Matthew Flanagan fails to demonstrate existence of objective moral requirements

My debate with Matthew has began focusing on his belief that objective moral requirements exist, and cannot be accounted for except by positing God as their point of origin.

Here's Matthew's post and my reply following.  I made my reply short because answering in too comprehensive fashion usually only gives somebody something more to hide behind.

"Matt,
e.
 It’s like answering “which morals am I required to live by in this house?”, by saying “the ones that it would be wrong to omit”. 

Matt replies:

No that again seems to conflate issues, when I ask what morals I am required to live by in this house, I am using the word “morals” in the sociological sense, that is a set of norms a person believes in or accepts.
 But, when I refer to moral requirements I am not referring to moral beliefs. I am talking about what morality in fact requires. Unless you think a person or community is never mistaken in what they believe we ought to do, you have to grant a distinction between what a person or groups thinks and accepts is required and what actually is required.
 The fact you spend so much time and energy arguing that the religious and moral beliefs of ancient Hebrew society or the bible are mistaken and in error, suggests you actually are committed to this distinction.

I had said:

Can you provide a specific example of a moral requirement that you think it is morally wrong to omit? 

Matt replies:

The claim its morally wrong to omit a moral requirement is analytically true, it’s a tautology.

 But here is an example, I think there is a moral requirement to not torture children purely for entertainment. I think this requirement holds even if a person or community thinks it doesn’t so that a community which endorsed and practises child torture would in be mistaken. I also think it’s a categorical requirement so that even if torturing a child for fun met some goal or desire you had, perhaps the sadistic desire to have fun seeing children scream in pain, then the requirement still holds. I think anyone who deliberately does this without some form of mitigation is guilty of not following these requirements worthy of blame and censure, a

 Your free to disagree of course, you can maintain that a community that believes in and practises torturing children for fun doesn’t do anything wrong at all or that such requirements are really hypothetical and don’t apply to people who have sadistic desires, or your free to think people who deliberately and knowingly torture children are worthy of praise and condemnation if you like. If you want to bite that bullet, then you can, but I think ranting about God being a moral monster and how awful it is for ancient cultures to have narratives about killing children ceases to become a terribly plausible past time if you do bite this bullet.

 But all this is irrelevant, because, in the argument, I cited from my response to Carrier, I pointed out the biblical passages you cite, even if your take on them was correct, doesn’t actually provide the slightest reason for rejecting a divine command theory. That attacks the doctrine of inerrancy which is a different and logically distinct position to divine command theories. I note you haven’t responded to it, you have again gone on a long tirade about what you think I argued in a book on a different topic.

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

The short reply I posted there:

Matt,
Again, I've written about 6 pages of point by point reply, but again, I will only reply with what I think is the most critical area we disagree on, since I'm well aware of the risk of the point being lost if too much material is posted.  If you are curious about how I answered every little point, it's at my blog http://turchisrong.blogspot.com

When I asked you for a specific example of what you deem a "moral requirement", you resorted to the classic example of a prohibition on torturing children solely for entertainment.
Several problems: 

Where is the moral yardstick you are using, which you apparently think is violated whenever anybody tortures a child solely for fun? 

Do you say this is immoral because the bible tells you so? 

Do you say this is immoral because the consensus of human opinion on the matter through history says it is immoral, and you think atheists cannot sufficiently account for why that pattern exhibited itself in human values?

--------------------------------
I did not post there my comprehensive point-by-point reply because I felt it was too long and might cause Flannagan to focus on something other than what I thought was the critical shortcoming he overlooked.

But for those who are curious, here is my full reply, available only here as follows: 
--------------------------

Oct 27, 2017 at 6:42 pm
Matt,
e.
“It’s like answering “which morals am I required to live by in this house?”, by saying “the ones that it would be wrong to omit”.
No that again seems to conflate issues, when I ask what morals I am required to live by in this house, I am using the word “morals” in the sociological sense, that is a set of norms a person believes in or accepts.

----------If you were dealing with a person who denied the existence of cars, you wouldn’t be answering the denier’s question (“what is a car?”), by providing a perfectly synonymous word “vehicle”.  He still denies the existence of cars, regardless of whatever different way you choose to describe such things.   So likewise, you think my denial of objective morals is as unjustified as the denial of cars.  If you aren’t beneficially clarifying “cars” by pointing out that they are also called “vehicles”, then you aren’t beneficially clarifying “moral requirements” by pointing out that these are “something that its morally wrong to omit.”  In both cases, you are simply providing a synonymous phrase as substitute.  But thanks to my requests for clarification, you finally answered in a way that infuses more information into your proposition, thus allowing for more focused critique.

“But, when I refer to moral requirements I am not referring to moral beliefs"

----------That’s most unfortunate since you cannot demonstrate that moral requirements have any existence outside of the human mind, that is, if your below-argument about prohibiting child-torture has anything to say about it.

 I am talking about what morality in fact requires.

---------Adding “in fact” to “morality” doesn’t magically broaden morality beyond the human mind that so far appears to be the sole ground of the existence of all morals humans have. 

   "Unless you think a person or community is never mistaken in what they believe we ought to do, you have to grant a distinction between what a person or groups thinks and accepts is required and what actually is required.”

