Dangerous Questions: Is God Proud?

The answer is simple to me, but I don’t beleive that the Bible is the “Word” of God. I believe it was “Inspired” by God.

So, from that comes:
It is not “pride as a sin” for one to know oneself. Self confidence is not the same as pride.

Self confidence is knowing your abilities, skills, talents, etc., and interestingly, self confident people tend to inspire others to their best. Self confidence is a good thing since it helps us to fulfill the law.

“Owe no man any thing, but to love one another: for he that loveth another hath fulfilled the law.” Romans 13:8 King James Version

Pride is to believe yourself better than others, leaving broken people behind. The sin is how pride keeps a person from recognizing other people’s worth, creating division, pain, and harm to others.

God has self confidence, not pride.

God doesn’t seem to have a problem doing it Himself or asking his people to do it for him. Ethnic cleansing, killing children and babies…

Since I believe that the Bible was Inspired by God, but written by men, the information is bound to have been skewed by the writer’s limited perceptions.

I seriously doubt that God really said, “keep the virgins but kill all the other people”. Keeping virgins from the enemy camp is a sexual drive desire, not a spiritual drive.

Since I believe that the Bible was Inspired by God, but written by men, the information is bound to have been skewed by the writer’s limited perceptions.

In that case, how do you decide which parts of the Bible are in fact trustworthy? If you have to decide for yourself based on learning from extra-Biblical sources which lessons in the Bible are worth anything, how can you be said to learn anything from the Bible at all?

Nate:

Some time ago, I asked you if you believed that it was moral to kill homosexuals, since the Bible commanded it. You responded that only the Old Testament gave that commandment, and even then only in Deuteronomy, which is not intended to be a general moral code but a set of laws specifically intended for ancient Israel. While I agree that it is a reasonable assertion that Deuteronomy’s laws apply only to pre-Christian Israel, you are left with one problem: is morality a constant or not? Killing homosexuals, according to the Bible, was not only moral but required then. It is, according to you, immoral now. I thought that was supposed to be an advantage of religious morality over the atheist’s, this rigid, constant moral law?

In that case, how do you decide which parts of the Bible are in fact trustworthy?

The same way one reads the news. One distills the propaganda slant from the facts. It’s called critical thinking. I’m sure God gave us a brain for using.

We read the news because it delivers information that would be impossible, or at the least very difficult and taxing, for us to experience personally. Even Fox News does not claim to be a source of absolute truth. The Bible does. A few mistakes do not terribly damage the credibility of a news agency. One mistake can irreparably damage the credibility of a document claiming to a perfect standard of accuracy. How do you apply critical thinking to such a text? Do you judge its lessons of morality based on your own innate sense of morality? If so, why bother with said Biblical lessons at all? Do you judge the Bible’s histories by cross-referencing with current archaeological knowledge? If so, why not base your knowledge on said archaeology and do away with the Bible at all? What, exactly, do you take from this text which you have admitted to be flawed, that you could not glean from other sources with higher degrees of accuracy?

It seems some of you have difficulty in maintaining a moral construct between the OT and the NT. Remember, Jesus is the Pleroma, the fulfillment of the Law. He wrote it, He is the Word. There is no moral change bewtween the Old Covenant and the New, God is immutable. Therefore, when God commanded the Israelites to kill indiscriminately, there must be a moral and theological answer for that, or the whole thing is a big fat lie. Also, incest. Incest was ok until the later chapters of Genesis, explain that one. That took me awhile, and I’m like a superstar at this stuff.

Don’t shrink from answers, just because you are bad theologians, so far.

Press into the Kingdom. From the days of John the Baptist until now, the kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent take it by force. Pluck out your eyes, little sheep, cut off your hands, in order to acheive it.

In order to answer this question, I really should offer the entire theology called The Hypothetical Question, because it solves the problem of evil and free will. But because I’ve been informed that when I take the time to actually explain something that’s makes sense, it is verbose and “scares people away,” I feel as if I’m casting pearls before swine.

So I won’t. I’ll just let your host handle it. Because frankly, I couldn’t give a crap whether you ever figure it out. I know. That’s enough for me. At least you guys give me a good laugh.

