My request to Dr. R Scott Smith, a Christian scholar/apologist working at Biola University

On March 7, I read the following written by R Scott Smith, PhD, c/o Biola University, at his blog https://rscottsmithphd.com:

Summary of the Survey
We have surveyed major ethical options for what our core morals are, including:
Are they how we happen to talk?
Are they physical things? Perhaps evolutionary products?
Are they ways of behaving or moving our bodies?
Are they results of a utilitarian calculus?
Are they emotive utterances?
Are they particulars? (nominalism)

But, at least since Hobbes, I’ve argued that none of the views can preserve our core morals of murder and rape being wrong, and love and justice being good.
What Are These Core Morals?

For one, they seem to be objectively real. They seem to exist independently of us as moral principles and values. They also simply seem to be intrinsically valid, and not due to anything else (like, the consequences). That is, they seem to have an essential moral nature. Moreover, they cannot be just physical things or particulars, as we’ve seen. Instead, they seem to be a “one-in-many” – each one is one principle (or value), yet it can have many instances/examples. In sum, they seem to be Platonic-like universals.

That raises many questions, however. Earlier, I remarked that Christine Korsgaard rightly observed that it’s hard to see how such things could have anything to do with us. While she thinks people are physical, it still applies if we are a body-soul unity. Why should these abstract objects have anything to do with us? On Plato’s view, they exist in a heavenly realm of values as brute features of reality.

What makes justice and love character qualities that should be present in us? Why is it inappropriate morally for us to murder or rape? These are normative qualities, not merely descriptive. As we’ve seen, it is hard to see how we can get the moral ought from what is descriptively the case. Yet, that problem could be overcome if humans have an essential nature that makes these moral values appropriate for them, and these acts inappropriate.

Earlier, I argued that the soul as our essential nature provides a sound explanation for how we can be the identical person through change. Body-soul dualists affirm that the soul is our essential nature, and it sets the boundary conditions for what is appropriate for us. For instance, it is inappropriate for us to grow a cat’s tail due to our nature, and it is inappropriate for us to murder due to our nature.

We also saw another reason for the soul’s existence. We do in fact think and form beliefs, yet these have intentionality, which I argued is best understood as something immaterial and having an essence. Now, it is hard to conceive how a physical brain could interact with something immaterial, but that problem does not seem to exist for an immaterial soul/mind.

Moreover, why should we feel guilt and shame when we break these core morals? That doesn’t make sense if these morals are just abstract objects that are immaterial and not located in space and time. Instead, we seem to have such responses in the presence of persons we have wronged morally. Also, retributive justice doesn’t make sense if we repay an abstract principle or value. But it would make sense if a person should be repaid.

There is another explanation we have seen for the grounding of these core morals: they are grounded in God. That helps solve the question of why we feel shame when we break one of these morals. But, that also raises questions, such as: are they good because God commands them, or does God command them because they are good (i.e., the Euthyphro dilemma)? Also, which God would this be?

I will start to tackle these in the next essay. But, first, there is another option for properties besides universals (realism) and nominalism. It is divine conceptualism; properties just are God’s concepts. Justice in us is God’s concept. Yet, concepts have intentionality, but virtues do not. When we think about people being just, we don’t mean they have a concept of justice (though they could), but that they have that virtue present in them. So, offhand, divine conceptualism seems to trade on a confusion.
For Further Reading

R. Scott Smith, In Search of Moral Knowledge, ch. 12

So on the same day I sent him the following message through his blog "contact me" page https://rscottsmithphd.com/contact-us/

Hello,

I would like to ask you a few questions raised in my mind after I read your "Making Sense of Morality: Where Do We Go from Here?", located at https://rscottsmithphd.com, which I read March 7, 2022.

I never seem to get a straight answer from Turek or others who try to argue that the common human repugnance toward murder and rape is more reasonably accounted for by positing "god put his laws into our hearts" than by any naturalistic explanatory mechanism.

I can ask you the questions by email or we can discuss at your blog, or wherever.

Barry

A screenshot of that message is:

Refuting Matthew Flannagan's defense of Divine Command Theory

Inerrantist Christian philosopher and apologist Dr. Matthew Flannagan continues pressing his pro-Divine-Command-Theory (DCT) arguments and thus wrangling words repeatedly about doctrine as if he never knew that 2nd Timothy 2:14 condemns word-wrangling and thus condemns all Christians who obtained higher education in analytic philosophy.  The one discipline in the world that makes you the most prone to thinking word-wrangling is godly, is analytic philosophy.

Flannagan's latest paper is "Why the Horrendous Deeds Objection Is Still a Bad Argument" which Sophia accepted: 26 October 2020, Springer Nature B.V. 2021.

I posted the following challenge/rebuttal to him at his blog http://www.mandm.org.nz/2021/02/published-in-sophia-why-the-horrendous-deeds-objection-is-still-a-bad-argument.html

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

Your paper apparently silently presumes that God would never command a man to rape a woman (and you'd be out of a job if you ever pretended God might possibly command rape).  

And it is clear in ALL of your apologetics writings that you want the world to know that unbelievers cannot be reasonable in accusing the bible-god of atrocities.

I offer a DCT argument to refute one particular belief of yours, namely, that those who accuse the bible-god of moral atrocities are unreasonable.  On the contrary, we are equally as reasonable as anybody who accuses the KJV of having translation mistakes.

The atheist's alleged inability to properly ground morals wouldn't help you overcome this rebuttal even if that accusation was true.  YOU believe burning a child to death is worse than raping him or her, so if I can show that your own presuppositions require that God caused people to burn children to death, you will be forced to logically conclude that your god has committed atrocities worse than rape.

