hal9000

Dave Gadbois, Did you even read the first post on this thread? You know Noah, the great flood etc. GOD murders everyone but him and his kin. DP didn't say anything about a particular religion or bring up the actions of people. He pointed out that GOD was the first being to commit genocide. And you true believers worship him for this kind of behavior. OK I can understand that, he scared the crap out of you and you reacted to this display of an irrational homicidal maniac with much fear and kowtowing.

HRG

While it is debatable whether Hitler was a Christian - he certainly appealed to many Christians in the beginning -, he definitely was a theist. All his life he saw himself as a tool of Providence ("Vorsehung" in German - which denotes a personal supreme being, the essence of theism.
If our eternal fate is more important than our terrestrial one - a central part of the Christian faith -, how can one consistently argue with Torquemada ? The separating line does not run between theists and non-theists, but between ideologists and non-ideologists. Ideologies can be secular (like Communism) or non-secular (like fundamentalist religions or the doctrine of the superiority of the Aryan race).

And of course your argument contains the naturalistic fallacy, too.

HRG.

HRG

[QUOTE]Originally posted by DaveJes1979:
typhon: You should be. The deaths waged in the name of gods pales by comparison to the deaths that would be the direct responsibility of god, if such a god as the Christian myth did exist.

Dave: once again, WHY, precisely, is God responsible for deaths waged "in his name"?? You are skipping some logical steps to come to this conclusion. If I go out today and kill someone "in the name of typhon", would you be responsible?
[quote]
No, but if X authors a book which

1) contains language which may induce people to commit atrocities *) and/or justify them, and

2) X knows in beforehand, being prescient, that it will be used that way,

X is responsible for the atrocities - whoever X may be.

HRG.

*) e.g. on Amalekites. Further examples:
"You shall not suffer a witch to live" - induced witch burnings.
"If your eye troubles you, rip it out" - use to justify massacres of Huguenots
The Curse on Ham - used to justify slavery

Thor Q. Mada

Wait a minute here!!
We are talking about the allmighty, the omnipotent, and he is not guilty of murders committed in his name??
That is strange. Shouldn't he have prevented these horrors from happening. Is somebody having the power to stop a murder, not guilty if he is doing nothing about it.
Strange way of thinking!!
But when you are born you are guilty of the sin of your ancestors??
Where is the throw-up emoticon when I need it??

DaveJes1979

Hal: Dave Gadbois, Did you even read the first post on this thread? You know Noah, the great flood etc. GOD murders everyone but him and his kin.

Dave: murder is defined as an unjustified killing. What makes you think that God's actions are "unjustified"? He killed, yes. Murdered, no. Such actions are "unjustified" according to the atheist - simply because they do not take into account the prerogatives of divine justice.

HRG: While it is debatable whether Hitler was a Christian - he certainly appealed to many Christians in the beginning -, he definitely was a theist. All his life he saw himself as a tool of Providence ("Vorsehung" in German - which denotes a personal supreme being, the essence of theism.

Dave: no doubt Hitler sought to appeal to religious people. But remember that Hitler's own philosophy was based on the "Superman" ideals of the skeptics before him (thus, the superior Aryan race).

HRG: If our eternal fate is more important than our terrestrial one - a central part of the Christian faith -, how can one consistently argue with Torquemada ? The separating line does not run between theists and non-theists, but between ideologists and non-ideologists. Ideologies can be secular (like Communism) or non-secular (like fundamentalist religions or the doctrine of the superiority of the Aryan race).

Dave: this is a diversionary response. You completely ignored what I said reguarding a consistent outworking of the atheistic worldview. How can the atheist argue with Stalin and Hitler? I am still waiting for an answer.

Reguarding the points you bring up, Torquemada, for instance, did not have any sort of consistent Christian worldview, which entails far more than the importance (I would NOT say superiority) of an afterlife. It entails following the demands of God, and leaving certain aspects of justice to God's own hands.

HRG: And of course your argument contains the naturalistic fallacy, too.

Dave: I use materialism as an example, since it seems to be the "majority report" of most atheists today.


HRG: No, but if X authors a book which

1) contains language which may induce people to commit atrocities *) and/or justify them, and

Dave: the Bible warns against taking God's justice out on others. "Vengence is mine, sayeth the Lord. I will repay."

HRG: 2) X knows in beforehand, being prescient, that it will be used that way,

X is responsible for the atrocities - whoever X may be.

Dave: why is God responsible for people MISUSING his Words? Yes, God knows about it beforehand - but the abuse still belongs to the creature, not the Creator. Do we have the obligation, as creatures, to refrain from making public ANY information that can be abused?

