This:
28
God blessed them, saying: “Be fertile and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it. Have dominion over the fish of the sea, the birds of the air, and all the living things that move on the earth.”
29
God also said: “See, I give you every seed-bearing plant all over the earth and every tree that has seed-bearing fruit on it to be your food;
30
and to all the animals of the land, all the birds of the air, and all the living creatures that crawl on the ground, I give all the green plants for food.” And so it happened.
Seems hard to reconcile with this:
15
The LORD God then took the man and settled him in the garden of Eden, to cultivate and care for it.
16
The LORD God gave man this order: “You are free to eat from any of the trees of the garden
17
except the tree of knowledge of good and bad. From that tree you shall not eat; the moment you eat from it you are surely doomed to die.”
In the first command, God gives dominion over the animals to Man. In the second, God tells Man explicitly that the will live forever as long as he doesn’t understand good and evil. This second implies that Man’s dominion will be, at best, haphazard. How can Man exercise effective and helpful control over the animals if he has no concept of right and wrong? I suppose it could be argued that Man would instinctively do what was right until he ate from the tree of knowledge. But that brings up another problem: if Man already knew right from wrong instinctively, why did he have to be told not to eat of the tree in the first place?
This whole episode falls into the “God is a jerk” theory of Biblical interpretation. First, God places, rather prominenetly, tree with delicious fruit in Man’s home. The God tells Man that if he eats from it he will no longer be immortal and instead will die. Then why put the tree there in the first place? You could put a lever that destroys the world in the deepest, darkest cave, surrounded by all the security measures the mind of man can conceive, attach a giant note in all known languages explaining that pulling the lever will destroy the world and place that same warning in a constantly replaying recording and it would be all of about five minutes before someone pulled the lever. That fruit never had a chance, and God had to know that.
Even worse, the Bible is clear that mortality was introduced with the knowledge of right and wrong. But the tree doesn’t introduce that knowledge, God does. Before the Great Fruit Conversation, Man had no knowledge of good or evil. After that conversation, even before he had eaten of the fruit, he did. Before God told him that eating from the tree would be bad enough to kill him there were just things that you did. After God told him about the tree, there were things that you did that were Bad and things that you did that were Good. Unless God was not being truthful about the understanding of good and evil being the cause of mortality, God Himself planted that knowledge in Man. The fruit got a bum wrap; this was a test that it appears to be literally impossible to pass.
From the standpoint of a creation myth, this works as well as any other explanation for why we grow old an die. But as a self-contained narrative, it is hard to come to any conclusion other than God deliberately took immortality away from his creation and did so in a rather cruel and capricious manner. In the absence of any other explanation for such a heinous action, it is hard not to come to the conclusion that God is a jerk.
*Yes, I know. I passed right over the second creation story. But there isn’t much to say about that. There are two completely different creation stories, right next to each other, in the Bible. They cannot be reconciled and their existence is just one more piece of evidence that the Bible was pulled together from many sources.
leanleft
Kevin
tgirsch
Kevin T. Keith
Judd
This is why I can’t get my head around the Christian notion that God is both all-knowing and a benevolent being. Why, oh why, would the omnibenevolent creator of everything include in that creation something he knew from the beginning was going to be the downfall of his special little project and doom it to an eternity of a less-than-perfect existence. Either God is a spiteful, borderline cruel entity (which I would believe from reading the Bible) who gets sadistic pleasure in fucking with us and saying “I told you so,” or he’s not the benevolent all-power being the Christians make him out to be. George Carlin’s characterization of a spooky, incompetent father figure who doesn’t give a shit may have been too generous.
This is what I was saying in your earlier thread about the OT. It makes sense if you don’t look at the Bible as literal fact but instead from a literary/mythic/sociological perspective. Both Creation stories are rooted in the myths of ancient cultures, Babylonian, Sumerian, etc. Both have something of interest to say about the experiences of the ancient Israeilites and the peoples of antiquity. The Bible — the Old Testament in particular — is terribly complex, and it’s important to remember that many of these stories are cross-cultural myths.
What I love about the “be fruitful and multiply” passage is that it is, in fact, the very FIRST commandment! Imagine inscribing THAT on the courthouse walls! “Go hump like bunnies, people!” Hilarious! We think of the Bible as being “thou shalt NOT” ad nauseum and yet the very first commandment is a YES to human sex. How funny is that?
In Genesis 2, humans are commanded to till the soil instead. “Adam” is a Hebrew pun: “Adama” means “earth” in Hebrew. In effect “Adam” means “Earthling.” Here we have an “Earthling” being told to till the soil. How hippie-dippie is that? I love it. Back to the land, earthlings!