God said through Isaiah in 700 b.c.  that He caused the Assyrians to commit their war-atrocities:

 5 Woe to Assyria, the rod of My anger And the staff in whose hands is My indignation,

 6 I send it against a godless nation And commission it against the people of My fury To capture booty and to seize plunder, And to trample them down like mud in the streets. (Isa. 10:5-6 NAU)

Ashurnasirpal II was king of Assyria from 883 to 859, and  admitted "I burnt their adolescent boys [and] girls.”  You may trifle that this was typical semitic exaggeration, but the fact that we have pictorial reliefs portraying Assyrians "flaying alive" their prisoners certainly makes it reasonable for a person to conclude that Ashurnasirpal's boasts were true to reality.  The production date for such relief is 660BC-650BC, so the specific sort of Assyrians that Isaiah speaks about in 700 b.c aren't likely less barbaric than Ashurnasirpal II.

To say nothing of the fact that every Assyriologist I've come across acts as if the literal truth of the Assyrian war atrocities was a foregone conclusion.  One example is BAR 17:01 (Jan/Feb 1991), "Grisly Assyrian Record of Torture and Death"  by Erika Belibtreu, professor of Near Eastern Archaeology at Vienna University, where she has worked since 1963.  

You can hardly fault atheists for failing to notice all that "semitic exaggeration" when actual Assyriologists think such descriptions are  telling about actual realities.  Just like you cannot fault the ignorant teenage girl who "accepts Jesus" in an inerrantist Evangelical church on the basis of writings by Norman Geisler, and doesn't notice all the obvious philosophical blunders he committed.

 I can predict you will trifle that God's use of the Assyrians doesn't mean he "caused" them to burn children to death, but Isaiah continues in ch. 10 and uses an analogy that makes the Assyrian the axe, and God is the one who uses it to chop things with:

 12 So it will be that when the Lord has completed all His work on Mount Zion and on Jerusalem, He will say, "I will punish the fruit of the arrogant heart of the king of Assyria and the pomp of his haughtiness."

 13 For he has said, "By the power of my hand and by my wisdom I did this, For I have understanding; And I removed the boundaries of the peoples And plundered their treasures, And like a mighty man I brought down their inhabitants,

 14 And my hand reached to the riches of the peoples like a nest, And as one gathers abandoned eggs, I gathered all the earth; And there was not one that flapped its wing or opened its beak or chirped."

 15 Is the axe to boast itself over the one who chops with it? Is the saw to exalt itself over the one who wields it? That would be like a club wielding those who lift it, Or like a rod lifting him who is not wood. (Isa. 10:12-15 NAU)

Hence, your theory that unbelievers can never be reasonable to accuse the bible-god of atrocities worse than child-rape, is false.

Update August 13, 2021:

Matthew Flannagan's blog usually allows the reader to post a response, and the bottom part of his blog posts looks like this:

see, e.g., http://www.mandm.org.nz/2021/03/12473.html#respond

But Flannagan has configured the webpage containing my rebuttal remarks, so that it no longer allows replies:

See, e.g., mandm.org.nz/2021/02/published-in-sophia-why-the-horrendous-deeds-objection-is-still-a-bad-argument.html#comment-260033

No, clicking the the "respond" button doesn't work.  I don't know if Matt will admit that he deliberately disabled the possibility of further commenting on that specific blog post, or if he will do what he did before, and claim ignorance as to why his blog often doesn't allow me to post replies.

Either way, Flannagan's question was insulting and in no wise a reply on the merits.  His Sophia article drew the following conclusion:

Emphasis added by me.

Therefore, it should be clear that my argument that God has commanded people to do things worse than child rape was a very relevant refutation of the the God-is-essentially-good presupposition which Flannagan based his Sophia article on.

It is not false to accuse the bible-god of being essentially evil (i.e., evil according to the standards of Christians, who always presume the evil of any person who would facilitate or command child rape).

My response to Flannagan's blog post was in rebuttal to Flanngan's concluding remarks in the linked SOPHIA article, therefore, my remarks could not have been MORE relevant.  Yet Flannagan has a nasty habit of constantly and falsely accusing his critics of either not reading his argument or misunderstanding him.

my latest challenge to Matthew Flannagan

Readers of this blog will note that Christian philosopher Matthew Flannagan, who makes such a big deal out of the "fallacy" of moral relativity, quietly and conveniently stopped responding to me after I started battering him with justifications for moral relativity.

I recently posted another challenge to him at another one of his blogs, see here.  In case that comment gets deleted, I'm preserving it below:

Barry Jones 11 minutes ago ·

Dr. Flannagan,

What do you believe is unreasonable about the person who uses your professed degree in contemporary analytic philosophy, and their reading of the book you co-authored with Paul Copan (i.e., "Did God Really Command Genocide?: Coming to Terms with the Justice of God", specifically the parts defending Wolterstorff's Appropriation Model and Speech Act Theory), that you live in sin (i.e., for many years into the past up to and including the present, you have been and always are intentionally seeking out opportunities to "wrangle words", the sin forbidden in 2nd Timothy 2:14)?

14 Remind them of these things, and solemnly charge them in the presence of God not to wrangle about words, which is useless and leads to the ruin of the hearers.(2 Tim. 2:14 NAU)

Is that verse so clear from its grammar and context that you can safely determine that the hair-splitting trifles of language you undeniably engage in, surely aren't what Paul was condemning in that verse?

If the atheist was forced to make a choice, which person should he view as more likely to engage in the sin of word-wrangling? The average Christian walking down the street? Or a Christian with a degree on contemporary analytic philosophy?

If you wish to insist that your ceaseless arguments with other people about the meaning of words and phrases ISN'T the type of "word-wrangling" that Paul was condemning in that verse, then please provide at least 3 different dialogue examples of the sort of arguing over the meaning of words, that you believe Paul meant the reader to understand in that verse. From the immediate context, it sure looks like Paul was condemning word-wrangling involving Christian doctrine.

