Answering R. Scott Smith on murder and rape

 This is my reply to an article by Dr. R. Scott Smith entitled:

Making Sense of Morality: Bentham, Mill, and Utilitarianism 

January 11, 2021/ R. Scott Smith

There definitely is a place for appeals to utility in moral reasoning. E.g., when crafting public policy, we should consider the likely consequences of a proposed action, even when a deontological principle clearly applies.

So when Christian women consider the consequences of their decision to have an abortion (i.e., the child goes immediately to heaven and all chance they might end up in hell is infallibly preempted), then it is clear that the abortion has greater moral good, while allowing the child to grow up, gain freewill, and thus open up the possibility of being tortured in flames forever, is clearly immoral. Especially given that the aborted baby's entry to heaven is necessarily approved by God (how else would he let them in)?  

You couldn't be immoral to murder anybody, because according to Job 14:5, God has set an unchangeable number of days for a person to live.  If you murder somebody, you are necessarily carrying out god's will on what happens to them when their number of days are expired.  Gee, I never knew that obeying the will of God was immoral!

After all, people have to live with such decisions. Moreover, utilitarianism appeals to people, especially in secular societies, as apparently being morally neutral. There is no appeal to God or some other set of values to determine what is moral.

Fair enough. 

However, what gets to count as a “good” or “bad” consequence in the first place? Who gets to decide that?

In America, the "who" are the people who decide whether to vote on proposed legislation.  In certain parts of Africa, it is a witch-doctor.

According to whom is something (or someone) more valuable than another?

See above. 

Biases easily could enter the calculation here.

It would be impossible if they didn't, since morality is ultimately subjective.  There is no such thing as moral neutrality in that group of people who desire to cast a vote about proposed legislation.

To make such judgments seems to presuppose some outside standard, beyond utility.

No, making such judgments presupposes the basic morality of the individual that they have by reason of genetic predisposition and environmental conditioning.  Many people mistake such morals as objective, but they do, in fact, spring from those two sources, no need to posit any moral source that is "above humanity".

Another issue is that utilitarianism seems inadequate in terms of how it treats motives.

Indeed, because morality is relative, there is not going to be any system that will be satisfactory to everybody.  Some people simply prioritize the long-term and others the short-term, and history tells us nothing if it doesn't tell us that we are incapable of creating moral utopia.  There's enough commonality to explain creation of different moral groups (nations, states, towns, clubs, churches) but not enough commonality to justify efforts to unite the whole world in morality.  Exactly what we'd expect on naturalism.

Yet, surely they are morally important. If someone kills another, it makes a major difference if it was done intentionally or accidentally. We rightly recognize that difference in the law.

But only for people who care about the long-term stability of society, not for those of more independent persuasion.  That's a lot of people.  Most people do in fact go faster than the speed limit, cheat on their taxes, and many refrain from calling the police if they have seen a crime, judging the judicial system inadequate to meet their needs.

Relatedly, utilitarianism undermines acts of moral supererogation, ones that are heroic and praiseworthy, yet not required. Suppose someone is jogging but notices another person in danger of being attacked by a third person with a knife. While we should expect that jogger to at least call for help (call the police or cry out, to scare off the attacker), it would be above and beyond the call of duty for that jogger to fight off the attacker and save the would-be victim. Yet, on utilitarianism, that act would be obligatory if it would result overall in net good consequences.

Then have fun refuting utilitarian advocates who think their system covers all possible moral situations.  Count me out.

Perhaps most significantly, utilitarianism makes net utility the basis for what is moral.

That's why it cannot be the answer to all moral situations, as most people do not agree that whatever is best in the long term for the majority of people is best.  People will flout the law for their own personal moral reasons often without caring whether this would help or hurt the larger concerns. 

Consider again our core morals: murder and rape are wrong, and justice and love are good.

Murder is not always wrong, its a question of whether the law which criminalize certain types of killing might end up operating to create a greater injustice, which discussion is not pointless merely because morals are relative.  We live with each other hear on earth, we don't need to claim we speak for God in order to legitimately seek what we believe is moral justice.

If you think rape is always immoral, then you are saying God is morally wrong.  See the Good News Translation of Deuteronomy 21:14.  Christian translators would hardly render the Hebrew as "forced her to have intercourse with you" if they could have grammatically justified any less rape-sounding translation. 

If the good consequences of a murder outweigh the bad, then that act would be justified and even obligatory.

But whether the good consequences DO outweigh the bad, is a moral judgment call that not even Christians can agree on.

The same goes for rape, whether under act or rule utilitarianism.

No, you only establish this "core" value by arbitrarily preempting the opinion held by remorseless rapists.  That's not very objective or clinical, that's nothing more than "those people are yucky so their opinion doesn't count."  And there are plenty of women who have a "rape fetish", and there is counseling available for rape victims who orgasmed during the rape.  But the victim having an orgasm during the rape probably isn't something you hear about in the mass media.  But an atheist could pounce on that as a proof that either your god doesn't exist, or the god who exists is a barbarian.  But that's not difficult anyway:  girls become capable of bearing children when they reach 12 years of age.  The male's sex drive is strongest during their teen years.  Why?  Might it be that your god seriously thought that having a family and working the farm was far more important than literacy, college and capitalism?

But these results clearly are deeply mistaken, to say the least. If this justification held, it could be moral to rape another person,

You don't have an argument indicating that rape is objectively immoral.  You just blindly presuppose that is the case because you know most people will agree with it.  But popularity doesn't equal truth.  You have to ask WHY most people think rape is wrong.  That's easy, the way they were raised:  most of us were not raised to take advantage of other people., and we were raised to believe that we shouldn't be subjecting somebody else to misery unless only a greater evil would occur without it, so since the satisfaction of the rapists sexual drive is not viewed by most people as a high priority, while their being born and raised in a democratic nation tells them the girl doesn't deserve to be raped, most people naturally eschew rape.

or murder a racial minority person who is protesting peacefully for civil rights.

There is no doubt that such a statement as this will garner an awful lot of support for you because America as a whole is steaming over the white cops killing black men.  But again, you have nothing but popularity on your side.  Once again, you cannot prove the objective immorality of a racist cop killing a black man in a way contrary to the applicable state and federal laws.   

But, we deeply know such acts are wrong; otherwise, why would there be such uproars against these acts?

But WHY do we "deeply know" such acts are wrong?  Gee, is it sheer coincidence that our viewpoint on such things is in harmony with the way most of us were raised, and in harmony with the kind of mammalian genetic predisposition most of us are born with (i.e., don't do something which threatens the survival of the group)?

Furthermore, your implied belief that murder is objectively immoral is disproven from the bible, in which God takes personal responsibility for all murders (Deuteronomy 32:39, Job 14:5, see Deut. 28:15-63).  You don't have to be a hyper-Calvinist to argue as a Christian that god is responsible for evil and works it to his own good.  That logically requires that when some white cop guns down a black man, God was more responsible for why the atoms in the cops brain did what they did, than the cop himself.  Biblical statements about God's omnipresence contradict biblical statements supporting libertarian freewill.  There is no place God is absent from, and that includes brain synapses.  Unless you wish to argue that ancient Semitic peoples tended to include exaggeration in their religious texts?  Gee, that wouldn't create a serious problem for inerrancy, would it? A Bible whose statements about God often exaggerate him?  How about a Court of law declaring the Affidavit of some witness "inerrant" despite its containing exaggerations?

Likewise, justice would be reduced to whatever is the result of the calculation. A rape or murder would be just in a society that is predominately one race if that act would maximize the overall benefits for the majority. Yet, if these acts can be just on this moral system, we have lost justice.

No, we'd have lost our current sense of justice.  Once again, your arguments blindly and wrongly presuppose that you DO have unchallengable "core" moral elements.  You don't.  You just have a lot of mammals in the world whose genetic predispositions are similar enough to explain their grouping together, but not similar enough to create moral utopia...exactly what we'd expect in a godless mammalian world where trying to stay alive and thrive is the ultimate purpose.

Indeed, murder’s and rape’s wrongness, and justice’s and love’s goodness, seem to be intrinsically so.

And there you go again appealing to the emotions of the reader, but surely an apologist can do better to prove objective morality, than by remarking that certain morals "seem" intrinsic.

But "intrinsic" doesn't have to imply transcendance.  Morals become lodged in our minds as we are raised by our caregivers.  I'm not seeing why that naturalistic explanation is leaving anything unexplained. 

God commands genocide, my challenge to Claude Mariottini

There's this book called Show Them No Mercy (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2003) wherein several Christian scholars debate the thorny issue of the bible-god's apparent ordering the ancient Hebrews to slaughter all Canaanite men, women and children living in certain specified locales, and whether this can be reconciled with God's alleged command in the NT that his people be loving toward everybody else.

In other words, a problem of consistency that only worries those who ascribe to bible "inerrancy".

