Raf

So we are more moral today than Yahweh was in the O.T. Thank you for taking forever to agree with me.

The problem with the "holy just and good" law is not alleviated by the fact that it was only given to a limited number of people. The problem is that it was given to anyone at all! I mean, Jeffrey Dahmer only ate a miniscule fraction of the people he met. Why does he get stuck with the cannibal label? I can't even get you guys to admit genocide is immoral because it was ordered by Yahweh and he must have had his reasons and who am I to judge? And that's sad, because if you cannot call immorality immoral on its face, then you can still be suckered into any cult with a halfway clever story (to answer the previous question about how this topic relates to waybrain and recovery).

The problem with the blind men and the elephant analogy is that each person is wrong. The one who says it's a wall is ignoring all the other evidence. "Without God, there is no objective morality" is one of the blind men. He is ignoring all the evidence of God's immorality. As are you guys. Open your eyes.

Why is it disparaging to refer to changes in the nature of God as evolution? If you sell a false premise, for example, morality comes from and is dependent on God, then you are forced into a position of Defending indefensible and immoral actions because to do otherwise is to admit that the premise was false. For my part, I am still waiting for someone to demonstrate at the premise that I put forth is false. I've seen it denied, but I have not seen it refuted.

I cited scripture to support every single contention I made about Yahweh. You have cited nothing to refute those characterizations. You merely deny them and expect me to accept your denials as having some kind of weight because somebody with a degree gave you a half baked idea.

For those not keeping track, when he says Yahweh, he's talking not about the God actually depicted in the Bible, but his own wishful thinking of what that God should be.

Tell me, how many genocides have you ordered? How many did you personally commit? Not "mankind." YOU.

Personally, I think the rampant disingenuousness of the arguments challenging my thread topic demonstrate that I've touched a nerve. Yahweh is a petty, vindictive, genocidal war-god with a serious jealousy and impulse control problem. If you are not more moral than Yahweh, then you need a padded cell.

Whatever you say.

Yet another disingenuous diversion from the topic. You're amazing.

You distort my thread and accuse me of misleading and deceiving? Funny how a dozen people got the point immediately, but you fail and that's MY fault. Go learn to read.

This is not "The Way International" section of the forum. How does it free anyone? Now THAT's a good question. When you realize that morality is neither objective nor dependent on the existence of a God, you realize that morality, while not objective itself, does have an objective basis. That basis is not some archaic law, but something we can all agree on, regardless of religious beliefs. We may not agree all the time on what acts are moral or not, but we can discuss the basis for morality intelligently, once we get notions like "God" as the source of it out of the picture. Hence the separate thread on where we get our morals. What did it have to do with David and Bathsheba? Exactly what I said it did back on that thread. No need to rehash it here. If you need a basic reading comprehension course, I suggest contacting some of those people with degrees and reputations at your nearest community college.

"Hateful"? No, my insult is a perfectly accurate description of how you have treated this thread. You're not engaging the topic. You're interfering with esoteric nonsense that is not designed to further conversation but rather to find a platform to pontificate on barely related nonsensical stream-of-consciousness thoughtless experiments that are only tangentially related to the topic of this thread. Are you more moral than Yahweh. Not "Are you more moral than Bolshevik's unique concept of what a god might be if a god were to exist and he must even though he doesn't because propaganda doesn't survive centuries which is a rule I just made up." Hateful is what you've done to this topic and the others you polluted with nonsensical diversions that appear to make you feel oh so clever and enlightened. Here's what's become clear: If I posted that the sky is blue and clouds are white, you would find something to argue about. If I said water is wet, you would say "what about ice?" If I said the earth travels around the sun, you would say neither is stationary. It's not that your observations and pontifications are incorrect. It's that they're f-ing irrelevant to the topic, and I've tried saying it politely but apparently it's not getting through. Other people have managed to grasp my point with ease. Some have tried (and in my opinion failed) to engage appropriately, by challenging the notion that Yahweh's actions were truly immoral, by challenging the notion that Biblical slavery was wrong, even by presenting the notion that Yahweh's positive attributes demonstrate that he is more moral than we. Each of those arguments was discussed. You're not presenting an argument. Your "evolving God" is not Yahweh, who does not change. You're having a conversation about religion in general, and I'm discussing the defined God of a defined religion. Honestly, your contempt for the topic of conversation is revealed in your repeated attempts to redefine it. Hateful? Hardly. But I guess the truth hurts.