HRG: *) e.g. on Amalekites. Further examples:
"You shall not suffer a witch to live" - induced witch burnings.
"If your eye troubles you, rip it out" - use to justify massacres of Huguenots
The Curse on Ham - used to justify slavery

Dave: abuse and misinterpretation. How is this "God's fault"?


Thor: Wait a minute here!!
We are talking about the allmighty, the omnipotent, and he is not guilty of murders committed in his name??
That is strange. Shouldn't he have prevented these horrors from happening. Is somebody having the power to stop a murder, not guilty if he is doing nothing about it.

Dave: ahhh, but you see, God uses the evils of men for His own righteous purposes. Namely, suffering exists as a manifestation of God's wrath against corporate humanity since man rejected Him at the Fall.


Thor: Strange way of thinking!!
But when you are born you are guilty of the sin of your ancestors??
Where is the throw-up emoticon when I need it??

Dave: but the sin of your ancestors is NOT ONLY the sin of your ancestors. God deals with man corporately. Your ancestor, Adam, sinned as man's representative. His decision reflected what others would have done in his place. As such, God has held all of humanity guilty.

Dave Gadbois

HRG

[QUOTE]Originally posted by DaveJes1979:
[QB]

HRG: While it is debatable whether Hitler was a Christian - he certainly appealed to many Christians in the beginning -, he definitely was a theist. All his life he saw himself as a tool of Providence ("Vorsehung" in German - which denotes a personal supreme being, the essence of theism.

Dave: no doubt Hitler sought to appeal to religious people. But remember that Hitler's own philosophy was based on the "Superman" ideals of the skeptics before him (thus, the superior Aryan race).

He did not only seek to appeal to religious people, he was a theist. He regarded the superiority of the "Aryan Race" as God-given.

HRG: If our eternal fate is more important than our terrestrial one - a central part of the Christian faith -, how can one consistently argue with Torquemada ? The separating line does not run between theists and non-theists, but between ideologists and non-ideologists. Ideologies can be secular (like Communism) or non-secular (like fundamentalist religions or the doctrine of the superiority of the Aryan race).

Dave: this is a diversionary response. You completely ignored what I said reguarding a consistent outworking of the atheistic worldview. How can the atheist argue with Stalin and Hitler? I am still waiting for an answer.

Dave: Reguarding the points you bring up, Torquemada, for instance, did not have any sort of consistent Christian worldview, which entails far more than the importance (I would NOT say superiority) of an afterlife.

Torquemadas's Christian worldview was entirely consistent. That it doesn't agree with your Christian worldview doesn't make it less or more correct than yours.

Dave: It entails following the demands of God, and leaving certain aspects of justice to God's own hands.

How can you show that Torquemada did not follow the demands of God, except by appealing to your personal interpretation of the Bible ?

HRG: No, but if X authors a book which

1) contains language which may induce people to commit atrocities *) and/or justify them, and

Dave: the Bible warns against taking God's justice out on others. "Vengence is mine, sayeth the Lord. I will repay."

But this vengeance is performed by his human agents - like on the Amalekites.

HRG: 2) X knows in beforehand, being prescient, that it will be used that way,

X is responsible for the atrocities - whoever X may be.

Dave: why is God responsible for people MISUSING his Words? Yes, God knows about it beforehand - but the abuse still belongs to the creature, not the Creator. Do we have the obligation, as creatures, to refrain from making public ANY information that can be abused?

Do we have the obligation not to leave a loaded gun around, when we know that a child will pick it up and shoot someone dead ? The answer should be obvious. An ambiguous statement can be as dangerous as a loaded gun.

HRG: *) e.g. on Amalekites. Further examples:
"You shall not suffer a witch to live" - induced witch burnings.
"If your eye troubles you, rip it out" - use to justify massacres of Huguenots
The Curse on Ham - used to justify slavery

Dave: abuse and misinterpretation. How is this "God's fault"?

Your claim that say that those words have been misinterpretated is purely based on your personal interpretation. And if they actually have been, why write words that will be misinterpreted ?

Omnipotence and omniscience together entail omniresponsibility.
HRG.

wordsmyth

God murdered? Yes! How do I know? Quite simply...

Genesis 3
22 And the LORD God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil:

Is murder evil? Of course it is and because Adam ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil we are all able to judge what is murder. God himself said that man had become like him in knowing what is good and what is evil therefore we do have the ability to discern whether God's actions are good or evil.

For this reason I declare that God's actions during the flood(in addition to other actions) were evil and unjust.

It's the theist who turns a blind eye to the overwhelming evidence of God's evil actions in the bible even when God himself proclaims that we have the same ability as he does to distinguish good from evil.

DaveJes1979

HRG
Dave: Hitler's "god", however, is far and away from being the Christian God. As such, it inherits all of the futility of full-blown atheism.