One of the Christian scholars to contribute an article in that book was C. S. Cowles, who wrote the article “The Case for Radical Discontinuity". He emphasizes NT passages which say the Old Covenant was imperfect and is passing away.

Dr. Mariottini has a blog and responded to Cowles, trying to argue under a presumption of biblical inerrancy that there is no inconsistency between the OT God commanding such genocide and the NT God who commands people to love one another.

I replied to Mariottini, see here.  I post the content below in case the good doctor deletes my post:

          Barry Jones says:
Your comment is awaiting moderation.
June 17, 2020 at 4:25 pm

Dear Dr. Mariottini, 

Frank Turek and other "apologists" strongly emphasize that objective morality proves god. Turek thus argues that most of humanity recognize rape as immoral, yet atheism cannot account for this pattern of opinion in human history, therefore, god did it. But most people also strongly oppose infanticide (Numbers 31:17, 1st Samuel 15:2-3), and they equally oppose using fire to kill a preteen girl merely for having premarital sex in her father's house (Leviticus 21:9, by having sex in her father's house, she likely still lives there, and thus is likely still unmarried and thus likely not older than about 12). 

If the collective human condemnation of rape proves God, why shouldn't we extend Turek's logic and similarly presume that because it is the Holy Spirit who convinces everybody that rape is absolutely immoral, it is also the Holy Spirit who convinces everybody that infanticide and burning children to death are absolutely immoral?

By what criteria do we decide when collective human moral opinion ultimately stems from the Holy Spirit, and when it doesn't?

Sure, that would have the effect of proving those parts of the bible are not inspired by God, but wouldn't logical consistency be a higher priority than bible inerrancy, given the former is beyond question, while the latter is the subject of endless confusion and disagreement within the Evangelical Christian camp?

Or do you think Turk is merely overstating the force of the moral argument for God?

Answering Apologetics Press and Dave Miller, Ph.D., on god killing children

This is my reply to an Apologetics Press article by Dr. Dave Miller, entitled

Did God Order the Killing of Babies?

by  Dave Miller,Ph.D.

 Skeptics and atheists have been critical of the Bible’s portrayal of God ordering the death of entire populations—including women and children.

Because the more infinite god is, the more options he has to solve sin problems without needing to inflict misery.  If limited sinners, can solve sin problems without mass slaughter, so can "god". 

Appeals to ripple-effect and chaos theory might help you save face, but foists not the least bit of intellectual obligation upon the person criticizing the bible's divine atrocities.  Hence appeal to such wishful speculations do not perform the function of making your fundamentalist position more reasonable than the position of a person who appeals to other dimensions to explain Bigfoot's uncanny ability to evade most attempts at detection.

For example, God instructed Saul through the prophet Samuel to “go and attack Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and do not spare them. But kill both man and woman, infant and nursing child, ox and sheep, camel and donkey” (1 Samuel 15:3-4, emp. added). Other examples include the period of the Israelite conquest of Canaan in which God instructed the people to exterminate the Canaanite populations that occupied Palestine at the time. However, if one cares to examine the circumstances and assess the rationale, the Bible consistently exonerates itself by offering legitimate clarification and explanation to satisfy the honest searcher of truth.

Ok, where does the bible teach that a person of infinite power "didn't have any other way" to resolve a sin problem except to inflict horrific misery on children and infants?   When we bomb cities in war and cannot avoid killing a few innocent people, it's precisely because we are limited in our power and knowledge.  If we have infallible ability to pinpoint where the innocent civilians were and where the guilty enemy combatants were, we would be able to solve the war problem without killing innocent people.

You know, the excuse of imperfection that your infinite god cannot use.

The Hebrew term herem found, for instance, in Joshua 6:17, refers to the total dedication or giving over of the enemy to God as a sacrifice involving the extermination of the populace. It is alleged that the God of the Bible is as barbaric and cruel as any of the pagan gods. But this assessment is simply not true.
 If the critic would take the time to study the Bible and make an honest evaluation of the principles of God’s justice, wrath, and love,

Which the bible says he cannot do unless he first converts to your religion (1st Cor. 2:14), so you are asking of the critic that which your own theology says is impossible.  Sort of like me asking you to lift 5 tons above your head with no other means beyond your personal unaided biological muscular strength.

he would see the perfect and harmonious interplay between them.

That's funny...most Christian scholars don't believe in biblical inerrancy, which means not even most Christian scholars find your fundamentalist "reconciliation scenarios" too convincing.  That is, even if I became a Christian, god still might be telling me that the divine atrocities of the OT truly contradict the divine love preached by Jesus.

God’s vengeance is not like the impulsive, irrational, emotional outbursts of pagan deities or human beings.

Of course not.  For example, when he determined to murder Moses for no specific reason, the wife felt so constrained by the urgent death threat that she used something more dull than a knife, which happened to be nearby, to circumcise her son, the only apparent way God would back the fuck off:

 24 Now it came about at the lodging place on the way that the LORD met him and sought to put him to death.
 25 Then Zipporah took a flint and cut off her son's foreskin and threw it at Moses' feet, and she said, "You are indeed a bridegroom of blood to me."
 26 So He let him alone. At that time she said, "You are a bridegroom of blood "-- because of the circumcision. (Exod. 4:24-26 NAU)

You will insist surely there was a reason God wanted to kill, even if the text doesn't express it, but on the contrary, God specifies that he can be incited to harm people "without cause":

 3 The LORD said to Satan, "Have you considered My servant Job? For there is no one like him on the earth, a blameless and upright man fearing God and turning away from evil. And he still holds fast his integrity, although you incited Me against him to ruin him without cause. (Job 2:3 NAU)

Miller continues:

He is infinite in all His attributes and thus perfect in justice, love, and anger.

Ok, you are a classical theist.  But Greg Boyd and other conservative Christian scholars reject classical theism and use the bible to substantiate the opposite doctrine of open-theism (i.e., God is limited and makes mistakes).  In other words, the only way I could allow your classical theist presuppositions is if I convert to Christianity and decide that the Christians who advocate for open-theism are wrong. 

Not likely.  In the text of Genesis 6:6-7, God's regret is not toward the sinfulness of man, even if that was historically true.  His regret is toward his own prior choice to have created man.  That is, god is sorry he created man and this means pretty much the same thing the parent means when saying they are sorry they ever chose to have kids.  In both cases, one's confession of personal imperfection is clear.  Hence I deny any bible verses that extol God's power and wisdom, and refuse to read such classical theist concepts into the biblical wording to make the bible agree with classical theism.  The bible's teaching about God's limitations and imperfections cannot be changed merely beaccuse other parts of the bible give a contrary picture.

Therefore I am reasonable to take god at his word, and accept his personal confession of imperfection as the truth about him...and therefore recognize the bible to be full of theological error.  As if 2,000 years of Christian theologians attacking each other didn't already do the job.

Just as God’s ultimate and final condemnation of sinners to eternal punishment will be just and appropriate,

Ok, you aren't challenging skeptics here, you are preaching to the choir.  Rock on.

so the temporal judgment of wicked people in the Old Testament was ethical and fair.

Gee, how easy is it to blindly accept God's perfection in one part of the bible, to justify the conclusion that "surely the judge of the earth will do right" to quell any problems with any other part of the bible?  Like I said, preaching to the choir.  What you say puts no intellectual compulsion on skeptics, nor highlights any logical fallacies in their criticism of the bible-god.

We human beings do not have an accurate handle on the gravity of sin and the deplorable nature of evil and wickedness.

Yes we do.  Those who trivialize the moral wrongness of sin aren't expressing any greater cavalier liberalism than God did when he got rid of David's two death-deserving sins of adultery and murder...by simply waiving his magic wand:

 13 Then David said to Nathan, "I have sinned against the LORD." And Nathan said to David, "The LORD also has taken away your sin; you shall not die. (2 Sam. 12:13 NAU)

How high is God's standard of justice?  Put your diapers on!....He requires a whole entire RAM to be sacrificed when a master rapes a slave girl, and by that sacrifice, he forgives the rapist completely:

 20 'Now if a man lies carnally with a woman who is a slave acquired for another man, but who has in no way been redeemed nor given her freedom, there shall be punishment; they shall not, however, be put to death, because she was not free.
 21 'He shall bring his guilt offering to the LORD to the doorway of the tent of meeting, a ram for a guilt offering.
 22 'The priest shall also make atonement for him with the ram of the guilt offering before the LORD for his sin which he has committed, and the sin which he has committed will be forgiven him. (Lev. 19:20-22 NAU)

I therefore soil myself at the thought of the bible-god's infinitely high standard of justice.  Clearly, he thinks the person who steals a pack of bubble gum from the corner store has made themselves worthy of eternally irreversible conscious torture by fire.

Human sentimentality is hardly a qualified measuring stick for divine truth and spiritual reality.

