04 May 2014

Killing for God

Religious 61 Comments

Last week I made an offhand remark to the way I try to explain why it’s not murder when God orders the Israelites to kill people in the Old Testament. Someone in the comments asked: “if God gave you the same orders as he gave to those Hebrews, would you go ahead with them?”

I think this is a great question because it once again illustrates how the usual standards of reasoned, philosophical debate go out the window when skeptics attack believers. (Note, I’m not necessarily implicating the guy who asked this, but I’m talking about the broader context, as we’ll see in a second.)

So in terms of my value system, yes, absolutely, if God orders you to do X, then it is good to do X. That is true even if He orders you to kill someone who, as far as you can tell, hasn’t committed a crime.

Now that I’ve given the atheist libertarians the “gotcha” they were looking for, let me add two big asterisks:

==> In actual practice, if I “heard a voice in my head” giving me such an order, I would not obey it. This is because I would be worried I was going nuts, that someone was playing a trick on me, that it was a demon pretending to be God, etc. Since that would be so far removed from what I would normally expect Him to tell me to do and since it conflicts in such a prima facie way with what Jesus commands us to do in the gospels–I would not actually believe it was God. At the very least, it would take some serious signs (such that Stefan Molyneux and Steve Landsburg would be running to get baptized) to make me even contemplate such a command.

==> I really do hope nobody goes, “Aha! Now we see the vile implications of the Christian worldview.” There are plenty of philosophical discussions about crazy scenarios in which totally moral, reasonable people would entertain the idea of killing a person who has not (to their knowledge) committed any crime. E.g. a runaway trolley, South American guerillas, or–everybody’s favorite–getting a time machine and killing baby Hitler. In fact, in addition to being ridiculed for my Christianity, I am also ridiculed (not necessarily by the same group of people) for being so “absolutist” about not violating rights when a killer asteroid is hurtling toward Earth.

So in summary, this is what I’m saying: Most people would admit that either (a) they would kill somebody or at least (b) they can understand how a moral person would make that decision, if there were strong reasons to suspect that doing so would produce humongous positive results (like avoiding the Holocaust or saving billions of people from being killed by an asteroid). Well, if you think God is omnibenevolent and omniscient, then He’s in a position to know when such a move would actually be correct, isn’t He?

Last point: Before any principled libertarian tries to bite my head off by pointing out that crude utilitarianism cannot justify the violation of rights: I agree with you. But if there really is a God as depicted in the Christian Bible who created the physical universe de novo, then He owns everything. It’s not a violation of anybody’s rights to be killed by God, through whatever means He chooses. George Lucas is not a murderer for making Anakin slaughter a bunch of kids.

61 Responses to “Killing for God”

  1. Yosef says:

    Thanks Bob, I certainly didn’t mean my question as any sort of “gotcha” question.

    I think it’s interesting that you say if you heard a voice in your head giving you such an order, you wouldn’t obey it. As I clarified in my question, the Hebrews didn’t even get a direct command from God to kill, but were told by Saul who was told by Samuel who was told by God. That is already several layers removed from God. Yet not only did those Hebrews obey the command, the Old Testament presents their obedience as the correct response.

    You also write “Since that would be so far removed from what I would normally expect Him to tell me to do and since it conflicts in such a prima facie way with what Jesus commands us to do in the gospels–I would not actually believe it was God.” Ok, let’s take that as given. We are now where the user Question placed us, with your response being dependent on the current point int time (after Jesus, having the gospels, your understanding is that God would not likely given such a command). What if you were in the time and place of those Hebrews then?

  2. Keshav Srinivasan says:

    “In actual practice, if I “heard a voice in my head” giving me such an order, I would not obey it.” Bob, you don’t believe that if God talked to you, he would be so convincing that you wouldn’t need any other confirmation?

    • JCNU says:

      Scriptures bind our conscious. It is inconsistent with the New Covenant to obey voices that tell you to go back to the types and shadows of the Mosaic Covenant. That is the point of the book of Hebrews, Galatians, Corinthians, Jesús discussions with the pharisees.

      Read Galatians 3 for starters.

    • Matt M (-Dude Where's My Freedom) says:

      Maybe, maybe not. In the bible, it seems to vary from person to person. Yosef is right that the Hebrews basically just took someone’s word for it. Of course, Moses needed to see the burning bush. Perhaps God would appreciate that Murphy would require some sort of positive sign.