In Eden God is telling mankind — who are apparently vegetarians, I might add–to work the soil, till the earth (“subdue it”), and the ground yields its fruit: great news for the ancient peoples trying to eke out an existence from the rocky soil of ancient Israel. It’s romanticized “good ol’ days” stuff.
As far as the whole tree thing is concerned, one question to ask is not, “Is God being a jerk,” but “doesn’t God already know what is going to happen”? If God is omniscient, omnipotent, yada yada, surely (s)he knows already the outcome. Well, how can we be fruitful and multiply if we stay in this Garden/paradise? (And it’s important to remember that the “sacred tree” symbol is rampant throughout ancient mythology …)
So, how did Eve learn not to eat from the Tree of Knowledge? In the text, God does not talk to her until after the apple. In fact, NO ONE talks to her until the snake! Poor Eve! God gives that commandment to Adam, not Eve. How did Eve know? Did Adam tell her? Obviously she knows, but I always wondered how. No wonder she wants out of this “paradise” that is a prison, she’s completely ignored!
I always thought the snake got a bum rap. He was, after all, one of God’s creatures and aren’t all of God’s creatures good? And the snake was right, Adam and Eve didn’t die after they ate of the apple, they just lost their innocence. Adam and Eve covered themselves because they gained “shame” … something all children experience as they enter adolescence. There is much wisdom in this text.
Oh and adding:
Even worse, the Bible is clear that mortality was introduced with the knowledge of right and wrong.
Well, not necessarily. Don’t forget, there is a tree of Life. Oddly, humans are not commanded against eating from that tree …
So, God got really ‘spankedelic’ on Adam and Eve and kicked them out of the Garden.
Then they were tainted with original sin, so the story goes…
Kevin,
Genesis 1 contains a chronological account of creation. Genesis 2 references that chronological account (“Thus the heavens and the earth were completed and all their hosts. And by the seventh day God completed His work which He had done; and He rested on the seventh day from all His work which God had created and made.” Gen. 2:1-2) and then details the special creation of man. There are not two conflicting accounts here, merely a general chronological account of the whole creation in Gen. 1 followed by a more detailed account of man’s creation in Gen. 2. It can be read in a way that it is seemingly contradictory, but to do so requires assuming different authors or a single author oblivious to the asserted contradiction; or later editors of compilers that either didn’t care or didn’t see the asserted contradiction. Rather than making such assumptions, isn’t it more reasonable to assume the author saw no contradiction and any we think we might see is due to our own preconceptions or misunderstanding?
Kevin and Judd,
As God gave man free will – the freedom to choose right or wrong – the ultimate choosing of wrong was inevitable and simply a matter of time. Just like our own children, God’s children were predestined to disobey. It’s our nature.
Is that a mark of sadism or cruelty? Hardly. Would it be the act of a loving parent to deny his son or daughter the freedom to make their own choices – even wrong choices? Would it bring either me or my child any joy if my child had no choice but to love me and express that love toward me? Could we even call that love?
Southern,
Are you not approaching the Bible with a fixed presupposition rather than an openness to following the evidence wherever it might lead you? You cite supposed similarities between the Biblical account of creation and the myths of other cultures, and some prevalence of “sacred trees” in different religions or cultures. While any such similarities might in fact represent borrowing from and between various cultures, it might just as easily represent a single, common source from which certain beliefs followed and diverged.
In other words, if the Bible is literally true in its account of creation and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, then it means that mankind originated from Adam and Eve and would have presumably passed down accounts of what happened in the Garden of Eden, with those accounts being modified and diverging over time.
There’s not a way of knowing whether your view or this latter one is correct. Thus, we cannot point to any similarities to prove or support our own respective conclusion. We can draw different and equally reasonable inferences from the same evidence. Our own presuppositions will determine which we believe to be true.
[C]hoosing of wrong was inevitable[.] Just like our own children, [we] were predestined to disobey. It’s our nature.
Now there’s a deeply perverse and arrogant understanding of humanity!
In the case of real children and real parents, disobeying is not the same as choosing evil over good. Some parents make mistakes, and some children make choices to correct them. I pity your children if you’re so sanctimonious and self-satisfied to not know that.
matt:
If one goes to the original Hebrew, the two stories are obviously different, and written by different authors. It’s so marked that it even manages to come through in the English translation (and other translations).
But I wish you could see just how strained your explanation appears. You’re effectively ruling out the possibility of a contradiction out of hand, and then looking for a way to explain why a perceived contradiction isn’t actually one.
Try this: Imagine, if you will, an editor who very much believes in God, and is tasked with putting together a canonical scripture. He’s presented with two stories of creation that are somewhat similar, but have important differences. He’s heard both of these stories since he was a boy. Do you really think that such an editor would be so arrogant as to purport to speak for God and either edit out the contradictions, or “pick a winner” and simply discard one of the stories?