Said the Muslim terrorist to the American mother of three kids.  When idiots get it in their head that their god wants them to commit some horrible act, they necessarily become immune to common sense.

How incredibly ironic that the atheist, the agnostic, the skeptic, and the liberal all attempt to stand in judgment upon the ethical behavior of God when, if one embraces their position, there is no such thing as an absolute, objective, authoritative standard by which to pronounce anything right or wrong.

We don't need any moral to be "absolute" or "objective" in order to remain "reasonable" to foist our subjective morals on others.  I am reasonable to conform to my culture's apathy toward racism, even if no absolute morals exist.  By conforming to my culture, I make my own life far more pleasant...while contradicting my culture's morals could easily lead to me landing in jail or otherwise making my life miserable.
Acting lawfully in effort to make life enjoyable, by definition, is reasonable. 

That logic will not disappear merely because you can carp "who was right, Mother Theresa or Hitler?"  The question blindly presumes there is a way to objectively determine who was right, which means the question is begging the question of the existence of objective morals, when whether they exist is precisely the debate.

As the French existentialist philosopher, Sartre, admitted: “Everything is indeed permitted if God does not exist.... Nor...are we provided with any values or commands that could legitimize our behavior” (1961, p. 485).

He was correct.  And due to the power of cultural and environmental conditioning, intelligent mammals are going to make changes in their lives that cause those who mostly agree on morals to band together in villages, cities, states, and nations. A whole bunch of people think raping a child is immoral, so it doesn't take a genius to figure out why such people choose to group together.  Yes, very often people are uneducated on moral philosophy and do indeed mistake their ultimately subjective morality for absolute morality, but thankfully, I'm not among them.

The atheist and agnostic have absolutely no platform on which to stand to make moral or ethical distinctions—except as the result of purely personal taste.

We don't need to ground our personal moral tastes in objective morality before our employment of those tastes to reach our desired goals can be reasonable and rational.

The mere fact that they concede the existence of objective evil is an unwitting concession there is a God Who has established an absolute framework of moral judgments.

Then you just encountered a rather extreme roadblock: I'm an atheist, I do not concede the existence of objective evil.  I am horrified at news that somebody slaughtered a schoolyard full of kids...but only because I was raised to adopt and reflect my culture's general morality...by parents who did the same.

Had I been born in 1915 in Germany, I might just as easily have taken the view that jewish kids "deserve" to be killed.  Now what are you going to do?  Find fault with a person for growing up to adopt their own culture's morals?  Ok, how about if I find "fault" with a man who grew up as a fundamentalist Christian and now thinks adultery is immoral?  Informed discussion about morality makes it clear that it is wrong to fault those who reflect the culture they were born and raised into.  We can disagree with them all day long, but we err in pretending the "American way" is "better".  We can't prove its' better except to shake our fist on Sunday and hear the claps of other people who already agree with us.  That doesn't prove the American way is objectively good.

The facts of the matter are that the Canaanites, whom God’s people were to destroy, were destroyed for their wickedness (Deuteronomy 9:4; 18:9-12; Leviticus 18:24-25,27-28).

John H. Walton (PhD, Hebrew Union College) is professor of Old Testament at Wheaton College and Graduate School.  He is author of The Lost World of the Israelite Conquest: Covenant, Retribution, and the Fate of the Canaanites" (IVP Academic, 2017).  Therein he insists

Proposition # 12: The depiction of the Canaanites In Leviticus and Deuteronomy is a sophisticated appropriation of a common ANE literary device.  Not an Indictment.

In other words, on the basis of the case made by Walton and Sandy, my becoming a genuinely born again Christian AND graduating from a Christian college AND conducting extensive review of fundamentalist Christian treatments of the Canaanite problem could easily still leave me thinking the fundamentalist view is incorrect. 

Now if becoming spiritually alive doesn't do anything to help me correctly understand God's justice, I'm not going to think becoming spiritually alive is anything deeper or more significant than a description of a purely  naturalistic process.

Miller continues:

Canaanite culture and religion in the second millennium B.C. were polluted, corrupt, and perverted.

Sorry, you don't have any archaeological evidence that any of them ever practiced bestiality with anywhere near the consistency that fundamentalist apologist typically accuse them of.  Instead, you read the ancient and politically biased accounts by the Israelites, and automatically assume these are just as easily understood and reliable as yesterday's headline in the San Francisco Chronicle.

No doubt the people were physically diseased from their illicit behavior.

The fact that the Israelites were so easily swayed into such idolatry on nearly ever page of the Pentateuch tells me your argument about who 'deserved' to be slaughtered is superficial.  If God was correct to slaughter the Canaanites, then since the Israelites were no better, they "deserved" to be slaughtered likewise.

If God could live with the Israelites who were just as bad (James 2:10-11), he could have lived with the Canaanites.

There simply was no viable solution to their condition except destruction.

Then I apparently know your bible better than you.  God could have just waved his magic wand and convinced all Canaanites to do whatever he wanted them to do.  See Ezra 1:1.

Their moral depravity was “full” (Genesis 15:16).

Yup, you aren't addressing skeptics, you are only concerned with the readers who automatically conclude "historically reliable!" every time they read something in the bible.  Perhaps that explains why your arguments here give skeptics little reason to worry about anything except their next beer.

They had slumped to such an immoral, depraved state, with no hope of recovery, that their existence on this Earth had to be terminated—just like in Noah’s day when God waited while Noah preached for years, but was unable to turn the world’s population from its wickedness (Genesis 6:3,5-7; 1 Peter 3:20; 2 Peter 3:5-9).

Nope, Ezra 1:1, God has a non-barbaric way of turning people from the error of their way...therefore his choice to solve the problem in an unnecessarily barbaric way means nothing less than what's implied when a parent puts a bullet in their child's brain to make them stop disobeying.  The fact that the parent had other options, is all we need to be reasonable to conclude that parent is evil and guilty.  Telling us that God is always a special exception and his ways are mysterious, etc, cannot be viewed as plausible unless and until some hardcore undisputed evidence of his actual existence is brought forward, lest we  find ourselves doing nothing more than making excuses for story characters.  I'm an atheist.  You aren't going to be bringing in any evidence of god's actual existence.

Including the children in the destruction of such populations actually spared them from a worse condition—that of being reared to be as wicked as their parents and thus face eternal punishment.

Which is the precise argument I use to prove that abortion is morally good.  How could it be morally bad to send a child to heaven in a way that protects them from the possibility of ending up in hell?  Isn't the spiritual perspective (going to heaven) more important than the earthly perspective (unlawful to kill)?  When we remember the bible god takes credit for all murders anyway (Deuteronomy 32:29), then we can know it is God who is causing a woman to get an abortion.

So if God cannot do anything morally bad, then is it morally good when God employs his Deut. 32:39 power, yes or no?

When you say God can orchestrate our sinful acts for his own good purposes without himself thereby becoming guilty of sin, you are clearly desperate to grasp at any stupid trifle nobody in their right mind would ever grasp at, to avoid admitting the god of the OT is nothing but an accurate reflection of the barbaric culture that created him. There is no possible reasoning that can justify the argument that you encouraged a person to commit a criminal act, but you yourself bear no moral responsibility for the criminal act.  If older brother James encourages younger brother Dennis to steal a candy bar from a store, does James bear any moral responsibility for this crime, yes or no?

All persons who die in childhood, according to the Bible, are ushered to Paradise and will ultimately reside in Heaven.

Well in any moral analysis, where the result of the act is morally good, the act itself was morally good (i.e, healthy kids because you made them eat healthy food).

If the result of the moral act is morally good, you are a fool to say the act itself could nevertheless be immoral, since the good result is precisely the reason to say the act producing the good, was itself good.  How do you know feeding kids healthy food is morally good?  The result.  That's sufficiently objective to make it reasonable for moral relativists to feel their actions morally justified, even if absolute morals don't exist. You will say "this is merely 'the ends justify the means' !", but that doesn't bother me, as ends-justify-the-means is a rather popular moral justification.  If I'm starving, I won't just look at somebody else's food and perish away, I'll probably try to get some of it even if I know this is stealing.

Children who have parents who are evil must naturally suffer innocently while on Earth (e.g., Numbers 14:33).

But only because your god chose to refrain from waving his magic Ezra 1:1 wand and causing those evil parents to do whatever he wants.

Those who disagree with God’s annihilation of the wicked in the Old Testament have the same liberal attitude that has come to prevail in America just in the last half century. That attitude has typically opposed capital punishment, as well as the corporal punishment of children.

Then count me out.  I'm not  fundamentalist Christian, but I'm not a card carrying ACLU radical.

Such people simply cannot see the rightness of evildoers being punished by execution or physical pain.

Said the Muslim terrorist leader to his followers when talking about the moral goodness of killing Americans.

Nevertheless, their view is skewed—and the rest of us are being forced to live with the results of their warped thinking: undisciplined, out-of-control children are wreaking havoc on our society by perpetrating crime to historically, all-time high levels.