      • JNCU says:

        ” it seems to vary from person to person”

        Do you mean people’s interpretations are different? Because people impose their biases on the text, that is why interpretations go wild.

        When I teach or discuss the text I always ask, what was the author intent? If you hear people talking about the Bible without mentioning the author’s intent, then their interpretations ought to be corrected.

        I do that all the time and some people freak out but when they go through thinking about the author and audience, they get out wiser Christians. Things start to make sense. They stop using passages like theological play dough.

  3. Travis says:

    One thing that you may have overlooked, Bob, is that you take for granted that the Hebrews really did get a direct command from God to engage in mass murder. As you say, Christians know that it would be completely outside of what we expect from God if we were to hear a “command” to kill. This is because we must look at the Old Testament through the lens of the New. The Hebrews didn’t know what God was actually like, because He had not yet revealed Himself via the Incarnation. Jesus explained in Matt. 11:27 that “no one knows the Father except the Son and those to whom the Son chooses to reveal Him.”

    Given that God had not yet fully revealed Himself, isn’t it more likely that the leaders of the Hebrews merely believed that God wanted them to commit those acts because of the wickedness of the inhabitants of the Promised Land?

    • Gene Callahan says:

      “Given that God had not yet fully revealed Himself, isn’t it more likely that the leaders of the Hebrews merely believed that God wanted them to commit those acts because of the wickedness of the inhabitants of the Promised Land?”

      And thus, Holocaust = A-OK!

    • Tel says:

      … God wanted them to commit those acts because of the wickedness of the inhabitants of the Promised Land …

      Especially true after all of those original inhabitants are gone and can’t complain anymore. A lot of political arguments end up resorting to Darwinism at the end of the day.

      • JCNU says:

        Still true, with or without cannanites to complain.

    • guest says:

      … you take for granted that the Hebrews really did get a direct command from God to engage in mass murder.

      If you’re going to start out taking for granted that the Biblical account is historically accurate, then you’re also going to have to take for granted that God told the Hebrews to kill (not murder, in this case).

      You’ll trust the Bible to give you true information about Hebrew attacks, but no further?

      Bob is asking you to consider a scenario, whether it’s true or not.

  4. JCNU says:

    “George Lucas is not a murderer for making Anakin slaughter a bunch of kids”

    to be quoted often in t g e future.

    • Tel says:

      But Anakin is still a murderer.

      • JCNU says:

        Not a perfect analogy. As analogies always are. But still a good one.

      • Andrew' says:

        Anakin isn’t real.

        • JNCU says:

          That is what mental experiments are. Non real hypothetical situations that enlighten another idea in an imperfect way.

        • guest says:

          Anikin isn’t real.

          Search your feelings; You know it to be true.

  5. DesolationJones says:

    If you heard a voice in your head that told you to kill someone, and at the same time saw your son’s rocking horse where it wasn’t before, would you kill that person?

    • jamhandle says:

      The rocking horse?

      • Keshav Srinivasan says:

        He’s referring to this:
        consultingbyrpm.com/blog/2012/02/why-i-know-there-is-a-god.html
        “Finally, one time I was pacing around the downstairs of my house (here in Nashville). I was alone in the house. For some reason I had lately been thinking along the lines that natural scientists and theologians were explaining the same events, just using different approaches. For example, theologians would say, “When Jesus was born, a star appeared in the sky to lead the magi to the new King.” Yet astronomers would say, “Oh, that was just a supernova in galaxy XYZ. Nothing supernatural about that. Given the state of the physical universe, that had to happen. It would have been a miracle if a ‘bright star’ didn’t appear in the sky to the people at that time.” So anyway, I was pacing around my downstairs, in the room holding a couch, table, and my computer desk, thinking along these lines. Just as I had satisfied myself that nothing really “miraculous” occurs–because God wants the universe to be orderly for us to understand–I turned around and saw my son’s rocking horse from when he was a toddler, sitting on the floor right where I must have paced at least 10 tens in the previous half hour. It was normally something that would be in the corner of my son’s room upstairs, and yet here it was, “suddenly” resting right where I would clearly have tripped over it 10 different times in the previous 30 minutes. There was no way I could have just not seen it for that long; it was smack dab right in between the wall and the table, where I had been pacing. This too freaked me out, because I interpreted it to be the least frightening thing God could have done, that was frightening enough to shock me out of my silly “deduction” regarding His position vis-a-vis the physical world.”