That’s just one entirely plausible explanation. Another could be that he was so familiar with both stories that he hadn’t really thought critically about them in years, and didn’t do so when merging the text. Or there’s the more cynical explanation, that someone was explicitly trying to merge two disparate religious traditions together, and so they left both stories intact, so that at least part of the new canonical scripture would be familiar to people from both traditions.
But however you look at it, the “it doesn’t make sense that there would be a contradiction, so the apparent contradiction must not be one” explanation doesn’t fly.
Dan M,
It’s arrogant to accept that as individuals we’re fallible and will do wrong? It seems to me it would be the opposite view that would be arrogant or perverse.
In your next point, you engage in fallacious reasoning. The fact that parents will, at one point or another, make or direct a bad decision and the child will make the right decision doesn’t detract from, let alone disprove, my point.
It’s most certainly arrogant to think that every time you tell your kid to do something, you’ll always be right, and the mere fact of them disobeying you makes them wrong. If that’s not what you meant, do feel free to clarify.
And to claim that choosing wrong is “inevitable” views humanity as perverse, pretty much by definition. The common-sense wisdom (i.e. assumption) that humans always eventually make a mistake is predicated on the ‘eventually’ and is just an instance of the Infinite Monkey Theorem. It’s inapplicable to a putative Adam and Steve because they are two humans with one choice. They only have to get a total of two choices right; there is no eventually.
Dan M,
It was not my position that the parent will always be right and that a child’s disobedience will always be wrong. My point was merely that giving the child the ability to obey or disobey, to choose right or choose wrong, regardless of whether you ultimately have to discipline the child, is an act of love. It is especially an act of love when you know with certainty that they will, at one time or another, disobey and do wrong.
Are you suggesting the conclusion that any one individual will do wrong depends on an infinite amount of time or an infinite number of people?
You’re going to have to expand on your “Adam and Steve” point because I don’t understand what point you’re trying to make.
Sorry, that should have been “Adam and Eve”. I forgot which imaginary characters we were using.
I understood your substitution of “Adam and Steve” for Adam and Eve, but don’t understand what overall point you were making.
The Infinite Monkey Theorem (No, I didn’t make up the name.) is just the limiting (heh) case of the Law of Large Numbers. That everybody eventually fucks up (whatever that means in context) is not a property of the difficulty that humans have in making right choices (whatever that means in context) but a result of ‘eventually’ allowing for an arbitrarily large number of separate chances to fuck up. Given a non-zero chance of fuck up, the probability of the sample mean number of fuck ups being zero (which is to say, the sample mean differs from the expected value by an amount equal to the expected value) decreases with increasing trials.
To assume that everybody eventually fucks up only claims that the chance of them making an error is non-zero. To assume that at least one of two humans makes an error in their first and only moral choice claims that the chance of making an error is large (whatever that means in context). That later claim is a claim that human nature is perverse.
Sorry I’ve been absent for most of this but…
matt:
God’s actions in this case are indeed the height of cruelty. The “We were given free will so we could make our own choices,” line doesn’t even pass the smell test. We’ll set aside for a moment that God would have been the one for creating our nature to disobey and just look at the method for a moment. I’m all for letting kids learn some things by fucking up for themselves but that has a limit; I’d let a kid touch a hot stove after they’ve been warned not to touch it because there’s not any real lasting harm done by it and in a couple days they’re good as new, but I draw the line at letting them play with gas cans and matches to teach them not to burn the house down. God appears significantly less reasonable than I am. And why put the tree there to begin with? If God knew from the beginning we would disobey then that’s like turning on a hot stove for the sole purpose of having your kid burn themselves.
Judd,
Think about it this way. The reason you might let a child learn by touching a hot stove but not by letting them have access to a gas can and a book of matches is because of the likely or potential consequences, right? With a hot stove, you know the worst possibility is that they might suffer a temporary burn, while with the gas can and matches you’re concerned about significant property damage or even some loss of life. Not knowing the outcome in either situation but knowing the potential bad outcome in the latter situation is far worse than the one in the former, you choose to avoid that possible outcome altogether.
But suppose you were considering the soul of a person, that the soul was eternal (or, more correctly, that once created it is eternal), and that the body is merely temporary – though being material it is less real than the soul. And suppose you had perfect knowledge of whether the child would disobey your direction and light the gas can. In fact, you know that if he doesn’t disobey about the gas can, he will eventually disobey on something else with significant harm to himself or someone else. And, if you know that no matter how he disobeys and how much he hurts himself, you lovingly can take him up in your arms and take away all the pain and all the guilt for having disobeyed, would that be the description of a cruel parent? Or even more so if you knew you would take on all his physical pain and guilt and whatever pain he’s caused to others and bear it for him although you didn’t have to, would that be a mark of a cruel parent?
