Stephen T-B

Two points before I attempt to dissect what’s going on here: LWF wrote: “Yet my interpretation of the Bible makes rational sense and yours does not.”
That is a subjective judgment and is worthless. For instance, what makes rational sense to a paranoid schizophrenic might well be sufficient to get him sectioned.

Then this: “Things that make sense are true...”
Sense to whom? A psychopath?

I reject utterly a god for which justifications must be found so as to explain its cruelty, which is why I fundamentally disagree with LWF.
In my universe we have but one existence, and in that existence THE MOST important thing is human contentment, which unfortunately is as illusive a thing as human happiness.

The long-standing belief that it lies in material wellbeing - fervently held by very many of those without it - is spurious, as the most well-to-do nations are finding out.
The even more long-standing belief that religion can supply it is also spurious, as the most religious peoples also demonstrate.
Do Christians, for example, exhibit unalloyed contentment? Those I’ve known - and I’ve known a lot - are certainly no more contented than the non-believers I know - and I know a lot of them as well. In fact, I would say that on balance they tend to be rather more discontented.

Contentment comes and goes, and it would appear that some people are more capable of attaining it than others.
What we can say about it is this: scope for contentment is destroyed by grinding poverty, remorseless hunger, absence of security, disease, and above all else, by bereavement.
Nothing is more destructive of it, I maintain, than losing those we love; and the degree of that destruction tends to be related to our ability to come to terms with those loses, being greatest when deaths result from something incomprehensible, such as a deliberate act of violence.

To what extent, I ask, has the Bible engendered human contentment?
It has failed to relieve poverty, end hunger, increase our sense of security, help us fight disease – and throughout the Old Testament are accounts of violent killings sponsored by God which have worked in such a way as to validate human brutality and violence. The happiness which many millions of people might have known over a great expanse of history has been washed away by brutalities which the Bible did nothing to prevent and on occasions, actually engendered.

This is the repugnant aspect of the Bible which LWF is attempting to justify, and the reason he is tying himself in knots trying to do so it this:
Those who wrote the stories in the Bible and assembled them had a very ill-developed sense of compassion compared to those which inform Emur’s criticisms.
They weren’t even Medieval (which is shocking enough when we see it portrayed by the Islamic fundamentalists); we are talking about an even more casually brutal period in human development, and this is the context in which the God of the Old Testament must be judged.
As I understand it, historical evidence suggests that by the time of Jesus of Nazareth, radical elements within Judaism were already reflecting a progressive humanitarianism which was not compatible with a primitive deity. There was a movement to re-defined the Jewish god, and it may well be that Jesus emerged as its charismatic leader.

But here we have the spectacle, 2,000-odd years later, of LWF ignoring all that and attempting to marry the Christian God of compassion with the primitive tribal god of a small, obscure but prodigiously self-important nation.

By emphasising the soul and the life hereafter, LWF is able to discount all cruelty, all barbarity, all hardship, all crimes against humanity, and to advocate a harsh theology which stopped being acceptable to the more enlightened young thinkers of Judaea over 2,000 years ago.

emur

LWF, you are certainly long winded!

I cannot relate to your illustration because I see genocide as horribly evil. It is completely incomparable to smoking and a team losing.

But you don't know what the result of genocide not happening is. You are just filtering it through your view of the bible and God. Besides, someone may choose to go to hell by seeing it take place. How many people reject Christianity because of its history of bloodshed and its divisiveness and intolerance in the here and now? I don't believe in hell by the way.

I can only shake my head at genocide ever being for a greater good. It's a good excuse for man's inhumanity to man in the name of God. What I see is you constructing a story to have your loving God and true bible regardless of the reality you see around you.

My OP didn't say all pain and suffering should be eliminated. It addressed two specific concerns and why I reject the biblical notion of God.

Really?

So those who disagree with you have not honestly and rationally thought the matter out? And are rejecting your view of what is true out of fear? More omniscience on your part perhaps?

I tend to agree.

This is nothing but your subjective opinion. Your interpretation is makes more sense to you, but not to me. From my perspective, your interpretation is much less likely to be true than the reality we observe. So, from my perspective, using your words, your interpretation is only clung to because you are dishonest and fearful.

To sum up your post, it seems to me that you are saying God does what he does (or what he allows) out of love, and anything in the real world that on the surface doesn't fit that is to be interpreted in light of God's love. But in doing so, you are letting your understanding of God and your understanding of the bible dictate reality to you, and then you twist reality to fit your understanding of the bible and God.

