Why does my God allow children to die? Is he evil?

[Saint Frankenstein]

God sent his son.--God stated from heaven at his baptism--This is my son the beloved, whom I have approved, LISTEN TO HIM. Few do. If all did--the world would be at peace. A lack of love prevents it. God always makes the right decisions--all of creation is involved, not just individuals. You see little--God has seen it all--you don't have a clue.
If you knew revelations, you would know Gods kingdom is close.

All you do is regurgitate Bible stuff that everyone knows. I'm not ignorant, like I've never heard of Christianity. I know its claims. Unfortunately for you types, I know enough about it to reject it. Christianity has been destroyed in my mind through earnest questioning and learning. Jesus probably didn't even exist. If he did, he was nothing like what the gospels portray him as. The Bible is hardly a history book and contains many fictions. It's myth. None of the religions have the truth.. However, some may be closer than others but the Abrahamic ones are very far from it.

You've all been claiming that "the end is near" for many centuries. It's 2014 now. We're still here. Time to wake up and stop waiting for your imaginary savior to swoop down from the sky (lol, is that what you really believe? Is Jesus kicking it in a spaceship right now?) and kill most of us off.

 

[CG Didymus]

God stated from heaven at his baptism--This is my son the beloved, whom I have approved, LISTEN TO HIM.

So a voice came out of the sky? So God speaks audibly? So why not listen for his voice? Why prophets? Why Jesus? God can speak for himself. Gee, I imagine the whole world must have heard it. Why didn't he say something like "Hey, you down there. Yeah, you, stop sinning." He could have "saved" his son a lot of misery.

 

[kjw47]

So a voice came out of the sky? So God speaks audibly? So why not listen for his voice? Why prophets? Why Jesus? God can speak for himself. Gee, I imagine the whole world must have heard it. Why didn't he say something like "Hey, you down there. Yeah, you, stop sinning." He could have "saved" his son a lot of misery.

Imagine that--this is how intelligent most mortals are------ After what God showed the Israelites before the red sea and that event, within 1 week were building a false god calf out of gold to worship. And nowadays its worse because mortals don't see miracles like that( extremes. )
Noahs day-- 8 humans knew God
The Israelites fell away constantly
Jesus, apostles Christians-murdered.
These last days. ------------ the pattern formed is 99% mislead.

WHY?--- because ones friends or family members wouldn't like it not to follow the crowd.

 

[gilligan8914]

You are asking a yes or no question. YES.

 

[CG Didymus]

You are asking a yes or no question. YES.

Yes, it is a yes or no question, so why doesn't' God speak up once in a while? His people are all over the place with their beliefs about him. He could straighten it all out with just a few words from heaven. Or, is he too busy right now? Or, too frustrated with us to bother?

 

[1robin]

Utterly and self-evidently false, both of the red highlighted sentences.

Well see.

And the blue highlighted sentence is offered as if it were some form of compensation being offered to grateful supplicants! It doesn't wipe out the suffering caused/allowed by God, which remains forever to prove the contradiction.

It was offered up as a far more relevant representation of the character of God. What will be true of eternity is far more relevant in discussing his character than what out sin made true for the microcosmic blink of time. I have had others say God was evil because he allowed servitude or war, yet if he was evil and desired those things why do they not exist in heaven?

With respect you breezily assert ‘no logical problem’ without even attempting to address the contradiction:

For the fourth or fifth time, I see no contradiction. You cannot show that a good God cannot permit evil, especially if that evil results in a greater good and the purpose allowed no other methodology to arrive at the goal. Declaring a contradiction is not to produce one.

P1. If God were all merciful there would be no suffering.

Do you or anyone even know what all merciful means? It certainly does not mean that every action he takes is the most merciful possible? What does that even mean? Merciful for who God, me, creation, certain groups? You are debating against a caricature of God. I could not find him described as all merciful in three translations. He certainly is merciful in that he paid the entire cost to save a doomed race from it's self. But he is also just, he does not simply hand waive away all cruelties we commit against each other. All merciful in the hyperbolic sense would be a travesty of justice and reason. You need to find a characteristic of God actually given in the Bible in it's original language and then complain about it.

