Demolishing Triablogue: Annoyed Pinoy revs the engine, but still spins the wheels

Mr. Pinoy,

I'm allowing your lengthy comments one last time, to which I respond.  But I would ask that in future, you keep your "replies" limited to one specific sub-topic.  The "reply" function limits me to 4.096 letters, so if I wish to provide a point-by-point response to what you say, I have to create a brand new original post, like I'm doing here.  Try to ask concise questions one at a time, such as why I don't think a bible verse you find to be relevant, is relevant to the debate.

ANNOYED PINOYJanuary 2, 2018 at 1:09 AM
Honestly, I haven't read all of your former blogpost, so I may say some things which you've already addressed or anticipated.

Thanks for your honesty.

I don't have the time to give my full attention to the issues brought up in both blogposts. I'm trying to give an answer as quickly as possible. My overall aim is to defend the truth of Christianity.

It would seem defending the truth of Christianity might require you to devote more effort than answering "as quickly as possible".

I wrote the following late at night, so my grammar may be messed up. Though I haven't proofread it, I think you should be able get the gist of my main points even if it might be incoherent at spots. I'm nodding off while I'm typing.
 The burden of proof is on the claimant.
 I agree. You wrote in the earlier blogpost, "No, your God only identifies two criteria, boobs and pubic hair. Ezekiel 16. " That's a claim on your part. A claim that seems to assume 1. that the only criteria God gave is in that single passage,

Yes, because

a) I cannot find any more biblical criteria God thinks must be fulfilled before the girl is ready for marital sex,

b) while Mosaic law certainly isn't exhaustive in fact, Deuteronomy 4:2 and 12:32 indicate the author wished the reader to believe it was exhaustive, in which case, no, you are not allowed to add "thou shall not have sexual relations with thy wife until she [insert whatever age or signs of maturity/puberty here]" to Mosaic Law.  So because Mosaic law doesn't condemn marital pedophilia, you, the Christian, have no biblical basis for saying God's view such act as sinful.  Do not say God thinks some human action is "sin" unless you have biblical authority for saying so; and

c) if Paul couldn't know coveting was a sin without Mosaic law specifically telling him so (Romans 7:7), it would appear that no Christian can know what human acts are sinful without Mosaic law specifically telling them so.

and 2. only explicit criteria count.

But when you try to argue for identifying sin on the basis of non-explicit criteria in the bible, you open the door to others being able to justify disagreement with you.  Indeed, it doesn't matter if Ezekiel 16:7-8 really does tell us what age of marriage for girls the ancient Jews deemed normative, it certainly isn't worded in an absolute way.  People 2000 years from now could legitimately say that Americans used to believe the minimum age of sexual consent was 18, and they would be correct, but that would hardly argue that therefore Americans always held that view even in earlier days.  The age of sexual consent in Delaware in the 19th century was 7.  So learning what the Jews of 600 b.c thought about the minimum age of marriage, doesn't provide reasonably reliable guidance for how Jews of 1200 b.c. thought about the same matter.

However, one can reasonably infer from OT and (especially) NT ethical standards [the latter building on the former]

Not really.  Christians are constantly attacking each others' morals by quoting the bible.

combined with inductive medical experience that it's biologically unwise and and therefore morally illicit to engage in sexual activity that will likely result in pregnancies that will (again likely) permanently injure or kill the mother.

That makes sense to me, but leaves you without ability to explain statements in the Babylonian Talmud that says girls aged three years and one day are "suitable" for sexual relations, such as

Abodah Zarah 36B-37A:

Said Rabina, “Therefore a gentile girl who is three years and one day old, since she is then suitable to have sexual relations, (!?) also imparts uncleanness of the flux variety.”  

Sanhedrin 55b  

R. Joseph said: Come and hear! A maiden aged three years and a day may be acquired in marriage by coition, and if her deceased husband's brother cohabits with her, she becomes his. The penalty of adultery may be incurred through her;

If adult men having vaginal intercourse with three year old girls were as obvious a risk to the girl's life as we modern people believe it is, how do you explain these Talmudic rabbis finding girls of such age "suitable" for sexual intercourse?  How could these rabbis bother saying such things if they saw in the bible the same absolute prohibition on adult-child marriage/sex that you do?