Now, let’s come back to how God created us with the capacity, even the desire, to disobey Him. If God is all-powerful, He could have created us without the capacity to disobey. Yet, without the capacity for choosing wrong there is no capacity for choosing right. How would we show love for God or for each other if we had no option but to obey? Would there be any value in our faithfulness to our wives if we had no option but to be faithful? Would we demonstrate love for our brother if we had no option but to lay down our life for him? Would we have any comprehension of how much we are loved if our parents, our spouse, or God had no choice but to love and care for us?
We know we are loved because despite our disobedience and the hurt we’ve caused our Father, He bore the punishment for our disobedience through His only Son’s agonizing rejection and death on a cross.
Just to share a wtf moment, I clicked on Digg’s recent comment on the front page, or at least wrongly thought I had, and instead got this one. Holy shit did that throw me for a loop!
Can we get a reality check here? Is there any reason to think that the authors of Genesis actual though there was such a thing as an immortal soul? To me, that sounds like a decidedly late-Greek idea. Considering that the christians were arguing about whether resurrection was bodily or not well into their second century, it seems wildly anachronistic to assume that Hebrews from a couple millennia earlier had already settled upon body-spirit dualism.
…being material [the body] is less real than the soul…
Setting aside whether the primitives that wrote the bible might have agreed with you on this, it’s a beautiful example of why those of us who aren’t superstitious sometimes feel the most appropriate response to theism is openly laughing at it.
[I]f … no matter … how much [the child] hurts himself, you [could] take away all the pain …, would that be the description of a cruel parent?
Um, yes? What part of “experiencing preventable pain” are you not getting? Unless by “take away the pain” you mean “alter the past”, in which case still yes until that alternate past replaces the one with the pain. In order for this not to constitute cruelty, you have to show that the pain is not preventable.
[Blah blah I can't tell what love is without the option to not love.]
Bullshit. Love is either an act or a feeling (or some combination thereof) and in both cases there are effects regardless of the deontic state of the lover. When I feed my cats because they are my companions, the result is that they get fed. If I feed them because they are sentients to which I am obliged to prevent suffering, the result is that they get fed. Likewise, when I scritch them because they are my companions, they get feel loved. When I scritch them to keep them from biting my toes, they feel loved. If I were incapable both of wanting my cats to enjoy their food and of deciding to shirk my obligation to them, they would still get fed.
Dan,
At the risk of stating the obvious, cats are not people. Do you mean to suggest that a waitress serving you a meal for which you will pay is no different than a stranger who offers to share his meal with you when you’re hungry? In both cases you’ll be fed, but you’ll be far more appreciative of the stranger than the waitress.
By the way, nice diversion. Please address the rather more relevant point of whether souls make any sense in this context.
No diversion, just didn’t see the import of your point. The question you and Judd raised was how could the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil be created by anything other than a cruel god.
Whether the author of Genesis – or I for that matter – had a full or correct concept of the soul is irrelevant to the question of God’s cruelty. The sun will still rise regardless of whether I understand the rotation of the Earth that makes it appear to do so.
I used cats because I actually live with and feed cats. They’re also entities with whom I can ethically have a wide power imbalance, and my relationship to them bears the added similarity to that between you and your god in that they have to fucking clue what I’m saying when I talk to them. They seem an entirely apposite case.
But I admit that I have failed to make explicit some of my assumptions in how their example must be read in order to make sense. My point was that the difference between my two proposed emotional states when feeding them is quite unimportant to them. On the other hand, there’re plenty of other possible states that they could distinguish: If were angry and yelled at them as I set down food, the cat who isn’t fat would like become scared and run away, thus not getting fed.
I’m sorry that I’ve broken my own rule against argument by analogy, since you’ve extracted from my comment the wrong set of features. Your waitress and stranger do indeed differ, but not in how hungry I am; instead, the major differences lie in how much money I’ve spent and what my theory of mind tells me about the general behavior of the stranger.
Well, no, I asked no such thing, for the same reason that I have no interest in an explanation of how to square Dorothy’s blood-thirsty and vindictive personality with her seemingly kindly dealings with Scarecrow. The question theorizes a personality that doesn’t fit with any other part of the story either.
(Emphasis added.)
Your insularity and dogmatism is blocking you from understanding the question, apparently.
The sun will still rise because there really is a sun, which continues to do what it does regardless of your knowledge. The sun is a real thing. Billions of people see it every day. It has obvious effects on the world. When the sun rises, weather changes, the ground increases in temperature, plants switch from passive states to active ones. There really is a sun that rises.