----------My basis for saying Hitler’s moral opinion on treatment of the Jews in WW2 was mistaken, is completely subjective, I do not mean mistaken “in fact”, as if there was some objective moral yardstick to which Hitler’s Holocaust could be compared and found wanting.  It is neither irrational nor unreasonable to be standing solely on a subjective basis when declaring that another person’s moral opinion is mistaken.  Again, when you were a child, if your dad told you to go to bed at 9 p.m. on a school night and you protested, he would be perfectly reasonable and rational to assert “your moral opinion that the proper bedtime for you tonight is something other than 9 p.m., is mistaken”, despite the fact that there is no objective moral yardstick telling anybody what bedtime is proper for such kids.

So my belief that others’ moral opinions are ‘mistaken’, need not imply “what morality in fact” requires.

The fact you spend so much time and energy arguing that the religious and moral beliefs of ancient Hebrew society or the bible are mistaken and in error, suggests you actually are committed to this distinction.

--------------My belief that the OT ethics are mistaken and in error, arises from my entirely subjective beliefs about morals, which I wasn’t born with, but were instilled in my by environmental conditioning.  You appear to under the mistaken notion that if morality is ultimately subjective, we cannot be reasonable or rational to say one moral is “better” or “worse” than another.  Not true.  See above.  Believing yourself to be in possession of an objective moral yardstick helps your moral criticisms sound like they have stronger footing that a completely subjective critique, but alas, whether any such objective moral yardstick actually exists, must be decided first, a thing you should have established, but for whatever reason, chose not to do so far. 

“Can you provide a specific example of a moral requirement that you think it is morally wrong to omit?”  The claim its morally wrong to omit a moral requirement is analytically true, it’s a tautology.

------------Only if we assume that “moral requirement” can be an objective thing that exists outside the human mind.  Had you done what you needed to do (i.e., establish the existence of an objective moral yardstick outside the human mind, then pointed out that “do not torture children solely for entertainment purposes” was written therein) we wouldn’t be having this discussion, as you would have won the debate.  Assuring me that torturing children for fun is objectively immoral doesn’t establish where that moral comes from.

“But here is an example, I think there is a moral requirement to not torture children purely for entertainment. I think this requirement holds even if a person or community thinks it doesn’t so that a community which endorsed and practises child torture would in be mistaken.”

------------What objective standard do you use to determine that those who torture children for fun are mistaken?  The bible?  The consensus view of humanity throughout its history?  What exactly?

“I also think it’s a categorical requirement so that even if torturing a child for fun met some goal or desire you had, perhaps the sadistic desire to have fun seeing children scream in pain, then the requirement still holds. I think anyone who deliberately does this without some form of mitigation is guilty of not following these requirements worthy of blame and censure, a”

1.      I don’t understand what you expect to accomplish here.  You are not establishing an objective moral by simply citing what you think is an example of such and reasons why you’d’ think the gainsayers “worthy of blame and censure…”  The way you establish an objective moral is by first demonstrating the existence of an objective moral yardstick.  THEN you prove certain morals to be objective by simply showing that they appear on such yardstick.  You haven’t done that.  If your moral was “objective”, it would have to originate from some source independent of the human mind.  Your above argument makes no attempt to show that prohibiting child torture for fun is an objective thing with grounding somewhere other than the human mind. 

2.      If that moral requirement is objective (i.e., it’s existence doesn’t depend on my own existence), please tell me where to find it so I can examine it more fully. 

3.      You need to clarify what maximum age the person can be and still be a “child” according to this moral requirement you now give, otherwise we run the risk of disagreeing when I start talking about how the sexual excitement of the Hebrew male in the ANE is just “entertainment” by another word since he need not intend to get the girl pregnant, and the pain his 12-year old bride experiences on their wedding night as her hymen is torn constituted the “torture” of a girl that is still properly call a “child” even if her own culture’s relative viewpoint said she became an adult at that age.

4.      You need to clarify what level of discomfort to the child constitutes “torture”.  A 4 year old little brother screams in pain and says “ouch! quit it you meanie!” when his older brother pinches him solely because the older brother is sadistic and is entertained by inflicting short bursts of temporary pain.  This would fulfill all of your above stated criteria , but most parents would not call this rather typical type of sibling interaction “torture of children for purely entertainment reasons”.  You think such older brothers are objectively wrong, but the older brothers themselves don’t think it objectively wrong, so how do we decide which of you is correct?

5.       How essential is “scream in pain” to your definition of “torture” in the example you gave?  Some kids have greater ability than others to suppress their urge to scream when pain is inflicted, thus raising the problem of whether the older brother who sadistically causes pain to his younger sibling solely for sadistic entertainment, can escape your accusation all because the child did not in fact ‘scream in pain’.   Can your moral be violated even where the child, able to scream, successfully resists the urge to scream?

6.      I can think of real world exceptions:  Many parents have concluded that because the little brother was “asking for it” by constantly teasing and poking fun at the older brother, the older brother’s sadistic infliction of pain sufficient to induce the child to scream “ouch” (usually a pinch, nothing permanent or extreme) is morally justified, despite the fact that the brother has other ways to deal with the child, indicating his infliction of pain wasn’t necessitated but merely desired for its own sake, the very definition of sadism.

