by sabastious 136 Replies latest jw friends
If you are to believe in gods and deities then you must believe in them all, not just the Christ of the bible.
Many as well were born miraculously .
Interesting that many of these once worshiped deities have completely vanished, along with the culture
or civilization from which they were derived.
The core evidence for theism, then, is Scripture. What if we accept Scripture as offering evidence of a God who has a moral character and plans for human beings, who intervenes in history and tells us how to live? What conclusions should we draw from Scripture about God’s moral character and about how we ought to behave? Let us begin with the position of the fundamentalist, of one who takes Scripture with utmost seriousness, as the inerrant source of knowledge about God and morality. It we accept biblical inerrancy, I’ll argue, we must conclude that much of what we take to be morally evil is in fact morally permissible and even required.
Consider first God’s moral character, as revealed in the Bible. He routinely punishes people for the sins of others. He punishes all mothers by condemning them to painful childbirth, for Eve’s sin. He punishes all human beings by condemning them to labor, for Adam’s sin (Gen. 3:16–18). He regrets His creation, and in a fit of pique, commits genocide and ecocide by flooding the earth (Gen. 6:7). He hardens Pharaoh’s heart against freeing the Israelites (Ex. 7:3), so as to provide the occasion for visiting plagues upon the Egyptians, who, as helpless subjects of a tyrant, had no part in Pharaoh’s decision. (So much for respecting free will, the standard justification for the existence of evil in the world.) He kills all the firstborn sons, even of slave girls who had no part in oppressing the Israelites (Ex. 11:5). He punishes the children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and great great-grandchildren of those who worship any other god (Ex. 20:3–5). He sets a plague upon the Israelites, killing twenty-four thousand, because some of them had sex with the Baal-worshiping Midianites (Num. 25:1–9). He lays a three-year famine on David’s people for Saul’s slaughter of the Gibeonites (2 Sam. 21:1). He orders David to take a census of his men, and then sends a plague on Israel, killing seventy thousand for David’s sin in taking the census (2 Sam. 24:10–15). He sends two bears out of the woods to tear forty-two children to pieces, because they called the prophet Elisha a baldhead (2 Kings 2:23–24). He condemns the Samarians, telling them that their children will be “dashed to the ground, their pregnant women ripped open” (Hosea 13:16). This is but a sample of the evils celebrated in the Bible.
Can all this cruelty and injustice be excused on the ground that God may do what humans may not? Look, then, at what God commands humans to do. He commands us to put to death adulterers (Lev. 20:10), homosexuals (Lev. 20:13), and people who work on the Sabbath (Ex. 35:2). He commands us to cast into exile people who eat blood (Lev. 7:27), who have skin diseases (Lev. 13:46), and who have sex with their wives while they are menstruating (Lev. 20:18). Blasphemers must be stoned (Lev. 24:16), and prostitutes whose fathers are priests must be burned to death (Lev. 21:9). That’s just the tip of the iceberg. God repeatedly directs the Israelites to commit ethnic cleansing (Ex. 34:11–14, Lev. 26:7–9) and genocide against numerous cities an tribes: the city of Hormah (Num. 21:2–3), the land of Bashan (Num. 21:33–35), the land of Heshbon (Deut. 2:26–35), the Canaanites, Hittites, Hivites, Perizzites, Girgashites, Amorites, and Jebusites (Josh. 1–12). He commands them to show their victims “no mercy” (Deut. 7:2), to “not leave alive anything that breathes” (Deut. 20:16). In order to ensure their complete extermination, he thwarts the free will of the victims by hardening their hearts (Deut.2:30, Josh. 11:20) so that they do not sue for peace. These genocides are, of course, instrumental to the wholesale theft of their land (Josh. 1:1–6) and the rest of their property (Deut. 20:14, Josh. 11:14). He tells eleven tribes of Israel to nearly exterminate the twelfth tribe, the Benjamites, because a few of them raped and killed a Levite’s concubine. The resulting bloodbath takes the lives of 40,000 Israelites and 25,100 Benjamites (Judges. 20:21, 25, 35). He helps Abijiah kill half a million Israelites (2 Chron. 13:15–20) and helps Asa kill a million Cushites, so his men can plunder all their property (2 Chron.14:8–13).