On the other hand, the author of Genesis writes a story, and many readers see that story as describing God’s cruelty. Maybe there are also some gods in the real world outside of that story, but they are fairly unimportant to what the author meant to portray in his own god character, except in as much as the story-writer could include in his character features from whatever real gods he had experience with. You talk as if you don’t realize that Genesis is not an eye-witness account.
Judd is asking what the author was trying to show about the god character. If you take the god character to be omnipotent and omniscient, then its actions are terribly cruel to the human characters in the story.
Your response to this is to theorize that the human characters have souls and therefore the seemingly-cruel actions has some additional effects that make them benefits rather than cruelty. BUT, if the author of this story did not have access to the concept of an immortal soul, then the author could not have written the characters to show this benefit.
The only way that your soul-benefit theory can counter an accusation of authorial intent of making the god character cruel is if we additionally presume that the author had no intention in his writing, and that it is driven by some external source, like observing the real world. If the author didn’t believe in souls, your discussion of souls makes no sense unless you also believe the Adam and Eve story to be an eye-witness account.
Dan,
Please continue to lay the smackdown as extensively, thoroughly, for as long as, and as condescendingly as you wish. But as a friend I do think it’s my friendly duty to remind you that are arguing with somebody who apparently believes in an invisible, presumably white man, who is omniscient and infallible, and who lives above us in the sky. I guess we all have to make our own decisions about how much to engage the perspective of the pathological who openly profess the import of believing zany ideas that exist counter to all objective evidence. I guess, we’ve either clearly reached different decision points, or I’ve found somebody who loves to argue for its own sake even more so than I do.
Dan:
Bravo! I came back to this thread worried that my work-fueled absence might have let the other side think I had seen the error in my thinking and retreated from the field but you’ve picked the ball up and run with it very impressively. I commend you, sir.
Very slightly related *grin*: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zxcFHY2eTOc
Digg, I do find some non-zero value in articulating where theists inject their god by presupposition rather than overt argumentation, if only for future use in other venues.
On the other hand, if matt is a creationist, I could just as well be using a brick wall for the exercise. (I do note, however, that he seems to accept as well-established the idea that the events in Genesis really happened, yet on the other hand thinks scientists still need to provide more evidence for global warming. You can’t write comedy that bizarre!)
Digg,
Whether God exists is not subject to scientific investigation. There isn’t some experiment you can conduct to prove or disprove His existence. Thus your “counter to all objective evidence” statement is irrelevant at best.
Dan,
You’re making this far more difficult than it has to be. As a Christian, I believe the Bible is divinely inspired so that God is essentially the author and Moses and others were merely transcriptionists. Consequently, it doesn’t matter whether the individual writers believed in a soul or had the same conception of a soul as I do. But, of course, the early Jews did not seem to think the God described in Genesis was a hateful or cruel God – is that because they had some concept of a soul or because they recognized my primary point above: that to be able to love and feel love requires that one be capable of choosing right or wrong, love or hate?
matt:
There isn’t some experiment you can conduct to prove or disprove His existence.
I guess I wouldn’t have pegged you for an agnostic, yet here you are arguing that we simply can’t know whether or not God actually exists (or, at least, that there’s no rational means by which one can arrive at that conclusion). You learn something new every day, I guess.
But, of course, the early Jews did not seem to think the God described in Genesis was a hateful or cruel God
Have you read Job?
Seriously, maybe not exactly hateful and cruel, but absolutely jealous and vindictive.
T:
First of all, you well know I’m not agnostic. I happen to think we can rationally come to the conclusion the God of the Bible exists. What cannot be done is to put forth “objective evidence” for that conclusion.
I have read Job. How does Job reveal either a jealous or vindictive God? Not to say that God doesn’t describe Himself as a jealous God, but I don’t see that in Job He is revealed as such.
Well, you’re right that Job’s god isn’t jealous or vindictive. Those emotions provide some motivation for harming others. Job’s god is just flat out abusive, cruel, petty, and malicious.
matt:
Please note Dan isn’t saying anything about Job’s god’s mindset. It’s utterly irrelevant in the context of what’s being discussed. You know how you and I look at liberal do-gooder social programs and say that while many of them are enacted with the best of intentions it’s their end results that make them deplorable? Same thing here. What motivates the god character in that part of the Bible is immaterial, the end result of his actions reveal him to be abusive, cruel, petty and malicious. It’s an important distinction you must keep in mind if you are to adequately address Dan’s point.
Judd:
Job clearly suffered a terrible price for his faithfulness to God: he lost his family and his wealth, he was scorned by his friends, and he suffered physically. And it all resulted from Satan’s challenge to God, and God then permitting Satan to take everything from Job but his life.
