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The problem with your argument is that you equate God on a human standard and that's apples to oranges. We are not equal to God. The creation and creator are not the same. God's operations are on a universal eternal scale that goes well beyond our limited human understanding. Even so, I can grasp that there would be consequences to God meddling with human's free will and that's what you are asking here.
God didn't force these women to be raped. These are all events that took place because of sinful man's free will of choice. If you think a moral God must stop all rapes. What's next? Stop all bank robberies? Stop all crimes? Eventually you will have God forcing you to drive the speed limit and free will has been eliminated. God operates on a individual level with those who desire a personal relationship with Him. He will end all evil and sinful man's freedom will eventually in one big final scourge.
No, the real question is why should we expect God to keep on blessing and protecting us personally if we betray Him? That's what David did. God gave him everything, and yet he had a man murdered so he could sleep with the guy's wife. That's a terrible betrayal of respecting God's laws. As a result, that sin set off a chain reaction that led to David's son betraying him and taking his wives. If you sin, you pay the consequences. Demanding God to always remove those consequences is asking God to go against His own nature.
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Also, the passage still doesn't say that these women were raped. They may have freely desired Absalom. But as typical, atheists will refuse to consider cultural context and read in the most foul negative interpretation due to their hatred of God's Word.
Don't you get the least bit tired of accusing those who disagree with you as hating your god. You get told over and over again that it is not that we hate your god, as you cannot hate what you do not believe exists, but that we disagree with how people like you will go to any lengths to take the darkest passages of the Bible and make it all sound rosy. The non raping of women that you claim, so God tells the men to kill all the men, women who have known men and the male children (and sometimes the livestock as well) and take the female virgins for themselves and you explain that this was really a good thing for those women and they were willing to marry and have sex with the men who murdered their mothers, brothers and older sisters.
Some one in the Bible, perhaps a major player in it said that God was both jealous and vengeful. You know the Bible well enough to find that passage, I think that it is somewhere near where it says to not bear false witness upon one' neighbours. That he ordered the killing of the entire village save the virgins may have been his vengeance for all you know but you will not use that reasoning as it does not make your God sound good in light of his character having been re-written in the sequel.
God does tell his people to not work on the Sabbath, to not bear false witness, to not murder but where is the command to not rape any woman? Or to not treat women as property? Where does it say in your Bible that the women in a captured city were willing to go with the men who murdered their families? Under what context would a woman be a willing player in that part? In what context would killing little boys or livestock be self defence. Those are not your God's words or in the Bible but the words of you, Jeffbase40 defending those actions to make them sound righteous. Don't hid behind God and attack the personalities of those who disagree with your sugar-coating those actions.
Why does your God even tell us that he is vengeful if he never took vengeance? What I do not get is that you and others like you tell us that our morals come from the Bible and yet when someone points out something that does not sound what we today consider moral, you defend the Bible as saying both that God can do what he likes and that we cannot understand why God did something or allowed something to happen. I could easily infer that the laws of war which do not allow an army to go in and slaughter all the civilians or all but the virgins which they can take for themselves are laws that are immoral and go against the desires of God.
And for I think the third time in this one posting, I do not hate your God nor do other atheists. This thread is not even if God exists or if God is good but how do some believe parts of the Bible that appear absorbed and got side tracked into how you can accept as good or at lest not bad, those dark passages of the OT.
Last edited by mensaguy; 12-09-2016 at 03:56 AM..
Reason: Fixed quote tag
The problem with your argument is that you equate God on a human standard and that's apples to oranges.
No. We hold your god (assuming it exists for the sake of the discussion) to an infinitely higher standard than that of humans...and as 99/100 humans would stop the rape if they were able too, we would expect your omnimax god to do so as well.
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We are not equal to God.
That's right. So if we would stop it if we were able then your god, who is infinitely more powerful than us should also stop it.
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Even so, I can grasp that there would be consequences to God meddling with human's free will...
What about the victims 'free-will' not to be raped.
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God didn't force these women to be raped. These are all events that took place because of sinful man's free will of choice. If you think a moral God must stop all rapes. What's next? Stop all bank robberies? Stop all crimes?
Yes...why not. Don't you think that would be an improvement for society??
IMO, it is clear that the Bible condones and sanctions immorality. These religions have been dragged kicking and screaming out of the dark ages of Bronze Age Judaism. This also applies to Islam. The immoral radicals we see are the ones truly practicing their religion. Thank secular humanity that Judaism and Christianity have weaselled into the 21 century.
