Trials and distress are not something unusual in life; they are part of what it means to be human in a fallen world. In Christ we have an anchor that holds fast in all the storms of life, but, if we never sail into those storms, how would we know that? It is in times of despair and sorrow that we reach out to Him, and, if we are His children, we always find Him there waiting to comfort and uphold us through it all.
In this way, God proves His faithfulness to us and ensures that we will stay close to Him. Second, He proves to us that our faith is real through the suffering and pain that are inevitable in this life. How we respond to suffering, especially when we are innocent of wrongdoing, is determined by the genuineness of our faith.
Finally, God uses suffering to take our eyes off this world and turn them to the next. The Bible continually exhorts us to not get caught up in the things of this world but to look forward to the world to come.
The innocent suffer in this world, but this world and all that is in it will pass away; the kingdom of God is eternal. And that itself is another God promised but that he wouldn't rain.
But what He does in Tim: In flood story. But the next time the word rain is used in the book of Genesis is the raining of the fire. Tim: I know. I thought about that, too. But it's another instance of the cosmos collapsing. In this time, it turns lightning. Raining fire is a standard Hebrew phrase for "lightning". It's lightning.
And you were told in Genesis 14 that the land is full of these pits that have all of this flammable sulfur in it. Or pitch and tar.
Lightning ball on one of those? It's going to go out. Tim: Carissa did a great summary. I keep problematizing things, and Jon you're sitting there looking unsatisfied. Carissa: There are problems. Especially with Korah's rebellion, even when we try to understand what the authors are doing with that story and how it fits in the overall storyline, it's still Korah and all of the family members that are associated with Korah, including their little ones.
I remember reading that specifically. The authors included that it was also little ones who were standing at the tents, and they're all swallowed any earth. And I think that we have a question about that too. Community judgment or First of all, thank you for all the work you've put into the Bible Project. I've learned so much from all the resources you provide. I struggle with the notion that God is handing over frequently targets a whole group of people, often based on the actions of a few.
How can I better understand God's love, wrath, and justice in this context? Tim: Excellent question. Isaac, you are expressing very articulately, something that many, many, many people, including the three of us, I'm certain, have felt.
Carissa: And it's true that sin affects the whole community, even people who don't deserve it. Our parents' problems affect us and so on and so on. So maybe there's something that's true about that in the stories of Scripture too where it feels unjust, but it's also kind of the way that the world works. Tim: You're saying that even within hyper-individualized Western culture, if you really think about it, it doesn't take too much time to get the fact that my decisions affect the people around me.
My negative decisions. Carissa: Yeah. The negative consequences of my actions will unjustly fall on the people around me. I think that's one helpful way to go with this. Isaak, you put your thumb on another part, which is I think there is a difference of cultural worldview and a different way of viewing the human individual and their relationship to the community.
And you're right. Every significant philosophical, political, and economic movement in the West over the last years has been about creating this new thing called the individual who is the autonomous. And if they have enough privilege and status, they can be mobile and create a whole life independence from their tribe and family.
You can go move away, get a job, never need anything from your parents. I mean, it's just I think unhealthy way to be a human being but.
But it's our cultural setting. So I think you're right, we read these narratives with an extra layer of strangeness. Jon: Help me understand. The tension though is not whether or not I believe other people's actions will affect me. Because even in a hyper-individualistic society, I might completely tie myself off from family and maybe my friend and move somewhere and try to be as individualistic and rustic as possible. Or even if I move out into the woods, I'm going to be dealing with the consequences of bears and moose and stuff.
There's no situation where I'm purely only affected by my decisions. So I don't think the conflict here is realizing that other people's decisions affect me. It's that is it fair to be held accountable for other people's decisions? Like if there's some sort of final judgment or if God's going to intervene and start giving consequences out, shouldn't He be able to tease out the difference between the people in the community that caused it and the people who were just along for the ride?
