- Before we get started, I recently made a debate offer to Dr. Jones concerning his online articles about how sinful the Canaanites allegedly were (i.e., his attempt to convince modern western readers that the Canaanite kids being killed by Hebrews was actually consistent with modern western notions of deserved justice). He first replied asking where my blog was. When I told him, he sent a final email saying he is just too busy to debate the issues raised in his articles. Now, I'm not saying he is lying. I'm just saying if he really was too busy, he likely would have said this before asking where my blog was. I think what happened was that he believed he could make the time to debate me if he liked my blog site, but after reading it, then “discovered” that he didn’t have enough time to do such a debate.
- Dr. Jones starts out with the NT and its out-of-context OT quotes for original sin. So apparently he seeks to restrict his persuasion power not just to "Christians", but to specifically only those Christians who regard bible inerrancy + doctrine of original sin as a foregone conclusions.
- Be that as it may, Jones cites Romans 3 to “prove” that everybody “deserves” to die because of “original sin”. Unfortunately, Paul here was taking Psalm 14 and Psalm 53 out of context. Psalm 14:5 says God is with the righteous generation, thus meaning the universal condemnation words immediately preceding weren’t intended in absolute fashion.. In Psalm 53, the Psalmist obviously excludes himself from the others he accuses of having gone astray. Apparently, Paul was misinterpreting Psalmic hyperbole as if it was literal, and in a way that ignored the context of those passages. The same is true for the case of Psalm 10:7. Romans 3:18 quotes Psalm 38:1, but in v. 10 the Psalmist admits the existence of those who are righteous. Evangelical Inerrantist scholars agree that Paul thought he could help god by "adapting" God’s originally inerrant wording in the OT, to a context the OT author did not have in mind:
"Also a New Testament author would quite often, under the inspiration of God and to accentuate a specific point, adapt an Old Testament verse to serve his immediate purpose. Furthermore, the practice of precise citation and scholarly acknowledgment is a modern phenomenon. It was not at all a customary practice in antiquity."-----------Romans 3:9-12, Mounce, R. H. (2001, c1995). Vol. 27: Romans (electronic ed.). Logos Library System; The New American Commentary (Page 108). Nashville: Broadman & Holman Publishers.
- Clay is apparently only talking to evangelical inerrantists, since his blind presumption of the doctrine of original sin would not be taken well by nearly half of the evangelical world “only fifty-two percent of evangelicals held to the doctrine of original sin.” See also Danielle, MDiv Princeton Theological Seminary, author of Original Blessing: Putting Sin in its Rightful Place,
Even conservative Christians deny original sin, such as the “Churches of Christ". The bible and especially the book of Jeremiah are full of references to the wrongness of a person in shedding "innocent" blood, which would doesn't make sense if in truth a) nobody is sufficiently innocent to deserve protection from murderers, and b) God numbered our days and thus logically also decreed the act that would take our lives, which often would be murder (Job 14:5).
- Clay also overlooks that if he wishes to credit God with the modern Christian moral disdain for murder, he opens the door to the possibility that it is also something from God in the heart that causes many Christians to disdain the doctrine of orginal sin. Doesn't do much good to talk about how our sense of morality comes from God placing his laws on our hearts, if in truth human intuition really isn't a criteria for deciding what morals come from god.
- Clay overlooks that Jeremiah and Ezekiel set forth new dogmas of individual guilt, intended to replace the older dogma of corporate guilt, and the new dogma appears to conflict with original sin, since the new dogma promises protection from the guilty conduct of others:
29 "In those days they will not say again, 'The
fathers have eaten sour grapes, And the children's teeth are set on edge.'
30 "But
everyone will die for his own iniquity; each man who eats the sour grapes, his
teeth will be set on edge.
31
"Behold, days are coming," declares the LORD, "when I will make
a new covenant with the house of Israel
and with the house of Judah
32 not like
the covenant which I made with their fathers in the day I took them by the hand
to bring them out of the land
of Egypt
20 "The person who sins will die. The son will
not bear the punishment for the father's iniquity, nor will the father bear the
punishment for the son's iniquity; the righteousness of the righteous will be
upon himself, and the wickedness of the wicked will be upon himself. (Ezek.