Oh, and before I go, think about this:

In WWII, when we bombed Nagasaki and Hiroshima, where we fried over 200,000 human beings, men, women, children, dogs and cattle…, and we targeted the civilian cities on purpose, were we moral in doing so? We defeated the Japanese Empire by doing so, and saved untold numbers of Americans lives in the process. Were we moral? Had we not acted, and the Pacific fell to the Japanese and millions more lost their lives, would we have been guilty of the immorality of inaction?

God acted through Israel often to destroy the heathen nations, often brutally. They were enemies of Israel which they were at war with. Was this destruction moral? Israel carried the seed of the Messiah. If the surrounding nations had destroyed her, the salvation of the entire human race would have been thwarted. Had God not acted to save the human race by destroying her destroyers, would that inaction have been immoral?

If you agree we were moral to fight WWII, or any other war where we kill men, women, and children, then you have your answer, you have to get your morality from somewhere, you have to appeal to a higher ethic to make that decision, it is inevitable. If you say no, we have no right to make such judgments, then you have left the world open to the destroyers who will kill you and your family, and rob your and their lives and yours and their freedoms. Your inaction would condemn others.

Human decisions about evil and good judgments make God, the very idea of God, an absolute necessity. And there must be a victor in the morality debate, there can be no stalemate.

Have I been concise enough to leave you more confused than before? If so, I guess this was a good post then, at least by these standards you all are putting up with here.

The final question that makes a theodicy of God a correct one, is JUSTICE. Does your theodicy have a provision for Justice. Or does it show humans beings who never really had a choice, or a chance to hear the Gospel, going to Hell for all eternity? I submit to you that the three theodical models out there, Catholicism, Calvinism, and Arminianism, do not adequately account for this, or God’s Justice in the end. And that’s why the world has never been truly satisfied with their answers.

I’m glad I know the truth. It feels good too…whoops, way over time….gotta run.

In WWII, when we bombed Nagasaki and Hiroshima, where we fried over 200,000 human beings, men, women, children, dogs and cattle…, and we targeted the civilian cities on purpose, were we moral in doing so? We defeated the Japanese Empire by doing so, and saved untold numbers of Americans lives in the process. Were we moral? Had we not acted, and the Pacific fell to the Japanese and millions more lost their lives, would we have been guilty of the immorality of inaction?

That is the rationale now given for what remains the only use of atomic weapons against a real target, but in fact the most pressing reason on the minds of the U.S. military and political officials was to end the war before the U.S.S.R. could invade Japan, and to further demonstrate our overwhelming technological superiority to the U.S.S.R. as a deterrent.
I am afraid you are also conflating your history somewhat. There is simply no way that, had we not acted, the Pacific would have fallen to the Japanese. They were defeated already, their navy was in ruins, we controlled the entirety of the Pacific. All that remained was the invasion of Japan itself- and make no mistake, you are correct that that would have cost tens of thousands, perhaps as many as a million lives.
The simple act of dropping an atomic bomb to cause such devastation and fear as to force the immediate surrender of the Japanese and the staving off of a long and bloody campaign was thus not immoral in itself. What made it immoral were 1.) the choice of a civilian rather than military target, and 2.) the (perhaps unforeseeable) initiation of the atomic era, which at the cost of saving at most a million lives has threatened billions.

God acted through Israel often to destroy the heathen nations, often brutally. They were enemies of Israel which they were at war with. Was this destruction moral? Israel carried the seed of the Messiah. If the surrounding nations had destroyed her, the salvation of the entire human race would have been thwarted. Had God not acted to save the human race by destroying her destroyers, would that inaction have been immoral?

In the case of the atomic bomb, provided we accept the premise that acting saved more lives than it cost, the action itself was moral, but made immoral by the choice of a civilian target and the resulting vastly greater cost in human life. Just so, provided we accept the premise that Israel’s survival would lead to the salvation of the human race, a thorough destruction of her enemies is morally warranted. However, the means of such destruction cannot be considered moral. Is God not all-powerful? He could have ended any assaults against Israel in a myriad of bloodless or nearly bloodless ways. He could have brought about just punishments to these nations for their sins, and gone no farther. Instead, he not only permits but encourages Israel to take the conquered as slaves, to rape their women, and so on. How is any of this necessary to ensure Israel’s survival?