Humans are made in God's image and therefore have dignity on that account.

If that dignity prohibits abortion, it would also prohibit infanticide, Numbers 31:17, 1st Samuel 15:3.  You are also assuming that dignity is degraded by sex within adult-child marriages, and while we see it that way today, the question is whether the ancient Jews and biblical authors saw it that way.  The Talmud rabbis and sages, well aware of man being made in god's image, didn't.

The quality and quantity of each others' lives are to be considered by fellow human beings [esp. in marriages and families]. This is true both before and after the times of Abraham, and later Moses [and the Mosaic Covenant]. The story of Cain and Abel implicitly teaches that we are our brothers keeper in some sense [especially the closer they are to us relationally, biologically, familially etc.].

If so, then you'd have to condemn Gary Habermas and Craig Blomberg for a) knowing that James Patrick Holding defamed and libeled me in extreme ways, but b) never approached Holding in the spirit of Matthew 18 to deal with it, despite my having consulted them first before suing Holding.

Before the distinction of Jew and Gentile, Noah was taught about human dignity (Gen. 9) as well as the brotherhood of mankind despite the different "races" (Gen. 10).

He was also taught capital punishment, Gen. 9:6, which many Christians oppose.

There's also the natural law consideration as well.

Which doesn't help matters, since it invites questions such as why God made females capable of conceiving as early as 10 years old, if their involvement in sexual intercourse at that age was against his intended design.

Presumably God intends women to bear children in such a way and in such a time that the likelihood of permanent injury and/or death is not maximized, but minimized.

But Triablogue Calvinist Steve Hays thinks it is God who causes the pedophile to rape girls, and that it is God who causes men to get barely pubescent girls pregnant.  You should go further with your point until Steve explains to you how it makes sense for God to inflict shame and guilt upon those who He causes to fulfill his "secret" will.  If God secretly wills for a 30 year old man to have full vaginal intercourse with a 4 year old girl, God can hardly condemn the acts that He desires to take place.

By "intends" I mean by God's Will of Delight, and God's Will of Design (see my 6 distinctions of God's will blogpost if one is curious, HERE). Someone might argue that God apparently didn't design pregnancy and birthing very well since infant skulls are so large that they can barely narrow pelvises. But if we really do live in a fallen world, then such an apparent flaw might be due to such a Fall.

True, but the biblical explanation for the "Fall" is that God intentionally "cursed" women to endure that pain and injury during child-birth, Genesis 3:16.  So God is still the cause, you cannot relegate it to the naturalistically degrading effects of Adam and Eve's bad freewill choice to disobey God.  David also disobeyed God by committing adultery with Bathsheba, but God apparently has the option to arbitrarily exempt David from the otherwise applicable death penalty ("the Lord has taken away your sin..." 2nd Samuel 12:13).

Even assuming a historical Fall didn't really happen, a design need not be perfect for it to genuinely be designed.

And the more you attribute to God the abilities of the human eye, the more you attribute to God the ability of 10 year old girls to get pregnant.  YOu cannot attribute precocious puberty to the Fall, since the Fall is a degradation, while puberty constitutes an increase in the young girl's complexity.

ANNOYED PINOYJanuary 2, 2018 at 1:09 AM
If God intends humans to be fruitful and multiply, then that assumes they do it in such a way that it doesn't leave the wife (or wives given OT polygamy) chronically sick and/or otherwise diminished in her ability to continue bearing healthy children.

No, read Genesis 3:16, God wanted women to endure injury and pain during childbirth.  So the fact that girls endure injury and pain if they give birth at 10 years old, isn't sufficient for you to prove your point.

If the wife dies, then she obviously cannot reproduce any more children, assuming the first one even survived. The common (though not universal) Islamic practice of not waiting for a female to be physically mature to engage in intercourse (IMO) stems from pedophilic desires of their men. With Mohammed being both the Prime Example and Exemplar.