Actually, I need to do more work on this theme but I'm convinced it's there. I think this theme of one person acting and their evil bearing consequences on the many or the many acting, and then it creates an unfair circumstance for the one. And this is a major theme that gets inverted and turned over in all these narratives in the Hebrew Bible. It is really interesting. The design pattern. So the outcry of the poor and oppressed. It's like "Carissa, should I tell you?
So Abraham gets in God's face. He says, "What? My nephew's there. And he's not perfect, but he's like Carissa: But isn't the reason that Abraham appeals to God because surely the just Judge wouldn't do that.
So in other words, Abraham is afraid that God's about to violate His own character by doing one of these cosmos Carissa: Which is interesting, because, okay, in this communal society, non-individualistic culture, Abraham still in the story is discerning between the individual and the community. Tim: Absolutely. Yeah, that's right. And notice God's the one to get Abraham talking in the first place by speaking in His presence.
Tim: And then they start what you think is negotiation. But then you realize that every turn God just says yes. God never bargains. Abraham's just like, "45? I will forgive the city on account of 5. In that case, Lot's righteousness is not sufficient to cover for the many. Well, it's more complex. But the point is that narrative is raising this theme that you're saying, Isaak.
It's problematizing it. And Abraham is saying, "Wouldn't be just for you to let the whole cosmos of Sodom and Gomorrah, the little mini Cosmos collapse on that account. So I think the Korah narrative, we mentioned earlier, is inverting that.
What God says to Moses when the leaders with Korah rebel is "I'm done with all these people," which has happened like four or five times now. And Moses says, "Will you…" Here, I'm going to quote it.
So what Moses says to God is, "Oh, God, God of the ruach of all flesh, when one person sins, will you be angry with all of them? But this time it's the inverse. It's when one person sins and leads the rest into rebellion, will you punish everybody? Another inversion of this is Daniel. Daniel is sitting in Babylon through no fault of his own. He's legit. But yet he will take personal He'll take personal responsibility for the entire history of his ancestor's rebellion against God.
So in that case, he doesn't differentiate his individual self from his tribe. And even though he's righteous, he will count himself among the many sinful people. So there's something happening here. The biblical narrative is exploring explicitly this theme about God's fairness, and about how individuals and their community's sins and consequences relate to each other. And it's nuanced I think. And it's all leading up forward to the suffering servant, who will be the one, in Isaiah, who bears the sins of the many.
And then Jesus takes that mantle upon Himself, as the one who dies for the sins of the many. Jon: So, through that One, all have died. And in the same way, life comes through the One so many can live. I mean, it's hard to do, but it's like all these stories on their own are working together towards this bigger depiction or exploration of these themes. And you have to take each of these individual narratives on their own, but then let this mosaic emerge. That's pretty more nuanced than I usually give credit to.
I don't know if that makes any sense. When I read this question, I was trying to think about the question behind the question. And I think he states it at the end that sometimes it feels unfair. So it's a question of God's fairness or justice, how God views people in those moments when the community is suffering for a sin that Or maybe not even for a sin, but just because of wicked systems because of whatever reason people are suffering.
Where is God in that? And where's His fairness? And I don't know the answer to that. But I think, as I was reflecting on this, some of the things that came to mind are just, well, this verse God doesn't delight in people suffering. Well, actually, this whole chapter, Ezekiel 18, starts off with that parable, that the children's teeth are set on edge because of the parents' sin, and the people are complaining that We didn't deserve this. You're in exile because of your own stuff.
But at the end of that passage, God's saying that "Hey, I don't delight in the suffering of the wicked. Any suffering that comes upon people, my hope is that they would turn from their sin and turn to me. It's like, again, that picture of God as compassionate as always wanting people to turn back to Him. For me, that's what I want to remember in those moments of like, man, there's so much suffering going on in the world, and it is unfair. That's the only thing maybe that gives me comfort is God's compassion toward that.
I don't know if that makes sense. Tim: Yeah, it does make sense. Something that's emerging out of all these questions we've talked about so far, which is only three, but they're whoppers, something that's sinking in with me more, I feel like it's taken me a long time, when we come to these huge topics in the Bible, the Christians and Jews have been arguing about for millennia.
