking about children, how does this argument sound? Do you think it is at least valid?
Sure, and I guess I had better do it now, before the discussion gets any thicker!
This idea occurred to me as a part of an argument that God cannot be a utilitarian:
Consider something with a small quantity of intrinsic goodness, maybe for the utilitarian the pleasure of smelling a rose, or for those of us with a more metaphysical idea of goodness, a hydrogen atom or a sugar molecule. Whatever it is, call it a "unit" of goodness. If one of these is good, two of them would be better, although not necessarily twice as good. And three would be better than two. This seems to go on without limit: for any N, N+1 units of goodness are better than N units. So there is no maximum amount of goodness that God could create, just as there is no largest integer. But utilitarianism requires us to cause the maximum amount of good possible. Therefore God cannot be a utilitarian.
Quoting Bob Ross
That is interesting. Now when you talk about a "best ordering to creation" or a best "ordering of things", are you talking about one thing or many things? Because while we might agree that for any one thing there is a way for it to be maximally good, and this conclusion might extend also to a fixed number N of things, I don't think it would extend also to the case where N is variable, and you could have more or fewer things.
But I don't want to get hung up on this, because we agree that God must be just, and that seems to be the main point relevant to this discussion.
I wouldn't necessarily equate these things. I would need to read up on Plato, though, but perhaps Plato would perceive God/the divine as unchangeable? The God of the Old Testament is so multi-faceted and presented in so many different ways that I would see some tension here. As @Count Timothy von Icarus mentioned, God can be bargained with.
"Auschwitz cannot be explained nor can it be visualized. The person who lived through it cannot explain it. The person who did not live through it will never understand it... There is no theological answer to Auschwitz, no philosophical answer there is only the pain of the survivor.
Elie Wiesel
Do you disagree then that there is no theological answer for Auschwitz? Is the btheological answer just pure abstracted faith, as in, there must be, but it is cloaked in impenetrable mystery? Wouldn't any attempt to describe the higher goodness of Auschwitz be an all new evil unto itself?
I'm not for abandoning God, but I've got to take theodicy problems seriously, and perhaps acknowledge a possibly imperfect world. But this view is covenantal and not Christian, and continues to wrestle with the angel so to speak. But how do you respond to Wiesel's position?
Well, my initial point was merely that reading the Scriptures in English translation, without additional context (from the Jewish or Christian tradition) is going to be problematic. God's intentions are not always obvious, nor are the ways in which texts were meant to be interpreted. Many Jewish, Christian, and Islamic "Neoplatonists" do write about these at length, but it's a quite broad area of commentary.
Just for example, Origen, the first Christian systematic theologian, one of the earlier Church Fathers (although also condemned long after his death, largely due to how others took his speculative theology), writes:
Or consider Saint Maximus in the Hundred Texts on Theology:
Note however that these are not denials of the historical conflicts. All of creation is a revelation of God, as is history (although it is also the dramatic stage on which man's freedom and ruin plays out, and the cosmos is a fallen cosmos).
Origen seems to be arguing that given Christ as love and mercy that the Old Testament has to be primarily spiritual lessons and not conveying historical events. However, most of the events we have some reliable historical evidence that they at least happened to some extent.
Also, didn't the Apostles also take the OT to be giving historical facts alongside spiritual facts? It seems like a hard pill to swallow to reject the literality of the OT outright.
Also, how does this address the three examples I gave? Are you saying you would hold that the great flood did not happen but was an analogy for something else?
I am absolutely disagreeing. The quote you gave serves only as a poetic line (even if Elie meant it as more). It's an emotion response, and rightly so, to a horror.
God allowing human evil is necessary in order for us to have free will; and we need that to choose Him. This does allow, then, for humans to commit atrocities against each other.
Do you think it is better to love God because He makes you; or love God because you love God?
As far as I know, for Plato God is the One which is unchangeable as a Platonic Form.
CC: @Count Timothy von Icarus
God cannot and is not bargained with in the sense you meannot even if what Timothy was mentioning. God already knows what someone who persuaded Him is going to say: that entails it was a part of His plan to say one thing initially and change His mind later.
What we are talking about is akin to whether it is morally permissible to create a world where it is possible for a child to get lit on fire or not; and I would say that it is.
To answer your question, which is completely separate and disanalogous, I think one has a legal right to withhold help all else being equal because no citizen qua citizen has the duty to rescue another. Morally speaking, I think it would be immoral not use the fire extinguisher all else being equal because it is trivial for you to do and their live is in danger. If you were to strengthen the risk on your end, though, I would say you are permitted to withhold help (e.g., if you would have to rescue them from a burning building).
Likewise, I was not saying that allowing evil is always permissible. I was saying that they are morally evaluated differently.
I commend your cleverness and ingenuity here; but I think this is fallacious. Goodness is not quanitified over like an atom: it isnt a concrete being but, rather, a property that concrete beings can have.
Think of it this way. Imagine we asked ourselves: what does it mean to be most perfectly circular? Your argument here is essentially in response: imagine we thought of circularity like it can be split into one basic unit-atom and that utilitarianism is true, then we would never be able to create something that is perfectly circular..
But circularity is a property and cannot be thought of as a unit like this. A perfectly circular thing is entirely metaphysically possible in isolation; and God, analogously, is a perfectly good thing.
I am talking about more than one real being and how they would be ordered. One can order them relative to any principle; but I am looking at the principle of ordering them relative to what is perfectly goodwhich is God Himself.
Okay, fair.
First let's clarify that the ban on the Amalekites was a religious or cultural form of genocide, given that their cultic rites required the abominable practices in question. "Amalekite" is a cultic referent, and it is precisely the cultic practices which are abominable. It is precisely the religion that is to be wiped out (although there was no distinction between the culture and the religion, because they were the same thing). Among other things, what this means is that if all of the Amalekites abandoned their Amalekite religion, they would no longer be Amalekites, and they would not have to be killed. For example, the Israelite leader Caleb was born into the Kenizzites, who were very similar to the Amalekites on the points in question. Yet he became an Israelite.
So it is not a matter of "genociding the people in their entirety" because some of them were doing horrible things. It is actually a matter of "cutting off the abominations" per se. If the Amalekites were not engaging in abominations, they would not have been put under the ban.
Are we still on the same page? (I realize I still haven't gotten to children yet. :razz:)
That's correct. So what you're really complaining about is the the OT God doesn't conform to the Neoplatonic image. Neoplatonism is a type of monism, so everything is God. That gives rise the to the older version of the problem of evil: if everything is God, what is evil? Some say Plotinus was an eliminative idealist, which means he believed evil, which is the privation of the Good, and also matter, is a type of illusion. In other words, Plotinus was the Daniel Dennett of his day.
I tried once to find that in the Enneads, and I couldn't.
Origen isn't saying the wars didn't happen. He is speaking to how the Scriptures tie into the spiritual life, which is their main function (i.e. how they are meant to be read). Allegory doesn't nullify historical content. Nor do I think we are forced to choose between young Earth creationism and the whole of terrestrial animal life being descended from animals on board the ark on the one hand and the denial of historical content to the story.
Interpretation is multilayered. For example, Leon Kass's The Beginning of Wisdom is a good look at interpretation from the Jewish perspective. It considers the Flood and the expulsion of Eden on a number of levels. Whereas, treating the Bible like a witness report and then passing judgement on God or any of the other figures is alien to most of the traditions that use the text. Theology isn't the sort of thing where you pull out isolated passages and then try to make a statement about God or morality from it. It can, of course, be done this way. Psalm 14 can be taken as an endorsement of total depravity, etc. It just leads to wild inconsistencies because of both the hyperbole common to Biblical language and the nature of the text.
He meant it as more. It's fine to disagree with him, but I don't think you can interpret it to mean you agree with one another. Quoting Bob Ross
This of course leaves unanswered the purpose of suffering not caused by humans, like babies dying in floods. But as to human evil, you must commit to whatever free will we have to be the perfect free will to have. If you say we have the free will to commit atrocity because without it the world would be lesser, you'll have to commit to the idea the free will we are deprived of (like the choice to fly like a bird) is an acceptable limitation.
Don't get me wrong. I am a theist, but I can't arrive at an answer for the problem of evil and I can't commit to the idea that all pain is for a higher good. There is true evil that had it been stopped, even if it meant an outstretched arm and a mighty blow from above, things would have been better. The OT is filled with such divine interventions. Why was Pharaoh"s free will imposed upon (hardened his heart) but not Hitler's?
Holding that all sufferimg leads to higher good might give great respect to God, but it doesn't for the suffering.
Quoting Bob Ross
I don't place particular significance on love with God. It's overly anthropomorphic and reductive and it de-emphasizes doing as opposed to believing.
So, to your question, I can't say I love God or God loves me in a way you'd think of it, as in an all embracing glorious way that salvages one's imperfect soul. I'll assume no one is terribly interested in my particular beliefs, but I'll just point out that the centrality of love to God is idiosyncratic to Christianity and not a necessary primary component of theism.
With all due respect, this seems like a non-answer that sidesteps the discussion. Is your rebuttle to the OP that we cannot know why God did evil, but that it is justified because you are biased towards God?
No. The OP demonstrates in a non-biased way that God cannot do what the OT purports God did. A bias is a prejudice that is irrational and not based in reason, evidence, and logic: I am not doing that in the OP.
Is there any evidence of what is being purported as Gods doing that is evil that would tip the scales for you and make you question if the purported history of God was really history of God?
This is what the OP is getting you to question:
1. Genocide is evil.
2. The OT purports God did genocide.
3. Therefore, either the OT was wrong or genocide is not evil.
Your response seems invalid. You are saying: God cant do evil and I am biased towards that, so I am going to believe that whatever God does is good.
However, this isnt a response to the argument (summarized above). You either think Genocide is always evil and the OT purports that God did it or you dont. If you do, then you have to bite the bullet and accept that either OT was wrong or genocide is not always evil.
Likewise, you could object to the 2 and give a historical account of what the passages really meant and how it didnt portray genocide; but saying God always does good doesnt help further the conversation: I agree God cannot do wrong, and thats why I dont think the OT is factually accurate.
I was not aware of that, and thats fine as long as we agree then that:
1. Not all people who lived in the culture of the Amalekites were Amalekites, since an Amalekite is a religious affiliation and those who lack the capacity or choose not to engage in it were not be properly affiliated. To iron man this, I would be thinking of children and disabled people that were Amalekites but not because they have properly been affiliated with the cultic rites but because they simply live among them.
2. As far as my understanding goes of the passage I quoted in the OP, God commanded them to wipe out the entire city or cities that the Amalekites lived; so this would seem to include the children, disabled people, people who couldnt leave but completely disagreed with the practices, and animals.
For now, I am leaving out the objection about animals, though, and we can focus on the children if you would like. I find it implausible that no one in an entire city had a cognitive disability (perhaps they always sacrificed those people?), a person that disagrees with the cult but lacks the means to escape, or were a child.
I think so! My only concern is that we are interpreting the texts as only fighting with those adults engaging in the cult but I dont find that plausible in the text so far.
EDIT:
My worry is that, analogously, we are noting that it is a just war to invade the Nazis but also conceding that the invasion was done in a manner intending to kill all the women, children, disabled, and animals to wipe out the german ethnic group out. It seems like a just war has certain rules of engagement.
I dont think it is a form of monism. Aristotle definitely wasnt a pantheist nor was Aquinas.
I see. Can you respond, then, to the three examples I gave and explain how they are allegories and what they are allegories about? I find this implausible for, e.g., Exodus where they are outlining rules. Rules are not usually meant metaphorically or allegorically.
Neoplatonism, Bob.
What you are raising is the problem of evil, which is not relevant to the OP.
The answer to natural evil is that you need a world where there are regularties of behavior of the environment for anythings good to be realized. I cant live a virtueous life if the floor randomly turns into TNT once a week. You need natural laws to allow for the good of anything at all; and that necessarily allows for natural evil.
I am talking about freedom to live in accord with ones nature: not the nature of something else. It isnt good for a human to be able to organically fly: its not in our essence.
Yes, this is a fair Biblical objection; but this is another example of exactly what my OP is arguing. It seems like God in the OT is not really God.
Well, thats a big problem; as love of God is love of love itself: It is to orientate ones will towards what is perfectly good. If you reject that, then you do not want what is perfectly good for anything.
I am not arguing from Christianity here. In this life, if you dont love God, then you dont love love itself or goodness itself. If you dont love that, then you arent orientated towards what is good: that hurts you and everything around you.
You don't think Aquinas or Aristotle were neo-platonists?!?
The Trinity is Neoplatonism, so Aquinas would have accepted doctrines that emerged from Neoplatonism whether he would have accepted the vision we associate with Plotinus or not. Aristotle was not a Neoplatonist.
Sounds exactly like Christianity to me.
As I noted, your position is reductivist and anthropomorphic as it relates to love, where love is God (reduced to a term) and we are to somehow love that we shouldn't kill, lie, and do immoral acts, as if that's not metaphor attempted to be made concrete.
All your beliefs are perfectly valid as Christian beliefs but your comment Quoting Bob Ross is where you present Christianity as The truth. If one is Christian, they'll say Amen, if not, then not.
Why is this? It's because the attributes of the OT God obviously vary from the NT God. You've located nothing not known. Your follow up that the OT God isn't God is just your assertion of Christianity as the Truth. You're telling those who accept a version of God closer to the OT than the NT, they don't believe in God. Lovely.
Right.
You do when you relate evil as privation of good. Good and evil are fundamental features of our experiences. We humans mostly prefer good over evil because of our genes. So we are biased.
Quoting Bob Ross
Evil, of course, is real.
Quoting Bob Ross
If something is not real, it cannot exist either, given the definition of real. So, I think you are contracting yourself.
Quoting Bob Ross
There is no relation between evil and nonexistence.
What do you mean by neoplatonism? I mean any view that adopts but sublates Plato's view.
Aristotle adopted Plato's views but sublated it; and in turn Aquinas did the same with Aristotle. I would consider them both neoplatonists.
Also, do you believe Plato was a Trinitarian? I'm not aware of him believing in that: I thought it arose in classical theism with thinkers like Aquinas who were Christians.
Quoting Hanover
But like so much of your posts, this is simply not true at all. Christians accept that the OT God is not God? What silliness is this? Marcionism is a very old Christian heresy.
The issue here is Biblical interpretation, and as a Reformed Jew you have a very loose way of interpreting the Bible.
The key to your position is found here:
Quoting Hanover
You would say, "I don't think God commanded the killing of the Amalekites," and the question is simply whether this view of yours is consistent with the Biblical testimony. There are a very large number of historical Christians and Jews who do not believe that such a view is consistent with the Biblical testimony. We can't just sideline these central questions and pretend that Reformed Judaism is the only possible approach.
This isn't my position. It's @Bob Ross's. He said the OT description of God wasn't God, and I said if it's not, the he saying those who do accept it as God don't believe in God.
Quoting Leontiskos
I never did. I've been consistenly open to other interpretations. I've only pointed out that if one claims to know what the true God is and then you claim others don't adhere to it, then you're just telling me your religion is right and mine wrong.
Neoplatonism
Read about Plotinus, the Enneads, and Augustine.
Also, watch this, somewhere in there he explains the Neoplatonic origin of the Trinity.
To clarify, I am saying that Christianity holds that the OT God is God; but that my OP is objecting by way of an external critique from classical theism to claim that it couldn't be God. Most importantly, I am interested to hear what Christian's think of my critique.
Also, I could make an internal critique that would suffice: if Christ is about love and mercy, then how does that cohere with the OT?
Either way, I think it is an issue Christian have recognized is noteworthy and something they need to respond to.
Frank, I've read about neoplatonism. What do you mean by it and how does Plato argue for the Trinity? I don't that happened. Just explain it briefly to me.
Do you think Christians would say "Amen" to the claim that "God in the OT is not really God"? Because that's what you said above.
Quoting Hanover
The OP is surely presenting arguments against a particular religious tenet, namely the divinity of the OT God. So yes, it involves the claim that such a religious tenet is wrong, along with any religion which upholds it.
Honestly, you're coming across as kind of clueless.
You are the one coming across as clueless, Frank. You make weird, contentious claims about neo-Platonism and then fail to substantiate them, gesturing towards "somewhere" in an hour-long video.
@Bob Ross - The reason these threads are tricky on TPF is because asking TPFers religious questions is like going into a bar and asking the patrons about quantum physics. They will have a lot to say, and none of it will be remotely accurate. Toss in the large number of anti-religious cynics like Frank and the quality dips even further.
I do think Bob has clarified. He did say he didn't think the OT God was consistent with what he knew God was. And I do see why a Christian would need to sort out what is pretty clearly a change from OT to NT if there is a commitment they are the same.
That being said, it just seems you've got to start with the obvious and admit to the literal inconsistency, and if you're going to adhere to that literalism, you're just going to have to admit to inconsistency.
If your hermeneutic leads to inconsistency, you either (1) live with the inconsistency as not overly relevant, (2) declare humility and lack of grasp of the mystery, or (3) change your hermeneutic.
I go with 1 and 3. God didn't write the Bible, so inconsistency should be expected and I choose a very non-literalist interpretation. My objection was to the suggestion of an a priori knowledge of God as being consistent with the NT and a declaration of invalidity to all other beliefs in God.
That is, an option 4 was being chosen. The OT was being rejected as invalid. That's the equivalent of me saying the simple solution is to reject the NT. That would work too.
Well what is "pretty clear" to you is not at all evident to Christians. Here is the heresy I spoke of:
Quoting Marcionism | Wikipedia
So when you claim that Christians would say "Amen" to the heresy of Marcionism, you are making factual errors that misrepresent the religion. Throughout the thread @Bob Ross has emphasized that his argument is opposed to Christianity, beginning with to Tzeentch. So it's really weird that you would claim that Ross is taking a position to which Christians would say, "Amen." Every Christian in the thread is arguing against the OP.
Quoting Hanover
I basically agree. :up:
Quoting Hanover
Good, that's what I was trying to get at.
Quoting Hanover
Is there something you believe to be wrong with "option 4"?
I think @Bob Ross is saying little more than, "I believe in God, and according to my beliefs the OT god is not God. Here are some arguments for why." He is of course offering his arguments tentatively, in the sense that he is looking to understand and address objections to his view.
You said it's heresy. But, assuming we don't care about that, I'd say it's perfectly fine to say the OT and NT are incompatible and you've got to choose one, the other, or neither. But to declare which must be chosen because it's the correct one is simply to declare your God the true God and all other believers wrong
I don't know public declarations that you worship the true God bring much fruitful discussion.
A Christian heresy is only a problem for a Christian. To accuse a non-Christian of heresy would be a form of begging the question.
Quoting Hanover
Okay, good. But I want to highlight that @Bob Ross is not a Marcionite, given that he does not embrace the NT. He is rejecting the OT on other grounds.
Quoting Hanover
"It's correct because it's correct," would be a tautological declaration. I don't see @Bob Ross doing that. His central premise is
Quoting Leontiskos
Do you think that argument is "to simply declare your God the true God and all other believers wrong"?
Quoting Bob Ross
Well that is precisely what I am disputing, although I want to leave children to the side for the moment.
It seems like part of your argument is
My point is that religion/cult in the ancient world is not an optional add-on. There is no such thing as an Amalekite who is not an Amalekite in a cultic sense. The difficulty is that modern preconceptions color the way one reads these stories, and the notion that religion/cult is optional or accidental is one of those. Again, we will get to the question of children soon.
Else, Stephen De Young explains that there are precedents and examples where defectors are not under the ban. So if someone defects from the Amalekites and abandons their cultural abominations, then they need not be killed.
Compare especially the story of Genesis 18, where we find that God will not destroy Sodom if there can be found righteous within the city.
Aristotle wasn't a Neoplatonist because he wasn't alive when Neoplatonism came into existence. There's nothing contentious about that. Anyone who knows the definition of Neoplatonist knows it.
The problem is in taking these stories too literally. It destroys all nuance and creates dichotomies that never really exist
Fast forward 600 years after Amalek to the Book of Esther. Haman is noted to be an Agagite, meaning a descendant of Agag, the sole survivor of the Amalek, who King Ssul failed to kill from sympathy. Samuel did kill him soon after, but the story being told is that evil. If allowed to spawn (and the rabbinical suggestion is Agag impregnated someone in that extra day) begets more evil. And, of course, Haman sought to murder all the Jews in the Esther story.
The point is this is a mythological story about responding to evil and the consequences of misplaced sympathy. I don't think a Christian should find that notion objectionable. It's the literalism that is unworkable. Quoting Leontiskos
I think if you begin with an immovable preconceived notion of what God is (love, etc.) and you encounter a tradition inconsistent with that, you are left with either judgmentally or non-judgmentally responding to it. Non-judgmentally, you'd recognize it academically and consider yourself educated. Judgmentally, you'd tell the other side they were worshipping a false god.
Quoting frank
And again I ask, is this what @Bob Ross is doing? Are you representing him fairly? Is his argument a "declaration"? Is he merely "considering himself educated" or "judgmentally telling the other side they are worshipping a false god"? Isn't he doing something altogether different when he offers you an argument?
It seems clear to me that you think it is impossible to give an argument for a religious position, and yet this is precisely what Bob Ross is doing. So apparently you are forced to construe Ross' argument as something other than an argument. That doesn't make any sense to me.
Quoting Hanover
Would you say that taking these stories too non-literally is also an extreme?
Quoting Hanover
That's possible, but the arguments are where the rubber hits the road, and those will necessarily be religious arguments. If the story is mythological then the religion which takes it to be mythological will be better than the religion that does not, ceteris paribus. Thus in order to support your own religion you would want to show that the story is in fact mythological. The point is that religious argument is inevitable. We can't make progress in any of this without it.
One of the reasons I think the Stephen De Young is because it addresses your approach as well, specifically at 1:00:17, where De Young considers using Game of Thrones as a religious text.