The experience of God's people is that God's mercy, unlike human mercy, cannot be exhausted ( 2 Sam 24:14 ; Lam 3:22 ). Yet divine mercy is not blind or dumb; although God tolerated Israel's rebellion with mercy for a very long time ( Nehemiah 9:17 Nehemiah 9:19 Nehemiah 9:31 ; Jer 3:12 ), ultimately ungodliness in Israel was met by a withdrawal of God's mercy, leading to judgment ( Lamentations 2:2 Lamentations 2:21 ; Zech 1:12 ). But even in judgment and discipline God's mercy can be seen and hoped for ( 2 Sam 24:14 ; Psalm 57:1 ; Isa 55:7 ; 60:10 ; Jer 31:20 ; Hab 3:2 ; cf. Tobit 6:17), for it is part of the basic disposition of love toward his people, and it directs his actions ultimately in ways that benefit his people.
Mercy - Definition and Meaning, Bible Dictionary

P2. There is suffering

Conclusion: Therefore there is no all merciful God.
P1 is a necessary truth; P2 is evidential. In order to disprove the conclusion you must show that P1 is false, i.e. that there can be suffering where there can be no suffering, which is impossible, or you must demonstrate that suffering does not exist, which would be absurd since you acknowledge its existence. And ‘justification’ simply states the problem and confirms the contradiction by admitting that there is evil and suffering that has to be dealt with (by more suffering!).

P1 is a caricature not related to what it is being used to label. The whole semantic exercise is based on distortion. There is nothing in revelation that binds God to acting perfectly merciful in all cases. His doing so would be as morally insane as acting perfectly vengeful in all cases. I would only agree with the proposition that his vengeance is far outweighed by his forgiveness.

And it is logically absurd to assert (in both senses of your statement) that evil and God are ‘almost mutually necessary’. (!)

I did not say both God and evil are mutually necessary. I said both God's purpose and the existence od evil are mutually necessary if we failed the test. God could have either created another creation that lacked true love and avoided evil or created nothing at all and still been as much God as ever.

 

[1robin]

You really ought to support the name-dropping with the actual arguments. I'm familiar with Aquinas' arguments, and I consider hen to be rather weak. But I know you're a Youtube fan, so why not give us Plantinger and Craig's arguments, in your own words, and we'll see how well they stand up?

I do not watch u-tube normally. In fact I cannot even get it on the same server as the one I use to debate.

You might consider (hen) Aquinas weak but history does not. (I have heard many claim that theological is the greatest theological work ever written beyond the bible by men who are qualified to know). Are you asking me to supply Craig's and Plantinga's works on the problem of evil in a post? Craig alone required a book to do so. Since you obviously know I cannot even give a summary of so much detailed work in a forum and you have as much access to their works as I do, what is your really asking?

 

[1robin]

My understanding of Christianity was slightly different-- that God could not abide us due to the stain of sin. I am sure support can be found for both theological positions, however, so I won't belabor it.

I am not really disagreeing with you. It is just very complicated. We were perfect, falling from perfection through sin is what separated us from God, but it is not what keeps us separated from him. God can legally declare us perfect based on his sons 'record' even though ours is marred with sin.

Regardless, a relationship takes two to tango. If God wants a relationship, he cannot put all the onus upon an imperfect person, born into a world full of darkness and without understanding.

My Lord, unlike man made religions that try and earn their way back to God by cutting others hearts out, taking drugs and dancing till they pass out, or creating 10,000 pages of ceremonies and rules God does 100% of the work in Christianity. Our sole necessity is belief. How in the world can that be too much?

If God wanted us to be free to choose him, then why are the cards so stacked against us? We are not free to choose, and no one has been since Adam and Eve. By this, I mean, we do not have the ability to make a true decision; we can make a choice as in a random lottery-- Door #1 or Door #2-- but we have not been given the information required to know what is behind Door #1 or Door #2, or why we should choose one over the other.

