[heartc]

Originally Posted by Sailor Steve

@ u crank: [...] What is relevant to heartc's argument is that God did indeed kill all those people. Were his reasons valid? If you're a believer, how do you question God? His reasons must have been valid.

What is interesting is that even if you look at it from the perspective of a believer, i.e. seeing the Bible as the Word of God, shutting down your own moral faculties and saying that whatever God did must be good (see "Divine Command Theory" and "Euthyphro dilemma"), you will still have a problem there. Christians say, "God is love", and one of the verses in the Bible where it says so is:

"And we have known and believed the love that God hath to us. God is love; and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him."
- 1 John 4:16

Now, when faced with the statement that "God is love" on the one hand, and the atrocities that he ordered and commited in the OT* (not to mention the NT and Revelations, where the whole concept of burning people forever in a lake of fire for not believing in Jesus as the son of god / saviour is revealed, while all the lucky ones are having fun in heaven praising the Lord 24/7/eternity - I could not praise the lord nor have fun knowing that billions upon billions of people are burning at the same time for all eternity), we can try some mental acrobatics in saying that "God's concept of love is different and incomprehensible to us" or "Whatever he does is love, you just might not understand it". Well, aside from the fact that this is absurd and the word "Love" then becomes totally meaningless if it is not understandable, and any notion by Christians that what we understand as "Moral Values" comes from / is proof for God goes right out the window (because so could any - what we would percieve as whicked -
notion come from him), the same Bible who says that "God is Love" actually describes attributes of love in 1 Corinthians 13 (NIV):

3 If I give all I possess to the poor and surrender my body to the flames, but have not love, I gain nothing.
4 Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud.
5 It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.
6 Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth.
7 It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.
8 Love never fails.

Christians sure like to point verses like these out, right?
So, the excuse of "God's concept of love is different" doesn't really hold water when we acknowledge the fact that one of his Apostles, Paul, inspired by the Holy Spirit ( = God / The "Trinity") described the attributes of love like that, and we recognize it.

So how does

God = Love = 1 Corinthians 13 = God in the OT

God = Love = 1 Corinthians 13 = slaughtering children, ordering the slaughter of children, ordering genocide, comitting genocide, condoning and promoting slavery (for example - but not exclusive to - God sometimes ordered to take the children of a tribe, that he commanded to be attacked, as slaves instead of killing them like the rest), taking the virgins after killing their tribe, death penalty for mundane things like picking up sticks on the wrong day of the week etc etc

compute?

It becomes even more absurd when you break it down into details:

God = Love = not rude = STONE THEM! / BURN THEM! / Summoning bears to tear apart several children that were laughing about the bald head of a prophet

God = Love = not self-seeking = I AM THE LORD YOUR GOD, YOU SHALT HAVE NO OTHER GODS BEFORE ME.

God = Love = does not envy = FOR I AM A JEALOUS GOD.

God = Love = not easily angered = YOU ATE FROM THE TREE!! NOW ALL OF HUMANITY WILL BURN FOR ALL ETERNITY IN HELLFIRE, except for those who believe that I sent myself down to earth to sacrifice myself to myself, even when they were born in India and have heard of my word but stayed in their religion because they were raised as such. Whew, those Americans
and Europeans are lucky, I guess! God is quite geographically biased, don't you think. Oh, and screw the Jews, his "chosen people", too.

God = Love = does not delight in evil = DASHING INFANTS AGAINST THE ROCKS IS FUN!

from Psalm 137:

8 O Daughter of Babylon,
doomed to destruction,
happy is he who repays you
for what you have done to us;
9 he who seizes your infants
and dashes them against the rocks.

(That Psalm is actually what the song "(By the) Rivers of Babylon" is based on, see verse 1 of the Psalm:

"1 By the rivers of Babylon
we sat and wept
when we remembered Zion."

Funny how no one ever sings verses 8 and 9, no?)

God = Love = always protects = Playing bets with Satan over Job's soul, him losing all he has, his family dieing, and getting severely ill in the process (all - except for his original family... - is later restored. Still, didn't protect him from Satan).

God = Love = never fails / always perseveres = frying the great majority of humans in hell (again this is the "nice" NT / and not so nice Revelations here, not OT).


...and you could go on and on and on.

Now, after we've established that the concept of love is defined / described in the Bible and is actually quite familiar to what we would expect it to be, but then seeing how this God who is supposed to be love is not acting on it, we could try a second mental acrobatic here and say that well, maybe God changed his mind from the OT to the NT (although this is a rather pointless try, see above), so basicly the thing that u_crank was trying to pull on me when he said "Well, that was God just dealing with the Israelites." (if only! Ask the tribes he eradicated lol.) and "Looks like a progression to me. I like it". In other words, God was evil in the OT, but then became a loving God in the NT...

Malachi 3:6 "I the Lord do not change. So you, O descendants of Jacob, are not destroyed".

Matthew 5

"17 Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. 18 I tell you the truth, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished. 19Anyone who breaks one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever practices and teaches these commands will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. 20For I tell you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven."

(That's Jesus talking, btw, u_crank. So much for your "But the OT doesn't count anymore." But I grant you the funny thing that Jesus himself goes on and breaks the law on several occasions, then tries to weasel himself out of it with word games or by taking the law ad absurdum.)