The problem with your argument is that you equate God on a human standard and that's apples to oranges. We are not equal to God. The creation and creator are not the same. God's operations are on a universal eternal scale that goes well beyond our limited human understanding. Even so, I can grasp that there would be consequences to God meddling with human's free will and that's what you are asking here. God didn't force these women to be raped. These are all events that took place because of sinful man's free will of choice. If you think a moral God must stop all rapes. What's next? Stop all bank robberies? Stop all crimes? Eventually you will have God forcing you to drive the speed limit and free will has been eliminated. God operates on a individual level with those who desire a personal relationship with Him. He will end all evil and sinful man's freedom will eventually in one big final scourge.
So, might makes right and wrong is only doing what might declares wrong on a "do as I say and NOT as I do basis?"
You keep ducking the point: God TOLD them to rape the women according to your Bible.
Don't you get the least bit tired of accusing those who disagree with you as hating your god. You get told over and over again that it is not that we hate your god, as you cannot hate what you do not believe exists, but that we disagree with how people like you will go to any lengths to take the darkest passages of the Bible and make it all sound rosy. The non raping of women that you claim, so God tells the men to kill all the men, women who have known men and the male children (and sometimes the livestock as well) and take the female virgins for themselves and you explain that this was really a good thing for those women and they were willing to marry and have sex with the men who murdered their mothers, brothers and older sisters.
Actions speak louder than words and the actions are that atheists relentlessly spend every day venomously attacking Christianity, the Bible and Christians exclusively and then turn around and tell me that you simply think God is fiction. That has to be a level of anger to commit yourself especially considering your brief time of existence on this rock to such an activity. And where there is anger, there is hate. And you pollinate such fears by trying to paint God has cruel and evil.
Atheists appear more outraged by an OT passage that they claim is raping then real life present day religious groups like ISIS who RAPE and kidnap women as sex slaves. Why are you not talking about them? Given the circumstances, having a husband back then was a GOOD thing. Starvation or prostitution were your other alternatives.
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Originally Posted by badlander
Some one in the Bible, perhaps a major player in it said that God was both jealous and vengeful. You know the Bible well enough to find that passage, I think that it is somewhere near where it says to not bear false witness upon one' neighbours. That he ordered the killing of the entire village save the virgins may have been his vengeance for all you know but you will not use that reasoning as it does not make your God sound good in light of his character having been re-written in the sequel.
If you are going to use the Bible to attack Christians, at least study the culture and language before applying modern day interpretations. Some words in the OT have multiple meanings and context. The Bible was meant to be studied deeply and read over and over.
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Originally Posted by badlander
God does tell his people to not work on the Sabbath, to not bear false witness, to not murder but where is the command to not rape any woman? Or to not treat women as property? Where does it say in your Bible that the women in a captured city were willing to go with the men who murdered their families? Under what context would a woman be a willing player in that part? In what context would killing little boys or livestock be self defence. Those are not your God's words or in the Bible but the words of you, Jeffbase40 defending those actions to make them sound righteous. Don't hid behind God and attack the personalities of those who disagree with your sugar-coating those actions.
My original point stands. You can not find a verse where God DIRECTLY says He approves of rape. You are just pasting your own scenario into the text without knowing all the circumstances and facts.
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Originally Posted by badlander
Why does your God even tell us that he is vengeful if he never took vengeance? What I do not get is that you and others like you tell us that our morals come from the Bible and yet when someone points out something that does not sound what we today consider moral, you defend the Bible as saying both that God can do what he likes and that we cannot understand why God did something or allowed something to happen. I could easily infer that the laws of war which do not allow an army to go in and slaughter all the civilians or all but the virgins which they can take for themselves are laws that are immoral and go against the desires of God.
Do you believe evil should be punished and wiped out? If so then why do you blast God for doing this?
jeffbase, it is the ISIS mindset that is so apparent in your belief system when you defend OT perceptions that atheists (and anyone with a concern for PEOPLE) object to.
Actions speak louder than words and the actions are that atheists relentlessly spend every day venomously attacking Christianity, the Bible and Christians exclusively and then turn around and tell me that you simply think God is fiction. That has to be a level of anger to commit yourself especially considering your brief time of existence on this rock to such an activity. And where there is anger, there is hate. And you pollinate such fears by trying to paint God has cruel and evil.