The response to your claim that the story is unworkable when taken in a literal sense would be, "Actually the story is unworkable even when taken in a mythological sense." For example, when Plato critiques the Greek myths, he is critiquing them qua mythology. Such a critique is equally open to @Bob Ross or anyone else who takes issue with the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament). I think De Young is correct when he says that the mythological pivot doesn't solve the problem.
Why do you refuse to defend your own position? I outlined mine clearly: can you do the same?
Agreed. @frank brought up the claim and then "justified" it by saying I am clueless. Frank, can you elaborate on what you mean?
Bob, "Neoplatonism" is a word invented by academics to categorize a specific set of ideas, typified by Plotinus. People don't debate the meaning of the term.
I directed you to the Wikipedia article on it. Read it.
That said, reading through these posts, I have some honest questions for you. I see a lot of contradictions and incompatible positions in your reading of the OT.
Do you think God is all good and all just?
Or do you think God orders evil and commits injustices?
Do you think God is not capable of committing evil?
Or do you think God is capable of committing evil?
Do you think the OT tells history, or it does not?
Do you think the Bible ever tells lies to us, purporting to describe events that are fictional as if they were historical?
Do you think God reveals himself to us through the OT or not? If so, is God a historical figure in the OT or the NT or both, or neither?
Did Abraham and Moses live and worship the same God whom Jesus called Father and whose Holy Spirit remains with us to this day, or no?
I cant really tell your answers to these.
Quoting Bob Ross
So God is good, but the alleged God of the OT is not good, and so the OT is false history of what God did; God didnt actually do what the OT says God did. Thats what you think.
Quoting Bob Ross
So killing of innocents is bad, but killing of Canaanites is justified, but not killing all Canaanites; God was ok killing some innocent Canannites, but not ok committing genocide of all Canaanites, innocent ones or not. That can be inferred from what you just said here.
Quoting Bob Ross
So the OT is not about history, and though it purports to be history, many of this purported history is not history but is spiritual lessons, although some of things happened historically to some extent.
And the alleged historical God of the OT is not about love, peace, justice, eternal life, goodness, hope, faith, charity, humility, mercy, forgiveness and redemption - but instead, in the OT, alleged God is basically a God of wrath and enforcement of law and demonstration of power, and sometimes evil deeds. We should read the OT to learn lessons, but not as containing any facts.
Quoting Bob Ross
Is God capable of committing sin or not, and is God a moral agent or not?
I agree that God is a moral agent AND that he is not capable of sinning. But these contradict each other. How is that possible?
Maybe, God does not follow the law like we must, though maybe he follows the law like the Son does the will of the Father. But God, simultaneously IS the law. God is the word, and God is with the word. The word was with God, and the word was God. God became man, and the man Jesus, the son of God, both is the Law as God, and follows and fulfills the law as the Son of man. Jesus is the way, and those on the way must follow the law. But those merely on the way cannot always see Gods ways (or see them without Gods help to understand).
So linear LNC reasoning cant really see how the Son has two natures, man and God, where one is capable of sinning and the other is not, but the other is still a moral agent. This takes deeper discussion, but if one didnt believe a logical explanation was possible (because God was genocidal), then what are we talking for.
Quoting Bob Ross
This is not what Jesus wanted anyone to think. There is one God in the Bible. From Genesis to Revelations - one and the same God, known to Abraham, to Moses, to Saul, to Peter and to Paul. The OT is perfectly compatible with the NT.
If you think the two are incompatible, then Moses and Abraham were only fools; Peter and Paul were the first to know God.
Are you saying Jesus was tricking the Jewish people when He upheld all of the law of Moses and referred to the God the Jews knew and lived as Farher?
Quoting Bob Ross
So the one God, or for you, the alleged God of the OT, ordered unjust, evil, killing of children.
Or the OT is just misleading and confusing, historically and/or spiritually?
Quoting Bob Ross
Exactly - these refer to many of my questions for you. Is the OT history or not? Is God all good or not? Does the Bible tell some historical lies in order to make some other spiritual points, but if taken literally it would be telling lies? Is God in the OT or not and is this the same God as the NT or not.
Quoting Bob Ross
I believe God is all-good, all-just. Period. Never in question as I seek to understand what God says and does.
There is only one God, revealed to us over time, expressly, since Abraham. So God made himself directly known to history and to me from the OT.
I believe we can know of God through natural reason (Aristotle was the first to do this best), but we would not know very much of the specific personality and thoughts and intentions of this natural God, like Abraham did and like Jesus is, without revelation. You are asking about Gods intentions and thoughts, not about Gods nature.
Why conclude from natural reason that God loves every single person? Why conclude from natural reason that if God was a man he would do what Jesus did and die on a cross to save me from my sins? These are not reasonable by natural reason alone.
You say we can know God through reason and our own natural gifts, but then, Jesus referred to the God of Abraham and the whole of the OT lovingly as his Father, and yet you dont see this as truth. You see the father Jesus spoke of as possibly committing genocide of children.
It is contradictory to say you can know God through reason, and to believe what Jesus said about the OT. Unless you are not a Christian, in which case you can believe whatever parts of this you want.
Dont get me wrong - it is ok to have doubts and to need to understand more - at least I hope so for my sake!
But this all seems very confused and the point of my prior posts is that the method to understand it cannot be to simply use reason alone.
God doesnt commit evil murdering genocide - even if he floods the earth.
That cant be a premise or a conclusion about God (not on any normal definition of genocide), because God is all good and all-just.
God told Saul to do a lot of things including to kill all. If Saul did exactly what God told him, then it would be entirely on God to justify what happened. But Saul didnt do exactly what God said to do - what Saul did, therefore, was Sauls will, not Gods. Now evil can be found. If you want to blame unjustifiable killing of children on anyone, you can choose those of us who dont listen to God to blame.
God takes care of all children justly.
Or, if you want to say what God thinks and what God loves and hates can be known from what Saul does in Gods name and if you want to say you know what those murdered children think and who they fear and who they love and who saves them and who destroys them, be my guest but I dont think you do. Thats not natural reason. Genocide is a human invention and a human deed. So is murder. And death and all of our suffering is a wage and debt God did not ask us to incur - we chose it ourselves. God seems to work to take away death and the wages and evils and burdens of sin. Such work is nasty work.
Does it perplex you that you dont understand?
Or does it trouble you that God is an unjust evil doer?
Or does it not trouble you and you think God is simply not in the OT?
Or are you doubting your faith?
Or are you doubting your reason?
We need to see how God thinks and how God reasons. We are asking for God to explain himself to us.
I agree there is a reasonable explanation for the apparent atrocities, but that explanation can never prove God commits injustice and evil or I need to keep looking for explanations.
I call the atrocities apparent atrocities. I dont assume what God does are atrocities and call him apparent God.
If the explanation concluded God commits injustice and evil then God isnt God and there is nothing to question - the OT and what Jesus said of his Father are all lies.
Quoting Bob Ross
You are conflating judging actions with judging souls. We have to convict murderers and put them in jail for life. We can learn this from natural reason. Period. Thats politics, survival and common sense. That has nothing to do with judging them as evil doers who we would put in hell for eternity. That is never up to me, nor can I possibly make that judgment.
Your OP doesnt ask whether a God like the the God in the OT should go to jail, you ask whether such a being is evil (and so not the God you want to know).
Vengeance and ultimate justice are for God. We better be careful when we convict murderers (which we usually are), we better show mercy when we sentence them, and forgive them when we visit and care for them in prison - weve learned this is Gods way by revelation of Jesus Christ, and if you look carefully, in the OT just as well.
Im not saying we should ever abandon natural reason - Im not saying there is not a reasonable explanation for the actions of God in the OT. Im saying the evidence we need, to use our reason to understand does not simply come from nature. Eyes and and earthly educations ALONE cannot show us God is good. We need to hear God himself to know his heart.
Why did God wait for you and me to come into being to ask him for these explanations? He says because he loves us. Are we so lovable after all, now that he created us with all of our reason and lived experiences, that we would accuse him of sin, evil and injustice for things we really dont know about, and may have participated in without Gods command? It all seems weak to me, and in need of prayer as much as anything else like our reason alone.
So you should know, there ARE reasonable explanations. The approach to those answers is not one that doesnt involve God telling us what he was thinking and who God is. This is not all about what the facts are.
Same thing about a murderer. Murderers need to go to jail on the facts. But unforgiven punishment in hell? We need to know the murderers heart. Where does Jesus find evidence that. Murderer is lovable? How does God love a person who sins against him? I dont think God uses reason alone when judging us.
So I am not saying your questions arent good ones, nor that answers dont have to be reasonable, but that approaching this problem like a scientist/mathematician /philosopher ONLY, and not like a child seeking Gods help to answer, knowing that God can and will answer everything, leads to all of the contradictions in your positions above.
Bottom line. God never does evil. So we need to find out how God treated the Cannaanites and all of us reasonably when we are murdered and drowned. We cant seek how the God of the OT was not actually God, because everything else that is good about the Bible falls apart if evil God so Biblical lies is anything close to an explanation.
How do you think Abraham approached questions for God?
What did Moses think was reasonable when he listened to a burning bush for evidence of Gods intentions? Or when he chastised his people because of a golden calf, but built a bronze serpent to heal them?
You wont be able to penetrate these things with natural reason alone.
Quoting Fire Ologist
Supernatural reason would be more applicable.
In this context, its more accurate to say weve all killed ourselves - all are guilty.
It is clear (at least it is clear to me) that the god of the OT is not the Christian God. The OT God is very specifically the god of the Jewish People (AKA the children of Israel, AKA the 12 tribes, etc). As long as the children of Israel follow all the laws - as laid out in Exodus, Deuteronomy. Numbers, & Leviticus - they are entitled to the land of Israel. The OT God holds all other groups of people to be outsiders - Jews are not even allowed to marry non-Jews. The OT God even assists the Children of Israel in committing genocide (think Jericho).
So when you say Quoting Bob Ross or Quoting Bob Ross you are making this judgement from outside the OT. Now this is a perfectly acceptable thing to do - as long as we are aware of what we're doing. But the OT god is not perfectly good. The OT gets angry and changes his mind - not the expected behavior of a perfect entity.
As long as I'm here, here are two other fun links from the Skeptic's Annotated Bible:
A list of all God's killings
A list of ALL the commandments on both the OT & NT
Books like Genesis and Jonah present a more universalistic picture, while Exodus is more particular/nationalistic. A group (Israel) accepted him as their God, but his dominion extends far beyond that, and others are free to accept him.
In Jonah, he cares deeply about Israel's historic nemesis -- the Assyrians.
Quoting EricH
God can be negotiated with and questioned; otherwise, you have a God who is beyond question. Some religions do perceive God like this.
I'm not an expert in interpreting the bible, but I'd disagree with this. The plain language of Genesis makes it clear that Israel belongs to the Jews for all eternity. Here's from Genesis 13:
[i]14. And the LORD said unto Abram, after that Lot was separated from him, Lift up now thine eyes, and look from the place where thou art northward, and southward, and eastward, and westward:.
15 For all the land which thou seest, to thee will I give it, and to thy seed for ever.
16 And I will make thy seed as the dust of the earth: so that if a man can number the dust of the earth, then shall thy seed also be numbered.
17 Arise, walk through the land in the length of it and in the breadth of it; for I will give it unto thee.
18 Then Abram removed his tent, and came and dwelt in the plain of Mamre, which is in Hebron, and built there an altar unto the LORD.[/i]
The later books add the proviso that the Jews must also follow all the laws.
You put your words into God's mouth, and I'll put mine. I will not say that infants are already guilty. Rather I will say "The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away." And perhaps it is a kindness that he spares them temptation, but it is not my business to make such judgements in His place. It is a matter for faith and doubt.
Yes, Genesis includes the patriarchal tales, but before that are stories about God's interaction with humanity more generally. Noah is saved on account of his righteousness and given seven rules that all of humanity must follow. It is only after these universal prescriptions that we see the shift to Abraham and his tribe.
I am ok with granting this, because you are excluding the kinds of people that would not be defectors but would not be meaningfully an Amalekite. I am just being careful to note that, e.g., a disabled person being taken care of by Amalekites would seem to count as an Amalekite in the sense you mean. Are you saying that the correct interpretation of the text is that God was specifically referring to an Amalekite in this strictest sense that would preclude children, disabled people, etc? If so, then how do you explain the fact that God punished Saul for sparing some animals? Doesn't that suggest that God was including everything that lived in the City itself?
Quoting Leontiskos
Sort of, but that would be immune to the strongest part of my argument; which involves the children. We could dispute plausbly either way if, for example, there were any healthy adults which could be held to be an Amalekite proper and I am willing to concede, given the seemingly identity relation between being an Amalekate and a part of the cult, that there weren't any. We also could dispute whether or not there were any disabled adults, such as cognitively disabled adults, which would be harder to classify as meaningfully an Amalekate even though they lived with them.
At the end of the day, I emphasize the children, although I understand you are setting that aspect of it aside for a second, because it is really implausible in my mind that there were no Amalekate children and it seems like they would be a part of the ban.
:up:
Yes I do.
Yes.
I dont know: it seems to be both history in a more literal sense of events, dates, and people and also literary. Its hard to decipher what was meant to convey a lesson vs. a mere exposition of historical fact; and it becomes dangerously close to confirmation bias, IMHO, with some of the interpretations Ive heard.
Well, on the one hand, it facially tells inaccurate information and is not inerrant; however, on the other hand, most of the text I would be referring to can be interpreted as allegorical, metaphorical, etc. Still then, it seems unsuccessful at solving the issues.
For example, the beginning of Genesis outlines the creation of the world prima facie and it blatantly incorrectly states that God created the light that shines on earth before the sun. However, somebody could say that it is metaphorical for God creating the universe. Still then, why would God divinely inspire His message to be conveyed in a manner where it gets facts blatantly wrong like that?
Whether or not the Biblical writers are lying is a separate question; and I would lean towards no. I dont think the author was intentionally messing up the facts to deceive people.
Thats what I am evaluating and why I started this OP. I believe if God voluntarily creates a world, then He will always have to (1) create the best possible world and (2) freely will to incarnate Himself through hypostatic union as a representative member of the species of any that are persons to save them. I think, and @Leontiskos can correct me on this, this would be a heresy for Christianity of God being forced to always pick the best.
I would find it plausible that Abraham and Moses were real people and worshiped the same God who Jesus called the Father.
Thats what I am arguing and what I would find most plausible right now. I dont have a strong intuition or position on this yet though. The point of this OP is work through my thoughts and see what other people bring to the table for me to digest.
I am fine with that assessment. My minor quibble would be that a just war does not entail it is just to have as your end to kill all the adults engaging in evil: a just war entails that you are justified in fighting with them to stop the evilwhich should be done with a principle of proportionate response in mind. If I can stop someone from committing child sacrifice without killing them, and this can be done with reasonable safety to myself and others, then thats what I should do. I would be being disproportionate in my response to the evil by still killing them anyways (unless that is a proportionate punishment, such as capital punishment, for their past sins of sacrificing children).
I see, so you are taking the spiritual approach of interpretationcorrect? What lessons are we learning from portraying, according to your own view, God purposefully incorrectly? What do you think about the aspects of the OT that seem to be historical (such as lineages, outlining laws, the people, the places, etc.)?
God is a moral agent because He is a rational agent that has absolute freedom; but His freedom is supreme freedom which is sometimes referred to as liberty of excellence. He does not have liberty of indifference: the liberal idea of freedom being having the ability to have chosen otherwise.
God is both absolutely free and incapable of sinning. A rational agent that is absolutely unimpeded by anything external and of which has absolute knowledge of the good necessarily will always freely choose to do what is good; and, heres where I think (@Leontiskos) the heresy maybe smuggling in here, to choose what is best.
But how can you say the God from the OT through the NT is the same God if you acknowledge that the OT portrays God in ways God is not?
I think Jesus was, in good faith, referring to himself as related to the Father of the OT; which to me means that your view that God can be portrayed incorrectly for the sake of a spiritual lesson as false. Was he lying about being the Son of God? I doubt it, but I dont know.
This this getting too long, so I will stop here and let you respond (:
At the risk of prolonging a side discussion - while they could be derived from Mosaic Law, the 7 rules are not in the Bible. They were invented by Talmudic scholars. WIkipedia says this might have occurred sometime in second century C.E.
The Noahide laws are in Genesis. See, for instance, Gen 9:4 and 9:5. The injunction against murder goes back further to at least Cain and Abel. God is first the universal God, then he is followed by Israel.
Rules that bind humanity have been present from the very beginning, in Eden.
Not briefly lol. Consider that the Noah story is rarely tackled in isolation and is normally always considered with everything that has happened up until then, particularly the "Third Creation Narrative" of Genesis 5, which seems to be nothing but a bunch of "begats" but actually has a lot of interesting things going on.
First, when considering what is meant to be taken "literally," as a sort of crime report or history:
- The first two creation narratives, which are delivered back to back, while not necessarily contradictory, appear to contradict each other on the order in which creatures came into being when read as a sort of ordering report.
- The above was often read as the difference between the creation of the forms of creatures, which are spoken into being in the first narrative (by the Logos, Christ, in the Christian tradition), and the creation of matter in the second narrative, where man is shaped from the dust and God's spirit is breathed into him (and presumably all living things), which was often taken as relating to the Holy Spirit. But things appear to happen in different orders in each, and in the first narrative man and woman are created seemingly simultaneously, not so in the second.
-The text does not concern itself with where wives for the sons of Adam come from or how there appears to be peoples aside from those mentioned specifically in the genealogies. If you're committed to an extremely literal reading, then you're also going to find it impossible to justify the claim that "God killed children in the Flood." They are only implied.
-There are indications that predation (between [I]any[/I] animals) does not exist in the Garden but also that it didn't exist after the Fall either, until man's poor guidance of the cosmos led to progressive degeneration.
-Aside from how literally we are supposed to take the slide into predation, some of the language seems to be metaphorical. Cain's generations produce a picture of the human race that is typical of a bronze age heroic era. His descendents all have names that reflect a sort of independence from God, and a sort of heroic brutality, and it is from these that we get the first city. But note that Cain himself is banished to the "Land of Wandering," presumably "to be a wanderer," but then turns "wandering" into a city, and his line gives birth to the arts, and seemingly war. Women are not mentioned at all in this set of generations.
-The generations of Seth are a sort of mirror image of the generations of Cain, but they do mention women, and the names, while similar (and identical in some cases), are slight but important variations of the earlier names. But we also see how long people lived, and if you read closely you'll see that, while death entered the world with the murder of Abel, no one dies a natural death in the Bible until the end of the generations. Noah is the first person born after any man appears to have died a natural death.
-Man's descent into wickedness then seems to be a response to the revelation of man's mortality and finitude, although it also obviously involves a conflict over "beautiful women" (and thus generation).
-The "sons of God" are sometimes taken to be rebellious angelic beings, although I think the most convincing reading is that these are the sons of the line of Cain.
-The story is itself an inversion of similar Near Eastern stories (a lot could be said here).
-Noah, having heard that he is to let the animals go forth to be fruitful and multiply, without any divine instruction, immediately gets off the Ark and begins butchering all the "clean animals." If read literally, as all terrestrial life having to be descended from just one male and one female of each species, Noah is here driving all clean animals to extinction immediately after God had him save them.
-Noah repeats Cain and Abel's mistake of thinking God is "just like me and likes what I like." The text is quite ambivalent as to what God thinks about this act. Actually, God responds by saying he will not bother trying to start over again because man is evil from his youth in response. That is, "even simple Noah of the line of Seth is already killing and consuming and failing to be a good steward, and so it isn't worth trying to simply 'reroll' and hope man chooses the right course, because he won't," is one interpretation that suggests itself. But note that if read literally Noah has already engaged in a mass extinction event and you'd have to assume that God recreated all livestock and game animals without the text telling us that.
So, whereas the story of the Amalekites is taken more literally (as suggesting a war and the destruction of Amalekites, although we know this doesn't happen because there are Amalekites centuries later to try to exterminate the Jews in exile) by pretty much all the Church Fathers (which is not to say it isn't also read allegorically), the early Genesis stories often weren't read literally because they are extremely stylized in this way (literal readings are bizarre without adding all sorts of extra details that aren't in the text), and it certainly seems like they aren't meant to be read as straightforward reports.
But I won't go on about the Amalekites because others have already responded to you on that one.
As an aside, references to allegorical reading crops up even in the NT. Consider Saint Paul on the story of Hagar and Sarah, which he calls allegory (although what exactly he means by this is open to interpretation).
[Quote] I find this implausible for, e.g., Exodus where they are outlining rules. Rules are not usually meant metaphorically or allegorically.[/quote]
First century Jews, including the Alexandrian "middle Platonists" who were the forerunners of Plotinus (e.g. Philo), did find this plausible though. For instance, the idea that the dietary instructions are to direct one to deep Torah study (i.e., ruminating, as one only eats ruminants).
But of course, the law was taken quite literally by many. However, it's also a law for the type of society it regulated. It did not institute slavery, etc., it merely introduces regulations for existing institutions, seemingly moderating them and setting limits on them.
God's exact purposes in giving the Mosaic Law could be discussed at length. It's worth noting that admonitions to honor the spirit of the law above letter in the prophetic writings are among the oldest writings in the Bible. I don't think even a literal reading is committed to the idea that the limits it sets on behavior (for a tribal Near Eastern people mind you) are in any way meant to be the guidelines for a sort of cultureless, Enlightenment-style "ideal behavior for all rational agents for all time." They are largely concerned with limiting excess and guiding worship within a particular context. Part of the point seems to be that the Law is tailored to their current way of life, and they still fail to follow it. Recall that at this point the Hebrews have seen miracles non-stop for years and yet still constantly rebel against God any time the going gets tough (fairly realistic if you ask me lol).
