Your just arbitrarily deciding what God should or should not do is a waste of our time. God chooses to act the way he wishes.
If you really believed this, you wouldn't be defending God or declaring him to be good.
His actions here us as its focus. That means that he must allow us to be us. Our limitations must be allowed to limit at times. His purpose was not to create automatons or to step in and force every issue or decision. His manipulation is very rare.
Baloney.
You talked about the context of the rest of the Bible before; well, the Bible is chock full of stories of God speaking to people to change their minds, smiting them, magically rescuing them from perilous situations, and generally making people to abide by his wishes. If you're going to argue that he doesn't interfere with humanity, then you deny all miracles and all revelation... IOW, you deny the context you appeal to.
No, because we are not God. We did not create the child and we have no right to take what we did not create. We also may think he will go to heaven but not being God can't be absolutely sure. God is sure.
And you, apparently.
You're moving the goalposts. Your argument earlier didn't have anything to do with God being God. Your excuse only focused on the fact that the baby avoided a life of suffering.
But if you want to change your mind now, fine - that's your prerogative. So we're back at "it's not evil if God does it."
Your side is killing babies before they are born as some type of sacred right by the millions. You may or may not believe in abortion but your sides of things are the ones that support it. Complaining that God has no right to take back what he made yet people have the right to take millions of them is schizophrenic. I never said it was right because he went to heaven. I said he suffered no loss and therefor your claims of injustice are meaningless.
I don't have the patience to get into a long debate about abortion with you, but I do realize that you're making a tu quoque argument: "God might be bad, but so are you!" It doesn't make God any better.
Being that I am not God the example is meaningless.
You appealed to an analogy with human parenthood to make your point. If it's meaningless, then your point was invalid.
However we lock up (torture in a way) and even kill millions of people to teach the rest of us a lesson. We applaud and reward with medals and museum people who are drafted and are killed in a war to save us, In fact one person suffering for the good of others is the most benevolent act we know of. Again the unbelieving side kills babies by the million for no lesson and for no fault outside their own. There is no moral high ground on your side to argue from. You can't even prove that torturing a child is actually wrong. You either assume it is or smuggle in morality founded on the transcendent and attempt to use it to condemn the transcendent.
I think it's interesting that you've retreated to an argument of "... yeah? Well you're bad, too" as if one person's bad behaviour justifies bad behaviour from someone else.
I will no longer entertain what a non-omnipotent being believes about an omnipotent one. It is meaningless.
You're a non-omnipotent being, right? Should I entertain your arguments for why God is good?
I am saying we do not have the capacity to determine what God could or could not do. nor what he should or should not do.
Actually, in this case, we do, just based on your own position:
- if you say that God is omnipotent, then this means God can do anything.
- if you say that God is perfectly good, then this means God shouldn't do anything evil.
Now... if you want to retract these positions and say that we don't have the capacity to determine that God is omnipotent or perfectly good, then fine... that's definitely one way to resolve the Problem of Evil. Are you?
Let me put it this way he was doing what he did for our sake. He wished to produce a result in us. He wanted David and Israel to come to grips with the fact they had both failed miserably. Would God producing a ping pong table do it? What about making the moon melt? No he had only a certain range of options consistent with us and his purpose to implement.
So I suppose that nobody would ever be convinced to choose the right path by, say,
hearing God speak directly to him, being rendered temporarily blind, and nobody dying at all, eh? It would be silly to believe that anyone's heart could be turned without torturing a baby or two.
He chose that one that after a short stretch of misery took a kid straight to heaven and BTW it worked. This avoided future punishment and made Israel's influence stronger and guaranteed Christ would reach thousands more people.
"It's only one baby we're talking about, and he only tortured him for a week. He's small, so he doesn't count for much."
Saying that anything that applies to the creator of the universe also applies to a corrupt speck of dust in that universe is absurd.
Why? Do kids go to Hell when a human kills them but go to Heaven when God does it?
I always find it funny how unbelievers never use the verse themselves but transform them into the worst possible form they can. Declare they violate a moral code that only exists if God does and would not bind God anyway and condemn a being that have no capability to comprehend fully. Yes the child was sick for a bit. His son hung on a cross for hours, his apostles lived a lifetime of suffering, and his church has been persecuted by the most powerful empires on Earth yet it only made the faith stronger. The child was guaranteed an eternity of bliss for a short time of suffering (BTW many Christian's have felt privileged to suffer for God the way Christ did) at the hands of the being that made him and you call foul. I would give everything I own if it would guarantee the exact same conditions for me and feel honored.
What you choose for yourself is your business. I'm guessing that a few-days-old baby who doesn't have the mental capacity to recognize that his limbs belong to him wasn't in a position to make a free and informed choice about having to endure torture and murder.
Then pick your worst accusation and let's concentrate on it. With the exception of the children that teased the prophet. (I have no answer to that one). All others have been sufficiently justified if God exists.
I disagree, but why not that one? It only takes one case of God being evil for him not to be perfectly good.
Does not help. Evil can't possibly exist without the transcendent.
Assume that maybe it can (since you haven't done anything but assert that it can't).
No I am stating absolute facts and attributing them to their actual source. It is Christians who always oppose abortion and atheists, humanists, materialists who support it in general. Shoot the messenger if you wish because the message can't be.
I'm not taking the bait. I haven't been impressed by the rationality of your arguments about the morality of God, so I have no confidence in your ability to have a reasonable debate about abortion. I'll pass.
Exactly, the one human most able to correctly judge God's actions (not perfectly able but most able) and the one that suffered the greatest loss did not accuse God of being some immoral monster. If the one most qualified to do so didn't then one of the least qualified (you) has no impact.
I don't think it's reasonable to assume that David was thinking rationally.
repeated cycles of violence and reconciliation can result in the following beliefs and attitudes:[6]
The abused thinks that the violence was his or her fault.
The abused has an inability to place the responsibility for the violence elsewhere.
The abused fears for his/her life and/or the lives of his/her children (if present).
The abused has an irrational belief that the abuser is omnipresent and omniscient.
Battered person syndrome - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Let me add something here I should have long ago. We all suffer a lifetime of misery and eventually die based on a judgment from God. Why is the suffering of one child so important in that context? None of it would be if we simply obeyed. We cause the suffering of others by our actions as well.
"It's only one kid - what's the big deal?" :sarcastic
I agree that David's son is only a drop in the bucket compared to the rest of the evil perpetrated by God in the Bible, but I think it serves as a useful test case for discussion.
It is intrinsic because God is. God is not a subjective being he is more objectively real and integral than the universe.
But it wouldn't have been there if God hadn't put it there, right?
If we subtract God from your view of the universe, then human beings lose their value, correct?
I can't find the question. Please slim this thing down to a single claim of God's acting immoral and we can use it to settle the whole issue but not the children and the bald prophet (I gave up on that one).
You haven't exactly done a proper job of explaining why God would torture and murder a baby, so maybe you should finish that before we move on to something else.
And same question as before: why
not the story of the children who get ripped apart by bears?
opcorn:
