Can a newborn baby ever be evil and deserving of death? It seems that in their quest to justify the unjustifiable some theists indeed think so.
a God that can cause a worldwide flood that kills off a world full of evil people and saves only a few that are good
I think we can safely assume that there were newborns in the world just prior to the floode. However I’m skeptical that any baby can be classified as “evil people”.
What do believers in the flood think? Did those babies deserve to drown because they were evil? Did those evil babies go to heaven? Or were they a price worth paying to “reset” the earth to only allow good people to survive?
I presume then, hypothetically speaking if there is a God , and the God is the Christian God, you view yourself as having a better way of doing business. In other words, Keiths is right, the Christian God is wrong (if He indeed exists). Is that correct?
Assuming that the God featured in the Old Testament is the Christian God you speak of here, then yes. As described, he’s wrong. There are certain moral standards to which one is expected to adhere. Killing someone for touching your ark, and in actual fact touching it to keep it from falling, is wrong by any reasonable standard. If any human did that, you would agree it was wrong. So why are the rules for God so different? Might makes right? What is your justification for such behavior?
Another clueless “scholar” that reads the incident out of context and thinks he knows better…
Agreed, but it’s OK if God does it, much like it’s OK for me to kill a maggot because the maggot’s very existence offends me, or for me delete a word I typed because I didn’t like it.
As we are greater than maggot, so much more so is God greater than us.
I didn’t say we ought to like this arrangement any more than a maggot likes being killed. But judging our value with reference to our own wants and desires isn’t necessarily the ultimate standard for good and evil in the universe any more than a maggot’s needs and wants defines what is good and evil.
How would a maggot know that?
stcordova,
So, again, you advance “might makes right” as your basis for morality. That’s some creepy argument you have there. I presume you also come out against the “God loves me” notion.
I must be dreaming…
What is Harshman talking about? What morality???
Has he lost him mind again…?
“Blessed are the poor in spirit,
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are they who mourn,
for they shall be comforted.
Blessed are the meek,
for they shall inherit the earth.
Blessed are they who hunger and thirst for righteousness,
for they shall be satisfied.
Blessed are the merciful,
for they shall obtain mercy.
Blessed are the pure of heart,
for they shall see God.
Blessed are the peacemakers,
for they shall be called children of God.
Blessed are they who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness,
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”
Nothing about maggots or words.
Certainly not the morality of a God which kills babies for offenses they will never commit.
Or the morality of a god who used a flood to kill all humans on earth for the perceived transgressions of those in a small middle eastern corner of the earth. Sounds like a cruel, sadistic, vindictive bastard to me.
What morality you and Harshman are you talking about then?
I guess Harshman and newton are not taking about the morality of groups of males who regularly rape because it is for the better good; the reproduction and survival…
Is this is morally acceptable?
Does it meet “…a certain moral standards to which one is expected to adhere…”, as Harshman asked earlier?
Sal,
It’s good to see you publicly rejecting what the Bible says. But if you reject the Bible, why are you a YEC?
J-Mac, to John:
Given your superior knowledge of the context, why are you afraid to answer my question?
Any other believers out there who are braver than J-Mac and would like to weigh in?
Correct, I was talking about the morality of the version of divine which you choose to worship.
Nope nor rape of captives. Is that the choice, blindly follow an ancient religious text or run amok?
I am open to a persuasive argument , what is the moral standard that allows the drowning of children for offenses they will never commit?
It’s amusing that Mung still hasn’t made an appearance in this thread, despite being quoted in the OP:
Come on, Mung. Tell us about those evil babies that God drowned.
This made me laugh.
From John Clayton’s discussion of the Uzzah incident:
So…rape is morally unacceptable in your view and you think in Harshman’s?
Or are you simply saying that rape is unacceptable in morality of the version of divine which I choose to worship but it is fine according to the evolutionary paradigm?
Please make it clear…
newton,
I have answered the other part of your question @11. If you have difficulty understanding what I meant, please let me know…
All you need is Einstein-like visual imagination… 😉
You haven’t found it why Uzza was killed, have you? So just continue pretending that nothing happened…My kids knew you wouldn’t find it… I won’t tell you why… for now… 😉 So much for you scholarly knowledge…
Numbers 31:17 “Now therefore kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that has known man by lying with him. 18 But all the women children, that have not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves.”
Nothing about keeping them alive for yourselves as long as they consent.