And like the parent who has the ability to control the kids without killing or brutalizing them, God just sits around refusing to exercise his Ezra 1:1 magic.  So God is like the wealthy parent watching their own kids starve, because dad refuses, solely by choice, to withdraw money from the bank to buy food.  When you have ability and opportunity to prevent your own created situation from spinning out of moral control, and you don't, the evil that occurs is YOUR fault whether others can be implicated too. 

God is no different than the mother with three toddlers who constantly chooses to never guide them, and just lets them run all over hell and back, then bitches about the fact that they exhibit the natural characteristics of unguided children.  Or like the mother who never guides her kids by anything more than words.  Sorry god, "words" are not enough, thus "the bible says..." is not enough to solve actual real world problems, even if it's enough to dazzle the delights of believers every Sunday.

Those who reject the ethics of God’s destructive activity in the Old Testament, to be consistent, must reject Jesus and the New Testament.

Nah, plenty of genuinely born again Christians have had severe probelms with the moral contradiction between the OT and NT.  I therefore reasonably deduce it is a real problem and not merely a case of somebody lacking spiritual insight.

Over and over again, Jesus and the New Testament writers endorsed and defended such activity (e.g., Luke 13:1-9; 12:5; 17:29-32; 10:12; Hebrews 10:26-31).

Yup, you aren't arguing to convince skeptics, but only to convince "bible-believers".  Dismissed.

The Bible provides the only logical, sensible, meaningful, consistent explanation regarding the principles of retribution, punishment, and the conditions under which physical life may be extinguished.

Yup.  We'd all cry if America's ghettos were nuked clean, but I'm sure you'd probably find a bible verses that says nuking the ghettos is the "only way" an infinite god of infinite powers could  possibly solve the problem.

My reply and challenge to Matthew Flannagan's objective morality, the baby-torture enigma, again

This is my reply to an article by Christian philosopher Matthew Flannagan entitled

The challenge of Moral Relativism:
Relativism vs Objectivism: understanding the issues:

Jun 19 (3 days ago)

by Matt Flannagan

While this post contains my direct challenge, I've also answered Flannagan point-by-point in each of his Challenge of Moral Relativism posts.  See answer to post 1, answer to post 2, answer to post 3.

I am strongly suspicious that Flannagan will do what he has done before, and what he is very good at...and escape answering my criticism on the merits, all because he thinks my reply is "off-topic".

But I've already called him on the carpet for this tactic.  I said:

I have a two-part response: a) you continue evading my most powerful rebuttal to you, and b) a request on how can I present you with my own scholarly rebuttals of your Christian beliefs in a way that doesn’t constitute me “changing the subject” or “evading the issue”...Second, I would like to know how I might go about presenting you with my criticism of bible inerrancy and my criticism of the Genocide book you co-authored by Copan, and present such in a way that doesn’t constitute my “changing the subject” or “evading” an issue.

 Flannagan did not specify how I might communicate to him certain challenges that would, in his opinion, technically go "off-topic" from a blog post he wrote.  Therefore he can hardly complain that I posted a strong rebuttal to his moral objectivism, in reply to his blog post wherein he asserts his belief in moral objectivism.

I told him before that under his criteria for what's off-topic, I'd be going "off-topic" if I wrote about green apples in reply to a post from him about red apples.  After all, he didn't raise the subject of green apples in his blog post, so discussion of green apples constitutes my "evasion" of the issue, amen?

(!?)

If Flannagan wishes to set forth any such trifling bullshit, let him remember Jesus who rebuked the Pharisees for focusing so much on technicalities that they ignored the more important stuff:

 23 "Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you tithe mint and dill and cummin, and have neglected the weightier provisions of the law: justice and mercy and faithfulness; but these are the things you should have done without neglecting the others. (Matt. 23:23 NAU)

Conservative inerrantist Christian scholar Craig Blomberg explains:

In the first two the Pharisees and scribes have misjudged priorities in God’s world; in the third and fourth they misjudge priorities in God’s Word. Minor matters are overly elevated; major ones are neglected. The former category includes tithing, even down to small herbs (“mint, dill and cummin”; cf. Lev 27:30). In the latter category appear “justice, mercy, and faithfulness.”…Christians in many ages have done a remarkable job of majoring on minors and minoring on majors. A scandal of the contemporary church is its unparalleled fragmentation into hundreds of denominations and groupings. Many of these divisions have been over issues nonessential to salvation. True Christians must stand uncompromisingly against all professing believers who promote teaching which, if embraced, would prevent people from being saved (Gal 1–2) but must bend over backwards to get along and cooperate with those who differ on doctrines that do not affect a person’s salvation (1 Cor 9:19–23). Otherwise our disunity seriously undermines Christian witness before a watching world.

Blomberg, C. (2001, c1992). Vol. 22: Matthew (electronic ed.).

Logos Library System; The New American Commentary (Page 345).

Nashville: Broadman & Holman Publishers.

So even if my reply to Flannagan was technically "off-topic", doesn't prudence and wisdom counsel that Flannagan prioritize replying to my challenge as somewhat more important than the earth-shattering debauchery of going "off-topic"?

I cross-post here the reply I posted to Flannagan's blog, linked above:
--------beginquote----------------

1 response so far ↓

Barry

Jun 23, 2018 at 8:48 am

Matt said:

“This means that Christians are objectivists about morality. Objectivism holds that: certain moral standards are correct independently of whether you, I or our society believe they are or accept that they are.”

If that is true, then you should be able to establish the correctness of the proposition

“torturing babies to death solely for entertainment purposes is objectively immoral”

WITHOUT relying on what anybody else “believes or accepts” about that subject.

Indeed, the dictionaries tell us that “objective” means

“not dependent on the mind for existence”

 

So go ahead…demonstrate that that the proposition

“torturing babies to death solely for entertainment purposes is objectively immoral”

is a true fact “not dependent on the mind for its existence.”

Another dictionary defines ‘objective’ as:

“having reality independent of the mind”

So go ahead…demonstrate that that the above-cited moral proposition has “reality independent of the mind”.

You know…just like you also don’t need any human input whatsoever to demonstrate anything else that you would characterize as having “objective” existence, such as trees.

If you start asking me questions, you’ll be violating the definition of objectivity. You don’t need my input on anything, nor do you need to know whether I accept or believe any certain way about it, to achieve your own stated goal of demonstrating the above-cited moral proposition to be objectively true.

You could also clear things up by directly answering the question of why you think said baby-torture is objectively immoral in the first place.

 

Is it immoral because the bible tells you so?

Is it immoral because most humans say it is immoral?

 

is it immoral because you personally find it revolting?

 Is it immoral because all strong feelings about a moral issue necessarily come from God?

Some other reason or reasons?

I look forward to your replies,

Barry

--------end of quoted reply------------

I could have added more problems:

Many Christians are 5-Point Calvinists and believe God has infallibly predestined each individual sinner to make the exact choices that they do, including sin.  Calvinists deny that God wishes to save everybody, and they happily blame God as the ultimate author of sin and evil.  Calvinists say our sense of freewill is entirely illusory, we do not have the ability to deviate from whatever future course of action God has predetermined for us.

Logically, that would require Calvinists to believe that the reason some people think it is morally permissible to torture babies to death solely for entertainment purposes, is because God predestined them to think and feel that way.  Nothing justifies a person's moral opinion more than the truth "God infallibly predestined me to feel this way and I had no ability to deviate from this result."

Then there's the small problem of god requiring that teen girls endure death by burning if they engage in prostitution before leaving their priest-father's house (Leviticus 21:9).  This moral came from God, so...was it "objective" (i.e., applicable to all people regardless of culture)?

Then there's the small problem of whether rape would be objectively immoral if God caused a man to rape a women.  Flannagan would, of course, immediately retort that the question is illegitimate since nothing in the bible says God would cause a man to rape a woman.  I beg to differ:

Isaiah 13, full chapter
 1 The oracle concerning Babylon which Isaiah the son of Amoz saw.

