IRON MAN

Not exactly Nero.

And by the way, I could make that same case against some of the atheists on this thread who missed the fact that in your question you say God is proved beyond doubt.

I am not a theist so I must think outside my box for a moment in order to answer your question.

Under the conditions you posed no one could logically remain atheist.

You still have two choices though, obey God, or disobey God.

The dilemma here is not so much that God is asking you to kill - as has been pointed out, it wouldn't be the first time.

The bible does not say however that He is a god of "No Killing", it says he is a god of love. I had my own dog put down out of love.

Love being presumably a quality put into you by Him when he made you in His image.

By that it is fair enough to say he would never ask you to kill your friend, just for his sadistic pleasure.

But your question puts us in a bind beyond that. He is the xian god of love, yet he asks you to do something unloving, and worse is acting in a completely unloving way Himself.

Sure if he had some grand plan, and killing your friend was some part of it -fine, but you said that He states that He just wants to be a sadistic arsehole.

Then you have two possible choices:

1. Say, "Well, He's the boss, and He has the right to change the rules, (so I am technically doing nothing wrong), but I will have to live with the conflict of conscience as I am doing something unloving against my nature, (a quality which he gave me in the first place)." Bang!

2. Say, "Go fuck yourself God! I have no wish to serve a god who either always was a sadistic arsehole and a liar, or is now, (due to the conscience I was created with by Him)."

Like I say, your only two choices are to obey or disobey. The origin of morality is still God - good, bad or ugly.

0

No, I would not kill at His Command.

First, I am a theist, but I believe the gods and goddesses are metaphors for aspects of reality/conciousness/Tao/the Great All/All that Is that we cannot communciate via language. Thus seeing a God whose message is for me to "kill the one I love" would not have literal meaning for me.
If the purpose of the OP is to state that this is, in fact, a literal request, then I would deny it based on the fact that I serve Gods and Goddesses of my choosing. Murder isn't one of those deities.
Second, I do not believe that morality is dependant on God. Morality is dependant on the individual and whatever justifications they come up with for such morality.
Morality itself, in the scheme of things, is neutral, IMO, as every action, regardless of reasoning for it will have both good and bad outcomes.

My two cents,
Tangie

long winded fool

The problem seems to me to be in the idea that "you are absolutely sure it is God" and "He wants you to kill your best friend." I don't think there are many christians who can reconcile these two notions together. They are mutually exclusive. A rational christian recognizes God by his behavior, he does not recognize God and then analyze His behavior. A rational follower of the Bible would not be fooled by smoke and mirrors, IMO. "God is good" is not a description of behavior, it is an identification of God. "I AM TRUTH" does not mean that Jesus tells the truth, it means that truth is the object of worship.

David B

Isn't there an example in the Bible where the god of the Bible did allegedly ask for something very similar?

'And he said, Take now thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah; and offer him there for a burnt offering upon one of the mountains which I will tell thee of'

Of course in this case he allegedly changes his mind.

But that seems by the by. If the god of the bible is your god, and (less likely) the bible is accurate, then the god of your faith did ask such a thing.

David B (trusts that if that is your god, you will now abandon him)

BadBadBad

I've thought about this a lot, and I've had many many threads on it here. For example, would you get flight training and fly a jet into a building with a lot of people this god finds particularly nasty? If so, how are you different than terrorists? For example, if Joshua handed you his bloody sword, would you hack a begging child to death? If so, how brutal would you have to do it so as to satisfy God's vengeance? If you only cared about God's absolute morality, would you do it while I held my sword to the throat of your child? Would you care about my morality where killing this child is a real bad bad bad thing to me? So first of all as a self-proclaimed expert on the matter, I think you've got a a couple of problems with your challenge.

First, you've put God's motive in there, and it's wrong. Why do we get God's motive wrong in all these challenges? God's motive is clearly lined out in various places. We can all look it up if we need to, but generally, God is vengeful. He wants revenge. He also wants to glorify himself Exodus style. He wants all to see his glory and declare is name throughout all the Earth. One killing isn't enough. He needs genocide to sufficiently glorify himself. He wants to be so well known, that his glory will be spread one generation to the next throughout time. God also wants absolute obedience and worship. Do what he says or else. Other than that, no one has a clue as to God's purpose. Nasty? Evil? A surgeon curing mankind through genocide? All pure speculation. All we have is vengeance, glory, and obedience.

Now let's look at some of the implications:

Not bad for an amatuer. Only you forgot the consequences. What happens if you don't do it? Looks like I can get off scott free here, and honestly, I don't think God is going to put up with a bunch of stiff neck rebels too much longer. Your example would make it what, the fourth time he's had to come down and explain all this stuff to all us worthless sinners? You better do what God says or else, and or else is something to horrible to even consider.

So in this scenario, what I've come to understand after all this time and all this bloody discussion is that what difference does it make what you do? In any event, how the hell will you be responsible? My Joshua Challenge included graphic scences from the 1994 Rwanda genocide. I've got Christians from the most successful missionary work in 200 years killing their Christian neighbors with machetes and nail studded clubs. I've got pictures of rotting dead bodies strewn about churches all over Rwanda. I've got eyewitness stories of the graphic details of what it's like to be slaughtered by sword literally on God's altar. I didn't need to go to the glorified stories of the OT. It's just a click away on google from 1994.