The cards are not stacked against us, our hearts are stacked against him. People in positions ten thousand times worse than your our ours have believed. There are people that were given miracles that denied him and people unjustly incarcerated or racked with a lifetime of pain that have loved him. It is not the evidence, it the lens through which the evidence is viewed. My case is typical. When I had more evidence that ever I lacked faith. It was only later after the good times and evidence was tempered with suffering and darkness that I could comprehend the contrast. It takes darkness to prove light is valuable and preferable in most cases.

God knows where I am. But I don't know where he is. God knows the depths of my heart. I have no clue who God is. It seems silly to blame the person without any knowledge (or else, someone who has been given misinformation) of doctors for running away from them; it seems preposterous to tell a person that it was their fault for freezing when they have never experienced fire.

For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities--his eternal power and divine nature--have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.
Romans 1:20 For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities--his eternal power and divine nature--have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.

Just the sheer wonder of creation is enough to spend a lifetime seeking it's possible creator. You have 750,000 of the most scrutinized and treasured words in human history to start with. You can theoretically understand a great deal about God from that source alone. God promises that he will meet anyone who diligently seeks him. Can you truly do that? If not can you therefor blame God. There are also hundreds of millions of people alive who claim to have met a risen Christ spiritually. How many have you requested their testimony from. Faith despite what we might believe has no neutrality. No one is on the fence even if we think we are. I can tell you may have a sincere desire for answers but have an insincere filter your looking through for them. Every statement you make is a complaint.

Condemning people to death for one mistake is not reasonable. Making the same punishment for large and small crimes is not just. Refusing to acknowledge, and actively belittling, attempts to be good is counter-intuitive.

Death is coming like it or not, and not for any one sin alone. All of us have purposefully or inadvertently causes ripples of damage we will never know the extent of. Might as well not eliminate the only way out. You are never going to find God if you resent him. I know because I did for years.

Killing an innocent person in order to "pay the wage of sin"-- a payment that God himself created and could have simply let go at any time-- is monstrous.

We build museums and give medals to the "innocent" who sacrifice themselves for others. God did not demand anyone die for us. Christ volunteered to fix the mess we created. he is the most beloved man that ever lived and displayed the greatest sacrifice possible. Now if you can hate that can you wonder if you do not find God?

If belief in God is all God wants, then jesus' sacrifice was completely unnecessary, BTW. If sin isn't what's keeping us from God, then why did Jesus need to die? Why couldn't all of us sinners just say "I believe and love you Lord and I will do my best to serve you, even though I know I will make mistakes now and then."

It was not belief in him that he wanted. He said even Satan and the demons belief in him. He wanted us to belief in a sort of generalized fact of the matter. That we blew it, and he fixed it, at his own expense. It is a belief in his character and a reckoning with our he wants faith in. That last sentence does not convey an acceptance of the enormous damage sin has done and the extent of the foul. Allah hand waives sin away, God's perfect justice meant a price must be paid, only he bore it all for those who will accept it. It is not an admission of the facts he wants, it is an admission of the extent and cost of the facts.

Continued below:

 

[1robin]

No hostility, and no logical inconsistency. It's a very simple question. God made all the rules. So, you cannot use a rule to explain why God had to act a certain way. God chose to set things up in a way that made it impossible for humans to ever please him.

God did not make all the rules. God is the rule in many cases. God did not chose to make murder wrong, the fact murder is wrong is a property of his nature. God did not invent morality, he is the locus of morality. He chose the purpose for creation but that purpose came with necessities. For example love cannot be love without freewill any more than a square can have curved sides.

So God made me insane, or gave me a faulty sense of morality? How is that my fault?

No God made men sane. Men choose insanity and call it sanity. Chesterton said men mostly agree upon what is right, they just disagree on what wrongs to excuse. Me and you know killing is wrong, yet the secular liberal mentality makes killing a convicted murderer wrong and killing a million lives in the womb right based on claims to a right a women does not have without God an the very right they take from the child. WE are not born thinking that is right. We know it is wrong yet we call it right so we can do as we wish and destroy the very foundation that makes it wrong to begin with. Nietzsche said because poets killed God in the 19th century a general madness would prevail in the 20th and that it would be the bloodiest in history. Not only was it bloodier than all previous centuries combined he went insane himself.