7.      A very rich man tells a single mother living in squalor and starvation that if she allows him to pinch her 6-year old diseased daughter (“child”) on the arm to the point that the daughter screams in pain (screaming in pain = your definition of torture), this man will deposit a million dollars in her checking account.  She consents, he pinches, the daughter screams, they receive a million dollars, and mom uses that money to purchase a medical cure for her daughter’s disease, and to purchase homes, food and clothes for 500 other families also living in squalor locally.   Then you come along and say “that man had no other motive in torturing your daughter, than his own sadistic entertainment, so you were objectively wrong to accept his bribe and help facilitate her torture.”  She says “the benefits resulting in relief to so much terrible suffering (reduction of the number of starving homeless children by putting them in houses with money to their families) clearly outweighed whatever immorality was involved in the rich man pinching my daughter for less than 2 seconds.”  How would you convince her that despite the relief of much suffering, the price was too high?  Would you also confront her like this if some of those families she helped were Christians who could be heard praising god for this relief as you walk on your way to confront her?

8.      If the ancient pagans were as evil as you allege (i.e., burning children alive, as evangelical apologist Frank Turek routinely alleges about the Canaanites), they likely harmed children in warfare for their entertainment even when not necessary to the battle, just like they raped some of the female prisoners of war despite this not being necessary to winning a battle.  So a biblical rebuttal to your child-torture prohibition would consist of are all those bible verses in which God admits responsibility for motivating the pagans to do things to the Hebrew kids that constitute unnecessary to winning a battle, which means torture inflicted for entertainment, such as beating them to death (it’s torture causing the child to scream in pain even if only for a few seconds before they actually die) and ripping fetuses out of pregnant women. See Isaiah 13:15-16 and Hosea 13:15-16.  As I informed you earlier, one evangelical scholar commenting on the infamous Psalm 137:9 said beating children against the rocks was typical of ANE warfare, so you cannot escape God’s enabling of pagans to torture children solely for entertainment purposes by pretending Isaiah and Hosea were engaging in hyperbole.  Their threats of woe referred to horrific realities of warfare (2^nd Kings 15:16)  that the Hebrews were well aware could be imposed on them should enemy nations decide to attack.

9.      The teaching in Deuteronomy 4:2 and 12:32, that you are not allowed to add or take away from the Mosaic law text, strongly implies that the author thought the law was sufficiently exhaustive that any act of a human being not prohibited/condemned in the Law, could not be punished by the elders (i.e., they would have no legal justification to impose such punishment) .  That being the case, there is a law that indicates slave-owners could not be prosecuted for their beating a slave to death, if the slave takes at least 1 day to die:

20 "If a man strikes his male or female slave with a rod and he dies at his hand, he shall be punished.

 21 "If, however, he survives a day or two, no vengeance shall be taken; for he is his property. (Exod. 21:20-21 NAU)

Evangelical scholars such as J.I, Durham agree that this is immunizing the slave owner here in those cases where there is at least 1 day’s delay between the fatal beating and the slave’s actual death:

The broad stance of our contributors can rightly be called evangelical, and this term is to be understood in its positive, historic sense of a commitment to Scripture as divine revelation, and to the truth and power of the Christian gospel…A slave owner who strikes his slave a fatal blow with a stick or a club (שׁבט) is to be punished unless the slave survives the blow for a day or so. In that case, he is to suffer no punishment beyond his financial loss in the death of his slave.

Durham, J. I. (2002). Vol. 3: Word Biblical Commentary : Exodus. Word Biblical Commentary (Page 323). Dallas: Word, Incorporated.

Hebrew slave-owners also had kids as slaves (Exodus 21:4).  If we agree with apologists for the sake of argument that Numbers 31:18 is only authorizing Hebrew men to take little girls as house-slaves and not as wives, then because the girls are defined in that verse are virgin, we may assume most of them taken as slaves were between infancy and about 12 years of age.  Now suppose a Hebrew man takes one such girl of 6 years old to his house as house slave, then pinches her on the arm for no other reason than his sadistic entertainment because he likes to hear her say “ouch!” in fluent Midianite.  Her screaming in pain fulfills your above-cited criteria of “torture”, and his doing this for no reason than his sadistic desire to hear her scream, fulfills your above-cited criteria of “entertainment”, and as a 6-year old girl she fulfills your criteria of “child”.  This then would constitute violation of your allegedly objective prohibition against child-torture, but because it doesn’t violate anything in the exhaustive Mosaic law, it cannot be called evil and thus under biblical standards this act wouldn’t be evil.

(the Mosaic law clearly isn’t actually exhaustive, but that truth doesn’t help you, Deut. 4:2 and 12:32 commit you to the premise that the author of the Mosaic law INTENDED for the readers to view it as exhaustive, which is what logically arises from the prohibition on adding to it.  You don’t need to add anything to the laws when they are sufficient to govern whatever civil or criminal case that might possibly arise).

Exodus 22:22-25 forbids afflicting an orphan, but because the death-penalty is imposed where the afflicted cry out to god (v. 23), we either assume the affliction imposed was something more serious than a mere pinch on the arm, or we assume that God would kill a Hebrew slave-owner for nothing more than afflicting an orphan slave girl with a pinch on the arm.  The former seems to accord with Christian common sense the most.

I am very well aware that you didn’t bring up bible inerrancy.  I am arguing that your own commitment to biblical inerrancy logically prevents you from saying God always disapproves of the type of child-torture you describe, and thus what you describe cannot be objectively immoral, had you properly taken into consideration what is required by other presuppositions you hold to.  And yet you insist that objective morals cannot exist independently of God. 