Mel

scombrid

I'm still waiting for a demonstration of god's divine wrath as being some error correcting mechanism analogous to a parent's punishment of a child. When we can't identify the behavior that pissed off god and made him hit us with a bolt of lightening then we can't change that behavior. God's justice is analogous to the parent that tries to get you to stop cussing by randomly washing your mouth out with soap periodically with no relationship to the act of cussing. If your parent is remotely competent then they'll dole out punishments in a manner that allows you to draw an association between the sin and the punishment.

long winded fool

Your interpretation presents a logical contradiction. Mine doesn't. How is mine less likely to be true than yours? And be careful! You can't reject the Bible now since the foundation of your argument is based on it. You've granted the God of the Bible for the sake of argument, therefore you cannot abandon this axiom.

Reality is not twisted. The Bible is merely interpreted in a way that eliminates contradiction. Like most atheists who grant the Bible to prove a contradiction, you retreat from your premise and therefore your argument the moment the contradiction is resolved. If you throw out the Bible and therefore the context of God, you are absolutely correct in your reasoning. The God that you've assumed cannot be all-loving. You say you've assumed the Biblical God but you haven't. You can say that "There's no reason to assume that divine genocide is not evil," however in doing so you reject the word of the Bible, and therefore the premise of "If the Biblical God..." becomes false. You've not proven that the God described in the Bible cannot be all-loving. You've proven that by your own non-biblical understanding of God, He cannot be all-loving. I've shown you that it's possible to understand the Biblical God to be all-loving. You reject my reasons based on personal intuition and not logical reason. I've shown how all of your problems can be resolved without contradiction, but instead of logically showing why this interpretation does not follow, you declare it incorrect based on a premise which conflicts with the foundation of your argument which is "If the God of the Bible exists, then..."

Your argument has collapsed because it consists of an irrelevant conclusion. You start out by declaring that the God described in the Bible is contradictory, but you end by rejecting certain Biblical properties of God and inserting non-Biblical properties and then assuming that this is still the God of the Bible. The Bible ties up its ends very neatly. This is why this form of argument is so often used by atheists. If you can't disprove the God of the Bible without first assuming His non-existence, then you are atheist based on personal feeling and not objective logic. As such, your belief has equal logical validity to blind Christian faith. Assuming from the outset that the Bible is "wrong about a few key things" in an argument about the God of the Bible is the logical equivalent of assuming the God of the Bible's non-existence from the outset as far as the conclusion is concerned. Which is, of course, an easily identifiable logical fallacy.

Stephen T-B

LWF suggests that we cannot be using objective logic if we can't disprove the God of the Bible without first assuming His non-existence (well, I think that’s what he suggests.)

Conversely, (I suggest) he cannot be using objective logic if, in order to prove the God of the Bible, he first assumes such a being exists.

Which anyway misses the points raised by Emur’s OP
Emur remarked: “God's supposed miracles seem very arbitrary to me,” and then came: “One of my huge problems with an interventionist God is that such an entity allows his children to abuse, mistreat, and even kill others of his children and doesn't do anything to intervene.”

The Judeo-Christian God is claimed, by those who consider such a thing to have an independent existence outside the human mind, to perform miracles from time to time. Furthermore, their holy scriptures describe innumerable miracles performed by this extraordinary entity. But both Biblical and post-Biblical miracles are characterised by their arbitrary occurrences, and for all his LW-ness, LWF hasn’t been able to soothe away the discomfort this causes Emur.
In fact he cannot soothe it away because the Supernatural has freakish irregularity built into it; it’s how we distinguish it from the Natural which possesses an inexorable quality of predictability.

It’s this very characteristic which makes it so attractive to some people, who tend towards scepticism, and so unattractive to others, who tend to embrace religious or occult beliefs.

Apparently it’s the freakish irregularity of the Supernatural which prevents Emur from being a totally committed believer.

So, moving on now to his second point: Christians are sure that their god is a “loving Father,” and an interventionist. So how come this benign, all-knowing, all-powerful, all-present entity (as big, presumably, as the Universe and expanding at the same mind-boggling speed) doesn’t intervene to stop his children making life horrid for each other?

Seems a perfectly reasonable question. And in ordinary, human terms, it is.
But God, as LWF has gone to great lengths to show, is not to be judged in human terms. Belief requires the believer to adopt an inhuman perspective in which everything God is said to have done in the Bible is consistent with an interventionist “loving father.”
This is the equivalent of interposing a computer program between you and the real world, so everything you see is broken down and re-assembled according to principles devised by a programer who's spent his entire life in a state of total sensory deprivation.
If Emur isn’t very happy about that, I for one don’t blame him.

emur

LWF, I realize that you can talk circles around me from a philosophical point of view. I can say that my two concerns from the OP are reasons that I reject the biblical notion of God. You have not answered these concerns from my point of view. You have only answered them from your point of view, which involves accepting things that I cannot in good conscience and with logical reasoning accept.

