I think we (along with most people) would agree with the following-- that while it may be bad to murder a stranger, it is worse to murder a friend, and much worse to murder a parent.
I don't, or at least, it's not a distinction that matters to me. What matters to me is that I have no intention of ever murdering anyone, and when others do, my concern is what to do about them. Since I don't believe in vengeance, "what to do about them" isn't about making sure they "pay for their crimes", it's about making sure they don't kill again, making them productive members of society if it's possible, and hopefully making it enough of a deterrent that others are less likely to murder.
We see such familial crimes as worse in part because the one doing the killing owes so much to the one he murders.
I'm not sure that's the case -- is a child killing a parent worse than a parent killing a child?
It would seem to me that if you extend that idea to the one who you owe the very conception of existence to, the punishment for even minor crimes would be correspondingly magnified.
Your family must be very different than mine. With my family, and friends, and even casual acquaintances, it seems that the closer I get to someone, the more likely I am to be forgiving of little things, in favor of focusing on what actually matters.
the crimes we commit are against one with such high standards, and to whom we owe so much, that no attempts by us can ever exonerate us.
And he knows this. In other words, the person (being?) setting the standards is deliberately setting them so high no one will reach them, and then punishing them for falling short. It's like a parent beating his child because the child can't fly.
David's sin was lack of trust. IIRC earlier in either Samuel or Chronicles, the Israelites were told NOT to construct large armies, but to rely on the Lord. David's intention was to perform a census for the express purpose of judging his military readiness, a clear violation of the implicit command to trust.
Emphasis mine.
So nothing was ever said about counting the armies you have (or how large "large" is), and it's even acknowledged that it's an implicit command. And this still doesn't address the question.
Normal person: "You didn't trust me. I'm disappointed."
Mob boss: "You didn't trust me. If you ever fail me again, I'll kill your family."
Serial killer: "You didn't trust me. My trust issues are going to make me somewhat unstable, so I'm just going to kill a dozen random people."
God: "You didn't trust me. I'm going to kill seventy thousand of your people!"
Loving? Really? I can only imagine what God would've done if Abraham had refused to sacrifice his son.
You can clearly see that he is a God who values covenants, truth, and "holiness" (perhaps best defined as being set apart, isolation from moral corruption) highly enough to put a high price on their violation;
Defining "holiness" in terms of moral corruption buys you nothing. I consider killing seventy thousand people as punishment for a lack of faith to be petty and morally corrupt. By your own definition, then, I would have to judge God as unholy.
That leaves covenants and truth. I think we can boil this down to just truth, because what's the worth of a covenant with a dishonest being? But God didn't tell the whole truth about the Tree of Knowledge. He certainly wasn't honest about his intentions for Abraham's son -- that, or he was fickle, commanding one thing, then another. There's a number of things attributed to God, particularly in Job, which are metaphor at best -- "corners of the Earth", for instance.
Even if I grant covenants, the way he goes about enforcing them is brutal. He promised the land of Canaan to Abraham. Fine. But to keep this covenant, he led the Israelites on a campaign of genocide. You know what? I'd rather he'd broken his promise.
...love enough to pay the penalty himself, in what physically can be described as a rather horrendous way to die,
Aside from the question of whether that was necessary at all -- and I'm sorry, another YouTube link is relevant -- there's still the question of how much suffering this actually is. It seems to me that there are worse forms of torture practiced today, and even if that wasn't the case, Jesus can hardly be paying the price if he has a bad weekend and ends up at the right hand of God.
If he had really "paid the price", he'd be in Hell. (I'm not saying that's what I want...)
Holiness in particular is shown by the very particular laws of the mosaic covenant-- a part of their purpose being to demonstrate the extent to which Israel was not to live like other nations, imaging a God who is in so many ways not like other (man-made) gods.
Actually, this god is very much like other man-made gods, just not like others of that region at that time. But the very particular laws of the mosaic covenant strike me as ranging from utterly pointless (don't mix cloth!) to utterly barbaric (the stuff about rape especially, but also slavery, sex in general, disobedient children, etc.)
If that doesnt quite cut it for you, Im sorry, but it is a discussion that could in and of itself take up the remainder of this post, and I dont know that I have adequate knowledge to essentially write up a systematic theology on the attributes of God-- there are books enough for THAT.
I don't think I'm asking for much. Right now, I'm pretty much where I started with this discussion -- the biblical God, and the laws ascribed to him, seem very much like what I would expect of a stone-age tribe writing stone-age mythology. It's even understandable and forgivable in that context. It doesn't seem understandable or forgivable for the very definition of what is good and right to condemn women to death for not screaming loud enough when raped.