“Your free to disagree of course, you can maintain that a community that believes in and practises torturing children for fun doesn’t do anything wrong at all or that such requirements are really hypothetical and don’t apply to people who have sadistic desires, or your free to think people who deliberately and knowingly torture children are worthy of praise and condemnation if you like. If you want to bite that bullet, then you can, but I think ranting about God being a moral monster and how awful it is for ancient cultures to have narratives about killing children ceases to become a terribly plausible past time if you do bite this bullet.”

-----------I won’t be biting that bullet, you haven’t done anything to establish that torturing children for fun IS this objectively immoral act you claim it to be.  The best you can possibly do is point out that atheists cannot adequately explain why most human beings in history have found it immoral to torture children purely for entertainment reasons, after which you could infer that such atheist-failure makes it likely that this pattern in human morality can only be accounted for by positing a god.  But you didn’t even make THAT argument.

“But all this is irrelevant, because, in the argument, I cited from my response to Carrier, I pointed out the biblical passages you cite, even if your take on them was correct, doesn’t actually provide the slightest reason for rejecting a divine command theory.”

------------I cannot give credence to the DCT theory because I am an atheist and find the concept of God to be incoherent.  If you believe the Christian version of DCT is the most powerful case to be made for DCT, then when the atheist refutes the Christian version of DCT, they have refuted what you think is the most powerful case for DCT.  The mere possibility that a non-Christian god might exist and justify DCT is about as frightful to the atheist as the mere possibility that the Book of Mormon is the word of God.  Invoking mere possibilities is not the way debates are made beneficial.  So far, the incoherency of the god-concept appears reasonable, and if so, decimates ANY version of the DCT.

 That attacks the doctrine of inerrancy which is a different and logically distinct position to divine command theories.

----------But you don’t give serious credence to any non-Christian form of the DCT, so if an atheist refutes the Christian or bible-inerrancy based form of DCT, you are disqualified from the game regardless.  You cannot allow that God’s truth is ever disqualified from the game, so my advice is that you honor Christ as highly as possible and insist that the only form of the DCT arguent that will suffice is the specifically Christian version.

Like it or not, my friend, you DO rise or fall with biblical inerrancy.

I note you haven’t responded to it, you have again gone on a long tirade about what you think I argued in a book on a different topic.

-----------yeah I know:  when you blog that apples are fruit, we are “changing the subject” if we reply that apples can also be green or red.  After all, the color of apples is on a topic different than their essential nature as fruit. 

I’ve also asked you before how we might discuss online my specific problems with your beliefs, problems that you haven’t brought up in your blogs.  Are you going to answer?

Demolishing Triablogue: No reasons for hell

This is my reply to an article by Steve Hays of Triablogue entitled

Reasons for hell

Recently I was listening to philosophical theologians give bad answers on hell.

 You should have recognized their bad answers likely implied they have been previously warned at least twice against their error, and accordingly you should have obeyed that part of the bible that tells you to avoid them, see Titus 3:9-11.

I've probably discussed most of this before at one time or another, but it may be useful to summarize them in one place. By way of preliminary comment, the primary reason Christians believe in hell

Speak for yourself, it should be obvious to a smart guy like you that not all Christians believe in hell, unless you use that doctrine as a test of orthodoxy.  Can a person be genuinely born-again while adopting annihilationism, yes or no?  If yes, then couldn't it be argued that every bit of time you spend arguing peripherals, the more you sin by taking away time better spend defending essentials?

is because they believe what the Bible says about hell.

Well gee, so do the Jehovah's Witnesses and the 7th Day Adventists.

It isn't necessary to provide an independent, philosophical defense of hell.

Especially given that such would be impossible, lest you look a little too consistent in your Calvinism and admit you worship a sadistic lunatic.

It's useful in apologetics and evangelism to be able to do that, but the warrant for believing in hell doesn't rely on that.

There's plenty of good warrant for ascribing error to the NT doctrine of eternal conscious torment.

1. Infinite God
i) A typical objection goes like this: how can a just God mete out infinite punishment for finite sin? How can the sins of a lifetime merit infinite punishment? The typical reply is that a sin against an infinite God is infinitely culpable, and merits infinite punishment.

Except that God's justice against sin in the OT is very often FULLY satisfied by decidedly temporal means of atonement, such as animal sacrifice.  Hell, the master who rapes his slave-girl is automatically forgiven simply by donating one of his rams to the priests, no repentance or change beyond this is expressed or implied:

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

Sometimes Leviticus is more specific than we might expect an ancient Hebrew author to be, to make sure the reader recognized how completely animal blood expiated God's wrath against sin.  Concerning Yom Kippur, or the once-yearly animal sacrifice:

 29 "This shall be a permanent statute for you: in the seventh month, on the tenth day of the month, you shall humble your souls and not do any work, whether the native, or the alien who sojourns among you;
 30 for it is on this day that atonement shall be made for you to cleanse you; you will be clean from all your sins before the LORD. (Lev. 16:29-30 NAU)

Gee, really?  Steve Hays would probably trifle "in what sense did they become clean before the Lord?" 

Well gee, in the sense that "The Lord viewed them as clean"?