Agreed, but again that leaves you unable to explain the above-cited Talmud passages.  One explanation is that the pedophile rabbis who made such statements believed that instead of delaying sex with girls until they were old enough to safely give birth, God would miraculously protect them from getting pregnant, meaning any girls who got pregnant and died, were those God intended to kill by that method:

Kethuboth 39

"|Three [categories of] women may use an absorbent4  in their marital intercourse:   a minor, and an expectant and nursing mother. The minor,  because otherwise she might become pregnant and die. An expectant mother,  because otherwise she might cause her foetus to degenerate into a sandal.   A nursing mother,  because otherwise she might have to wean her child [prematurely]  and this would result in his death.  And what is [the age of such] a minor?  From the age of eleven years and one day to the age of twelve years and one day. One who is under,  or over this age  must carry on her marital intercourse in a normal manner; so R. Meir. But the Sages said: The one as well as the other carries on her marital intercourse in a normal manner, and mercy  will be vouchsafed from Heaven, for it is said in the Scriptures, The Lord preserveth the simple.14”

 Footnote 14 reads:  

Ps. CXVI, 6; sc. those who are unable to protect themselves. From this it follows that a girl under the age of twelve is incapable of normal conception.

So the answer of Talmud Sages is that girls under the age of 11 are not allowed to use a contraceptive, because God would keep them safe from getting pregnant at such a young age. You really need to work on avoiding seeing the ancient Jews through the rose-colored glasses of your modern eyes.  Excuses we today find stupid, were deemed just back then.

I'm not aware of any passage of Scripture where God permits or encourages as morally licit sexual activity for prepubescent females.

Then read 2nd Samuel 12, the account of David's adultery with Bathsheba.  That she was prepubescent or near is legitimately inferred from Nathan's analogizing her to a young ewe lamb who was taken from her rightful owner.  God condemnation of the sex act implies pedophilia was considered acceptable, since God condemns the adulterous aspect, but says nothing about the fact that she was so young, yet you'd figure if God was as against pedophilia as you are, God would have cited her prohibitively young age first, since under your own reasoning, there is more that is sinful and wrong with specifically pedophilia than there is with general adultery.  Once again, the ancient authors did not always see things the way we do today.  The only thing you get from God's condemnation of David is that he sinned by committing adultery with another man's wife.

The fact that in the allegory YHVH WAITS for the female to develop breasts should say something.

Not according to your prior post, where you said "Moreover, you press the allegory beyond it's intended purpose..."   apparently indicating that we shouldn't be drawing conclusions about what the ancient Jews believed about the minimum age of girls for marriage, from Ezekiel 16

He didn't marry her when she was prepubescent.

But Calvinist Steve Hays thinks adult men are still fulfilling god's "secret" will when they vaginally rape 4 year old girls.  Again, Pinoy, it appears you are asking me to decide that Hays' views about what God wants are incorrect, but if spiritually alive people cannot even agree on whether or how god "wills" such things, you should conclude that spiritually dead people, which is the way you see me, will only fare worse, hence counseling that you shouldn't be telling me about what God "wills" until you resolve your disagreements with other Christians

Likely because He cared for her and wanted to bless her, not harm her. What's missing in your interpretation is how lovingly and tenderly YHVH took care of the child during her prepubescent years.

Ok, so apparently you've changed your mind, again, and now consider the allegory to be suitable for drawing conclusions about ancient Jewish morality?

Again, this is Ezekiel in 600 b.c, whose authority for representing the morals of Moses from 1200 b.c. is anything but clear, and about as prone to fallacy as using the morals of Americans in 2017 to tell us what the morals of Americans were like in 1417.  600 years more than likely introduces some changes.

Read the passage again:

 And as for your birth, on the day you were born your cord was not cut, nor were you washed with water to cleanse you, nor rubbed with salt, nor wrapped in swaddling cloths.
5 No eye pitied you, to do any of these things to you out of compassion for you, but you were cast out on the open field, for you were abhorred, on the day that you were born.
6 "And when I passed by you and saw you wallowing in your blood, I said to you in your blood, 'Live!' I said to you in your blood, 'Live!'
 YHVH waited all this time and can't wait a few more months or a year(s) till it's relatively safe for her to have children, as opposed to when it's relatively and statistically risky?

The ancient Jews apparently thought the risk was negated by biblical promises that God would protect the simple.  See above.