Last time: your definition of "God" is so vague and ethereal that it is not relevant to this discussion. You are mot talking about Yahweh. You are talking about that warm and fuzzy feeling you get when you see a dandelion. Your "evolving" God is not Yahweh, and therefore your approach to this discussion is off topic. If the thread were called "Are you more moral than whatever vague concept of God Bolshevik can concoct while sitting on his thumb," you would be on topic. But it's not. Yahweh is a character with attributes defined in the Bible, not in your evolving imagination. You have offered NO compelling reason to suggest we cannot examine Yahweh as portrayed in the Bible and compare his morality to our own. None. The point of this thread has been examined with a proctoscope. You still don't understand the basics. I can't fathom why, but I suggest you examine your motive in trolling this discussion, because it is rather obviously not to engage in a rational discussion.

Actively attempting to distort the plain meaning of the original post and subsequent discussion = trolling. If I wanted to compare societies I would have. Obviously your difficulty grasping concepts like "You" and "Yahweh" make it tough for you to follow along in this conversation. More obviously, you joined this thread to argue with me and will do so no matter WHAT I say. And that's the essence of trolling behavior. That you're still not embarrassed by your conduct or the vacuousness of your approach is baffling to me.

Animals showing some semblance of morality is unrelated to this discussion and has no bearing on it.

I will say it again: NOTHING makes my point more strongly than the intellectually dishonest depths you have to sink to in order to challenge it.

Believing anyone can do anything and everything God does is excusable because of DNA and evolution and you decided to come up with some excise or other makes your opinion on this thread fairly pointless. Your participation on this thread is logically indefensible and in bad faith. you do not seek dialogue. you are trolling. enough.

Like I said, dishonest bad faith questions, uninterested in real dialogue. Shameless

And they undermine any claim that "objective morality" is dependent on Yahweh's existence.

It was literally the subject of the very first reply and addressed immediately. Not in those words, but in those themes. "Different laws for different cultures..." Yeah. Times change. But that is the POINT: Why would objective morality change? That's like saying "the objective chemical formula for water changed." No, it doesn't. The chemical formula for whatever stays the same. But "morality" as a system of mutually accepted principles DOES change. I dare say it tends to improve, at least in the long run. The problem you're not seeing is, understanding how religion evolves contradicts the Biblical principle that Yahweh, by the Bible's definition, does not change. Therefore, what he declared to be moral in 2017 BCE should be the same as what he declares to be moral in 2017 CE. Note, I said what HE declares to be moral. I've seen theists (not fundamentalists, but Christians) argue that when God ordered the children of Israel to kill women and children of foreigners, the people most harmed were the Israelites who did the killing. That's how twisted people become justifying atrocity because it was ordered by a God. Let ANY OTHER GOD order a genocide and Christians would cite it as evidence of that God's cruelty. but Yahweh gets a pass. Relating the question of this thread to the real world requires an acceptance that Yahweh is real [which can be done as a hypothetical for the sake of exploring the issue without accepting it as a reality] and that the Bible is a source of information about his attributes. As such, you don't get the privilege of saying "that's a fundy approach" because to do so is to eliminate the Bible as a source of information about God's attributes. People somehow think it's perfectly fair to quote a verse saying "God is Love," perfectly okay to cite a verse where God says murder is wrong, usury is wrong, etc, but it's out of bounds for me to point out this same God never, anywhere, condemned the ownership of one human being by another, that this same God ordered executions for the pettiest of reasons, that this same God saw fit to punish rapists by making them compensate the victim (that girl's father: the girl's FATHER was considered the victim in a rape case) and having the rapist MARRY THE GIRL! That was his PUNISHMENT! It's out of bounds for me to point that out, because that makes me fundy. But it's okay to point out that God is love. The evolution of God is proof that the premise of this thread is correct: Yahweh was indeed a moral monster, and over time his reputation was overhauled by people who wanted to market him as something more palatable. But Yahweh never changes, according to the Bible, so we have a problem. Something's got to be incorrect. Either he evolved or he didn't. Nonetheless, the overarching point is simple: it is impossible to reconcile the depiction of Yahweh as the source of objective morality with the Bible's depiction of Yahweh, a most immoral character.