Sort of like, if you barged into Steve's house and said "your mother was just murdered!', he would probably trifle "in what sense, after all, 'murder' can be used by modern American persons in a variety of different ways!".  Obviously, this text was intended to be read aloud to the mostly illiterate Israelites, and such people would not likely have conjured up the stupid semantic trifles in their mind that are conjured up by Steve Hays...and his concern to make sure the NT book of Hebrews continues being held up as inerrant.

That's a popular answer because it's compact and uses the same principle as the critic, only turning that principle against the objection. But as it stands, it's a bad argument:

Thanks for the honesty.

ii) It equivocates over the nature of infinitude. The objection is to a quantitative infinite punishment. A temporal infinite. Everlasting punishment. For finite, discrete sins.

However, to say a sin may be infinitely culpable swaps in a qualitative concept. An infinite degree of badness. I'm not sure if that's even meaningful.

Skeptics like me will use such concessions from Christian apologists to straighten out the idiots that warm the pews every Sunday.  Half of the atheist bible critics' plight is in simply getting the "Christian" to correctly understand their own book.

In addition, what does it mean in this context to say that God is "infinite." In what morally relevant sense is God infinite in this argument? Perhaps what is meant is that God is infinitely good, so that a sin against an infinitely good God is infinitely bad, meriting infinite punishment. "Infinite" in the sense that God is as good as anything can be. Indeed, better than anything else. The uppermost maxima of goodness or exemplar of goodness. Something like that.
When you try to unpack the argument, it gets messy. I don't think this is a good argument as it stands.

Again, thanks for the honesty.

It does, however, contain a grain of truth, so I think it can be rehabilitated in some respect:

iii) There is a moral principle where the same action may be worse depending on who you do it to. It's worse to betray a friend than a stranger. It's worse to mistreat your elderly mother than to mistreat the telemarketer. So there can be degrees of culpability, not due to the action itself, but who it's directed to. Taken to a logical extreme, the argument is that we owe the most to God, we have the greatest obligation to God, so sinning against God is the worst kind of sin.

Except that in Steve Hays' very staunch 5-Point Calvinism, it is this infinite god who intended the sinner to sin the way he did, so that offending god by sinning is sort of like offending the person whom you gave a black eye to, because they took your hand and hit themselves with it.  How the fuck could a Calvinist believe anybody could "offend God"?  Is God offended when we manifest perfect compliance with his secret will?

Hays' displays his disturbing consistency by arguing elsewhere that God secretly wills that people disobey his revealed will, which while logical enough under his Calvinism, is viewed as shockingly heretical by most Christians.  See here.

Steve continues:

iv) There is, though, another complication to this argument. In what sense can we sin against God? We can't harm God.

Good point.  And yet Malachi uses the word "yet" to duck the obvious criticism that it is logically impossible to steal from God, see Malachi 3:8.  That's sort of like saying "Can a sinner make God go out of existence?  Yet you have caused God to stop existing."  Interesting how the little "yet" word can successfully shield an argument from deserved criticism.

It is, however, possible, to wrong someone without harming them. A thankless, malicious son can dishonor his father's memory. Suppose his dad was a conscientious father, but the son spreads scurrilous rumors about his late father that destroy his father's reputation. In one sense it's too late to harm is father. But there's still something terribly wrong about the action.

But according to Steve Hays, we only sin because God has infallibly predestined us to, and has secretly willed that we disobey his revealed will.  One can only wonder whether our "wronging" god even makes sense under such a fatalistic system as Calvinism.  Is it "wrong" to conform to God's secret will, yes or no?  If yes, then God is a stupid sadist for blaming us for such wrong since he rigged the game to make sure we couldn't possibly deviate from "wronging" him.  If "no", then god deprives himself of any basis to bitch, lest you serve a god who condemns people for OBEYING him?  But because Steve is brainwashed, he will just blindly assume that the idiot who wrote Romans 9:20 rendered all objections frivolous.

2. Eternal existence
i) A basic reason hell is forever is because human beings are forever. If human beings have an immortal soul (not to mention the resurrection of the body), then whatever happens to human beings will last forever.

Except that there are plenty of Christians and Christian scholars who teach annihilationism.  Probably because the "wrongness" of these doctrines are somewhat less obvious than the wrongness of 2+2=5... so that you can hardly blame them for adopting such doctrine.

They have an unending destiny because they have an unending existence. So whatever happens to them will go on forever. It continues because they continue. Annihilationists duck that by denying that human beings are naturally immortal.

ii) Now this is more of a necessary rather than sufficient condition for eternal punishment. In principle, it could be a argued that while whatever happens to them is never-ending, it needn't be the same thing forever. It can change. That's the contention of the universalist, as well as exponents of postmortem salvation. That requires a separate response.

It is, however, important to make the initial point that one reason damnation is inescapable is because existence is inescapable. Damnation never ceases because the damned never cease to exist.

Except that this is a philosophical objection, whereas Steve Hays' first commitment must be to the bible, whose OT clearly indicates god's justice against sin can be, and often is, fully satisfied by less than infinite means, such as animal sacrifice.  See above.  The reasonableness of that view is not going to be diminished merely because god's jailhouse lawyer can simply tack "in what sense?" onto everything they ever think of.  Steve Hays doesn't get to dictate how much stupid pretentijous trifling the unbeliever must put up with in his apologetics before they become reasonable to just flip him the middle finger and walk away. 