    • Enopoletus Harding says:

      Excellent! Almost laughed out loud!

  6. Lord Keynes says:

    “But if there really is a God as depicted in the Christian Bible who created the physical universe de novo, then He owns everything”

    That is a bizarre argument. If conscious entity x produced conscious entity y, then it does not follow that x owns y. If that were so, then parents would literally own their children like property.

    More seriously, divine command theory faces clear problems. Is something good solely because god orders it, or because it is good by some other objective criteria?

    If one really thinks that, say, any action is good simply, solely and only because god has ordered it, this suggests that morality is ultimately nothing but the arbitrary whim of good. Morality has no objective basis. You are effectively saying that there is no ultimate moral standard except the subjective whims of god.

    When we turn to the Bible, that is exactly what we see, for god repeatedly violates his own commandment that killing is wrong (see list below).

    “Since that would be so far removed from what I would normally expect Him to tell me to do”

    Why??? Just look at your Bible:

    (1) in Genesis 7:21-23, God kills and drowns the entire population of the earth — animals, men, women, children. Pretty gruesome.

    (2) in Genesis 19:24, God kills everyone in Sodom and Gomorrah

    (3) God orders mass murder right in Deuteronomy 2:33–36 and 3:1–11.

    (4) in 2 Chronicles 13:15-18 God helps the men of Judah kill 500,000 of their fellow Israelites.

    (5) in Exodus 12:29, God murders all Egyptian firstborn children and cattle

    (6) In 2 Kings 2:23-24, some silly children kids tease the prophet Elisha for being bald, and God sends bears to dismember and kill them

    (7) in 1 Samuel 6:19, God kills 50,000 men for looking into the ark of the covenant.

    (8) in Deuteronomy 13:6-10, God’s commandment is that you must kill your wife, children, brother, and friend if they entice you to worship other gods.
    ——————-
    You already believe whatever god orders is right, and mass murder is clearly in character for god in the Old Testament.

    • jamhandle says:

      >If one really thinks that, say, any action is good simply, solely and only because god has ordered it, this suggests that morality is ultimately nothing but the arbitrary whim of good. Morality has no objective basis.

      The arbitrary whim of god seems to be a pretty objective basis of morality. I mean, there’s not really much lee-way there.

    • Futurity says:

      “When we turn to the Bible, that is exactly what we see, for god repeatedly violates his own commandment that killing is wrong (see list below).”
      Murder is wrong. Many times in the Bible the punishment for sin is death.
      Killing a murderer as part of punishment is not murder.
      Punishing for sin is not wrong.

      (1) Reason for Genesis 7:21-23 is in Genesis 6:5
      “The Lord saw how great the wickedness of the human race had become on the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of the human heart was only evil all the time.”

      (2) Genesis 19:24 and in Genesis 18 we learn how Abraham pleads that God should spare the cities if Abraham finds righteous people in them.

      (3) Genesis 15:16 mentions the sin of Amorites:
      ‘In the fourth generation your descendants will come back here, for the sin of the Amorites has not yet reached its full measure’

      (4) 2 Chronicles 13:8
      “And now you plan to resist the kingdom of the Lord, which is in the hands of David’s descendants. You are indeed a vast army and have with you the golden calves that Jeroboam made to be your gods. 9 But didn’t you drive out the priests of the Lord, the sons of Aaron, and the Levites, and make priests of your own as the peoples of other lands do? Whoever comes to consecrate himself with a young bull and seven rams may become a priest of what are not gods.

      (5) Sins of Egyptians:
      Exodus 1:8 Then a new king, to whom Joseph meant nothing, came to power in Egypt. 9 “Look,” he said to his people, “the Israelites have become far too numerous for us. 10 Come, we must deal shrewdly with them or they will become even more numerous and, if war breaks out, will join our enemies, fight against us and leave the country.”

      Exodus 1:15 The king of Egypt said to the Hebrew midwives, whose names were Shiphrah and Puah, 16 “When you are helping the Hebrew women during childbirth on the delivery stool, if you see that the baby is a boy, kill him; but if it is a girl, let her live.”

      (6) Silly children. LOL.
      http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MgkMJhcTE1c

      (7) Numbers 4. Only Levites could handle the ark.
      ‘But the layman who comes near shall be put to death.’

      (8) The first commandment

      Clearly holy and just Judge is the character of God in the OT.