18:20 NAU)
- Clay
then cites to atrocities committed by other nations on their own people, but
this is rather disingenuous, since to be consistent, Clay would have to
draw similar inferences from the fact that people and leaders also do much
good to their people too. Why
doesn’t
- Clay overlooks the fact that the vast majority of people on earth have not been egregious tyrants or criminals outside of their country requiring them to participate in war or battles. The vast majority of people in history do not exhibit the atrocities Clay documents from a handful of tyrants like Stalin and Hitler. The point is that Clay's unwillingness to credit people properly with being good for their good works, makes him inconsistent to say the only works they can be properly credited with are their bad works.
- Clay says Jesus never implies that those who die might be undeserving of death, but he overlooks Exodus 32:9-14, where God backs off of his original intent to kill the Exodusing Hebrews, because Moses slapped some sense into the divine head.
9 The LORD said to Moses, "I have seen this
people, and behold, they are an obstinate people.
10 "Now
then let Me alone, that My anger may burn against them and that I may destroy
them; and I will make of you a great nation."
11 Then Moses
entreated the LORD his God, and said, "O LORD, why does Your anger burn
against Your people whom You have brought out from the land of Egypt
12 "Why
should the Egyptians speak, saying, 'With evil intent He brought them out to
kill them in the mountains and to destroy them from the face of the earth '?
Turn from Your burning anger and change Your mind about doing harm to Your
people.
13
"Remember Abraham, Isaac, and Israel
14 So the
LORD changed His mind about the harm which He said He would do to His people.
(Exod.
32:9-14 NAU)
- Clay presumes that all of God’s judgments are good and right, but in this overlooks the plain fact that given his presuppositions about the nature of sin and man, God either knew or should have known that flooding the world in the days of Noah would not accomplish his goal. God appears to admit he should have known that the flood was a bad idea. Genesis 8:21 makes no sense unless it means that God discovered at some point after flooding the world that this response to man’s sin was inappropriate or inadequate:
21 The LORD smelled the soothing aroma; and the LORD
said to Himself, "I will never again curse the ground on account of man,
for the intent of man's heart is evil from his youth; and I will never again
destroy every living thing, as I have done. (Gen. 8:21 NAU)
- at timecode 26:20 ff, Clay says Canaanites fully indulged their sins, thus trading on the western individualist ethics of his modern Christian hearers to make Canaanites seem “deserving” of being massacred, but in this he overlooks that the Hebrew god command things just as atrocious. We are most offended at the idea of Canaanites throwing their live children into burning furnaces, but God commanded death by burning for teen girls who lost their virginity and/or engaged in prostitution during pre-marital sex while living in their fathers house:
9 'Also the daughter of any priest, if she profanes
herself by harlotry, she profanes her father; she shall be burned with fire.
(Lev. 21:9 NAU)
- refers to reader to “we don’t hate sin” article, and at time code 27:17 says bestiality and other sins were ‘rampant’, but as I show in my own blog post, one author Clay relies on for his bestiality comments frankly admits she cannot find any Mesopotamian sources asserting anybody ever had sex with animals.
- Mr. Jones than cites to a Baal poem of the Canaanites saying baal committed rape incest bestiality a lot, and he says we may thus infer the people worshipping said god did the same. But that is ludicrous. Christians believe their God is responsible for all murders (Deut. 32:39), should we assume that Christians imitate this divine practice? Christians believe their God causes ceaseless conscious torment in mind-numbing pain for those who die in unbelief (hell), should we assume Christians do something similar? Christians believe God credits himself with why pagan nations brutalize the Hebrews by beating children to death and forcing women to endure abortion by sword (Isaiah 13:15-16, Hosea 13:15-16), should we assume Christians engage in whatever acts they believe their god does?
- 28:15 ff says our modern liberal culture is against death penalty because sin has corrupted us, but one wonders how strongly Jones would fight to save his daughter, should she be falsely convicted of murder and sentenced to capital execution. Would he tell her that her deserving death from original sin, and suffering for righteousness sake for Christ, was more important than the fact that she was actually innocent of the charges?