3. Apropos (2), a supporting argument is that damnation is forever because the damned continue to sin. An objection to this argument is that people have a capacity for change.

That can be true, but what causes them to change? In Christian theology, God's grace is transformative. If, however, God withholds his grace from the damned, then they don't get better. If anything, they get worse. More hardened.

Which denies the view of freewill held by most Christians, to the effect that we are just as capable of accepting Jesus solely by our freewill as we are capable of making a peanut butter sandwich by our own freewill.  Attributing only the good in your life to "god's grace" and the sin only to "self" is just stupid inconsistency, which renders void the many biblical passages on god "rewarding" those who do good.  If it wasn't us doing the good, then giving us a prize at the end anyway cannot rightfully be called "reward".  If the good doesn't come from us, but only from God, then only God can logically be "rewarded" if at all.

4. Apropos (3), why doesn't God enable the damned to change? Why doesn't God grant them the ability to repent?

This goes to another principle in Christian theology: in terms of eschatological judgment, some sinners get what they deserve while others get better than they deserve (no one gets worse than they deserve).

Sort of like when both of your kids disobey you and each eat one cookie before dinner, you beat one of them with a rod (Proverbs 22:15) and ground them for a month, while you give the other one $50 to go blow at the mall however she wishes, with your blessings.  Are you a fuckhead parent, yes or no?  Or did you suddenly discover how wonderful god was for enabling his jailhouse lawyers to invent "ad hoc" excuses whenever expediency dictates?

The reason the damned never leave hell is because they don't deserve to leave hell.

That's right.  If the 12 year old non-Christian girl who has done many good works of charity and gets good grades in school, should happen to reject the gospel invitation, then die in a state of unbelief in a car crash on the way home from church, God's righteousness permits no other fate for her except conscious eternal torment in "hell".

They don't deserve a better life.

You'd have been a bit more honest with your own doctrine had you specified that newborn babies do not deserve to be protected from death by rape.  God was never 'required' to give them anything better, so when he leaves them to suffer, this is nothing short of god's righteousness in action, amen?

Of course this violates common sense, since if everything is covered by the sovereignty of god, then the fact that most babies are not raped to death makes it reasonable for any Christian to suppose that God feels a moral obligation to give such protection.

That's their just desert, and there's nothing wrong with that. Indeed, there's something right with God.

Sort of like if you came home to find your mom being raped by a whole gang, the fact that she is a sinner and the fact that God himself obviously wasn't doing anything to protect her, makes it at best ambiguous whether or not you "should" do anything to prevent this crime.  But I'm sure that if you found out this happened to some mother down the street, and her son just stood around solely by choice and not fear while his mother was raped. you'd feel better knowing that God secretly wanted the rape and this neglect to happen exactly the way it did. 

Revealed will of God = "thou shalt not commit adultery, thou shalt not murder", etc.
Secret will of God = "you shall kill that child, you shall obey that traffic signal", etc.

Is it morally good to act in conformity to the revealed will of God, yes or no?

Is it morally good to act in conformity to the secret will of God, yes or no?

Steve's Calvinism forces him to admit that Hitler's massacer of the Jews in WW2 was in perfect conformity to the "secret" will of God.  So...was it morally good for Hitler to act in conformity to God's secret will, yes or no?

Or did Steve suddenly discover there's room in Calvinism for moral relativity?

Hopefully you have a better understanding of why biblical theology causes me, an atheist, to stay awake at night, all worried "what if I'm wrong and the creator really is a sadistic lunatic?"

In Christian theology, God doesn't treat all equally-undeserving sinners alike.

Which is precisely why it is reasonable to call him a sadistic lunatic.  Just like if you didn't treat to the same discipline all of your kids who disobeyed you in the same exact way.  When the punished ones cry out "why didn't you punish her too?", you'd be 'godly' to reply "my ways are mysterious, I don't have to explain myself to you, and since you are getting what you deserve, you have no right to complain if I let other persons, equally deserving of this punishment, off the hook."  I'm sorry, but Steve is a fool to derive theology from Matthew 20:11-15...and so was Jesus for teaching such obviously unfair stupidity.  How would the world be if all employers were that arbitrary?

He draws a distinction. You shouldn't expect to get better than you deserve.

So because none of us "deserve" to have food, clothing and shelter, it can only be sinful and thus unreasonable motive why we seek these things.  Steve, why do you seek for that which you don't deserve?  isn't that sort of like the new inexperienced crew member at McDonald's wanting his starting wage to equal that of the crew members who have been there for 3 years?

Steve is also wrong biblially to condemn our wanting more than we deserve.  If God sends his rain on the just and the unjust (Matthew 5:45), then our aquiring things we don't deserve is a routine that God is responsible for, and therefore god is responsible for this routine creating a habit and expectation in our mind that we should have some things we don't deserve.

Throwing dice to decide god's will is biblical (Acts 1:26), so you should expect to get more than you deserve through the inevitability of chance + time.  Throw the dice often enough and they are bound to roll winner, and when they do, Calvinists will insist god wanted it that way.

In fact, Calvinists would say God is ultimately responsible for whatever defects in biblical and logical reasoning that you might engage in.  Could anything have more powerful justification than "god wanted it that way"?  No.  If the most reasonable thing possible is conformity to god's will, then under Calvinism, beating children to death is equally as reasonable as saving a little girl from drowning.  BOTH acts are exactly what God wanted, and by definition, God's will cannot possibly ever be "unreasonable".