 2 Lift up a standard on the bare hill, Raise your voice to them, Wave the hand that they may enter the doors of the nobles.
 3 I have commanded My consecrated ones, I have even called My mighty warriors, My proudly exulting ones, To execute My anger.
 4 A sound of tumult on the mountains, Like that of many people! A sound of the uproar of kingdoms, Of nations gathered together! The LORD of hosts is mustering the army for battle.
 5 They are coming from a far country, From the farthest horizons, The LORD and His instruments of indignation, To destroy the whole land.
 6 Wail, for the day of the LORD is near! It will come as destruction from the Almighty.
 7 Therefore all hands will fall limp, And every man's heart will melt.
 8 They will be terrified, Pains and anguish will take hold of them; They will writhe like a woman in labor, They will look at one another in astonishment, Their faces aflame.
 9 Behold, the day of the LORD is coming, Cruel, with fury and burning anger, To make the land a desolation; And He will exterminate its sinners from it.
 10 For the stars of heaven and their constellations Will not flash forth their light; The sun will be dark when it rises And the moon will not shed its light.
 11 Thus I will punish the world for its evil And the wicked for their iniquity; I will also put an end to the arrogance of the proud And abase the haughtiness of the ruthless.
 12 I will make mortal man scarcer than pure gold And mankind than the gold of Ophir.
 13 Therefore I will make the heavens tremble, And the earth will be shaken from its place At the fury of the LORD of hosts In the day of His burning anger.
 14 And it will be that like a hunted gazelle, Or like sheep with none to gather them, They will each turn to his own people, And each one flee to his own land.
 15 Anyone who is found will be thrust through, And anyone who is captured will fall by the sword.
 16 Their little ones also will be dashed to pieces Before their eyes; Their houses will be plundered And their wives ravished.
 17 Behold, I am going to stir up the Medes against them, Who will not value silver or take pleasure in gold.
 18 And their bows will mow down the young men, They will not even have compassion on the fruit of the womb, Nor will their eye pity children.
 19 And Babylon, the beauty of kingdoms, the glory of the Chaldeans' pride, Will be as when God overthrew Sodom and Gomorrah.
 20 It will never be inhabited or lived in from generation to generation; Nor will the Arab pitch his tent there, Nor will shepherds make their flocks lie down there.
 21 But desert creatures will lie down there, And their houses will be full of owls; Ostriches also will live there, and shaggy goats will frolic there.
 22 Hyenas will howl in their fortified towers And jackals in their luxurious palaces. Her fateful time also will soon come And her days will not be prolonged. (Isa. 13:1-22 NAU)

Logically:

Premise 1:  Everything God does, is morally good.

Premise 2: God causes some men to rape women.

Conclusion: Therefore, when a man's rape of a women was caused by God, that rape was morally good.

Can we take God's clear admission of responsibility for causing rape ("I will stir up the Medes..."), at face value?  Or will Flannagan argue that the only objective way to interpret this is by presupposing biblical inerrancy and thus tossing out any interpretation that contradicts another part of the bible?

Hosea 13 describes much the saem type of divinely-caused atrocities:

 1 When Ephraim spoke, there was trembling. He exalted himself in Israel, But through Baal he did wrong and died.
 2 And now they sin more and more, And make for themselves molten images, Idols skillfully made from their silver, All of them the work of craftsmen. They say of them, "Let the men who sacrifice kiss the calves!"
 3 Therefore they will be like the morning cloud And like dew which soon disappears, Like chaff which is blown away from the threshing floor And like smoke from a chimney.
 4 Yet I have been the LORD your God Since the land of Egypt; And you were not to know any god except Me, For there is no savior besides Me.
 5 I cared for you in the wilderness, In the land of drought.
 6 As they had their pasture, they became satisfied, And being satisfied, their heart became proud; Therefore they forgot Me.
 7 So I will be like a lion to them; Like a leopard I will lie in wait by the wayside.
 8 I will encounter them like a bear robbed of her cubs, And I will tear open their chests; There I will also devour them like a lioness, As a wild beast would tear them.
 9 It is your destruction, O Israel, That you are against Me, against your help.
 10 Where now is your king That he may save you in all your cities, And your judges of whom you requested, "Give me a king and princes "?
 11 I gave you a king in My anger And took him away in My wrath.
 12 The iniquity of Ephraim is bound up; His sin is stored up.
 13 The pains of childbirth come upon him; He is not a wise son, For it is not the time that he should delay at the opening of the womb.
 14 Shall I ransom them from the power of Sheol? Shall I redeem them from death? O Death, where are your thorns? O Sheol, where is your sting? Compassion will be hidden from My sight.
 15 Though he flourishes among the reeds, An east wind will come, The wind of the LORD coming up from the wilderness; And his fountain will become dry And his spring will be dried up; It will plunder his treasury of every precious article.
 16 Samaria will be held guilty, For she has rebelled against her God. They will fall by the sword, Their little ones will be dashed in pieces, And their pregnant women will be ripped open. (Hos. 13:1-16 NAU)

Once again, how can Flannagan accuse the pagan invaders who do these things of being objectively immoral if they are, in fact, doing what God wanted them to do?

Since when is it objectively immoral to do something God wanted you to do?

Does Flannagan think that sometimes God wants people to engage in objectively immoral acts?
 


If God wants you to force women to endure abortion-by-sword (v. 16), and if everything God wants is "good", then it is "good" to obey when God impells you to hack pregnant women to death.

And yet something tells me that Matthew Flannagan would probably insist that hacking a pregnant woman with a sword and yanking out the fetus constitutes an objectively immoral act.  And so, under Hosea 13, the infinitely good God wants certain people to engage in objectively immoral acts.

Now you know why I turned down several offers to become a Christian philosopher.

My challenge to Matthew Flannagan

Over at Matthew Flannagan's blog, I posted the following.  The last section is my direct challenge to him to defend against my attacks on the Christian presuppositions that lay behind his opinions about biblical matters.
--------------------
Matt,

I have a two-part response:  a) you continue evading my most powerful rebuttal to you, and b) a request on how can I present you with my own scholarly rebuttals of your Christian beliefs in a way that doesn’t constitute me “changing the subject” or “evading the issue”.

First, you have consistently evaded responding to my most powerful rebuttal to you on moral objectivity, so let's try this again:

YOU initiated the subject of torturing babies solely for entertainment, as a thing objectively immoral.  You admit this now when you say “But I did offer an argument that moral judgements are objective”.

You certainly did.  And I have asked you, several times now, WHY you think torturing babies solely for entertainment is objectively immoral for all people in all circumstances and cultures.

You have evaded, several times now, answering that question.  For reasons unknown, you don't wish to reveal the basis upon which you judge torture of babies purely for entertainment, to be objectively immoral in all human situations.

So let’s try this again:  What standard of measure (or "moral yardstick") tells you that torturing babies solely for entertainment, is objectively immoral?

Your problem here is even worse now, with your recent refusal to ground your view in human consensus (i.e., when you said “…the fact there is a consensus of judgement on a particular issue does nothing to establish the judgement is correct, consensuses have been mistaken…The issue isn’t whether everyone thinks something, its why they think it and whether it’s correct.”)

You are exactly right, Matt.  So when I ask WHY you think torturing babies solely for entertainment is objectively immoral, I’m legitimately inquiring into the real issue.

So let’s try this again:  Now that you’ve admitted human consensus is NOT why you believe torturing babies solely for entertainment is objectively immoral, why DO you believe torturing babies solely for entertainment is objectively immoral?

The bible tells you so?
You were raised to believe it was immoral?
The Holy Spirit spoke to you heart and testified that such act is immoral?
All acts that are done solely for entertainment, are immoral?

Something else?  Please specify a) the source or yardstick and b) why you believe it constitutes an objective measuring tool for morality.

----------

Second, I would like to know how I might go about presenting you with my criticism of bible inerrancy and my criticism of the Genocide book you co-authored by Copan, and present such in a way that doesn’t constitute my “changing the subject” or “evading” an issue.

For example, several times now you have pointed out that I don’t solve my own atheist problems by complaining about the barbarity in Leviticus 21:9.

Ok, how WOULD I go about initiating my arguments to you on that subject, in a way that doesn’t constitute “changing the subject” or “evading the issue”?  Lev. 21:9 poses an arguable moral dilemma for many Christians, on its own, it doesn't have to be connected to some other issue to be the unexpected shocker that it apparently is to many Christians.

Or do you have a rule that you must be the one who initiates the issue, before you will be willing to dialogue about it?  I hope not, your discussions from 2010 indicate you have no problems responding to new arguments initiated by your critics.  Then again, that WAS 7 years ago.  Things might have changed, hence I seek clarification.

Where would it be proper to post such arguments of mine and expect a response from you?  Do you have a blog site or discussion website or maybe an email address where you allow skeptics to initiate such topics?

If not, would you be willing to respond to my arguments posted at some other blog or website?

Would you be willing to respond to my arguments if i post them at my own blog?

If so, let me know, and I’ll set things up in a manner to your liking, whether to allow or disallow third-party commentary, etc.

Here is a sample of the stuff I’d like to argue, which probably couldn’t be posted at anywhere at your blog here without running the risk of you calling it “changing the subject” or “evading the issue”:

1. It is both unreasonable and irrational to use bible inerrancy as a hermeneutic.  Without more, the mere fact that an interpretation of a bible verse would make it contradict something else in the bible, is insufficient to justify claiming such interpretation is false.

2. Some biblical authors advocated henotheism.

3. If the “dispossession-only” hypothesis you and Copan argue for, be true, then if the bible correctly describes how God went about actually “dispossessing” the Canaanites, this justifies viewing the bible-god as an even greater moral monster, than the god of the “kill’em all” hypothesis ever was.