What's Matt gonna do?  Wrangle with me over the proper meaning of "don't wrangle words"? LOL.

Does the bible require Christians to do apologetics?  Yes.  Does the bible allow them to do the type of apologetics that involves their wrangling of words?  No.  According to Titus 3:9-11, you don't have interactive dialogue with those who deny Paul's veracity.  You "warn" them twicej (warnings don't require dialogue), then you are to have nothing to do with them.

 9 But avoid foolish controversies and genealogies and strife and disputes about the Law, for they are unprofitable and worthless.
 10 Reject a factious man after a first and second warning,
 11 knowing that such a man is perverted and is sinning, being self-condemned. (Tit. 3:9-11 NAU)

Apparently, Paul placed more restrictions on his followers, than what he allowed for himself.  Probably because he felt that apostles had more privileges than non-apostles, or had greater spiritual power so that apostles could play such games with people without being as subject to the temptations of the devil as non-apostles.  So I don't care if Paul himself wrangled words, that doesn't automatically imply he wanted his followers to imitate everything he did.  Common sense says what the NT directly commands of Christians in general is far more imposing on their conduct, than their more indirect argument that they are allowed to do just whatever they find the apostles doing.  Paul also enraged entire cities to the point of his being arrested.  Gee, does that mean Paul necessarily wanted his followers to enrage entire cities and get themselves arrested?  If you did that, you wouldn't be able to form churches and obey the stuff in the pastorals on church government.  The last comment in Acts about how the Romans soldiers allowed Paul to promote, during house arrest, the very things that got him arrested, is absolute fiction.

God and Genocide: An atheist answers Matthew Flannagan's trifles about Numbers 31

Atheist bible critics like myself constantly confront Christian "apologists" with disturbing stories in the bible in which God or his followers committed some type of moral atrocity that we are pretty sure the apologist would never try to morally justify, such as child massacre.  We do this in the effort to use the apologists common sense as a tool to get him or her to give up the bible or take a liberal position on it.

In Numbers 25, the Israelites fall into sexual sin with the Midianite, in a place called Peor.

6 chapters later, God tells Moses to take "full" vengeance on the Midianites because they had tempted Israel into sexual sin.  The following quote is long, but the part about killing children for the sake of convenience is found in v. 15-18:

 1 Then the LORD spoke to Moses, saying,
 2 "Take full vengeance for the sons of Israel on the Midianites; afterward you will be gathered to your people."
 3 Moses spoke to the people, saying, "Arm men from among you for the war, that they may go against Midian to execute the LORD'S vengeance on Midian.
 4 "A thousand from each tribe of all the tribes of Israel you shall send to the war."
 5 So there were furnished from the thousands of Israel, a thousand from each tribe, twelve thousand armed for war.
 6 Moses sent them, a thousand from each tribe, to the war, and Phinehas the son of Eleazar the priest, to the war with them, and the holy vessels and the trumpets for the alarm in his hand.
 7 So they made war against Midian, just as the LORD had commanded Moses, and they killed every male.
 8 They killed the kings of Midian along with the rest of their slain: Evi and Rekem and Zur and Hur and Reba, the five kings of Midian; they also killed Balaam the son of Beor with the sword.
 9 The sons of Israel captured the women of Midian and their little ones; and all their cattle and all their flocks and all their goods they plundered.
 10 Then they burned all their cities where they lived and all their camps with fire.
 11 They took all the spoil and all the prey, both of man and of beast.
 12 They brought the captives and the prey and the spoil to Moses, and to Eleazar the priest and to the congregation of the sons of Israel, to the camp at the plains of Moab, which are by the Jordan opposite Jericho.
 13 Moses and Eleazar the priest and all the leaders of the congregation went out to meet them outside the camp.
 14 Moses was angry with the officers of the army, the captains of thousands and the captains of hundreds, who had come from service in the war.
 15 And Moses said to them, "Have you spared all the women?
 16 "Behold, these caused the sons of Israel, through the counsel of Balaam, to trespass against the LORD in the matter of Peor, so the plague was among the congregation of the LORD. 17 "Now therefore, kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman who has known man intimately.
 18 "But all the girls who have not known man intimately, spare for yourselves.
 19 "And you, camp outside the camp seven days; whoever has killed any person and whoever has touched any slain, purify yourselves, you and your captives, on the third day and on the seventh (Num. 31:1-19 NAU)

Most Christians are justifiably scared of this biblical bullshit, and quickly change the subject by talking about how the new covenant in Christ is one of Grace and we are not commanded to kill each other any more, etc.  Many Christians personally hate the OT.  We grant the concession of defeat.

But some Christians are die-hard apologists and would rather be slowly burned alive, than admit their bible-god was an unconscionably barbaric petulant asshole.  They will split hairs all day long like a jailhouse lawyer, just to get away from the obvious meaning of a biblical text.  Jesus is not found in scripture, he is found in playing word-games, and telling yourself that splitting hairs about what should be inferred or not inferred from what God didn't say, is what the seriously Holy Spirit filled Christians spend most of their daily lives doing.

Two such apologists would be Matthew Flannagan and Paul Copan, evangelical Christian philosophers and co-authors of Did God Really Command Genocide?: Coming to Terms with the Justice of God (2014, Baker Books).

In that book, Flannagan wastes the readers time with some trifling sophistry in the effort to arrive at the conclusion that the actions of Moses in Numbers 31 were more more barbaric than God had intended.  I reply to these absurd trifles in point-by-point fashion:

Number 31:15: “Have You Allowed All the Women to Live?”