- Clay at timecode 21:45 ff deflects question on whether some Canaanites might have been moral among the many depraved, like Lot, by assuming that because God destroyed Sodom despite promising to spare it should he find 10 righteous people (Genesis 18:32), the slaughter of the Canaanites can only have taken place by reason that not even one of them were righteous. But the possibility that some of the Canaanites weren’t deserving of death is found in the story of Rahab the innkeeper or “harlot”, wherein she is the only person spared in the sacking of Jericho because she assisted the Hebrew spies. But nothing in the story from Joshua 2 expresses or implies that Rahab was doing anything more than pretending to align herself with the views held by spies whom she believed were part of an army easily capable of massacring her city, when in fact she didn’t really give up her pagan faith, she was only pretending so as to save her own skin. There’s no evidence that she actually repented, and the Christian view is even more unlikely if she was actually a prostitute and not mere innkeeper. What she did is what anybody in her position would have done had they felt the coming destroyers of her city would be successful. And if she was a Canaanite prostitute, she probably had much practice in pretending to believe things she didn’t really believe.
- Matthew
Flannagan who co-authored the “Genocide” book with Paul Copan, believes no
children were present in Sodom when it was destroyed, because Genesis
18-19 indicate God would spare it if 10 righteous people could be found
there, but then he didn’t spare it.
Flannagan thinks children are righteous by default because of their
innocence. But despite Flannagan’s
belief being unlikely given that
- Jones
then adds to the word of the Lord by saying God’s choice to kill
Canaanites is based on his foreknowing who would respond to the truth and
who wouldn’t. But that is
unfalsifiable nonsense. Had the
story of Rahab the harlot ended with her being accidently killed in the
sacking of
- Jones’s assumptions would require that he view Lot as righteous and godly, no matter what, all because the NT characterizes Lot as righteous and godly (2nd Peter 2:7-9), when in fact, if today’s apologist doesn’t already have his defense mechanisms on red alert, he would automatically conclude that any “Christian” who sought to protect his house-guests from homosexual rape, by appeasing the mob with invitation to rape his own virgin daughters, was not righteous nor godly in any sense of the word, yet Lot committed such atrocity:
8 "Now behold, I have two daughters who have
not had relations with man; please let me bring them out to you, and do to them
whatever you like; only do nothing to these men, inasmuch as they have come
under the shelter of my roof." (Gen. 19:8 NAU)
If today’s atheists do not stoop this low into immorality,
would it be fair to say that they are more righteous than Lot ?
- Jones at time code 32:20 ff uses his foster parenting history to argue that kids who are corrupted at early age simply do not learn better regardless of whatever new parents they are placed with, but he overlooks that child-rearing was much stricter and violent by OT policies than he would have been as a modern Christian foster parent. The OT advocates beatings with a rod that leave welts, believed to be the body removing evil (Proverbs 20:30), and that specifically the rod must be used on children to cure them of their foolishness:
13 Do not hold back discipline from the child,
Although you strike him with the rod, he will not die.
14 You shall
strike him with the rod And rescue his soul from Sheol. (Prov. 23:13-14 NAU)
How can Jones know that the child abuse policies approved by
God in proverbs likely wouldn’t have changed the disposition of disobedient
Canaanites kids orphaned by Joshua? Did
Jones use a rod to beat his foster kids, only to find there was no positive
change? If so, was that true even in
those cases where he beat the child to the point of leaving the bruises and
welts the bible says perform the good of cleansing away evil (Pr. 20:30)? Or can he not answer because he never
actually did use a rod to beat his foster kids?
Doesn’t matter if the Proverbs are guarantees. If Christians are still supposed to apply the
proverbs in faith and not discard them merely because they don’t promise
guaranteed success, then Jones cannot argue that the risk of discipline failing
to correct the child was sufficient to justify Joshua in putting Canaanite kids
to the sword.