God walked with Adam. I would kill for that. To have such evidence.

So would I , yet people in prison camps with not even a bible have come to faith, people living in empires set on destroying faith of any kind have come to faith, people who have never lived a disease free day have come to faith. It is not the evidence it is the heart that beholds it.

Did Adam have free-will?

Yes.

He lived in the Garden of Eden. No suffering. Adam also knew God. He was able to talk to God. This did not curtail his ability to choose, did it?

No, I never suggested it did. I do not understand the point. He could have reclaimed faithful or he could have messed up. he did the latter. Also the Adam story may very well be an analogy or partially so. For stories before the historical period I do not draw concrete conclusions about context.

Well, that's actually one of those famous philosophical debates (Euthyphro dilemma): Is it Good because God loves it? Or does God love it because it is Good? You take the former.

It was a very famous one and an irrelevant one, I do not take either. I take the God's nature mandates moral truth position.

But I don't think I was talking about moral law. I think moral laws are things like "don't hurt people on purpose", "don't murder", "don't steal", "don't lie", etc.

The point is none of those are true unless God exists. Hurting people maybe socially unfashionable but only with God is it actually wrong. Hitler actually thought (using the exact methods any atheist would employ) that he was helping mankind by hurting a certain group. As Dawkins so honestly put it without an objective standard no one can say he was actually wrong.

I don't think there is any moral law that says "If you are mean to your sister even once, that means you deserve to be tormented in hell forever" or "Because your great-great-great-great-etc-grandfather ate a piece of fruit God told him not to eat, the entire world must be cursed and every woman must have pain at childbirth." And other such things that God does (or people claim that God does).

You and I have both denied our maker, taken his name in vain, sided with Satin, hurt others on scales we have no possibility to ever know. Let's not blame our condemnation of others. No one is going to Hell only for pinching his sister or for what Adam ate.

This is kinda sick. Humans have worth.

My evaluation of something has no potential to actualize that value. It doe snot exist outside my mind and my mind is not the arbiter of truth. For example if I was to aim a gun at someone you value and you protested that they had value to you, I would say not to me and pull the trigger and have offended nothing but your sensibilities. Now if that were to take place and you said that person had actual objective value and I killed them I would actually have done wrong and will be judged for it. One standard either produces 6 billion differing opinions or the opinion of the strongest subgroup of them and never makes anything actually wrong ever. The other has one objective standard rooted in fact. One makes torturing a child socially unfashionable one makes it wrong. If the Nazi's had won the war and exterminated all opposition then your standard would have made killing the Jews ok but mine would have still condemned it. My morality is plugged into unmovable truth, secular morality is untethered to objective foundations and is available to be plugged into anyone's preference based foundation. The only place it can't be plugged into is truth.

 

[1robin]

Justification for morality: To make living within a community easier and to reduce personal likelihood of suffering.

So you have redefined morality as equal to the least suffering. Hitler thought killing off all the Jews would make the world better, stronger, and more productive ultimately making it better in all categories. Now you would say Hitler was wrong but he used the exact standards you did, but happen to arrive at another conclusion. How many tyrannical genocidal maniacs thought they were doing wrong. Most thought their actions somehow good for humanity like communist utopias, etc... You would have two choices agree with them, or do what the world actually does in these circumstances and appeal to objective values your worldview does not contain. The civil rights movement, Gandhi's protests, and the American revolution began in a bath of blood and no one knew they would ever produce anything better. Your system above would have had to condemn them all. However they could all take the pain and keep moving forward based on objective rights and wrongs that do not exist in your system. Not to mention many of our morals do not maximize ease and pain free lives. The highest moral acts of all are usually ones that include great pain and even loss of life. Following your criteria we should have all joined the Nazi's and not lost 50 million lives stopping him.

Why's it gotta be any more complex than that?

Because life is.

