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Was the God of the Old Testament cruel?
Yes. 80%  80%  [ 20 ]
No. 20%  20%  [ 5 ]
Total votes : 25

Ragtime
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09 May 2008, 3:37 pm

Awesomelyglorious wrote:
Ragtime wrote:
God rewards deliberate evil with punishment.
Where from that do you get cruelty?

Um.... have you read it? It is 2 pages long about all of the terrible things that God would do. Punishments can be considered cruel or unusual.


Are you suggesting that the punishments did not fit the crimes?
Evil is absolutely, positively grotesque to God; it is held in theological circles
that God cannot look at sin.
God called even something as simple as insincere sacrifices "a stench in my nostrils",
so you can imagine how unpalatable willful evil would be!
Horrible evil deserves horrible punishment.
It's certainly nothing worse than exact recompense.
As to determining the exact amount of "horribility",
that's something entirely in God's arena of determination.


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twoshots
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09 May 2008, 3:46 pm

I only actually read Job. But the presentation of the Old Testament God as someone who was so terrible seems so much more like how I would imagine an anthropomorphic God.

Absolutely fascinating. So much more rich than the papa-in-the-sky of the New Testament.

I don't know if I'd call him cruel (without first defining "cruel"). I suppose he probably counts. But is it bad is the question.



Ragtime
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09 May 2008, 3:47 pm

Awesomelyglorious wrote:
He's having people smash BABY skulls and having them enjoy it!! That is not a small thing but rather sadistic from most perspectives.


You're missing the point of the passage, which is that God destroys evildoers,
and that He enjoys the justice of doing so.
Only a just God can enjoy justice.
A cruel God would act like Caligula.
God is not described as Caligulaic by any means,
but rather as acting logically and justly.

Example of pure mercy in the Old Testament:
God told Israel not to boil the kid of a goat in its mother's milk (Ex 23:19, 34:36; Deut 14:21),
which refers to an ancient celebrated Babylonian practice of killing a live calf.
That act was cruel to the animal, and it was perverse in nature,
so God told Israel not to do it.


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Last edited by Ragtime on 09 May 2008, 3:54 pm, edited 4 times in total.

iamnotaparakeet
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09 May 2008, 3:51 pm

twoshots wrote:
I only actually read Job. But the presentation of the Old Testament God as someone who was so terrible seems so much more like how I would imagine an anthropomorphic God.

Absolutely fascinating. So much more rich than the papa-in-the-sky of the New Testament.

I don't know if I'd call him cruel (without first defining "cruel"). I suppose he probably counts. But is it bad is the question.


Only recently did some humans decide that, "cruel and unusual punishment" should be considered illegal. And it's an opinion of creatures that like being fat and happy anyway.

PS: "fat and happy" is a reference to Epicureanism, but not to obesity.



iamnotaparakeet
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09 May 2008, 3:53 pm

Awesomelyglorious wrote:
He's having people smash BABY skulls and having them enjoy it!! That is not a small thing but rather sadistic from most perspectives.


Smashing baby skulls... how is that different to cutting them up in the womb?



Ragtime
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09 May 2008, 3:54 pm

iamnotaparakeet wrote:
Awesomelyglorious wrote:
He's having people smash BABY skulls and having them enjoy it!! That is not a small thing but rather sadistic from most perspectives.


Smashing baby skulls... how is that different to cutting them up in the womb?


Thank you.

Whacha think about abortion, AG? You don't think it's... oh... cruel, do you?


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Ragtime
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09 May 2008, 4:00 pm

Awesomelyglorious wrote:
Ragtime wrote:
That's God's perogative, is it not?
But I see what you mean, and that you're coming from a standpoint of human ethics -- counting God as human.
Not only is there that fallacy of anthropomorphizing God and thus judging Him by our human standards,
but you're also, as you are in both the previous and the first examples, discounting the evil of the people God punishes.
Pharaoh cruelly enslaved the people of Israel, and made them do hard slave labor for him.
So, AG, you completely discount the fact that God was playing games with a very cruel man.

Um.... Ragtime, the ENTIRE POINT of your thread is to judge God by human standards as you are asking humans "Do you think that these actions seem cruel".


No, that is not the point of my thread. (facepalm to you)

I don't judge God, and I don't ask others to judge God. You should know that about me by now.
The point of the thread is to take a reading as to where people are emotionally toward God,
not to imply that man's opinion of God is valid.


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Ragtime
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09 May 2008, 4:03 pm

Awesomelyglorious wrote:
Ragtime wrote:
If God played games with Hitler's mind, would you think God was being cruel?
Or would you see it as God's executing justice on an evil man?
That evil befalls evildoers is justice, not cruelty. Yes, for humans to attempt
revenge in the name of "justice" is wrong.
But God is far, far above humans in His rightful purvue.

