Re: Post Any Evidence For God Here
Posted: Sun Aug 18, 2013 7:35 pm
It's not saying we don't like the world and that's why there is no God (tho I've never seen a satisfactory answer for the problem of evil/suffering/whatnot) - this is different Player, we're saying that the moral viewpoint of "everything God does is good because God done it" is seriously messed up, especially when, if we are to believe the Bible because God wrote it and therefore it must be true story yeah, God doesn't exactly look like a particularly moral individual.
Now you can try and claim (like J9B does) that God has perfect knowledge, and therefore is allowed to sail closer to the wind than us, and has to give us rules to act as limits for our moral behaviour but not his, as he can do things like warn the righteous people to flee cities before he orders his followers to massacre everyone else and is therefore just exercising the same kind of divine judgement logic as we'd see on the "yes" side of a moral debate about "is it right to kill a murderer if that is the only way to stop him killing someone else?" He simply made the rules stricter for us to give us a kind of margin for error before we actually sinned.
But if it is OK for God to do something, then under some circumstances it is right also for us to do that thing. If you truly believe, in your heart of hearts, that you are inspired by God's divine hand, just like the Jews were when they conducted the slaughter of those entire cities (less the righteous), then you are capable of literally anything (for example flying passenger planes into office buildings - not just talking Christians here). Abrhamic religion allows, and indeed fundamentally supports, the killing of your enemies. And it can go right down to the individual level - if I truly believed that God told me to kill Dave down the road becuase he was a satanist and was going to rape, torture and sell drugs to the neighbourhood kids if I didn't then by definition there is nothing you can say that makes that act immoral. If every test you can devise shows that I am honestly 100% convinced, and every test you can devise shows that I am an honest and devout follower of any of the Abrahamic religions, then by your standards that act is also moral.
UC - I know you won't read this, but do you think it might be possible in the 8 centuries between the first known writings in hebrew (and that's ignoring up to another 2000 years of written language, and who knows how many years of oral tradition) and the Torah being written some knowledge may have been accumulated and the Torah might just be based on observable wisdom like "if you're going to cut bits off your kid, we've found that if you do it on the 8th day after birth there seems to be the least amount of blood"
Now you can try and claim (like J9B does) that God has perfect knowledge, and therefore is allowed to sail closer to the wind than us, and has to give us rules to act as limits for our moral behaviour but not his, as he can do things like warn the righteous people to flee cities before he orders his followers to massacre everyone else and is therefore just exercising the same kind of divine judgement logic as we'd see on the "yes" side of a moral debate about "is it right to kill a murderer if that is the only way to stop him killing someone else?" He simply made the rules stricter for us to give us a kind of margin for error before we actually sinned.
But if it is OK for God to do something, then under some circumstances it is right also for us to do that thing. If you truly believe, in your heart of hearts, that you are inspired by God's divine hand, just like the Jews were when they conducted the slaughter of those entire cities (less the righteous), then you are capable of literally anything (for example flying passenger planes into office buildings - not just talking Christians here). Abrhamic religion allows, and indeed fundamentally supports, the killing of your enemies. And it can go right down to the individual level - if I truly believed that God told me to kill Dave down the road becuase he was a satanist and was going to rape, torture and sell drugs to the neighbourhood kids if I didn't then by definition there is nothing you can say that makes that act immoral. If every test you can devise shows that I am honestly 100% convinced, and every test you can devise shows that I am an honest and devout follower of any of the Abrahamic religions, then by your standards that act is also moral.
UC - I know you won't read this, but do you think it might be possible in the 8 centuries between the first known writings in hebrew (and that's ignoring up to another 2000 years of written language, and who knows how many years of oral tradition) and the Torah being written some knowledge may have been accumulated and the Torah might just be based on observable wisdom like "if you're going to cut bits off your kid, we've found that if you do it on the 8th day after birth there seems to be the least amount of blood"

