Morality Double Standard

[Freodin]

Yesterday at 11:55 PM Pray4Isrel said this in Post #24



Alrighty, before we go there, let's evaluate these "evil things" that God commanded people to do.  Where would you like to start?

Where to start? Well, the OT is full of things that a modern human would consider overly cruel.

I just opened my Bible at random, and got: Joshua takes Ai. (Joshua 8)

Read verse 22-29 and tell me how you justify that.

 

[Annabel Lee]

Just to play Devil's Advocate...

Maybe the Gnostic Christians were correct. Jesus was not just our Savior but our Liberator.

He was sent by the True God to liberate us from the false OT God.

 

[Received]

You guys are wasting your time. You're either fighting a phantom - a God that doesn't exist - or you're sawing off the limb you're sitting on by claiming the one from which morality comes is immoral. And we cannot prove that the God of the bible is or isn't the God of the universe. Intellectual claims will continue to be made on behalf of non-Christians, and heart felt, testimonial responses will continue to be held by the Christians.

If the same God who annihilated an entire nation - a wretched and sinful nation I would add - is the same God who washed a fisherman's feet, I would wonder how this contradicts.

Death is a flea-bite compared to eternity; killing a child or a nation is, from a God from which morals come, a good work in comparison with the damage that only divine foreknowledge knows would erupt if left to itself.

And let us keep in mind that it is only a being capable of foreknowledge that is justified in doing such actions.

 

[Freodin]

Recieved, but isn´t that exactly what a "double moral standard" is?

"This is moral when I do it, but immoral when you do it?"

And the most essential problem I see arising from that: how do you know the one from the other?

Hey, I can have pre-maritial sex, and kill my neighbor to steal his car! God has just now in this second allowed me to.

From an eternal viewpoint, this might be irrelevant, but we humans have a decidedly un-eternal viewpoint.

 

[Received]

But with God, you cannot even call Him moral or immoral. He is not morality; He is what morality finds it's measurement according to. If we, from an imperfect stance, argue that perfection - which is contingent beyond our debating skills - is imperfect, we are contradicting ourselves.

We claim death row is justified because downright foul people are getting what they deserve there - momentary seperation from society, and eventual final seperation from humanity.

We claim God - the creator of the universe, supposedly - is unjustified in killing a handful of children, even though the results of doing so are beyond our feeble comprehension. Rae once said that killing children is always wrong, appealing to emotion. Killing children IS always wrong, but only if it is from the hands of humanity. Divine foreknowledge and redemption is what is the center of our debate here, and with it comes salvation or condemnation.

 

[Arikay]

It always comes down to, "Is god above his own laws."

My opinion is:
A Perfect god is not above his own laws because he can find a way to make everything work without breaking his own laws (since a hypocrite isnt perfect).

An inperfect god is above his own laws because he needs to break the laws he set out for inperfect beings to stay above them.

 

[Arikay]

Its very interesting you should mention keeping god in a box.

I find it interesting that many people who take the bible literally are basically keeping god in a nice zip up (at least mine is) black book.

Since that book (taken literally) tells us how god acts and doesnt act and how he did stuff and keeps it all nice and tidy and easy for humans to understand. sounds like a nice box to me

Today at 05:04 PM Pray4Isrel said this in Post #31



Ah, that would be a nice little box to keep God in.

Fortunately God is God and goes beyond our human fallible logic.

 

[foolsparade]

Received: how can morality find it's center in God, when according to you God is neither moral or immoral? I would agree that if God is all powerful and infinite he is everything and nothing at the same time. Therefore morality is created and uncreated by human reason only. Morals and values are nothing more than opinions right?

I can only think in human terms, so no matter how you say it, if God chooses to kill children then I believe that is wrong. The entire concept of a Christian God is a contradiction, if not barbaric.

 

[Arikay]

It Opens the box and pours it into a book

But he is easily restricted by the words. I can ask "I wonder how god created all of these amazing and wonderfull things around me"

Now, one answer is: "I dont know. Carefull study of gods creation (the earth) can help explain my answer, but in the end its mostly beyond my current comprehension."

Another is: " Thats easy, he spoke things into existance based on a couple pages of a book. I know exactly how god created all."

Which one of these answers is the one based on the literal translation?

Which one requires more faith in god?

Today at 05:31 PM Pray4Isrel said this in Post #34



The Word is the very key to open the box and let God out.

If He was so easily restricted by the Word as you just claimed, none of you would have such a hard time accepting it as truth, now would you?

 

[Arikay]

Well, not really. It takes the most faith to believe that god is here and that we dont know why or how, etc.