Yes, I would think God was being cruel, especially given the fact that there were others under Hitler who would also have to suffer for the choices of Hitler.


You misread me yet again, but I won't facepalm you this time.
If God played games with Hitler's mind after Hitler freely
chose to pursue the Holocaust, and after it was all over,
and God made Hitler go insane with no consequences to anyone else,
then would God be cruel by making Hitler go insane?
No. He would not be cruel to do that.


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Fred2670
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09 May 2008, 4:03 pm

The truest form of justice (being the opposite of
the darkest form of evil) can only be defined by its
comparison to the darlest form of evil. It must cease
to exist without evil. Therefore any God who would
destroy this evil would himself then be evil..


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Last edited by Fred2670 on 09 May 2008, 4:04 pm, edited 1 time in total.

iamnotaparakeet
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09 May 2008, 4:03 pm

Ragtime wrote:
Awesomelyglorious wrote:
Ragtime wrote:
That's God's perogative, is it not?
But I see what you mean, and that you're coming from a standpoint of human ethics -- counting God as human.
Not only is there that fallacy of anthropomorphizing God and thus judging Him by our human standards,
but you're also, as you are in both the previous and the first examples, discounting the evil of the people God punishes.
Pharaoh cruelly enslaved the people of Israel, and made them do hard slave labor for him.
So, AG, you completely discount the fact that God was playing games with a very cruel man.

Um.... Ragtime, the ENTIRE POINT of your thread is to judge God by human standards as you are asking humans "Do you think that these actions seem cruel".



No, that is not the point of my thread. (facepalm to you)

I don't judge God, and I don't ask others to judge God. You should know that about me by now.
The point of the thread is to take a reading as to where people are emotionally toward God,
not to imply that man's opinion of God is valid.



Yeah, a person can have the opinion that cyanide is safe to consume or that a car will keep traction doing a high-speed turn on an icy road, but the opinions don't matter one iota.



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09 May 2008, 4:07 pm

iamnotaparakeet wrote:
Awesomelyglorious wrote:
iamnotaparakeet wrote:
Yeah, what is wrong with executing murderers and rapists? I see nothing bad about that.

Look, all you have to do in order to justify Sodom and Gomorrah is to state verses such as Genesis 18:32, and Genesis 19:5, as that is enough to show the city as pretty evil, at least if you explain what "knowing someone" means in the biblical sense.


Conocere un hombre... o Sabere Dios?

As for the whole city... who's to say the omniscient God didn't know the future of the children... such justifications are used to murder babies today if we are to compare some "human" standards with that of God's


Indeed!
Much of our society already considers termination of a ret*d or otherwise disabled fetus a favor to the fetus.
What gaul! :x
And I believe they're working on adding Autism to the list.


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Last edited by Ragtime on 09 May 2008, 4:11 pm, edited 2 times in total.

iamnotaparakeet
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09 May 2008, 4:08 pm

Fred2670 wrote:
The truest form of justice (being the opposite of
the darkest form of evil) can only be defined by its
comparison to the darlest form of evil. It must cease
to exist without evil. Therefore any God who would
destroy this evil would himself then be evil..


Q's para ti:

What is darkness?
What is quiet?
What is cold?
What is weightlessness?
Et cetera ad infinitum.



jiggeryqua
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09 May 2008, 4:47 pm

Either that god is God, in which case by definition we're in no position to judge him, or he isn't, in which case we're asking whether Top Cat was morally reprehensible. I don't want to spoil anyones fun, but isn't there something useful you could be doing?



mikebw
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10 May 2008, 12:49 am

Ragtime wrote:
As long as we can differentiate strictness from cruelty,
I think it's easy to conclude that the God of the Old Testament
did not have a mean streak -- He simply had very high demands,
reflective of His rightfully high status and authority.
After all, He set up a sacrificial redemption system for my ancestors, the Jews,
giving them full pardon from their sins against Him.

A cruel God would have let every imperfect human (i.e. everyone)
die to face the afterlife as sinners.
Being God, He didn't have to keep them alive.
Being God, He didn't have to lead them to their own land, Israel.
Begin God, He didn't have to make non-conditional convenants with them,
which promised He would never forsake them no matter what they did or didn't do.

And He didn't have to bestow any number of other mercies that He did as given
in the Old Testament, but He did.

1 John 4:8 makes the claim that "Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love."
(That's got to be my favorite verse.)
So, was God love back in the ancient days, too?
I am convinced He was, and that He always will be.


Was the God of the Old Testament cruel? In many cases, yes, yes he was.