Consider also what the Bible permits. Slavery is allowed (Lev. 25:44–46, Eph. 6:5, Col. 3:22). Fathers may sell their daughters into slavery (Ex.21:7). Slaves may be beaten, as long as they survive for two days after (Ex. 21:20—21, Luke 12:45–48). Female captives from a foreign war may be raped or seized as wives (Deut. 21:10–14). Disobedient children should be beaten with rods (Prov. 13:24, 23:13). In the Old Testament, men may take as many wives and concubines as they like because adultery for men consists only in having sex with a woman who is married (Lev. 18:20) or engaged to someone else (Deut. 22:23). Prisoners of war may be tossed off a cliff (2 Chron. 24:12). Children may be sacrificed to God in return for His aid in battle (2 Kings 3:26–27, Judges), or to persuade Him to end a famine (2 Sam. 21).
Christian apologists would observe that most of these transgressions occur in the Old Testament. Isn’t the Old Testament God a stern and angry God, while Jesus of the New Testament is all-loving? We should examine, then, the quality of the love that Jesus promises to bring to humans. It is not only Jehovah who is jealous. Jesus tells us his mission is to make family members hate one another, so that they shall love him more than their kin (Matt.10:35–37). He promises salvation to those who abandon their wives and children for him (Matt. 19:29, Mark 10:29–30, Luke 18:29–30). Disciples must hate their parents, siblings, wives, and children (Luke 14:26). The rod is not enough for children who curse their parents they must be killed (Matt. 15:4–7, Mark 7:9–10, following Lev. 20:9). These are Jesus’s “family values.” Peter and Paul add to these family values the despotic rule of husbands over their silenced wives, who must obey their husbands as gods (1 Cor. 11:3, 14:34–5 Eph. 5:22–24 Col. 3:18 1 Tim. 2:11–12 , Pet. 3:1).
To be sure, genocide, God-sent plagues, and torture do not occur in the times chronicled by the New Testament. But they are prophesied there, as they are repeatedly in the Old Testament (for instance, in Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Micah, and Zepheniah). At the second coming, any city that does not accept Jesus will be destroyed, and the people will suffer even more than they did when God destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah (Matt. 10:14–15, Luke10:12). God will flood the Earth as in Noah’s time (Matt. 24:37). Or perhaps He will set the Earth on fire instead, to destroy the unbelievers (2 Pet. 3:7, 10). But not before God sends Death and Hell to kill one quarter of the Earth “by sword, famine and plague, and by the wild beasts” (Rev. 6:8). Apparently, it is not enough to kill people once they have to be killed more than once to satisfy the genocidal mathematics of the New Testament. For we are also told that an angel will burn up one third of the Earth (8:7), another will poison a third of its water (8:10–11), four angels will kill another third of humanity by plagues of fire, smoke, and sulfur (9:13, 17–18), two of God’s witnesses will visit plagues on the Earth as much as they like (11:6), and there will be assorted deaths by earthquakes (11:13, 16:18–19) and hailstones (16:21). Death is not bad enough for unbelievers, however they must be tortured first. Locusts will sting them like scorpions until they want to die, but they will be denied the relief of death (9:3–6). Seven angels will pour seven bowls of God’s wrath, delivering plagues of painful sores, seas and drivers of blood, burns from solar flares, darkness and tongue-biting (16:2–10).