When I see all of these different camps staking out different viewpoints on these issues, to me that becomes like a little flag saying, maybe the function of the Bible isn't to give us clarity. But it's trying to create the venue within which we go to wrestle with God with our deepest questions.
And what we discover is not a systematic answer. What we discover is a portrait of God's character that emerges throughout the story that we are to take with us as we go into the complexities of reality, and justice and suffering and death and pain and joy. And that kind of becomes like a north star guiding us through a complex world. God's character is the north star, and also the function of each of these stories in the broader narrative.
Those are maybe the two main questions that can give us more solid answers than a category or a system. Kayleigh: Hey, guys, this is Kayleigh from South Africa. Thanks and keep up the great work. Tim: Thanks, Kayleigh. We'll talk about that. But it says "quick to anger". Obviously, you notice that in contrast to the phrase "slow to anger.
But I think it's actually a good example of maybe applying what we were just talking about, about this way of engaging the Bible that thinks both in terms of the little tree I'm looking at, but always keep an eye on the forest. Carissa: Psalm It says, this is NIV, "Kiss his son, or he will be angry and your way will lead to your destruction, for his wrath can flare up in a moment. Tim: Yes. So one important distinction here is that this is the anger of the Messianic King.
And his anger is directed towards the tyrants and corrupt rulers of this world who are introducing the opening paragraph of the poem. So the bad guys are in the opening and closing paragraphs.
So you know, they're thinking of your Nebchadnezzars and your and Sennacheribs and your Ashurbanipals, and all the other bad guys in the Bible.
Imperial tyrants. So first of all, if you have never lived under one of those or in the nation, enslaved by one of those, you know, it's always good to be So the hope in Psalm 2 is for a Mashiach, an anointed one, that Yahweh will raise up who will confront those nations.
And in verse 9, break them with a rod of iron and shatter them like earthenware. Welcome to the Psalms. Carissa: This is an example of God's anger being good in the eyes of the psalmist that it's just And specifically, that God employs an agent, namely, the Messianic son. And with evil tyrants, He's quick to get angry and will bring them what they have coming to them.
So that's a portrait of the Messianic king in Psalm 2. This is Psalm 2. There's more. So this is just the first little tile, so to speak, in the mosaic of the Messianic King in the book of Psalms. But then when you move forward, that portrait gets made a little more complex.
Carissa: Totally. Even just the next psalm, Psalm 3, the psalm of David the king, when he fled from his son, Absalom. David is one of the main portraits or figures of this anointed king, and the first collection of Psalms from 3 to 14 shows him on the run, hiding, powerless, weak, and crying out to God for help. You're like, "Oh, so that's what it looks like when God sends a messianic King is he's powerless and he cries out for God to vindicate him.
Carissa, you've worked extensively in the next section of Psalms 15 to And it's very much the same. It's like Psalm 22, for example. Carissa: Totally, yeah.
I think you were going here, but the portrait of the Messianic King is the afflicted one. He's the poor. He's the afflicted. Tim: This is a good example where the biblical authors will often begin a book with one statement and then they'll go on to explore it as the book goes on, and wit and problematizing that and showing like, but then look at this, and then look at this, and then think from this angle, and think from this story, and then from this poem.
And then you walk away with a much richer picture of how that messianic King is going to bring his authority over the evil nations. Jon: What's interesting is that's a much different type of hermeneutic than I think most people were taught in the church. From maybe a specific tradition. Which is, if you find a verse like that in Psalm two that says, "Don't make the Messiah angry Jon: Or specifically His wrath is quickly kindled, you can then take that, attach that verse to an idea, which is the Messiah is going to throw down fast.
And then that's your proof text. That's one type of hermeneutic. Where I hear you saying that there's this other hermeneutic that there's all these portraits and it creates a mosaic.
And if you really want to figure out how the biblical authors think of it, you can't just pull out any one verse card. You have to look at them all together. Carissa: I think that's what Kayleigh is bringing up too is that, okay, so there's a portrait of God being slow to anger and then there's a portrait of the Anointed One being quick to anger.