Human decisions about evil and good judgments make God, the very idea of God, an absolute necessity. And there must be a victor in the morality debate, there can be no stalemate.

No, they don’t, and yes, there can be. I do not need to appeal to God or the Bible to be a moral person and to make moral judgements. I simply consider the fact that other human beings react to conditions in similar ways to myself; conditions that are unpleasurable for myself will also be unpleasurable for them; and that if I do my best to make conditions pleasurable for them and they all do the same, conditions will be more pleasurable for all. And yes, there can be a legitimate stalemate between those with opposing views. It cannot be a permanent one, but it may exist so long as information required to make a proper decision is lacking. Given the state of human knowledge, many such debates may arise where said information is lacking.

Finally, you seem unable to distinguish between what is pleasant and what is true. It seems to me that your insistence on the existence of God as a real entity is entirely predicated on the fact that you consider a world with God a more pleasant, just, and moral place than a world without one (note I do not share that consideration). Do you really not care whether it is true, so long as it has these characteristics?

Nate:

Killing homosexuals is of course a matter of behavior. It was a set of laws laid out by God for Israel. It was a governmental rule with a consequence. Since it’s no secret that I believe that homosexual behavior is indeed a sin, I believe it was perfectly within reason to enforce the law accordingly.

Ok- then what about the other things condoned and encouraged in the Bible? What about slavery and rape? Were those moral, then, too?

But as an American libertarian, I obviously don’t believe putting homosexuals to death is right. It’s not a moral thing, it’s a political position.

Ok then, let’s consider a hypothetical theocratic Christian state existing in the modern world. Would it be moral for that state to condone and encourage the killing of homosexuals? And what about slavery, rape, the inferior status of women, all the things in the Old Testament that seem abhorrent to modern Western society. Is your opposition to those acts being committed in modern day America also a political position, and not a moral one?

Funny, you call an immoral act moral. Yeah, we should have killed them, but the way we did it was really wrong.

All these equivocations is based in a morality that you, sir, do not have the epistemological authority to make, without appeal to a higher power than yourself, a standard of ethics outside of yourself. I’d like to see how you make that standard work in your evolutionary construct. Might makes right. Survival of the fittest. If you can kill me, you are free to kill me and profit from it, morality makes no issue with you.

In other words, if I wanted to rape, murder and eat your wife and children, right in front of you, there’s NOTHING wrong with that, in your ethical system, is there?

So, since you are the only one who has brutally murderered your fellow human beings using thermonuclear war, what does that say about you sticking your fingers in the face of God and questioning Him about His dealings with Israel’s enemies? You, according to your own admission, are an immoral SOB. That’s like the pot calling the kettle black. Not only that, you claim to be one of the lovers of science that created the Bomb in the first place. Double ASSHOLE.

I think you need to realize that you can’t start from yourself, and acheive a moral ethic that you can call a standard in a world filled with evil. You may not wish to call it evil, but I assure you when you walk amongst the bodies of the dead, murderered by evil empires and sadistic ghouls thirsty for your blood, you’ll change your mind.

Or maybe not. maybe your just a hopeless athiest. In that case, you’ll change your mind after your dead.

Oh, and in case anyone becomes confused in the midst of debate a to my own stand, my uncle was in a Japanese prisoner of war camp for two years. He witnessed men being hung by their elbows on crosses and hoses stuffed down their throats and then their bellies sliced open by samurai swords, and witnessed fyers taken into the woods just as the American forces were liberating the camps, and Japanese officers played a game of execution on the line of eighteen Americans doomed to be inches from freedom when their heads were struck from their bodies, because the Japanese wanted to see which of them could do it in one stroke. Some of the officers used traditional bow and arrows and one took three arrows before a Jap cut his throat.

Another took a stroke across he shoulder down through the chest and drowned in his own blood.