But to me the real question is only able to be truly judged by reflection of beliefs. If we're going by Christian beliefs, that anyone from anytime and period of history that doesn't take Jesus as their savior during their short life time will suffer for all eternity even though they finally learn whatever lessons they needed to learn, like they should believe in Jesus, clearly that is cruel. If we're going by Jewish beliefs, that you only suffer for a short period of time whatever time it takes to learn your lesson, at the max a year unless you are truly evil and unrepentant, than God doesn't seem so cruel all of a sudden.

Strictness tends to have a point, cruelty doesn't. If God's strictness doesn't do anyone any good and has no possibility of doing anyone any good, than it is cruelty. Plain and simple.


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10 May 2008, 1:30 am

Ragtime wrote:
Are you suggesting that the punishments did not fit the crimes?
Evil is absolutely, positively grotesque to God; it is held in theological circles
that God cannot look at sin.
God called even something as simple as insincere sacrifices "a stench in my nostrils",
so you can imagine how unpalatable willful evil would be!
Horrible evil deserves horrible punishment.
It's certainly nothing worse than exact recompense.
As to determining the exact amount of "horribility",
that's something entirely in God's arena of determination.

So? That does not mean that God is still not acting in a manner that I might consider cruel. Frankly, the sound of a child's voice might be so grating to a man that it fills him with white hot rage, I still would not consider it justified for that man to brutalize the child. Frankly, your response basically sums up to "We are being cruel to God so it isn't cruelty if he is cruel back".

Ragtime wrote:
You're missing the point of the passage, which is that God destroys evildoers,
and that He enjoys the justice of doing so.
Only a just God can enjoy justice.
A cruel God would act like Caligula.
God is not described as Caligulaic by any means,
but rather as acting logically and justly.

Example of pure mercy in the Old Testament:
God told Israel not to boil the kid of a goat in its mother's milk (Ex 23:19, 34:36; Deut 14:21),
which refers to an ancient celebrated Babylonian practice of killing a live calf.
That act was cruel to the animal, and it was perverse in nature,
so God told Israel not to do it.

Umm... no, I am simply not concerned about the overall point of the passage. Frankly, I was pointing to the small heads being bashed rather than the rest of it. Frankly, cruelty and a notion of justice are not necessarily separate, as the notion of cruel punishment still exists. You still have not disproven the notion that OT God is cruel.

Ok? So? One instance of non-cruelty does not disprove an instance that may subjectively be taken as cruel.

iamnotaparakeet wrote:
Awesomelyglorious wrote:
He's having people smash BABY skulls and having them enjoy it!! That is not a small thing but rather sadistic from most perspectives.


Smashing baby skulls... how is that different to cutting them up in the womb?

Completely different discussion.

Ragtime wrote:
iamnotaparakeet wrote:
Awesomelyglorious wrote:
He's having people smash BABY skulls and having them enjoy it!! That is not a small thing but rather sadistic from most perspectives.


Smashing baby skulls... how is that different to cutting them up in the womb?


Thank you.

Whacha think about abortion, AG? You don't think it's... oh... cruel, do you?

Still a different discussion, Ragtime and I don't feel like going down that rabbit hole.

Ragtime wrote:
No, that is not the point of my thread. (facepalm to you)

I don't judge God, and I don't ask others to judge God. You should know that about me by now.
The point of the thread is to take a reading as to where people are emotionally toward God,
not to imply that man's opinion of God is valid.

You ask others to express their judgments on God. I never said that you actually believed man's judgment is valid, however, the very set up is to imply that, as to ask for a judgment is to give it some import.

Ragtime wrote:
You misread me yet again, but I won't facepalm you this time.
If God played games with Hitler's mind after Hitler freely
chose to pursue the Holocaust, and after it was all over,
and God made Hitler go insane with no consequences to anyone else,
then would God be cruel by making Hitler go insane?
No. He would not be cruel to do that.

Yes, I would consider that to be somewhat cruel if I had to judge. He took a human being and made him suffer immensely. That is cruelty.

iamnotaparakeet wrote:
Yeah, a person can have the opinion that cyanide is safe to consume or that a car will keep traction doing a high-speed turn on an icy road, but the opinions don't matter one iota.

Sure they do, they would impact purchasing decisions a lot. Frankly though, the entire argument that the Christian God isn't cruel is ultimately very circular. Why isn't God cruel? Because proper morality shows that he isn't but rather just. Why is he just? Because he is defined as good and just and fits within proper morality. Who set up proper morality/is proper morality? God. So, basically, all we have to say for God to be good, is that God is consistent, not that he agrees with my moral intuitions or anything like that, and it may be objective that he is good, but he still may seem cruel to everyone else who doesn't accept his framework, and frankly, to an atheist or other, God does not have the luxury of having his framework assumed as true anyway, and you cannot prove something right or wrong, cruel or uncruel to a person with a different moral framework.



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10 May 2008, 1:49 am

The Old Testament stories would be charming if people didn't insist upon taking it seriously.