You apparently are so hostile to Christianity and want to attack it so much that you have to take THE MOST Uncharitable interpretation as the natural and ONLY interpretation, contrary to the tenderness and patience YHVH is described as having exercised in the previous verses. [*cough* eisegesis *cough*] Your interpretation goes against the whole tenor of the passage.
CONT.

You first used the passage to draw conclusions about what God or the Jews believed about pedophile marriage, THEN you changed your mind and told me it was allegory and not to be pressed for details, NOW you changed your mind again and have decided the allegory does indeed reflect on what Jews thought about the proper age for marriage.  Some would argue that your own inability to keep to one interpretation suggests that the passage is too ambiguous to be useful in our debate.

ANNOYED PINOYJanuary 2, 2018 at 1:10 AM
In the ESV (v. 7) she is likened to a plant in a field "...and arrived AT FULL ADORNMENT. Your BREASTS were formed..." [ESV]. Other versions translate the verse differently. For example, in the ASV she is told, "...thou didst increase and wax great". The sense I get in some translations is that she is like a plant (or a field of plants) that's ready to be reaped because nearly fully ripe. That's contrary to your interpretation that reduces YHVH to a buck in heat that's ready to mate as soon as the gate is opened.

It's also contrary to the Talmud rabbis who felt three year old girls were "suitable" for sexual relations, see above, a view they'd hardly hold if there was something else in their religion that absolutely forbade girls of such age from having marital sex.

Notice too that verse 8 indicates even more time passed, when it says, "When I PASSED BY YOU AGAIN and saw you, behold, you were at the AGE FOR LOVE". Apparently the "age for love" is some time AFTER the mere and first appearance of (to use your words) "boobs and pubic hair".

I don't deny that the Jews of Ezekiel's day felt sex within adult-child marriages was taboo.  What I deny is your ability to establish from the bible that breaking such taboo would have been considered "sin".   God's original model for marriage was monogramy, yet evangelical scholar Richard Davidson (Flame of Yaweh) and others say God "tolerated" polygamy.  So even if you are correct that Ezekiel 16:7-8 provides the divine blueprint for minimum age of marriage for ancient Jewish girls, you aren't showing that the model is absolute.

It should be noted that not everything OT people (or ANE Semites in general) did was necessarily moral.

But what they did is material toward modern people drawing conclusions about what was acceptable and unacceptable to them.

The same is true for post-Tanakhian Jews (e.g. Talmudists). And even if some things were permissible or a concession on God's part, that doesn't mean it's the ideal.

Philsophically, it is unlikely that an infinitely perfect God, allegedly as angry at pedophilia-marriage as you are, would ever "tolerate" deviations from his original model of marriage.  So if Richard Davidson and other Christian scholars on marriage are correct that the bible god "tolerated" polygamy, then this god's perfection is not "infinite".

Moreover, there's God intended moral development within the OT as well as between the Testaments. For example, the ideal in the NT is monogamy, though polygamy in the OT was permitted/tolerated.

An infinitely perfect God who hated polygamy as much as you think he does, would not "tolerate" it, but would, like you, specify it to be sin.  Nowhere does the Mosaic law specify polygamy to be sin.  Deuteronomy 17:17 no more means a King cannot have two wives than it means he cannot have two horses.  He is not allowed to "multiply" wives to himself.  The infinitely perfect God is regulating, not condemning, polygamy

Jesus Himself taught that the OT Jews often misinterpreted and misapplied the OT laws. Or didn't interpret them in a truly consistent way.

And I teach that Jesus and Paul often misinterpreted and misapplied the OT Laws.

Had they, they would have had a more Christonomic interpretation of the Torah.

I'm an atheist, I don't find non-Christonomic Torah-interpretation to necessarily be faulty.

Finally, it's the Christian claim that its morality is higher than that of Judaism.

No, it was the claim of Jesus that his followers be careful to obey the spirit and letter of Mosaic law, see Matthew 5:17-20.  Paul's view of the Law was often at odds with the legalistic view held by Jesus.

The Messiah would magnify the law and make it glorious (Isa. 42:21).

Which seems to indicate that Christian parents need to burn their teen prostitute daughters to death.  Leviticus 21:9.

That's why Jesus could say, "BUT I say unto you" without contradicting the the OT (Matt. 5:17). And why Jesus said of the Jews that they added to the Word of God by teaching as doctrine the commandments of men (Matt. 15:8-9).