To get just what you deserve is the essence of justice.

And for a justice system to decide for itself which among the two equally guilty criminals to let off the hook, and which to prosecute, is the antithesis of justice, lest you stupidly insist that the justice meted out in American Courts every day for the last 200 years is a bad idea? (Conforming to God's secret will, as America's history absolutely must, is a bad idea?).  Only in Calvinism could you get in trouble with God for doing exactly what he wanted when, where and how he wanted.  Everybody else would call this sadistic lunacy, and Calvinists reply with "that's just human logic!"

Let's just say God infallibly predestined me to avoid joining the Calvinist cause, ok?

They don't get out of hell because they deserve nothing better. They are in their natural element.

If we deserve nothing better than hell, why did God allow us to exist for the present on this better-than-hell earth?  Does God sometimes give people what they don't deserve?  If so, then why couldn't there be a strictly philosophical argument that this way of God remains true in the afterworld (i.e., sinners deserve to be in hell longer, but God limits the amount of time they spend there anyway, for the same reason he often makes life easier for undeserving criminals)?  Something is greatly amiss in your trifling attempt to make your sadistic god's ways sound plausible to modern western ears.  But since you view yourself as a puppet on a string, I'm sure you couldn't care less whether your reasoning does or doesn't square up with common sense.  Cultists are experts are justifying their departure from common sense and convincing themselves God wanted them to act contrary to "worldly wisdom".  The brainwashing is the same whether you push Christianity or ISIS.

There's something nihilistic, something morally subversive–even diabolical–about the idea that no matter what anyone ever does, it makes no ultimate different to what happens to them. To treat good and evil alike.

Then blame your god, who often treats criminals and law-abiding people alike.  And blame yourself for promoting Calvinism, a doctrine that says our sense of making a genuine difference is completely illusory and false, we can do nothing whatever except react to an infallibly predetermined plan.  And your god often treats evil and good alike.

5. Suppose (ex hypothesi) that human agents start out as a clean slate. By that I mean, suppose that initially they have no rap sheep. Their moral record is spotless.

There's no ex hypothesi about it, the bible forthrightly calls little kids "innocent", see Psalm 106:37-38, Matthew 18:3, 2nd Kings 22:16, 24:4, and under James 4:17,  which predicates sinfulness upon knowledge, for which babies, then who know nothing (i.e., they don't know the difference between good and evil, Isaiah 7:15) are correctly deemed "innocent".  If that contradicts Paul's doctrine of original sin in Romans 5, lets get excited about preaching the good news to those lost inerrantists.

I'm not an inerrantist, and for academically rigorous reasons, therefore, I really don't care if another part of the bible tells Steve that babies are infected with original sin, this doesn't impose the slightest intellectual obligation upon me to give up my reliance on grammar, context and genre, and add "reconcile this with what the bible says elsewhere" to the list of hermeneutical principles that scholars agree apply here.  Most Christian scholars are not inerrantists, those who are inerrantist cannot even agree amongst themselves about its scope, Steve Hays himself allegedly thinks the Chicago Statement on Bible Inerrancy was less than perfect, etc, etc.  So bible inerrancy is not sufficiently settled as to deserve being exalted in my mind to the status of governing hermeneutic.  I will NOT give up an otherwise contextually and grammatically justified interpretation of a bible verse merely because the interpretation contradicts my interpretation or somebody else's interpretation of some other bible verse.

Hays will trifle that biblical passages calling people "innocent" are only meant with reference to the human standard, but alas, it is "god" who is doing the talking in all the above-cited passages (at least as far as Steve is concerned) so it is Steve's burden to show that the "human standards only" interpretation arises from the grammar, context or genre of such passages.

Steve continues:

The first time I do something evil, that puts me behind.

Except that in Steve's world, whether raping children is "evil" depends on your frame of reference, and is therefore only a moral relativity.  Even if we granted that baby-rape violates God "revealed" will, Steve has already argue that any and all acts of man, including sin, necessarily conform to God's "secret" will, so that a completed act of baby-rape is biblically in harmony with God's secret will.

In other words, Steve wants us to believe that you can be "evil" because you conformed to the will of God.  Sort of like the parent who punishes their child for doing an act exactly when, where, and how the parent intended the act to be done (!?).  There's an excellent reason why Paul's smoke and mirrors evaporates at Romans 9:20.  There is no moral method anywhere near any accepted convention of reason or common sense, that will justify punishing a person for perfect obedience.  Except of course in the bible, where the stupider the act, the more "spiritual" it is (where you defeat death by getting yourself killed, and where strength is made perfect by lack of strength).  I call victory when Christians feel forced to decry the superiority of 'human reason'.  That's what one should expect from stupid cultists whose doctrines completely defy anything remotely approaching sensibility.  Whether it's about Jesus or Vishnu hardly matters.

Because I can't change my past, if I do something evil, I can't get back to where I was before I did evil.

Which would justify a lifetime of depression after you jaywalk.  Isn't it obvious how evil sin really is?

I can't get out from under that. If I did something evil, then it will always be the case that I did something evil. That's indelible. It doesn't fade with the passage of time. I don't become less guilty. Once I do something evil, there's no way to put that behind me. It's permanent. Evil has a timeless moral quality. There's no decay rate. The past is irrevocable.