The third example Morriston cites to make his point is the defeat of Midian as recorded in Numbers 31. The Israelites fought against Midian, as the Lord commanded Moses, and killed every man (v. 7). After the battle, however, Moses commanded Israel to kill all the boys and every woman who has slept with a man, but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man. Morriston says Yahweh was angered by the fact that some young Israelite men had worshiped Baal alongside their new Midianite brides, writing, “Not only must the Israelites be punished, but the Midianites must be punished for causing the Israelites to be punished.” God’s stated reasons, according to Morriston’s thinking, are inadequate.

But Morriston appears to have misread the text. First, consider his claim that the text explicitly states that God’s reason for commanding the killing of the Midianite women and boys was “spiritual infection” because “some young Israelite men had worshiped Baal alongside their new Midianite brides.” There are several problems with this.

First is the fact that, in the text Morriston cites (Num. 31:17-18), God himself does not explicitly command Israel to kill all the Midianite women and boys. God’s command to Moses regarding the Midianites is actually recorded in Numbers 25:17-18 and 31:1-2. God explicitly commands Israel to respond to the Midianites’ spiritual subterfuge by fighting against the Midianites and defeating them. The reasons why Israel is to obey isn’t the spiritual infection of women as Morriston says, but rather the fact that Midian has been hostile toward and deceived Israel.

The Numbers 31 text does not explicitly attribute the command to kill the women and boys to God, but to Moses.

 Then maybe you missed the word "full" in Numbers 31:2?  Was that a superfluous word?

Morriston acknowledges this, but suggests three reasons why this observation doesn’t come to much. (1) Moses is regularly characterized as being very close to Yahweh, faithfully obeying his instructions most of the time; (2) Yahweh expresses no disapproval of anything Moses does in this story; and (3) Yahweh himself is the principal instigator of the attack on Midian.

I can give a better reason: first, the "full" in 31:2, as already argued.  Second, the fact that the Midianites successfully enticed the Israelites into sexual sin, just proves the Midianites were not one of the far away nations for whom Mose' rules of warfare allowed to be spared/enslaved, rather the Midianites were one of those "nearby" nations that must, under Moses' rules of war, be "totally" destroyed, since they proved to achieve the sin-enticement result that the mass-annihilation commanded was intended to preempt:

 10 "When you approach a city to fight against it, you shall offer it terms of peace.
 11 "If it agrees to make peace with you and opens to you, then all the people who are found in it shall become your forced labor and shall serve you.
 12 "However, if it does not make peace with you, but makes war against you, then you shall besiege it.
 13 "When the LORD your God gives it into your hand, you shall strike all the men in it with the edge of the sword.
 14 "Only the women and the children and the animals and all that is in the city, all its spoil, you shall take as booty for yourself; and you shall use the spoil of your enemies which the LORD your God has given you.
 15 "Thus you shall do to all the cities that are very far from you, which are not of the cities of these nations nearby.
 16 "Only in the cities of these peoples that the LORD your God is giving you as an inheritance, you shall not leave alive anything that breathes.
 17 "But you shall utterly destroy them, the Hittite and the Amorite, the Canaanite and the Perizzite, the Hivite and the Jebusite, as the LORD your God has commanded you,
 18 so that they may not teach you to do according to all their detestable things which they have done for their gods, so that you would sin against the LORD your God. (Deut. 20:10-18 NAU)

Since the Midianites certainly did teach the Israelites to commit idolatry and other sexual sins, only a fool would trifle that because "Midian" isn't specified in the war-book's list of condemned nations, Moses "should have known" that 99% extinction of the Midianites was more than what God wanted.

Flannagan continues:

These responses, however, are inadequate. Consider the last point first. The fact that someone is the “principal instigator” of an attack doesn’t entail that he approves of every single action that takes place within the battle in question.

The fact that a woman is the mother of a 3 year old girl doesn't necessarily mean she loves the girl, but we are reasonable to presume this would usually be the case and require viewing of good evidence before we are obligated to think that any specific mother/daughter case is an exception.

Similarly with 2: the lack of explicit disapproval in the text does not entail approval.

 But the lack of approval also doesn't entail disapproval.  If you wish to claim God disapproved of the higher level of slaughter Moses called for, that is your burden to prove.  Your view of the text is hardly a priori.

31:2 has God saying Moses should take "full" vengeance on the Midianites.  If the result of the war comports nicely with "full" vengeance, then the burden of proof is on the apologist to argue that the the way Moses carried out the attack order was "too full". 

Morriston’s argument is an appeal to ignorance; absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

There is no reason, other than fear of one's god looking stupid and sadistic, for pretending the "full" of 31:2 meant something less than the full-scale destruction Moses actually carried out.

It is not uncommon in biblical narratives for authors to describe sinful behavior without expressing explicit disapproval.

But the burden of showing the way Moses carried out this command of God was more extensive and sinful than God wanted, is on YOU.

In most cases, no doubt, the author expects the reader to know certain actions are right and wrong.

Not likely; the originally intended recipients were mostly illiterate, they weren't "readers".  Hence, they likely would accept the story at face value, like every Christian commentator on it did between the 1st and the 18th centuries,  and not trifle about what can be implied by God's failure to condemn something.

Finally, regarding 1, the fact that someone is portrayed in the text as close to God or faithful to him does not mean that every action he is recorded as doing is commanded or endorsed by God. Consider David, or Abraham.

Consider Jesus too.  Do Flannagan's trifles here justify a person's refusal to believe Jesus was always in conformity to the will of God?  After all, just because he was the son of God doesn't necessarily...and so you see the desperation in Flannagan's atomistic analysis.

