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Dave: no one is innocent in this situation. Once again, you have failed to take seriously the fact that the child was tainted with original sin.
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Irrelevant. According to you,
everybody is "tainted with original sin", therefore it is not a relevant factor in any decision to kill or not to kill. The only relevant factor, as the Bible states and as you have conceded, is that the kid was punished specifically for David's sin. And there is no doubt that the child was innocent of that crime.
God punishes innocents for the crimes of others.
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Dave: I never coneded any such thing. I specifically noted that they must be differentiated. The basis of Creator-creature vs. creature-creature justice is different. But no innocent parties are punished in either case. Since God's glory is the highest end of the universe, the exercise of Creator-creature justice as well as His decrees governing creature-creature justice find their origin and unifying principle in God, his glory, and goodness.
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However, we have already established that "goodness" is meaningless in your worldview when applied to God: it simply means "godlike". So why do you keep saying that God is perfectly godlike?
All that matters to your barbarian war-god is GLORY.
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Dave: here you are assuming, without support, that there is only one sense of biblical justice. Giving context its due, one must differentiate the places where God, through special mandate and revelation, give men the authority to exercise Creator-creature justice, vs. the normative, normal rules governing civil justice.
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And YOU are assuming, without support, that there are TWO senses of Biblical justice. Nowhere is this stated in the Bible.
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Dave: God adheres to the principles of justice, but He carries out those principles of justice in differing ways than men do. That is because justice has a Godward origin and end. God, being omniscient, can treat men corporately (through Adam's representation). Men, not being omniscient, cannot - thus they cannot have the son pay the debt of the father.
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Again, you have it backwards. Look at the advances in military precision strikes since WW2. Truman used nuclear weapons against Japanese cities: Bush used laser-guided bombs against individual buildings in Kabul. According to your twisted argument, superior targeting ability should have "allowed" Bush to turn Afghanistan into radioactive glass, whereas the less "omniscient" Truman could only target the actual bad guys.
You are babbling, Dave.
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Dave: Moses had no such Zeus-like conception of God. He believed specifically that God did NOT have the "likeness of male or female" (DEU 4:15)
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Not male or female, but a physical body nonetheless. "And I will take away mine hand, and thou shalt see my back parts: but my face shall not be seen." (Exodus 33:23)
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Even in places where God does manifest special presence, such as when He visited Abraham near Sodom, we see that the "Lord" on earth calls up to the "Lord in heaven" to bring down fire on the cities- demonstrating both a special and a general presence.
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This was written while Judaism was still polytheistic. One God is calling in an airstrike from another.
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Dave: this assumes, a priori, that Judaism is not older than the Babylonian captivity. You have not presented any evidence beyond your speculative conjecture that would induce anyone to believe that the Babylonians forced any such monotheism on the Jews (especially given the glaring differences it holds to Zoroastrian theology).
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Then you should educate yourself about the history of your religion. I'm not saying that Judaism isn't older, I'm saying that
monotheistic Judaism isn't older. The Caananites were polytheistic. The Bible is a collection of modified Caananite folk myths.
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There are some usages where the plural forms could conceivably be referring to a plurality of divine PERSONS (thus, the Christian Trinity), as opposed to a plurality of gods.
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The Trinity is a concept invented by Christian theologians long after the death of Jesus. The Old Testament wasn't written by Christians.
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Lastly, the Bible often uses the word "god" or "gods" with a lower-case "g". That is, in a loose sense. Thus, false gods, rulers, or spiritual powers are in view in many of these places (as the context dictates). This also follows by taking into consideration the plain teachings concerning monotheism (Deut. 6:4). It is a simple equivocation fallacy to confuse the different instances of "el" or "elohim."
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Blatant apologetic denial. God is repeatedly referred to as one among many. Your own fallacy is the baseless assumption that the Bible must be coherent. When faced with a contradiction, you are unable to see the obvious fact that
both views were considered correct by their respective authors. You are forced to choose one, then invent elaborate waffle about "literary conventions" to explain why the other one doesn't
really mean what it plainly says.
Apologists have been doing this for years. I have seen Young-Earth Creationists claim that references to flat-Earthism in the Bible are in an "allegorical style", whereas six-day creation and the Noachian Flood are not. Other "inerrantists" proclaim that six-day creation, the Fall and the Noachian Flood are written in an "allegorical style" and are therefore not literally true.
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There are references to other gods which escaped the censors, however. The priests of Egypt tranformed their staves into serpents and reproduced several of the Plagues due to the power of their gods (no, they were not "demon-worshippers": read a book on the Egyptian pantheon).
Dave: the so-called "gods" of the Egyptians were indeed demons (no matter how the Egyptians themselves conceived of them), because the Egyptians did not worship the one true God, Yahweh.
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They worshipped gods with an equal claim to greatness. Gods which created and sustained the Universe. Gods which (according to the Bible) could duplicate some of the "true" God's powers. Gods which are never dismissed as "demons" in the Bible itself. Beings of great magical power who fully deserve to be called "gods" by anyone who hasn't arbitrarily decided that the word cannot be applied to any other being. A "demon" is simply a lesser (but, in this case, still very powerful) God.
Of course, if you had EVER bothered to give
any justification whatsoever to support your utterly baseless belief in "the one true God, Yahweh"...
06-06-2002, 07:48 AM