4. The open-theist interpretation of Exodus 32:9-14 (i.e., that God makes mistakes and learns) does more justice to the grammar and context than the classical-theist interpretation set forth by conservative Christian scholars.  Hence, if this passage speaks correctly about God, God recognizes that sometimes his own initial reaction to a sin-problem is morally bad.

5. The open-theist interpretation of Genesis 6:6-7 (i.e., that God makes mistakes and learns) does more justice to the grammar and context than the classical-theist “anthropomorphism” interpretation set forth by conservative Christian scholars.  Hence, if this passage speaks correctly about God, God’s regretting one of his own prior actions logically falsifies the popular classical-theist belief that God is infinitely holy, good, righteous and wise.

6. The literal interpretation of Deuteronomy 28:30, which takes the verse to be saying God sometimes God causes men to rape women, cannot be falsified merely because the context admittedly contains hyperbolic statements.

7. The interpretation of Ezekiel 38 and 39, which says God sometimes forces people to sin against their wills, and then punishes them for doing what he forced them to do, does more justice to the grammar and context, than any interpretation which denies that God would ever force a person to sin.

8. The interpretation of Numbers 31:18 that says Moses was authorizing his army men to marry and then have sex with non-consenting prepubescent virgins, does more justice to the grammar, immediate context and historical context, than does the interpretation which says any marital sex that might have been authorized was also required to be delayed until the girls both reached puberty and consented to the marriage.

9. The interpretation of Deuteronomy 21:10-14 which asserts God is authorizing a man to rape a female war captive, does more justice to the grammar and context, than does the interpretation which says the woman’s consent in these circumstances was a mandatory condition of the marriage.

10. Interpreting the sex-denial statement 1st Kings 1:4 as the bible author’s attempt to deceive the reader about actual historical reality, does more justice to the historical context within which the text was written, than does the interpretation which says this sex-denial statement was 100% truthful.

11. Interpreting the bible’s statements endorsing corporeal punishment of children,  to inflict abuse to the point of leaving the children bruised, bleeding and scarred, does more justice to the grammar and context of those passages, than does the interpretation which denies same.

12. Generously assuming otherwise hotly contested apostolic authorship of the gospels, there are only 3 testimonies to the resurrection of Jesus in the New Testament, which come down to us today in first-hand form, Matthew, John and Paul.  Every other statement in the NT about Jesus rising from the dead is either second-hand, third-hand, based on visions, or something other than first-hand recall of eyewitness memory.

13. The stories in the NT that are most explicit about Paul’s experience of the resurrected Jesus, do not support classifying Paul as an “eyewitness” of the resurrected Jesus.  Now you’ve got only 2 NT resurrection testimonies that come down to us today in first-hand form, Matthew and John.

14. Interpreting Matthew 28:20 as a proof that apostle Paul was a heretic, does more justice to the grammar and context of Matthew’s gospel, than does the interpretation which leaves room for God to make Paul’s theological ramblings a part of the canonical gospel.

15. The biblical and historical information on who authored the gospel of Matthew is sufficiently plagued with uncertainties, ambiguities and falsehoods, that one’s remaining skeptical of Matthew’s authorship of canonical Greek Matthew, is more reasonable than asserting Matthew was the author.  Now you’ve got only one NT resurrection testimony that comes down to us today in first-hand form, John.

16. The biblical and historical information on who authored the gospel of John is sufficiently plagued with uncertainties, ambiguities and falsehoods that one’s remaining skeptical that John was the author of canonical Greek John, is more reasonable than asserting John was the author.  Now you’ve got ZERO NT resurrection testimonies that come down to us today in first-hand form.

17. Interpreting John 7:5 as a proof that Jesus’ miracles were fake, makes better sense out of the fact that his brothers didn’t initially believe his claims, than does the interpretation that says their disbelief was founded on misinformation, obstinate refusal to acknowledge reality, or some other unreasonable basis.

Sincerely,

Barry Jones

Frank Turek's dishonesty concerning pagan child sacrifices

 This is my reply to a video by apologist Frank Turek entitled

Slaughter of the Canaanites 

Frank Turek Frank 

2,682 views 

Published on Oct 22, 2017  

Responding to why did God command the extermination of the Canaanites.

Tuesday, October 24, 2017

Edited Jan. 16, 2020

Frank at 0:55 ff first distracts the discussion by pretending the atheist has no sufficient standard of morality by which to legitimately judge the OT atrocities to be immoral. But most people think slaughtering children is immoral, so we only need to appeal to this general mindset to show that our critique of the bible-god's morality, being contrary to even normative Christian ethics, thus indicates the OT god's morality is more likely a reflection of the morality of the OT authors, as would be the case with any ancient writing from the ANE.  Does the Republican Christian hold off from criticizing the Democratic Christian all because of charges that one of them cannot sustain his ethics from the bible?  No.  So if Christians forge ahead with their convictions despite a fair chance such ethics might be completely subjective, the atheists should be allowed to do so as well.

Second, "that's just your opinion" might be true, but that hardly proves the opinion is disqualified. When your dad sent you to bed on a school night at whatever time he did, he couldn't ground that exact bedtime in any absolute moral source, and yet under Turek's logic, as a child you'd have been morally justified to dismiss this parental mandate because it was your dad's merely subjective opinion.  But most people would say you had an obligation as a child to obey your parent, even if the particularly chosen bedtime for your Christian household was not the same as required by the Christian father living down the street. Hence, obligation can be reasonable and rational despite being based on non-absolute ethics.  Hence, our disgust at infanticide can be rational and reasonable even if only premised on subjective ethics.

Third, Christians who disagree with each other on gun-control and capital punishment do not objectively and non-neutrally sit on the fence until these issues are fully resolved, showing that even the possibility that their ethical views contradict the bible, doesn't slow them down from setting forth their subjective views and demanding compliance.

Fourth, Turek at 1:35 ff responds to the "you Christians provide the standard which God fails, when you say the God of the OT is loving" critique by saying God gives reasons in the bible for his slaughtering of people in the OT. But that doesn't work either; as he is assuming God' is always correct in his ways, when in fact the anthropomorphic interpretation of Genesis 6:6-7 and Exodus 32:9-14 cannot be sustained on objective bases such as grammar, immediate context, larger context or genre, in which case we find the bible-god's imperfection to be just as literal as the other matters testified to in those contexts, and thus whatever "reasons" he gives for killing children, could just as easily be a case of him commanding now, that which he will literally regret later (Genesis 6:6).

Fifth, Turek is incorrect 2:15 ff to say the Canaanites engaged in many abominations and watched their babies sizzle to death. a) his god would have to be morally inconsistent to kill pagans who burn their children to death, since God commands this in the OT, Leviticus 21:9; b) Gwendolyn Leicke asserts that while Hittite law allowed for bestiality, “I do not know of any references to intercourse between humans and animals from Mesopotamian sources.” (“Sex and Eroticism in Mesopotamian Literature” Routledge; 2003 at 210).  As far as children being “burned to death”, Plutarch (110 AD) notes that the Carthaginians used a knife to slit the throat of the children first, so that only a dead body was placed on the burning statue’s arms. De superstitione, chapter 13.  Carthaginian scholar Shelby Brown assert the literary evidence does not support the notion that the parents of such kids were calloused and hardened (“Late Carthaginian Child Sacrifice”, Sheffiled Academic Press, © 1991, p. 174).

Worse, when Turek at 2:30 ff says the music players played loud with intention to drown out the screams of the  babies being “cooked to death”, this is a dishonest representation of the sources.  Plutarch in the only source that mentions this loud playing of music to drown out the crying, but makes clear it is the crying of the parents beingdrowned out so they would not reach the ears of the other people.

“…No, but with full knowledge and understanding they themselves offered up their own children, and those who had no children would buy little ones from poor people and cut their throats as if they were so many lambs or young birds ; meanwhile the mother stood by without a tear or moan ; but should she utter a single moan or let fall a single tear, she had to forfeit the money, 6 and her child was sacrificed nevertheless ; and the whole area before the statue was filled with a loud noise of flutes and drums so that the cries of wailing should not reach the ears of the people. Yet, if Typhons or Giants were ruling over us after they had expelled the gods, with what sort of sacrifices would they be pleased, or what other holy rites would they require?

Note also that Plutarch there says the child's throat was cut before being placed on the altar, obviously necessitating the conclusion taht the child was killed before being put into the flames.

It is clear that the wailing is being done by somebody other than the children whose throats were previously cut, and even if we trifled the kids were wailing because their throats were cut, that does not constitute parental wailing while kids burn to death, nor does it constitute the wailing of children as they themselves burn in the fire.