That’s just what’s in store for people while they inhabit the Earth. Eternal damnation awaits most people upon their deaths (Matt. 7:13–14). They will be cast into a fiery furnace (Matt. 13:42, 25:41), an unquenchable fire (Luke 3:17). For what reason? The New Testament is not consistent on this point. Paul preaches the doctrine of predestination, according to which salvation is granted as an arbitrary gift from God, wholly unaffected by any choice humans may make (Eph. 1: 4–9). This implies that the rest are cast into the eternal torments of hell on God’s whim. Sometimes salvation is promised to those who abandon their families to follow Christ (Matt. 19:27–30, Mark 10:28–30, Luke 9:59–62). This conditions salvation on a shocking indifference to family members. More often, the Synoptic Gospels promise salvation on the basis of good works, especially righteousness and helping the poor (for example, Matt. 16:27, 19:16–17 Mark 10:17–25 Luke 18:18–22, 19:8–9). This at least has the form of justice, since it is based on considerations of desert. But it metes out rewards and punishments grossly disproportional to the deeds people commit in their lifetimes. Finite sins cannot justify eternal punishment. Since the Reformation, Christian thought has tended to favor either predestination or justification by faith. In the latter view, the saved are all and only those who believe that Jesus is their savior. Everyone else is damned. This is the view of the Gospel of John (John 3:15–16, 18, 36 6:4711:25–26). It follows that infants and anyone who never had the opportunity to hear about Christ are damned, through no fault of their own. Moreover, it is not clear that even those who hear about Christ have a fair chance to assess the merits of the tales about him. God not only thwarts our free will so as to visit harsher punishments upon us than we would have received had we been free to choose. He also messes with our heads. He sends people “powerful delusions” so they will not believe what is needed for salvation, to make sure that they are condemned (2 Thess. 2:11–12). Faith itself may be a gift of God rather than a product of rational assessment under our control and/or which we could be held responsible. If so, then justification by faith reduces to God’s arbitrary whim, as Paul held (Eph. 2:8–9). This at least has the merit of acknowledging that the evidence offered in favor of Christianity is far from sufficient to rationally justify belief in it. Granting this fact, those who do not believe are blameless and cannot be justly punished, even if Jesus really did die for our sins.
And what are we to make of the thought that Jesus died for our sins (Rom. 5:8–9, 15–18 1 John 2:2 Rev. 1:5)? This core religious teaching of Christianity takes Jesus to be a scapegoat for humanity. The practice of scapegoating contradicts the whole moral principle of personal responsibility. It also contradicts any moral idea of God. If God is merciful and loving, why doesn’t He forgive humanity for its sins straightaway, rather than demanding His 150 pounds of flesh, in the form of His own son? How could any loving father do that to his son?
I find it hard to resist the conclusion that the God of the Bible is cruel and unjust and commands and permits us to be cruel and unjust to others. Here are religious doctrines that on their face claim that it is all right to mercilessly punish people for the wrongs of others and/or blameless error, that license or even command murder, plunder, rape, torture, slavery, ethnic cleansing, and genocide. We know such actions are wrong. So we should reject the doctrines that represent them as right.
Of course, thoughtful Christians and Jews have struggled with this difficulty for centuries. Nothing I have said would come as a surprise to any reflective person of faith. Nor are theists without options for dealing with these moral embarrassments. Let us consider them.
One option is to bite the bullet. This is the only option open to hard-core fundamentalists, who accept the inerrancy of the Bible. In this view, the fact that God performed, commanded, or permitted these actions demonstrates that they are morally right. This view concedes my objection to theism, that it promotes terrible acts of genocide, slavery, and so forth. But it denies the moral force of this objection. We know where this option has led: to holy war, the systematic extirpation of heretics, the Crusades, the Inquisition, the Thirty Years War, the English Civil War, witch-hunts, the cultural genocide of Mayan civilization, the brutal conquest of the Aztecs and the Inca, religious support for ethnic cleansing of Native Americans, slavery of Africans in the Americas, colonialist tyranny across the globe, confinement of the Jews to ghettos, and periodic pogroms against them, ultimately preparing the way for the Holocaust. In other words, it has led to centuries steeped in bloodshed, cruelty, and hatred without limit across continents.