So it is a complex portrait. Tim: This is great. Kayleigh used the words "there seems to be a contradiction. It actually has a lot to do with my assumptions about how the book works. Is it a contradiction that in a cookbook there's like a recipe with carrots and a recipe without carrots?
Well, no, because I don't expect a recipe book to be all the same. And this explains I think a lot of modern Westerners' frustration with the Bible. Or that when we create too much order out of the Bible, and then you let somebody just go read it from page one, well, their faith is scandalized because it doesn't read as smoothly as the systematized version of the Bible that my tradition gave me.
Nevertheless, I don't think it's very useful to broaden this conversation by you citing more and more examples of Old Testament passages e. If we are to make any progress in this conversation, we need to keep things focused. Perhaps on the concept of authority? Your statement that the legitimacy of political authority comes from democratic elections is clearly false.
Prior to the 18th century, very few government systems were democratically elected though many had the support of the bulk of the people. Your view would imply that before that time, there was no such thing as a just trial. This is absurd. As for abuse of power, I agree that Kim Jung Un does it in spades, but I fail to see how that should make a difference on those rare occassions when his judicial system acts to punish actual wrongdoers.
Does living under an oppressive government make it acceptable to loot your neighbors? If not, then it is legitimate for the oppressive government to punish you for being a thief. I agree with you that elections are a good system for reducing government abuse, but that does not imply that all monarchies are illegitimate by nature, just that they produce good outcomes less frequently.
The Christian answer to your question is that all political authority on earth is ultimately delegated from God, who possesses authority over us because he created us, loves us, and knows us perfectly.
In other words he is not even remotely like Kim Jung Un. Supposing hypothetically that you knew such a being existed if necessary, suppose that the Old Testament passages in question didn't really happen, and postulate whatever is the minimum amount of hypothetical evidence that would make you confident of his existence , would you agree that he would have legitimate authority over you?
And do you also agree that there are at least some things which such a being could legitimately do, which would be presumptuous for a being with lesser power and wisdom to do? PS I agree with St. Dennis' remarks about why trying to prove that the Canaanites practiced child sacrifice is a red-herring:.
But I suppose God doesn't generally want to do so when it would override the will of the person in question. Pharoah hardened his own heart Ex. The word translated as "harden" also means to "strengthen".
God was merely giving Pharoah the psychological strength to do what Pharoah himself wanted to do. I'm also sorry if you feel insulted over the issues of animals. I, of course do not know you and so can only respond to what you put in your posts. What is in your post does seem to show a lack of concern for the animals that are killed and tortured at gods command and by god in the bible.
Your response was:. Presumably God ordered the destruction of the animals for the same reason as the gold and other property: to prevent the Israelites from thinking that the purpose of the genocide was to enrich themselves, and to emphasize the severity of the judgement. Perhaps I have overlooked something, could you can point it out to me?
To answer your question, yes I am vegetarian. But the killing of the animals in the bible seems to go far beyond killing animals for food. They are killed and not eaten and they are not just killed but also tortured.
At no point in your post do I see any empathy for this. I hope you understand my issue is with what you post, I know nothing of you as person. If you are the nicest person in the world and spend all your time working for wounded animals, I will still have the same issue with your post. I hope you will also see that the validity of my arguments do not depend on whether or not I'm a vegetarian. Moreover, god could have made the animals temporarily immobile, he could have given the Israelites a burning pain if they tried to touch the animals, he could have made them invisble, all of this would have given them the same lesson but with less violence.
Yet god chose the way of violence and suffering. You respond: "Killing innocents without sufficiently good reason would indicate that a being is not perfectly good. Of course its possible that god has some good reason for his apparent evil acts.
But its also possible he has an evil reasons for his apparently good acts. Surely we have to assess those agents based on the evidence we see not on a hypothetical reasons that no one has been shown. If I want someone to love and I appear to do evil acts, shouldn't I should explain myself to that person?
