Bill Snedden

Perhaps, but it still doesn't get you anywhere.

If moral intuition is sound, and is a reflection of God's moral law, then why does this intuition differ, often from person to person?

In other words, if the "moral intuition" argument is valid, then why do some people seem to believe that a particular action is okay while others feel that it is wrong?

Original sin is the common explanation I've heard, but without it there is no explanation at all and the argument still fails.

You're equivocating on the term. The definition has nothing to do with the motivation, as you imply, but as it plainly states, the deliberate and systematic destruction of political, racial, or cultural groups.

As examples of God's alleged genocidal behavior, I offer Genesis 6 and 7: the great flood, Numbers 21: the elimination of the Canaanites, the Amorites, and the people of Bashan and Numbers 31: the destruction of the Midianites as well as 1 Samuel 15: the elimination of the Amalekites ("man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass").

As you can plainly see, no difference whatsoever.

This may be a matter of interpretation, but in Numbers 31:17-18, God orders the Israelites, "Now therefore kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him. But all the women children, that have not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves." Why keep all those young virgins around?

In Genesis 19, Lot, whom Peter later describes as a "righteous man" (2Peter:7-8), offers his two daughters to the mob, saying "do unto them as is good in your eyes." While God didn't order it, He later, through his disciple, affirms it as the act of a righteous man. This is certainly condoning the action.

Even if we cede the point and remove "rape" from the list of monstrous acts alleged of the Almighty in the Bible, there are plenty more where that came from including slavery and infanticide.

The point is, of course, that if we accept the Bible as a veridical catalogue of God's interactions with Man and then attempt by it to determine what actions God considers "good", we will be able to determine no standard of action whatsoever.

Regards,

Bill Snedden

Satan Oscillate My Metallic Sonatas

Bill,
Servitude (as was customary), perhaps even for marriage.

Regardless, your dubious interpretation is a far cry from 'God ordering rape' which you imply here...


Peter regarding Lot as a righteous patriarch implies that God condones/commands rape?

????

Quite a stretch...even by the most cynical standards.

Satan Oscillate My Metallic Sonatas

[ March 19, 2002: Message edited by: Satan Oscillate My Metallic Sonatas ]</p>

Pomp

Jumping in a little late here.

Tercel said:

3. Right and wrong is intrinsic to the nature of God.

I've always interpreted this as a clever rewording of option 2: god's choices are subject to some "higher" restraint.

bgponder

Hi y'all, I been out for awhile enjoying the fruits of a big tax refund received quickly 'cause I is po' and therefore get TurboTax for free, yes Lawdy Lawdy I say again free!! But I digress;

Dammit Somms, this is why you always get creamed. Now Bill Snedden needs no help, but Jeezus I just gotta jump in here! You quote Bill as saying--
and then You say--
LOL!! Ho-kay, the Holy Spirit Itself tells us that God tells the Israelites to keep some girls for themselves after referencing sexual connotations, and you counter by saying that maybe it was for "servitude"(read: slavery), or perhaps marriage? Yeah, right, perhaps!! Like, these young "servant" girls(and in my ol' uneducated referencing of the time and culture I might add, these very young girls) captured in war would be oh-so-willing to marry and copulate with their brand-new Conquering Yahweh-slinging husbands!! But maybe that's just my heathenous ol' Southern original sin talking, and not my intuition, and anyway I should know what the Holy Spirit was talking about, that this was right and righteous in this situation??? Setting aside that it is supposed to be just hunky-dory that the Israelites kill everybody and keep the young girls as "servants" anyway. Like, nobody who offered to convert to Yaweh was to be spared?? Stuff like that. 'Splain it to me.

Further:
It ain't dubious, nor is it a far cry!! See above!!