With all due respect, I can't seem to follow what your rejoinder is to the arguments I gave in the OP. Can you take one of my three examples from the OP and demonstrate what interpretation you hold of it that is immune to my critique?
I think you are giving me a lot of substantive information on the topic, but I'm having a hard time relating it to the OP.
You mean:
As noted, the story only mentions men, most of whom are several centuries old. I don't see how it isn't selectively reading to add what you find "reasonable" in a story where animals don't predate one another, men live centuries, etc. Other people are implied, but God creates Adam seemingly as an adult capable of speech and reproduction. Since these others are seemingly also created, why not assume the same for them? Indeed, we might suppose that fertility worked differently in this epoch because Adam appears to be young for centuries without birth control and only has three children (although many more in the tradition, Judaism is not Sola Scriptura). Generally, a principle was that if one adds something to the text that makes God appear evil, one has erred.
If you're allowed to add things from outside the text, then justification is easy. Rashi proposed that God has Saul kill the Amalekite animals as well because they practiced shape shifting through demonic arts for instance.
If the question is: "how is a 20th century fundamentalist reading of the Bible consistent with Christian or Jewish 'neoplatonism?'" I think the obvious answer is it isn't. You're mixing traditions separated by millennia, with vastly different theologies. If you want to know how someone like Philo or Origen found the Bible consistent with their theology, you need to read them and their understanding of Scripture.
Quickly, I would not say that the doctrine which holds that God always creates the best is a heresy, although it isn't characteristically Christian and I don't think it comes onto the scene until Leibniz. Aquinas doesn't think the word "best" makes sense in that context, given the infinite possibilities. Regarding (2), it looks like you are claiming that, "He will always have to freely will..." Here necessity runs up against freedom, and beyond that, Christians do not tend to hold that the hypostatic union was logically necessary. They will say that it was conditionally necessary either upon the condition of creation, or else upon the condition of sin.
I haven't been following the thread too closely, but I realize some are imputing (1) to the OP and then arguing against (1). I don't think the OP requires (1)or (2), for that matter. The OP looks to me like an argument from injustice, and it is much easier to get a theist to agree that God is not unjust than to get them to agree to these other points.
Murder is the unlawful premeditated killing of one human being by another. Animals cannot murder, nature cannot murder, and God cannot murder.
Beyond this, God is the source of the Law; for God to be a law-breaker, there would need to be some higher law that God is subject to, which would make him not God by definitionat least not the Judeo-Christian one. Maybe Greek or Roman Gods were bound by pre-existent laws, but not the God of the Bible (who is the source of all creation).
Your argument seems to hinge on the idea that there were no children on earth during the Flood; but the very previous chapter, 5, outlines in detail the lineage as normal procreation and Noah is said to have three sons in chapter 6.
Also, it is worth mentioning that these kinds of rejoinders, like Rashis, seem to fall prey to violating the principle of parsimony. No where in the OT does it suggest remotely that there were no children or that the beasts were shapeshifters: youd think it would mention that, or at least not mention things which imply the contrary.
I'll have to think about this: maybe if there are an infinite range of possibility then God would have an infinite amount of 'best' worlds He could create. I am not sure.
By your definition, a person would kills an innocent child in society that has not made killing humans, in any way or means, illegal has not committed murder and, most crucially, apparently, has done nothing wrong.
Murder is the unjustified killing of a person: the direct intentional killing of an innocent person.
Moreover, "God being the law" is partially true and partially false. God IS perfect goodness and perfect justice: His commands are not themselves what grounds what is good or just---it is His nature.
So you are right that there is no other being above Him: He is constrained by His own nature to be perfectly good. So my argument is perfectly valid: if God is all-just (because it is in His nature to be all-just and not merely because you are defining arbitrarily God's commands as what defines justice) and murder is unjust, then God cannot commit murder; but God does commit murder in the OT, so that is not God or they got the facts wrong.
Well, the story tells us in one passage there were 2 of each animal, but in another 7 pair of clean animal and 1 of unclean. It tells us the flood was 40 days but in another it was 150. The story fluctuates from calling God Yahweh and Elohim, which supports the theory that this is a tale from multiple sources weaved together and therefore not consistent. Keep in mind the physical impossibility of a rainfall flooding the entire earth and animals of all sorts from polar bears to kangaroos all converging upon the ark at the same time. And there is that whole problem of the Nephilim, the offspring of the gods and mortals which is given as the basis for the flood, further discussed in Enoch, a book that failed to make the canon. Why do we not stop and ask ourselves more about those giants of old who irritated God so much that he killed them by flood? And multiple gods having sex with humans seems so non-monotheistic. Like how do I make that consistent with the absolute monotheism of Deuteronomy?
The point being that I have no idea how to apply the rule of parsimony to this ancient and largely borrowed tale.
Then let's talk about your insistence upon looking only at the text. That isn't the Jewish tradition. They rely upon the oral tradition that was eventually written down in the Talmud, which has as much priority as the Torah for explaining all these things. That is, subtracting out the rabbinic tradition from the source material is not how the source material is supposed to be understood by those who are relying upon it.
Are you proceeding under the theory that the OT was written by God, that it is consistent, or that it can really be used without other documents for a complete understanding? The inconsistencies are not just curious problems that we must rectify, as if a diety of such complexities left them as riddles to challenge us. They are true inconsistencies, formed from too many cooks in the kitchen and preserved for posterity by an ancient editor, who's name or names was lost to time, meaning the scribe was not Moses.
The man would be guilty by divine law, which exists independently of man-made legal systems.
Quoting Bob Ross
:up:
Quoting Bob Ross
The religious view is that God has the right to take and give life as He sees fit.
Death is an inevitability, whether it's now or in 100 years. Whether through pain or with ease.
Does it? It says Noah has his sons when he is 500 years old. His sons are all a century old when the Flood comes, when Noah is aged 600. Noah's sons are the last births mentioned in the text. If one reads this literally, I'm not sure how fair it is to make assumptions about human life cycles at these scales, particularly if one considers the radically different biology that is being suggested elsewhere.
There is no "principle or parsimony" for reading historical texts that says: "stick to just one text." Really quite the opposite. We try to confirm things through as many traditions and texts as possible. I am not sure where Rashi got that idea though, if it might have been in an earlier tradition.
The biblical rule that provides authority to the rabbis:
Deuteronomy 17:811
"If a matter eludes you in judgment... you shall arise and go up to the place that the Lord your God shall choose. And you shall come to the Levitical priests and to the judge who will be in those days, and inquire, and they will declare to you the matter of judgment. And you shall do according to the word which they declare to you... You shall act according to the Torah which they teach you and according to the judgment which they say to you; you shall not deviate from the word they tell you, either right or left."
Consider also:
Exodus 24:12
And the Lord said to Moses, Come up to Me on the mountain and stay there, and I will give you the tablets of stone, and the law and the commandment that I have written for their instruction.
The "commandment" is considered differently than "the law," which is interpreted as the oral tradition that was supposedly passed down from generation to generation, eventually being written into the Talmud. The Talmud is considered as authoritive as the Torah, and it is interpreted by the rabbis. That is, there is an entire legal system devised around these writings, largely given meaning by the rabbis.
It's for that reason that isolated readings of biblical passages have no authority because they ignore other binding writings and binding rabbincal authority. It's not terribly different from legal interpretative systems in secular society, giving priority to various documents and authority to interpreters.
:up:
Exactly, and most Christians have the Church itself as an interpreter, and its most respected saints as anchors. You have the Church Fathers as an anchor point, and within them the "Universal Fathers" who are doctors of the Roman Catholic Church and also among the most respected saints in the East, e.g. the Capaddocian Fathers, Saint Maximus the Confessor, etc., as well as the Apostolic Fathers who wrote within living memory of the Apostles or those they directly taught.
Islam has a similar set of texts and interpretive system. Evangelical Christianity, as dominant as it is in the Anglophone world due to its influence in the US, is quite unique in the Abrahamic tradition in how it deals with scripture and tradition.
I sympathize with your position, since it does seem to me that the OT counts, all else being equal, against God being all-just OR that the OT is not describing God (or potentially divinely inspired).
The point of this OP is to see what people would say who would hold that the OT is divinely inspired
.
But how are they interpreting it? How do they respond to the things @Hanover said? If you would like to respond to a specific example, then here's one: why does Genesis describe God making light for the earth before the sun?
But, then, murder is not the direct intentional killing of an innocent person. It would have to be defined some other way, and different than it being merely an illegal killing.
I see your point: upon thinking about it more, I think this is a fair and reasonable rejoinder. I dont think the great flood mentions or implies there are children and there are plenty of mentioning of abnormal biology.
EDIT: It is worth noting, though, that the lineage part does suggest that they are procreating (instead of God manually creating them), so it's still kind of suspect that there are no children at all. Especially if people are said to be doing immoral things: that usually involves sex.
What are your thoughts on the other two examples I gave in the OP?
What I was referring to is the principle that the simpler explanation that explains the data is the one we should use. I believe this would be used by historians.
I am not Rabbi Hanover, so I'll cite to ChatGPT, which is generally forbidden here, but I offer it to provide you a glimpse perhaps into what I'm talking about:
[i]Key Rabbinic Interpretations:
The "Or HaGanuz" (??? ?????) the Hidden Light:
Midrash (Bereishit Rabbah 3:6) and Talmud (Chagigah 12a) teach that the light created on the first day was a special, transcendent light.
This light allowed one to see "from one end of the world to the other."
Because of its purity and power, God hid this light after the first few days of creation and reserved it for the righteous in the World to Come.
The sun and stars, created on the fourth day, are seen as "cloaks" or physical vessels to carry light going forward.
Rashis View (Genesis 1:3):
Rashi, citing Midrash, holds that the initial light wasnt the same as the suns light.
It was an independent illumination that allowed for the division of day and night even before the celestial bodies existed.
Philosophical and Kabbalistic Views:
Maimonides (Rambam), more rationalistic, tends to allegorize these verses and sees "light" as symbolic of form, potential, or divine emanation.
Kabbalistic sources (like the Zohar) associate the first light with divine emanationa manifestation of Gods presence, not bound by physicality.
Literal Harmonizers:
Some rabbinic commentators, like Ibn Ezra, try to harmonize with natural observation by suggesting that light was created in a diffuse or unlocalized form first, and only later gathered or fixed into celestial bodies.
He suggests perhaps the sun already existed but was not yet assigned its calendrical role until day four.[/i]
Your questions (all of them), trust me, have all been answered in one form or the other over the past couple thousand years.
Yeah, but don't those seem like highly ad hoc explanations? The Rabbi, granting Chatgpt even got it right, is inventing a new kind of light to explain it when the simpler answer is that the author had no clue how light works OR the author was trying to convey something spiritual.
I'll try a different approach, as I don't intend to restate what I've already said.
Considering other common forms of death in antiquity, death by flood isn't exactly a bad way to go. Would you also think, e.g., death by tuberculosis or dysentery to be God "murdering?" Or dying at 60 of heart disease? People rarely lived past that back then. I don't get where we draw the line between God "murdering" and there being an ok death that isn't "God murdering" if we adopt this absurd view that God "murders."
Secondly, if a set of pre-existent rules binds God, then he is not God. Creation (which includes rules) proceeds from God.
Talmud helps us apply Torah, but Torah is the holier, more primary text. If you're looking for a complete code of halakha just go to Shulchan Aruch or Mishneh Torah and skip the Talmud, but the authors of those respective books would never say that their texts hold equal weight to the Torah such a claim would be horrible blasphemy. Those works are Judaism's best attempts at halakha (religious law) formulation, but a major thinker like Maimonedes would argue that understanding is to be prioritized over the simple rule following of religious law.
Thanks for confirming.
Okay, that's fair. I just wanted to try to impress the idea that the Amalekite culture and the Amalekite religion/cult go hand in hand, and if we want to get into the exegesis we could show that it is specifically the abominations associated with the Amalekites that God is concerned with. The question, "Why the Amalekites?," is something we ought to keep in mind. It would be a significant mistake to assume that this is how God/Israel deals with every people-group. But let's move on to children.
Quoting Bob Ross
I think it is reasonable to assume that there were Amalekite children and that they were part of the ban.
Quoting Leontiskos
In the first place I would want to note that in our Western society which strongly values individualism, the individual is the central agent and the child is often seen to be his own person, so to speak. I saw the new Superman movie (which I did not think was very good) and there is a scene where Clark's father is telling him that parents don't shape their children's lives, but instead give the children tools with which to shape their own lives. That a pretty standard individualistic sentiment, and it would in no way have been the view of ancient peoples.
To oversimplify, the ancient world is going to see the child as strongly shaped by their environmentboth "nature" and "nurture"whereas our own culture tends to see the child as a free agent who largely transcends their environment. I think we have veered too far in the "libertarian" direction, and I think that a factual or statistical analysis would show that children are deeply influenced by environment and culture.
A second consideration is the question of support mechanism. Suppose Israel wipes out the adults. Would they have the resources to absorb all of the children into their own numbers? That seems unlikely, and neither is it clear that the children would be overly cooperative at that point or even when they grow older. So there is the simple logistical problem, where there is a people-group who practices abominations (human sacrifice, cannibalism, rape, demon worship, etc.) and you have to address the problem. How do you address it? Given that the adults are not able to be reformed, they must be imprisoned or killed, and imprisonment of such a large number would have been impractical in that day (if not in ours as well!). So what do you do with the children? How do you view the children? Similarly, what is best for the children? Should they be left to live without parents and support? Should they be left to grow up into evil cannibals (in the case where their parents are not killed)? Should they be abandoned to their fate if they cannot be incorporated and supported? I don't see any obvious answers here. Indeed, the command to kill the children is much like a command to pull out the weed by its root, so that it does not regrow.
Now your argument is apparently thinking in terms of commutative justice, where the child is the agent, the agent has done nothing wrong and is therefore innocent, and therefore the child cannot be harmed and certainly not killed.
So at this stage we have three considerations which cannot be altogether ignored:
The injustice argument has a certain preeminence given that it is trading in exceptionless norms. More explicitly, if the Amalekite children have a right to life, then it is unjust to kill them. So we probably want to ask whether they do in fact have a right to life, even though they are Amalekite children.
Certainly if we think of agency in terms of groups instead of in terms of individuals, then it is no longer clear that the Amalekite children have a right to life. More specifically, it is no longer clear that the Amalekite children are innocent, given that they are inextricably bound up with an abominable group.
Note that when thinking in terms of group agency rather than individual agency, children of the Edomites, for example, are innocent in virtue of their people-group and therefore do have a right to life. Or more simply, the commandment against murder applies straightforwardly to them. So the criterion of innocence has not been abandoned, but is rather being interpreted and applied differently.
Anyway, those are three of the basic data points I think we would need to consider when thinking about the Amalekite children.
Quoting Bob Ross
At the very end of that clip I suggested this is addressed quite well (beginning at 1:11:45). If you didn't get a chance to watch those 18 minutes I would recommend it.
P.S. The reason you aren't getting a lot of direct answers to your argument in this thread is simply because it is a very difficult argument to address. For that reason I'm not sure whether I will succeed in giving you a satisfactory answer either, but I think these considerations complicate the initial picture quite a bit.
Are you confusing an action with an allowance. God is doing the flooding (by willing it); whereas a person with cancer right now was through privations of what God willsGod is not willing it.
Its the difference between me killing someone and letting them die.
God is not bound by rules; but that doesnt mean He isnt bound by His nature. His nature is perfectly good which binds Him: the modality of rules is irrelevant to that point.
Again, you are taking a divine command theorist approach and this is very flawed. Things are not good merely because God wills them: God has to will them in a way that is good because He is goodness itselfHis nature is perfectly good.
Thats fine by me.
:up:
I am having a hard time parsing your argument. Let me offer some arguments I think might be extractable from your elaboration. Im going to use loose arguments and I am not intending to put words in your mouth.
Argument from Group Agency
1. A persons innocence or guilt is determined relative to the groups innocence or guilt.
2. A person that has done nothing wrong themselves but is a part of a group that is guilty is thereby guilty (just the same).
3. Murder is the direct intentional killing of an innocent person.
4. The Amalekite group was guilty (of relevant crimes to potentially killing them).
5. The Amalekite children had done nothing wrong.
6. The Amalekite children were guilty by association with the Amalekite group (2).
7. Therefore, killing the Amalekite children was not murder.
Is this an argument you would endorse?
Briefly, I would say that I would deny 2. Ethics is person-centric, not group-centric; but then, again, maybe you would rejoin that this is libertarian modernism.
Argument from Mercy Killing
1. A person that could be mercy killed or left to endure a serious and fatal life (such as leaving them to starve to death because no one can feed them) should be mercy killed.
2. The children of the Amalekites would have been left to starve, because the Israelites lacked the resources to integrate them into their society properly, and inevitably die in insufferable ways.
3. Therefore, the children should have been mercy killed.
Is this an argument you would endorse?
Briefly, I would say this is consequentialistic; and I would deny it on those grounds. Murder is not allowable if letting a person live would result in grave consequences for that personincluding insufferable death.
Argument from Evil Cleansing
1. An extremely evil idea deeply rooted in a society, culturally, should be eradicated.
2. Eradicating such an extremely evil idea is infeasible without killing off most of the population.
3. Therefore, one should kill most of the population of a society that has a deeply rooted extremely evil idea.
Is this an argument you would endorse?
Briefly, I would say that this also is consequentialistic at heart. I dont think it is permissible to do evil in order to eradicate evil.
Thats fair, but arent you a Christian? Im curious what you make of these difficult passages: does it affect your faith?
God is reality. The dynamic essence of reality, according to the Hebrew conception. I believe God is good, but he is reality first. If he is good, his idea of goodness is simply beyond our common-sense understanding. This is the same God who sent snakes and plagues to the Israelites in the desert and swallowed up Korah's family whole. The same God who slew the Egyptians' firstborn from the highest to the lowest, and even included animals in that count.
In some ways, I find the NT God more terrifying. In the OT, he'll kill you, but he never threatens you with eternal damnation. If you want to define God as the Form of the Good, you can worship that, but you're better off reading Plato. I'm not even sure what the point would be of worshipping the Form of the Good; wouldn't it just be a one-way relationship?
Which part of the midrash or Talmudic passage cited do you contend doesn't support the interpretation?
My comment just points out you didn't explore those cites or other rabbinic commentary because you've already decided upon a hermeneutic that demands author intent determine meaning. Notwithstanding the Creation myth passages clearly provide distinct stories strewn together and you have no basis to suggest the original author(s) ever expected their tale to be taken as a literal account.
Is the interestiing part of Aesop's fox and grape fable that it accurately describes human behavior or that foxes can speak?
My point here is simply to say if you've arrived at literalist method of interpretation within the four corners of the document, you will reject others, but just appreciate you're using language differently.
Wittgensteinian speaking, you're a different form of life.
Is there free will in heaven?
That is a very good question! If Heaven is the final destination for those who repent, and if these individuals are free, then they could commit sins in Heaven as well!
Or, if free will exist in heaven and evil doesn't exist, then it's possible that God could create a world where no evil exists and free will also exist. That means that God chose to create a world where evil exist.
I don't equate evil with sin, but I understand what you are trying to say.
Okay, those are reasonable attempts to capture my arguments and good responses in turn. :up:
First, let me try to elaborate on the second consideration I gave. Consider this argument:
1. It is impermissible to indirectly kill an infant
2. Killing an infant's parents will indirectly kill the infant (if left to itself)
3. Therefore, it is impermissible to kill an infant's parents (for any reason, so long as you cannot support the infant)
Would you agree with that argument? Because anyone who accepts that argument simply cannot justify killing the Amalekite parents, regardless of what the parents have done, unless of course all of the infants can be supported. That is one way of seeing how the second consideration comes to bear on the issue. Specifically, it is the idea that the Amalekite adults who should be killed cannot be killed because they have infants (and thus the Amalekites will simply keep infants as a defense strategy).
Similarly, suppose that (1) is false and that one is permitted to indirectly kill an infant in certain circumstances. In that case a command to kill infants could be reasonably interpreted as a command to indirectly kill infants by killing their evil parents.
Another argument would be as follows. God is allowed to "kill," given that every time anything dies God has "killed" it. Life and death are in God's hands. Can God delegate such a prerogative to the Israelites in special cases, such as that of the Amalekites? If so, then this "mercy killing" of an infant is not per se unjust, and it actually provides the infant with the best option, given the alternatives.
Let me respond to a few things:
Quoting Bob Ross
Quoting Bob Ross
The first thing I would say here is that someone who intentionally remains attached to an evil group is evil, and has bound themselves to the consequences of that group. But this doesn't apply to infants or small children.
Note though that collateral damage is part of war, and that it bears on the question of directly intended killing versus indirectly intended killing. Often innocents are casualties of war, and often this is foreseen, but there is a difference between intending to kill an innocent and foreseeing an innocent's death as a side-effect. This is all related to our conversation about indirect intention and double effect.
Quoting Bob Ross
Yes, I am a Christian. I would say that, first, I am not God and therefore I do not expect to understand everything. Second, there are many different ways to approach these issues, and the video from Akin highlights some of the different approaches. A lot of it relates to whether some text is literal or figurative, and whether one takes the text to be inerrant. I actually like Fr. Stephen De Young's approach because it is not too liberal or wishy-washy, it is rigorous, it is contextually robust, etc.
With that said, your argument is not bad. Perhaps such an argument must push us into more liberal exegetical approaches. Or perhaps such an argument must push us away from the Old Testament altogether. That's possible. I am not there myself, but I do know some people who take such routes.
Bob, your argument is not perfectly valid. It is only partly valid. You argued that God is perfectly good
and cannot be evil. You argue that if "God does commit murder in the OT, then that is not God, or they got the facts wrong." This is a valid argument. But when you said that God committed murder, your argument became invalid. I would argue that God did not commit murder in the Old Testament, He did not murder the Amalekites because they were not truly dead. God only destroyed their flesh and brought them to judgement. God's judgement and justice is perfect. You are only truly dead when you are dead to God.
