Why don't the faithful hold God morally accountable?

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Indeed which is the point I am trying to make to him.

What possible context is there for burning people alive? Are you trying to claim that it isn't reprehensible to take a living person and light them on fire under ANY circumstances? O_O

In that part of the old testement it was the people that followed the God Baal that was burning people in fire not Jews and not christians.

Jephtah burned his daughter as a human sacrifice to god (god, not baal). In the verse I provided, it plainly states that you should burn a priests daughter if she becomes a prostitute.

So yes, it was Jews and Christians burning people alive...

The Old Testament can only be expected to portray rival religions poorly

It's been said that the hardest trial of any true believer is to forgive God for putting them on this planet.

so, well, yes, they do hold God accountable.

Yes, do quote more, I'll see which ones I can answer. And please use this: http://www.breslov.com/ref/Deuteronomy13.htm
or
http://www.breslov.com/bible/Leviticus.htm

Those translations tend to be more accurately translated from the hebrew then whatever version you are quoting.


For Leviticus 21:9

They ment it literally at first, and one cannot walk around that verse, it is troubling.
The Sadducees believed in literal burning, but the Pharisees believed only in burning of the soul. Some time 2300 years ago, after they came back from babylon, a priest in the second temple era did witness a daughter of a priest burned for becoming a whore, but that is the only example. It's never happened since then, and has taken a stance against that literal interpretation by revising it in the talmud.

The way it is understood is that is merely an indicator of the severity, and how seriously the torah takes the issue.



For (Deuteronomy 13:13-19

They are the first generation in setting up the Jewish nation, most of them are very pagan themselves, this was the only way to shape them into the vehicle for monotheism that they will eventually become. They had to wipe out those pagans, who, described in the previous chapter, sacrificed their children to their false Gods. They were primitive, engaged in sex with their syblings, or animals, were ethically FOC's (Fresh Out of the Cave), etc.

The ending of that group of versus ends with the concept: You do what is right in Gods eyes, not what is right in your own eyes. In setting up the Jewish Republic, this was the only way to condition this people into the right ethical model that can then go forth and spread the torah to the world. In other words... this is for the Jew, there isn't much for us to learn from it other then this was how God inculcated Gods values into this group of people to purify them so they can carry out a specific task for God. I can't think of any examples off hand where this policy was carried out, and again, the way its always been understood in Jewish Rabbinic teaching is that it is only to teach us the severity of the matter, and for us to treat it with immense seriousness.

Because they were...

No, when I say context, I mean that there are two books, the old and the new, and things don't always square up because the old evolved and got a new take when the new came along. One then views the old through the lens of the new, and where there is conflict, one then adopts the new ones interpretation on things, and that is how Christianity made peace with its roots.

Can you name another man who burned his daughter as an offering to God in 4000+ years of Jewish life? What can one possibly learn from this... if there is anything to learn at all... It takes nothing to dump on the bible, any crackpot can cite a verse here and a verse there. Imagine if someone took a few lines from a piece of writing of Shakespeare or Hemingway or Dickens or Orwell out of context and tried to then say that any one of those authors were an idiot, one would immediately demand to know what education they have in literature, or what they degree they hold, but the bible seems free for anyone to dump on without knowing a thing about it.

This would make sense to me if people didn't at the same time say "Thank God!" or "It's a miracle!" whenever something good happens.
The girl from the plane that crashed in Detroit is called the miracle girl. So if God suspended the laws of physics and intervened on her behalf, then in my mind he (it?) could also have done the same for the 148 other passengers. To me, this is a mass murder. If God could have prevented it but didn't, it seems a very strange thing to celebrate.

(in actual fact, of course, it's none of these things. A comedy of errors caused the crash. There is no need whatsoever to invoke a divine being in the explanation of any aspect of the crash - so I don't actually mean that god killed all those people, because there is no god)

Except when it comes to gays, of course.

If the faithful are the ones who believe that the Bible is literally true, they might not want to risk criticizing the biggest mass murderer in known history.

Criticism might also be mistaken for disbelief, which according to the New Testament, leads to an eternity of torture in Hell. This is not logical, since the god of the Bible is omniscient. He could tell the difference between belief and the appearance of disbelief. But if they were logical, they probably wouldn't be among the faithful. Faith, after all is belief in the face of evidence to the contrary.

I may have some of the details wrong, since it was quite some time ago that I read that book.

Last edited by Rocky on 13 Apr 2012, 5:01 am, edited 1 time in total.

Poor Job attempted to criticize God and he got a tongue lashing.

ruveyn

If the god of the Bible treated a good man like Job the way he did, the faithful have one more reason not to push their luck. I agree.

Inspite of the title of this forum, I am not at all sure it is possible to have a serious discussion on the subject here.

Flaw: The politicians create laws which expressly state they are for all people in the state/nation, not certain classes of people therein. God created laws which expressly state they are for all humans, and not for Himself as well.

Also, how would you be able to define being moral when it comes to God? I'll explain what I mean. One law He gave in the Old Testament is not to look upon the nakedness of any family member. Well, being God, he is omnipresent and sees all. So, that moral law would be inapplicable to Him. As would many others. If God kills a human, it's simply reversing His own previous action: creating that human. Whereas, when we murder someone, we violate the Creator's act of having put that person into existence. A person is allowed to inflate, then deflate his own tires; he is not allowed to, after watching someone else inflate their own tires, come over to that person's car and deflate them. Same reasoning goes. God owns us. We do not own each other. Also, his law is not to murder, which is killing for no justifiable reason. Well, when God kills someone, He has His reasons, and being a just God, they are therefore just reasons.