I see no reason to distinguish Jesus' view of the law from Moses' view, for purposes of this discussion.

BTW, I'm not a "Theonomist" as it's commonly understood. I agree with much of what they say, but I have enough disagreements to not use that term. I prefer, "Christonomist".
 as most ANE scholars agree that the age of 12, or menses or when signs of puberty showed, was when ANE peoples generally deemed a girl ready for marriage.
 Ready in what sense? Ready to marry, or start considering marriage?

Well according to Ezekiel 16:7-8, ready to actually marry, not merely consider it.

Since there was often a betrothal period that was also considered (in some sense) marriage even before consummation, that delayed period allows for even more time for the female to sexually mature even more.

But the betrothal itself was created by the act of vaginal intercourse with the three year old girl:

Tractate Sanhedrin Folio 69aR. Jeremiah of Difti said: We also learnt the following: A maiden aged three years and a day may be acquired in marriage by coition, and if her deceased husband's brother cohabited with her, she becomes his. The penalty of adultery may be incurred through her... 

ANNOYED PINOYJanuary 2, 2018 at 1:11 AM
What I said was true. Your God does not identify any other criteria in that passage for sex-readiness for the girl, except boobs and pubic hair.
 Now you seem to be reducing your claim to only Ezek. 16, when your original claim seems (?) to include ALL of Scripture (or at least the Tanakh).

No, I'm only pointing out that you have no textual justification for asserting that Ezekiel 16:7-8 expresses or implies that any criteria beyond boobs and public hair need be fulfilled to declare the girl ready for marriage.

As for quoting the NT, perhaps you didn’t know, but I am an atheist. I do not believe in biblical inerrancy, biblical inspiration, or harmony of morals or theology between the testaments. 

IF Christianity is true, then the OT can not only be interpreted in isolation, but also in light of the later fuller revelation.

But since Christianity is not true, I am free to limit my understanding of an OT text to just what the author intended by examination of his grammar, immediate context, chapter, and genre.  Discerning meaning that way is objective, while trying to read the OT through Christian-colored lenses is absurdly controversial.

Also, it touches on the issue of the consistency of the Testaments. I would seek to defend it. While you'd be fine with there being irreconcilable contradictions between the two. You wouldn't take the NT to be authoritative, but the consistency between the Testaments has some abductive argumentative force.

I don't see the point, not only is there nothing in the NT against sex within adult-child marriages, there is the theological principle that you cannot know a human act is a sin unless there is a prohibition against it specified in Mosaic Law.  See Romans 7:7.  Either Paul was wrong for speaking in such absolute terms about how sin cannot be identified apart from Mosaic law, or he, and by extension Christians, cannot know what acts are sin without Mosaic law telling them so.  If Paul wouldn't have known coveting was a sin without Mosaic law, YOU don't know that sex within adult-child marriages is a sin without Mosaic law telling you so.  Are you smarter than apostle Paul?

We have literally zero “records” produced by the Jews in the days of Moses, with the exception of course of the Pentateuch itself and a few fragments whose date is hotly contested... 

Apparently you claim we do have enough records from those very sources to tell us that adult-child marriages were accepted.

No, I think they were accepted on the basis of the biblical and Talmudic statements.

I'm dubious of the claim, but even if true, that doesn't make it morally licit according to the Mosaic Covenant or the teaching of the rest of the Tanakh. If it does, I'm not aware where.

See Romans 7:7, supra.  If you don't have a Mosaic Law specifying a human act as sin, you have no warrant for calling it sin in the first place.  So either find a Mosaic law that prohibits sex within adult-child marriages to the same degree that it prohibits coveting, and you'll dodge the Romans 7:7 bullet.  If you cannot provide such a text, then you never had any theological justification for labeling sex within adult-child marriages to be sinful in the first place.

You are also assuming that sex within adult-child marriages necessarily involved attempts to make the girl pregnant, 

Not necessary attempts, but that they always had that potential.

Well then the man could easily limit himself to sex acts that cannot make the girl pregnant, in which case  your rebuttal based on the dangerousness of potential pregnancy, is deprived of force.