I can yell, "Show me a sign to prove to me you are here god." And not get a sign, and prove to myself god is not here. So im not basing my belief god isnt here on faith but on lack of evidence.

On the opposite side of things.

Many literal bibleists have said that the bible Must be true and seem to have put all their faith into the bible being the absolute truth in god. It doesnt take much faith to believe in the written word. They put faith in the word as truth, not god. So they are basing their belief in god based on the evidence of the true bible.

However, its in the middle ground that requires the most faith.

The middle ground that believes that god is here, but that the bible isnt all literal truth. Seems to me to have the most faith, as there isnt as much evidence to put faith into, only the unknown. Since they believe in god even though there is a lack of evidence that god exists. But they dont believe all the bible is true so there are many unknowns, so they also dont put trust in the literal word, only trust in god himself.

If that makes any sense.

Today at 05:43 AM Pray4Isrel said this in Post #37



Both require faith.

Is faith the determining factor in all of this?

It takes more faith to believe that God doesn't exist than to believe He does.

 

[Freodin]

Today at 01:00 AM Received said this in Post #29

But with God, you cannot even call Him moral or immoral. He is not morality; He is what morality finds it's measurement according to. If we, from an imperfect stance, argue that perfection - which is contingent beyond our debating skills - is imperfect, we are contradicting ourselves.

We claim death row is justified because downright foul people are getting what they deserve there - momentary seperation from society, and eventual final seperation from humanity.

We claim God - the creator of the universe, supposedly - is unjustified in killing a handful of children, even though the results of doing so are beyond our feeble comprehension. Rae once said that killing children is always wrong, appealing to emotion. Killing children IS always wrong, but only if it is from the hands of humanity. Divine foreknowledge and redemption is what is the center of our debate here, and with it comes salvation or condemnation.

Yes, that is true - but that is what this thread is about: it IS a double moral standard. Perhaps it is even justified. Perhaps all what you just said is true - but the problem still is: how do you know?

It is easy to justify almost anything with the reference to an outside, omni-whatever and un-human deity - but it is not easy to explain, to others as well as to yourself.

You talk about redemption, condemnation and salvation - but you do that from a point of personal faith in your salvation. You heard the word, your trust the promise, and you expect to be saved. Would you not ask "Why?", when you ended up in Hell? Would you believe, if you were told your damnation was just and right and for some "greater good"?

[/QUOTE]

 

[Freodin]

Today at 02:05 AM Pray4Isrel said this in Post #32



What do you see that is unjustified about it to begin with? 

Err, starting a war of conquest and killing a whole city of 12,000 people - men and women (and persumedly children).

 

[Quath]

Yesterday at 06:37 AM Pray4Isrel said this in Post #22 All that I can do is pray.  Would your mind really change even if I refuted all of your statements you started this thread with?  Didn't think so.  I just hope you don't promote being open-minded when you are clearly not open to what we "on the other side" have to say.  I honestly started to refute each or your incorrect perceptions and then stopped dead in my tracks... why?  because I realize that you have made up your mind... you have taken bits and pieces to mold a sketch of God that portrays Him how you want Him to be portrayed.  Kinda like the media when they tell you a slanted view of a story.  

I am very open minded.  My disbelief in God does not depend on His morality.  What I do see if people using the lessons set down by God as moral lessons for every day life.  Now if there was no Old Testament, I would see no problem.  However, the Old Testament is part of almost every Christian belief and in it God can be quite cruel and merciless from what I see.

So if a believer in the OT can tell me how Christians deal with God's morality, it will better help me understand why people think the way they do.  I would like to be proven that God really is good and not just defined good because they would strenghten my hope that humanity will follow justice over cruel might.

I believe examining God's morality should reveal insights into His nature.  For example, God kills everyone in the world because they are all bad during the flood.  This raises other questions.  Were the children born bad?  If so then there is no age of accountibility.  If not, then God killed innocents in the flood.  Why kill the animals as well?  Why not just kill the bad humans?  (If this seems like a petty detail, then go and drown your pets and see if it is petty.) 

Why didn't God use a plague that only affects the bad people?  Why make people suffer through drowning as opposed to a peaceful death?  Why didn't God just make the bad people infertile?  Why didn't God take Noah to another planet or make a new one?

Each one of these options was open to God by standard Christianity.  He could have chosen to do things in so many different ways.  So what does it say about His character if He choses death and war to solve problems over peace and working together?

If He is a good god, why doesn't He act good?  Why would people want to follow Him based on all the horrible things He did?

