Showing posts with label preexistence of the soul. Show all posts
Showing posts with label preexistence of the soul. Show all posts

Friday, March 15, 2019

Cold Case Christianity: When Does God Identify “You” as “You”?

This is my reply to an article by J. Warner Wallace entitled


Life begins at the moment of conception.
The same was true for the baby boys whom Moses ordered killed in Numbers 31:17.

Apparently, the question of when life begins, does not answer the question of whether killing them can be morally justified.  And by the way, under your own stupid theology, because aborting babies sends them directly to heaven with no possibility of going to hell, any fair moral analysis would take this good effect of abortion into account when deciding whether abortion produces more bad than good.  The fair moral analysis would not ignore this obviously good effect.  And in the NT, the spiritual effects are always given greater weight than the earthly effects, see Romans 8:18.  If murdering babies who have already been born can be morally justified by God (1st Sam. 15:2-3), you need to back the fuck off before pretending that murdering unborn babies cannot be morally justified. 

And since your god takes responsibility for all murders (Deut. 32:39) and decrees how many days a person shall live (Job 14:5), your stupid Christian theology would force the conclusion that God's bitching about abortion is equal to God's bitching at people for doing exactly what he wants when he wants.
We know this to be true due to the unique genetic nature of every fetal human. I didn’t always accept this truth, however. In fact, for most of my life, I was pro-choice. I came to this realization about the nature of human life through a careful examination of embryology, rather than a careful reading of Scripture.
Irrelevant, your god doesn't just kill babies, but tortures them for 7 days, before killing them:
 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.
 16 David therefore inquired of God for the child; and David fasted and went and lay all night on the ground.
 17 The elders of his household stood beside him in order to raise him up from the ground, but he was unwilling and would not eat food with them.
 18 Then it happened on the seventh day that the child died. (2 Sam. 12:14-18 NAU)
Then you wonder why some people characterize your god as a sadistic lunatic? 

Perhaps those sorts of bible verses will cause you to hesitate before you blindly presume that torturing babies is an objective immorality.  Since your fictitious god tortures babies, you are forced to give up the idea that baby-torture is always immoral.  In fact, I'd go further and say your quick disapproval of baby torture arises from your sin nature, since you appear to be far more soft-bellied than your god.

Face it:  if God wants your little girl to die in a car accident, but you don't want your daughter to die in a car accident, then you deserve to be called "Satan" because you care about human compassion more than god's will. Now discover a bible passage you apparently never noticed before:
 21 From that time Jesus began to show His disciples that He must go to Jerusalem, and suffer many things from the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and be raised up on the third day.
 22 Peter took Him aside and began to rebuke Him, saying, "God forbid it, Lord! This shall never happen to You."
 23 But He turned and said to Peter, "Get behind Me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to Me; for you are not setting your mind on God's interests, but man's."  (Matt. 16:21-23 NAU)
Wallace continues:
The Bible does, however, affirm this truth. Every human being, according to Christian scripture, is a unique, intentional creation of God, even if he or she might appear to be an unplanned accident from our limited, human perspective.
 Thus assuring us that you've chosen the easier route of preaching to the choir, instead of the harder route of giving skeptics anything to worry about.
The Bible affirms our identity as unique, distinct human beings long before we were born.
Not if you take Deuteronomy 28:15-63 seriously.  When God doesn't like you, you become about as important as a homeless welfare-abusing crack-whore.  If god thinks even these scumbags are "important", well, Mr. Wallace, how many homeless crack-whores have you allowed to stay in your house?

If the only way you could save the lives of 5 unborn crack-babies is to raise them in your house yourself after they are born, would you sign the contract?  Obviously not.  

God Had Plans for You Before You Were in the Womb
God had plans for you and I from the very beginning. This makes sense if we are us from the moment of conception. God knew us before we began our mortal existence, and we began it in the womb at the moment we were conceived:

Jeremiah 1:5
“Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you; I have appointed you a prophet to the nations.”
If you were in Mormonism, you'd have quoted the book of Mormon, your students would have clapped, and you'd have felt no less a sense of fulfillment than you have now. Dismissed.
God Referred to You While You Were in the Womb
You have always been you, even from the earliest moments in the womb.
 But the more interesting question is how we existed before conception.  You will say we had no existence apart from God's foreknowledge of us, but some church fathers believed in pre-existence of the soul, which they would hardly have believed, if as today's fundies insist, such a doctrine was as contrary to scripture as the notion that Jesus was a woman.  See here.

As usual, J. Warner Wallace's "apologetics" have less to do with beating back skeptics, and more to do with coddling the currently existing beliefs of his Christian followers.

Jason Engwer doesn't appreciate the strong justification for skepticism found in John 7:5

Bart Ehrman, like thousands of other skeptics, uses Mark 3:21 and John 7:5 to argue that Jesus' virgin birth (VB) is fiction.  Jason Eng...