Since this is clearly reprehensible, one might try a stopgap measure. One could deny that the dangerous principles in the Bible have any application after biblical times. For example, one might hold that, while it is in principle perfectly all right to slaughter whoever God tells us to, in fact, God has stopped speaking to us. This argument runs into the difficulty that many people even today claim that God has spoken to them. It is hard to identify any reason to be comprehensively skeptical about current claims to have heard divine revelation that does not apply equally to the past. But to apply such skepticism to the past is to toss out revelation and hence the core evidence for God.
Another option is to try to soften the moral implications of embarrassing biblical episodes by filling in unmentioned details that make them seem less bad. There is a tradition of thinking about “hard sayings” that tries to do this. It imagines some elaborate context in which, for instance, it would be all right for God to command Abraham to sacrifice his son, or for God to inflict unspeakable suffering on His blameless servant Job, and then insists that that was the context in which God actually acted. I have found such excuses for God’s depravity to be invariably lame. To take a typical example, it is said of David’s seemingly innocent census of his army that he sinned by counting what was not his, but God’s. Even if we were to grant this, it still does not excuse God for slaughtering seventy thousand of David’s men, rather than focusing His wrath on David alone. I also find such casuistic exercises to be morally dangerous. To devote one’s moral reflections to constructing elaborate rationales for past genocides, human sacrifices, and the like is to invite applications of similar reasoning to future actions.
I conclude that there is no way to cabin off or soft-pedal the reprehensible moral implications of these biblical passages. They must be categorically rejected as false and depraved moral teachings. Morally decent theists have always done so in practice. Nevertheless, they insist that there is much worthy moral teaching that can be salvaged from the Bible. They would complain that the sample of biblical moral lessons I cited above is biased. I hasten to agree. There are many admirable moral teachings in the Bible, even beyond the obvious moral rules—against murder, stealing, lying, and the like—that are acknowledged by all societies. “Love your neighbor as yourself” (Lev. 19:18, Matt. 22:39, Mark 12:31, Luke 10:27, James 2:8) concisely encapsulates the moral point of view. The Bible courageously extends this teaching to the downtrodden, demanding not just decency and charity to the poor and disabled (Ex. 23:6, 23:11 Lev. 19:10, 23:22 Deut. 15:7–8, 24:14–15 Prov. 22:22 Eph. 4:28 James 2:15–16), but provisions in the structure of property rights to liberate people from landlessness and oppressive debts (Deut. 15, Lev. 25:10–28). Although the details of these provisions make little economic sense (for instance, canceling debts every seven years prevents people from taking out loans for a longer term), their general idea, that property rights should be structured so as to enable everyone to avoid oppression, is sound. Such teachings were not only morally advanced for their day but would dramatically improve the world if practiced today.
Elizabeth Anderson
Elizabeth Anderson is John Rawls Collegiate Professor of Philosophy and Women's Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her areas of interest and expertise are Ethics, Social and Political Philosophy, Philosophy of the Social Sciences, Feminist Theory, Epistemology.
Her academic background is Harvard University, Department of Philosophy, 1981-1987. A.M. Philosophy, 1984, PhD, 1987. Swarthmore College, 1977-1981. B.A. Philosophy with minor in Economics, High Honors, 1981.
Know what I love about Theology?
At leats all the books I have read have made it clear that one must keep and open mind to ALL the possibilities, that we do NOT know as much as we would like to THINK we know and that, absolutisim in ANY form shows ignorance far better than simply saying " I don't know enough about that to give you a honest answer".
Personally I know there is God and I know His Son Christ, can I prove that to anyone here? No.
Should anyone here take my word for it? No.
Nor should they take anyone's word that there is NO God.