ANNOYED PINOYJanuary 2, 2018 at 1:12 AM

Hebrews 13:4 and the Song of Songs counsel that cunnilingus was considered acceptable sexual practice, and if so, then the problem of physically traumatizing the underage girl in an adult-child marriage among the ancient Jews, disappears: 

Hebrews 13:4 says nothing about oral sex.

It also doesn't say anything about vaginal intercourse, but you certainly feel free to infer that the author's words "marriage bed undefiled" are saying vaginal intercourse between monogamous Christian couples is undefiled.

While Canticles MIGHT refer to oral sex in one or more passages, it's not certain.

Most conservative Christian scholars take it in its obvious sexual sense.  From the inerrantist-driven New American Commentary:

4:16 This, with 5:1, is the high point of the Song of Songs. She calls on the winds to make her fragrance drift to her beloved, thus drawing him to herself. Maintaining the metaphor of the garden, she invites him to come and enjoy her love. This is the consummation of their marriage.

...5:1 a,b The man responds. The poetry is discreet and restrained; it conveys the joy of sexual love without vulgarity; at the same time, the meaning is quite clear. The catalog of luxuries here (garden, myrrh, honey, wine, etc.) imply that he has partaken of her pleasures to the full.
Garrett, D. A. (2001, c1993). Vol. 14: Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of songs (electronic ed.). Logos Library System; The New American Commentary (Page 407). Nashville: Broadman & Holman Publishers.

The important point is that in marriage coitus is the norm and would be expected to begin the marriage.

I don't see how that trifle helps you.  That's also the norm for marriage today, yet I've known many Christian couples who said they abstained from sex on their wedding night.  So again, while coitus was probably normative among ancient Jews for consummating the marriage, that doesn't argue that deviations were disallowed.

Without consummation via coitus the marriage wouldn't be fully legal. A bleeding hymen was meant to signify the cutting/enacting of the covenant of marriage.

By that logic, the marriage wouldn't be fully legal if the man had erectile dysfunction.  You need to stop interpreting what Mosaic law presents are normative, as if it was absolute and exclusive.

You refer to adult-child marriage, but I don't know what you mean by, and how you define "child".

In this discussion, by "adult-child marriage" I mean men who are in their 20's or older, getting married to girls who, by reason of lack of puberty, can still be called "child".

Or in what way you (presumably) frown upon adult-child marriages.

I frown on them for the same reason the Legislators and Congress do:  such unions are more productive of lasting physical and emotional harm to the girl.

I don't deny that a some females consummated marriage at an early age. Maybe even at 12. But some girls enter puberty earlier and progress faster than other girls.

That's right. the reality of precocious puberty means it is possible that in Ezekiel 16:7-8, God was thinking about a 9 year old girl whose breasts and public hair had grown, as the template for his allegorical language.

This is also true of the girls of some ethnic groups as compared to others. So, randomly citing the age of 12 is meaningless unless one also addresses and acknowledges the issue of the fact that different female would be sexually mature sooner than others.

I don't see your point, most scholars of the ANE agree that these people usually delayed marriage until puberty.  You appear to be concerned to make your trifles look like serious objections.  No dice.

I don't know what you're entire claim is, but my claim is that given OT ethics (and especially NT ethics), it would have been morally wrong for a female to have been given in marriage for consummation before she had sufficiently matured so as to lessen the chances of birthing complications.

That's not good enough.  Your claim is that your god views sex within adult-child marriages as "sin", so it is perfectly legitimate to ask why you call it a sin when you cannot provide any biblical evidence that it is.  Sin is trangression of God's law (Romans 7:7, 1st John 3:4), it is not "deviation from what's normative".

Regarding pedophilia of prepubescents in the Talmud, even if your interpretation were correct, that doesn't tell anything certain about the beliefs and practices of Jews during Biblical times.

It does it we accept the conservative Christian assumption that oral traditions among the ancient Jews were carefully handed down from generation to generation.  If you start screwing with the reliability of those oral traditions just to get out of this jam, then you increase the likelihood that the oral traditions laying behind the OT text were corrupted before being written.

Even then, the beliefs and practices of Biblical Jews is not sure indicator of what the OT law itself requires or allows.