Turek's emotional remark that the children were screaming as they sizzled "to death" arises from his desire to make the Canaanites appear to modern minds to be far more vile than they really were, and constitutes dishonesty on his part.  The historical sources neither express nor imply that the children were alive as their bodies burned.  They obviously wouldn't cut the child's throat, if they wished for fire to be the efficient means of death.

Sixth, Frank says God’s ordering the Israelites to slaughter the Canaanites was a case of God stopping evil, and yet those who ask why God doesn’t stop the evil in the world, are still complaining about it.  Yes, we do because your bible-god has the telepathic ability to successfully convince even pagans to do whatever he wants them to do, no bloodshed required (Ezra 1:1), so that God could have stopped the alleged Canaanite atrocities with a wave of his magic Dale Carnegie wand, but no, he prefers to solve the problem with more bloodshed than necessary.  Sort of like you solving the problem of lacking rent money by robbing a bank.  In both cases, the problem was likely capable of less violent resolution.

Seventh, Copan, Flannagan and other Christian apologists try to make God look more politically correct to modern sensibilities by saying God’s infanticide orders in the OT were cases of mere war-rhetoric and exaggeration which was common in the ANE of those days. At 4:15 ff Turek says those arguments for hyperbole are compelling, because the bible forbids intermarrying with the group that it just said in a prior verse were to be “wiped out”, so the only way to avoid the contradiction of possibly marrying dead Canaanites is to assume the text was hyperbole.  

First, doesn’t matter if it was; the “hyperbole” defense does not even imply that there was NO infanticide or killing of non-combatants, so the moral outrage will not go away even with the "hyperbole" defense.  

Second, and worse, the cities of the promised land often fought amongst themselves, so if all Joshua intended to do was “dispossess” them, that means pagans fleeing to parts unknown, outside the promised land, with the kids and not much to survive on, and likely to be turned away whatever pagans were already there, while not knowing exactly how far they must go to get free of the Hebrew attacks.  One could say merely "dispossessing" the Canaanites subjected their children to a slow death from starvation, thirst, disease, attacks by other pagans, which is worse than simply putting them to the sword immediately.  So that the "dispossession" hypothesis of Copan/Flannagan ironically makes God out to be a greater moral monster than he was in just ordering such kids to be immediately killed.

And some Christians would argue that just because it was PAGAN convention in those days to exaggerate war victories, doesn’t mean the Hebrew authors would have found such literary convention appealing.  When you say you worship a god who cannot lie (Hebrews 6:18, Titus 1:2), you are necessarily implying that when God inspires you to write in the style of straight narrative history, he is not permitting you to “exaggerate” what really happened in history.  Copan appeals to the bizarre and convoluted theories of Wolterstorff to justify trivializing the yucky parts of the bible while still somehow saying those parts were still “inspired by God”, but this is nothing but semantics run amok.  Sure is funny that nobody in the church in its 2,000 years of history ever suspected the "kill'em all" passages of being mere hyperbole.  Will you still uselessly insist that God was "still somehow" guiding the church as it taught error for 20 centuries?  Then I suppose God can inspire the Mormon uprising too, since stupid error doesn't seem to preclude God playing a part in it.

Pagans also told stories about their gods that were pure fantasy…should we presume OT authors likely did something similar?  Or does your god’s inability to lie sort of argue that he likely wouldn't wish his human subjects to imitate dishonest pagan literary convention?  And if you had to ask where the pagans got their idea that it was permissible to exaggerate what 'really' happened, how must the Christian answer?  John 8:44, the devil is the father of lies.

Eighth, Turek says God is the creator of life and thus can take it whenever he wishes (3:15 ff), but would you continue to think a man was free from mental illness, if he intentionally destroyed all of his possessions and burned his house down once per year, with no criminal intent?  No.  Well why not?  Isn't it true that this father had the "right" to destroy those things as often as he wished?.

Ninth, Turek says if Christianity is true, people don’t die, they just change location, but that’s a pretty big IF.  It is far from clear that the OT supports the notion of an afterlife, and groups like Seventh Day Adventists and Jehovah Witnesses make compelling arguments that the NT doesn’t even support the idea of a literal afterlife.  Once again Turek’s apologetics here appears geared away from convincing atheists of the error of their way, and more geared toward helping Christians feel good about the bible they already infuse with a great amount of trust.  If that is the case, prepare to be decimated in your own debates with atheists if you take Turek’s comments here and try to use them in actual debate.  

Tenth, Turek says the Canaanites, without extermination, would otherwise have corrupted the Israelites coming into the promised land.  While the threat of corruption is stated in the bible, this argument creates more problems than it solves:  Most of today’s atheists don’t feel the least bit of compulsion to get into New Age crap, spiritism, the paranormal or palm reading or any of the things you say are spiritually false.  As atheists, they don’t have the weapons of warfare the NT says Christians have to fight such things, such as the shield of faith...yet they do little more than just laugh at the idiots who promote such things.  So apparently, unless you are willing to say the ancient Israelites were more stupid than today's atheists, or more prone to sin than today's atheists, it is highly unlikely that the Israelites would give in to the mindless idolatry of their near pagan neighbors anymore than the big-city atheist would give in to the spiritualist operating in the store below him. So its seems false to say that the pagan threat was so severe as to justify extermination.  The fact that evolution is taught in schools to Christian kids today greatly increases the odds that your child will believe evolution is truthful science.  So...why doesn't god's perfect plan for keeping the israelites pure from sin and error, continue to be a perfect plan for the rest of his kids today?  Or did you suddenly discover that even god changes his ways through the years?

So it is not likely that the Israelites, had they experienced God in reality exactly as the bible says, should have found pagan practices directly contradicting the most basic level of Hebrew ethics, to be the last bit enticing.  This "need" to kill the pagans was nothing more than a false excuse to justify the desire of Moses and Joshua to steal land from its rightful owners.  Every fucking fool back then believed that his "god" was inspiring him to make whatever wars he wanted to make.

What makes more sense of Israel’s alleged continual fall into idolatry on nearly every page of the OT is that they had no real-life reasons to think their Yahweh was any more “true” than the Molech or Chemosh or idols worshiped by the pagans.  And apparently God’s motive for killing the Canaanites (to prevent them from corrupting the Israelites) didn’t work, since on nearly every page of the OT, the Hebrews are giving in to polytheism.  Yup, there's lots of serious problems with the biblical excuses for the divine atrocities.  God has about as much "need" to kill kids as YOU have to rob a bank.  If the person had ability and opportunity to solve the problem with less bloodshed than they did, we call them sadists and maniacs.  We do not say "their ways are mysterious, we can never know whether they were doing things the more bloody way for the sake of a greater good".  But you DO turn off your brain like that when it comes to this non-existent concept called 'god', which you continue visualizing in your brain.  Welcome to all the reasons why it is so difficult to evangelize the "cults".  They are just as convinced as you that there is just no other way...is it any mystery why the prioritize their own mental comfort above objective consideration of the obvious?  They probably learned to be that narrow-minded from YOU.  So give yourself a pat on the back for teaching the rest of the world how wonderfully you can insulate yourself from reason.

Eleventh, Turek says God allows people to make free choices (3:55 ff), but according to Ezra 1:1, God can successfully motivate even pagans to do his will, and in Ezekiel 38-39, the metaphor of “hook in your jaws” is used to describe the degree to which God causes pagans to sin, then punishes them for doing what he forced them to do.  So again, God’s respect of freewill is about as stupid as the parent “respecting” the freewill of a disobedient daughter to take a gun from the house with intent to shoot others at school.  True love will always force the loved one against their will to protect them from disasters about to be caused by their own choices, and there’s no denying that the parents who engage in “tough love” after the teen leaves home, obviously love their children just a bit less than they did when the kids were just toddlers.  You do NOT “love” the person whom you allow to destroy themselves, when you have ability and opportunity to prevent the evil without creating greater evil, and yet you just stand around watching and doing nothing.  Clearly a mother’s “love” for a toddler and a man’s “love” for his 23 year old gangster son are not the same thing.  In Psalm 5:5, God’s hatred is not toward the works, but the “workers” of iniquity (i.e.,, the people themselves).  So perhaps part of the problem between Christians and atheists is that Christians are arguing from a premise of God’s love that doesn’t even work biblically.  God's "love" for sinners is nowhere the "love" that a man has for his own kids.  A man will not allow his child to be raped if he can help it.  But god will allow somebody to rape your kids despite his ability to prevent it.  If Christians had a more biblically justified idea of divine "love", 90% of the disagreements about god could probably have been avoided.  What we should be debating is whether it is reasonable to label the divine will toward us as "love", when that "love" allows for violations that no type of genuine human "love" would ever allow.  