Good and evil are not clearly understood and delineated. So why should you expect one theory to completely explain our sense of morality?

They certainly are not without God. They gain much clarity given God. That si the whole issue.

Even divine command theory, in which morality comes from God, doesn't explain everything clearly and perfectly.

It si not meant to, it is designed to found everything not clarify everything. I am making an ontological point not an epistemological one.

No response to Bundy is required. Whether morality is relative or absolute there will still be Bundy's out there.

I did not ask you to remove future Bundy's. I asked you to find a flaw in his reasoning if God does not exist.

As for the frightening prospect of moral relativism, I think it's a philosophical bogeyman. Even if morality has been created by the subjective preferences of humans, there are still objective reasons for preferring a society (and people) with a sense of morality that is typical of most people. It is also the case that society enforces its morality essentially as an objective standard. Simply replace society with God and there's not much difference between a relative morality that has developed due to society and one that God decided upon.

It is a clear and present horror. If we can consider the murder of human lives in the womb based on convenience by the hundreds of millions not something to be alarmed about then we are truly morally insane. There is a huge difference , one is based on fact and the other on preference and opinion. Try and re-write all natural laws based on guesswork and see ho many space shuttles you can make work.

The same way God has been proven to exist?

What?

Obviously, these philosophical arguments have not convinced me. They all tend to boil down to "free will demands that suffering exists." I don't buy this. Free will doesn't require cancer any more than it requires us to be able to breathe underwater.

Those arguments have stood for hundreds of years for a reason and that does not include what you thought of them. I doubt seriously you have read them in full. However cancer is a different. God originally supervised nature and no cancer existed. When we told God to shove off and we did not need him (as another poster said) he granted our wish to a degree and stopped directly supervising nature. Tornados now rip off roofs, cells mutate into terrible diseases, and hurricanes flood cities. One passage is very important on this subject. In the OT a tornado or great wind ripped through someplace and the bible said but God was not in the wind. That means that God does not send tornados to kill us but our rejection of him prevents him from stopping them at times. Here is a bonus. My grandparents are those good kind of Christians that really make a difference. They plus other family members just like them lived in three houses lined up in a row in Birmingham Alabama. A terrible tornado came straight up that street. It got to the first house and split in two. It went past al three of their houses and came back together. I think God at times intervenes but generally gives us what we chose, our own way.

Why not?

If you cannot see the necessity for what I requested I do not think elaboration will help.

If God gave us the ability to discern right from wrong, then surely it is valid to use this sense to determine whether something is right or wrong. I see no reason why God's actions should be exempt.

However this reasonable method would go horribly wrong if there were no God to give us this sense would it not? You cannot deny God but utilize what he provides.

Neither should God be above his own law. If it is not moral for us to punish the children of a murderer for the crimes of their father, then neither is it moral for God to do so.

I never suggested he was. He is perfectly consistent with his own law. Yet we who do not have absolute sovereignty, do not create life, and do not know the future are subject to laws that he is not. The exact same way we are not subject to the laws we give to children.

I know the Gospel. I still think it was a pretty bad plan, both logistically and morally. Note that Jesus could still be sincere, his death could still provide salvation, even if my contention that the whole thing was sick and mismanaged is true.

I have never heard that one before.

Thanks for your time!

You bet. You seem like a respectful but committed debater.

 

[1robin]

God could've done a better job by not being so hung up on rules, being petty and narcissistic by demanding that we love and worship him, make his desires for us known in an absolutely clear way instead of having flawed humans with agendas write down in his "word" in an extremely vague way, making himself more apparent in our lives, not leaving us to suffer when we do believe in him and cry out to him, etc. Basically your god comes off as a sadist who loves to punish us when we don't even have half of the information needed in order to make a clear choice in life. The Bible isn't clear about much of anything. It's like your god is playing a game and enjoys watching us fumble throughout life and suffer. We've been waiting for centuries for this god to come back and fix things. We just get silence in return. Al Pacino's character in the Devil's Advocate was totally right about your god.

Oh, yeah - the Bible god could've done a much, much better job.