Thus anything can be interpreted in a way that eliminates contradiction. But just because it can doesn't mean that the contradiction has in fact been eliminated. And just so you know, I am not an atheist.

If reality means anything, then the God described in the bible is not all-loving. As for logic, how is it logical for a genocidal savage to be all-loving? It is logical to me that any being that commands genocide cannot be all-loving. Because you have interpreted away the contradiction doesn't mean it doesn't exist, except in your own mind.

I am not saying that the God of the bible exists. I am saying that the God described by the bible does not.

The God described by the bible is contradictory upon my reading of the bible. It is those biblical properties of God given in the bible that contradict one another. Again, a being that commands genocide cannot be all-loving, even though the bible says such a being is all-loving. I don't have to insert non-biblical properties into the equation. The properties are right there in the bible and those properties contradict. Because you have interpreted them in a way that leads to a non-contradiction doesn't mean they don't contradict.

Mel

long winded fool

True enough. I'm not trying to prove God exists. Emur is trying to prove that He doesn't exist in the way that He's described in the Bible. I'm showing that his proof must first reject at least some things present in the Bible in order to follow logically. This is begging the question.

It is a reasonable question and it has a reasonable resolution. Do I know for sure that the resolution I've presented is objectively true? No. It is a reasonable resolution to an apparent contradiction and that's all. Emur can ignore a reasonable resolution if he wants, but he is then arguing against a God different from the most reasonable interpretation of the description of God as given by the Bible. I have shown how it is reasonable to assume that a loving Father can allow his children to experience pain without intervention. Once you assume the existence and the importance of the eternal soul, indeed the very essence of who His children are, (a very Biblical idea) it becomes reasonable to assume that a loving father can allow his children to die without intervention. Knowledge of the greater good is not necessary. The possibility still logically exists without it.

If you're saying that reconciling non-Biblical issues with the Bible is comparable to your program example I won't argue. But if you're going to argue against the Bible using an interpretation of the words of the Bible, it is fair to use the words of the Bible to show that the argument is not applicable. All other things being equal, I don't know how a loving God could allow His children to kill each other. Given the explanation provided by the Bible, it makes sense that this could occur without God being unloving to anyone. Ignoring the explanation provided by the Bible, (the very book where we get our idea of God from) it once again becomes a contradiction, however you've now taken a Biblical idea, changed it, made it your own, then claim that the Bible is what is contradictory and not your own interpretation of it. You can ignore the Bible when discussing the idea of the Biblical God, but don't you agree that this would be a very irrational non-productive train of thought? Wouldn't this only serve to satisfy an irrational personal desire to not believe? Don't turn this around and say that theists are guilty of the same thing only vice versa. I know that they are. The point is that this argument proves that atheism, in this example, is also guilty of ignoring the facts (what is objectively stated in the Bible) and applying personal opinion (divine gonocide is always totally evil) to arguments about the Bible. Reject any part of the Bible to prove that it is contradictory and you create a straw man.

The fact is, the Bible says an all-loving God allows genocide. Can this be reconciled Biblically? Yes. Can it be reconciled without the stipulations of the eternal soul and the temporal physical body presented in the Bible? Probably not. Therefore, to reject it is to reject the Bible in the first place, which prevents you from truthfully claiming to believe that the Biblical God is not all-loving. The God you describe as not all-loving cannot be the Biblical God without all of the characteristics applied to Him by the Bible, though it may be similar and may be easily mistaken for for the God of the Bible. So essentially, Emur's idea of God is not Biblical. The problem he's presented doesn't actually apply to the Christian God. It applies to what he mistakenly believes to be the Christian God.

long winded fool

The reason I haven't addressed them from your point of view is because they can't be addressed from your point of view. They are inherently contradictory. Since you assumed 'God' at the outset, I thought it was fair and logical to use the Bible to examine your point of view. Your point of view has turned out to be dependent on a non-biblical proposition. Nothing wrong with this as it stands. The problem arises when you claim that it's the Biblical God you have the problem with. When it requires a proposition that is not present in the Bible, one that is in fact contradictory to the Bible, it cannot logically apply to the Biblical description of God and therefore to the God of the Bible.

If reality means anything, then the God described in the bible is not all-loving. As for logic, how is it logical for a genocidal savage to be all-loving? It is logical to me that any being that commands genocide cannot be all-loving. Because you have interpreted away the contradiction doesn't mean it doesn't exist, except in your own mind.

It is logical for a genocidal savage to be all-loving if the motive for the genocide is a greater good than not comitting genocide would be. I don't need to prove that the greater good exists in reality to suppose that it would be a case that a genocidal savage would be all-loving if it did. I only need to prove that the greater good exists in the Bible to prove that the Biblical God could logically allow genocide without contradicting His omnibenevolence.