My uncle was forced to work the mines and never saw the light of day for almost two years.

Should we drop the bomb on the terrorists of evil today, the ones who also strike the heads off their victims with knives while the world watches? Or who hit our mainland just as the Japanese did? You betcha. Drop that f*****, twice, sir.

There is right, and their is wrong. But you have yet to show anyone here a standard by which you would make such a judgment, except some balthering about mutual comfort or something. I think it’s hilarious and extremely naive to believe you can co-exist with evil. Evil people do not care about your comfort sir. They have a religious agenda, or even a secular one, because in this century it was secular athiests who have killed more than 100 million people, not religionists. At any rate, whether you agree with a God or not, you are making a judgement when you kill them, regardless. I’m just wondering where, a your Darwinian evolutionary construct, you are getting that judgment. You are attempting to act morally, without admitting a higher moral standard. I don’t get it.

Someone who is infinitely better than I am at articulating this is William Bennett, read “Why We Fight.”

Let’s see, in two posts you’ve managed to ignore or misconstrue exactly everything I’ve said. Your interpretation of my statements bears zero resemblance to what those statements actually were.

That’s because you are a moron George. Go take a few classes in logic and come back and see me.

lol

Hey gays, I have to go try and survive a massively invasive surgery to save my life.

When I see God I’m gonna spend about ten minutes bitchin’ His ass out, and I’ll keep you guys in mind. Signin off.

No fear, baby.

Right. You totally misrepresent and fail to attain even a glimmer of understanding of my statements, therefore I am a moron. And you me to take classes in formal logic, when you have yet to use it or even demonstrate a passing knowledge of its use. And I thought Matthew was an arrogant SOB at times- with you it seems to be more of a constant thing.

1 John 3:8:
8He who does what is sinful is of the devil, because the devil has been sinning from the beginning. The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the devil’s work.

Adios, compadres

Happy trails to you, until we meet again….

Whatever then. Everyone else should be perfectly capable of reading what I actually said and figuring out that you’re full of BS.

I do want to clarify one thing regarding my statements about the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki- that could only be a moral decision under these conditions/assumptions-
-The military leaders did not and could not foresee the resulting nuclear age and the threat it would bring to the world’s population (I do not know whether this condition was met);
-We had a largely conscripted military force instead of an all-volunteer force as we do now (met),
-Vastly more lives would have been lost in the invasion than in the bombings (I don’t know), and
-We bombed a military target instead of a civilian one (not met).

When a person volunteers for the military, they are doing so with the knowledge that they may have to kill or be killed in action. They are no longer ‘innocents’ in the moral spectrum. The same does not hold true for the draftee. A civilian of an enemy nation, however, is an ‘innocent’. Therefore, the lives of enemy civilians should always be given greater concern than the lives of the soldiers of an all-volunteer army such as we have now. Any nation maintaining such an army must take the greatest care never to cause harm to civilians, even when doing so carries major risk to their own soldiers. This is why, when our enemy uses civilians as human shields, our troops are expected to hold their fire even as they die.
Yet we do not extend the same moral reasoning sufficiently broadly. We bomb restaurants in the middle of cities and kill dozens on the possibility that a terrorist leader might be hanging out there. We bomb civilian targets with the sole purpose of decreasing morale (think Dresden- explain to me how that was different from terrorism). I am not a pacifist- I do not deny the occasional necessity of war. I simply disagree with the way in which wars are conducted.

Nate- I hope you will not miss my comment directed at you, I believe there are some important(and Dangerous :D) questions there.

Are you listening to this a-hole, Aminadjab?

You are witnessing history today fellas.

The American communist insurgency, which controls modern academia in America, wants you to hear this disturbing interchange. Bollinger, et al, has had a long established history of supporting radical Iranian groups and Columbia stands to profit greatly from both Iranian endowments and endowments from radical liberal alumni who seek the destruction of Western democracy. They know that their questions will be redefined and twisted, and in the interchange young students without the context of history will actually believe this guy’s garbage.

