This is what blows my mind in these kinds of discussions. The mass murder of infants and the enslavement of children is seen as a conditionally ok thing by people who defend the Old Testament as being moral. I'm going to make a bold claim here: genocide, the mass murder of infants and making sex slaves out of children is universally wrong. In the exact same sense that me going out and killing a family or raping someone is wrong, it is wrong to engage in mass murders and mass rape. Could we both agree that murder is wrong on a one person murdering another person basis? Most people then extrapolate from that proposition to thinking that murder is then also wrong when it is on an ethnic group versus ethnic group basis. It is wrong if the Hutus are mass murdering and raping Tutsis, it is wrong if Stalin is engineering mass starvation to wipe out vast numbers of people, and it is wrong if Eastern European ethnic groups engage in mass killings and rapes of other Eastern European ethnic groups. Can we agree on the inherent immorality of those three examples? The people here who are against the Biblical examples of genocide are against them on the basis that genocide is always wrong. We don't see any difference between Hutus attempting to wipe out all Tutsis and Israelites attempting to wipe out various neighbors.

You seem to be demonizing these tribes as being so purely evil that they must have been wiped out in order to allow the good humans to survive. Comparing them to cancer, a virus and the cannibal bear people from the "The 13th Warrior" is your attempt to dehumanize them. I'm not so sure that they were as evil as you seem to be thinking that they are. Israelites lived among some of those people and found wives among them. Were these senselessly evil people who had to be wiped in order for the Israelites to survive? Or, were these just a bunch of neighboring bronze age tribes, some of which were very friendly and good sources of foreign (ie: non-incest) wives? One of the things that the Israelites had to occasionally do is kill other Israelites that married foreigners. I do not believe that the genocides described in the Old Testament are moral because you suppose that we wouldn't be alive today if they didn't happen. We would still be alive, there would just be a few more North African and Middle Eastern ethnic groups. Wiping these obscure groups out wasn't a neccessary precondition for our modern existance.

Also, the Israelites aren't our ancestors. I'm Western and Northern European caucasian and you seem to be that kind of caucasian in your picture. We didn't come from a North African and Middle Eastern tribe. Are you claiming to be a Mizrahi Jew (you know, the ones actually from the Middle East and North Africa, unlike the European jews that we are mostly used to)? Are you claiming that modern civilized society could not have come about if those obscure ethnic groups weren't wiped out by ancient Israelites?

From Magus article 2:

"Agreement with the hypothesis that belief in a creator is beneficial to societies is largely based on assumption, anecdotal accounts, and on studies of limited scope and quality restricted to one population"

Incorrect, the entire social experiment visible today, is the result of faith in God. No society has persisted or evidently will persist separate from faith. As these are the evidentiary facts of the case I argue further that no society will, or even can, come about separate from faith in God, nor will it persist as evidenced by the absence of the existence of such societies.

I guess that would be an "assumption" as written in this article. Just pointing out the facts.

The fact is that the most godless society you could find today has roots of interface with the divine that affected their world views and has redirected every nation on earth to their present states.

You are correct sir. It was and is never good that such a thing occur. Very good, now you go the next step. If you are attacked in your home, who gets to live in the house?

After that guess work is done, I would ask who "should" live in the house? Then I would ask "why?"

.........

I don't even know how to respond to that.  I'm gonna go watch reality tv because that shit makes more sense than you do.

Best. Insult. EVAR.

Not to be difficult, but I don't get what you are asking. Who gets to live in my house? Is 'house' figurative for my nation or city? If that is a literal question, then "my roommates" is the answer. It is their house (or one of them is on the lease anyways). I'm just renting a room. Who 'should' live in my house? Well, my roommates and me. We collectively pay rent and bills. By virtue of the monthly cheques we send out, we are entitled to live here. "Why?" Because the house's real owner has a lease with one of my room mates and he has room mates such as myself to ease the burden of covering the lease. I don't suppose that the realistic answers to your question address the point that it is trying to make. You'll need to rephrase what you are asking.

Keep in mind that the Israelites wiped out apparently non-hostile groups. Friendly groups that supplied the Israelites with wives and tried to intermingle with the Israelites were wiped out just as thouroughly as hostile groups. This isn't like you killing those assaulting your home. This is like you killing the family that a child of yours married into and then killing the child for being contaminated by contact with strangers. I'm not against Israelites defending themselves from assault from hostile neighbors. I am against them wiping out groups that tried to intermingle and be friends with them. That seems to be senseless barbarism on the Israelites part. This is why I think the Hutu and Tutsi analogy works so well for the Israelites. The Tutsis and Hutus weren't really even two distinct groups. There was frequent intermarriage and hybrid offspring. But, some Hutus wanted to kill all Tutsis and purge their own ranks of what they considered to be impure part-Tutsis. So they killed every Tutsi, everyone who married a Tutsi and every part-Tutsi that they could. This seems to be exactly, in every way, what the Israelites did according to the Old Testament. And this seems very, very immoral.

Well I fear to make that association even remotely sane you would have to show that "murder" built anything at all. I mean no life has existed untouched by death after all. Death is absence just as murder is absence. The two cannot be compared in such a way because God has made and murder, from within what was made, has unmade.

I will agree that "general" revelation applies as a means of learning about the fundamental truths on which we stand. Death has certainly been a great motivator of many things, but it was not "death" that did it. It was the living souls whose motivation did anything.

