Christians, Please Deal With It

[POI]

I don't think Bible commands 1) infanticide, 2) rape and 3) slavery.

The above statement is objectively incorrect. God objectively does command or condones such actions, as demonstrated below.

"God" commands infanticide in Hosea 9:11-16:

11 Ephraims glory will fly away like a bird"
no birth, no pregnancy, no conception.
12 Even if they rear children,
I will bereave them of every one.
Woe to them
when I turn away from them!
13 I have seen Ephraim, like Tyre,
planted in a pleasant place.
But Ephraim will bring out
their children to the slayer.

14 Give them, Lord"
what will you give them?
Give them wombs that miscarry
and breasts that are dry.

15 Because of all their wickedness in Gilgal,
I hated them there.
Because of their sinful deeds,
I will drive them out of my house.
I will no longer love them;
all their leaders are rebellious.
16 Ephraim is blighted,
their root is withered,
they yield no fruit.

Even if they bear children,
I will slay their cherished offspring.

"God" commands rape in Numbers 31:7-18:

7 They fought against Midian, as the Lord commanded Moses, and killed every man. 8 Among their victims were Evi, Rekem, Zur, Hur and Reba"the five kings of Midian. They also killed Balaam son of Beor with the sword. 9 The Israelites captured the Midianite women and children and took all the Midianite herds, flocks and goods as plunder. 10 They burned all the towns where the Midianites had settled, as well as all their camps. 11 They took all the plunder and spoils, including the people and animals, 12 and brought the captives, spoils and plunder to Moses and Eleazar the priest and the Israelite assembly at their camp on the plains of Moab, by the Jordan across from Jericho.

13 Moses, Eleazar the priest and all the leaders of the community went to meet them outside the camp. 14 Moses was angry with the officers of the army"the commanders of thousands and commanders of hundreds"who returned from the battle.

15 Have you allowed all the women to live? he asked them. 16 They were the ones who followed Balaams advice and enticed the Israelites to be unfaithful to the Lord in the Peor incident, so that a plague struck the Lords people. 17 Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man, 18 but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man.

"God" condones slavery in Leviticus 25:44-46:

44 As for the male and female slaves whom you may have, it is from the nations around you that you may acquire male and female slaves. 45 You may also acquire them from among the aliens residing with you, and from their families that are with you, who have been born in your land; and they may be your property. 46 You may keep them as a possession for your children after you, for them to inherit as property. These you may treat as slaves, but as for your fellow Israelites, no one shall rule over the other with harshness.

***********************

So, the real question becomes:

For debate: If God is all powerful, all good, all loving, and all just, why command and/or condone such actions?

[Haven]

[Replying to bluegreenearth in post #70]

No, he’s a presuppositionalist. Notice how there was no response to “what, if anything, would change your mind?” The answer is “nothing,” because blind faith is his epistemic starting point. He can dismiss all evidence, all logic, all facts because his beginning and end are “the Bible is true because the Bible says the Bible is true…pure circular reasoning.

I also responded to the “paradigm” thing earlier (comparing it with the scientific “paradigm,” which produces real, testable, repeatable results…no response).

[Haven]

[Replying to bluegreenearth in post #65] I don't know what any number of doctrines have given others. The smartest Christians I've heard speak, like the Oxford professor John Lennox doesn't appear to be this lost person whom can't acknowledge reality. Nor Einstein who believed in a cosmic order, that didn't stop him, that dangerous presupposition.

Are you trying to use every single logical fallacy? Appeal to authority is also not a path to truth. Lennox and Einstein can be wrong.

(Einstein wasn’t a Christian, by the way. He was at most a Deist, and more than likely he was an atheist who just used God as a metaphor).

[Clownboat]

"Claims like all powerful and all loving can be tested to see if such claims are true or not and if such claims even hold water."

I have said I do not believe it is logical from what I know that God could have simplly folded his arms, bowed his head and blinked and brought all of creation back to heel, raising the fallen back up.

I'm confused, are you now not psychoanalyzing? You claimed that cannot be done. You can't have your cake and eat it too.
I for one can imagine what you cannot, though I don't see why it would need to blink.

All loving should mean he never had to kill a single person to achieve any magnificent end that he has in store?

Not for a normal person, but for something with claimed traits of all loving and all powerful, yes.

Perfect in every way means he should have condemned slavery in the Holy Land even in such a world as there are altars and covenants, and powers that seek to supplant his will.

Supplant his will? It seems you no longer believe this god concept to have the trait 'all powerful'.

All of this makes perfect sense if your paradigm were correct. If the paradigm itself is wrong, can you even change a paradigm without some special pleading? Is it even possible?

This reads as a distraction. Can you make it 'on topic'?

To view it in a manner beyond how you may judge a man for his actions with no righteous end moving him?