I don't need to have a "sure" indicator.  I will be rationally warranted in my arguments if I have a "reasonable" indicator.

Since many things recorded are explicitly or implicitly taught to be wrong. Think for example of how the book of Judges records the general degradation and moral decline in Israel.

But from a historical perspective, it is how the ancient Jews were, not whether their acts squared up with their religious claims, that helps one form an opinion on which among the historical possibilities is most probable.  If the ancient Jews allowed pedophile-marriages, then it is unjustified for modern-day apologists to be shocked at my argument, as if the ancient Jews' morals were a mirror image of those held by modern conservative Christians.  What's "obvious" to us today doesn't tell us what would have been allowed by ancient Jews.

Much of the OT is a record of how the majority often disobeyed God, from generation to generation.

And the most substantial portion is the Mosaic Law.

ANNOYED PINOYJanuary 2, 2018 at 1:12 AM

Sure is funny that the God who hates the idea of 11 year old boys having sex as much as you hate it, never bothers to specifically condemn it, despite his ability to specify which exact sexual relations are indeed prohibited... 

That is or close to an argument from silence.

So?  Arguments from silence are not automatically fallacious, which is the sense you appear to be intending with your short unqualified sentence.  It is perfectly reasonable to assume that if the bible god exists and really does regard sex within adult-child marriages as abominable as you do, he would have specified a prohibition against it.

Laws and Case Laws are meant to be studied and applied to cover situations not mentioned.

And I see no biblical warrant to suppose that, where the 3 year old bride's father agreed to give her in marriage to an adult man who paid the dowry, the sexual relations between this couple after the wedding would constitute a legal case requiring application of law.

In America, one state's criminal law code is limited to less than 100 pages, so if Moses was inspired by God, he has no excuse for failing to specify as sin any and every human act god thought was a sin.  We specify the minimum age, why couldn't god?

Your duty as a Christian to obey Deuteronomy 4:2, 12:32 is more important than your desire to come up with a clever way to read things into the law.

In fact, if the Mosaic Law included every possible situation the Pentateuch would be larger than the U.S. Library of Congress.

How much extra room in Moses' books would "you shall not marry a girl until she is at least 16 years old" have taken up?

Also, Natural Law gives us some indication.

You mean like the natural fact that most girls become capable of getting pregnant around 11 or 12 years old?  Does this natural law tell us anything about what God intended?

Especially when it's coupled with the OT Revelation. For example, the very passage you cite (Ezek. 16). If females should wait till sometime after puberty begins to get married and be sexually active, then it makes sense that that's the case for boys too. Nocturnal emissions happend after the onset of puberty, not before. Prior to that a boy is not fertile. The libido of both sexes kicks in at high gear at puberty. Since one of main the reasons for marriage is to propogate the species (Gen. 1:28), AND since the OT prohibits extra-marital sexual relations, AND since fertility only occurs after the onset of puberty, it therefore makes sense that the consummation of marriage was meant to also be after the onset of puberty in both the male and female.

I don't see the point, you are only specifying what makes sense and what's normal, you are not making a case that God believed sex within adult-child marriages was "sin".   "Sin" is not merely "deviation from the norm".

Whenever you wish to discuss your reasons for saying your bible god has always believed sex within adult-child marriages to be “sin”, let me know. 

I'm not sure I would say that it was/is always sin.

!?

At the very least I think the Biblical ideal (additionally attested by natural law) is that marriage should be between two sexually mature individuals of the opposite sex.

You haven't made a very convincing case that your god thinks marital pedophilia is sinful.  If my blog educated you, a thanks would be in order.

Another issue that one would expect some atheists to look down upon is arranged marriages (AM). AMs could potentially motivate adult-child marriages. Or what of the hypothetical where two groups of parents arrange the marriage of prepubescent children and foregoing the betrothal period. Would it necessarily be sin if a 7 year old "husband" and a 7 year old "wife" engaged in sexual intercourse? I'm not sure.

Well, if your God hasn't made clear to you that prepubescent kids having vaginal intercourse is "sin"...

What's clear to me is that if such a situation continued the girl would likely get pregnant long before her body could handle giving birth.