I don't see how Christianity can do this. Jesus frequently references the Old Testament, so the Christian exegetical approach to those passages would be something along the lines of "Jesus is referencing irrelevant texts" if we were to discard or "push away" the OT. Who or what would that make Jesus? Maybe a conman.
* Note that when I spoke about the possibility of being pushed away from the OT, I was prescinding from the question of Christianity. Such a thing may or may not invalidate Christianity (even though I think it generally would).
Could you elaborate?
That's not correct because you've decontextualized a fantastic tale and are trying to plug in a few facts to 2025 western civilization.
Per the story, Amalek attacked the Israelites unprovoked from the rear, picking off the weakest after they had recently been freed from 400 years of slavery through a series of miracles. The Israelites were under divine protection as part of a covenant between God and the Israelites at that time. This attack characterized absolute evil directed against God himself.
The sole survivor's descendant of these Amaleki went on to try to murder all the Jews 600 years later. That is, Amalek are the metaphoric spawn of Satan in this story and boldly confronted the the very force of good (i.e. God himself).
So, to your question: if there were a community of demons, some old, some young, and some cute as a button, all of whom you know for certain will perform horrible acts of violence, destruction, and mayhem because God himself told you they would, are you not obligated to nip that in the bud?
That, if Bob Ross' argument proves persuasive, then one will be pushed away from the OT whether or not they are Christian. So if one is a Christian and Marcionism is untenable, then then persuasiveness of such an argument would ipso facto push one away from Christianity.
Edit:
Quoting Hanover
Else, given what Bob Ross has said, I am not convinced he would find this persuasive. He would ask whether it is permissible to "kill" a demon for their future crimes, Minority Report-style. Admittedly, I myself wouldn't have such qualms. :halo:
I'll start with a few base concepts. Your flesh (in and of itself) is already dead; it's literally decaying as you read this (as is everything else in this world), except for, to religious people, the "divine essence" or "soul" or what have you that keeps it intact. Meaning, when the real you (not your flesh or body, but the deeper conscious being that is eternal) leaves your body, the body immediately and rapidly starts to decay as does every thing without a soul in this world. According to the body of literature in question, it's not impossible to raise the dead. That means, for a divine being, death or "killing someone" as we mortal beings would imagine it, is little more than how a parent would send a child to their room for misbehaving. It's literally that impermanent. Just as easily undone as it was originally done. If not even easier. Basically, the hallmark of this and many if not most religion is "Death is a lie." It's not rational, in a scientific sense, so if you don't accept that, that's the reason you find yourself unsatisfied with the answers being provided. Which again is perfectly understandable.
As far as I was made aware, the Amalekite people were known sorcerers. If you want to believe magic is not real, yet stick with the underlying narrative, call it some sort of alien technology, if that pleases you. In the world described in the Bible, sorcery is real. You can alter your flesh to appear as an older person, a younger person, an animal, even an inanimate object. Easiest thing in the world; provided you know how. But for mortal beings, this requires either a temple or obelisk or some sort of magic-related practice or place. So, prevailing theory in my circle is, obviously during an invasion if you are unable to repel the enemy, you hide. These people, according to the world the Bible describes, "hide" a bit differently than how you or I would I.E. altering their flesh to "become" non-hostile objects, be they children, animals, or even empty barrels and crates. But they can only do that in close proximity to the object or obelisk from which they draw their power from. Hence the order to "Destroy everything living and non-living" I.E. raze the place to the ground. Again, this is not what one would call "rational." But if you're asking questions about a school of thought or world that is inherently "not rational" by modern understanding, this should be expected and par for the course.
Call it all hogwash if you will, but, again, the above scenarios seem to be the only "logical" (heh) answers and explanations that line up perfectly with the world described in the text you reference in the OP.
As for the rest, I have no idea. Other than not that long ago there was one option to survive: war. And as to war there were only two options further when it was all said and done: to kill an entire population so that they would never rise up and rebel against you for what you did to them, or enslave them, for the same reasons. As to which is more or less cruel, that's not something I have much to say about.
Of course, even if everything is true, including my justifications, it still leaves one nagging question unanswered: Why? Why all of this? Well, that's just something I believe we'll find out one day. Or, maybe we won't! Could you even imagine a more interesting existence? I think not,
Agree. I see Bob's point as an ordinary and natural theological hurdle. Man is by nature unable to want God to be God. Indeed, he himself wants to be God, and does not want God to be God" - Luther.
Who hasn't read the Hebrew Bible and thought, "If only I were in charge, I would have handled the situation better." However, upon deeper reflection, we find ourselves unjustified in our judgments of the divine. The Flood is the first central juncture point.
Yes, but you are thinking of liberty of indifference and not liberty for excellence; and this is why you will find it incoherent and probably downright contradictory to say that people in heaven cannot sin and yet are free. No different than how if you think freedom fundamentally consists in this indifferent ability to choose from contraries you will find it impossible that God is free, let alone perfectly and absolutely free, and yet cannot do evil.
There was nothing invalid about the form of my argument. Murder is the direct intentional killing of an innocent person. God did that in the OT, or rather it is purported that God did that. Either God did it and committed murder or He didn't. If He did and murder is unjust, then God is unjust. However, God is all-just, so God cannot commit murder; so the OT cannot be correct. You may not find it plausible, but the argument is logically sound.
Quoting Hanover
You are not obligated to nip that in the bud. The original premise is that God is perfectly good and not evil. God cannot and will not command you to do evil things, like murder. You cannot justify your evil acts by saying that God himself told you to do it. It is your choice.
Bob, the form of your argument is valid, it is logically sound. Let's look at this another way. My argument is that God did not murder the Amalekites because they are not truly dead. God only destroyed their flesh and brought them to judgement. They will be properly tried and will not be truly dead until God passes His judgement. This is not murder.
It's not a speculative preemptive strike, but one where we know what will happen if we relent because the warning was from God, not just some UN inspectors who might be wrong.
God didn't tell you to murder. He asked you to commit a justifiable killing.
If God asked you to commit a justifiable killing, then you won't be in trouble with God. Do you wonder why the "God defense" don't usually work in a court of law?
How could the OT be wrong if Jesus frequently referred to the Old Testament and identified himself as the Messiah, fulfilling prophecies found within those scriptures?
There are legally justified killings. Self defense is an example. If you know with 100% certainty that your failure to protect others will result in death, that would be justified. Our hypothetical is usual in that it gives literally god-like certainty, so I'd say it'd be justified.
No, I wouldnt. But lets say I did: is your argument that if it is immoral to kill or leave the infant, then the lesser of the two evils (that should be picked) is to kill it? I do accept the principle that if one has to do evil that they should do the lesser of the evils; but wouldnt this argument require that God had to do evil?
The reason I wouldnt accept the argument, on another note, is for two reasons:
1. It is sometimes permissible to indirectly intentionally kill an infant. Going back to our discussion about the principle of Double Effect, the tactical bomber, e.g., is justified in bombing the military base even if he knows with 100% certainty one innocent bystander will be killed.
2. Omissions and commissions are evaluated morally differently, such that if one can only do immoral acts then letting something bad happen is always the permissible and obligatory option. If I can only murder someone else to stop the train to save the five or let the five die, then letting the five die is morally permissible and obligatory; however, all else being letting the five die would be immoral. If you either have to let the children starve or murder them, then letting them starve is bad but morally obligatory and permissible.
I think you would have to, at the very least, deny the principle in 2 that
Well, this cannot be true. 1 Samual 15 makes it clear God is commanding Saul to directly intentionally kill them all. It even goes so far to explicate that Saul did it but kept some of the animals and God was annoyed with Saul for keeping the animals BUT NOT for directly intentionally killing the people:
He took Agag king of the Amalekites alive, and all his people he totally destroyed with the sword. 9 But Saul and the army spared Agag and the best of the sheep and cattle, the fat calves and lambseverything that was good. These they were unwilling to destroy completely, but everything that was despised and weak they totally destroyed.
Yes, this seems to be Aquinas answer; but then you are saying that murder is not the direct intentional killing of an innocent person OR that murder is not always unjust. Would you endorse one of those?
But this seems disanalogous. The tactical bomber is not indirectly intending to kill an innocent bystander if he successfully bombs the military base, notices he has another bomb leftover, and uses it on an innocent person riding their bike. Going in and winning a war against the Amalekites and then killing en masse the women and children is not indirectly intentional. Technically, one could argue that the women and children were all killed in the heat of battle; but how honestly plausible is that? When has that ever happened in war?
GregW, murder is the direct intentional killing of an innocent person and a killing is to end the natural life of a being. By your logic, then, if I go and kill someone it isn't murder because they haven't truly died since their soul is immutable and ends up in heaven.
It seems a medical professional who engages in euthanasia would fit this definition.
Because the OT claims God has done things that are evil; and God cannot do evil.
Yep, that's why it has been historical seen as immoral and has been illegal. Same with assisted suicide.
If you don't agree with the definition, then please provide the one you are using and we can discuss with that one.
Why did Jesus refer to Himself as the Messiah, the promised Person from the Old Testament, then? Do you give a reference to something wrong?
I havent responded in a while because Im trying to shorten this. It seems impossible to make this simple and make it satisfactory.
1. I think it is contradictory to think of God as all good, Jesus as God the Son, and that the God of the Israelites in the OT was not one and the same all good God whom Jesus loved as his Father, and taught us to love as our Father. Jesus spoke of his Father, and Jesus spoke of fulfilling the promises made to Abraham fortold by all of the prophets and worshiped by David and the judges.
God is certainly all good, so the task is to answer how are the things God told Saul to do something an all good God would tell us to do? The task is not to weed out all of the lies and misrepresentations in the Bible. That would contradict what Jesus did, what Jesus died for.
We can reject all of Bible, but we cant logically accept only the NT and say we are literally doing what God, in the New or the Old testaments. tells us to do.
So I think your whole approach, thinking the depictions in the OT are not God, is doomed to fail and will blind you to any real answer.
You need to trust there is an answer.
2. Who is innocent, of what are they innocent? My interpretation of the law against killing is that it is a sin to commit unlawful, unjustified killing of another person. It is NOT that we can never kill innocent people, but we can kill evil people.
So you need to stop looking for innocent people and guilty people to find who it is justified to kill and who isnt justifiable to kill.
The law against killing is a law I am to follow regardless of the guilt or innocence of the other person. The question when I am faced with the choice of whether to kill another person is not do they deserve it? The question is am I justified before God in killing that person. Am I justified before my fellow man and the dead person when I kill them?
So if a person just killed your son on your front lawn and was now breaking down your front door while screaming Im going to kill you all! And you take your shotgun and kill them, can you justify the killing of this person? Sounds like self defense. But what if you and your son just murdered 20 people. Was it still unjust for someone to kill your son and break down your door to kill you? Or lets say you and your son did nothing wrong, so you killed the maniac in self-defense. Should the maniac take any responsibility for his own death?
And if you are a bomber during war and your bombs kill the enemys bomb factory, and bridges and military installations, and some families and children, and hospitals, and some gun factories and tank factories, and some elderly and sick people - will you be justified before God and the enemy?
The answer to your question is not about the innocence of the children - it is always and only about whether God will find your actions justifiable. Or is always about who looks to God to justify their actions and who does not.
According to you, Bob, you know the guilt or innocence of others without God, by your own reason. You know children are innocent, you know killing the innocent is always only wrong, and you know the OT story describes God as killing innocent souls. And from all of these you conclude that either God does evil, or the OT is lying when it talks about God, so therefore the NT is lying when it talks about the OT.
That makes a mess of logic and of faith.
But I would say we should never judge the guilt or innocence of other souls (just our own - we can judge others actions, make laws, put people in jail, etc, but not condemn them to hell for sin), killing other people can be justified regardless of innocence or guilt, God never once ordered the death of an innocent soul, God does not do evil and Jesus taught us to love the God of the OT.
Basically, killing kids is terrible nasty business, but not per se evil. If you know Gods will but do not follow it (by omission) or resist it (by commission), that is per se evil. I feel it is easier to find all people deserve to be slaughtered for their sins then it is to see some people are innocent. Its not that babies are innocent, its that they are lovable and can be saved. But do you know what God did with the souls of the Amalekite children? If you believe Jesus was God, what do you think Jesus did for the Amalekite children?
One of the lessons of Saul story is that, if we would just listen to God, we can let God work out what is just and good and evil because by always listening to God, we are always good and justified. We have the ability to judge good and evil for sake of judging our selves and so that we can face God honestly and knowingly like men - not for the sake of judging others, and certainly not for judging God.
Again, more assumptions. If, right now, I break into your house, kill everything alive, including you (or so I thought, but you instead manage to escape) and afterward, while I have died, but my kids end up living in the house that rightfully belongs to you, and would kill you (gladly) if you tried to reclaim what is yours, are they innocent? Who is more justified in the death of the other, and why?
The fundamental concept is that people are individuals, souls that may have lived before, perhaps responsible for many terrible things, not "nationalities" that fundamentally possess an inherent right to exist simply for existence sake.
Is it just because God says so, or does God say so because it is just? :)
I agree that there are legally justified killings. If you commit a legally justified killing, then you will likely not be in trouble with the law. let's look at a hypothetical example. God asked a man to hijack an airplane and crash it into a building full of evil people. In obeying God's command, is he justified in killing thousands of people? Is this a justifiable killing in a court of law?
Bob, by your reasoning, if "murder is the direct intentional killing of an innocent person and a killing is to end the natural life of a being", then aren't we destined to be murdered by God eventually and intentionally as we lead our innocent ordinary lives? By that reasoning, all human deaths are murders by God. I would argue that If God go and kill someone it isn't murder because they haven't truly died since their soul is immutable and ends up in heaven to face God's judgement.
What definition of murder are you using?
You are just shifting the goal post to a discussion about what constitutes innocence. There is a wide consensus that unjust acts involve a victim and a victim, as the name implies, was innocent.
Innocence, I would say, has to do with being morally blameless as it relates to the incident at hand. Hence, an ex-convict would be an innocent victim if they were shot point blank on a sidewalk because someone didn't like the fact they had been previously convicted of a crime.
I didn't give a reference for that because I do not see the relevance. The OP is arguing that the OT depicts God in a light that is contradictory to God's nature. Even if the NT depicts God accurately or inaccurately, that is a separate issue.
Sure. If it was "just someone". But what if the person who was shot actually got away with a crime they were never charged with, say killing a man's sister, and the person who shot him was said man whom he robbed of a family member.
Getting deep down to the root issue in question, to refine it (or perhaps invalidate the premise itself), while distracting for some, is not "moving goalposts", respectfully.
You are making my point for me! In my example I am right that they are innocent because they are morally blameless as it relates to the incident; whereas you are right in your example that we could import variables into the hypothetical where they are not morally blameless in ways where it may be justified to kill them.
My point was that murder is considered normally killing someone that is innocent, although I would refine it a bit, and you were asking about what constitutes innocence. In both our examples, it is evident that innocence is about whether or not a person is morally blameworthy in a relevant way for the other person(s) to be justified in what they did to them.
I said you were shifting the goal-post because obviously innocence is a key component of murder: no one disputes that and my original comment was a definition of murder.
What variables? You mean truth and the actual reality of the situation at hand? That's a bit of an abrasively dismissive way of describing such, wouldn't you say? But alright then.
Seriously. Imagine yourself just on the crosswalk and having the misfortune of witnessing a child being stabbed. Or something else egregious, whatever suits you. You see the man who discards his knife and then walks nonchalant coming up to the scene just when an officer does, and said man acts in utter shock. You tell the officer "He just stabbed him! He threw the knife over that ledge!". And the officer responds, "oh you're just importing variables into the hypothetical". It is not a hypothetical. It literally happened. At least, allegedly, per the text we're discussing.
Quoting Bob Ross
Okay, so like I said. Maybe your premise is invalid. Simply, perhaps you're just wrong about one or more things. This is why religion is not generally a "hot topic" in the halls of philosophy. Because faith is belief, and belief is anything you deem fit. It's your right, after all.
You didn't answer my question. I asked why Jesus called himself the promised Person, Messiah, cited in the Old Testament, if the Old Testament is wrong. What is the God of the Old Testament? Is He real or is he a fiction made by people?
Quoting Bob Ross
Bob, I am using your definition of murder. In Genesis, God directly intentionally cursed man to suffer and eventually die when He expelled man from the Garden of Eden. You have many posts saying that God directly intentionally killed all the Amalekites. I am arguing that God killing us or letting us die is not murder because we are not (yet) dead to God until after His judgement.
Ok, thank you for the clarification. If you are using my definition and leveraging that God is not murdering people because they can't truly die, then no one ever commits murder. Are you accepting that? I want to make sure we are on the same page about the consistent conclusion of your position here.
If I kill an innocent infant, then the same logic would apply: I have not murdered them because they haven't truly died.
That's why I added in the "and a killing is to end the natural life of a being" since rational souls have a supernatural component that the stereotypical idea of killing does not apply.
I don't see the relevance: can you elaborate on how this relevant to the OP?
Let me grant you that Jesus relates himself to the messiah from the OT which, in turn, is related to the God of the OT (the father). My argument demonstrates that the OT gets some stuff wrong about God because God can't do some of the things the OT claims God did; so those portions are false. However, it could be true that some of the other portions are accurate or none of it is. This argument certainly would jeopardize the standard Christian view that the Bible is inerrant.
When we discuss hypotheticals, they are in a vacuum: they are ceteris paribus. We add in variables to test our reasoning and decipher what we believe. You keep shifting the goal posts because you are not quite envisioning or appreciating this aspect of hypotheticals.
If I say is it permissible to run a red light all else being equal?, then it is not a valid response to say it is permissible if its 1 AM with no traffic and your wife is bleeding out in the car while you rush her to the hospital. Do you see what I mean?
Thats not at all whats happening. Thats adding context to a real scenario: these are hypothetical scenarios. Do you understand the difference between a hypothetical scenario and a real-life scenario?
Nothing about my definition of murder is faith-based or religious: I dont know why you went there.
To be clear, if you reject that murder definitionally has to do with killing an innocent person then you are using a definition that is completely and utterly foreign to the modern justice system. A definition that includes killing guilty people would imply that there may be scenarios where what normally is considered legitimate self-defense is murder and scenarios where normal murder is not self-defense and yet not murder or manslaughter.
Bob, here's the flaw in your logic. You cannot compare yourself to God. Just because God does not commit murder does not mean that no one ever commits murder. If you kill an innocent infant, then you have committed murder even though to God the infant is not truly dead. But to you, and more importantly to the justice system, the infant is dead. Just because the murdered infant is not dead to God does not mean that you are absolved of this evil act.
Then you need to refurbish your position. You said that God does not murder because when he kills us we don't truly die. This applies to all killings within your view.
You need to clearly define what murder is and then apply that standard to God's killings. So far you just keep ad hoc patching your view. You say God can't murder because you don't really die, but we both agree that's false; so now you are appealing to God just being special.
I'll ask you again: how do you define murder?
Your hypothetical assumes God assessed the evil of the people within the building and determined that their death would save the world from greater harm, or perhaps he assessed their just dessert to be death by airplane. That is, this was not the killing of innocent people, and it would go somewhere along the lines of any other preemptive response (like self defense) or just punishment.
This is not to suggest that when someone believes God tells them to do something that they are justified in doing it or that that there isn't real danger in relying upon what you believe the will of God is when you act. Your hypothetical, strictly construed, is that God directed the order, so here we know it was God's will.
We can hypothesize a rational basis for any decision. As in, should I use a baby as a baseball bat? In a typical day, no you probably shouldn't do that, but suppose the only way to save a village from complete annihilation is to beat back the attackers with a slinging baby? Maybe the act itself would bring such fear to the attackers, they'd leave the village alone for millenia. But this ridiculous hypothetical makes an important assumption: you know with certainty the baby as weapon will be effective, you know with certainty that there are no lesser alternatives, and you know that without it, your whole village will die.
How can you know all this? You know it because your hypothetical asserted it when it said the information came form God.
Back to Amalek. We are working within a scenario where we know God is talking to the actors in the story. There have been miracles of plagues and the parting of the sea and God seems to be having fairly open conversations with Moses. Presenting this story as myth, a work of fiction, but with a consistency among its characters, we say of course the response to Amalek was justified. We have a super-hero built in the story that is always right.
You didn't reply to my last post here, so I don't know what you think about it. The current discussion started from the point that I replied to your post, in which you were saying that OT is wrong.
Quoting Bob Ross
Why didn't Jesus Himself say that portion of the OT is false? How could Jesus miss such an important thing in His teaching, if the purpose of His teaching is to complete the prophecy as well?
You may be right, Bob, although I don't fully understand your argument. Mine was directed against utilitarians. Since you are not a utilitarian, it would probably have been better for me not to have brought it up. We agree that God must be just, and that is what is troubling you about the O.T. So I'd rather not discuss any further here the question of whether there is any limit to the amount of goodness God could create, but rather use my limited time to try to address your concerns about slavery.
I may have missed something: I apologize. I still dont see the relevance of:
Given Jesus failed to address the OTs mistakes and given him referring to himself as the messiah and that the OT is errant, it follows that Jesus probably wasnt God.
With respect to your post you linked:
Goodness is the equality of essence and esse; so it follows that badness is the privation (inequality) of essence and esse. So badness to goodness is like darkness to light.
You would have to provide a different account of goodness to make it work with your view that evil is some positive, real thing out there. My point was that I am a privation theorist about evil; so I do no think it is just as unreal as darkness.
:up:
Feel free to let me know your thoughts on Biblical slavery.
1. The first passage (Ex 21:20-21) is about beating slaves, as you say: specifically, beating them to death. Saying it is not to be punished is not the same as saying it is permissible. In the Ten Commandments there is one against murder!