If I do not then it seems perfectly reasonable for that person to withdraw their affections. So far I have seen no good explanation in your posts about why god can not only allow so much suffering for animals but actually command it.
Why does he use so much violence when peaceful methods could be used? I have no problem with your belief in god coming from other sources, what I find hard to understand is why someone trained in scientific method, would still not want to test your otherwise derived beliefs against the available observational evidence. Surely no matter how reasonable a theory may seem we must always test it against the evidence wherever we can?
I would not [be] surprised to find one observation not over turning an a compelling piece of theory. But observation after observation, most certainly should. And that is what we see in the bible, time and time agin, if the stories are true, we see gods being needlessly violent.
With regard to authority, I asked what legitimises authority? Your response was god delegating power but this argument would imply that any government that has not been delegated by god has no authority. So a just trial done by a government not delegated by god is not just? How do you know if they are delegated by god or not? What if they could build a mind reading machine? They would then know me perfectly, does that mean they can enslave me?
As we have seen the evidence that the Canaanites committed child sacrifice is not as compelling as many Christian apologists imply. This seems to be a consistent theme. Yet they also say "If the God of the Bible exists and did command the Canaanite genocide, would there be any justification for this act?
We need evidence and the evidence presented is not compelling. Moreover I haven't seen the claim that the Canaanites sacrificed their children nor the Egyptians, nor the pre flood population in the bible. But even if it is there why is child sacrifice worse than killing disobedient chidlren in the case of the Hebrews or keeping slaves as in the Americans?
I have not seen any reason for this. Perhaps even more importantly do you think if we found a society today that killed their children should they be wiped out?
Personally I would not condone genocide even for such a soceity. The Germans of WII killed millions of their own citizens, does that mean a genocide aganst the Germans in would have been justified? Why should god give Pharaoh the psychological strength to lead to the death of so many innocents? The first born of every Egyptian, and their animals, not to mentioned that suffering of the other plagues?
Why would god give pharaoh the strength for this outcome? How is this consistent with a perfectly loving god? Thanks; I had a nice Christmas. But unfortunately I have the flu right now and thus I don't have the energy to make a detailed response to all of your arguments.
But let me clarify what I meant by government having divine authority. I was referring to the Christian doctrine that government is in general authorized by God to do certain things, as St.
Paul says in Romans 13 :. Let everyone be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God. Consequently, whoever rebels against the authority is rebelling against what God has instituted, and those who do so will bring judgment on themselves. For rulers hold no terror for those who do right, but for those who do wrong.
Do you want to be free from fear of the one in authority? Then do what is right and you will be commended. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for rulers do not bear the sword for no reason. Therefore, it is necessary to submit to the authorities, not only because of possible punishment but also as a matter of conscience.
Give to everyone what you owe them: If you owe taxes, pay taxes; if revenue, then revenue; if respect, then respect; if honor, then honor. Paul did not mean, of course, that the Roman government was authorized from God in the sense that God specifically spoke from heaven and said "I command that there be a Roman Senate and Emperor", and that there are other governments which were not authorized.
The only nation which has ever been directly founded by God was ancient Israel, and therefore that was the only legitimate theocracy to ever exist. All other goverments are presumptuous if they seek to enforce a religious code of law.
He meant that God has providentially arranged so that human beings are capable of forming governments for the purpose of justice, using our own wisdom, and that those governments therefore possess real delegated authority from God. Similar to the way God has delegated authority to you to feed your own body and look after it. He didn't need to tell you in a voice from heaven to do that, it's built into his creation.
So when you ask "So a just trial done by a government not delegated by god is not just? Of course this doesn't justify them when they do injustice for example when, somewhat ironically in light of the passage I just quoted, the same Roman government executed St. You are taking isolated things out of context. I never said that creating somebody gives you absolute authority over them. But it does give some authority.
As you know, your parents had quite a lot of authority over you while you were younger. For example a parent is allowed to punish their own child, but not a random adult or a stranger's child. This authority was grounded partly in the fact that they begat and bore you it would be an exaggeration to call this creation given that they have almost no control over the process , but also in additional facts about them and facts about you.