      It is quite pathetic that you would quote the OT out of context for sometimes the reason for judgment is written few verses earlier.
      You don’t even make an argument. All you do is appeal to emotions. People died therefor God is a murderer.
      Holiness of God demands justice. And God will not allow the evil to continue forever. Repent and trust is Jesus Christ. It is the only way to be saved from God’s justice.

      • Lord Keynes says:

        You’ve proven my point that god is not subject to any law and Murphy’s plaintive cry that god doesn’t regularly kill people or order people to kill others is pathetic and untrue.

        Divine command theory results in reducing ethics to arbitrary decisions of god.

        Regarding the flood myth, so we are to assume that all human beings — every single one — was “wicked” including new borns? I know original sin is a Christian doctrine, but this is one of the most immoral ideas ever.

        Regarding the Exodus massacre, god already hardens pharaoh’s heart (Exodus 4:21; 7:3; 9:12; 10:1,20,27; 11:10; 14:4,8,17), which requires that he has to power to make pharaoh decide to let them go. This means the massacre of firstborn children — including the innocent — is disgusting killing of the powerless victims that could have been avoided.

        The Elisha video is laughable: so 42 teenagers were mauled by bears for laughing at his bald head. So you’re saying they deserved it and god was right to do it? Also, there is nothing in the text to make us think they were not killed by the mauling. Makes a mockery of Murphy’s plaintive cry about he normally expects god ot do.

        • Futurity says:

          ‘You’ve proven my point that god is not subject to any law’
          No. I have proven that He is subject to the commandment He set( or rather that law is His nature). Even in your original poster you tried to prove that He murders people, that is He is doing something against His own commandment.

          ‘Divine command theory results in reducing ethics to arbitrary decisions of god.’
          Perfect law and perfect and holy Judge. What is wrong with that?

          Regarding the historical event of Noah flood. Obviously God found Noah to be righteous and saved him and few others.
          Regarding newborns, just because you cannot accept it, does not mean it is not just. Apparently, you have no problem calling a perfectly just Judge who inflicts death penalty: a murderer.

          God hardness someone heart as a form of punishment:
          Lamentations 3:64 Thou wilt recompense them, O Lord, According to the work of their hands. 65 Thou wilt give them hardness of heart, Thy curse will be on them.

          Regarding Elisha video: Your understanding of ANE world is laughable. Do you comprehend that it was a honor-shame society? Do you comprehend that Elisha was representing God? Do you comprehend that this act was a honor challenge towards God?
          Anachronism is what you are doing here, assuming that it was silly and God overreacted.
          Lord Keynes wrote: “Also, there is nothing in the text to make us think they were not killed by the mauling”.
          There is also nothing in the text that says that a bunch of unicorns that fart rainbows did not kill them. Therefor they died from unicorns that fart rainbows.

          • Lord Keynes says:

            Tell me something, futurity.

            If you were a parent and you were convinced that god had ordered you to kill your own son,would you do it?

            • Futurity says:

              That is a nonsensical question.
              This is a sort of question if God can make A equals NOT A.
              Knowing the nature of God, He would not order me to murder my son.

              If he did, then I would think he would raise him from the dead etc. or stop me before.
              Like Abraham:
              By faith Abraham, when God tested him, offered Isaac as a sacrifice. He who had received the promises was about to sacrifice his one and only son, 18 even though God had said to him, “It is through Isaac that your offspring will be reckoned.” 19 Abraham reasoned that God could raise the dead, and figuratively speaking, he did receive Isaac back from death.

          • Enopoletus Harding says:

            Does God have control over everything? If so, punishment is simply a game he plays, like a kid drowning some ants.

      • Enopoletus Harding says:

        Nothing in particular seems to have been done. Not a school was established. There was no written language. There was not a Bible in the world. The “scheme of salvation” was kept a profound secret. The five points of Calvinism had not been taught. Sunday schools had not been opened. In short, nothing had been done for the reformation of the world. God did not even keep his own sons at home, but allowed them to leave their abode in the firmament, and make love to the daughters of men. As a result of this, the world was filled with wickedness and giants to such an extent that God regretted “that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart.”

        http://infidels.org/library/historical/robert_ingersoll/some_mistakes_of_moses.html

    • Gamble says:

      lK wrote :”You already believe whatever god orders is right, and mass murder is clearly in character for god in the Old Testament.”

      Okay but Jesus changed everything, forever.

      The OT merely set the stage for Jesus, the Prince of Peace.
      We had to see how bad we could behave before we would even contemplate savior….