A second instance of Morriston misreading the text is that not only does he attribute Moses’s reasons to God; he also misstates the reasons Moses does give in the context. The real issue is that the Midianite women had been following the devious advice of the pagan seer, Balaam, who had been explicitly commanded by God not to curse Israel. Balaam had led the Israelites into acting treacherously at Baal-Peor. This is the clearly stated issue (31:16). What occurs, when the background is taken into account, is not that some Israelites marry Midianite women, but rather these women use sex to seduce Israel into violating the terms of their covenant with God—an event that threatened Israel’s very national identity, calling, and destiny. This act was in fact deliberate.

 Then what's your problem with Moses' refusal to spare any except the virgin girls?  

So Morriston’s comments are far off the mark when he insists that the Midianites could not have been trying to harm the Israelites by inviting them to participate in the worship of a god in whom they obviously believed. The whole point of the exercise was to get God to curse Israel so that a military attack could be launched by Moab and Midian. The picture isn’t one of innocent Midianite brides, but acts tantamount to treason and treacherous double agents carrying on wicked subterfuge.

Sounds pretty serious.  But your trifles are still pointless:  If you are claiming Moses required more destruction than what God intended in 31:2, then say so and explain why, quit pussy-footing around with trifles about how God can condemn something without explicitly saying so.  What textual evidence is there to suggest God disagreed with the degree of death and destruction Moses called for? 

And Flannagan's skepticism seems more extreme than is warranted for a Christian bible believer.  n Numbers 31:14, Moses is "angry" with his military leaders for sparing the women.

Shouldn't a Christian believer in bible inerrancy like Flannagan first assume that Moses had expected his men to inflict total destruction?

Once again, if 31:2 has God decreeing "full" vengeance on the Midianites, what textual evidence makes Flannagan so positively certain that the full manner Moses carried out God's orders, effected more death than God wished?

Didn't this Moses and his Hebrews believe in corporate solidarity, the doctrine that holds you responsible for sins of your leader even if you were not personally guilty?  

Didn't this god hold entire cities responsible for murders that went unsolved or idolotry committed by a few (Deut 13:12-18; 21:1-9)?

Didn't the Israelites manifest the same observation of corporate solidarity when willing to spare anybody that might come under Rahab's roof (Josh 2:12-14; 6:22-25)?

Didn't this god refrain from revealing Achan as guilty of stealing the wedge of gold, until after God decided this sin, unknown to Joshua, should cause Joshua to suffer more than the expected number of battle casualties (Joshua 7, i.e., only Achan sinned this way, but God spreads the guilt to the entire nation saying "Israel has sinned...they have taken some forbidden things..." v. 11-12)?

Didn't this god kill off seventy thousand men of the people from Dan to Beersheba, all because David had chosen to take a census of Israel (2 Sam. 24:15 NAU)?

Doesn't this god condition his grace on the children confessing both their own and their fathers' sins (Leviticus 26:40)?

 

Didn't the god Moses served kill a bunch of toddlers and babies with a flood in the days of Noah?  Or maybe Flannagan will trifle that the flood waters  inflicted no harm on anybody below the age of accountability?

Didn't the god Moses served decree that the sin of Adam and Eve should inflict all of their descendants?

 Didn't this god visit the iniquity of the fathers up to the third and fourth generation (Exodus 20:5,6)?

Why should anybody think the killing of the babies in 31:17 was against the will of a god who routinely killed babies for other people's sins?

 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.
 14 "However, because by this deed you have given occasion to the enemies of the LORD to blaspheme, the child also that is born to you shall surely die."
 15 So Nathan went to his house. Then the LORD struck the child that Uriah's widow bore to David, so that he was very sick. (2 Sam. 12:13-15 NAU)

There are solid reasons for saying Moses' actions in Numbers 31 didn't inflict more death than God intended in 31:2:

• Christians automatically presume the sinful human leader correctly conveys God's sentiments, always placing the burden on those who would cry for an exception (i.e., Flannagan blindly presumes just whatever the biblical prophets credited to God, really was from God, and requires liberals or skeptics to overcome that presumption).  So Flannagan cannot coherently pretend that an assumption of Moses' consistency with God is too speculative.
• Moses' god routinely killed children for the sins of their parents, so the call to take "full" vengeance, without further qualification, would naturally be taken to mean the children shall share in the guilt of the parents.
• Moses himself adhered to corporate solidarity.   God should have specified this case was exceptional and limited, if He didn't want somebody who believed in corporate solidarity to get the wrong impression about how extensive the vengeance should be.
• God obviously wanted the Midianite men to die, since he called for battle despite knowing the Midianite men would rise to the defense of their nation. 
• it would be stupid and foolish to suggest maybe God only wanted the guilty adult Midianites killed, and the Hebrews should just walk away from their war victory leaving the orphaned Midianite kids to fend for themselves
• God obviously wanted the death of the adult women who were personally guilty of the sexual sin at issue.  If he didn't what sense would it make to say God wanted Moses to make war with the Midianite men, but not the women who were instrumental in causing the idolatry to take place?
• God or Moses was the author of a war-book that included instructions on how to justify impregnating the female war captives (Deut. 21:10-14).  Moses' sparing of the virgin girls was in harmony with what Moses or God allowed elsewhere.
• God obviously wanted the male Midianite children to be killed, since a) raising them as foster children would likely give rise to possible blood-feud after they grew up (an excuse many Christian apologists hide under), and b) God never makes good on his promises, therefore, God's promises that kids will not depart from proper Jewish teaching if they are raised in it (Proverbs 22:6) could not possibly be taken seriously by anybody faced with such a foster care situation.

Flannagan has no basis whatsoever for his trifling suggestion that the massacre in Numbers 31 was somehow more extensive than God intended.

Therefore, the inerrantist who compares Moses' actions in Numbers 31 to everything else that can be known about him, his god, and his ideas about just war, has no other option but to admit the massacre of innocent children and babies in this dreadful story was the will of God.