I am not saying that the God of the bible exists. I am saying that the God described by the bible does not.

But in order to prove that the God of the bible doesn't exist, you claim to assume Him as a premise and then show that the conclusion presents a contradiction. This would be a good argument if the God you were assuming in order to point out a contradiction were actually the God of the Bible.

You do insert non-biblical properties when you assume that divine genocide is an evil act. But you are right. Because I have interpreted biblical properties in a way that leads to a non-contradiction doesn't mean they don't contradict.
It merely means that my interpretation of them is not contradictory and yours is. Which do you suppose is the more rational interpretation? The one that contains contradictions or the one that doesn't? If you want to reject God and the Bible with logic, you'll need more than a provably contradictory interpretation, unless no other more rational interpretation exists.

emur

It is the biblical description of God that I have a problem with. God commands genocide - that's in the bible. God is all-loving - that too is in the bible. These are contradictory, regardless of whether a soul exists or not. It's almost like you assume, because it says so in the bible, that these things are not contradictory. The bible is wrong. Period.

But the greater good from where we sit is a mystical guess at best. We know what genocide is in reality. It is not simply combatants killing combatants. It involves the slaughter of non-combatant men, women, children, and infants. Brutal and savage. Absolutely no excuse for it. Yet, because of the bible's concept of the soul (as you understand it), it is fine with you that an omnipotent, omniscient, all-loving deity can and does command this utterly depraved action. If there indeed was a greater good involved in this, an omnipotent God would not need genocide to achieve it.

With this mindset, a Christian who is in danger of losing his/her salvation should be killed (and brutally I might add) to protect his/her soul from eternal damnation. This is the kind of stuff one must come up with to defend the teachings of the bible. It reminds me of why I am so glad that I walked away from evangelical Christianity and its biblical notion of God.

No, you only interpret that I insert non-biblical properties in order to protect your assumption that the bible doesn't contain contradictions. Rationality doesn't require interpreting something so that there are no contradictions. It is more rational to see contradictions for what they are, and less rational to interpret them away to protect certain religious notions.

On another note, I am in the process of a move and may not have internet access from tomorrow (Thursday) till Tuesday of next week. Yep, that's how long the lady at the phone company told me it may take. If I get a chance to check back this evening I will. Many thanks to all who have participated in this thread. Stephen and others please feel free to carry on in my absence. I'll be back when I can.

Mel

scombrid

LWF:

You have yet to establish that god's seemingly criminal acts actually achieve a greater good. Unlike the guy that refuses a smoker a cigarette and thus helps in the greater good of helping the smoker quit, the good that comes of god's actions is hidden. God's largest and most prominent act of genocide, "The Flood", failed in it's goal of clensing the earth at least as evidenced by the continued sinful nature of man and the subsequent need for a Savior. What greater good was served by that act? Presumably everybody killed in the flood was condemned forever without the opportunity to correct their ways.

You've put forth that in modern times god still allows suffering for some greater good. However, that greater good is only served if that suffering leads the sufferer to "Glory". Otherwise the suffering is just a prelude to the rest of eternity. If we can't detect a pattern in suffering that compels us to mend our ways then no one is going to turn around. Thus the suffering (as experienced within the frame of reference of human experience) is just for the sake of suffering as it is purely unreliable in compelling one to either accept the Jesus patch or become more holy (or whichever method your flavor of Christianity says is necessary to acheive salvation). The only greater good is salvation. The suffering at the hands of god failed to bring about salvation in the bible and fails to bring about salvation today. Thus the suffering is pointless and makes god appear pretty darned mean. Your every post in this thread amounts to a long winded iteration of "God works in mysterious ways". That is a waste of time. Please demonstrate that god's genocide actually brings about a greater good. You can justify any assertion about god when you join it with a disclaimer that we don't really know what he is up to.

At least where a child percieves his parent as mean, that child can know that the parent was striving for greater good as the child becomes more aware of the world. Shoot, the child can even detect a pattern in punishment and alter behavior to avoid further punishment even before the child excepts that the parent is doing it "for his own good". As a child I knew that I was going to get the strap if I fought with my brother. I knew that I was going to eat soap if I cussed. God's suffering is more analogous to my mother walking into my room while I'm doing homework, beating the crap out of me, not telling me why, and expecting me to stop fighting with my brother because she beat me while I was doing homework. With god we never become aware of the greater good through experience. You say we'll know after death but then it's too late. We're either simply dead or condemned to hell because we couldn't assertain from god's actions just what he wanted us to do or believe.