Besides a complaint do you have any actual proofs for any of this? God sucks is not really an argument nor something unexpected from a Satanist.

 

[1robin]

All you do is regurgitate Bible stuff that everyone knows. I'm not ignorant, like I've never heard of Christianity. I know its claims. Unfortunately for you types, I know enough about it to reject it. Christianity has been destroyed in my mind through earnest questioning and learning. Jesus probably didn't even exist. If he did, he was nothing like what the gospels portray him as. The Bible is hardly a history book and contains many fictions. It's myth. None of the religions have the truth.. However, some may be closer than others but the Abrahamic ones are very far from it.

You've all been claiming that "the end is near" for many centuries. It's 2014 now. We're still here. Time to wake up and stop waiting for your imaginary savior to swoop down from the sky (lol, is that what you really believe? Is Jesus kicking it in a spaceship right now?) and kill most of us off.

Most of this is just a complain again but I will point out one thing.

The majority of NT scholars agree to these three historical events among many others.

1. Jesus appeared in history with an unprecedented sense of divine authority.
2. He was crucified and died on a Roman cross.
3. His tomb was found empty.
4. Eyewitnesses sincerely recorded his appearance to them even among his enemies after death.

None of this proves him the messiah but that is by far the best explanation and he is also the most textually attested character in ancient history. If you deny his historicity you can not grant anyone else's without a double standard.

 

[AmbiguousGuy]

The majority of NT scholars agree to these three historical events among many others.

1. Jesus appeared in history with an unprecedented sense of divine authority.
2. He was crucified and died on a Roman cross.
3. His tomb was found empty.
4. Eyewitnesses sincerely recorded his appearance to them even among his enemies after death.

That simply isn't true. You are posting false claims about NT scholars.

Very few NT scholars, for example, believe that there are eyewitness accounts of the life of Jesus. One can't believe that after examining the evidence.

 

[johnhanks]

So you [Favlun] have redefined morality as equal to the least suffering.

Not to speak for Favlun, but I think he was looking at morality as an enabling mechanism for cooperation and reduction of potentially harmful confrontation. (If I've misread him, I'm sure he'll correct me.) Such a mechanism requires no divine origin, though its adherents may well claim one to make it even more authoritative.

Following your criteria we should have all joined the Nazi's and not lost 50 million lives stopping [Hitler].

About 20% of those deaths were on Hitler's side; most of the rest were Soviet, and until Operation Barbarossa the Soviets did indeed have a non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany. The idea that "we" lost 50 million lives proactively resisting Nazism is infantile, as is the notion that Favlun's idea of morality would logically lead "us" to fall in with Nazi ideology.

 

[1robin]

That simply isn't true. You are posting false claims about NT scholars.

Very few NT scholars, for example, believe that there are eyewitness accounts of the life of Jesus. One can't believe that after examining the evidence.

No, that is true and you are posting false claims about me. I have even posted the evidence for it. Since it won't make any difference I will leave it to you to look it up.

Here is a quick example:

Most modern scholars of antiquity agree that Jesus existed,[8][9][10][11] but scholars differ on the historicity of specific episodes described in the Biblical accounts of Jesus,[12] and the only two events subject to "almost universal assent" are that Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist and was crucified by the order of the Roman Prefect Pontius Pilate.[13][14][15] Elements whose historical authenticity is disputed include the two accounts of the Nativity of Jesus, as well as the resurrection and certain details about the crucifixion.[16][17][18][19][20][21]
Historical reliability of the Gospels - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

[AmbiguousGuy]

No, that is true and you are posting false claims about me. I have even posted the evidence for it. Since it won't make any difference I will leave it to you to look it up.

Here is a quick example:

Most modern scholars of antiquity agree that Jesus existed,[8][9][10][11] but scholars differ on the historicity of specific episodes described in the Biblical accounts of Jesus,[12] and the only two events subject to "almost universal assent" are that Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist and was crucified by the order of the Roman Prefect Pontius Pilate.[13][14][15] Elements whose historical authenticity is disputed include the two accounts of the Nativity of Jesus, as well as the resurrection and certain details about the crucifixion.[16][17][18][19][20][21]
Historical reliability of the Gospels - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Where does it say that most NT scholars think the gospels to have been written by eyewitnesses?