More!! You quote Bill again:
and say:
No, no, no!! It is not a stretch, by any means of any imagination of nontheists here, obviously including Bill and myself and those among whom we may number ourselves(a little ad populum never hurt anybody)!! In the context of Lot's actions re Genesis 19 and Peter's pronouncements of Lot, it is the Word of the Holy Spirit Itself which implies that God condones the actions therein described!! You gotta dig deeper, SOMMS!! To rebut this, you might have said something like: "I prefer to interpret Peter's evaluation of Lot as righteous in this situation in the light of Lot's obvious devotion to God. He was so devoted, that he would have done anything to avert the attention of the crowd from God's messengers. It is a sad cultural fact of the time, but women were considered less than men, even chattel; so Lot offered his daughters in the hope that the mob would be appeased, while more than likely praying to God that his daughters would live through the ordeal, or if not, be received into God's bosom. We may reflect on faith of the order of Abraham when he was about to sacrifice Isaac." Now, that's the stuff, SOMMS!! You gotta divert attention away from the actual words of the Bible and go for the concepts.

God, I hate helping theists, except for Catholics; at least they go for the mystery and the intellectual tradition.

Peace, Returning Cornbread Barry

[ March 19, 2002: Message edited by: bgponder ]</p>

Bill Snedden

I note that you didn't even attempt to refute God's alleged acts of genocide...

I suppose you're right. After all, slavery is so much more morally acceptable than rape.

Well, let's see. If I said that Jeffrey Dahmer was a "righteous man", wouldn't you take that to mean that I believed his heinous acts were, in fact, praiseworthy? How else might one interpret such an evaluation?

At any rate, I noted in my follow-up post that the "rape" example was based on an interpretation, rather than plainly laid out like the genocide examples. I suppose I should have made that clear in my initial post, but c'est la guerre!. Anyway, as I also noted there are other "examples" that one could use: killing children, slavery, and even lying.

I think it's important also to note that whether or not God actually did these things is irrelevant. I know many Christians who repudiate God's actual participation in these activities; preferring to believe that the OT is a record of God's relationship to His chosen people from their point of view. In other words, inspired, but not inerrant historical chronicle. However, such a belief still fails to solve the problems inherent in attempting to use the Bible as an objective moral guide.

Regards,

Bill Snedden

HRG

Equivocation warning. We have two concepts that you want to label with the same word "right":

1. that what we should do (moral imperative, prescriptive)

2. that what is intrinsic to the nature of God (descriptive).

It is obvious that those concepts are not identical; thus different words should be chosen for them.

Of course, your argument raises the next question: what if the nature of God demanded human sacrifices ?

Regards,
HRG.

Jayhawker Soule

Well, I guess that settles it. <img src="graemlins/banghead.gif" border="0" alt="[Bang Head]" />

Tercel

And I've always interpreted option 2 as an ignorant/deliberate way of trying to hide the existence of option 3.

The only thing that's "bad" about option 2 is that it places something "higher" than God which is clearly going to be unacceptable to most theists. However it does so unecessarily, there is no reason to posit objective morality as being higher than God as opposed to part of God.

Tercel

Bill,

I don't see any problems with differing moral intuitions. If an objective moral standard exists within God then it would seem entirely possible for us to dimly perceive some form of it as "intuition". As humans, none of us are perfect or anything, and so all our perceptions are going to be different. Our natural intuitions are going to be further modified by what our culture artificially teaches us.
Hence, I don't see moral diversity as very good disproof of intuitive objective morality.
However the fact that there seems to exist "common ground" on some issues between most all peoples and that the truth of these things seems naturally obvious to all would seem to argue strongly for some sort of intuitive morality however dim or flawed.

Eudaimonist

I think it may obscure the issue to ask if morality is "higher" than God. Perhaps it's clearer to ask: is the nature of morality subject to God's will, or is it ineluctable?

Assuming that rape is immoral (Ghengis Khan might disagree, but I think most here would agree), can God make rape moral at a whim?

If yes, what would be required to accomplish this feat? Would God have to supernaturally alter human nature to make rape good, or could God simply declare rape moral?

If no, how can the nature of morality be part of God's nature? How did it get there? Since God seems to play by different moral rules than the rest of us (e.g. the Great Flood), why should rules governing human action be part of God?