2. It is not altogether clear to me that the second passage (Ex 21:7-11) is about raping women and selling them into sex slavery. Verse 9 suggests that the daughter who is sold becomes a wife or something like a wife. If she is not a wife, then the man who bought her (or his son) would be committing adultery, which is also forbidden in the Ten Commandments.
Be that as it may, in the Old Testament we already see the commandments to love God and neighbor (Mt 22:34-40, Dt 6:5, Lev 19:18) A father who sold his daughter into any kind of undesirable situation would be not loving his daughter.
Polygyny is tolerated, but I think its portrayal is never favorable, frequently unfavorable. Look at all the troubles resulting from the multiple wives in the families of Abraham, Jacob, and David!
3. A wise and just lawgiver will sometimes permit acts that are wrong, because the evils of repressing them are worse than the evils of allowing them. (Cf. Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I-II, Q. 96, A. 2 ) As Jesus said in the New Testament, "For your hardness of heart Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginnning it was not so." (Matthew 19:8)
Is it not the same with the regulations concerning slavery?
4. "Modern readers are distressed by the inclusion of laws concerning slavery in this biblical code (Ex 21:1-11, 20-21, 26-27, 32), but for ancient peoples, including Israel, slavery was simply an unquestioned reality and a part of life. When the laws of the Covenant Code are compared with other ancient Near Eastern law codes, it is worth nothing that they emphasize limiting the duration of slavery (Ex 21:1-6), protecting the marital rights of female slaves (Ex 21:7-11), and providing sanctions against the abuse of slaves (Ex 21:20, 26-27)." ---John Bergsma and Brant Pitre, A Catholic Introduction to the Bible: The Old Testament (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2018), ch. 7, "Exodus", p. 181.
5. To sum up: the laws given in the Old Testament restrained evil gradually, not suddenly, because of the hardness of men's hearts.
6. Re-reading the OP, I've just noticed that you anticipated a reply along these lines and have said that it turns God into a consequentialist. I don't think it does, but please give me some time to reflect on that before repeating your objection ....
Probably or certainly!? If God fails to convey His message, then He is not God.
Quoting Bob Ross
I would like to bring you to the crux of our discussion: You mentioned that evil exists, but it is not real. Don't you see a problem in this statement? I am afraid that you need to read through our discussion to see why we reached such a crux.
I dont see why that would be the case. Although maybe you are getting at a divine hiddenness objection.
I see why you see an issue; but there is none. I distinguish between being and reality; and you dont.
Something has being if it is; but something is real if and only if it is a member of reality.
For example, the color orange that I see, phenomenally, has being but is not a member of realityso it exists but is not real. A chair is real because it has being and is a member of reality.
I would view darkness more like having being in the sense of the color orange and less in the sense of the chair; but granted it is an absence which is different than the color orange.
Agreed, God cannot be a consequentialist. But how does making restrictions on slavery, to make it less evil, turn Him into one?
Suppose I am a state legislator in a country where abortion is permitted up to "viability". I believe that abortion, the deliberate killing of an unborn human being, is always wrong. I vote for a bill prohibiting abortions after six weeks of pregnancy, with penalties for abortion providers, no penalties for the mothers, and no exceptions except life of the mother. This law, if it could be enforced, would drastically reduce the frequency of the injustice of abortion, and that is my intent. Does that make me a consequentialist? Am I having an abortion myself? Am I providing abortions or helping someone to have one? Am I telling people it is okay to have abortions?
The law is on the books, but it can't be enforced. Then the nation's Supreme Court reverses Roe v. Wade, turning abortion law back to the states. The barbarians come into my state with their money and their ads and flood the airwaves and tubes with an actor saying "I wouldn't want my 15-year old daughter to go through the pain of having to bear a child conceived by rape", etc.---not noticing or caring that he'd be wanting to kill his own grandchild---and they have a referendum and the people pass a state constitutional amendment to make abortion legal again up to "viability".
I tell you that to prevent that I would have voted for a six-week ban with exceptions for rape and incest, and I'm no consequentialist. I think it would be my duty to make clear, publicly, my opposition to abortion under any circumstances, and my reasons for voting for the limited ban.
So where does this leave the God of the Old Testament? Did He speak against slavery through the prophets or the rabbis? Not all that they said would have been recorded, so we don't know. Except, what's this?
Does this passage contradict the other (Ex 21:7-11)? If so, I will not be so bold as to draw any and all logical consequences from it. But rather, doesn't the other passage apply to the case where a man has broken the law by selling his daughter, and moderate her circumstances?
Hmm ... I feel like I'm ranting more than expressing myself with proper logical clarity. And you might object that my declaring "I am not a consequentialist", either on behalf of myself or of the state legislator, does not prove that I'm not or he isn't, any more than a man's declaring "I have always known that I am the Queen of England" proves he is so.
So let's get down to the logic, shall we?
Could we start with a definition of consequentialist? I mean, I think everybody understands something like "Consequentialism ... is simply the view that normative properties depend only on consequences .... the most prominent example is probably consequentialism about the moral rightness of acts, which holds that whether an act is morally right depends only on the consequences of that act or of something related to that act ...." (https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2023/entries/consequentialism/)
So what I'm trying to ask is:
1. What kind of consequentialist do you think the O.T. God would have to be? I mean, for example, an act or rule based consequentialist, and what idea of the kinds of properties of consequences, such as pleasure and pain, that are relevant, etc.
2. How does His making rules to mitigate slavery, without prohibiting it entirely make Him a consequentialist of that kind?
Well, in the case of the law, I think it's important to consider that there is a difference between what God wills and what God permits. I don't think the law is intended as a guide for ideal behavior. The law restrains existing practice. The section you cited is not a positive commandment. It would perhaps be more challenging to consider some of the positive commandments re punishments (some of which seems excessive), or even the practice of animal sacrifice.
Yet in considering the law it seems important to consider the entire historical purpose of the law within the context of God's relationship with man.
Since plenty seems objectionable to modern eyes there, I would think the overarching question would be: "if God was good, could God have given a tribal, near eastern group like the Hebrews this sort of law, or would a "good God" necessarily have to give them a more enlightened law?
I am not sure this question is all that different from: "if God is good, would God allow near eastern culture (really all cultures) to develop these sorts of practices?" Either way, God is allowing these practices. I am not sure if questions of guilt by commission (giving the law that doesn't go far enough) versus omission (contexts without a law) are that different when it comes to divine causality, or at least it isn't clear to me why it should make a difference in this case, when the law was going to be broken anyways. Basically: could a "good God," have given no law at all, but then if a "good God" does give a law, it must be an ideal one?
It seems relevant here that even the commands that were given, even in the context of signs and wonders, were immediately disobeyed. If God knew that even a "slow pitch" law that conformed to contemporary standards would be ignored or abused, what exactly would be the purpose of an even higher standard, which would likely be ignored to an even greater extent? But then the prophets begin to expand upon the law and its spirit. So, one could see it as more or a process. Our culture tends to be quite individualistic, but I think this makes more sense if one thinks of God as working with Israel over centuries, and man across history.
We are talking about a God who is Omnipresent, Omniscient, and Omnipotent. Such a God, for example, could present Himself to individuals, so there would be no doubt, and teach the correct way to live life, so there would be nothing wrong. Why does God hide from us? Prophecies have all failed!
Quoting Bob Ross
I do.
Quoting Bob Ross
That says nothing to me. To me, real means actually existing as a thing, whether it is different modes of experience or beings.
Quoting Bob Ross
I cannot see how this follows given my definition of real.
Quoting Hanover
Hanover, you appear to be saying that as long as you are certain that the order cane from God, you are justified in the killings of thousands of people. Sadly, I think that most people agree with you. Today, Presidents, Prime Ministers, and religious leaders have ordered men to fly airplanes to drop bombs into buildings full of people, innocent or not. These are all considered to be legally justified killings, we no longer need to use God for justification.
Bob, we are at loggerheads because not only can't we agree on the definition of murder, but we also can't agree on the definition of death. A murder must have a dead victim. If the victim is alive, then it's not murder. My position, my argument is that God did not commit murder in the Old Testament because not only is God perfectly good but also the people He supposedly murdered is not truly dead.
Let me use you in a story as an example. You were with your friend living an innocent ordinary life when God appears and struck you with a thunder bolt. Your friends all said that you were murdered by God when they buried you. You were brought to heaven, body and soul., and in the presence of God, you asked: Him why did you murdered me? God replied, Bob, I didn't murder you, you're still alive. But since you accuse me of murdering you, you are dead to me. You immediately disappeared from the presence of God. Now you are truly dead. Bob, let me ask this, were you murdered by God on earth as well as in heaven?
The person who says that being killed in the hand of a God who is Just and All Wise is wrong is wrong! Of course, after accepting that such a God exists.
I appreciate your thoughts!
Firstly, endorsing a law that does not protect against certain evil is not the same as endorsing a law that protects evil. To use your example about pro-life voting, a pro-life law that explicates it is impermissible to abort after 6 weeks is not technically endorsing abortion prior and up to 6 weeks; whereas a law that explicates it is permissible to abort before and up to 6 weeks is endorsing abortion. The former is permissible for a person to vote for (assuming thats the best law they can manage to get passed) whereas the latter would be impermissible. This is a subtle and seemingly trivial note but is really crucial.
I think you are focusing on the wrong part of the passage in Ex. 21:20-21: it declares it morally permissible to beat slaves because they are property: it states that explicitly. It doesnt merely outline that beating slaves is immoral. The claim that beating slaves is immoral is true and theres nothing wrong with endorsing that even if slavery is permitted under the current legal system (so long as you didnt vote or comply with that being in place).
I would say God is acting consequentialistic, and so would you in the pro-life example if you endorsed the latter example I gave, because He is endorsing immorality as a means towards a good end; and this means that the action being intrinsically wrong is being ignored or denied (which is unique to consequentialism).
Moreover:
I am not endorsing abortion by voting in a bill that only explicates that abortion after a certain stage is immoral and illegal: if I could pass a law that banned it outright and I still chose to endorse this other option then it would imply that I find it morally permissible to do (all else being equal).
You are absolutely right that one is permitted to limit the evil effects of evil as best one can; but this does not include doing evil as a means towards that good end. If you go around arguing that abortion is perfectly fine up to the 6 week mark, then you are doing something immoral even if it is for a good end of mitigating the effects of abortion; and you dont have to do that to endorse a bill that limits abortion without banning it outright.
I see the appeal, but that would be a consequentialistic move. You are saying that you would endorse a bill that explicates that in the case, e.g., of rape it is not wrong to abort when you know it is wrong. It is intrinsically wrong to abort in the case of rape and subsequently immoral to advocate or permit abortion in the case of rape. To permit it anyways is to do something immoral as a means towards the good end of mitigating the evil of abortion.
No, Leviticus is coinciding with it, in fact. The author is saying, just like Exodus, Israelites cannot own each other as slaves: they can, however, own other nations as slaves. This is a common practice and rule back then: we also see it in Islam.
I accept the definition you gave from standford. I would say it is a family of normative ethical theories that fundamentally posits that the intrinsic badness of an act is either irrelevant to or not real as it relates to evaluating wrong and right action.
I am not sure. Rule consequentialism is a phony version of consequentialism though: that one doesnt really meet the definition you gave IMHO, although people would consider it one.
I am going to stop here and let you respond.
Not quite. As I mentioned to another person on this thread:
Yes, so your argument is from Divine Hiddenness. This assumes that it is better for God to reveal Himself constantly to people throughout history than for them to come to know Him from His effects/creation; and I am not so sure that is true, although I get the appeal.
I am saying that some things exist but are not real: do you agree with that in principle?
You never provided a definition of murder: I am still waiting to hear it.
Your defense of my charge of God committing murder is that no one can commit murder on earth because no person actually dies completely when they are killed.
Everyone would call this God killed you. For you, you couldnt say that because you didnt actually die. How would you describe it?
Lets take a step back, though: you are saying that God didnt kill melets forget if its murder for a second. Do you agree God killed me?
This is incoherent with the hypothetical as outlined before this sentence. If God struck you down with a thunder bolt, then your body lost its lifeyou were killed: you are dead. Now, your soul has a faculty of mind which is immutable because it is immaterial; so although the body and the souls faculties which pertain to bodily/material functions ceases, the mind continues to live. You have now posited that God either did not end your bodys lifekill youbut instead teleported you to his throne to judge you OR God did in fact kill you and then resurrected your body. Which is it in your view?
You are equivocating the killing of a person in the natural sense of the body dying and the soul be killed.
Yeah, but you entirely misunderstand my post. If you posit that God, the knower of all, in fact said that X is the best course, then that is by definition the best course.
You are discussing politicians declaring knowledge of what God dictates to justify their behavior.
Quoting Hanover
So if the knowledge of the future (i.e. foreknowledge) is certain then preemptive action is not unjust? The only problem with Minority Report was that the precogs did not provide perfect certainty?
I think this raises problems of justice, even apart from the can of worms it opens regarding free will. I don't think knowing someone's crime in the future is sufficient justification for an act in the present that would be justified in response to their crime in the present. I don't think we can punish for future acts, or even act preemptively in that particular way. But such a stance depends on free will, and you might deny demons free will, in which case the dispute would turn on whether the Amalekite infant is a demon who lacks free will or a human who possesses free will.
If the computer says mate in 12 and it gives you the moves, then those are the best moves. I get how giving the moves might be wrong because it deprives the players the chance to play themselves, but there could be an instance where it's better not to all things considered.
"God says do it, therefore you must do it," simply begs the question against the argument you are up against, namely, "The true God would never tell you to do such a thing." If the OT God is God, then it is correct to follow his advice. But the whole question is whether the OT God is God. Or in this sub-case, the question is whether God would tell you to do what is unjust, i.e. killing someone in response to an act that they will perform some time in the future.
Why are you unsure Bob? It is obvious that Humans cannot handle the situation well, given all the prophecies, inventions, etc. There is injustice everywhere. I am sure that you are not in favor of war, but there are people suffering from it in certain places. This is God's creation. Would you do the same if you were God? Let's create and let injustice be in it!
Quoting Bob Ross
The experience is the only thing that we have direct access to so we are sure that experience exists but not real (please see the following). The trueness of resst of things is the subject of discussion, for example, external reality. There aree two scenarios available here: 1) You are Omnipresent and 2) You are not omnipresent. In the first case, you are certain about the existence of other things since you experience them all. In the second case, you don't have direct access to things. There is no solid argument for the existence or non-existence of reality as well. So we cannot tell for sure.
There are four combinations that you can make with the two words existence and real by adding the prefix un, including the first case that there is any prefix un: 1) Existence and real, 2) unexistence and unreal, 3) unexistence and real, and 4) existence and unreal. Real is defined as: actually existing as a thing. Existence is defined as: The state of having objective reality. So the definition of real depends on the definition of existence. Please consider the order in these combinations. Given this, (1) is the correct combination, since it refers to the state of affairs that something that exists and is real, like the mind. (2) is a correct combination as well. (3) is definitely a wrong combination. (4) is also a correct combination, like experience. So we are left with the mind and experience. I think you are arguing that goodess and the mind are somehow related. I see no relation between them at all. Good and evil to me are features of our experiences only.
Allowing for evil is necessary when creating a good world. A world with natural laws allows for natural evil; a world with persons allows for person evil.
I could see your point to an extent with respect to what may seem as pointless evil, but I dont accept that they really are pointless.
I didnt understand what you were saying: can you say it a different way? Are you saying that getting stabbed isnt evil, but that our suffering involved in getting stabbed is evil?
Why create a natural world at all? Why not create a paradise without suffering or scarcity?
A good God is not allowed to allow evil in His creation. The God of the Old Testament allows evil and good in His creation, though. Good and evil are fundamental features of our experiences. We do things for a reason, which could be pleasure or pain. Therefore, the God of the Old Testament is right since something is missing in a creation without good or evil! Of course, if His intention is to create a universe in which you could find good and evil!
Why? Evil is a privation of the good that God always wills.
Given your previous elaboration that I didnt understand, I dont think you are talking about good and evil in the classical sense: it seems like you are talking about happiness and suffering.
To be fair, it was, but we didn't listen. According to the text in question. Whenever governments try to control birthrates and population they get called "fascist" or "genocidal" when specifically controlling populations who only proliferate a certain area through their own historic genocide. But since "every kid is innocent", nothing ever gets done.
If people lived within their means, having kids only when a society deems necessary, we would be living in paradise. But people need to satiate a useless ego, primal lust and pleasure. So until those people who promote doing so unrestrained are neutralized, strife and suffering is all the average person will ever know.
This made rethink this whole OP. My first response was going to be to point out that you're assuming a particular hermeneutic that might be subject to challenge. That is, you're asking whether Yahweh would fare well if judged as, say, an American citizen who decreed the annihalation of a neighboring community. My response would be that you can't ask that question because the OT context must be maintained, meaning that Yahweh is a character in a story with stipulated perfectness, so it must be better that Amalek be destroyed than it not. The OT God is the entity that literally spoke the universe into existence after all, and he should be trusted to know what ultimately is best.
But this is overly simplified, and it overlooks something not addressed (I don't think) in this thread regarding "What OT God do you describe?" As in, are we improperly assuming that the OT god is consistently described throughout the OT, and is the God of Genesis and Exodus the same God of Deuteronomy, and is he the same as described in Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Amos? I say that because there is something very different from the God of Genesis who says "Let there be light" and later writings where God ceases to directly interact with the Jews, the prophets cease to exist, and there are no more miracles.
Early on God is anthropomorphic, gets angry, debates with humans, performs miracles, then he turns to a lawgiver and demands obedience to the law, and then he moves to what we consider more justice and righteousness based principles.
So what do you do? Do you say the OT God is actually different gods during different periods? Do you say he's an evolving god, changing over time? Do you just say the bible is a hodge podge of different books so it just isn't consistent? It would seem that if you can't say the OT God is the same God throughout the OT, you shouldn't be worried that the NT God is different also. On the other hand, if the OT God can be many different things and still be the same God, then he can also be the NT God too.
What is really being pointed out in the OP is biblical inconsistency, which is problematic only if you believe the Bible (OT and NT together) should be consistent as a single work. It's clear that it's not a single work and that it's not from a single author, so from a critical literary analysis, these problems aren't problems. They just give us insight into how the document was pieced together.
Well, my argument was an external critique; but one could make an internal critique that the NT is incongruent with the OT: it just isn't as powerful of an argument.
In a previous post, you said:
Quoting Hanover
You are saying that as long as you are certain that the order came from God, you are justified in carrying out that order because it is God's will.
The problem is not that following X is the best course. The problem is in authenticating X and personally deciding that X is the course of God's will.
Your argument if I understood it is that the NT description of God is the true God and to the extent the OT God is incongruent with the NT God, it does not descibe God. Yours is therefore both an external critique and an internal critique.
The greater part of of my point is that you cannot condemn the OT God until you define the OT God. Your definition of the OT God comes entirely from Genesis and Exodus. My post referenced the fact that the God of Leviticus and Deuteronomy describe a different God as is further modified in the books of the prophets. The Book of Esther doesn't even mention God's name. What you're then saying is that you can't figure out how to make the earliest renditions of God in the OT consistent with the God of the NT. The point is you can't make the later OT God compatible with early OT God either.
What does this mean? It means the sacred literature of the Jews and Christians describe an evolving God, which says nothing about God as much as it does the people conceptionalizing God.
No, what I'm saying is that as long as the order came from God, you are justified in carrying out the order because it is God's will. Quoting GregWThis is obvious. My point, and you can go back through my posts and show where I've said anythying inconsistent with it, is that Exodus stipulates that God, the creator of the universe, decreed the destruction of Amalek. Those are the facts of the book. The book might well be fiction, and I do believe it is, but those are nontheless the undisputed facts of the book. Under the terms of the fictional tale, the destruction is just.
That is, if you're going to read a fictional book, you have to accept its fictional metaphysics and you can't keep jumping between the fantasy on the pages and the real world before you.
It's like if I write a book and name Knute the smartest person who ever lived. Every time Knute does something apparently idiotic, we later learn it was brilliant. He plays 4-D chess and we just have to wait and see how things unfold. That is the Amalek story. God said kill them all. Saul left one standing by the name of Agag. 600 years later Agag's greatest of grandchildren Haman tried to wipe the Jews off the face of the planet. Shoulda listened to God. That's the moral.
This is what I see @Bob Ross doing in the OP and in the thread:
1. I believe in God, and therefore I have a conception of God
2. I understand that Christians see their God depicted in both the Old and New Testaments
3. My conception of God is consistent with the New Testament
4. My conception of God is not consistent with the Old Testament, and here's why...
5. (I am therefore resistant to accepting orthodox Christianity because of these considerations)
So I don't see an internal critique taking place. There is no a priori commitment to the NT, and the argument does not pertain to an inconsistent canon. It does present Christians with an allusion to an inconsistent canon, but that inconsistency is not the thrust of the OP.
Quoting Hanover
The OP actually addresses this in part:
Quoting Bob Ross
I have an argument for that:
P1) Perfect Being, like God, cannot do wrong/sin
P2) Imperfect beings, like creatures, can do wrong/sin
C1) So, there would eventually be sin in an imperfect creation
C2) So, creating an imperfect creation is wrong
C3) Therefore, a perfect God cannot create an imperfect creation (from P1 and C2)
Please note that I did not mention good and evil in my argument. I don't equate good with right and evil with wrong. I already defined good and evil in one of my threads, "From morality to equality". Please find the thread here if you are interested.
Quoting Bob Ross
I don't understand you! Good God can only will good.
Quoting Bob Ross
Which elaboration didn't you understand? I would be happy to provide further explanation.
Quoting Bob Ross
Please find my definition of good and evil in my thread that I mentioned in this post.
Let me post my full quote for context.