And many other verses. But on the other hand, there are indeed verses where it says that he in fact changed his mind, or which are indicative of that. For example in the Flood story:

Genesis 6:5-7 (NIV)

5 The LORD saw how great the wickedness of the human race had become on the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of the human heart was only evil all the time. 6 The LORD regretted that he had made human beings on the earth, and his heart was deeply troubled. 7 So the LORD said, "I will wipe from the face of the earth the human race I have created and with them the animals, the birds and the creatures that move along the ground ;for I regret that I have made them.";

How's that for cleaning up your act after realizing you screwed up?
The Lord changes his mind not only in so far as coming to the conclusion that his creation is crap, he also changes it again in so far as that he's killing EVERYBODY

"8 But Noah found favor in the eyes of the LORD."

so, except for Noah & family and several billion animals. (Too bad the second try after hitting the reset button didn't work out either with those whicked humans, so he had to send Jesus down to be "sacrificed". For 3 days, that is, then he was back again.)

So, I will grant u_crank or whomever the possibility that God might sometimes change his mind. But this then still leaves us with the fact that he was an evil, petty and genocidal maniac in the OT, and that he's going to burn the great majority of mankind in hell for all eternity, which makes him exactly *what* as opposed to the OT?? Or will he maybe change his mind again on that and send another prophet down to tell us about it? In fact, when God changes his mind on things as profound as creating, then wiping out all life on earth etc, how do you have any security about the will of God at all?
Actually, most Christians will say that while God might change his opinion sometimes, he does not change in his nature, i.e. he is perfect love, perfect justice, perfect everything. So, we are back to the first step of trying to make sense of "perfect love" and genocide.

Also, if God is perfect, this would preclude any change from happening, because any change from perfect can only lead to something less than perfect. There is no "better than perfect". Perfect is the superlative. So any change must necessarily be in a negative direction. But then he wouldn't be perfect anymore.
Also, how do the stories that show God changing his mind about something compute with an "omniscient" God? How can you feel "regret" over the fact that you created mankind when you know everything beforehand? And why does a perfect and omnipotent God create an imperfect species that does not use its free will in the way that God has intended for it?(paradox alert, btw) As a matter of fact, giving limited and gullible people free will but then confronting them with a supernatural snake (or the devil) is a recipe for disaster.

There is no sense in any of it. These are writings from ancient men, written over a looong period of time, some of them connected, some of them not really, and later compiled into a single book, the Bible. Some people have only some of the books of the Bible, like the Jews. Some people have some things in common with it, and an additional author, like the Muslims. Or the Mormons.

Believers (at least in the Christian and Muslim faith) should ask themselves how it is that an omnipotent God does not communicate more efficiently with his creation, considering that your soul is supposedly at stake, so that the message would be clear and people would actually stop killing each other over it?

There can be only three possibilities:

a) He cannot communicate more efficiently; then he is incompetent and not omnipotent.

b) He is unwilling to communicate more efficiently; then he is evil, because as a result a great number of souls will be lost / burn in eternal hellfire / whatever your religous mileage.

One of the above must be true. Oh wait, there is actually a third option here:

c) He cannot communicate more efficiently because he does not exist.

Isn't it fascinating how the Bible makes COMPLETE sense the moment you look at it as the works of men. Then there's no mystery in God ordering genocide on neighbouring tribes. There's no mystery in keeping the virgins to oneself. There's no mystery in the story of creation. There's no mystery in a talking snake. There's no mystery in God communicating inefficiently
to modern man while he talked out of the clouds to ancient men.
And this is how we go about things when we try finding out the truth: Rationally. If hypophysis x makes a hell of a lot more sense than hypophysis y, then it is rational to conclude that hypophis y is probably not true.

Simply by looking into it, it is a lot more rational to conclude the Bible is the word and works of men rather than the word and the works of an invisible man in the sky (or omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent anything).

Only because one *wishes* something was true (although I wonder who would ever want a monster like Jahwe to be true), doesn't
make it true. We do not need a daddy in the sky that tells us right from wrong. We can try figuring that out on our own. And indeed, that is what we've been doing all along, only that some of us invented an invisible man in the sky and projected themselves onto him. This might sometimes have positive effects, depending on what the invisible man says in your head or your book. But other times, people fly airplanes into skyscrapers or paint a cross on their shield and slaughter everybody because of it.

Think about it, the Middle East / Palestine / Israel ist still contested territory and a hotbed for violence to this day, and a major - if not the only - reason for that is because people down there cannot agree on what the invisible man in the sky said, and did, and wants.
Europe was in the dark ages for centuries because of the invisible man, until the power of the church was subordinated to REASON, and the separation of church and state took place. Why was this such a blessing, when the Law of God is supposedly something good? Because it isn't. Because "He" isn't. And we sure as hell do not get our moral compass from "Him". Or had better not.

Originally Posted by SailorSteve

"and the God of the Christians, wantonly killed several thousand people"

Try a few millions.








I love how Sam Harris puts it btw,



If you are interested in more from Sam Harris:

The Moral Landscape (long):