What would be obvious to any reader above the age of 14 as metaphorical language...
In evaluating this claim, first, I have to ignore this for a moment:
...the word 'akal, as I understand, has as part of its meaning a figurative eat.
I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and concede the point as a legitimate argument -- I did ask "what am I missing" (not entirely rhetorically), and you answered, so thank you.
But I can't seriously expect any random 14-year-old to just know the appropriate Hebrew offhand, nor can I fault the creator of that video for the same.
So here's the problem: How do you know what's intended as metaphor and what's intended as historical fact? Did a whale (alright, "great fish") really eat Jonah, or was it a metaphor? Jesus cursing a fig tree, fact or metaphor? God creating Adam from dust and Eve from Adam's rib, fact or metaphor? Noah's flood, fact or metaphor? Elijah being lifted into the sky in a chariot of fire, fact or metaphor? The resurrection, fact or metaphor?
Even in context, it's just not always obvious. This is why there are Creationists, but not all Christians are Creationists.
In relative terms, yes, which becomes rather obvious given Peter and Pauls repeated assertions and implications that ONLY God is righteous when judged on an absolute scale and on their own merits.
So, how do we know when it's meant as absolute and when it's meant as relative? This actually struck me as a contradiction when I first read it, because I didn't see any indication that the mention of Lot was "relative" to anything -- and relative to something worse than a father who'd give up his own daughters to be raped?
I do not intend to do a full exposition on the reasoning behind each and every law, but that specific law was to protect women who would no longer be marriageable in a time when they relied on marriage for protection. A terrible thing has happened, but letting the rapist off of any responsibility to the woman whose prospects he has ruined is not a better scenario.
So, require the rapist to pay child support. Or kill him and take his money for the woman.
Or do whatever you want to the rapist, but deal with the issue of women being treated like property -- why shouldn't a woman be "marriageable" unless she's a virgin? Why not let the community chip in some money to support the victim?
Think about this. What we're saying here is that God found it more acceptable to force women to marry their rapists, thus guaranteeing a lifetime of further rape, than deal with a social problem. And it's not like God was afraid to dictate social norms -- after all, he sold them on the idea of circumcision.
Except we do know things about the prehistoric Earth.
I would take issue with the word "know" if you mean it in a technical sense. Assumptions still form the foundation-- assumptions about geological processes, the constancy of certain laws, etc.
Assumptions are not created equal, especially when they are testable, especially when multiple different lines of evidence repeatedly lead to the same conclusion, even a conclusion nobody wanted to believe.
That is, it's not assuming that radioactive decay is the same now as it always was. What it's assuming is that it's not the case that radioactive decay of multiple substances, cosmological distances and the speed of light, computerized models of the formation of the solar system, the spacing of tree rings, et cetera, et cetera, all lead to the same erroneous conclusion.
I perhaps should not have used the term "no difference", though i DID use the word "practically" quite specifically in the next sentence.
Yes, you did -- I guess I couldn't really let a fundamental difference slide that easily, even if it's somehow "practically" the same for some purposes. It may result in no "practical" difference in some sense on this narrow issue, but it's a fundamental difference of opinion.
More than that, what often happens -- though I'm not sure if you were doing this -- is that by claiming it's a belief system, the next claim is, "So it takes just as much faith to be an atheist as a Christian! You just don't want to believe..." and so on.
By contrast, the attitude that led me to atheism is just the opposite. I try not to have faith in anything, which means I try to work with as few assumptions as I can, and keep those assumptions reasonable. I also try to keep in mind that they are assumptions, and be open to the possibility that I might be wrong -- to the extent that proof applies, as AronRa says, "I'd rather be proven wrong than forever be wrong."
Maybe you weren't going there, but I try to stop things like that in their tracks, especially when it's a verbal conversation. When someone starts with a faulty premise, the sooner I stop it, the less of their baseless argument I Have to listen to. Even if I have to listen to it, it's much easier to find a foundational fallacy than have to deconstruct the whole thing.
That is KJV english, which I find to be quite popular in such objections,
I think it's more because it's popular in general. See, for example, The Onion -- that, and it's what I remember watching The Ten Commandments as a kid.
I have no problem with using "thou shalt not murder", but that's a lot of killing to justify.
"Is it good because God says it, or did God say it because it's good?"
Im not philosopher enough to give a full answer to this. One might wonder, could there possibly have been a universe where cowardice was morally good, and love was an evil-- and were seen as such by all? I dont know. I suppose IMO both of his statements are true, and that it is not a dichotomy at all.
I don't see how they can both be true without being circular. If it's good because God says it -- that is, if the cause of its goodness is that God said so -- then the cause of his saying so can't be that it's good. That he said it because it's good, similarly, seems to necessarily imply that there is some standard other than just that he said it by which it is judged "good".