Quoting GregW
In a previous post, we have argued over the definition of murder:
Quoting GregW
Bob, this is only true if the murder, killing, death is not sanctioned by God. So, murder is a death not sanctioned by God.
Quoting Bob Ross
In a previous post we have also argued over why God does not commit murder does not mean that no one can commit murder on earth.
Quoting GregW
Quoting Bob Ross
Bob, you were murdered, killed, made dead by God when He struck you with a thunderbolt. All your friends blasphemously accused God of murdering you. You were dead to your friends, but you are not dead to God. This distinguishes the definition of death to your friend and the definition of death to God.
Quoting Bob Ross
Yes?
Quoting Bob Ross
This is the full quote:Quoting GregW
You are truly dead when you are dead to God. This is God's definition of death.
Quoting Bob Ross
There is no equivocating, when you are dead to God, you are truly dead body and soul.
We apparently disagree on the definition of death. What is your definition of death?
Quoting Bob Ross
If that would be a consequentialist move, then that is not what I meant to say. I see a morally significant difference between laws that say
(a) Abortion is prohibited after 6 weeks of pregnancy not resulting from rape or incest.
and
(b) A woman has a right to an abortion during the first 6 weeks of pregnancy and in all cases where pregnancy is due to rape or incest. All other abortions are prohibited.
It's (a) I would support, if I couldn't get anything better; not (b).
I think it's generally understood that what is not prohibited by the law is (legally) permitted, allowed, tolerated. That's not the same as being condoned or approved. For example, there is no law here against smoking outdoors or in my own home, but that doesn't mean the government approves of it.
I think he meant "Evil is a privation of (the good that God always wills)". What God wills is the good, of which evil is the privation; God does not will the privation itself.
To quickly note, this would be confirmation bias. My argument is an external critique, and there is one fundamental way to contend with it: to demonstrate that my understanding of Gods nature is flawed in a relevant regard where what is spoke of about God in the OT is accurate and immune to my claim it portrays God as unjust. This could be done by depicting Gods nature as differently that is consistent with the Bible, which is something William Lane Craig does for example, or it could be done by noting a flaw in my own logic or position to merely eliminate my critique from the table of plausible accounts of Gods nature. As @Leontiskos noted, my OP is an external critiquenot an internal one. A Christian could hold a view of God consistent with the Bible, at least prima facie, and it would be immune to my argument if they simply reject my metaphysics of God.
I would say that, yes, it portrays the same God: that is the most plausible reading of the OT texts. Theres no evidence that historically they were discussing different gods.
Yes, but then we run into a new issue that is interesting: why would God divinely inspire a collection of scriptures that portray Himself as a disparate collection of gods? Someone might appeal to the idea that He is giving us spiritual lessons; but then we run into the issue that we arent even trying to read the texts in a literal sensewhich jeopardizes the NT.
No, the OP itself just leverages the kind of argument @Leontiskos gave you. I do think there is a separate issue that Christians have been trying to solve ever since the birth of the movement which is an internal critique of how the NT and OT seem prima facie to talk about God in mutually incompatible ways. The NT describes God as merciful and loving; whereas the OT version of God is pure wrath and punishment. This is a different argument though.
But, then, you are denying the legitimacy of the Bible itself; which isnt a rejoinder to the OP. The OP is challenging those that believe the Bible is legitimate.
So are you saying @Bob Ross basically has no skin in the OT/Biblical revelation game?
Bob has a conception of God.
This conception of God happens to be consistent with maybe the best parts of the NT. (Probably not all of the NT since the NT often upholds and seeks to support the OT.)
But separate and apart from that, in this OP, Bob is asking Christians and theologians, how they can reconcile a NT type conception of God with an OT type conception of God? How is a good God capable of doing what God is said to do in the OT?
The answer need make no reference to any actual scripture - it is a philosophical/theological question about goodness, Gods, and child killing.
(See, all along I thought Bob was a Christian - no wonder my posts meant so little and were off target.)
But @Bob Ross is that the gist?
You conflated God doing wrong with allowing wrong. There is no possible world where a perfect being can exist that is not God; which you may use this to argue God shouldnt create anything then. However, many people like myself would say that there is nothing wrong with allowing evil if the creation is properly ordered to what is perfectly good. Remember, by evil I am taking a privation theory position. Evil is a lack of goodness: it is not a real property of things but a privation of the real property of goodness. God cannot will for a privation to happen; but He can will things that are good and privations happen somewhere in the interactions between those things.
I think you also might be claiming that if God willed the creation of only good things then they would never be deprived of goodness; but thats not true. For starters, persons have free will to will the deprivation of goodness.
What I meant to say is that God only wills what is good; and badness is a privation of that good which can occur afterwards.
Goodness as a property is not identical to pleasurableness; nor is badness identical to sufferingness. Pleasure is good all else being equal and suffering is bad; but that is not to say that what makes something good is that it is pleasurable or what makes something bad is that it causes suffering. You are confusing what can be predicated to be good or bad with what goodness and badness themselves refer to.
Again, goodness is the equality of the things essence and existence: it is oneness; and oneness is that which all things aim at, which makes it always desirable.
I would agree if you remove the not resulting from rape or incest. I get the appeal to vote for it because it is like well, its better than nothing!; but it is condoning, in law, abortion during rape or incest; which is distinct from omitting it from the discussion.
This may sound nitpicky, but if they said something like:
m (a): Abortion is prohibited after 6 weeks of pregnancy in the case that the sex was consensual that resulted in the pregnancy or the sex was performed by a man and woman that are not immediately related.
M (a) is permissible to endorse; (a) is not. In practicality, to your point, I honestly would just vote for (a) since it is basically saying the same thing as m (a) for practical purposes. The reason I am splitting hairs here, is because Godwho can decide completely freely what to endorse and what not towould not divinely inspire, by analogy, (a) but could inspire m (a).
I hold God to a higher standard then myself; because, as you noted, we may tolerate laws because we dont have the power and freedom to inspire what we really think. Can we agree on that?
Edit: I would view myself voting for "(a)" as a tolerance and not an endorsement although technically it is an endorsement. Does that make sense?
I'm having trouble seeing a real distinction between (a) and m(a). It seems to me they say the same thing, just different words. You yourself say they are "basically saying the same thing ... for practical purposes." The purpose of a law is to regulate actions, and if two laws (or two formulations of a law) would prohibit and permit the same actions, don't they then fulfill the same purpose equally?
But suppose we omit the "not resulting" part:
(a') Abortion is prohibited after six weeks of pregnancy.
(b') A woman has a right to an abortion during the first 6 weeks of pregnancy.
For the same reason that you thought (a) was condoning abortion in cases of rape and incest, wouldn't you also have to say that (a') is condoning abortion during the first six week? If not, why?
Quoting Bob Ross
We can agree to hold God to at least as high a standard as ourselves. Whether higher, I feel a little doubt, because Christ says "You, therefore, must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect" (Matthew 5:48, RSV). A king or a president has more power and freedom than I, but must uphold the same moral standards. I'm not responsible for what I can't do. So I don't think God's power and freedom entail that He should be held to a higher standard; only that He can do more to fulfill that standard than I can.
I think this is the conclusion of the arguments he is proposing:
Quoting Leontiskos
What is at stake in the arguments is justice, not the compatibility of canonical texts.
Quoting Fire Ologist
Right. I think he is sympathetic to Christianity, but at the same time the OP represents qualms.
Quoting Leontiskos
The funny part is, all of this goes away if we think, just for a moment, that not every tale and act of God was permitted to be recorded by men, let alone was observed. The last chapter of the book literally says "if you change or add to this, you will die." More or less. That doesn't mean, not for a moment, stuff happened during the periods in question that weren't included, nor that stuff could not happen after. It is simply, sealed off. It's all we need to know. Not an "incomplete picture" in the functional sense as far as those it was intended for, simply all we need to know.
Again, why religion is generally unpopular in the arena of debate. Provided it isn't directly contradicted (and even so as opinion, interpretation, and translation throughout the millennia are subjective), faith is belief and belief is generally whatever one deems fit.
No, I was thinking of offering a reductio ad absurdum against the argument, but it looks as though you agree that killing with indirect intention is not necessarily unjust.
Quoting Bob Ross
Okay, I think you are reasoning well in this. :up:
Quoting Bob Ross
Okay, good point.
Quoting Bob Ross
That's a good question. I am not sure. Maybe I will try to dig up a place where Aquinas speaks to this.
One of the things I am asking you is this: What would you have decreed if you were instructing the Israelites? Kill the Amalekites, take as many children as you can support, and leave the other children to die?
The reason I don't personally find the critique overwhelming is because, faced with that situation, I have no clear alternative.* I guess I could say, "Assuming the children are not demonic, make sure to only intend to kill them indirectly." Yet such an approach would be incongruous in an ancient text and an ancient paradigm, and it would also somewhat undermine the whole "remove evil at its root" meaning of the text. I think the nub for you is that the text presupposes that a child can be deserving of death, and this is seen as incredible.
Similar to Akin's video, I think it is worth surveying the options for someone who accepts the Old Testament. Here are some, in no particular order:
Perhaps, taken singly, none of those are satisfactory. It is worth noting that the last option, which alluded to, seems to be supported by later texts such as Ezekiel 18:20. This goes to the fact that, read literally, the Bible does contradict itself. For example, if God does not change, God killed the Amalekite children for the wickedness of their parents, the Amalekite children were human, and Ezekiel 18:20 holds, then we have a contradiction. Indeed the literary genres found in the Bible are not really meant to support that level of scrutiny. This does not dissolve the problem, but it does complicate it.
* Also, I am not willing to abandon Christianity on this basis. I would need a foundational alternative to Christianity to which to turn before I would be more comfortable with such a move. Even if I were to make that move, I would still see the Old Testament as preparatory and indispensable to any true morality that one discovers later.
No. Let me give you an example: You are an engineer. Would you make a car that you are sure will not take you to the end of a long journey? No, you wouldn't. I didn't even consider you a perfect being in this example. A perfect engineer cannot make such a car. So it is not about 'wouldn't,' but 'cannot.'
Quoting Bob Ross
Perfect God can only create perfect things. So, if the creation of a perfect creation is impossible, then there is no creation. There is an imperfect creation. So, either we are blind and cannot see that the creation is perfect, or God is imperfect. Which one do you pick?
Quoting Bob Ross
Here, you are talking about an imperfect God.
Quoting Bob Ross
Same here. You are talking about an imperfect God.
Quoting Bob Ross
In my dictionary, which present my word view, good is related to pleasure and evil is related to pain. Good creatures, like you, prefer good, there are evil creatures who prefer evil too, like masochists. Are you saying that a masochist is bad!? Likeing pain is his part of his nature.
Yes, b is immoral to endorse: it positively affirms abortion; whereas a does not.
Think of it this way, which is harder to revoke: a bill that merely omits something that you could pass legislation on later or a bill that explicates the permissibility of something that you want to ban later? The latter of course. This also runs on moral lines: I cant positively endorse abortion, but I can pragmatically endorse prohibiting abortion in as many cases as I can.
Sort of. We usually consider culpability relative to what one can do, what they know, and what they do. God is absolutely free; whereas we are limited severely. By standard here, I was really referring to culpability. I am culpable for voting for b but not for a; and God is culpable for inspiring positively affirming rules about slaves in Exodus and not if He omitted affirming slavery in them; and I am less culpable than God because I have limited freedom, knowledge, and power.
Think of it this way. If an ordinary citizen votes for b and I think we both would hold them less culpable (granted it is immoral) than dictator that decrees b. This is because that dictactor by way of having the power to decree it themselves could have decreed it differently. Imagine a being that has perfect knowledge and power that simply endorses b instead of a: wouldnt that be a weird mistake?
Quoting Bob Ross
Quoting Bob Ross
Quoting GregW
Death can mean various things. (1) When a person stops breathing and the heart stops beating and soon the body begins to decay, people say "he is dead," without necessarily understanding what death is, i.e., its essence. (2) Traditionally, death is understood as the separation of the soul from the body. This is called the First Death in Christian theology. (3) There is also the Second Death, when the soul is separated eternally from God (goes to hell). (4) In 1968, the Harvard Medical School promoted the concept of "brain death", allowing organs to be harvested for transplant while they are still fresh because the patient's (donor's) heart and lungs are still functioning. (See David S. Oderberg, Applied Ethics: A Non-Consequentialist Approach, sec. 2.7.) And there may be others.
Mathematicians can define their terms as they like, but in an ethical discussion about murder, we must understand death in the right sense. GregW thinks (3) is the appropriate sense of death for murder. But this cannot be correct, for it is beyond the power of any human being to put another to death in sense (3). How, then, did Cain kill his brother (Genesis 4:8)? How did Lamech slay one or two men (4:23)? How did Moses kill the Egyptian (Exodus 2:12)? Why is there a commandment against murder (Gen. 9:5-7, Ex. 20:13)? It is pointless to prohibit what cannot be done.
He says "aimed at limiting the harm", without saying anything about the precise wording.
(I couldn't remember what (a) said.)
Quoting Bob Ross
I think that, in answer to my question, "wouldn't you also have to say that (a') is condoning abortion during the first six weeks?", your "Yes" meant "No", because you went on to say "a' does not."
I take it that your objection to (a) is because (a) positively mentions exceptions for rape and incest, but you do not similarly object to (a') because it does not positively mention an "exception" for before 6 weeks, although it implicitly allows it because it only prohibits after 6 weeks?
Similarly, then, your objection to the legislation concerning slavery is that even if it greatly ameliorates the evils of how slavery is practiced, it still recognizes a right of masters to own slaves? And where exactly does it say this?
And the definition of exists depends on the definition of reality, so the combination is circular.
Is the distinction you're trying to make here between objective reality and merely subjective experience? For example, I seem to be seeing a bear in the woods, but it is only a tree stump, or I am imagining a unicorn, both merely subjective; versus there really being a bear in the woods?
I'd like to add another description of death to your list:
(5) When a person is dead to God. When a person ceased to exist to God.
Quoting Gregory of the Beard of Ockham
No. I do not think that (3) and (5) are the appropriate sense of death for murder. Murder can only be committed by people, not God. The death described in sense (3) and (5) are the prerogatives only of God, it is not murder.
Quoting Gregory of the Beard of Ockham
Yes, it is beyond the power of any human being to put another to death in sense (3), but Cain, Lamech, and Moses did murder, kill, and cause death in sense (1), (2) and (4).
Quoting Gregory of the Beard of Ockham
There is a commandment against murder because God did not want us to murder, kill, and cause death without His sanction. It is not pointless for God to prohibit murder as described by (1), (2), and (4).
Correct. So, I need to provide an example to illustrate what I mean by "exist". When something, such as a human, exists, it is a part of reality. By reality, I mean the set of all objects, whether mental or non-mental. Mental objects, such as experiencing the red color of a rose, and non-mental objects, such as a cup of tea. So, something can be unreal yet still exist, such as an experience. In the same manner, something can be real and exist, such as matter. Something that does not exist cannot be real. And eventually, nothing is defined as something that does not exist and is not real. I have to say, making the distinction between existence and real started from a post by me that from which Bob agreed that evil exists, but it is not real. The story is long, so please read the discussion if you are interested.
Quoting Gregory of the Beard of Ockham
Yes, that is a part of the discussion.
Quoting Gregory of the Beard of Ockham
I don't understand how this example is proper to what you said before? Do you mind elaborating?
IIRC, if we take the Book of Samuel literally, we understand that God's words/wishes/desires are all conveyed through the prophet Samuel. Samuel serves as a mediator between the divine and the Israelites, allowing us to contextualize him with other divine mediators. Additionally, in the Book of Samuel, Samuel often plays an active role in shaping events or situations to his will. In any case, the words we have in the Book of Samuel are Samuel conveying the divine will, and that ambiguity runs through the text (i.e. whether it is God or Samuel making the commands... or both). If I had to judge, I'd say it's a mix of both. Even at this early date (c.1050 bc-1000 bc), the words of God are not as clear and direct as they were before in the Torah. The Torah is from Sinai; Samuel, while a brilliant piece of literature, isn't.
Quoting Wayfarer
Nietzsche on the OP's psychology:
Further still this is what Nietzsche means in AC 24... on how Christians cherish Antisemitism and don't realize it's just one more step in the Judaic equation... where the virtue of calling things evil begins to back bite itself out of a different perspective... as the final consequence of the psychology of Judaism.
OPs taking the psychology of Judaism and inverting it back upon itself. Which is where anti semitism arises. Not that OP is one. But he's traversing that slippery slope.
Exactly. One explicates an endorsement; the other omits a discussion about it.
Quoting Gregory of the Beard of Ockham
Yes.
Quoting Gregory of the Beard of Ockham
All over the place. For example here:
-- Exodus 21:20-21.
And here:
Leviticus 25:44-46
:up:
The difficulty in this question is that:
1. It shifts the discussion from what a perfect being would do to what a nuanced, particular human would do; and
2. We dont have to have knowledge of what the best choice is to know some of the bad choices. I can say that a pizza-lover does not throwaway a perfectly good pizza without speaking to what a pizza-lovers best choice is in terms of what to do with it.
If I had to answer, I would say that I would have told the Israelites to focus on themselves and ignore the immoralities of the Amalekites: they dont have a duty to sacrifice their own people in just wars against abominable nations. I think it is a, e.g., just war to conquer North Korean but I wouldnt advocate for the US to start WWIII over it.
If I had to decree the just war, then I would say to:
1. Eliminate the enemy combatants while limiting innocent and non-combatant civilians;
2. Assimilate any of the people that they can without assuming significant risk to their own sovereignty and stability;
3. Segregate those who cannot be assimilated into their own areas and give them the freedom to leave (and go somewhere else) if they want;
4. Give as much aid as feasible to those segregated.
I would hold a significant weight to the in-group over the out-group; so I wouldnt probably decree any commandments to sacrifice ones own people to free another people.
Likewise, those who are not assimilated would not be citizens of Israel; so they would, in necessary, be left to themselves if Israel cannot afford to help them; and this could be all the way up to starvation, disease, and death.
Yeah, but wouldnt you agree it would be immoral what they did since it is directly intentional? Im not saying they would have had this level of a sophistication in their ethics back then; but we know it to be immoral.
This interpretation seems to superficially reinterpret the text though; given that it explicitly details directly intentionally killing children. Wouldnt this interpretation jeopardize the entire Bible? If someone can reinterpret what is obviously meant one way as another, then why cant I about anything therein?
This is the most plausible out of them all, and is the one Aquinas and Craig takes. Again, though, the bullet here is that one has to hold that murder is either not the direct intentional killing of an innocent person or that murder is not always unjust. That is a necessary consequence of this view.
This is an interesting one I am admittedly not very familiar with: Ill have to think about that one.
This has to be immoral: it would conflate culpability and innocence with the individual and group.
Yeah, thats true. I am not sure how to interpret the texts. Maybe it is all spiritual lessons; but then what isnt and what is the lesson?
I am working on an alternative that I will share with you when it is ready to hear your thoughts.
Yes, that's a good point. Your emphasis on weighting different parts of the canon is edifying and intuitive. I was aware that such is a traditional Hebrew approach, but I had never witnessed it first-hand.
On a similar note, I was revisiting the book, Dark Passages of the Bible: Engaging Scripture with Benedict XVI and Thomas Aquinas. The author looks at the way that the Pharaoh of the Exodus story is variously described as having his heart hardened by God, as hardening his own heart, and as simply having his heart hardened (in a passive sense). The author is trying to demonstrate the manner in which the Hebrew understanding of God's action is in a continual process of development, and I would add that such a topic is inherently unwieldy and difficult to understand. For example, there is a constant vacillation in the Bible between the idea that everything is according to God's will (and therefore even evil things are brought about by God), and the idea that God does not do or will evil. I think that's a natural vacillation that can't be overcome easily or quickly, and the sacred texts inevitably reflect this reality.
This is disanalogous to allowing evil. An analogous version of your example would be: Would you make a car that works fine but you knew someone else could come and mess it up?.
Yes, but this doesnt mean that those things are not subject to change.
But this makes your argument weaker; because then perfection isnt about goodness necessarily, since God could create being without pain or pleasuree.g., a rock.
A masochist doesnt prefer evil; they does mis-hierarchize or misunderstand the goods. Specifically, they will in accord with getting a euphoric high where pain is the means and not the end. To truly prefer evil, is to will it as an end.
:up:
Their view leads to the unhelpful absurdity that murder never happens on earth.
Sorry, I may have misread your original question. Yes, I would say that No; (a) does not condone abortion prior to six weeks: it omits that from the discussion. If you could demonstrate, in the given example, that the author is omitting it because they intent for it to be legal; then maybe that author is intending an implicit endorsement, but someone else could vote for it and not condone it because the verbiage itself does not condone it.
Exactly.
I believe I already responded to this, but I can provide it again if you would like.
Quoting GregW
It is not clear to me how (5) is different from (3), unless maybe you believe that God destroys, i.e. literally annihilates the soul in (5)? To my understanding, "separated eternally from God" and "dead to God" are the same thing.
Okay, we agree that human beings commit murder by causing death in senses 1, 2, 4 (except I would not include 4 because it is not true death). However, I was under the impression that elsewhere you were saying God did not commit murder when He put someone to death in sense 1, 2, or 4, but only if He killed someone in sense 3 or 5. Maybe I misunderstood, but if that was what you meant, is that not an equivocation?
And why would that commandment not apply to God himself in senses 1, 2, 4?
Okay, thanks for clarifying. "Is Real" = exists objectively. "Exists" may be subjective or objective.
Yes, I knew you were having that discussion with Bob Ross, and it was confusing me because I didn't understand your terms.
Appearance of bear when there is no bear: subjective. In your terms: exists, but not real.
Imagining a unicorn: ditto
Seeing the bear which is really in the woods: objective. In your terms: exists, and is real.
I hope I've got that straight!