I'm sorry, but I can't make sense of this question?

You have laid at my feet an impossible situation, and it is not right.

It sounds like I owe you an apology. Please inform me of the impossible situation that is not right that I put you in so I can make amends.

The story is not nearly as dull as you and your peers suggest.

I'm usually pretty good about following along, but what dull story are you referring to and what would it being dull or not have to do with anything?

A world where there was never even a need to make anything how it is because as a genie, poof, all is right in the world. If this is your idea of all powerful, I dispute it!

I don't fully understand the first sentence, but in hopes of offering clarification about 'all powerful', I offer you:
all-pow·er·ful
/ˌôlˈpouərfəl/
adjective
having complete power; almighty.

[Difflugia]

No, he’s a presuppositionalist.

…pure circular reasoning.

A lot of people assume that circular reasoning is just a side-effect and presuppositionalists just don't notice or something. It's actually considered a feature, rather than a bug. Cornelius van Til actually thought our "total depravity" (he was a Calvinist) prevented us from doing logic correctly. Since logic without a foundation therefore can't be trusted, believing that the Bible is true to start with is the solution, even if the goal is to prove the truth of the Bible.

[Haven]

No, he’s a presuppositionalist.

…pure circular reasoning.

A lot of people assume that circular reasoning is just a side-effect and presuppositionalists just don't notice or something. It's actually considered a feature, rather than a bug. Cornelius van Til actually thought our "total depravity" (he was a Calvinist) prevented us from doing logic correctly. Since logic without a foundation therefore can't be trusted, believing that the Bible is true to start with is the solution, even if the goal is to prove the truth of the Bible.

Van Til was wrong, of course. The scientific worldview, rooted in secular logic, produces results that are testable, repeatable and useful, which provides strong evidence that it’s rooted in reality.

The Biblical worldview had us drilling holes in people’s heads to relieve headaches and “cure” strokes and mental illnesses, which we believed were caused by demons.

Under fundamentalist Christian rule (for millennia) virtually zero progress was made in understanding the world, and that only changed when we abandoned Biblicist assumptions during the Enlightenment.

If anything, we should presuppose atheism and secular logic. It leads to better results and a more-accurate world model.

[SimpleLayman]

[Replying to Haven in post #71] No, I wasn't raised up in any faith or doctrine. You'd think this would mean I'd see it as clearly as any atheist does, and I chose to see it that way at various points in my life. I've matured since then, and I understand it's so incredibly difficult to wrap your mind around various paradigms, especially when you're so convinced your paradigm has the best epistemology even when analyzing a character in a story that's deserving of his own paradigm. Choosing a doctrine myself, rather than offering an example is also lacking in value. That'd only be valuable to me, as that'd be my revelation as to what paradigm is appropriate here and it'd sound bonkers to people simply trying to reason how in the hell a God that can do no evil did XYZ.

So yes, you can change my mind with rationale, but I can't change every objective mind out there to listen so charitably that the entire paradigm shifts to something more appropriate for the story rather than your idea of good epistemology. What lead to that was a number of things you might say is purely subjective. If the only way to objectively understand how such an act by God's character was justified is to compare the act to a man or a nation and how you'd perceive their moral character, then that's the paradigm you have chosen. I have offered but one alternative. Just one, and correct or incorrect, it's irrelevant. It served only to show you it's possible to do so without ignoring it entirely.

I have indeed been ignoring specific arguments about specific things, and that's because arguing the specific points only through one paradigm where everything but how we'd collectively judge a nation or a man is chucked in the waste bucket until we figure this out, I now know to be an absurd approach. The protagonist in the story is defined as all these things that you are testing, but testing it under one paradigm is a bad idea. It isn't even worthy of a charitable understanding by shifting the paradigm itself to match the story, and revelation that believers profess is also in the waste bucket until you finish your specific inquiry. If you want to look at it as a believer, you can have a strong epistemology and sense of right and wrong, but the paradigm absolutely has to shift.

These aren't gotcha questions for the faithful. They're gotcha question for specific doctrines and beliefs that your peers don't even profess to be the most accurate, some of you couldn't care less. It's why some of you come at me with these mainstream ideas like torturing humans for eternity that you think are nails you can drive into our coffins. It's why the underbelly of so many of your peer's arguments are soft with ideas like all powerful means magically achieve any end while skipping everything challenging and terrible. All loving means no hard choices or wrath is justifiable. Yall claim I'm the presuppositionalist, but all you can work with are mainstream points from people you already know are incorrect, but it's mainstream so 10 points to you. It's all very absurd.

[Haven]

[Replying to SimpleLayman in post #76]

Why won’t you substantiate your claims then? I and many others in this thread have asked for a justification for your views on your god’s morality, and you’ve done nothing but appeal to logical fallacies and repeat your unsupported claims, all while skeptics have pointed out why we believe what we do.

Can I just ask you: why do you believe your god is exempt from and above ethics and morality? And if God is “above good and evil,” how is accepting his rule* anything more than bowing to a cosmic dictator? How does it make sense to call someone who elects a plan that gets babies butchered and traumatized children raped “all-loving,” especially when (assuming he’s all powerful) he could have chosen to act differently?

‘Might makes right’ seems to be your only argument here.

*assuming, for the sake of argument, that he exists.

[SimpleLayman]

Why is any of that even relevant to this debate? Because some of us do feel a sense of duty to reconcile all of it, especially that which non-believers detest the most. We can not, however, convince anyone of anything if God is not even worthy of his own paradigm. It's not even blarringly obvious what that should even be, so you also have to listen and not toss out the very concept of revelation. I tell you now, some of you are willfully blind; by that, you see clearly that you do indeed have a good epistemology for navigating the world of ideas, but you do not wish to see what I am telling you. If the word of God can not even so much as shift a paradigm, it's worthless. It shifts peoples paradigms all the time, and we are not running blind into walls, the data suggests clearly that we are prospering from it more so than your peers. Mull on that, if you would. You've chosen to ignore any paradigm but an atheistic one to test the titles and moral aptitude of God in the bible. You are ill equipped, and the Christians that fall for it are also ill equipped. You and your peers, however, are willfully ill equipped. You do not see because you do not wish to see, because you think that you've discovered the only paradigm with any real-world value. I've just tossed that little idea right out of the window for you.

[Haven]

Why is any of that even relevant to this debate? Because some of us do feel a sense of duty to reconcile all of it, especially that which non-believers detest the most. We can not, however, convince anyone of anything if God is not even worthy of his own paradigm. It's not even blarringly obvious what that should even be, so you also have to listen and not toss out the very concept of revelation. I tell you now, some of you are willfully blind; by that, you see clearly that you do indeed have a good epistemology for navigating the world of ideas, but you do not wish to see what I am telling you. If the word of God can not even so much as shift a paradigm, it's worthless. It shifts peoples paradigms all the time, and we are not running blind into walls, the data suggests clearly that we are prospering from it more so than your peers. Mull on that, if you would. You've chosen to ignore any paradigm but an atheistic one to test the titles and moral aptitude of God in the bible. You are ill equipped, and the Christians that fall for it are also ill equipped. You and your peers, however, are willfully ill equipped. You do not see because you do not wish to see, because you think that you've discovered the only paradigm with any real-world value. I've just tossed that little idea right out of the window for you.

Two things:

1. Paragraphs are your friend. It’s hard to read a wall of text like this.

2. I’d be happy to change my views if you substantiate your claims! I won’t just take a preacher’s word for it, though, especially when all evidence and reason says otherwise.

3. You’re smuggling in the fallacy of equivocation here. If words like “love,” “all-powerful” and “good” mean different things to your god, then explain what they mean? Because after eight pages, I think we can pretty well conclude that the god of fundamentalist Christianity is not all-loving and all-powerful according to the most common definitions of those words.

4. What is wrong with naturalistic, empirical epistemology? You can start a new thread if you’d like. I’d be happy to debate you on it.

I tell you now, some of you are willfully blind; by that, you see clearly that you do indeed have a good epistemology for navigating the world of ideas, but you do not wish to see what I am telling you. If the word of God can not even so much as shift a paradigm, it's worthless.

Then I guess it’s worthless, because I’m not taking a bunch of ancient writings with wild supernatural claims at their word without evidence. None of us has claimed that revelation is impossible assuming a god exists, it’s just that we aren’t convinced a god exists and that revelation has occurred. If you’re not willing to offer evidence and argument for the supernatural origins of your holy book, then we have no reason to accept it. It would be no different than if a Hindu asked you to accept Hinduism as a paradigm because the Vedas were revealed by Vishnu. You don’t believe in Vishnu. If they just responded with “but Lord Vishnu wrote these books. Believe!,” you wouldn’t find that reasonable.

Btw, suppose I were to become a woo-believer, and decided to sit down and write a holy book (let’s call it the Bhagavad Porta) after meditating on the goddess Tara. The book would contradict the Bible in multiple ways, and would call for kindness and love to all (without any slaughter). When asked to defend the book of Porta, my only response would be that Tara revealed it to me and that you just have to shut up and believe. Would you accept this? If not, why do you expect us to do the same thing with an even more self-incoherent collection of books ostensibly written by Yahweh?

[Haven]

[Replying to SimpleLayman in post #78]

One last thing - I’m an evidentialist and a pragmatist when it comes to epistemology.

Even if god himself were to come down and personally tell me that every word in the Bible was true, I still wouldn’t believe him without evidence. Bare assertions and hearsay are not a path to truth, as literally all of human history asserts.