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.

Matthew Flannagan finds it difficult to answer simple questions about the sufficiency of scripture

In reply to Christian philosopher Matthew Flannagan's blog piece, wherein he tried to dispute the liberal interpretation of hell, I asked him whether he felt simply quoting the bible was sufficient to discharge his obligation as a Christian to teach and refute error.  He replied in the negative, that proof-texting was terrible error, I responded that this is exactly what several NT authors do in their own treatment of the OT.

Matt then asked me to go waste somebody else's time, and I took that as his subtle way of asking me to quit stomping him down intellectually.  Here's how it happened.

barry
Jan 5, 2018 at 10:17 am
 Matt,
 Do you believe that the biblical wording is “sufficient” for Christian faith and practice?

 Matt
Jan 5, 2018 at 12:09 pm
 Barry, sorry, but I don’t know what you mean when you say that “biblical wording” is sufficient for Christian faith and practise? 

 barry
Jan 5, 2018 at 1:19 pm
 By “biblical wording”, I meant the words of the bible. 

 Matthew Flannagan
Jan 5, 2018 at 6:37 pm
 By “biblical wording”, I meant the words of the bible.
 Sounds to me like your equivocating, when a person talks about the words of the Bible, they often mean by that what the bible teaches. But it could also be a reference to the phraseology, used by biblical authors.
 I am still unsure what you mean. 

 barry
Jan 6, 2018 at 8:41 am
 Do you believe that merely quoting Luke 16:19-31 verbatim to an Evangelical Annihilationist, without adding any commentary or argument, is ‘sufficient’ to discharge your Christian obligation to refute error?

Peter S WilliamsJan 7, 2018 at 3:27 am Please get someone to copy edit this article. There are sentences that make no grammatical sense and this is unfortunately obscuring the content.

 Matt
Jan 8, 2018 at 12:49 pm
 Barry, No, Luke 18 is a parable and it comes in a section where Jesus is discussing money and greed. So simply quoting it wouldn’t suffice, you’d have to make the case that in addition to making a point about money and greed, Jesus intended in this parable to give an accurate description of what hell is like. I think that’s dubious.
 Generally just quoting a passage without taking into account the context or Genre is a terrible method. Its known as proof-texting and is widely disparaged. 

 barry jones
Jan 10, 2018 at 12:13 pm
 If “proof-texting” is is a “terrible method” and is “widely disparaged”, then do you accuse Jesus and some NT authors of using a terrible method? 

 Matthew 1:23 quotes Isaiah 7:14, without commentary…as if he expected his readers to just “get it”, despite the obvious fact that no surviving pre-Christian Jewish commentary describes it as messianic (i.e., there was great likelihood Matthew knew the unbelieving Jews he wrote to did not accept Isaiah 7:14 as messianic, yet he quotes it verbatim, plus nothing, as if he expected that the quotation, alone, would be sufficient. 

 And since patristic testimony on Matthew indicates he wrote also for non-Christian Jews and not just Christian Jews, this appears to be a case of a NT author expecting an unbeliever to “get it” through nothing more than “proof-texting”.
 Hebrews 1:6 quotes Psalm 97:7 as if the latter was speaking about God’s “Son”, but again, without commentary. If Clement and Eusebius can be trusted, then Eusebius at H.E. 6:14 reports that Clement explained “the name “Paul an Apostle” was very properly not pre-fixed, for, he says, that writing to the Hebrews, who were prejudiced against him and suspected, he with great wisdom did not repel them in the beginning by putting down his name.” 

 That is, Paul was addressing unbelieving Jews (i.e., who were prejudiced against him) and apparently expecting them to just “get it” without his further commentary despite how obvious it must have been that such unbelieving Jews did not understand Psalm 97 to contain any references to Jesus. So Paul’s lack of commentary when quoting the bible to unbelievers seems to constitute the exact proof-texting that you call “widely disparaged”. Paul wasn’t doing much different here than KJV Onlyists do when street-preaching.
 Paul in Hebrews 10:5-10 does even worse: Although the Hebrew of Psalm 40:6 says “my ears you have opened”, Paul here quotes the Lxx form which says “but a body you have prepared for me”. 

 Here’s the problem: Paul is speaking to unbelieving Jews (Clement, supra), and here, quotes to them not just the Lxx form they are unlikely to prefer anyway (their problem with the Lxx obscuring or corrupting the text goes back at least to Ben Sira’s grandson’s extended prologue to Sirach, saying the Greek translation doesn’t have the same force as the Hebrew original, and that such differences are “not small”) but a specific form of a verse that aligns much more closely with Paul’s thought that God prepared a body for Jesus, a thought utterly at odds with what the unbelieving Jews Paul was addressing would accept…and yet Paul does exactly nothing to justify to them his convenient preference for a controversial Greek translation that just so happens to make the incarnation of Jesus much easier to prove. 

 Worse, Paul characterizes this as what God does when he brings Jesus “into the world”, when in fact nothing close to kenosis can be found in Psalm 40. So not only is Paul refusing to justify to an unbelieving audience his preference for a controversial translation of the Hebrew, he is also refusing to justify why he thinks this Psalm has anything to say about God bringing Jesus into the world. 

 If Paul didn’t feel the need to academically justify his arguments to those who clearly didn’t agree with those arguments, why do you? 

 If Paul can be comfortable quoting to unbelieving Jews a version of Psalm 40 that they do not agree with, and feel no need to provide the academic justification for it, why can’t you be comfortable quoting Luke 16 to liberals who do not agree with you on what it means, and feel no need to provide them any academic justification for your particular understanding?
 In Luke 4:4, Jesus answers the devil by proof-texting from Deut. 8:4, again, no commentary, as if he thought the mere verbatim quotation of the scripture, alone, was sufficient to discharge the need to rebuke or correct those who are in theological error. 