If I did not believe in an eternal afterlife and an omniscient and omnipotent God, I would have significant difficulty accepting Job’s sufferings (or God’s commandments to the Israelites to kill every man, woman, and child in the Promised Land). But if we may choose an eternal afterlife in either Heaven or Hell, and if God knows what choice we will make and has the power to save or condemn, then there is nothing abusive, cruel, petty or malicious in His actions in the book of Job.
Are you even aware that you just said it’s A-OK to commit genocide as long as you’ve convinced yourself a god told you to?
[W]e can rationally come to the conclusion the God of the Bible exists. What cannot be done is to put forth “objective evidence” for that conclusion.
You’re obviously using at least one of the bolded words differently than the rest of us, since these two sentenced are otherwise in direct contradiction.
(Though I suppose you can resolve that contradiction by instating the beginning of your sentence that I’ve elided, and then appending “I practice doublethink.”)
matt:
These two statements are incompatible:
Whether God exists is not subject to scientific investigation.
and
[W]e can rationally come to the conclusion the God of the Bible exists.
Square those two statements, if you can.
Full disclosure: I am an actual scientist. If you can explain me to how it’s possible to rationally come to conclusions on things that aren’t the subject of investigation then you’ve found a way to radically alter the way my colleagues and I do things.
You have my full, complete and undivided attention.
Judd:
“Objective evidence” implies something physical that can be examined and tested (e.g. acceleration due to gravity or the independence of the force of gravity from the mass of an object). In evaluating such evidence, we rely (or at least should) on logic or reason. We apply a rational process to evaluating the “objective evidence.”
But we also rely on logic/reason and a rational process in evaluating abstract ideas for which there is an absence of “objective evidence.” For example, we have no “objective evidence” for the inherent, individual rights of man, but we can apply a reasoned, rational analysis to conclude that man does possess such rights.
In short, while reasoned, rational analysis is used in science, it is not limited only to science.
Judd,
<matt>You’re making this far more difficult than it has to be. As a Christian, I believe
the Bible isI am divinely inspired so that God is essentially the author the shit I’m spewing.</matt>Dan,
You asked, “Are you even aware that you just said it’s A-OK to commit genocide as long as you’ve convinced yourself a god told you to?”
That’s not what I said at all. Rather, I said that is what God commanded the Israelites as they prepared to enter Canaan. The point here is not what one would need in order to be sufficiently convinced that that is what is being commanded by God, but taking it as a given that it was commanded by God what does it tell us of His nature.
It seems to me though that we have wandered far afield of the critical point we started out addressing: can we feel and act in love if we have no choice but to do so? If God had created us such that we could only obey Him, could we feel or show love?
So you’ve reduced your concept of the all-powerful creator of life, the universe and everything to the level of something people just made up because it made their lives more pleasant? Now we’re getting somewhere!
Let’s look at that “inherent rights of man” thing. What you’re suggesting is that we’ve got ex post facto evidence and can extrapolate some conclusions from it. We can rationally analyze objective evidence from societies with and without respect for the life, liberty and property of individuals and say that based on what we’ve seen a society is more prosperous when protections are put in place to safeguard those three things. That’s fundamentally pretty sound. You’re taking it a step further though and saying not only should we safeguard those things, they’re also inherent human rights and ergo they would have to be safeguarded regardless of anything else. You’ve just gone a couple bridges too far; the evidence we have shows nothing about anything being an inherent right, merely that one system yields a more pleasant society. That proposition of yours doesn’t even survive the most basic level of scrutiny. And that’s how you believe we can rationally come to the conclusion there’s an invisible man living in the sky who created the universe only a couple thousand years ago? Yep, sounds about right to me.
If there is no objective evidence then there is no reason to believe something really exists, be it the sun, a unicorn or a patriarchal invisible white man who lives in the sky and created the entire universe a couple thousand years ago and filled it with tricks to make us think is was much older.
Would you care to try that one again? Or perhaps you would prefer to share the reasoned, rational analysis I’m apparently not smart enough to comprehend?
Judd,
A lot to unpack, but are you approaching this question with an open mind as you would some scientific proposition, recognizing that one’s starting biases can influence their evaluation of the evidence?
Let’s assume just for the moment that God exists, what objective evidence can you imagine for His existence? Would it be enough for Christ to claim His divinity to you? Would it be enough to see Him walk on water? Would it be enough to see Him die on a cross but see Him days after and put your fingers in His wounds? Let’s just say you could, through DNA testing, establish that the man you saw die and examined in order to confirm his death was confirmed by your own inspection to be alive three days later. That wouldn’t be objective evidence he was God, would it? The most we could say is that we had objective evidence that a man who was previously dead was again alive.