Gregory, (3) is distinguish from (5) in that you are not dead to God in (3). You still exist in Hell. In (5), you are dead to God. You cease to exist to God.
Quoting Gregory of the Beard of Ockham
In (1), (2), (4), you are dead to the world, but you are not dead to God, even if God appeared to have murdered, killed, and made you dead. If you are not dead to God, then you have not been murdered, killed, or made dead by God.
Quoting Gregory of the Beard of Ockham
The commandment against murder does not apply to God because God does not commit murder. Even in (5) when God killed you and you are dead to God, you have been judged and given due process by God, you were not murdered.
Are you referring to the story of Adam and Eve? This story is nonsense! The God you are defending is out of discussion since He is less than you. Adam and Eve were put in a sinful situation in which God knew in advance that they would sin! They were also lied to by the snake/Satan! And people are here, part of them suffering for no rational reason. What are their faults? Why should they be held here for the sin that the Parents did? Does any of these make any sense to you?
Quoting Bob Ross
Yes, but in a perfect creation, all changes are perfect as well. So there could be a creation in which wrongdoing/sin does not exist within. Our universe is not perfect. A perfect God does not make such a thing.
Quoting Bob Ross
Yes, perfection is not about goodness or evilness. It is about doing things always right, whether good, evil, or neutral.
Quoting Bob Ross
No, they just like pain in a certain part of their body. And, they don't misunderstand the good.
Quoting Bob Ross
A masochist is not a perfect evil creature.
The first part is concise. I think the second part should be "Exists" = is either subjective or objective, unless you clarify why you used "may".
Quoting Gregory of the Beard of Ockham
Ok, I hope we are on the same page right now, regarding the definitions.
Quoting Gregory of the Beard of Ockham
The confusion is real in the sense that it affects you somehow. But I distinguish between this real and the real in my first comment. All our experiences are real in this sense.
Quoting Gregory of the Beard of Ockham
Imagining a unicorn is another activity.
Quoting Gregory of the Beard of Ockham
Yes, the bear exists and is real, given the definition of "exists" and "is real" in my first comment.
Quoting Gregory of the Beard of Ockham
Please let me know if you are happy with what I said. Otherwise, let me know.
Quoting Bob Ross
I agree with (2), but I am not asking you what the best choice is. I am asking what you would do, and the implication is that you must be able to provide a better option than the one you are criticizing, not that you must be able to provide the best option. If you cannot provide a better option than the thing you criticize, then your criticism will be otiose or at least severely mitigated. Granted, not-acting is always an option, and so you can object to some action with the mere alternative of not acting at all, but in the case of the Amalekites not-acting may not be a plausible alternative.
Quoting Bob Ross
In the first place I would point out that the Amalekites lived near the Israelites and were a threat, so in that sense it is a bit different than the U.S. and North Korea. In the second place, in the Biblical mind truly abominable acts are not self-contained. They literally corrupt the earth and the world and empower the demonic presences that are being worshipped through the acts. For this reason the libertarian approach requires a different understanding of reality, where abominations do not pollute or affect the wider world.
Quoting Bob Ross
Okay, that approach makes sense. Thanks for providing that. :up:
Quoting Bob Ross
I would say that it is immoral given certain conditions. For example, if the Amalekites and their children were not demonic then the act was immoral; if it was not a delegation of God's legitimate prerogatives then the act was immoral; etc.
The other question here is that if we know it to be immoral but they did not, then was it immoral? We might then say that it was objectively immoral but not subjectively wrong, similar to the case where someone breaks a law that they were not aware of. But even on something like the pedagogical approach God could not say, "Perform this act. It is not objectively immoral" (because this would make God a liar). makes a good point about Samuel as the author, and about the priority of the Pentateuch; but if we supposed that the literal command truly came from God, would it be permissible for God to pedagogically recommend that Israel carry out an act that is objectively but not subjectively immoral? It's an interesting question.
Quoting Bob Ross
On one reading it would superficially reinterpret the text. On the reading that provided it would not. The sort of question here asks whether we are permitted to interpret these sorts of post-Pentateuch texts as including the perspective of a fallible author, such as Samuel. I don't think there is anything de facto impossible about doing this, even on the presuppositions of historical theology. Many of the various known contradictions in the Bible (including those I mentioned in to Carlos) have to do with the perspective of the speaker. Only if we make the highest canonical source fallible do we forfeit Biblical inerrancy or strong Biblical authority, which in the Old Testament context would be to make the Pentateuch fallible in this way.
Quoting Bob Ross
Sort of. The thing I think you're missing here is the idea that God is not said to murder even though he is the judge of life and death. For example, if there is an angel of death or a "grim reaper" who works at the behest of God, is the angel of death a murderer? Or is he just doing his job? Or one could put it differently and ask whether the fact that God allows death within the world makes him a murderer. Theological traditions do not hold that God or the angel of death are properly involved in murder in these ways. On this point, I see the crux not so much in the definition of murder but in the question of whether God can delegate his power over life and death.
Quoting Bob Ross
I think it is definitely part of the Biblical context, but it is not altogether clear to me how this affects the Amalekite children's "right to life." I would want to begin with the question of whether one who is demonic via demonic rites ceases to be human, and then whether their children also cease to be human (in the sense that they lose their presumptive right to life).
Quoting Bob Ross
Well, even on a modern understanding there is commission, there is "aiding and abetting," there is failing to oppose someone in your midst who is involved in commission, etc. So the idea that groups rather than mere individuals are responsible for abominable, public acts is supportable. I think the counterargument lies in the idea that a child or especially an infant does not count as part of the group.
Quoting Bob Ross
Over the years I have come to appreciate the complexity and ambiguity of the Bible, because it does mirror real life. How one is to resolve the difficult tensions and contradictions that arise in life is not obvious, and in the Bible we see people grappling with this same difficulty. There are some deeply interesting writings of J. G. Hamann that have begun to be translated into the English. Hamann was a highly intelligent Christian contemporary of Immanuel Kant, and he was famous for cutting to pieces Kant's cut-and-dried understanding of reality by recourse to philological and Biblical allusions. Schemas such as Kant's tend to oversimplify complex realities, and although Hamann and the Bible are far from simple, they nevertheless reflect the complexity and chaos of real life.
I mean, one of the theological issues undergirding your probing questions is the issue of Biblical inerrancy and how that is supposed to be understood. In one sense the Bible is not inerrant given that there are clear contradictions. What's curious is that the authors and the community were aware of these contradictions and they didn't find them problematic, and from this one would generally deduce that the texts neither aim at nor presuppose inerrancy in that literalistic or top-level sense. This is why what Carlos said about Samuel's authorship and fallibility is not a new idea in theological communities.
Related to these points, it is good to be humble when scrutinizing a text that has a sacred or divine pedigree, because it is very easy to impose personal idioms. Or perhaps put it this way: the more certain we are that something comes from God, the less sure we are about our negative judgments regarding it. I am not faulting your basic method, but rather noting that anyone who approaches a text as sacred will be very receptive to interpretive subtleties. This is because to believe that a being who is infinitely beyond you is communicating with you is to be open to semantic and and metaphysical possibilities that would usually be excluded. One's expectations of depth and overflowing meanings (i.e. being polysemic or plurivocal) increase in proportion to the perceived profundity of their interlocutor.
Quoting Bob Ross
Okay, sounds good. :up:
Quoting Leontiskos
I remember the writing in bSamuel as brilliant and capturing what can happen even when legitimate prophecy is granted to the crooked timber of humanity. I think it would be a mistake and a superficial reading to decontextualize the command to kill the Amalekites and use that as an injunction against God. The command is given by Samuel, speaking on behalf of God.
Even though Samuel is a legitimate prophet, he's far from a passive conduit of the divine will. He's constantly setting up Saul for failure. Samuel is irascible and continually seeks influence and power for himself. Presumably, if Saul fails, Saul can be dismissed and Samuel can exert authority again. Samuel is a fascinating character and quite complex. He is critical of both the kingship and the people. His speeches in Samuel remind me of a libertarian warning against the dangers of big government. It is unclear how much of this is genuine ideological commitment versus a desire to maintain influence.
Martin Buber argues that Samuel mistakes his own will for God's, which I imagine would be easy to do for a man who selects kings and possesses a special relationship with the divine. The divine voice in this book is more removed than in earlier books.
In Torah, you'll hear, e.g., "And God said to Abraham...." In the book of Samuel, this doesn't happen, and instead, it's Samuel telling Saul to put Amalek under the ban. The key here is Samuel. He could be correctly and perfectly conveying God's will, or he could be mistaken, or he could be deceiving. The clarity of Torah, where we see God's words openly dictated, is no longer present in Samuel.
Yes. I suspect the former idea is earlier, the latter idea (seen in Chronicles) is later. Biblical authors struggle to deal with this. Each view has its strengths and weaknesses. I find the notion that God allows evil to fester and build until it's ripe for destruction to be a fascinating and non-modern one. My favorite theodicy is Job. We can engage in apologetics, but ultimately, I believe the existence of evil and suffering in this world is beyond human comprehension.
I am unsure how you got to there from what I said: I was saying that God can allow evilthats not the same as doing evil. Maybe under your view God cannot allow evil either, but allowing evil and doing evil are still different.
I dont think the Adam and Eve story is about historical events.
Well, thats true of all of us. God knows ahead of time whether we will sin or not as well as knows how it will end; this doesnt mean that God is doing evil by allowing you to make your own choices. I think you are thinking of God as if He is in time like us. A being out of time knowing everything that will happen is very different. One of the beauties of absolute goodnessof Godis that He transforms, in the final result, our evil into good. He does not make us do evil, but when we do the totality of the result of His creation over time ends with good coming out of it so that it did not happen in vain.
Do you deny the existence of persons? Persons can cause evil in a perfect creation that originally had perfect changes!
Thats fair. I think letting them starve, all else being equal, is better than murdering them.
But couldnt God just drive them out? Why would God murder a child when He could just command the demon to leave the childs body? Jesus drives out demons all the time in the NT.
This is analogous to if you could snap your fingers to cure this child of some deadly virus that needs to be contained but instead you execute them to solve the problemhow is that morally permissible?
I would say no; for example, a judge that knows it is wrong to steal cannot advise to a citizen to steal irregardless if the citizen themselves understand it is a crime. (We are assuming here) God knows it is immoral; so He cannot command it.
Thats interesting, I will have to take a deeper look into that.
Yes, but then, again, you have to deny that murder is the direct intentional killing of an innocent person. You cannot have the cake here and eat it too.
If you do deny that definition, then I would like to hear your definition that is consistent with this view that God does not murder when killing innocent people.
Those examples you gave are relative to the individual so they are not examples that support group culpability. E.g., a person or group that aids or abets are culpable because they themselves did something that is involved with that practicean innocent person who did not aid or abet but happens to be a part of the group would not get charged unless they demonstrate they themselves did aid and abet.
Fair enough. What do you think of the Adam and Eve story?
Is your position, then, that Samual lied about God commanding the slaughter of all the Amalekites?
Well, you believe in NT, and within it, Adam is cited.
Quoting Bob Ross
I am saying a perfect good God cannot create an imperfect good creation, wherein doing evil is possible. A perfect good God can only create a perfect good creation. So your God is imperfect since the creation is imperfect.
Quoting Bob Ross
No, under my definition, a perfect God can only do things right! He cannot do wrong. If God does wrong like imperfect creatures do, then He is like imperfect creatures. I also don't equate evil with wrong.
Quoting Bob Ross
So you don't believe in NT?
Quoting Bob Ross
I have a challenge for such a God. If one day, by chance, I meet your God in Heaven, while being allowed to wish only one thing, then the Forknwoeldge of God about what I am going to do would be my only wish. I do the opposite of whatever God says according to His foreknowledge then!
Quoting Bob Ross
Evil cannot be transformed into good. Are you thinking that humans can live in Utopia one day without God's intervention?
Quoting Bob Ross
No, I am not denying the person. I am saying perfect creatures can only do right.
Buber thought Samuel was confusing his human impulses with God's will. Rashi, OTOH, does take it as a literal command to slaughter all of Amalek.
@Leontiskos
@Gregory of the Beard of Ockham
Quoting Bob Ross
In previous posts, I had discussions with you and with Gregory of the Beard of Ockham on the definition of death.
Quoting Gregory of the Beard of Ockham
I would like to add another description of death to the list:
(5) When a person is dead to God. When a person ceased to exist to God.
Quoting GregW
Quoting GregW
Bob, your definition of murder, the direct intentional killing of an innocent person applies only to you, to me, and to other people. It does not apply to God. If you are innocent, you are alive to God, then God have many options to keeping you alive anywhere, on earth as well as in heaven.
:up:
Quoting BitconnectCarlos
Interesting. Thanks for your thoughts on this.
Quoting BitconnectCarlos
:up:
Okay, understood.
Quoting Bob Ross
Sure, except that the case in question is not a matter of possession. It is not a demon inhabiting a non-demonic inhabitant, but rather something which is inherently demonic. This is so because the sexual cultic rites were actually meant to create a bond with certain demons through worship, and to result in the procreation of a demonic race. The demonic attachments that Jesus encountered are considered different in that way. So the cases are different, but as I said earlier, I am still not sure how to "objectively" assess the "rights" of such beings.
Quoting Bob Ross
This all gets a bit tricky, and it may take us too far afield. Nevertheless, I think you are on safe ground when you talk about commands proper. Even if it is generally permissible to advise in that way, it is probably not permissible to command in that way.
Quoting Bob Ross
Yes, and I think it is something that our Protestant culture misses. The Protestant doctrine of Sola Scriptura has a tendency to see all of Scripture as completely equal (and would thus be unable to "single out" the Pentateuch in the way that @BitconnectCarlos is able to do). Granted, in Catholicism you get some of that too, but it is strongest in Protestantism and that is our culture context here in the U.S.
Quoting Bob Ross
I think the problem here is a sort of reductio. God and the Angel of Death are not generally deemed murderers, and therefore if one maintains a notion in which they are murders then an abnormal semantics is in play.
There are different approaches here. Some would say that God simply does not murder, some would say that no one is innocent before God, etc. The general problem is the negative connotation of murder. For example, the Angel of Death does take life, but because it is his job to do so he is not transgressing in the process. Not even in a mythological sense would it make sense to bring the Angel of Death before the judge and accuse him of murder.
Quoting Bob Ross
But the contention is that everyone who is part of the group is implicated, and that no one can just "happen" to be part of the group. That's how human communities tend to work. There aren't really communities that one only "happens" to be a part of, given that mutual influence is always occurring within a community. This is precisely why the one who expels an evildoer from the community is praised: because they have protected the group from contamination.
Fr. Stephen De Young must be in my YouTube algorithm now, because I stumbled upon <this short video on messiness>. I think his advice is salutary. Granted, his advice will be more directly applicable to Christians, but a reflection of it still holds for those such as yourself who are investigating Christianity or religion. The key point is that, wherever you do end up, you must eventually be aware of the complexities of reality that we are not always consciously aware of. In some sense an argument against injustice can sidestep that advice, but in another sense it cannot, and I think @BitconnectCarlos' points highlight why it cannot be altogether sidestepped.
It seems like, then, that aspect of the scripture was not Divinely Inspired. Maybe what God revealed to Samuel originally was; but I don't see how this view is consistent with Divine Inspiration.
I dont, and this OP doesnt suggest that. I am sympathetic to the NT though.
Again, you are confusing God willing evil and doing evil. Persons in creation would have the free will to do evil in virtue of merely having it.
I dont understand how that challenges the view of God I exposed before.
Evil is a privation; privations can produce good. Missing a limb is a privation, but this privation can produce courage, kindness, a renewed enjoyment/respect of life, etc.
Logically, it would apply to any circumstance where an innocent person is directly intentionally killed. God is not exempt: you would have to redefine murder to support your case. I am still waiting for a definition of murder from you.
The closest I see to one is here:
To cease to exist to God is just for God to no longer will ones existence, since we actively get our being from Him, and so this would be the ultimate death of ourselves as soul. Again, this is not what death means in the context of murder: we are talking about the death of a body.
Quoting MoK
Happy with what you say, MoK.
I don't see what the big deal is here. There are plenty of wicked kings in Israel and Judea's history, and these accounts still make it into the Bible. All I'm saying regarding Samuel's command is that there is ambiguity.
The Bible contains some ugly history.
How about God? Is God free?
Quoting Bob Ross
You propose a God who has foreknowledge. If I know about God's foreknowledge, I can do the opposite since I am a free agent.
Quoting GregW
Your definition of murder is 'the direct intentional killing of an innocent person".
My definition of murder is "a death not sanctioned by God".
Quoting Bob Ross
Let's use your definition of murder as it applies here. For God to have murdered you, you must be innocent, and you must be dead. You cannot just be innocent and dead to other people, you must be innocent and dead to God because God holds the exclusive judgement on innocence and death.
Quoting Bob Ross
When you talk about the death of a body, you are only talking about a partial definition of death. God does not commit murder. Even if God killed you, body and soul, and you are truly dead, you have been judged and given due process by God. You were not murdered by God.
Hope to get you in another thread! :wink:
I apologize: I was not understanding you before. I thought you were referring to demonic possession. Indeed, I agree that it is much more questionable if demonic hybrids would have rights.
On the one hand, I want to say that created beings which violate the proper order of creation should be uprooted and this is not unjust to do (such as eliminating torture devices); on the other hand, persons have rights and a person is a substance of a rational nature. Consequently, (fallen and unfallen) angels would be persons with rights under this view; and since the ends do not justify the means, it follows that these demonic children would probably have rights (since they probably were substances of a rational nature).
It would be permissible, though, to isolate them if needed to stop them from their natural, evil pursuits (if that is intrinsic to being a demon-human hybrid). Stopping evil as it is being attempted is always permissible.
Could God wipe them out justly? I dont know, but it would definitely violate the rationale I gave above for rights.
I agree. The Bible is incredibly difficult to interpret (Ive found).
Yes, but no one that objects with those to me (so far) has ever coherently defined what murder is. Like I said, that view may be internally coherent in some theory; but it isnt coherent with the idea of rights I expounded above. Do you have a different definition of murder that you prefer such that God and the Angel of Death are not committing murder?
My definition, to recap, is that murder is the direct intentional killing of a person.
Interesting. It seems like Fr. Stephen is taking a more spiritual approach to the theology and the Bible (going back to the beginning of our conversation). His critique is fair insofar that systematizing is can go too far and systematize for the sole sake of doing so (e.g., Kant); but I wonder how valid this critique really is: he seems to just have given up on striving towards perfect knowledge. It seems like systematic knowledge is just the attempt at, or aspiration towards, complete knowledge. Should we really give that up? What do we have left after doing so?
That's alright - it's an understandable assumption. At this point we are knee-deep in obscura. :smile:
For example, according to the secondary literature the demons that Jesus casts out were originally spawned by groups like the Amalekites, and roamed the Earth looking for hosts after being killed by the Israelites.
Quoting Bob Ross
That's a fair argument you give. What's interesting is that when Jesus encounters these demons thataccording to the secondary literatureoriginally came from groups like the Amalekites, they say things like this:
Quoting Matthew 8:29 (RSV)
The backstory here is that in his mercy and providence, God has allowed such beings to continue to exist on Earth until "the time," namely the end times. So oddly enough, there is a respect even for demons built into the narratives. Jesus even accedes to their request in v. 32.
Quoting Bob Ross
Yes, and it's fair enough that you would press your point. Let's try to understand the logic a bit. First, your argument, which of course presupposes that murder is impermissible:
1. Murder is the direct intentional killing of an [innocent] person
2. The Angel of Death intentionally kills the innocent Amalekite infant
3. Therefore, the Angel of Death is a murderer
And then the reductio I mentioned (although I will not here present it as a reductio):
4. It is the Angel of Death's job to take life
5. It is not impermissible to do one's job
6. Therefore, the Angel of Death is not a murderer
This is the case where there is a logical standoff between two contradictory conclusions, and yet there is no attempt to formally invalidate the opposing argument. Formal reductios also function in precisely this way. If we have only these two arguments, then one must simply weigh them and decide which is stronger.
Digging deeper, (4) and (5) have to do with the idea that death is inevitable, and that for a person to die is not inherently unjust. This opens up the can of worms of the metaphysics and ethics of death, and the adjacent can of worms is the question of God's sovereignty within which question is the matter of whether God is responsible for death (or whether God "directly intends" the fact of natural death).
So this all gets complicated quickly, and therefore it is hard to try to capture the various complexities with a syllogism or two. For example, if everything that occurs is allowed by God to occur, and if this allowance counts as an intentional bringing-about, then it follows that everyone who dies is murdered. The reductio in this case lies in the idea that murder and death are two different things. Note too that we are wrestling with precisely the same issue that the Hebrews wrestled with in trying to understand God's sovereignty and providence (in, for example, hardening or not-hardening Pharaoh's heart).
Quoting Bob Ross
I wouldn't say that he takes a more spiritual or metaphorical approach to theology and the Bible, but I can see how this video in particular might produce that idea.
Quoting Bob Ross
This is a really interesting and complicated topic, but I will try to say a few things.
In general we recognize that one must collect the data before they form their theory or propose their thesis. We also recognize that if a theory is invalidated by data, we have to accept that rather than stubbornly cling to the theory while ignoring the data. I think De Young is saying that a lot of people have over-simple theories that run into problems when deeper and broader datasets are encountered. For example, I am told that there is a fun documentary on the Super Smash Bros video game, which follows different groups of people who thought they were the best and had mastered the game, only to find that others were much better (and that South Koreans are often elite in such matters).
It's something like that: you thought you understood it until you understand that you don't. That is Socrates' virtue: an understanding of his own limitations and ignorance. De Young is saying that when it comes to God this phenomenon gets taken to a whole new level (cf. Isaiah 55:8-9).