Twelfth, Turek then gets preachy at 5:20 ff and says we do evil every day, which contradicts Luke 1:6 and other texts that say sinners managed, without becoming perfect, to satisfy God’s commands upon them to the point of being righteous in his sight.  Apostle Paul thought he obeyed the law in "blameless" fashion back when he was a non-Christian Pharisee (and he likely said this while being mindful of the obvious legalism spouted in Psalm 18:23-24, see Philippians 3:6, he was blameless "regarding the Law").  That's pretty difficult to reconcile with Turek's "we break the law every day" crap.  Hey Turek, have you ever met anybody in your life who was "blameless as to the righteousness in the Law"?  Besides Paul?  NO.  Back to the drawing board for you.

As far as Turek’s trifle about how God’s love is manifested: God also killed the baby born to David and Bathsheba (2^nd Sam. 12:15-18), and Turek would be foolish to ask the atheist to first take sides with him in Christianity’s in-house debate about original sin, so Turek could persuasively argue that the baby, infected with original sin “deserved” to die.  If Christians had the law of God in their heart, they’d never cry about the death of a loved one, because the deceased had always “deserved” to die no less than the pedophile convicted of raping a little girl to death.  So the fact that even spiritually alive people violently disagree with god’s ways, justifies spiritually dead atheists to think they will never make sense of this religious confusion, and to thus avoid entering the fray.  If the math teachers cannot even agree on how to do algebra, exactly why should the students give two shits about the subject?

Finally, Turek argues that an atheist cannot justify atheism on the basis that the god of the OT is evil, which is technically true (i.e., atheism no more suggests any moral code than sharks suggest shaving) but the more developed atheist argument is that the evil and ways of the OT god are so close to the evil of the pagans in the ANE (except of course for the monotheism which doesn’t go back to the people as much as it goes back solely to a handful of idealistic OT authors), that it is more likely the OT authors didn’t speak about their god with any more truth than the Moabites did when speaking about Chemosh.

For all these reasons, Turek is not saying ANYTHING that makes biblically informed atheists, like me, feel the least bit threatened.  His efforts at making the Canaanites appear horrifically vile were based on his intentionally false understanding of the ancient sources.  And since Turek is a "smart guy", he doesn't have the option of pretending he got this wrong "by accident".  So atheists are reasonable to charge this error of his as intentional.  He knew there was no historical evidence saying Canaanites used fire as the means to kill their kids.  Hell, none of the bible's "pass your son through the fire to Molech" references indicate fire was to be the means of death:

 10 "There shall not be found among you anyone who makes his son or his daughter pass through the fire, one who uses divination, one who practices witchcraft, or one who interprets omens, or a sorcerer, (Deut. 18:10 NAU) 

 3 But he walked in the way of the kings of Israel, and even made his son pass through the fire, according to the abominations of the nations whom the LORD had driven out from before the sons of Israel. (2 Ki. 16:3 NAU) 

NAU 2 Ki. 16:3  But he walked in the way of the kings of Israel, and even made his son pass through the fire, according to the abominations of the nations whom the LORD had driven out from before the sons of Israel. 

NAU 2 Ki. 17:17  Then they made their sons and their daughters pass through the fire, and practiced divination and enchantments, and sold themselves to do evil in the sight of the LORD, provoking Him.
NAU 2 Ki. 21:6  He made his son pass through the fire, practiced witchcraft and used divination, and dealt with mediums and spiritists. He did much evil in the sight of the LORD provoking Him to anger. 

 10 He also defiled Topheth, which is in the valley of the son of Hinnom, that no man might make his son or his daughter pass through the fire for Molech. (2 Ki. 23:10 NAU) 

NAU 2 Chr. 33:6  He made his sons pass through the fire in the valley of Ben-hinnom; and he practiced witchcraft, used divination, practiced sorcery and dealt with mediums and spiritists. He did much evil in the sight of the LORD, provoking Him to anger. 

 35 "They built the high places of Baal that are in the valley of Ben-hinnom to cause their sons and their daughters to pass through the fire to Molech, which I had not commanded them nor had it entered My mind that they should do this abomination, to cause Judah to sin. (Jer. 32:35 NAU)
NAU Ezek. 16:21  "You slaughtered My children and offered them up to idols by causing them to pass through the fire. 

NAU Ezek. 20:26  and I pronounced them unclean because of their gifts, in that they caused all their firstborn to pass through the fire so that I might make them desolate, in order that they might know that I am the LORD."' 

NAU Ezek. 20:31  "When you offer your gifts, when you cause your sons to pass through the fire, you are defiling yourselves with all your idols to this day. And shall I be inquired of by you, O house of Israel? As I live," declares the Lord GOD, "I will not be inquired of by you. 

NAU Ezek. 23:37  "For they have committed adultery, and blood is on their hands. Thus they have committed adultery with their idols and even caused their sons, whom they bore to Me, to pass through the fire to them as food.

-----------------------------------

There's also biblical evidence that "pass through the fire" did not mean "use fire to kill the child":

In 2nd Kings 16, King Ahaz is said to have caused his "son" (singular) to "pass through the fire" (v. 3).  

Nothing in the rest of the chapter expresses or implies that Ahaz ever had anymore than one son.  Yet v. 20 casually claims that after Ahaz died, his "son" (singular) Hezekiah took the throne:

NAU  2 Kings 16:1 In the seventeenth year of Pekah the son of Remaliah, Ahaz the son of Jotham, king of Judah, became king.

 2 Ahaz was twenty years old when he became king, and he reigned sixteen years in Jerusalem; and he did not do what was right in the sight of the LORD his God, as his father David had done.

 3 But he walked in the way of the kings of Israel, and even made his son pass through the fire, according to the abominations of the nations whom the LORD had driven out from before the sons of Israel.

 4 He sacrificed and burned incense on the high places and on the hills and under every green tree.

 5 Then Rezin king of Aram and Pekah son of Remaliah, king of Israel, came up to Jerusalem to wage war; and they besieged Ahaz, but could not overcome him.

 6 At that time Rezin king of Aram recovered Elath for Aram, and cleared the Judeans out of Elath entirely; and the Arameans came to Elath and have lived there to this day.

 7 So Ahaz sent messengers to Tiglath-pileser king of Assyria, saying, "I am your servant and your son; come up and deliver me from the hand of the king of Aram and from the hand of the king of Israel, who are rising up against me."

 8 Ahaz took the silver and gold that was found in the house of the LORD and in the treasuries of the king's house, and sent a present to the king of Assyria.

 9 So the king of Assyria listened to him; and the king of Assyria went up against Damascus and captured it, and carried the people of it away into exile to Kir, and put Rezin to death.

 10 Now King Ahaz went to Damascus to meet Tiglath-pileser king of Assyria, and saw the altar which was at Damascus; and King Ahaz sent to Urijah the priest the pattern of the altar and its model, according to all its workmanship.

 11 So Urijah the priest built an altar; according to all that King Ahaz had sent from Damascus, thus Urijah the priest made it, before the coming of King Ahaz from Damascus.

 12 When the king came from Damascus, the king saw the altar; then the king approached the altar and went up to it,

 13 and burned his burnt offering and his meal offering, and poured his drink offering and sprinkled the blood of his peace offerings on the altar.

 14 The bronze altar, which was before the LORD, he brought from the front of the house, from between his altar and the house of the LORD, and he put it on the north side of his altar.

 15 Then King Ahaz commanded Urijah the priest, saying, "Upon the great altar burn the morning burnt offering and the evening meal offering and the king's burnt offering and his meal offering, with the burnt offering of all the people of the land and their meal offering and their drink offerings; and sprinkle on it all the blood of the burnt offering and all the blood of the sacrifice. But the bronze altar shall be for me to inquire by."

 16 So Urijah the priest did according to all that King Ahaz commanded.

 17 Then King Ahaz cut off the borders of the stands, and removed the laver from them; he also took down the sea from the bronze oxen which were under it and put it on a pavement of stone.

 18 The covered way for the sabbath which they had built in the house, and the outer entry of the king, he removed from the house of the LORD because of the king of Assyria.

 19 Now the rest of the acts of Ahaz which he did, are they not written in the Book of the Chronicles of the Kings of Judah?

 20 So Ahaz slept with his fathers, and was buried with his fathers in the city of David; and his son Hezekiah reigned in his place. (2 Ki. 16:1-20 NAU)

Now before you jump out of your skin to defend a biblical inerrancy doctrine that you couldn't defend to save your life, take a breather and think for a second:

Why are you so powerfully in favor of the Canaanites using fire to kill their kids?  Is it because if the Canaanites weren't this evil, then your bible-god's "reason" for slaughtering them would accordingly be less convincing?  That is, you need to make sure they were as horrifically evil as possible so that God's ordering their slaughter will seem to have greater moral justification in the eyes of modern western individualist Christians?

Don't you think you need to first make sure the ancient sources on Canaanite child sacrifice really did state that the children were cast alive into the fire, before you so blindly assume your god is the neatest thing since sliced bread?

Or did I miss that bible verse that says the more your zeal departs from common sense, the more "spiritual" you'll be?