This is not to say that we should then accept His existence; it is merely to say that the question of whether God, a supernatural being, exists cannot be answered by “objective evidence.” Applying such an evidentiary standard to that question would be like trying to apply mathematic formulas to the study of history.
As far as inherent, individual rights go, we most certainly can discover them through reasoned analysis. Very briefly, the argument is essentially that man is separate and unique from animals through, at the very least, his capacity for rational thought and communication. That a man has a property in his own life and conscience and that all men, being equally human, have the identical right to life and conscience. If a man possesses such a right, then another man cannot possess a greater right to deprive the first of his life or conscience, and the exercise of one man’s right cannot interfere with the exercise of another’s rights.
The problem with your ex post facto analysis is that you have assumed certain criteria for measuring the utility of individual rights (e.g. prosperity). But, if we were to rely on different criteria, we would come up with a different conclusion based upon that ex post facto analysis.
But again, we’re wandering far from the point you initially raised that a God that allows for the possibility of disobedience and consequences must be a cruel God. You have yet to take on the point that the inability to do wrong, disobey, or hate eliminates also the capacity to do right, obey, or love. Without a capacity for disobeying man would be reduced to a mindless robot. Would a loving parent deny his child any freedom to disobey? What would that child’s life be like?
matt:
I’m not saying I needed to be there when God waved his magic wand and created the universe for me to see evidence that would convince me of its existence. Give me one talking whirlwind or burning bush and I’ll start to seriously reconsider my position on the workings of the universe. And if some dude showed up who could walk on water, raise the dead and then three days after being nailed to a block of wood and dying was up walking around like nothing happened, all the while claiming to be the son of God then he would have me in the audience. That has not happened though so “meh”.
You’re still making big leaps on the rights of man. Man’s capability to engage in rational thought and communication does not lead directly to man having as a property his own life and conscience. You’re taking one thing and inferring another then another then another then getting to man having property. Some of that isn’t necessarily correct.
A god who is in complete control of the universe who allows bad things to happen when it’s not necessary is, in fact, quite cruel. You’re using an analogy of a parent and a child. This is fundamentally flawed. A child will one day grow up to be an adult in a society where they will be confronted with situations and choices that can sometimes have life-shattering consequences and so it is important children learn the different between right and wrong and that bad things can result from certain actions. Unless the god character in Genesis was grooming Adam to take over for him one day, it isn’t necessary for Adam to know right from wrong. There’s nothing at all wrong with being a mindless robot in the Garden of Eden. We are God’s creations, after all. We’re exactly what God wants us to be. Now if God felt he needed to be glorified and worshipped by creatures he’s got 100% control over but he allows to have free will for no other reason than an ego trip while he sees if they’ll actually pay him the proper respect (or perhaps to impress and brag to Zeus that his creations are so loyal) then that can be described as nothing but cruel.
Judd,
First, is it your position that individual rights do not preexist government – that rights are merely the creation of government and can, therefore, be denied by government?
More importantly, do you think there is no value in free will? Do you think your significant other would feel your love if you had no choice but to love her? If you could choose, would you choose a world where you had no choice but could only do right, where you could never risk anything, let alone your life, for a loved one or a moral principle?
matt
Say, did you know that groups of humans sometimes come to consensus by means other than government?
This is a surprisingly good analogy. Pity it hurts your case instead of helping it. While mathematics doesn’t provide much in the way of developing theories about history, it provides absolute limits on what those theories can contain.
You could come up with an idea of history in which the Civil War was due to expansionist aggression by the economically domineering South, but this would obviously be bullshit because the simple math of the economy of the time is that the South wasn’t economically domineering. Likewise, you can come up with a theory that some magical entity got less angry at us because it got to watch a magical rabbi be murdered, but no evidentiary standard is met for thinking there was even a magical rabbi to murder. And nevermind just how nonsensical it is to think the first magical entity created the universe.
matt:
More or less. The idea that things like life, liberty and property, a decent job, food, housing or whatever else is an inherent right of man is basically a construct some people came up with and other agreed to. Occasionally enough people who’ve agreed to that consensus come together to form a government that’s set up with boundaries to respect the will of the group but that doesn’t make what the group came up with some high and mighty inherent right of man.
You can say some of things like protections for life and liberty are inherently better in that they seem to lead to a higher quality of life for the average person but that doesn’t make them an “inherent human right”. If I have my inherent rights to life and liberty violated by the Sudanese government or the North Korean government then are they in trouble? Does something bad happen to them? Nope. What you think of as a human right only exists so long as governments allow it. The whole idea of human rights is basically an opiate for the masses to make them feel more secure in their daily lives.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m high on the stuff, too. I’m all in favor of governments that protect the life, liberty and property of their citizens and I’d never ever want to be somewhere that didn’t. The idea though that those concepts fall under this nebulous concept of “inherent rights of man” that humans have by virtue of their existence then there’s a substantial burden of proof that has to be met. Where did these rights come from? What all is on the list? Who’s in charge of enforcing them? What happens when they’re violated?