What you are witnessing is all part of the grand deception. Did you hear his comments about science and religion? Well, I can’t spend time today to take apart his comments, although that would certainly be useful.

Where are the men in this country? Somebody put a bullet in that guy’s head before he leaves U.S. soil.

Oh, btw, I was a part of the rescue operation in 1980 to rescue the American hostages. April 23, 1980 we lost 8 U.S. soldiers in that operation, which was huge, three aircraft carriers were deployed on that.

This guy was one of the captors.

Yeah, anybody with an M-40 out there, lock and load and take him out. That’s an order.

The actual operation is interesting, I was in an Air Cav unit flying support, and Delta Force was the main rescue team. Col. Charlie Beckwith, commanded Operation Eagle Claw, also known as Desert One. The Nimitz, the Coral Sea, and the Okinawa were deployed with a Marine detachment on each. The various units including Delta had been training for at least 6 months prior to that, though at the time none of us knew what the operation was.

The rest is history, but the whole thing was a fiasco from the get-go. Democrats couldn’t rescue a cheerleader under a football dogpile, because they don’t want to. They do everything in their power to lose wars, not win them, to lose soldiers, not save them.

Carter would rather let his mother burn at the stake than to do anything to stop the worldwide propagation of the Islamic threat to Western culture, and the whole born-again thing was a ruse to gain the Christian vote to get him elected. The man is a born-again Satanist, not a Christian.

That speech today was a disgrace to America. Shows you how far the internationalist brainwashing program has infected our society. Unbelievable. You ought to have a politics string on here, I’d talk about how pervasive the communist grip is on our society, and how it relates to eschatology. What I think anyway. But what do I know? I’m just a nut, right?

I think we are all missing the point of the hard question, is God Proud?

To answer the question: Yes, God is proud. At least the “God” depicted in the “Holy” Bible.

Being, at my most spiritual moments, Agnostic, I believe, if there be a God, He’d be unknowable by us humans. We’re some small race in this small, tucked-away corner of the Universe, and we seem to think we’re actually important. That’s what gets me. Without us, the universe would be indifferent, all our Holy Babble would be a mere letter in the book of the universe. Our existence as a sentence.
A God, who has created this universe, wouldn’t be so low as to want OUR worship. He wouldn’t be as low as to expect us to be more than animals. We’ll just be animals who have acquired a few civilized qualities; and even more if we throw all this hatred called “Religion” out.

Most “modern” (within the last 10,000 years or so) religions were created due to the fascination of the universe, the innumerable stars in the sky, the giant ball of flame in the sky we call the Sun at day, with a giant, cool moon and many distant balls of flame in the sky at night. We humans were so fascinated that we assumed that the Sun was our God. That’s how the Egyptian religions started, and the Egyptian religions are where Judaism, Islam, and Christianity started.

To take a quote from Carl Sagan on the Universe: “For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.”
That’s how modern religion started, through the love of the universe. Although, the impurity of man (especially the bronze age they were in) made religion into the rotting piece of dying flesh that still lives on today, through hatred and intolerance of others.

On my “logic” days, where I look at evidence, I see that a “God” isn’t required, the evidence clearly shows how everything may have come to be; I am an Agnostic Atheist, I believe there is no God, but evidence would change that. On my philosophical days, I am Agnostic, I believe that it can’t be known whether a God exists or not, but evidence, still, would sway me. Either way, I’m Agnostic.

I’ll end this comment with some of my favorite quotes.

“My view is that if there is no evidence for it, then forget about it. An agnostic is somebody who doesn’t believe in something until there is evidence for it, so I’m agnostic.” - Carl Sagan

“We must question the story logic of having an all-knowing all-powerful God, who creates faulty Humans, and then blames them for his own mistakes.” - Gene Roddenberry

“If I were not an atheist, I would believe in a God who would choose to save people on the basis of the totality of their lives and not the pattern of their words. I think he would prefer an honest and righteous atheist to a TV preacher whose every word is God, God, God, and whose every deed is foul, foul, foul.” - Isaac Asimov

“The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike.” - Delos B. McKown

“Who are we? We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people.” - Carl Sagan