      • Lord Keynes says:

        Gamble, the whole basis of Christianity is that god decided to have his OWN SON horribly tortured and killed.

        Philippians 2:8 implies that Jesus meekly accepted this order: “he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death– even to death on a cross.”

        Doesn’t that say something about whether it is normal for god to order killing?

    • Bob Murphy says:

      LK wrote:

      That is a bizarre argument. If conscious entity x produced conscious entity y, then it does not follow that x owns y. If that were so, then parents would literally own their children like property.

      Unless a God like the one depicted in the Christian Bible exists. Phew!

      • Lord Keynes says:

        Apart from pure faith, there’s nothing about a creator creating humans that logically entails that the creator owns humans, and can do anything he wants with them, anymore than the fact that parents create children means that parents own children.

      • Keshav Srinivasan says:

        Bob, back when you were an atheist Rothbardian, what did you believe was the refutation of the argument that parents own their children?

  7. Lord Keynes says:

    “Well, if you think God is omnibenevolent and omniscient, then He’s in a position to know when such a move would actually be correct, isn’t He”

    The only way you can sustain that argument is if utilitarian ethics is true! And also that god is the ultimate utilitarian.

    It follows that Rothbard’s natural rights ethics cannot be right, nor any libertarian ethical theory that contradicts utilitarianism, by simple application of the law of non-contradiction.

    All in all, this post and the thoughts expressed in it are just awful.

    • Andrew' says:

      Setting aside the fact that you are wrong, i guess you have a point.

    • Major_Freedom says:

      LK,

      Can you explain why that comment requires a utilitarian based ethic?

      • Lord Keynes says:

        Murphy’s advocating a consequential/utilitarian theory of morality here:

        “if there were strong reasons to suspect that doing so would produce humongous positive results … Well, if you think God is omnibenevolent and omniscient, then He’s in a position to know when such a move would actually be correct, isn’t He?”

      • Andrew' says:

        It doesn’t. Bob’s understanding doesn’t hinge on vulgar utilitarianism. He just knows others does.

  8. Tel says:

    This is because I would be worried I was going nuts, that someone was playing a trick on me, that it was a demon pretending to be God, etc.

    Isn’t that the problem with God though?

    Let’s suppose you have a magic box that answers “YES” or “NO” and 50% of the time it is completely and perfectly correct, and 50% of the time it tells the opposite of the truth, but you don’t know which is which, and actually it’s random.

    So I ask the box, “Should I kill this man?” and the box says, “YES”… but maybe that’s just a lie… I don’t really know.

    So I ask the box, “Did you just tell me the truth?” and the box says, “YES”… but that also could be a lie.

    So I ask the box again, “Did you just tell me the truth?” and the box says, “NO”… but was it telling the truth the first time, and now the answer is a lie, or was it telling a lie the first time and now it started telling the truth?

    Crap, I just don’t know anymore. I’ll have to depend on my own common sense, might as well throw away the stupid box.

  9. Futurity says:

    Nice post,

    I would like to raise two issues:
    1. If I was able to go back in time to kill baby Hitler, would I do it? No. As a Christian I know that Hitler was made in the image of God and that I ought to love my neighbor. For to love your neighbor is to love God with all your heart and keep His commandments(that includes thou shall not murder).
    We should also ask ourselves why God did not kill Hitler when he was a baby if God knew what would happen?
    Of course I would kill Hitler if he was a murderer.

    2. ” But if there really is a God as depicted in the Christian Bible who created the physical universe de novo, then He owns everything. It’s not a violation of anybody’s rights to be killed by God, through whatever means He chooses.”
    I strongly disagree with this as it assumes that God did not limit Himself in this regard. He gave Adam a choice between tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and said to man ‘you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die’. Thus God limited himself to how man can be killed by Him. If God killed Adam and Eve any other way, it would mean God denied himself.
    The commandments of God are reflection of His goodness and holiness, therefor He can not break them.
    That is why unsaved people hate God so much, because the commandments mean condemnation for them.

  10. Gamble says:

    God will never command you to kill anybody. Pointless hypothetical that creates more problems than it solves.

    Jesus was anti murder, and ever since resurrection, Jesus has all authority and is the ONLY way to God. God wont even talk or listen to you if you do not come to him in the name of Jesus.

    1Tim2
    3For this is good and acceptable in the sight of God our Saviour; 4Who will have all men to be saved, and to come unto the knowledge of the truth. 5For there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus; 6Who gave himself a ransom for all, to be testified in due time.