 We would hardly find the NT justifying such “proof-texting” if the NT authors agreed with modern conservative Christian scholars that one’s obligation in preaching/teaching requires them to follow up their verbatim bible quotes with their own commentary. 

 It would appear then, that the NT authors find it far less needful to provide academic justification, than do modern day conservative Christians. 

 How could you go wrong making the change and imitating the NT authors’ more simplistic methodology? You quote Luke 16 verbatim to the liberals who say hell is mere metaphor, that’s it, and you allocate the job of overcoming their academic objections, to the Holy Spirit. 

 Yeah, you’d lose your standing as a Christian “scholar”, but it’s more important to you to align as close as possible to the apostolic method of teaching unbelievers/heretics, than it is for you to impress your modern peers with your ability to trifle about scholarly minutiae, amen?
  

Matt
Jan 10, 2018 at 2:21 pm
 Barry, I see you want to change the subject from the post again to ask me to exegete a swath of different passages you disagree with.
 But for the record there is a difference between proof texting of the sort you were mentioning and enthyeme.
 How could you go wrong making the change and imitating the NT authors’ more simplistic methodology? You quote Luke 16 verbatim to the liberals who say hell is mere metaphor, that’s it, and you allocate the job of overcoming their academic objections, to the Holy Spirit.
 This is mistaken on several counts, First, the phrase “hell” is a metaphor, Jesus isnt literally referring to the valley of Hinnom in Jerusalem but using a well known apocalyptic symbol almost no one conservative or liberal denies this.Theologians such as Jean Calvin and Charles Hodge acknowledge this, are they liberals? Second, as I pointed out the passage in Luke you mentioned is a parable, so your just misreading the Genre. It would be like the someone quoting Nathans story about a sheep as a teaching on shepherding.

 Yeah, you’d lose your standing as a Christian “scholar”, but it’s more important to you to align as close as possible to the apostolic method of teaching unbelievers/heretics, than it is for you to impress your modern peers with your ability to trifle about scholarly minutiae, amen?

 This is just ironic, skeptics emphasis reason and science and complain that religion is thoughtless based on faith and not reasoned, then they complain that Christian scholars use reason and complicated arguments.
 You come in and demand I respond to your arguments and then complain I engage in argument. I suggest you waste someone elses time. 

 barry jones
Jan 10, 2018 at 3:21 pm
 Matt,
 I’m not changing the subject. You impugned “proof-texting” as “terrible error”, so it was a legitimate move on my part to confront your evangelical self with passages from your own bible where biblical authors are committing the same alleged “error”. And since you didn’t do much to oppose, apparently, that strategy was correct. 

 You refuse to say which instances I quoted are a case of the bible author employing enthyeme, so I guess that means you wanted me to guess which ones were doing that. I shall not play guessing games with you. 

 When I said the liberals view hell as metaphor, I wasn’t mistaken, your problem is that you think there’s a “mistake” merely because, like a jailhouse lawyer, you can capitalize on your opponents failure to speak in detailed qualified manner. I obviously meant that the liberals view hell as ONLY metaphor, that is, they deny there’s any literal aspect to it. But because I didn’t use the word “only”, you cry “mistake!”, as if I didn’t’ know the conservative position that agrees biblical hell is metaphorical in certain aspects. Stop being so quick to leap from somebody’s failure to qualify, over to “mistake!”. 

 You say you “pointed out” that the passage is a parable, but “pointed out” is not “argument”, and as such, you did not justify disagreement with other Christian scholars who say this story is real history and not parable, such as Grant R. Osborne, The Hermeneutical Spiral: A Comprehensive Introduction to Biblical Interpretation (Intervarsity, 2006), p. 534?

 “skeptics emphasis reason and science and complain that religion is thoughtless based on faith and not reasoned, then they complain that Christian scholars use reason and complicated arguments.”

——-But that’s your problem: Your own bible condemns any effort you make to justify your treatment of scripture to unbelievers or heretics with academic argument. Therefore, when you make such argument, you can be condemned with your own bible as not living up to the more simplistic method advocated by NT authors. When you DON’T make academic argument, you might be living up to the more simple standard of NT authors, but the consequence is that nobody is obligated to seriously consider a position that has nothing more behind it except “proof-texting”. It is not my fault if you wish to uphold two contradictory standards of proof, the academic argument approved by modern scholars, and the proof-texting employed by NT authors.

 “You come in and demand I respond to your arguments and then complain I engage in argument.”

——-You wish to look good to modern people, thus calling for scholarly level argument, but you refuse to condemn the NT authors for their more simplistic argument via proof-texting.  It is not my fault if your attempt to serve two different masters makes it easy to condemn pretty much any scriptural argument you attempt.

 “I suggest you waste someone elses time.”

——Perhaps I was also wasting my time asking you to describe and source whatever moral yardstick you were using to justify saying torturing babies solely for entertainment is objectively immoral, given that you essentially disappeared after I pressed that matter.
 That you are wrong about me wasting your time (and wrong in your implication that this was my primary motive in dialoguing with you), all anybody has to do is check out my list of challenges to you in the last post over at http://www.mandm.org.nz/2017/10/richard-carrier-on-the-moral-scepticism-objection-to-divine-command-theory.html 

 When you are prepared to defend the matters those challenges attack, you know where I blog.
 https://turchisrong.blogspot.com/2017/11/my-challenge-to-matthew-flannagan.html
 Conversing with you was fun and educational. Fare ye well.

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

Apologist Clay Jones fails to morally justify Joshua's massacre of Canaanite children

This is my reply to a lecture by Christian apologist Clay Jones, Phd., uploaded to YouTube by Biola University, entitled:

Killing the Canaanites Was Justified Capital Punishment

1. 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.  