Atheists appear more outraged by an OT passage that they claim is raping then real life present day religious groups like ISIS who RAPE and kidnap women as sex slaves. Why are you not talking about them? Given the circumstances, having a husband back then was a GOOD thing. Starvation or prostitution were your other alternatives.
If you are going to use the Bible to attack Christians, at least study the culture and language before applying modern day interpretations. Some words in the OT have multiple meanings and context. The Bible was meant to be studied deeply and read over and over.
My original point stands. You can not find a verse where God DIRECTLY says He approves of rape. You are just pasting your own scenario into the text without knowing all the circumstances and facts.
Do you believe evil should be punished and wiped out? If so then why do you blast God for doing this?
Since when has disagreement meant outrage and pointing out things that YOU said means blasting God. Actually what ISIS is doing is just following the OT. Do you have any evidence that they are not following God's word?
Find me a verse where God DIRECTLY says that same sex marriage if a sin or that homosexuality is a sin. You seem to have no trouble attacking science and calling evolution a lie when you clearly have no clue how it works or what evidence there is for it.
Show me where in the Bible does it say that disagreeing with Jeff's explanations is an attack on God and Christianity. The OT is not even the domain of Christians. I would argue the same if I was religious as I most likely would be following Judaism considering my ancestors. If I was set out to attack Christians and God I would do so on the Christianity Forum where I often read but very seldom post and my only posts are to address something that was said. And you know something I have never been told I hate God or Christians or that I have attacked the Bible by anyone on that forum. But here if I find fault in what a human poster claims and excuses, you accuse me of being mad at God , at hating him and being hateful of Christians. You are full of it, false accusations that is.
The fact is that unmarried women in some other cultures at this time were not disrespected to the extent that you portray was the standard of the time and the best that could be expected for them. This is a forum in which each thread has a topic and I was addressing posts on this topic, not ISIS or climate change or any other unrelated subject. We all know that what ISIS or the Lord's Army are doing is wrong and must be stopped, the Lord's Army claim to be Christians by the way and yet Christians focused on the wrongs of Muslims and ignore that by Christians. You know that there are sex slaves in the United States right now and yet you post here instead of combatting it.
I fail to see how going to Syria or wherever and killing the children of ISIS fighters is wiping out evil or the taking of their daughters will help in getting rid of ISIS. In fact I think it will draw people into their cause, nor do I think that going into inner city of Chicago and killing all the blacks there is the right way to combat the high crime rate that is occurring. But you make the claims that all the people that the Israelites killed were evil, on what grounds other than God told them to kill them.
This is a forum and if you expect that you can say anything you what without some one here being able to disagree with you because you believe in a god is plain outright silly. If anyone displays anger and hatred on this forum I would point to you, anyone who disagrees with you is a non believe no matter how religious they are, atheists are all mean and selfish, gays are bullies and so forth. You even attack anyone who offers you pointers on how to get your view across better.
Have a good day I am sure that you will pick out something on this post to twist and claim it was an attack on your God. He claims he is vengeful but you claim he only does things for the best. Who is mistaken on this, you or God?
The problem with your argument is that you equate God on a human standard and that's apples to oranges. We are not equal to God. The creation and creator are not the same. God's operations are on a universal eternal scale that goes well beyond our limited human understanding.
No, we would not be equal to god, we'd be inferior to him -- less wise, less powerful, and presumably less moral. So all I am doing is noting that even we unwise, weak, immoral humans would see this as a morally unambiguous scenario and would know what the right thing to do is. So precisely because I am for the sake of argument allowing that your god would be even MORE morally advanced than his puny creations, it is all the MORE inexcusable that he does NOT do the right thing here.
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Originally Posted by jeffbase40
Even so, I can grasp that there would be consequences to God meddling with human's free will and that's what you are asking here.
Since your god is omnipotent there need be no consequences that would limit his intervention. He can do anything he wants, including "meddling with free will" and yet having no consequences. Unless you want to argue that god is limited in some way which means he isn't, in fact, omnipotent.
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Originally Posted by jeffbase40
God didn't force these women to be raped. These are all events that took place because of sinful man's free will of choice.
I didn't say he forced them to be raped, I said he ALLOWED them to be raped. It is incredible to me that you have often gone on in the past about how you mustn't "condone", say, homosexuality by allowing marriage equality and now all of a sudden in this context you have no concern at all about "condoning" rape by allowing rapists to rape. Makes zero sense.