More quote mining? That’s nice…
Seems nobody is going to address the issue with gang rape or rape itself from evolutionary prospective and the “morality” issue of it…
It seems easy to materialists to judge God on morality and who deserves to die and who doesn’t but when evolution in on a hot plate, then all the experts disappear… hoping it is going to pass on… pity…
keiths:
J-Mac:
It’s because the God you worship is a petulant ass. However, the real question — which you are avoiding for obvious reasons — is this:
You are showing your kids how to run away from questions. That’s good. If they remain Christians, they’ll be doing a lot of that.
True, cause proceeds effect
For example?
That is not the issue, the question is about whether the actions of God within time are subject to parameters of time.
Your position is that God is justified the punishing babies because of being outside time He knew the babies will commit evil actions.Yet due to the causation of the Flood no evil actions occurred. The question is, if God knew beforehand what actions He would take, then He knew the babies would never commit evil being dead.Therefore God could never know the babies would commit evil action whether or not He was outside time.
Would like to see a citation for that.
Yes , is it morallly unacceptable in all instances in the Bible?
Not sure if it is unacceptable in all cases for the Biblical God.
Why should we base morality, the way we treat other humans, on an evolutionary paradigm? Certainly some do, killing all the males ,men and children, of conquered enemies and taking their women as possessions.
I am trying but you seem confused that there are only two rationales for morality, ancient texts and biology.
I think you are not perceiving a contradiction in your logic that God’s actions effect timelines that would exist without His actions.
keiths,
I’m going to let my kids decide whether they are going to continue this cat and mouse game …I’m done with you…
BTW: Isn’t it more fulfilling to take your cat for a walk and feed the birdies than spend all this time here pretending that you know something?
Bye bye!
What other guidelines of morality are there? When something is immoral in your view, how do you know that? How do you measure it? According to what or who?
You obviously don’t get the perception of time…I have neither time nor the desire to teach you that…
If my kids decide to do it, you will hopefully see some links here…
My kids favorites are Back to the Future movie and The Illusion of Time doc.
You can watch the latter on youtube…
ETA: It took me 5 sec to find it:
http://www.artofspirit.ca/ ” Albert Einstein was very clear in his day. Physicists are very clear now. Time is not absolute, despite what common sense tells you and me. Time is relative, and flexible and, according to Einstein, “the dividing line between past, present, and future is an illusion”. So reality is ultimately TIMELESS. This sounds pretty bizarre from the view of classical physics, but from the view of consciousness theory and spirituality, it fits in perfectly.”
J-Mac,
What cat and mouse game? I asked you a simple question, and you are afraid to answer it. You can’t defend your God, to no one’s surprise.
Besides seeing you run from a simple question, your kids are also watching you flakily flounce, deflounce, and flounce again, over and over. Is that the kind of example you want to set for them?
If you’re going to declare that you’re “done with” me, why not keep your word for a change?
J-Mac,
Regarding newton’s point, you are making a very dumb error: confusing Einsteinian block time with what happens in the set of all possible worlds.
If God drowns a baby, then any future sins that the baby would have committed are not committed, and that’s true even from a God’s-eye perspective outside of block time.
You like it? Well here are a few more:
What is truly amazing is that there are actually women who worship this misogynistic god.
Empathy, altruism ,fairness for some.Vengeance ,punishment and fear for others.
Justification versus harm would be one metric. How do you know what is immoral, someone tells you what God says?
Harm inflicted,how do you?
Good question.
What do you think you found here? Proof of what?
And If I explain it, what are you going to do next? Move goal posts and find some more bible accounts were people get killed raped? And then another one and another one… ???
Of course you will…
Imagine an isolated town in the mountains of Peru where former Nazis-war criminals settled who escaped the justice of death penalty for murdering, raping and torturing thousands of people, including your family members…
Someone finds them and collects a bunch of people and you to surround the town to bomb it from all sides, so that nobody escapes. But one of the executors has second thoughts about the execution of justice on those war criminals and says:
-What if not all people in that town are war criminals?
Someone else responds:- I checked it out. All of them are war criminals.
But the first fellow insists:
There is a possibility that same of those criminals are just accused of being war criminals just because they were a part of Nazis and they had no choice but to escape or they would be executed along with the real war criminals…
Finally, the boss of this whole operation comes in and finds out what’s going on.
He says:-I thought all of those people in town were convicted war criminals; there is proof that they all deserve to die. What are you talking about few people being possibly innocent?
The guy who spied them out responds: There is a possibility that few people in that town may be innocent…I don’t have full proof. Just circumstantial evidence…
What should we do?