2. 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.

That's a problem:  Does Jones recommend that his Christian audience take any of his pro-bible inerrancy apologetics arguments and try them out on atheists?  Or he is just giving the lecture to help those already committed to his version of Christianity, to feel better about serving a Christian god that used to ask his followers to kill children? 

3. 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. 

4. 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).

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.

6. 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, My covenant which they broke, although I was a husband to them," declares the LORD. (Jer. 31:29-32 NAU)

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)

7. 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 America’s creation of the U.S. Constitution show good in people just as much as tyrants of other countries show the bad?  Could it be that we are simple minded idiots and feel more comfortable labeling somebody fully good or bad, and would rather not admit the complex truth that most people are an inconsistent mixture of both?

8. 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.

9. 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 with great power and with a mighty hand?

 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, Your servants to whom You swore by Yourself, and said to them, 'I will multiply your descendants as the stars of the heavens, and all this land of which I have spoken I will give to your descendants, and they shall inherit it forever.'"

 14 So the LORD changed His mind about the harm which He said He would do to His people.

 (Exod. 32:9-14 NAU)

10. 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)

11. 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)

12. 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. 

13. 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?

14. 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?

15. 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.

  

16. 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 Sodom and the cities of the plan were a rich metropolis, the point is that Jones and Flannagan still disagree about the moral status of kids.  Can they blame the atheist bible critic for saying such disagreement is not likely if their god is true and they both seek god’s truth sincerely as equally authentically born again Christian scholars?  How many times must you pray for God to lead you into a correct understanding of the bible, before it becomes God’s fault that you continue to misunderstand it?  If God can make even pagans willing to do whatever he wants or believe whatever he wants them to believe (Ezra 1:1), then why does God prefer to “toy” with you and make you plead for truth over and over before he implants the truth and right motive in your heart? 

17. 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 Jericho, Clay would have just as blindly assumed that God “knew” Rahab’s “faith” was fake.  Jones treats his view of God’s goodness as some untouchable icon of presuppositional glory, when in fact it is the bible itself that testifies that God often learns and regrets his own actions no less than imperfect humans often learn and regret their own prior acts.

18. 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 (2^nd 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?

19. 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:

 15 Foolishness is bound up in the heart of a child; The rod of discipline will remove it far from him. (Prov. 22:15 NAU)

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.

20.   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)

21. 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? 

22. 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.

23. 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 Jericho?

24. 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.

  

25. 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.

26. 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. 

27. 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 2^nd 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.

28. 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 Israel with idolatry/corruption?

29. Jones says the best proof that the Canaanite massacre was capital punishment and not genocide was that God exacted the same punishment when Israel did the same type of sins.  But that the Hebrews imposed on themselves the same ethics they imposed on others only shows they weren’t as inconsistent as they could have been.  This argument doesn’t take away from the fact that the Hebrews and other ANE nations were far more brutish than evangelicals are today. Clay further blindly presupposes the people who authored these stories were just passing down intact traditions, when critical scholars have made it pretty clear that it is later editors that are taking Israel’s military histories of various origins, stitching it together and infusing it with explanatory glosses about how losses were the result of sin and wins were the result of obeying God, etc.  Not much different than a reporter who takes raw footage of what happened, and turns it into a documentary where her after-the-fact commentary “explains” the footage.  For all we know, Moses and Joshua were genocidal maniacs who thought they were their own gods, and it is only dishonest priests and scribes of hundreds of years later who infuse these earlier raw stories with theological commentary to make it seem like Moses and Joshua only did what they did after being given moral and theological justification by God.  The conservative view that all we read in the current canonical form of the Pentateuch was written by Moses before he died, is precarious.  Even such an evangelical commentary as the Word Biblical Commentary finds that stories like those in Numbers 31 have “little realism”:

  

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: Word, Incorporated.

  

30. 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.

31. 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 (1^st 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.).

32. 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 2^nd 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.

33.  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 Sodom if even 10 righteous people could be found in it.  How can God be willing to spare Sodom on the basis of 10 righteous men, but be unwilling to spare the Jews if a few righteous men were found living among them?  It’s called theological evolution, not bible inerrancy:

 12 Then the word of the LORD came to me saying,

 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: sword, famine, wild beasts and plague to cut off man and beast from it! (Ezek. 14:12-21 NAU)

34. 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! For if the miracles had occurred in Tyre and Sidon which occurred in you, they would have repented long ago in sackcloth and ashes.

 22 "Nevertheless I say to you, it will be more tolerable for Tyre and Sidon in the day of judgment than for you.

 23 "And you, Capernaum, will not be exalted to heaven, will you? You will descend to Hades; for if the miracles had occurred in Sodom which occurred in you, it would have remained to this day.

 24 "Nevertheless I say to you that it will be more tolerable for the land of Sodom in the day of judgment, than for you."

 (Matt. 11:20-24 NAU)

12 "I say to you, it will be more tolerable in that day for Sodom than for that city.

 13 "Woe to you, Chorazin! Woe to you, Bethsaida! For if the miracles had been performed in Tyre and Sidon which occurred in you, they would have repented long ago, sitting in sackcloth and ashes.

 14 "But it will be more tolerable for Tyre and Sidon in the judgment than for you.

 15 "And you, Capernaum, will not be exalted to heaven, will you? You will be brought down to Hades!   (Lk. 10:12-15 NAU)

Will Jones trifle that Chorazin and Bethsaida were significantly different from the Canaanites Joshua killed throughout the promised land?

35.  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).

36. 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.

37. 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.

38. 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.

39. 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”.

40. 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.

41. 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.  2^nd 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 (2^nd 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.

  

42. 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.

43. 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?