- Again, when Jones assures us the Canaanites would not have repented, he is ignoring the important bible teaching from Ezekiel 38:4 – 39:7 that God can and does force people to do whatever he wants them to do, and that God can cause even pagans to become motivated to do God’s will (Ezra 1:1)
- Jones at time code 32:55 ff, says such kids will bring their bad behaviors with them, as if this justified killing them, and at 33:20 ff Jones asks if we have any logical reason to believe Canaanite kids would not have retained the sinful ways of their parents. Yes, Jones overlooks how his “these kids were incorrigible” excuse gets him in trouble with bible texts where Hebrews, presumably knowing this truth Jones gives us, nevertheless chose to assimilate pagan kids into their lives anyway by God’s authority. In Numbers 31:17-18, Moses requires his people to kill the male babies and boys of the pagan POW’s, but allows his men to take alive the little virgin girls for themselves (v. 18). If Jones denies the interpretation that says this was permission for the men to marry and have sex with prepubescent girls, then he is committed to the premise that these girls would become house-servants…in which case Jones must say Moses intended for Canaanite kids to be assimilated into Hebrew homes and family life. So… did Moses require this because he disagreed with jones and believed proper training could purge a pagan child of her prior rebellious conditioning? Or did Moses require this because he knew about, but didn’t care about, the ability of pagan kids to corrupt the Hebrew culture?
- Will Jones foolishly trifle that because it was only Midianite virgins who were spared here, they were spared solely because they did not participate in the sexual sin at Peor (Numbers 25:1) that was being avenged here in Numbers 31 (i.e., these kids exhibited potential for not corrupting the Hebrews)? Last I checked, virgin girls can do plenty of sinful sexual acts without losing their virginity, so that the unbroken hymen tells you NOTHING about whether she became involved with and helped facilitate the sin in question.
- If
virginity of pagan girls overshadows the question of their specific
propensity to sin, in Numbers 31:18, we have to wonder how Jones explains
that the virginity of young Canaanite girls in the promised land doesn’t
overshadow their propensity to sin in the case of Joshua massacring the
Canaanites in the promised land.
Will Jones trifle that the pagan corruptions of the Midianites at
Peor (Numbers 25) were somehow less grostesque than the sinfulness of the
Canaanites in
- Jones is confronted the same problem of God’s people appearing arbitrary in whether to spare pagans, from Deut. 21:10-14, which allows the Hebrew man to marry a female pagan war captive. Tellingly, the text nowhere expresses or implies that the captive first repent of her paganism, nor that she make clear her adoption of the YHWH cult beliefs, as a pre-condition to the marriage. And if the GNT is correct in saying the sexual consummation was rape, then it is even more clear from the context that here God was authorizing his Hebrew men to marry pagan women unwilling to be with them, which justifies the inference that such pagan women still clung to their pagan religious beliefs the whole time. God’s basis for massacring some and sparing others is truly arbitrary and likely the result of commingling disparate Hebrew religious traditions by the OT editors, than that God really does things like this for sovereign mysterious reasons.
- Jones at 33:38, says God doesn’t do wrong in taking the life of children because God foreknows they wouldn’t repent, but if so, he opens the door to the possibility of those kids going straight to hell for the same reason (i.e., they wouldn’t have repented). Jones is also deceptive since he gives the impression God could be proven immoral if we should show God kills kids despite believing they would repent later in life. Not true. If we found such biblical text, Jones would simply insist that God’s ways are mysterious, he always does good, and that we are nobody to question God’s reasons or his morals. Jones is thus deceptive for pretending God’s goodness can be substantiated on the merits, when in fact he removes the issue from the merits whenever expediency dictates. Jones would NEVER accept ANY evidence that God ever did anything immoral.
- At 33:50 ff, Jones agrees with Paul Copan there is possibility god by killing pagan kids thus saved them from further harm since their death placed them into heaven, but if removal from sinful earth is good, then neglecting children and leaving them to grow up in the sinful earth is bad, and God certainly allows children to strive on the earth and slowly die of starvation and abuse. Once again, Jones gives the appearance that God’s goodness can be demonstrated by reasoned argument on the merits of God’s acts, but in fact is quite willing to say God’s ways are good even if they don’t prove to be good by human examination on the merits. Hence, the effort to show goodness on the merits in god is deceptive, since they don’t believe the merits actually matter anyway. They will pick and choose that which looks like it can be argued, and insist the yucky stuff be resolved into the mystery of God.