    • Gamble says:

      God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit.

      The Holy Spirit is with us.

      Here is the characteristic of the Holy Spirit, murder and aggression is not listed. God will not go back on his word.

      Galatians 5:22-23

      New International Version (NIV)

      22 But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, 23 gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law.

  11. Chris says:

    “George Lucas is not a murderer for making Anakin slaughter a bunch of kids.”

    This is a bad analogy, as it’s fiction and that makes all the difference. If children are purposely killed in reality, we all understand that this would be murder. So is the argument here to excuse any atrocity and say “it’s God’s world” so he’s free to do anything he wants and his acts are not “really” immoral, we don’t understand his logic, etc…?

  12. Andrew' says:

    Han Shot First!!!

  13. John Becker says:

    This is why I don’t like religion, it gets intelligent people to argue and disagree about a fictitious story in a book written by ignorant people in a cultural backwater approximately 1900-2500 years ago. Why is the Bible taken so seriously as a religious book while, arguably, a better work of literature like the Illiad is seen as having a silly idea of the relationship between man and divinity. Are the stories of the behaviors of the God’s in Homer any less “realistic” or different from the behavior of the jealous god of the Old Testament?

  14. Bob Murphy says:

    Incidentally, I am NOT saying that something is good “merely” because God orders it. (Although that’s a pretty strained usage of the word “merely.”) I am not claiming that morality is subjective and anything can be moral, “just because” God says so.

    To make this concrete, LK you might say, “Oh, so Murphy says if God orders someone to do something immoral, then it becomes moral.” No, that’s not what I’m saying; God would NOT order someone to do something immoral.

    But this gets really subtle. Switch it to a purely secular everyday context:

    BOB: “A landlord can’t make something immoral moral. But, if the owner of an apartment building tells the maintenance man to go into Unit #45 to check the smoke detectors, then it is moral for the maintenance man to do that. However, without such an order, it would be immoral for the maintenance man to use his master key and go into Unit #45, even if he has a hunch the smoke detector needs a new battery.”

    I hope nobody would accuse me of moral relativism with the above statement.

    • Lord Keynes says:

      “No, that’s not what I’m saying; God would NOT order someone to do something immoral.”

      In that case, you’ve just totally refuted the divine command theory. For now there must be some objective and independent standard for what is right and wrong — independently of god.

      http://socialdemocracy21stcentury.blogspot.com/2014/05/libertarianism-and-fundamentalist.html

      • guest says:

        In that case, you’ve just totally refuted the divine command theory.

        Why would it be problematic for a Christian to refute the divine command theory?

        God is not the source of morality – and he still gets to claim the moral high ground because, presumably, he has never been immoral.

        (By the way, murder is prohibited to man by God, but not killing. And the creator of something is the owner of it – There is more to a human than the physical body, and parents can’t create free will.)

    • Yosef says:

      Bob, when you write that “God would NOT order someone to do something immoral.” Do you mean

      a) While God *could* order someone to do something immoral, God would never choose to do so, or
      b) Anything God orders someone to do, by virture of God’s knowledge and benevolence, is moral?

      I hope you notice that option b meanse that something is good “merely” because God orders it (I am willing to concede that, if one takes the God of the bible for granted that the use of the word merely here is very strainted). But you say that’s not what you mean, so do you mean option a?

  15. knoxharrington says:

    “In actual practice, if I “heard a voice in my head” giving me such an order, I would not obey it. This is because I would be worried I was going nuts, that someone was playing a trick on me, that it was a demon pretending to be God, etc. Since that would be so far removed from what I would normally expect Him to tell me to do and since it conflicts in such a prima facie way with what Jesus commands us to do in the gospels–I would not actually believe it was God. At the very least, it would take some serious signs (such that Stefan Molyneux and Steve Landsburg would be running to get baptized) to make me even contemplate such a command.”

    When God ordered Abraham to kill Isaac why did he “follow orders”? Bob, and any other moral person, would have told God to go pound sand. That is the moral response. I would have welcomed hell for eternity rather than follow such a grossly immoral command. If that is the moral response why are we listening to a God that gives such manifestly immoral commands? Can anyone envision a scenario where the killing of your own children under divine command makes sense? And by make sense I don’t mean rationalizing the behavior by saying “we don’t know why God would command such a thing but he’s God so, oh well.”