At the same time there is the danger of falling into the other extreme, which is what I think you are speaking to. There is the danger of skepticism or despair of knowledge altogether. There is the danger of theological voluntarism where God becomes wholly inscrutable. Yet what happens when one settles into a deep tradition such as Christianity, is that they settle into the habit of finding they were mistaken and thus being prepared to see how they are currently mistaken. This creates an openness to a reality beyond them (and this same phenomenon occurs when someone takes on a teacher, acknowledging that they have much to learn). I want to say that this humble stance towards reality and God is incredibly important, even if one rejects Christianity. We can of course reject things, but (please God) we should never find ourselves in a place where a self-confidence has closed us off to reality or to that which transcends our own capacities.
There is definitely at least some ambiguity in Samuel. When the Israelites ignore his anti-monarchy polemic, God tells Samuel to give them a king and he sends everyone home instead, a sort of punt perhaps, and then there is his inability to communicate his virtues to his sons, and his seeming habit of withholding information and guidance from Saul until the last minute.
Nonetheless, this reading seems to be a stretch. I have seen the argument that Samuel is here trying to manipulate the recalcitrant Saul into taking on a dangerous task. Either Saul will be killed, returning leadership to Samuel, or he will be successful, and more in awe of Samuel and beholden to him. In the end though, God refuses to be manipulated, and places the kingship in the hands of a third party. At least that's how the "Samuel misinterprets or makes it up," often narrative goes.
Robert Alter deigns it worthy of a footnote at least, but I cannot see how this isn't doing violence to the text. Nothing in God's late condemnation of Saul suggests the misrepresentation thesis. Although, it seems more plausible to me if Samuel is read has wholly misreading the entirety of the Saul selection in some way (to this point he does initially think David's strapping older brother is who God intends, a sort of second instance of his prioritizing the visible above the invisible, suggesting a sort of lack of full vision).
I haven't read much on this point, but it seems to me that the condemnation remains intelligible as long as we don't take the Samuel thesis to an extreme. Saul's actions seem indefensible in general.
So I think this line could be fruitful even if we don't go the route of the "deceiving" thesis:
Quoting BitconnectCarlos
Meier's Themes and Transformations in Old Testament Prophecy would generally support this thesis, as he argues that the potency, competency, and clarity of prophets gradually diminishes as the Bible draws on.
Yes, God is absolutely free and absolutely incapable of doing otherwise in my view. This is fundamentally because freedom for excellence, as opposed to freedom of indifference, does not require the ability to have done otherwise.
Well, I think this would assume that God has the same kind of foreknowledge as you in this case and that freedom consists in true agent indeterminacyboth of which I reject. When you have foreknowledge, it is temporal; God doesnt have foreknowledge in the literal sense, because He is outside of change itself. The whole is just immediately in front of Him; which is different than you knowing something about what is going to happen next. Likewise, I dont think you have the ability to have done otherwise simpliciter: I think libertarian freedom, leeway freedom, properly consists in the ability to do otherwise than what physically would have happened.
Now, you could say that if you had this whole of all change in front of you like God then you could go against God. Ok, but then you are God.
Now, if you have foreknowledge in the literal sense and know that God wants you to do something, X, but choose not to; well, thats standard free will which doesnt negate anything I said. God would know you will choose not to do X and that would be a part of His knowledge of the whole.
But how is it inerrant if the author's are untrustworthy and give false information?
Maybe it is Divinely Inspired that way, but, at a minimum, that doesn't seem to cohere with God's nature. Don't you think?
But I dont think you accept that reductio. Ill run a parody argument to demonstrate my point:
4. It is the Heinrich Himmlers job to mass execute jews.
5. It is not impermissible to ones job.
6. Therefore, Himmler is not a murderer.
I think what you are really contending, which to me begs the question, is whether or not God has the authority to take innocent life; and this just loops back to our original point of contention.
Thats an interesting point. I am going to have to think about that one and get back to you.
My prima facie response would be that the world is fallen due to sin, and that sin is what causally is responsible for our mortality. Without evil of persons, there would be no mortality. That seems like the only viable rejoinder.
Theres no definition in your quote that you provided of yourself. What is your definition of murder? All you said is that it must have a dead victim.
Ok, this is a definition: thank you! Firstly, I want to hyper-focus on the fact that your definition here would prima facie allow for murder on earth for people who dont completely die (e.g., have rational souls). Are you also still claiming that a death has to be a complete annihilation of a life? If so, then there cannot be murder of any humans on earth according to your view.
Secondly, I would like to just note how arbitrary this definition is. You just evaded the conversation by defining murder as any case of directly intentionally killing an innocent person that does not involve God. Why doesnt it apply to God too?
So, God can sin since He is free! Agree, or disagree?
I can do the opposite of God's foreknowledge if I am a free agent and have access to His foreknowledge. I know that is not acceptable in your view, but I am able to do it since I am free. That is the same ability that keeps us responsible for our actions. If you think that is not an acceptable problem in your view, then you have to either agree that I am not free or that Foreknowledge does not exist. Which one do you pick?
Off the top of my head, this seems to hold for Ezra or Maccabees. I have seen this trend remarked upon as well. God goes from being a direct parent figure (a "helicopter parent") who speaks to individuals, to speaking through prophets to a corporate people, to (in the Christian Scriptures) speaking to man as man, to a direct indwelling of the Holy Spirit and the putting on of the "Mind of Christ." This can be put in developmental terms, i.e., as man moves from "childhood towards adulthood," we see the need for the internalization of external teaching, with the teaching becoming more and more hands-off as man matures (and man is allowed to fail more often and more severely). It can also be put in terms of an "exitus et reditus," a fall from the presence of the divine, and a parallel ascent and return.
Anyhow, in support of such a reading of Samuel, Samuel doesn't seem particularly concerned with being a strict documentary (if it was, we shouldn't expect ambiguity). In I Samuel 16 we get the first David origin story, with David being selected to play the lyre to calm Saul who is afflicted by an evil spirit. In I Samuel 17, we get the parallel story of David killing Goliath. But in I Samuel 17, we Saul and Abner seem to have no idea who David is, whereas, in I Samuel 16 he has already become Saul's beloved armor bearer who goes everywhere with him. Some commentators have tried to explain the disconnect as amnesia brought on by the evil spirit (and Abner is just humoring Saul), but this seems like a stretch. Or we could assume that Samuel 17 comes first, but then we have the same sort of problem where Saul should know David.
Often this is explained as two parallel takes on David, where by Biblical convention a character's first words and appearance define them. In this first, God is central, and David is a sort of conduit, whereas in the second, God is absent and David is a worldly military leader. We get the two sides of David.
In terms of the text giving guidance itself, such a disconnect (if one takes the point of the text as being primarily documentary) could hardly have been lost on the writer or any redactor. It's like that for a reason. There are a number of cases like this in the Bible, right from Genesis 1 vs Genesis 2. And I think this at least suggests a close reading.
It wouldn't be false in that reading, it simply reports what Samuel says. But see the point above about the parallel David introduction stories. One can take the text as divinely inspired and not take its purpose as being primarily a straight documentary. If it was, it is, at the very least, quite confused.
It could be just that there were multiple versions of the various stories and a desire to create a single consistent story was of less priority to the person who sewed the various accounts together than was protecting as much original text as possible.
This posits that there were multiple sources for the Bible and that the redactor's primary objective was that of an archivist of foundational literature.
This is a widely held view.
Quoting GregW
Quoting GregW
Bob, if you use my definition of murder in place of your definition of murder in all your arguments that God had committed murder in the Old Testament, then you would find that God had not committed murder by my definition of murder, on earth or anywhere else.
I am talking about free will. The ability to do whatever I want, even sin. Does God have such an ability?
I would agree, although I would need to read Buber's case. If I'm not mistaken, the mainstream rabbinic Jewish view is that Samuel does receive legitimate revelation, interprets it correctly, and does correctly convey God's will in his command to Saul to destroy Amalek.
The question is what we as believers make of this. What do we have here a divinely ordained state of exception where moral rules have been temporarily (or permanently) altered regarding a specific group (Amalek, Midian, Canaan)? And sure, we can say that historically, putting groups under the ban in the ancient Near East has precedent, but theologically, what do we make of our relationship with God in light of these commands? And how do we view such an extreme manifestation of His authority? Not only does He give the law, He can also suspend it at will. That is no minor feature.
I don't have any easy answers. Much easier to try to make the question disappear by absolving God of responsibility.
Which version of the Bible are you claiming inerrancy? In modern biblical studies, many different versions are often compared with each other.
In any case, it may come down to whether one understands the Bible as being written in the language of man to understand the divine or as a divinely perfect language where every detail is meaningful.
I think it has more to do with the metaphysics of death, as noted in my last.
Quoting Bob Ross
Sure, and that's a pretty common Christian response. But if someone is focused on individual guilt, then Original Sin will not satisfy them. Someone focused on individual guilt would insist that only one who has personally sinned is able to die.
I was speaking generically like a stereotypical Christian would about it. I would say stereotypical Christianity sees all legitimate copies of the Bible to be inerrant.
Not really. This isnt a dispute about God dumming things down: its about how God is said to do things in the OT that are incongruent with His nature (e.g., the Great Flood, laws about slavery, the conquest of Canaan, etc.).
When God inspires rules in Exodus about keeping gentiles as property, thats not a question about Him dumming ethics down.
I dont see why someone cannot hold an individual guilt theory and hold that Original Sin is the causal consequence of the first fall. If my parents are given 10,000,000 dollars and they waste it and I consequently get no inheritance, I dont think that infringes or impedes on guilt being individualistic: I wasnt owed that money. However, perhaps someone could rejoin that God, being perfectly good, would intervene and fix that causal chain for me so that I get what He intended for me (instead of letting me exist in the fallen world); but I think this requires that God is doing something wrong by allowing the evil to continue and this requires a demonstration of how God could intervene in a morally permissible way: I simply dont see how He could.
Likewise, correct me if I am wrong, but I dont think Orthodox and Catholic Christians believe that Aboriginal Sin is something one is guilty of: they believe that it is something one is not culpable for but still causally affects them.
The problem with the analogy is that Original Sin doesn't merely deprive you of a gratuitous gift; it actually harms you. You come to harm (or come to be compromised) through no fault of your own, and because of someone else's poor decision.
Quoting Bob Ross
Right, but it's always an uneasy notion. It's not natural evil and it's not personal evil. It is a natural consequence of another person's individual evil. This is by no means sui generis. That sort of thing happens all the time. A quintessential example is the crack baby. But there is a prima facie injustice about the plight of the crack baby. It's not easy to reconcile.
As Chesteron said, Original Sin is perhaps the most empirically verifiable Christian doctrine, but it nevertheless still has about it the mystery and opacity of evil.
Going back to the issue of slavery, if you agree with me that the legislation in the Torah ameliorates it, there seem to be three ways to argue in defense of God as portrayed in those books:
1. Slavery is not always, necessarily, or in all forms evil; God permitted it because some forms of slavery are just.
2. Although what we understand by the English word "slavery" is unjust, the Hebrew word translated as "slavery" refers to a different practice which was not necessarily unjust.
3. Even if slavery in all its forms is unjust, God could permit it without being a consequentialist.
It is possible that #1 and #2 are related, e.g., maybe everything properly called "slavery" in English is unjust, but some things called by the Hebrew word thus translated are not unjust.
I am utterly unqualified to say anything definitive about #2, due to my lack of knowledge both of the Hebrew and the rabbinic tradition, to which Hanover has drawn our attention:
Quoting Hanover
Because what God said to them cannot be separated from what they understood. I would be glad if he or others familiar with that tradition would be able to help us out here.
1. Slavery is not always, necessarily, or in all forms evil; God permitted it because some forms of slavery are just.
---Catholic Encyclopedia, Ethical Aspect of Slavery
What do you think?
I apologize for the incredibly belated response!
I see what you are saying. The question arises: if God is not deploying a concept of group guilt, then why wouldnt God simply restore that grace for those generations that came after (since they were individually innocent)?
This makes me hypothesize that it may have been impossible for God to do so because it would violate His nature OR that group guilt is not immoral. I lean towards the former.
My thought would be that God begins creation with a pure act of which He knows its full causality; i.e., if He chooses to create world A then causally all of this stuff in set sA will happen and if He chooses to create world B then causally etc. If there is a best possible world, which is perfectly aligned with Gods nature (which would be causally harmonious and non-parasitically causally ordered), then a Great Fall would entail the necessary annihilation of that world and its re-creation; because the causality would always be altered indefinitely from the sin spillage. This restoration would be impossible through repairing it (that is, through preserving some of the world in restoring it back) because the very fabric of causality would be polluted (e.g., the molecular level would be poisoned). If this is true, then God could only restore the grace of those born after the Great Fall by an act of annihilation; and annihilation is an act of willing the bad of something (by willing its non-existence, which is bad for that thing since the more being it hasthe more its essence is realized in existencethe better it is). God cannot will the bad of anything directly because His creation powers can only will a thing in accord with is form (perfectly) because He has perfect knowledge; and to will the bad of something is to will a depravity in its form. Consequently, once God wills something to be He cannot rescind it. Therefore, under this view, God would have to let natural death do its thing, for those who can die, as opposed to doing it Himself.
Of course, the highlight here is the hard pill to swallow that God cant rescind existence from things (which would be by way of no longer willing their existence [actively]). However, God could annihilate particular things through other things (e.g., having fire burn a man); because He, in those instances, is simultaneously willing the good of both by willing their existence in perfect correspondence with their forms (e.g., the fires form and the mans form) and allowing their interaction to dictate the outcome (e.g., the man burns alive). Annihilating an entire totality of creation, though, would require willing the bad of it in a direct way; and this is impossible for God to do.
What do you think?
No worries.
Quoting Bob Ross
Yes, good. That is one of the questions that comes up.
Quoting Bob Ross
That's an interesting theory, with a lot of different moving parts. I'm not sure how many of the details I would want to get into, especially in a thread devoted to Old Testament evil.
My thought is that there must be some ontological reality binding humans one to another, i.e. that we are not merely individuals. Hence God, in creating humans, did not create a set of individuals, but actually also created a whole, and there is a concern for the whole qua whole (which does not deny a concern for the parts). If one buys into the Western notion of individualism too deeply, then traditional Christian doctrines such as Original Sin make little sense.
Quoting Bob Ross
That's an interesting argument, and it may well be correct. Annihilation is certainly unheard of in the Biblical context, and even the notion of non-being is something that develops relatively late.
I am inclined to agree, except wouldnt it be juridical and not ontologically?
it's really hard to know what went through the minds of people who wrote ancient documents, but the old testament was likely part of some ruling class's doctrine on why they are superior; one part of the old testament that supports this is how Lot's daughters got him drunk in a cave and had sex with him to continue the bloodline of their family. It's a blatant appeal to lineage.
there are of course logically consistent and different theories:
1. The existence of a jealous, controlling, and evil God. Whether or not this makes sense is entirely up to you, it's not exactly a comforting belief in my opinion.
2. The people who wrote the old testament were simply crazy and delusional.
3. The documents representing the "Old Testament" are not being translated properly, and we impose our modern ideas and agendas on these ancient people. Lots of people talk about the bible as it is truth, but i have little sense of what the sources are. I think translation error is pretty unlikely because jewish people have been passing down these ideas as traditions. Maybe things got distorted along the way for selfish purposes.
I think it has to be a combination of my theory on it being used as part of a social control scheme and number 2#.
The old role of myth making also wasn't to speak the truth bluntly, but people seem to have a need to condense things into narratives. If you have observed children, you'll see that they have spontaneous imaginations: when humanity was early, they just didn't have access to the type of accumulated knowledge we have today, so they stayed more childlike in terms of belief and explanation.
this is a pretty interesting point; i remember in christian school the logic was that "Jesus fulfilled the word of God", but seems pretty empty, no? What the hell does that even mean? In 6th grade, at a 7th day adventist school, i was confused about how enternal hellfire could be a just way to punish the wicked. They were nice enough that they set up a meeting for me with the preacher so I could talk to him, and he could clarify what their religion. The preacher said it was the Catholics who believed in that, but THEY believed that the hellbound are currently in some sort of holding pattern until the next return of Christ, and the wicked would simply be obliterated while the fallowers would join God in heaven. Christianity, Judaism, and Islam are simply too nonsensical for me to take them seriously.
Well biologically we are all clones (I know there is sexual and therefore genetic diversity, but this is merely a means of introducing a mechanism for individual diversity between clones). So we are a colony of clones. This would suggest much more of a common ground between us than would outwardly appear to be the case. Extend this to a transcendent soul and Bobs your uncle (excuse the pun).
More than this, people in those days didnt think rationally as we do. They thought in allegory, it was much more like the dreamtime of the Australian aborigines. In a real sense the narrative of a story would convey a unique morality, applicable only to the story being told, magic and sorcery were real and archaic power structures were still in play.
We are, for example, no more meant to question whether there were children killed in the Flood than we are meant to question whether Gandalf should not have converted the Orcs in Lord of the Rings to the side of good.
Or whether we are meant to obsess over whether Lady MacBeth had children ("I have given suck").
Or whether the film's "message" of "Million Dollar Baby" is "pro-suicide".
Or whether, for that matter, whether Romeo and Juliet is "pro-suicide".
That simply is not what the story is about.
As far as the conquest of Canaan is concerned it must be read from the point of view of the norms of that time and place - where the conquest and utter destruction of one's enemies was a completely glorious event, worthy of song and worship.
If we ignore these contexts, we will judge the God of the OT from the post-Enlightenment perspective of the Blind Watchmaker - and miss the point.
PS: Reading the Bible from this post-Enlightenment perspective is akin to claiming that the "days" of Genesis were literal 24 hour days or asking whether the Devil put the dinosaur fossils there.
The old testament is an attempt at giving a narration of what they believed was Divine Revelation by God (even if it wasnt); and recording lineages was an aspect of giving a historical account of what was happening.
The idea that the Biblical scriptures were a product of insanity or elitism seems implausible given that they were recording as different times and over a long period of time. It was and still is a generation-by-generation effort. You would have to believe that these were historically unfolding for the purpose of aristocracy
To some extent this is true, but this begs the question by assuming that the Bible doesnt have truth in it.
Isn't this just the problem or flaw with monotheism? If everything flows from one entity, then that entity is responsible for everything. Since many events are evil, then that entity must be at least partly evil as we conceive it.
It doesn't matter that he was explicitly killing everyone in the OT. If the Biblical flood is the anthropomorphization of real natural disasters, then under monotheism those disasters require explanation as well.
This is the familiar:
God is all good
God is all powerful
Evil things happen
At least one of these must be false.
Fair enough!
No. Evil is the privation of good; and other persons in the creation could be responsible for its introduction.
It matters because God then would be doing something evil as opposed to merely allowing the evil of someone else.
I believe we have discussed this before. Allowing evil is itself a kind of evil. God permitted the Holocaust, for which he must take at least some responsibility.
But what I had in mind was more natural disasters. Not only does he allow these, but at least in some sense he actively brings them about. The natural world, as I understand monotheism, is an expression of God's will. And so here responsibility seems total.
As long as man has free will, there will be evil in one way or another. God could remove our free will, then the problem of evil would be solved.
In any case, if we're all going to mindless oblivion, then whether one dies now or later makes no real difference. In the end, our minds will be destroyed, along with all our experiences and thoughts.
Quoting hypericin
I touched on the same sort of thing here:
Quoting Leontiskos
---
Quoting hypericin
What I would say is that @Bob Ross' OP prescinds from this question of whether allowing evil is evil, and that this is okay given the thorniness of that question. He therefore isolates Biblical passages where the stronger premise can be used, namely the premise that the committing (or else commanding) of evil is evil. So your observation is salient in certain ways, but in other ways it is a different argument than the one Ross has given.
This seems to miss the distinction between dying naturally (old age) and dying unnaturally of natural causes(cancer, earthquake).
In terms of adjudicating God's culpability I see four cases:
1. God directly kills, or commands murder (OP)
2. A human kills
3. A natural event kills
4. A human dies a natural death
My point was that 3 and 1 are essentially the same in a worldview where natural events are expressions of God's will. And so 1 is perhaps a personalization or reification of a contradiction in monotheism itself, manifest by 3.
Whereas, 2 and 4 are morally distinct cases. 4 seems fair enough: if God gives the gift of life, he is not obliged to give it for an unlimited period of time.
Quoting hypericin
Dying unnaturally of natural causes. :chin:
Medically, "old age" is never the cause. It's e.g., organ failure, heart disease, etc.
Well, if you are thinking of death as a natural event, then I don't see the difference between 3 and 4. Alternatively, if God gives a gift that allows one to die, hasn't he allowed death?
Of course. But when those causes are ultimately consequences of the aging process, that is considered dying of "old age".
Quoting Leontiskos
I am distinguishing dying naturally and being killed. To be killed is to die before your natural lifespan, by something other than old age. You might not see the difference, but most humans are keenly aware of it.
Quoting Leontiskos
He allows death. Additionally, he allows killing. These are distinct claims.
I believe we did discuss this before too: allowing evil may be evil but is not necessarily evil. E.g., if I can only save a person from getting murdered by doing evil, then allowing the evil of that person getting murdered is morally permissible and, in this case, obligatory. You are omitting a crucial distinction between the moral evaluation of omissions and commissions.
Perhaps so, but only because you are not "God"; the "Almighty" otoh can "save a person" without "doing evil" or "allowing evil", thus every occurrance of "evil" in creation caused or allowed either by "Creator" or creature, the "Creator" is ultimately responsible for "thy will be done!", or as scripture sayeth:
[quote=Isaiah 45:7]I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the Lord do all these things.[/quote]
(2020)
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/523586
Yes, I am also responsible for allowing an evil to happen; but what I am saying is it is permissible under certain conditions. It is permissible, likewise, God to allow evil; but it never permissible for Him to do evil. That's what they were missing. It seems like under your view it is not permissible for God to allow evilwhy?