Assuming your parents were ordinary decent people, they would have loved you more than anyone else, devoted time and effort to raising you, knew you better than almost anyone sometimes better than you knew yourself. You on the other hand were weaker, less rational, had a great need to be taken care of and so on. It is therefore quite natural that parents should have nonabsolute authority over their children. When the children grow up they rightly assume control over their own lives, although they always owe their parents respect and honor, not just for bringing them into existence but also for services rendered which cannot ever be fully repayed.
The authority of parents is rightly limited because parents never love or know their children perfectly, and in the end they are the same kind of being. The child does not exist solely for the sake of their parent: their DNA which the parent only transmitted, not controlled has made them into a being who properly has their own independent interests and ambitions.
Now God's authority over you is rooted in a similar natural situation of parent to child, only his authority is absolute because the ratio of his greatness to yours is infinitely greater, even after we grow up. There is no chance of you being right and him being wrong. Also, he created you for a specific purpose, and knows that you will be unhappy if you don't fulfil it.
And he knows better than you do how to acquire true happiness. And yet it is true that he's delegated quite a lot of freedom to you, so apparently he isn't a bossy micromanager either. That seems to presuppose you and the other person are roughly equal in wisdom, so that they can fully understand your reasons for behaving the way that you do and that you have no good reason to withhold the information from them.
But in the case of a parent and a small child, parents may know perfectly well that their explanations won't always satisfy the child, and yet they still reasonably ask them to trust and obey them. Or if a proven good friend whose character you trust says "I can't tell you why I'm doing this without breaking a confidence.
You'll just have to trust me," then that might be reasonable in certain circumstances. If you go back and read my previous comments you will find that I stated twice that no human beings have the right to commit genocide in the absence of specific divine authorization.
So the answer to your question is NO. I have responded to only a small portion of your questions, and yet my reply has still gotten rather long. With these internet exchanges it's best to keep things very tightly focused or they quickly spin out of control. As I said, I don't have the energy to follow up this conversation much longer but don't let that keep other people from responding if they wish.
Of course I think Aron has as well but for some reason you have simply ignored or misunderstood most of what he has said. He had to say more than once that he has answered certain of your accusations against the biblical God and then he repeated his answers, yet you keep repeating the same accusations. So would you go over my comments from the 22nd and point out what you think I have failed to answer? I know you have added some new arguments since the 22nd, e.
In the meantime I will try to go over Aron's and your posts and try to find some arguments to which no one has responded and I will make some comments.
And as Aron mentioned, some other readers may have comments as well. Hope you're feeling better, Aron. Maybe you just need a good break from your blogging. You are making the claim that there is an inconsistency in the Hebrew scriptures such that one cannot claim that the God described there is completely just and good as it claims e.
Gen But if we are going entirely and only by what the Hebrew scripture says, one cannot pick and choose which portions one wants to accept and which one wants to reject. Nevertheless, though it is not needed for the above argument to work, there is good external evidence that the Canaanites did practice child sacrifice.
The cultural connections between Phoenecian Carthage and Canaan, the archeological evidence that they worshiped the same deities, and the references throughout the Bible and other Near Eastern writings provide good evidence that this did happen in Canaan. Hi Aron, Sorry to hear about your flu, hope you are recovered now.
I have been very very busy over the last few months but have finally found some time to reply. I thank you for the time you have spent on it. Dennis Jensen, if I get some more time I will post a reply to your post. When you say that all governments are delegated by god whenever they seek to do justice. I don't see any real argument here, because the phrase "doing justice" is not clearly defined.
For example some Christians feel they are doing justice when they prevent homosexual marriages, others think this is itself unjust. Some Jews feel that it is wrong to drive on the Sabbath, others feel its fine. Some Muslims think blasphemy should be punished by death, others think this is wrong. With respect top parental authority no one is claiming parents have the rights to kill their children or read their inner thoughts.
So I think the analogy is weak. You accept of course that parents have limited authority over their children but only because their knowledge of them is imperfect. You answer is simply: "Didn't I mention something about love".