To argue that God is good you merely have to identify that society is good. If you enjoy a civil society then the God that motivated the living individuals to build it is also good as good cannot come from bad. Murder simpy did not build anything to have something existant we can call good. If you had that, then murder would be good too by association.

It invloves the argument of good and evil. To offer an extreme comparison, I reflect upon the yinyang symbol and focus upon its darkness vs. light aspect. You can see why something such as this would be created within the material as we all are surrounded by both dark and light. They coexist with one another evidently as both types of events do occur. Dark events being those that cause us direct experiential pain at one end of the spectrum and those deeds and occurrences which bring us directly great experiential comfort and pleasure at the other.

We would need to debate this as I'm sure there are those of you that seem to reject good and evil, so in this limited post I must remain brief and assume that we may agree on this definition of good and evil or dark and light as I wrote.

If we assume this then I believe we can percieve a self evident truth that pain and death are directly connected and pleasure and life are also directly connected. So really life and death are the spectrums of light and dark. As this is the case it is impossible that the two can co-exist as life opposes death, it does not co-exist. It's merely existence and its absence which is a fundamental whole as existence will always walk with non-existence within the framework of a finite reality. The end is a part of the whole only in respect of the nature of the actual whole which is existence itself.

Only existence can and does exist therefore it is all there is. Absence cannot "be" anything at all. Only within the framework of existence can we perceive whole's and parts.

So fundamentally that which brings pain, brings death. Bringing anything at all can only occur within life as absence cannot bring its non-self anywhere as it is absent from "anywhere". So it can neither be anywhere nor bring anywhere.

Finally if THE life or God brought death, then life would do nothing more than unmake itself, therefore life cannot bring death and live.

Life makes the rules and if it brings its own unmaking then the rules also will be unmade as The Rules can only exist within the existence of The Life.

You'll only encourage him...

Then this god has made shoddy product, but good nonsense!    

I wonder what age psychologists would say a child must be to have achieved a state of free will? It would have to vary wildly. I'm not convinced I operate on the basis of free will at the age of 42. 

Anyway. There's something in Tr1n's tone at times that rather makes me think he's at heart a sensitive and decent person who is in the habit of judging himself much too harshly.

Judging from the way he's looking down at that kid I think everything there will be fine. And - fuck. He hasn't convinced me and I'm not the smartarse teenager of the 2020s his bub is going to be...

*sigh* Yeah, daddy thinks women shouldn't have the right to own property. Poor kid.  

We're not assuming that God would actually ask you, and it's irrelevant that Jesus has already relieved us of our sins. The question is hypothetical, understand? You still haven't answered the question. Pretty amazing. 

Because he has to operate constrained by the humans who thought him up?

I argued, in fact, that god does NOT follow externally imposed rules, and is in fact the imposer of rules. The rules you try to hold him to when you use them to explain his nature. But, since he does NOT have externally imposed rules, he can change the rules as he likes and when he likes.

Well then your talking about unmaking. God would unmake Himself with any imperfection. The fact that we exist is due solely to the perfection of God. You can't do better than perfect ever. Our existence testifies that God has not failed yet. You argue that He could fail to be what He is, well then we would cease to exist just as God would.

Of course God is more than a rational idea. He also walks among us, so we can experience Him and reflect on the things we can know and compare them.

Please elaborate. 

Huh? Please try that again? Your post was both broken and incoherent. The latter in part due to the former, though not entirely.

Canada
United States
England
France
Sweden
China
Japan

Should I go on?
Sure, all of them have religious people, but none are religious states/societies. In none of these is religion the law or the standard of living. So you were quite wrong.

As far as we can tell, there is nothing "necessary" about our existence and survival. Some pre-conditions were necessary for us to have evolved, but our emergence was not "necessary", so neither were those conditions necessary in themselves. They could easily have been different, without violating any logic or basic natural law, in which case our particular Universe would not exist.

With regard to our urges to survive, what is true is simply that if random variation leads to creatures which have some instinct to avoid death, to survive, those individuals will be more likely to survive - ie more likely than the ones which don't run away from predators, for example. There is no purpose in current existence, it is all a consequence of the course of past events and the constraints imposed by the basic laws, along with a big does of random and/or chaotic variation.

There is no logical requirement that whatever pre-conditions were 'necessary' for our Universe to come into existence via the Big Bang involved an intelligent agent of any kind.

This is rich.  So I make an argument that god belief is bad for society and cite studies done to prove that point.  You respond that no society can thrive without it because there has not been one without it.  So RatDog says murder has always been there too.  Thus your respond that god belief is "good" to try to establish that it is different than murder. however this leads back the my first point you know the one with the links proving that it isn't good for society. Circular argument.

 ...Wait? 

Magus?

There's a guy actually throwing OT scripture around? For real?

That's fantastic.

Trinity, do you still have your tongue? You better fucking not - the Bible implicitly states that you have to cut it out if you ever tell a lie. You don't want to go to...

HELL

...do you?

I hear the weather's pretty crummy down there.

EDIT:

This is always classic, too.

Guy can't even just say, "No, I would not kill my own family if God told me to do that," 

Has he left us? Or has his faith in his ability to convert the fallen wavered to the point he had to recharge on god visions?

It was a dingo...

Stop it, Bob.  You're starting to make an argument for why we're not supposed to run around defining G-d.  Keep it up and no more cheeseburgers for you.