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Originally Posted by jeffbase40
If you think a moral God must stop all rapes. What's next? Stop all bank robberies? Stop all crimes? Eventually you will have God forcing you to drive the speed limit and free will has been eliminated. God operates on a individual level with those who desire a personal relationship with Him. He will end all evil and sinful man's freedom will eventually in one big final scourge.
If god has a malfunction with robberies and crimes or exceeding the speed limit and if the consequences of those things would in some baroque way both justify and necessitate eternal perdition for those who do such things, and if god is all powerful and all loving, then yes, this would present no problem at all.
On the other hand if what you call free will matters to god then he cannot get his knickers in a twist about what people with free will do either. You can't have it both ways. Either some choices are harmful and therefore should be prevented so the harms don't occur, or else god is unconcerned about the harms and indifferent to the actions that cause them.
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Originally Posted by jeffbase40
No, the real question is why should we expect God to keep on blessing and protecting us personally if we betray Him?
In my personal experience AND observation of others god often blesses and protects people who do harmful things and visits calamity on those who do not. I do not see any correspondence between the two. But if for the sake of argument we observed God reliably blessing and protecting those who do not betray him, who are redeemed through faith and follow all the rules, it would be fair still to wonder why his "nature" demands ultimate and eternal torment for the very finite and often trivial offenses that people commit. The people that are, after all, as god supposedly made them. He could have made them virtuous i the first place according to his lights. Or he could have RE-made them that way when he belatedly recognized the problem.
This free will canard that you keep tossing out is irrelevant to an all powerful, all knowing, benevolent being such as your god. He makes the rules, and can remake them at will and without limitation or consequence. If free will is important to him he can preserve that too. How? By fiat.
In any case in heaven one day you claim we will suddenly be pleasing to god, unwilling or incapable of sinning, living in perfect harmony with god and each other, and yet somehow there is zero concern about free will ... no claim that in heaven we will be "nothing but robots". So by your own lights even god is perfectly capable of rendering people incapable of sin, of stopping all sin in its tracks and yet without concerns about free will being taken away from people. If he's capable of doing it in heaven he's capable of doing it on earth. And if he's capable of doing it on earth, and doesn't, then he's not all loving because he's fine with human suffering.
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Originally Posted by jeffbase40
Also, the passage still doesn't say that these women were raped. They may have freely desired Absalom. But as typical, atheists will refuse to consider cultural context and read in the most foul negative interpretation due to their hatred of God's Word.
Even if for the sake or argument that is true, why then is it okay for you to read in the most pleasing and positive interpretation due to your LOVE of god's word? It seems to me that given how the ancient world worked and the patriarchal context of the story, that the women were voiceless chattel who were to service men sexually based on who owned them at the time. That is rape. Yes that is a modern understanding of rape, a concept that quite probably didn't meaningfully even exist at the time in question. But wouldn't we expect that if morality were immutable that if you and I agree it's wrong now, that it's always been wrong? Nothing prevents god from leading morally from somewhere other than behind the curve of human history. If humans didn't realize this was wrong in "whatever" BC, a loving, moral and benevolent god surely did and would have been derelict not to act to prevent the violation of these women.
Do you seriously think it likely that they were all estranged from David and enamored with Absalom? That this is less likely than that they were, at the very most, resigned to their role as sexual gratifiers and baby incubators to whoever would feed them? And would you actually seriously suggest that it's fanciful or wishful thinking that they were actually willing to switch their affections and alliances at the drop of a hat?
No, even as a child when I read this R-rated material I saw Absalom's seizure of his father's wives / concubines as a power and dominance play, which is exactly the prime impetus behind the violence of rape.
What exactly do you think happened to the women they"saved" for themselves???
The women more than likely did not DO ANYTHING willingly...let alone sex...
Nothing screams RAPE ,more than taking someone to save for yourself...
More likely you don't have the intelligence to get what God means to say.
Just as prophesied in Genesis, you choose to eat from the tree of knowledge and the same day you choose to eat of it the same day you shall surely die.
That said, do you need me to explain you why that situation is so?
More likely you don't have the intelligence to get what God means to say.
Just as prophesied in Genesis, you choose to eat from the tree of knowledge and the same day you choose to eat of it the same day you shall surely die.
That said, do you need me to explain you why that situation is so?
Nope. No need to s'plain.
I get it: The OT god is insane, not to mention stupid beyond belief.
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