For all you former JW's I remind you simply this:
That I am right because I KNOW view didn't work for you as JW's and the same attitude as NON-JW's may not be the way to go.
Just saying that keeping an open mind is not a bad thing when it comes to things we simply:
Do NOT know as much about as we THINK we do.
A theologian once said something along the lines of "A Theologian is someone who watches his words and language, in the presence of God"
I didn't really understand what his meaning was till I read your post P.sac., thanks.
tec: Jesus had the Old Testament in writing, including the LXX. Ps. 119 is about His written Word which does not negate the fact that Jesus is the Living Word. People can be misled by subjective impressions that they think are Jesus (ACIM, Urantia Book, Conversations with God, etc.), but it is actually an angel of light/demon. The written word is more objective and God chose it for a reason (objective standard; does not change; not subjective/counterfeit impressions/demonic, etc.). The Bible is also the source for knowledge about Jesus.
Thanks Wobble, that is a very kind and encouraging thing to say :)
Personally I know there is God and I know His Son Christ,
What is the source of this knowledge, Paul, that eludes so many of us who seek truth? I think your statement reflects not knowledge but an abiding, all encompassing faith. Something you feel in your heart. Personally, you can say honestly that you have faith that there is a God and you have faith that there is a Christ but how it is you can claim you have knowledge of these supernatural beings defies what is reasonable and certainlywhat is demonstrable. With respect, your statement has no more currency than if you were a muslim who said you personally know that Allah exists and you know that Mohammed is His prophet. The conviction is the same as is the source of the conviction, but knowledge is not involved.
Just saying that keeping an open mind is not a bad thing when it comes to things we simply: Do NOT know as much about as we THINK we do.
I agree. But we will have a tendency to apply that maxim more to others than to ourselves.
Nick,
When I say personally that is what I mean, personally.
I have heard Christ's voice and felt his love so I know Christ and God to be real and true, BUT I don't expect ANYONE to believe me so I rarely use that personal knowledge in any of my "apologetics" and the reason is also that I believe faith must be based on reason, not just personal knowledge of something and to me MY faith is based on both.
For example:
I was never sure about evolution tell I was shown what it was and, because I kept an open mind and understood that I didn't knwo enough about it to dismiss it ( or believe it at the time), I was able to understand and see it for what it was and came to believe it.
But if I had a close mind about it, I probably never would have believe it.
I am not saying that people that don't believe in God are closed minded, not all of them, I am just saying that keeping and open mind when we know so little abous something is an ok thing to do.
Again, I never use my personal knowledge of God as a base for any argument because not only can't I prove it, I don't think that personal experience in of itself is enough of an argument for anything, there shoudl be more than just that.
As for this tired and old and already discredited argument:
We know where this option has led: to holy war, the systematic extirpation of heretics, the Crusades, the Inquisition, the Thirty Years War, the English Civil War, witch-hunts, the cultural genocide of Mayan civilization, the brutal conquest of the Aztecs and the Inca, religious support for ethnic cleansing of Native Americans, slavery of Africans in the Americas, colonialist tyranny across the globe, confinement of the Jews to ghettos, and periodic pogroms against them, ultimately preparing the way for the Holocaust. In other words, it has led to centuries steeped in bloodshed, cruelty, and hatred without limit across continents.
I am glad, at least, the the more progressive atheists have gone beyond this argument which has been shown to be, well, lame to say the least.
Since this is a thread about theology I can state that, one of the first things I studied was how much of this was true and how much was false and how SO MUCH of it was man simply and cruely being just that, Man.
Of course the pther thing the theology taught me was that, outside of an "absolute moral" we really don't have any reason to object to ANY of those things.
We cannot ignore our human past, Paul. Those things happened, peoples' lives were caught up in those events and if nothing else they demand a modern reckoning. At the end of my life, which is drawing near, I will look upon all of the things I have done in my lifetime and I will judge myself accordingly. Christendom must do the same or else it is false and irrelevant.