    • Matt M (-Dude Where's My Freedom) says:

      Except that God knew that he was going to interrupt Abraham and that his son WOULDN’T be killed in the end. Therefore, it’s not an immoral command.

      Of course, even if he didn’t, it’s still not any more immoral than God “allowing” murders or starvation or hurricanes or anything else. That’s Bob’s point here. If God has all the powers that Christianity claims he does, then every single death that has ever occurred was “caused” by God. Either God murdered everyone, or he murdered no one, depending on how you define “murder.”

      • knoxharrington says:

        Ordering a father to deliver up his son on a funeral pyre so that he can be stabbed to death all the while knowing that he wasn’t ACTUALLY going to kill him is torture and totally immoral. God could just have easily said “Abraham we are going to initiate a new covenant. Circumcision is a half-measure. I want you go all the way and castrate yourself up on the mountain. Ha! Just kidding. You can keep it.” At least the only victim is Abraham in that scenario and God could avoid the psychological terror Isaac experienced as his father trussed him up, put him on a pyre and held a knife over his head.

        Christians are amazing with this crap.

        • Anonymous says:

          knoxharrington,

          Why do you classify Abraham as a victim and how do you know what Isaac experienced?

          • knoxharrington says:

            Do you think Abraham thought “this is awesome, I’ve always wanted to tie my child up and drive a knife into his heart and now God has finally given me the ok – I can’t believe how fortunate I am!”? Or, do you think Abraham broke out into a cold sweat and regretfully and sorrowfully went to fulfill the command. I think any parent faced with a “Sophie’s Choice” like this is a victim. I think that is relatively clear and straightforward.

            As to what Isaac experienced one need only imagine what it was like to be a child whose parent was going to stab you to death. I can’t really believe you really want an answer to these questions – they seem fairly obvious and self-evident.

        • Matt M (-Dude Where's My Freedom) says:

          “Christians are amazing with this crap.”

          I wouldn’t know. I’m not one.

          • knoxharrington says:

            Sorry – but you can understand why I thought that when you make the same arguments that Christians do, i.e., bad ones.

    • Matt M (-Dude Where's My Freedom) says:

      “Can anyone envision a scenario where the killing of your own children under divine command makes sense? And by make sense I don’t mean rationalizing the behavior by saying “we don’t know why God would command such a thing but he’s God so, oh well.””

      And sorry, but that IS the rationalization. The Bible is nothing but a long collection of stories of God telling people to do things that seemed bizarre and illogical but ultimately did in fact make sense and were correct.

      The reason God’s commandment to Abraham to kill his son “makes sense” is because first of all, it wasn’t actually going to happen (see above). The purpose was for Abraham to prove his faith and to understand that God really IS looking after his best interest after all. You don’t get to pick and choose with God. You do what he tells you, and you are richly rewarded for it. That is the entire point of the story.

      • knoxharrington says:

        See above. The mental gymnastics Christians go through to make this stuff “make sense” would shame a contortionist.

        You heard it here folks – genocide, slavery, genital mutilation, incest, infanticide, killing of your children are bizarre and illogical but – what the heck – “God” told us it was ok. You literally CAN make this stuff up.

  16. John says:

    You know, I feel this is a definitional problem. Bu definition, the God of the three great monotheistic religions is always morally right. Unlike a human king, by definition, He really can do no wrong. If He could, He wouldn’t be God as religious people understand the term. Consequently, what God commands Is moral, by definition. That humans sometimes can’t perceive or understand its morality cannot matter because again, God can do no wrong — up to and including smiting the first born of Egypt down to the maidservant that is in the mill and all the first born of beasts, or consigning people who don’t believe in His Son to eternal torture. That may sound like peculiar morality to our human ears, but we don’t judge God, He judges us, again, by definition.

    I do think in the end this can lead to what appears to be morality by whim. We humans have commandments, which He gave us, and other important principles to live by which His son, or Mohammed, or whatever you happen to believe, also gave us, but God need not operate by those same principles, and He’s still always right, again by definition, because, you know, He’s God. I think this is kind of how He explained himself to Job out of the Whirlwind. Many people don’t find it emotionally or philosophically satisfactory, but many do.

    By the way, although personally I like Bob’s religious interludes, they do seem to lead to a lot of discussion about something that is pretty ineffable and of which no party can be convinced by rational discussion to the other side’s view. (I exempt my own comments of course; those are surpassingly persuasive, obviously.)

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