Dave: if it was entirely consistent - then one could prove that such actions are justifiable from the pages of Scripture. I'd certainly take him to task if he were alive today.

Dave: I don't appeal to "my personal interpretation" of the Bible. Rather, I appeal to the Scriptures themselves to critique any personal interpretations. And if one is indeed misinterpreting the Bible - then they are not following the demands of God.

Dave: indeed, but what the Amalekites did was evil. God even punished them for it!

Dave: apples and oranges. The misuse of Scripture is a moral problem. A child picking up a loaded gun is a maturity and knowledge problem.

Dave: yes, it is "based on my" personal interpretation. But I have based my personal interpretation on the Bible - and I am willing to demonstrate that this is so.

Evil always takes what is good (things such as God's words) and distorts them. That does not mean that God should withold good things from us, that are necessary to life and salvation.

Dave: I would agree that God is "responsible" for everything, in a causal sense. But moral responsibility (for evil), on the other hand, lies on the heads of man. That is because moral responsibility (rather than mere causal responsibility) is based on

1. motivations. Man's motivation is for evil. God's is for good.

2. law-breaking. Man has broken God's decrees. For God, there is no authority above Him that can issue any such decree.


wordsmyth

Dave: this is a bizarre interpretation of Genesis 3. How does the fact that man "knows" what is good or evil entail that man can impose his own standards of good and evil on God? How does that entail that man has become a law unto himself?

Secondly, you haven't exactly told us how you "know" that God has murdered (that is, that God's killing is unjustified).

Dave: but many would disagree with your understanding of what is evil. I, for instance, think that the flood was a justified killing, not unjustified. So, what makes your standard right?

You are still confusing our ability to DISTINGUISH good and evil, with the ability to define good and evil autonomously from God.


Dave Gadbois

Ender

That right? Let's see whatcha got! *pop knuckles*

I have a three tiered question:

• Since it is not self-evident what is and what isn't genuine Scripture, which text belongs to the canon? And of the parts that make the cut, are there any errors or additions made in transcription? If you check the Scripture, it seems to answer this question- that the text records some speaker is a prophet or says an eyewitness recorded it. This leaves the presupper (you) in a vicious circle. When the identity of the Scripture is under question, there is no basis for deciding what the Scripture says.
• Is it possible at all to extract the pure, literal essence of the Bible? The true meaning of the Scripture is never apodictically lucid, clear, so it requires interpretation. Since Augustine did interpret the Genesis allegorically, this could be seen as a violation of the faith of a presuppositionalist. Due to the fact that there are competing interpretations, questions arise and are in need of answer. One may answer with the rule of the faith (sic), since the putative Scripture incorporates several directions to the reader with classifications (poetry, songs, parables, and history). But the passages on biology, history, or astronomy echo the literature, especially of the fictional and dramatic kind. Ergo, the presuppositionalist cannot draw upon the Scripture to settle the question of interpretation.
• How do you derive proper implications in order to settle a dispute on whether a belief is in agreement with the scripture? Pure logic is useless here- it's not a matter of logic that all humans have hearts, arms, elbows, noses, toes. Since the Scripture doesn't explicitly describe Abraham we take what he looked like for granted, and consequently we generate the missing descriptions with our own default assumptions and general background. But the Scripture is silent on how we interpret the rule of presupposition in the hopes of adding our opinions. In order to draw on the Scripture, we need to figure out what is the correct method to elucidate what it implies, but we cannot draw upon the Scripture in order to do so!

I conclude that we cannot apply the rule of presupposition without interpreting, identifying, and extrapolating from the scripture. Each result opens a fresh can of worms- alternate interpretations. What we have here is a paradox that shows the rule asks for the impossible, that the correct choice between these alternatives should be on the basis of the Scripture. The formulated epistemic position of the presuppositionalist is untenable through and through.
Happy apologetics!
~Speaker 4 the Death of God~

[ May 13, 2002: Message edited by: Ender ]</p>

wordsmyth

Man's standards of good and evil are the same as God's standards of good and evil. God said as much.

"the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil:

We have become AS God to know good and evil. Therefore God's standards of good and evil are the same as OURS.

I consider the killing of children to be murder.
Please explain how you can justify murdering a single child? Thousands? Millions?

My standard is the same as that accepted by every civilized nation in the world. There is no justification for killing children, so that is murder. Apparently those standards of morality are above yours and God's.

I certainly hope you aren't trying to pin your hopes of a valid argument on poor semantics. One cannot distinguish good and evil if one cannot define what constitutes good or evil. Distinguish and define are synonymous in this regard.

[ May 13, 2002: Message edited by: wordsmyth ]</p>