Are you seeing the breakdown here? Human rights do not exist as absolutes; they’re relative on a good day and only important to those who choose to respect them. At their core they’re a fiction that only exist in the minds of people who choose to believe in them and don’t rely on things like actual evidence. Which is very much like God.
Judd,
Although I disagree, your argument that rights are merely man-made constructs is logically sound (the logic follows for the most part but is based, I believe, on faulty premises). But there is a portion of your argument that suggests faulty reasoning that may be misleading you on the basic premises: “If I have my inherent rights to life and liberty violated by the Sudanese government or the North Korean government then are they in trouble? Does something bad happen to them? Nope. What you think of as a human right only exists so long as governments allow it.”
Your final statement here is simply irrelevant to the question of whether rights are inherent in man. The fact that a right can be violated or denied doesn’t have any bearing on whether the right exists. Even in our nation, where one is guaranteed the right to life and our government enforces that right, another individual can wrongly take your life. That doesn’t mean the right doesn’t exist. In other words, just as a murderer may take my life while our government guarantees my right to life, so can China deprive its citizens of their inherent rights. The fact that a right may be violated has nothing whatsoever to do with whether the right exists.
Finally, you have still not addressed the other point.
I addressed the other point before. I’ll restate it.
What I think of free will is irrelevant. For you and me, human free will exists and we’re just playing the field as it’s striped. The thing is in your worldview, God’s the one who striped the field we’re playing. An all-powerful, all-knowing, all-seeing, all-everything god should not need to be worshipped by us. What does he get out of it? A self-esteem boost? Is the god character in the Bible really that insecure? Since an all-everything God doesn’t need us to do anything the mere creation of free will so as to provide a little extra ego-stroking is nothing but cruel.
Judd,
The point is not what God gets out of free will – He gets nothing but pain from our disobedience. The point is what you and your wife, or you and your children, or you and your brother get from it. Would you prefer a world in which there was nothing to live or die for? One in which all you could do is what you were created to do? I can’t truly believe you would take the position that a more loving God would have created you without free will, and that one who gave you free will could only be a cruel, insecure God.
The point is completely what God gets out of our free will. It’s his universe and he gets to set it up and run it however he sees fit. He’s God for fucks sake! What you or I want is immaterial. I would prefer free will but I would also prefer a universe where my soul wouldn’t be damned to an eternity of agony for rejecting the teachings of a several millennia-old storybook that’s fraught with inaccuracies, not to mention a world full of all sorts of tricks to make us doubt said storybook has any truth to it. None of what I want matters to God though.
Reading again through what you’ve written has forced me to ask a question just to make sure I’m not totally missing what you believe. All I need is a yes or a no. Is it your position that God did something kind by both giving us free will and creating the opportunity for us, as a species, to fail, lose the idyllic existence that was the Garden of Eden and be condemned to an eternity of toil, death and the possibility of having our souls condemned to hell instead of either creating mankind without the capacity to disobey or with the capacity to disobey but without the means to do so?
Without question, yes! Alfred Lord Tennyson summed it up pretty well:
“I hold it true, whate’er befall;
I feel it, when I sorrow most;
‘Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all.”
Whatever idyllic existence Adam and Eve might have had before the fall, they couldn’t know it or comprehend it. They couldn’t appreciate any love they had for one another or that God had for them. We can only know God’s love for us through our capacity for disobeying – He still loves us and forgives us when we disobey. Would you consider any feelings your wife has for you as love if she had those feelings only when you behaved perfectly well and were without flaw? It’s that she loves you despite your shortcomings that is true love.
And Tommy Lee Jones in “Men In Black” summed up Tennyson pretty well:
“Try it.”
As for the rest….. this.
Among other things…….
The god character in the Bible does NOT always forgive after we disobey, even if we repent.
Mark 3:29 But whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will never be forgiven; he is guilty of an eternal sin.
My name is Judd. I am a well-educated white man from the United State of America who grew up in a religious household but rejected that upbringing upon reaching the age of reason and with full knowledge of the the potential consequences of my action, I deny the Holy Spirit.
I’m officially hellbound! Sorry, Grandma!
On the up-side, hell will be an awesome time. All the interesting people seem to either be there or are well on their way there. I can finally meet Christopher Hitchens and then hang out with Dan and have cocktails. It should be fun!