The questions remains. A parent that doesn't even try to explain their apparently cruel actions is quite possibly an irresponsible parent. You say that parent and the child have to be roughly equal in wisdom, where is the justification for this?
They need to have a minimum amount of knowledge, I see no reason to suggest they have to have an equal amount of knowledge. Surely we have to go on the basis of evidence that we have and not just reconfirm our preconceived notions, which is what it seems you are doing.
How can you seriously claim that the god that supposedly created the entire universe yet is interested in my sex life is not a bossy micro manager? I understand that you think no human being has the right to commit genocide in the absence of divine authorization. But I think you are missing the point.
So my question is, if it was right for god to command the Israelites to kill the Cannonites why would it not be right for the Israelites to kill all the Germans after WWII? To simply hide behind the fact that god didn't command it, doesn't explain why gods commands are just. I also don't see any justification for the torture of the animal found in the bible in your reply.
Quite frankly I have never seen a good justification of this. Let us remind ourselves that god commands the Hebrew armies to severe the Achilles tendons of their opponents horses. God could have just put these horses to sleep but instead he commanded them to tortured instead. One can only assume that you are simply not open to evidence. I find that an incredible state of affairs for someone of the very high level of scientific training you have.
I hope you had a nice Christmas and New Years. So the accusation stands, god is barbaric. Similarly you justify the killing of the Egyptian children and their animals by appealing to the fact that the Israelites were enslaved. That maybe true but the Egyptian children did not enslave them? Would it be just to kill American children for the crimes of slavery? You claim that the Canaanite children were compensated, but it does not say this in the bible, so you are simply assuming that, furthermore do the animals get compensated?
Lets suppose a child molester compensates the said child by buying them lots of things they like; toys, candy etc. Does the compensation mean we ignore the crimes of the molester? Is the molester no longer guilty? I think your answer is extremely callous, imagine watching your mother killed before your eyes. That is extremely worrying. I do not see why the Canaanite civilization needed to be wiped out.
Lets assume they did have child sacrifice, why is that worse that the slavery institutionalized in America for hundreds of years? Would you say that the American civilization should be wiped out?
Where is your evidence that a barbaric practice that a culture is performing at some time T will always be practiced into the indefinite future? Lots of societies were barbaric in the past, including our own. God could use his powers to protect the children from such practice, instead he decided on genocide and we are really to believe he is all loving?
Even if we agree they should be killed, God could have killed the Canaanites peacefully in their sleep; instead he chose the violence of the sword. Coming back to the issues of animals, you claim that animals may not feel pain in any significant manner; do you have any evidence for this? If that is so why do animals chose to take painkillers when in pain? Your alternative is that god has another plan for them, but unless you tell me what this plain is and provide some evidence for it, I have no reason to take such an argument seriously.
The argument from parents and government officials is a fortiori. That is, if parents and judges have some authority despite being human beings with limited wisdom, love, and connection to those they rule over, then how much more authority would reside in a being with infinite love and wisdom who created everything?
This is the same type of argument that Jesus uses in Matthew If you, then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him! That there is disagreement about the exact scope of government authority is irrelevant. All that matters for my argument is that they have some legitimate authority.
But my own personal belief is that, apart from the specific divine authorization to ancient Israel, no government has any buisness imposing a particular religion or religious ritual on anybody else. Do I really need to spell this out for you? The ability to read people's minds would increase our knowledge, but it would not necessarily make us more loving or even more wise.
Furthermore it would be a much lesser degree of knowledge than omniscience. So the parallel to God is lacking. Also I doubt many human beings have the wisdom to handle mind reading; I strongly suspect it would make most people worse parents rather than better. How can you possibly suggest that a God who cares about human beings, could be uninterested in one of the most important parts of human behavior? Which incidentally is also the mechanism for creating new human beings. How could he not be interested in sex?