One question that turned all this around for me is what would it take for me to be the murderer, and I had the answer. In Rwanda, men were drug out of their homes and butchered in front of their families. If you didn't put on the banana leaves, pick up the machetes, and go killing the cock roaches, that might happen to you. Worse yet, maybe it would be your wife that was gang raped while your children watched. Maybe they would kill your children in front of you or kill you and your wife before your children. No, I must say that when they came to my door and handed me the machete, I would have squashed the cockroach Tutsis right along with the best of them. I would have smashed thirteen year old boys in the head with my nail studded club, dumped him into the pit, and buried him never knowing if he was dead. I would have done anything to come home and happily celebrate our lives with my own thirteen year old. What does it matter?

Let's say you're taken hostage and the murderer comes to you and demands that you hand over one of your two children. Who ever you pick, he's going to drag him over to where the police can see, and he's going to kill him. If you don't, he's going to kill all three of you. Time is up. What's it going to be? What is the moral decision?

The answer is that your decision doesn't have anything to do with morality. It has to do with fear and desparation. If you steal bread to feed your starving family, is that immoral? It's not a matter of morality. However, you still know what morality is. So after all this, what you would do, pitted against an omnipotent God, doesn't matter. The question is what is it that God wants to do. Why is it that he wants that, and what does that say to you about his character? So the what and why are clear. Kill, kill brutally, and kill senselessly. The why is clear. Kill for revenge. Kill for glory. Kill for notoriety.

Now for the conclusions. You judge. Judge God. You can't you say? Why not? Are you mindless? Surely you have an opinion on butchering babies for God. He wants you to kill for glory, revenge, and notoriety. That makes God immoral. Admit it! It's the only moral choice you have.

TrueMyth

Hi! I'm new (as will very readily become apparent)

I'm afraid this is only a disastrous criticism if the answer can and/or should be answered as a simple "yes" or "no". For my part, very little in this world affords that sort of reductionistic simplicity, and philosophical conundrums are certainly the worst at this.

TrueMyth

In what sense do you mean that these persons have claimed this? If you mean that all other worldviews (i.e., Paganism, Islam, Confuscianism, etc) are without any truth, then I would heartily disagree that this is "routinely argued", let alone by the thinkers you mentioned (particularly C. S. Lewis). If you mean that classical theism is held to be the best source of moral values, then I would agree with your assessment of these thinkers' position.

However, I fail to see how that is problematic for multiple sources of moral value-- Christianity has never claimed to be novel in every respect; only grandiose delusional schizophrenics do that. I am neither surprised nor threatened by the presence of such myths as Adonis, Osiris, and Balder which contain the death-resurrection motif, nor am I surprised or threatened by the presence of Semitic creation myths which closely resemble that in Genesis. If I ought to be, I welcome someone to point this out to me.

David Vestal

As David B. pointed out, it wasn't philisophical when God told Abraham to kill Isaac. Would you applaud Abraham for his willingness to kill his son, yet hesitate to personally respond with Abraham's resolve?

TrueMyth

Thank you for pointing this out to me.

I believe the circumstances are different between Abraham and myself in such a situation, and this is my brief reason why:

Old Testament revelation vs. New Testament revelation
-- This is touchy and complex, but suffice it to say that a) I am not a Biblical literalist, b) God is always and at all times essentially the same person, w/ the same commands, and c) God's revelation is substantially different between the Old and New Testament. I have not worked out fully in my own heart and mind why this is, but I suspect very strongly that this is b/c of the sacrifice of Jesus which led to the abolition of the old approach of sacrifices and penitence, and therefore fear and trembling (although some of this ought to remain in mediated form). God operates in the OT through the whirlwind and the pillar of fire; he operates in NT (our time) through the Holy Spirit, the gentle and subtle voice of conscience in every human being.

Thus, I do applaud Abraham's willingness to follow God's commands (he was not willing to kill his son). In that culture, respect was transmitted in one of two ways 1) a natural superior, or 2) power. Just as if God were to go to an alien race, he would take their form and speak their language, he tested Abraham (so Abraham could both know the extent of his own faith and the power of God) in his own language and with symbols he could understand. I still think the relevant point is that he kept Abraham from killing Isaac, thus demonstrating his goodness.

Also, I would lack both the courage and the will to execute such a command today towards my fiancee. I also believe this is praiseworthy, since there is no comparable situation in the Bible to compare it to as a precedent (Abraham is ruled out for the above reason), and my conscience protests violently against it.

This presents an inherent problem with the dilemma which suggests to me that it is logical nonsense: Christian teaching is that the Holy Spirit (identical with the conscience) is the coequal voice of God, therefore in order for a true Christian to believe fully that God was requesting this heinous act of him, he would have to feel no abiding moral qualms about it. Thus, the question seems to be absurd and self-referentially contradictory.

This is ridiculously brief and does violence to my position, but hey...

Hiero5ant

Read the passage again.

"But it is routinely argued, in pop-culture, in the apologetic literature by people such as C.S. Lewis and William Lane Craig, and on these very boards by people like BGiC that classical theism is the only "worldview" that provides a "source" of moral values."

This is indeed the opening argument in Mere Christianity, but the argument itself is ubiquitous.

No one is arguing (in this thread) about whether other "worldviews" (I hate that word) are "without truth".


No, my description of Lewis, Craig, and BGiC is accurate. I can give URLs. They don't hold that Christianity is the "best source", they hold that it is the only source. And that makes quite a difference.