It's also interesting that you say "and were seen as such by all..." Since when is that a requirement? Certainly, if there is an absolute standard of good and evil, people could be mistaken about it.
But that's essentially the problem I see here -- if goodness is simply an absolute standard set by God, a situation philosophers call "Divine command theory". There are several objections, and I'm working from memory and Wikipedia here, but the most serious seems to be that it is entirely arbitrary, but you can't possibly know yourself, since you don't know the mind of God.
It also works equally well no matter what you apply it to, so long as you accept that thing as the source of all that is good. This is problematic since we can't know the mind of God, and different people have different opinions on who or what God is -- how are we to know which is correct? And how is it fair to judge us for the honest mistake of not knowing what the right religion is?
The biggest problem I have, you already know: Special pleading. You're saying that since God is the author of morality, anything God does is by definition good, even if it runs contrary to any moral standard we apply to pretty much anyone else. There are just too many cases where if it was any human in that position, performing those actions, you would call them a monster, a terrible person, beyond evil.
Glenn Beck claims to be mormon, not Christian...
This isn't really crucial, but that's a No True Scotsman. I'm aware of all the crazy shit Mormons pile on top of Christianity, though I'm not convinced it's really harder to believe than Christianity by itself. But by what definition of "Christian" are you excluding Mormons?
(at the very least in the sense that he doesnt think OT+NT is reliable)
Neither do most Christians, at least where Genesis is concerned, but often many other places are either ignored or explained away as metaphor or allegory. In fact, when you restrict it to those with the most consistent interpretation of the Bible, it seems like what you end up with is Fred Phelps.
for instance, if you were born in Iran, you'd probably be a Muslim.
That is what we call an untestable hypothesis, and Ive heard it enough for it to be obnoxious. Just how do you know this?
It's testable in that the best predictor of a person's religion is the religion of their parents, and the religion of the surrounding environment. I don't know enough about you to know that this applies to you personally, but this is as valid as saying that if you had been born in a slum, you probably wouldn't end up with a million dollars.
Sure, it happens, but without knowing more about you and how these things work, it's reasonable to say you're probably not an exception.
Doesnt this exclude the possibility of any religion whatsoever-- as if it were true the first people would not have had religion at all, so neither would their kids?
Well, like I said, "probably".
It actually seems that, given human psychology, religion often arises naturally and very quickly in the absence of either an existing religion or sufficient understanding of reality. But even without that, you might imagine that a few people would start believing, and then a few more -- that kind of change is slow, though maybe it was quicker before the religions learned to better defend themselves by, for example, threatening unbelievers with Hell.
But are you really going to say you don't see the pattern? Once you've got a religion... Iran is full of Muslims. There are exceptions. They are a tiny, tiny percentage. Iran isn't significantly genetically different than America -- there is far, far more genetic diversity within races than between races. Therefore, it seems likely that if you, with the same genetic material and basically the same initial conditions, were born in Iran, where you'd be indoctrinated into Islam, that you'd now be telling me about the Prophet, and how the Bible is basically true, but unreliable, and I'd be asking you to justify why the penalty for apostasy is death.
As it happens, I don't believe "perfection" is possible or desirable,
Though I would wonder why at this. People have long wanted a utopia (see communism etc), and the barrier always seems to be precisely that people arent morally perfectable.
That's one barrier. It's more fundamental than that human nature is so bad -- it's raw natural selection at work. In a world which is morally perfect in even one narrowly defined sense, like, say, always telling the truth, the first person who tells a lie is the most powerful man on Earth.
More than that, though, I'm not sure I want "perfection". It might be a visceral thing, more than a logical one, but it seems like every attempt at perfection ends up being flawed in concept. For example, suppose we wanted to create a perfectly athletic society. What do we do with cripples? Kill them, as Sparta might have? Or take it a step further, what if you could genetically engineer people to be perfect in every way, or at least everything we could control with genes? Then you have Gattaca.
Or think about a perfect artist of pretty much any kind. What defines "perfect" art? How can it still be art if it's perfect?
So...
Possibly you are speaking from the standpoint that "Christianity is wrong, therefore I dont want you forcing your conception of morality on me", which is from your stance understandable.
It's less this, and more that with my views on morality and ethics, I don't think perfection according to those views is the point. The point of ethics in particular is to answer the question, "In the situation I am in now, what is the right thing to do?" Sometimes there's no right answer. Sometimes it doesn't matter. Sometimes there is exactly one right answer.
But even if everyone did exactly what they should do, you can still end up with no-win situations, so perfect ethics doesn't lead to a perfect world.