pandamonk
Active Member
To provide proper atribution
This argument is detailed by Raymond Bradley in The New Zealand Rationalist & Humanist (spring 2000) pages 2 to 12, and subsequently reprinted in The Impossibility of God on page 135
Pah
I'm sure everyone in this forum will agree with me(well the writers of "The Impossibility of God") that:
1. "It is morally wrong to deliberately and mercilessly slaughter men, women, and children who are innocent of any serious wrongdoing."
2. "It is morally wrong to provide one's troops with young women captives with the prospect of their being used as sex-slaves."
3. "It is morally wrong to make people cannibalize their friends and family."
4. " It is morally wrong to practice human sacrifice, by burning or otherwise."
5. "It is morally wrong to torture people endlessly for their beliefs."
Ok so lets call these "our moral principles" (because we all share them).
Now to move to "God's violations of our moral principles"
In violation of 1:
In violation of 2:
This argument is detailed by Raymond Bradley in The New Zealand Rationalist & Humanist (spring 2000) pages 2 to 12, and subsequently reprinted in The Impossibility of God on page 135
Pah
I'm sure everyone in this forum will agree with me(well the writers of "The Impossibility of God") that:
1. "It is morally wrong to deliberately and mercilessly slaughter men, women, and children who are innocent of any serious wrongdoing."
2. "It is morally wrong to provide one's troops with young women captives with the prospect of their being used as sex-slaves."
3. "It is morally wrong to make people cannibalize their friends and family."
4. " It is morally wrong to practice human sacrifice, by burning or otherwise."
5. "It is morally wrong to torture people endlessly for their beliefs."
Ok so lets call these "our moral principles" (because we all share them).
Now to move to "God's violations of our moral principles"
In violation of 1:
- God himself drowned the whole human race except Noah and his family (Gen. 7:23)
- He punished King David for carrying out a census that he himself had ordered and then complied with David's request that others be punished instead of him by sending plague to kill 70,000 people (2 Sam. 24:1-15)
- He commanded Joshua to kill old and young, little children, maidens, and women (the inhabitants of some thirty-one kingdoms) while pursuing his genocidal practices of ethnic cleansing in the lands that orthodox Jews still regard as part of Greater Israel (see Joshua, chapter 10, in particular)
In violation of 2:
- After commanding soldiers to slaughter all the midianite men, women, and young boys without mercy, God permitted the soldiers to use the 32,000 surviving virgins for themselves (Num. 31:17-18)
- God repeatedly says he has made, or will make, people cannibalize their own children, husbands, wives, parents, and friends because they haven't obeyed him (Lev. 26:29, Deut. 28:53-58, Jer. 19:9, Ezek. 5:10).
- God condoned Jephthah's act in sacrificing him only child as a burnt offering to God (Judg. 11:30-39)
- God's own sacrificial "Lamb," Jesus, will watch as he tortures most members of the human race for ever and ever, mainly because they haven't believed in him. The book of revelation tells us that "everyone whose name has not been written from the foundation of the world in the book of the life of the Lamb who has been slain" (Rev. 13:8) will go to Hell where they "will be tormented with fire and brimstone in the presence of the holy angels and in the presence of the Lamb; and the smoke of their torment goes up forever and ever: and they have no rest day or night" (Rev. 14:10-11)