- Jones at 34:00 ff says Joshua’s conquest of the promised land was not genocide but capital punishment, but a) the dictionary definition of genocide does not take the motives of the killers into account, only that they systematically remove some religious or political group; and b) it wouldn’t matter if Joshua’s conquest wasn’t genocide, the brutal war-atrocities God causes the pagans to inflict on the Hebrews as revealed by Isaiah 13:15-16 and Hosea 13:15-16 and 2nd Samuel 12:15-18, show God willing to do worse than genocide, and cause children to suffer horrific miseries before experiencing the release of death. Will he say God also “knew” the fetuses of the pregnant Hebrew women God caused to endure abortion by sword (Hosea/Isaiah, supra) would otherwise have grown up to imitate their sinful parents? Then how does Jones explain God allowing to live those kids that never repent and die of old age as unbelievers? God must have known they wouldn’t repent either, yet the fact that he allowed them to live means God did not feel “compelled” simply by reason of foreknowing a person’s consistent stay in unbelief throughout their life, to just kill them in their infancy. If God can allow some incorrigibles to live despite his foreknowledge, then his killing off only some is nothing he was morally compelled to do. Once again, Jones’s god is utterly arbitrary in a way that reference to god’s mysterious ways will not fix.
- Clay’s
pessimistic outlook on disobedient children overlooks the other reality that
many kids enduring a horrible childhood turn out better than their
parents? Are we quite sure that the
Israelites, so infected with original sin, surely had no selfish patriotic
genocidal motive in killing non-Hebrew kids? Can we really say it was at all “likely”
that allowing the orphaned Canaanites to live would have led to infecting
- Jones says
the best proof that the Canaanite massacre was capital punishment and not
genocide was that God exacted the same punishment when
In an idealized way this section tells of a battle
against the Midianites, and of its consequences…The story has little “realism,”
and is best understood as a midrashic construction,
Budd, P. J. (2002). Vol. 5: Word Biblical Commentary
: Numbers. Word Biblical Commentary (Page 332). Dallas
- Jones at 34:30 ff says God promised capital punishment to them if they mingled with Canaanites, but a) we don’t see this happening in Numbers 31:18 where virgin pagan girls were spared despite the fact that virgin girls can do plenty of sexual sins without losing their virginity and b) we don’t see God imposing the death penalty on anybody in any consistent way in the Monarchy, particularly the time of Solomon and other kings who allowed intermarriage and mixed Yahweh and pagan worship. So we have to entertain the prospect that, like many other matters, exactly to what degree to enforce Mosaic legislation was often unclear, justifying the belief that the law of Moses was an ambiguous thing that developed throughout an inconsistent history between Moses and the exile.
- Clay’s blind trust in Deuteronomy 20:18 and in God’s alleged belief that the pagans would surely corrupt Israel if allowed to live next to each other, overlooks that Saul believed the Kenites worthy to be spared despite living so close to the doomed Amalekites (1st Samuel 15:6…did the Amalekites corrupt the Kenites by close living proximity? If so, then apparently, Saul believed a prior act of kindness from the Kenites overshadowed the fact that they were equally as deserving of death as the Amalekites. If the Kenites kept free of Amalekite corruption despite such close proximity to each other, then Deut. 20:18 and other passages speaking in absolute terms about how Hebrews sparing the pagans will surely cause the Hebrews to imitiate the pagan sins, are the passages that must be viewed as hyperbole…in which case the urgency to rid the land of the pagans was nowhere as extreme as the biblical narrative makes it seem.).
- Jones at 35:25 ff. cites to Jeremiah 5 where God says he will forgive the sinful city if even one person who deals honestly can be found therein. Jones overlooks that this supports the doctrine of corporate responsibility (i.e., that doctrine that says a group will be found equally as guilty as the actually guilty member even if the rest of them didn’t partake of his sin, the doctrine that most modern western Christian cannot stand). Jones also overlooks that this passage from Jeremiah contradicts the statements in Numbers 14:18 saying God will “by no means” clear the guilty. In this, Jeremiah has a friend in 2nd Samuel 12:13, where God, with nothing more than a wave of his magic wand, clears David from guilt deserving of capital punishment, or at least chooses to exempt David from the capital punishment requirement otherwise mandated by his acts of adultery and murder of Uriah. Dr. Jones isn’t being biblically consistent in pretending that God feels some type of moral compulsion to hold people guilty for sin. God could have waived his magic wand and exempted Canaanites from their death-deserving sins of bestiality and child-sacrifice no less than he did when exempting David from his death-deserving acts of adultery and murder. Biblically, Jones gets nowhere pointing out that somebody “deserved” the fate god imposed on them. God does not impose punishment and sparing in a uniform way, strongly suggesting that the real reason is that there is no god behind this stuff, it is just a canonical bible of today that is the result of a long process of stitching together ancient stories and adding theologically appropriate commentary where expediency dictated.