It appears we don't agree on one point because you are constantly shifting the premise to something untenable. The Bible tells us the qualities of God. I explore them. BAM! I'm a fundy who doesn't understand how religion evolves. Of COURSE I understand how religion evolves. It's my flipping point! If religion didn't evolve, and people's definition of their Gods with them, then there would be nothing to discuss because either the religion would have gotten morality right on the first try or I would not be arguing that you are more moral than an ancient war God because you would NOT be. But honestly, it just seems to me, based on how you trolled this theme from one thread to another, that you are not actually interested in a real dialogue or discussion, You're just interested in saying "Raf is wrong" on as many threads as you can. Which would be DELIGHTFUL if you had a real point, but you don't. That's why you have to shift all the definitions to post anything. That's why you have to ask, sorry, STUPID questions like whether I think we're more moral than the devil or whether there are any laws in the Old Testament I like. These are bad-faith questions that expose your approach as insincere, and I'm tired of addressing them.

One: your declaration does not make it so. Two: The false equivalency between "fundamentalism" and "atheism" should embarrass you. That it doesn't tells me the quality of this dialogue. Three: Why would I demonstrate an understanding of that which is not true? Four: Glad to see you can acknowledge a fundy perspective without adopting it. So you're saying it's okay for God to kill because he can raise. It's actually the best point you've made. I'll give you credit for that. The problem is, the killing was not done as some kind of favor, ushering him into a pleasant afterlife (whenever that would commence). It was done as a punishment. And as a punishment, it is still ridiculous to think death fits the crime of sabbath breaking. Five: The modern world is still prone to the problems of 5,000 years ago. Thanks. This literally has nothing to do with what we were discussing. Six: "originators of the mythology" is not a misunderstanding, and propaganda DOES survive. What made you think otherwise? "Definitely not thousands of years"? Where did you come up with that rule? By what standard do you conclude propaganda does not survive thousands of years? Of course it does! The existence of all religions save one is a testament to the fact that propaganda can and does survive years, centuries and millenia. (I say "save one" as an oversimplification: most religions are mutually exclusive, and while one may accommodate the other, the feeling usually is not mutual. As such, both cannot be right). Seven: What is an ultimate morality? You need to read more carefully. You're assuming I said there is such a thing.

The depths to which you'll sink to avoid simple answers to simple questions demonstrates that I am correct in asserting that you are more moral than Yahweh. Oh, but you want specifics. Fine: You are more moral than Yahweh as he is depicted in the Bible. "But that's fundamentalist!" No, that's what the Bible depicts. And really, it's revisionist for you to come along thousands of years later and say that the originators of this mythology didn't really think this way. We today are more moral than Yahweh for oodles of rational reasons. We know more. We have challenged the assumptions of the past (allowing slavery and demeaning women). Society has indeed evolved. God is not supposed to evolve, and if He existed as depicted in the Bible, he would not evolve. He is the Lord. He changes not. Can God grow in wisdom? Can his morality improve over time? True, the Law was never designed to be kept on every point. But it was designed to be the expression of His will. Paul called the law "holy just and good." But it's not. Sure, it's got some good points. Hooray, don't murder! (Literally every society came up with the same rule, some with Yahweh's guidance, most without). Showing that there was morality in the Old Testament does not negate the point I'm making. The point I'm making is that Yahweh as he is depicted in the Bible cannot possibly be the author and determiner of objective morality. To criticize my position as relying on a fundamentalist interpretation is to admit I am correct: Fundamentally, if you take the Bible at its word, Yahweh is a moral monster. The two things that absolve him are the unreliability of the fundamentalist position (the Bible doesn't really mean what it says when it says God ordered a man to be executed for picking up sticks on the wrong day of the week) and the non-existence of its central character.

Let's make this a little simple. Do you believe there is anything morally wrong with executing a man for picking up sticks on the Sabbath? This is a simple yes or no question. Do you think there is anything morally wrong with killing a man for picking up sticks on the wrong day of the week. Answer either yes or no. Anything else is dishonest. Next, does the bible present Yahweh as having executed a man for picking up sticks on the Sabbath? The answer, of course, is objectively yes. He did order that man's execution for that crime. Was that order immoral? My position is, if you're honest, you have to admit that it was immoral for Yahweh to execute a man for picking up sticks on the wrong day of the week. It was immoral for Yahweh to order a rapist to marry the woman he raped as punishment for his crime. In my opinion, Yahweh is a fictional character who is not actually guilty of any of these things. But one cannot say that Yahweh is the author and determiner of objective morality without excusing moral atrocities that he authored and authorized. This is not a "fundamentalist view." Missing my argument on that basis admits that my argument is correct. Namely that Yahweh, as depicted in the Bible is less moral than you and I are today. And that would not be the case if he were the author and determiner of objective morality.