Your concept of God is much too anthropomorphic, you are thinking of him as a sourpuss and a killjoy rather than as the cosmic artist who created sex in the first place. I assume that God is great enough to be interested in every electron in the universe or it would not exist , so why should he not be interested in the things that people care about? You may as well say that Leonardo de Vinci was a bossy micromanager when he made sure every little fleck of paint on the Mona Lisa was exactly how he wanted it to be.
And yet, when was the last time he spoke from heaven and told you to refrain from a particular sex act you were about to perform? Or made himself so obstrusively present that you felt that your privacy was violated?
Seems to me he's given you quite a bit of space and freedom to make your own choices. Quite the opposite of a micromanager, really. When you consider what God could easily do with his power, it seems to me he shows far more humility and restraint than any human being would, if given absolute power. I don't know whether I would have the right to say it to a grieving mother, but it would be true.
The only thing capable of fulfilling the eternal longings of the human heart is a relationship with God, not with a human child. See Chapter 11 of the Great Divorce by St. As for hamstringing the horses, I don't know what God's exact motives were, but I can speculate. I know you will find this difficult to believe, but although God loves animals he thinks human beings are even more important.
So what he wanted to teach Israel about not relying on cavalry was more important than the sufferings of the horses. Possibly their lives were still better than if they'd just been killed; I'm not in a position to know that. Of course God could have intervened miraculously to teleport them all to a Happy Horse Paradise, but the same could be said about every other evil in the world that God could remove it if he chose to. There's already lots of suffering in Nature due to disease and carnivores.
Presumably God's plan includings limiting the amount of direct intervention he uses, and accomplishing some of his goals through human beings and natural processes instead of doing it all miraculously. Necessarily, some amount of evil must be tolerated as a result, but good also comes from it.
Only God is in a position to know this sort of thing in advance. If we humans acted alone without divine guidance, we would be in danger of pulling up the wheat with the tares Matt. I'm plenty open to the evidence, it's just I'm working from a broader base of evidence than you are. There was an experiment a while back where it looked like neutrinos were going faster than light. Yet most physicists refused to accept the obvious conclusion because they were working from a broader base of evidence than just that one experiment, which indeed turned out to be wrong.
My additional evidence includes: 1 Metaphysical arguments about the fundamental nature of reality of the sort described in my most recent post and the preceeding posts, 2 God's own explicit statements in the Bible that he takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked, and has motives other than cruelty to act the way he does, 3 The New Testament revelation of God's universal love revealed particularly in the life, teaching, and sacrificial death of Jesus, 4 My own personal religious experiences of God, which without exception has revealed God as holy and ethical and loving yet not always nice , 5 the religious experiences of other Christians I respect, which are similar in character.
Since we have not discussed most of these additional sources of evidence something which would take quite some time , you are being much too hasty in accusing me of closed-mindedness. Can't we discuss the particular topic in front of us in a civilized and rational manner, without all of this grandstanding about how irrational and heartless anyone must be to disagree with you? Recall you said governments had the authority of god when they seek to do justice.
I raised the problem of how do we know when they are acting justly or not. If you read the debates that took place over slavery in the 18th and 19th century you will find both sides of that debate used the bible to justify their position.
More importantly the issue is, does the god of the bible really have infinite love and wisdom? Of course if you assume from the outset he does you will get the answer back that you want. Whenever you look at a behavior that looks barbaric you can always assume he has some good reason for it.
It reminds me of stories of wives who are continually beaten up by their husbands and still assume he is the right and its for her own good as he really loves her! But in the case of homosexual sex it is not going to lead to the creation of new humans. Even in the case of hetro sexual sex, this is not necessarily the case.
Killing homosexuals certainly does qualify god as more than a killjoy. Rather, as we engage them with diligence and humility, troubling questions can lead us to deeper faith.
Though we may be tempted to skip over difficult passages like the flood in Genesis, those are exactly the places we should give extra attention, pray about, and explore. When we read the story of the flood as part of the ongoing narrative of redemption , it points beyond itself to the goodness of God.
This violent event in history turns out to be one step along the way of God restoring broken creation. He holds an M.
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