- Jones at 36:15, cites to Ezekiel 14:12
ff, but Ezekiel’s statements that the three most righteous men in bible
history could only save themselves when god’s wrath hits the sinful city,
contradicts the deal god made with Abraham to spare
13 "Son
of man, if a country sins against Me by committing unfaithfulness, and I
stretch out My hand against it, destroy its supply of bread, send famine
against it and cut off from it both man and beast,
14 even
though these three men, Noah, Daniel and Job were in its midst, by their own
righteousness they could only deliver themselves," declares the Lord GOD.
15 "If I
were to cause wild beasts to pass through the land and they depopulated it, and
it became desolate so that no one would pass through it because of the beasts,
16 though
these three men were in its midst, as I live," declares the Lord GOD,
"they could not deliver either their sons or their daughters. They alone
would be delivered, but the country would be desolate.
17 "Or
if I should bring a sword on that country and say, 'Let the sword pass through
the country and cut off man and beast from it,'
18 even
though these three men were in its midst, as I live," declares the Lord
GOD, "they could not deliver either their sons or their daughters, but
they alone would be delivered.
19 "Or
if I should send a plague against that country and pour out My wrath in blood
on it to cut off man and beast from it,
20 even
though Noah, Daniel and Job were in its midst, as I live," declares the
Lord GOD, "they could not deliver either their son or their daughter. They
would deliver only themselves by their righteousness."
21 For thus
says the Lord GOD, "How much more when I send My four severe judgments
against Jerusalem
- Jones at 37:52 ff, says we have no basis to intuit that Canaanites would have repented had they been allowed to live, but Jesus made clear the exact opposite concerning other cities and how they would have repented had they been allowed to see more of God:
20 Then He began to denounce the cities in which
most of His miracles were done, because they did not repent.
21 "Woe
to you, Chorazin! Woe to you, Bethsaida Tyre and Sidon
22
"Nevertheless I say to you, it will be more tolerable for Tyre
and Sidon
23 "And
you, Capernaum Sodom
24
"Nevertheless I say to you that it will be more tolerable for the land of Sodom
(Matt.
11:20-24 NAU)
12 "I say to you, it will be more tolerable in
that day for Sodom
13 "Woe
to you, Chorazin! Woe to you, Bethsaida Tyre
and Sidon
14 "But
it will be more tolerable for Tyre and Sidon
15 "And
you, Capernaum
Will Jones trifle that Chorazin
and Bethsaida
were significantly different from the Canaanites Joshua killed throughout the
promised land?
- Jones at 38:05 ff, says Lord is indifferent to whether we die of old age or by tooth and claw, and that seems to be a pretty good case for God’s sadism, confirmed in Deut. 28:63, where God says he gets the same “delight” in inflicting atrocities that he gets in prospering the faithful. Some atrocities God would delight in (v. 63) include rape (v. 30) and parental cannibalism (v. 53-57).
- Jones at 38:30 ff specifies the biblical descriptions of atrocities are not metaphor or hyperbole, therefore making perfectly clear that he is not impressed with the thesis of evangelicals Copan/Flannagan, that most such descriptions are hyperbole.
- Jones again at 39:15, argues that since god foreknew who would repent, we can be sure he did no wrong in killing children. This is deceptive, because he implies he would accept that god’s judgment is immoral if god killed kids despite knowing they would have repented, when in fact even if confronted with such a nuanced bit of theology from the bible, Jones would simply run to sophistry fortress #521 (God’s acts can never be immoral or evil regardless of how they might appear to us). But Exodus 32:9-14 forbids trust in the goodness of god as if it was some untouchable icon or foregone conclusion.