I'd like to see that.

 

[1robin]

Not to speak for Favlun, but I think he was looking at morality as an enabling mechanism for cooperation and reduction of potentially harmful confrontation. (If I've misread him, I'm sure he'll correct me.) Such a mechanism requires no divine origin, though its adherents may well claim one to make it even more authoritative.

My point was that morality cannot be redefined as happiness, ease of living, or human flourishing. Morality is not any of those things specifically. It is a set of laws concerning absolute right and wrong. Even the Pagan Roman's separated rules against societal norms (mallum prohibitum), and violations against objective reality (mallum en se). Morality is not ethics. Ethics can be derived without God moral truths cannot.

Let me illustrate one problematic example:

If we claim human flourishing is the goal. Without God this is simple speciesm because we have no way to credit humans life with more worth than any other biological life. We simply oppress cows the same way we would a slave yet call it moral. That is not morality, it is moral hypocrisy. However if God exists then humans do have an objective right and value that allows us to eat other biological forms. Multiply that one example times a million and the gross deficiency of ethics over morality is obvious.

About 20% of those deaths were on Hitler's side; most of the rest were Soviet, and until Operation Barbarossa the Soviets did indeed have a non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany. The idea that "we" lost 50 million lives proactively resisting Nazism is infantile, as is the notion that Favlun's idea of morality would logically lead "us" to fall in with Nazi ideology.

However all were the result of Hitler's actions or the actions of cultures acting on ideas contrary to the Bible and without God no objective criteria existed to indicate who was right. I did not see the need for perfect clarity here to make the point. Let me add some since you seem to desire it.


Most of the deaths in WW2 were the direct result of several main factors.

1. Nietzsche's philosophy. (Hitler personally gave a copy of Nietzsche's work to Mussolini and Stalin)
2. Accurate or distorted extrapolations from evolution.
3. Race superiority (which evolution would easily justify because it has never made two equal things ever).
4. False idolatry (which may have been the worst of all).

This kind of glosses over greed, hate, etc.... because the above is what justified their actions regardless of what motivated them. Military history is my favorite subject and wanted to make sure you did not mistake unfamiliarity with brevity. 50 millions lives were laid on the alter of not having a universal Biblical morality. Not one verse in the bible could have justified a single axis action.

 

[SkepticThinker]

This kind of glosses over greed, hate, etc.... because the above is what justified their actions regardless of what motivated them. Military history is my favorite subject and wanted to make sure you did not mistake unfamiliarity with brevity. 50 millions lives were laid on the alter of not having a universal Biblical morality. Not one verse in the bible could have justified a single axis action.

Wait a minute though ... haven't you said that your god wrote his absolute morality on our hearts or something along those lines? So if we've all got the same morality written into our makeup, how it is that morality differs among individuals and cultures as well as over time?

 

[1robin]

Where does it say that most NT scholars think the gospels to have been written by eyewitnesses?

I'd like to see that.

When that is part of the claims I made I will include that. Just can't get a handle on that admitting you might have been mistaken thing so far, huh?

 

[1robin]

Wait a minute though ... haven't you said that your god wrote his absolute morality on our hearts or something along those lines?

I also must have said a thousand times we have made a career of ignoring what our conscience dictates. We can even as the bible says seer our consciences to a level we no longer hear anything from them.

So if we've all got the same morality written into our makeup, how it is that morality differs among individuals and cultures as well as over time?

Morality has differed very little as far as general principles go. Chesterton said men do not have a problem agreeing what is wrong, they just disagree about what wrongs to excuse. Since the two primary themes in the Bible are we know what is right, yet we do not always choose it reality as usually reflects this accurately. Very few cultures have ever legalized murder, they just differ on which killings they will consider murder. All of us agree in principle yet the evil take advantage of real or invented ambiguity in apprehension.