And since puberty is an increase in the girl's complexity, you cannot relegate the problem of girls becoming capable of conception while it is still dangerous to give birth, to the Fall. The "Fall" didn't cause human beings to increase in complexity, the Fall was a degradation.  So it would seem that nature's equipping girls to get pregnant at such dangerously young ages can be blamed squarely on your god, not the Fall and not "evolution".

Leading to the likely death of both her and the child. Also, I think an adult male with fully developed sexual organs engaging in coitus with a prepubescent girls can do serious damage.

That was probably also obvious to the Talmud Rabbis who said three year old girls are "suitable" for sexual relations:

Abodah Zarah 36B-37A:

Said Rabina, “Therefore a gentile girl who is three years and one day old, since she is then suitable to have sexual relations, (!?) also imparts uncleanness of the flux variety.”  

There are modern cases where death or infertility ensued. Whatever nearly ensures injury or death would likely be considered sin.

How much did the odds of injury/death increase when Moses roused the Hebrews to dispossess the Canaanites and make war?

Apostles boldly confronting their captors with the gospel would likely ensure their deaths, so perhaps there are times when preaching the gospel would be a sin?

The difficulty women have in childbirth is not due to "sin", but God's voluntary choice to curse the woman, Genesis 3:16.  From 2nd Samuel 12:13, God's nature does not "require" him to punish sin in any certain way, he can exempt a sinner from punishment by simply waving his magic wand.  So under your logic, God was sinning since his curse on the birthing process increased the odds of a women suffering injury or death.

The case of Adam and Eve is our exemplar. They were man and woman, not boy and girl when God presented them to each other for marriage.

But because God made concession for one deviation from this model (polygamy), you have to be open to the prospect that he'd make similar concessions for other deviations from the model.

He shows no intent to repent, there is no sign that any Christian brother confronted Holding in the spirit of Matthew 18, and to top it all off,
 I have no knowledge about the dispute between the two of you. I'll leave that between the relevant parties and the law. When it comes to Matt. 18, I think that's in the context of internal matters within the church.

No, Christians, especially Christians who take up the office of teacher, are required to have a good reputation with unbelievers, 1st Timothy 3:7, so when they fail Paul's standard, they fail their own self-imposed standard and have engaged in the biblical equal of sin.

Disputes between Christian brothers. If so, then it doesn't apply to you since you're not in the church.

So under your logic, if you murder me, none of your Christian brothers have a biblical duty to confront you about this sin since I'm not in the church.

You mention Rom. 13. That's the very chapter that acknowledges the state's role in the punishment of crimes. If there's a place for ministers to address Holding's sins, it would be his immediate elders and not random spiritual mentors who don't know or have the time or resources to investigate the issues.

Which is precisely the problem since Holding is the type of apostate who believes himself spiritually above any immediate elders.  Blomberg and Habermas would have known this, so because they chose to discuss the matter with him a little bit, they committed themselves to rebuking him for his sin.

When it comes to CRI, I suspect that folks like Perry Robinson who have complained about Hanegraaff's behavior for decades seem legitimate (from my limited knowledge). Also, I think the role of teacher and apologist are two distinct things. One can be one, or the other, or both. The role of a teacher implies authority and reliability in doctrine. Whereas neither need be the case with an apologist.

Yes, they do, at least for the apologist who thinks god works through him to promote the gospel.

Finally, what lies of Walter Martin are you specifically referring to?

He claimed to have been a descendant of Brigham Young

ANNOYED PINOYJanuary 2, 2018 at 1:51 AM
What's the NAU translation?

New American Standard, 1995 Update.  You can't be serious.

Re-reading my comments I see I may have been slightly inconsistent. For example, in one place I wrote, "it would have been morally wrong for a female to have been given in marriage for consummation before she had sufficiently matured so as to lessen the chances of birthing complications." Yet, in another place I wrote, "I'm not sure I would say that it was/is always sin. At the very least I think the Biblical ideal (additionally attested by natural law) is that marriage should be between two sexually mature individuals of the opposite sex. "
 But those two statements need not be contradictory. In the former quotation I wasn't speaking absolutely, but generally and usually. While in the latter I was speaking in terms of absolute and unchanging designation and moral evaluation.

I think the fact that you can't make out a biblical case for saying God views marital pedophilia as "sin" speaks clearly enough.

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?