The boss responds: If there is a chance that a few people in that town are innocent, we have to spare the whole town… as there is no other way to punish the guilty ones…
Everybody begins to protests: 99.9 % of people in town are full-proof war criminals who killed, raped and tortured our family members and thousands of others. How could we let them escape justice and allow them to continue living?
The boss says again: For the sake of the few innocent people in that town, I am willing to spare the whole town…
What would you do, if you were the boss?
So by stating all those great qualities about humans, such as empathy, altruism , fairness you say that harm, such as rape is morally wrong because of what you said: justification versus harm…
In other words rape may help to procreate i.e. pass on offspring, but if it is going to harm the raped, then it is morally wrong, right? More or less…
If that is all true, would you still agree with the idea that humans are just hairless monkeys?
J-Mac, to Acartia:
An omniscient and omnipotent boss could punish the guilty while sparing the innocent. Why is your God too stupid to think of that?
Given that their god is a projection of their gut beliefs, it instantiates those beliefs.
It can’t jump any higher.
What the fuck??!!
I give you words from the bible about god instructing his “chosen” to kill all women who have had sex (even though they have been faithful to their husbands) and to rape all those who haven’t, and you are asking me to take it context? What context can their be? God said to enslave and rape women. That is as clear as night and day.
You can’t even argue that there are nuances. He told them to enslave and rape the virgins.
He told them that if you rape a girl that you have to pay the father some cash and marry the girl. Maybe it’s just me, but if someone raped one of my daughters, he sure as hell isnt going to be marrying her.
Let’s face it, your god is one misogynistic, sadistic, childish, vengeful bastard. How else can you describe this behaviour?
Hairless monkeys who apparently have a better moral sense than your god.
I’m going to try to answer this as clearly as possible:
Time seems to be an illusion and Einstein came to the conclusion himself. We measure time, time seems to be “flowing” in one direction only from the past to the future…But in quantum mechanics the concept of time seems to despair because reality as we know it disappears too..
Einstein realized that separating past present and future “time or times” is an illusion, but I call it fuzziness because Einstein didn’t know about QM what we know now…
Now, to make long story short, God, being the creator of the universe and the laws of physics and space-time is outside of time; meaning He is the ultimate reality not restricted by anything including time…
So, if He chooses to, he can “look into the future” (not really future for him, because time doesn’t flow for Him) and check out the slices of space time depending on His needs… The documentary on youtube about the illusion of time explains it to a degree about the slices of spacetime carved out of like slices of a loaf of bread I think… While not the same, it is similar as to what the GTOR allows…
Since according to the general theory of relativity motion affects the passage of time (the now timeslice) God can choose to take advantage this law and look into the different “now slices of time” including the future ones…
In another words, God can look into the future to be able to judge justly the present events, based on the future outcomes…
I knew it was pointless to explain it to you…but then again, it didn’t do it for you in the first place..I did it for my kids and the very few who really wanted to know…
You… on the other hand, are welcomed to ignore! It wasn’t a pleasure talking to you…ciao! 😉
Who said God is omniscient and omnipotent? Oh, that narcissistic idiot… He’s been saying it for a long time and I keep telling him God is not but he can’t remember…You know…he’s got good days… and he’s bad days…but his narcissistic issue is beyond what current advancements in psychiatry can do…
You just have to ignore him until he goes away…but he will forget again… 🙁
J-Mac,
I’ve already explained your mistake:
Pointless? You haven’t tried.
Explain to me why god thinks that it is OK to enslave and rape girls. Why it is OK to force s girl who is raped to marry her rapist. This should be interesting.
For those who have a hard time imagining drowning a baby few thousand years ago, just imagine that that baby grew into one the narcissistic scums like the one who executed innocent people in Las Vegas this week…
Getting the point?
BTW: I do however realize that some people here have major cognitive issues, but obviously I wasn’t talking to those people…
I think we all get the point. What you are saying is that all of our futures are predetermined and that we have no free will. Which sort of contradicts that “free will” gift that he gave us. Was he lying?
But you haven’t answered the questions I have asked about his treatment of women. Why would he think that it is morally OK to enslave women, rape them, make them marry their rapists?
J-Mac:
So your claim is that every single baby in the world — no exceptions — was an evil motherfucker who was going to grow up and wreak havoc on the world? Therefore God was justified in drowning all of them, the little bastards?
And you know this, how?
Oh, the irony.
So why didn’t God drown Stephen Paddock when he was a baby?
He should have but that would have meant cooperating with his greatest enemy; the same one who was causing all the calamities to Job and his family…