Is it moral for God to punish us?

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Yet God said that man had become as Gods in the knowing of good and evil which indicates that we have God's same moral sense and can use human designators for God just as he did when saying he is a jealous God.

Your statement is thus wrong.

Regards
DL

Did *he* tell you this personally? He never told me any such thing!

"G-D is not a person."

Did *he* tell you this personally? He never told me any such thing!

Your own Jewish oral tradition tells you that God is a man.

I assume you are a Jew. If not, apology.

Regards
DL

I am not a Jew but my brother-in-law is Jewish and I do know a little somthin about the Jewish religon. The Torah uses masculine pronouns to refer to G-d as all Hebrew nouns have grammatical gender but G-d is not human in the Jewish faith! G-d is a being that cannot be personified nor depicted in any tangible form unlike Christianity and other polytheistic religions. Since G-d is transcendent, he doesn't need to follow any moral rules and is exempt from causality which is why your question is ultimately a moot point.

The Jewish name for God has both masculine and feminine include. Their old God was androgynous like most of the ancient Gods.

Jews gave man the highest position on earth and not some God because they would not personify the mythical God they hoped existed. Not faith, hope.

http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/03132009/watch.html

Rabbi Hillel, the older contemporary of Jesus, said that when asked to sum up the whole of Jewish teaching, while he stood on one leg, said, "The Golden Rule. That which is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. That is the Torah. And everything else is only commentary. Now, go and study it."

Please listen as to what is said about literal reading.

"Origen, the great second or third century Greek commentator on the Bible said that it is absolutely impossible to take these texts literally. You simply cannot do so. And he said, "God has put these sort of conundrums and paradoxes in so that we are forced to seek a deeper meaning."

For God's mane. Check this from the 10 min. mark.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-TndLzFZI9A

For the power of a Rabbi to overrule God. Check this from the 12 min. mark.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tddCNY6U77Y

Regards
DL

Last edited by Campin_Cat on 17 Nov 2015, 7:55 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I don't think there is any "higher being" punishing anyone. In the wise words of Nicolas Cage,

"s**t just happens"

The way I see it, if any deities do exist, they most likely belong to a long forgotten pagan faith far predating any of the Abrahamic religions. As for explaining why bad things happen to us, well, we're the most destructive species to ever exist to our knowledge, and as such, whoever is running the show is probably not impressed with how we've been treating our planet, that of course implying that there would be something behind all this.

I don't know if it's gods, goddesses, a god or goddess, aliens, or even the programmers behind some big computer simulation that everything we know is a part of. This could all just be a big coincidence too, existence may have just "happened". I don't know the answers, and I'm not ready to jump to conclusions, but I can make some semi-educated guesses.

Another thing I will say, it seems that Christianity and Islam have caused more problems than they have solved. That's not to say that the practitioners of these religions are necessarily bad people, or that these religions lack any good ideas, but it is rather alarming the things that have been done in their name.

Yeah, ripples of cause and effect crisscrossing. Some people just catch the swells more than others.

pretty much..

You keep hiding God's culpability behind free choice.

"He promised us free-will. It's just that He'll punish us if we don't follow His rules."

Note how you yourself write that that choice is not really free as it contains a carrot and a stick. A reward for doing God's will and a punishment for us if we do our will. Rules and commandments screw up free will.

Further.

Christians are always trying to absolve God of moral culpability in the fall by whipping out their favorite "free will!", or “ it’s all man’s fault”.

That is "God gave us free will and it was our free willed choices that caused our fall. Hence God is not blameworthy."

But this simply avoids God's culpability as the author of Human Nature. Free will is only the ability to choose. It is not an explanation why anyone would want to choose "A" or "B" (bad or good action). An explanation for why Eve would even have the nature of "being vulnerable to being easily swayed by a serpent" and "desiring to eat a forbidden fruit" must lie in the nature God gave Eve in the first place. Hence God is culpable for deliberately making humans with a nature-inclined-to-fall, and "free will" means nothing as a response to this problem.

If all sin by nature then, the sin nature is dominant. If not, we would have at least some who would not sin. That being the case, for God to punish us for following the instincts and natures he put in us would be quite wrong.

Psalm 51:5 "Surely I was sinful at birth, sinful from the time my mother conceived me."

Regards
DL

That is the difference between you and a Christian idol worshiper.

You think.

Regards
DL

I am Paris at the moment.

Regards
DL

Um, what does that have to do with anything?

Um... what do you THINK? Read a paper lately?

To the OP: WOW! Are you really in Paris right now? What a bad time to happened to be there!

Sorry, had a brain fart. Though the reason why I asked is because he has internet access from what I can tell, yet he hasn't really responded. I can sort of understand why though, amidst all the chaos that's probably going on in Paris at the moment.