- Jones quotes Genesis 6:5 about man’s heart being always evil, but the next verse shows god regretting his own prior choice to make man, and because a) context favors literal interpretation while b) anthropomorphic interpretation is premised on nothing more objective than the need to maintain biblical inerrancy, the open theist interpretation here, asserting God’s regret signifies his imperfection, is more objective.
- At 40:20 ff Jones says there is a cosmic lesson for “free beings”, but a) the sinner’s ability to repent is hotly disputed within conservative Christian scholarship, and b) if God knew the kids he killed would not have repented, and if God’s foreknowledge is infallible, then those kids were not “free” to deviate from their foreknown fate (i.e., not free to make freewill choice to repent). If God’s foreknowledge is infallible, then whatever it contains in incapable of failing. If God infallibly foreknows what will actually happen, and thus infallibly foreknows you will actually drop a pan on your foot tomorrow at noon, then dropping a pan on your foot tomorrow at noon is not capable of failing. How you reconcile that with “freewill” is immaterial and will not change the definition of “infallible”.
- Jones at 40:45 ff ends with preaching, but the entire experience of “getting saved” and “new nature” and “adopted into god’s family” is 100% theoretical and has no empirical justification beyond a few bible verses which talk the same way. It is deception to say the least to speak about the born-again experience with the same type of language one uses to describe how one became a member of a local organization.
- Jones at 41:20 ff, answers question as to why other peoples on earth, allegedly as deserving of death as the Canaanites, aren’t killed off by God too. Answers the Canaanites had given themselves over more thoroughly to evil. But as I show in my blog post cited above, the specific accusations that Canaanites burned children to death and engaged in bestiality cannot be verified by actual literary or epigraphic evidence. Jones may point to the bible, but we accuse the bible of misrepresenting the Canaanites, so it would be the fallacy of begging the question to quote the bible as proof when the reliability of the biblical record is precisely the issue. Furthermore the bible has two stories indicating “pass through the fire” was a symbolic rite not intended to cause pain or death to a child. 2nd Kings 16:3, Ahaz made his “son” (singular) pass through the fire, but then his “son” (singular) Hezekiah took over the throne (v. 3) (!?). Well gee, because God can do miracles, maybe Hezekiah took over the throne as a zombie rising from the ashes? Manassah also made his “son” (singular) pass through the fire (2nd Kings 21:6), but then his “son” (singular) Amon took over the throne (v. 18). Since the context provides no reason to think the kings had more than one son a piece, it appears the Kings author did not believe the “pass through the fire” was a ritual intended to cause the child to die.
- Jones at 42:20 ff,. resorts to Genesis 15:16 and the story bit about how God refused to clear out the Canaanites since the time of Abraham because their sin was not yet complete. But there are serious problems with this verse; a) all scholars admit the Pentateuch was edited to include information moses didn’t write, so it remains a possibility that this blurb is a bit of theological explanation that was added to the text of Genesis between authorship by Moses and its current canonical form; b) the very idea that god would spare people so they could fill up the measure of their sins, contradicts the Christian interpretation of this verse saying God waited those 400 years for them to repent. No, he was waiting them to become exceedingly sinful, he wasn’t waiting for them to repent. And if God’s foreknowledge was infallible, then i) infallible means incapable of failing, which would mean the Canaanites could not deviate from becoming more and more sinful, since god cannot be surprised, and ii) God therefore wasn’t “hoping” the Canaanites would prove his foreknowledge wrong, anymore than you wait two years “hoping” your two year old will prove wrong your predictions about their behavior two years into the future, and pass college tests in advanced statistics. The standard Christian view that God waits around “hoping” for an outcome that by his infallible foreknowledge he is perfectly certain has no chance of actually materializing, is a serious blight on Christian doctrine.
- Basically, Jones’s traditionalist stance makes it ironic that he seeks to appeal to our human reasoning to make his 44 minute argument justifying God’s acts as good, since he has already committed to the premise that human reason is corrupt. Jones would be more consistent to bypass human reasoning altogether and simply quote the bible without his imperfect commentary. How can it be meaningful for Jones to satisfy our sense of justice by saying Canaanites deserved to die for acts like bestiality and child-sacrifice, if in truth he will merely run and hide behind the mysterious ways of God when confronted with biblical instances where God killed others in ways that don’t satisfy modern western reasoning?
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