Scott (Quath)

 

[Quath]

15th March 2003 at 08:06 PM Received said this in Post #17

Constantly? I would beg to differ. Have you read the entire Old Testament? Have you read the entire new Testament? At least try Hosea.

I javen't made it too far into the OT.  However, even if God straightens out and acts nice, I don't see how it can undo the bad things He did in the past.  (Unless He realizes the error of His ways and changes.)  Otherwise it is like saying that Hitler did nice things.  No matter how many nice things that Hitler did, I don't think his actions in WWII could ever be undone.

But the question still is not whether God does a few bad things; it is whether this God of the bible, presented as being the one and only, omnibenevolent one from which justice finds it's roots is indeed the God of the universe. And we cannot prove this here. All we can do is place our own personal opinions - finite, temporal, and non-omniscient against the infinite, eternal and omniscient - on something we have no right to judge given our position.

Why do we have no right to judge God?  We have intelligence and knowledge.  Otherwise, we could just as easily say that we are in no position to judge Satan and we should follow him.

God either is, or He isn't. Begging the details, as is being done here, will get us nowhere.

Well, this thread is more about the people that worship God.  I want to see why people will follow God.  If God were human, He would be seen as one of the worst sociopathatic, mass murders in all of history.  But as a God, He is Good.

Scott (Quath)

 

[Received]

Yes, that is true - but that is what this thread is about : it IS a double moral standard. Perhaps it is even justified. Perhaps all what you just said is true - but the problem still is: how do you know?

It is easy to justify almost anything with the reference to an outside, omni-whatever and un-human deity - but it is not easy to explain, to others as well as to yourself.

You talk about redemption, condemnation and salvation - but you do that from a point of personal faith in your salvation. You heard the word, your trust the promise, and you expect to be saved. Would you not ask "Why?", when you ended up in Hell? Would you believe, if you were told your damnation was just and right and for some "greater good"?

Ah, yes, how DO I know? How do YOU know? How do WE know? What is knowledge? How abouts we start a little thread where we screw around with the holes in epistemology for a good while - you know, the holes that are so big they basically define the theory more than they take away from it.

And this is as far as this thread, here, will go, Freodin, and I think your comments are perfectly philosophical.

We solve the problem of morality and God, and we run into our philosophical black sheep - epistemology.

 

[Received]

I javen't made it too far into the OT. However, even if God straightens out and acts nice, I don't see how it can undo the bad things He did in the past. (Unless He realizes the error of His ways and changes.) Otherwise it is like saying that Hitler did nice things. No matter how many nice things that Hitler did, I don't think his actions in WWII could ever be undone.

And from the way you are looking at things, one can easily come up after reading Hosea and Isaiah and claim even if God crooks out and acts bad, I don't see how it can undo the good things He did in the past. This section is more a matter of taste that it is...debate, which seems quite common.

Why do we have no right to judge God? We have intelligence and knowledge. Otherwise, we could just as easily say that we are in no position to judge Satan and we should follow him.

Because He either IS the God of the universe - and thus all morals find their roots in Him - or He isn't. We cannot prove either side of this here, or anywhere. And so we are wasting our time. Assuming God to BE perfection, and the true God, it would follow that all His acts are perfectly just, and WE are in lack because WE are imperfect; but then the retort simply comes back, begging the question, that God cannot be God because it doesn't seem just the actions He did. His truth (or falsity) is contingent beyond our capability to calculate, simply because salvation and following Him is a matter of the heart - and of faith - everything transrational.

Well, this thread is more about the people that worship God. I want to see why people will follow God. If God were human, He would be seen as one of the worst sociopathatic, mass murders in all of history. But as a God, He is Good.

See, you're absolutely right. IF God were human, and fallible, and imperfect, these acts would be CRIMES and nothing more. But perfection, assuming momentarily on your behalf that this is indeed perfection, cannot make mistakes, cannot act from emotion and 'blow it'.

 

[tcampen]

It was written:

"See, you're absolutely right. IF God were human, and fallible,
and imperfect, these acts would be CRIMES and nothing
more. But perfection, assuming momentarily on your behalf
that this is indeed perfection, cannot make mistakes, cannot
act from emotion and 'blow it'."

This is classic moral reletivism or situational ethics. Whether an act is moral or immoral depends on who does it or the circumstances of doing it. Those who profess to oppose such a code state that morality must be absolute, making certain acts wrong regardless of the circumstances or who does it.

i.e. taking the life of a healthy, newborn baby is simply wrong - period. To say that such an act is absolute wrong, except when God does it, eliminates the absolute nature of the rule. The rule applies to any being capable of morality. (For example, we don't apply morality to the independent acts of bears or sharks.)

I understand the idea that simply creating a definition of God which basically says: "God is perfect and is incapable of doing anything wrong" makes it easy to justify anything he does, no matter how wrong it would be for any of us to do precisely the same act under the same circumstances. But definition again creates an exception to the rule so big that it utterly swallows the rule itself. At worst, it allows people to commit immoral acts based on a belief of acting on behalf of or under the direction of god. (The bible is full of examples of god sanctioning the killing of one person by another, remember.)

I find it fascinating that the very ones who abhor so called moral relativism are in fact some of its greatest promoters. Hmmmmmmm.

 

[greeneyedgirl]

But just because the bible said God did all of those things doesn't make it so. The men who wrote the bible had very strong opinions about God and tried to pursaude others. Not much different from many people today. But there isn't a shred of evidence to implicate God in any of this. Just because people use the bible to discriminate doesn't mean God had anything to do with it. Just because people killed in God's name in the bible doesn't mean God had anything to do with it.Just because people exaggerated in some book about things doesn't mean God had anything to do with it. Believing in the bible has nothing to do with believing in God and or God . Just because someone quotes a verse out of the bible that says this is what God wants doesn't make it so.

 

[Magisterium]

Most people would see the following as an evil act. However, they Bible credits God with doing the same thing.

1. President of the US launches a full nuclear strike on Iraq and kills every man, woman and child in that country because they are part of the axis of evil. (Destruction of Sodom & Gemorrah)

2. A mafia boss tells someone that works for him to kill their son. Right before the person shoots the son, the mafia boss says he was just kidding. (Abraham is asked to kill his son Issac)

3. A scientific lab develops a cure for cancer and better telecommunications system for the world. Their lab is destroyed by the government because the lab didn't credit the government enough with all they learned. The scientists were forbidden to work together. All imformation was lost. (Tower of Babel)

4. Someone hypnotizes a leader and forces him to start wars that kills many of the nation and eventually the leader. (God forces Pharoah to keep the Isrealites as slaves so God can punish the Egyptians.)

5. Someone walks up to a king and forgets to bow. The king kills the person. (God kills Aaron's sons because they offered the wrong fire to Him.)

6. People ask a king for meat. The king gives them meat and then kills them. (God kills many of the Isrealites because they asked for meat instead of manna.)

7. A union worker works one Sunday. The union gathers together and kills him. (God ordered a man killed for gathering firewood on the Sabbath.)

8. Kids make fun of a guy at a zoo. A zoo keeper opens the lions cage and lets the lion attack and feast on the kids. (God sent a bear to kill kids making fun of a man.)

9. Hitler wishes to weed out the bad seeds of humanity by killing them. (God starts a flood to kill all the bad people, including women and children.)

I could go on and on with stuff like God and Satan torturing Job to prove a point; God telling David to count his men and then killing the men because David did so; or God killing 185,000 people because a king made fun of him.

Now if a human or another "god" did any of these things, Christians would easily say that person or "god" is evil or immoral. But when their god claims credit for this, then God is seen as good and moral. Why is there such a double standard?

Scott (Quath)

At first glance, these appear to be hypocritical demands from an irrational and petty god. However, we must dig deeper to find the truth.

We first have to realize why when man does acts such as these, they are inherently evil. The reason for this is that no man knows the hearts of other men. Therefore he is not qualified to execute judgement. However, when God acts, he is blameless precisely because he knows the intent and innermost desires of the heart. This is demonstrated in a positive manner with the thief on the Cross next to Jesus. In all of these cases it is evident that God knew somehting about the intents of the people judged which escaped the Biblical Authors.

 

[David Gould]

At first glance, these appear to be hypocritical demands from an irrational and petty god. However, we must dig deeper to find the truth.

We first have to realize why when man does acts such as these, they are inherently evil. The reason for this is that no man knows the hearts of other men. Therefore he is not qualified to execute judgement. However, when God acts, he is blameless precisely because he knows the intent and innermost desires of the heart. This is demonstrated in a positive manner with the thief on the Cross next to Jesus. In all of these cases it is evident that God knew somehting about the intents of the people judged which escaped the Biblical Authors.

Ah, the good ole 'unknown reason' defence.

Let us examine this a little bit.

Imagine that I, David, discovered a way of reading minds - even down to the intent and innermost desires. If I read someone's mind and discovered them to be completely depraved and plotting to carry out atrocities against another person, would it be morally right for me to kill them on that basis?

If you say yes, then I ask a further question: would it be morally right for me to kill them on that basis if it was within my power to prevent the atrocity through other, less drastic, means?