Then the same must be true about your good deeds.  They too are permanent, right?

And the more evil things I do, the further behind I fall. A lifetime of cumulative wrongdoing.

Now you are just preaching the choir.

This is why vicarious atonement and penal substitution are fixtures of Christian redemption.

Maybe that's also why god offers to "forget your sins", because they are permanent? (Isa. 43:25-26).  No, Mr. God's Jailhouse lawyer, that doesn't mean he is only claiming to exempt people from the penalty for sin.  Read both verses, the human sense of literal memory failure is meant, even if the consequence is that this god would have to be insane.  The dumber it makes god look, the more likely the interpretation is correct, amen?

Without a Redeemer who atones for your sin, on your behalf and in your stead, your culpability because increasingly hopeless.

No, all we need is charcoal briquettes, a pair of tongs, and obviously non-existent creatures who seem to think heaven has air:

 1 In the year of King Uzziah's death I saw the Lord sitting on a throne, lofty and exalted, with the train of His robe filling the temple.
 2 Seraphim stood above Him, each having six wings: with two he covered his face, and with two he covered his feet, and with two he flew.
 3 And one called out to another and said, "Holy, Holy, Holy, is the LORD of hosts, The whole earth is full of His glory."
 4 And the foundations of the thresholds trembled at the voice of him who called out, while the temple was filling with smoke.
 5 Then I said, "Woe is me, for I am ruined! Because I am a man of unclean lips, And I live among a people of unclean lips; For my eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts."
 6 Then one of the seraphim flew to me with a burning coal in his hand, which he had taken from the altar with tongs. 7 He touched my mouth with it and said, "Behold, this has touched your lips; and your iniquity is taken away and your sin is forgiven." (Isa. 6:1-7 NAU)

(and Steve says "mere anthropomorphism! the get-out-of-jail-free card that is by definition necessarily always a correct interpretation with no obligation to actually justify it from the grammar or context or genre.)

Actually, we can be exempted from the penalties of even the most egregious sins (i.e, adultery and murder) by nothing more than god waiving his magic wand:

 11 "Thus says the LORD, 'Behold, I will raise up evil against you from your own household; I will even take your wives before your eyes and give them to your companion, and he will lie with your wives in broad daylight.
 12 'Indeed you did it secretly, but I will do this thing before all Israel, and under the sun.'"
 13 Then David said to Nathan, "I have sinned against the LORD." And Nathan said to David, "The LORD also has taken away your sin; you shall not die.
 (2 Sam. 12:11-13 NAU)

Feel free to dig your own theological grave by pretending the subsequent divinely caused death of David's baby was the "atonement".  You can't cover it with Yom Kippur, that didn't cover intentional sins.  Now what?  Maybe David committed adultery without intention?

Steve continues:

6. Counterfactual guilt
Another factor I've discussed, although it has yet to catch on, is that it's very nearsighted to limit culpability to the sins of a lifetime.

That's right.  If your teenage son jaywalks, you should save up to finance the desecration of his grave marker after he dies.  Culpability doesn't cease with physical death.  Only in stupid fanatical religion.

The sins we commit are related to our circumstances. Change the circumstances and we'd commit a different set of sins.

or not sinned at all, such as changing "we went to the titty-bar" to "we went to church".

It's not so much about committing a particular sin, but the character of the sinner. Put him in a different situation and he will commit different sins.

Put sinners in different situations and they might not sin.  Hence, the reason Christian parents counsel their kids against running around with the wrong crowd.

It's arbitrary to exclude from consideration all the wrongdoing he'd commit if the opportunity presented itself, and he could get away with it, as if guilt and innocence in God's eyes is a matter of lucking or unlucky timing or setting. Wrong place. Wrong time. Just missed it. Had you been there an hour sooner or later.

In other words, sin is inevitable...and yet God still bitches at humans over that which they are incapable of avoiding, sort of like bitching about the fact that humans need water.

But more directly to the point:  there are gullible or 'weaker' Christian brothers that will sin simply because of the peer pressure from other Christians, whereas had those Christians not come to visit, the weaker brother would probably not have sinned as he did.  So you are wrong, Steve:  how you act really IS dependent on the timing of your arrival to any situation and other circumstances.   The Christian man who has an anger problem shows up at his ex-wife's house and she's the only person there, and he does not sin.  But if he had showed up 5 minutes earlier when her boyfriend was there, he probably would have started a fight.  Steve, you are stupid if you think circumstance doesn't contribute to what motivates a person to sin or refrain from sin.

You also pretend that any act we might engage in would be sinful, when in fact chance and circumstance do not merely dictate what evil we'll do, but what ACT we will engage in.  Tarnishing the future possibility as an inevitable "sin" doesn't make sense, otherwise, why bother trying to stay away from Christians who live in sin?  If you are running around drinking on Saturday night, or staying at home reading your bible, you are still bound to sin, regardless, so how the fuck could it "matter" which way to spend that evening? 

What are you gonna say next?  Maybe that reading the bible is sinful for a Christian because their sin nature requires that their motive in doing so was to become puffed up with knowledge?

Yes, there are fuckhead Christians who demand that Christians repent of their repentance.  Read Valley of Vision by the Puritans, which is apparently approved of D.A. Carson and other prominent conservative Protestants.  I've heard the same in plenty of Protestant and Calvinist churches years ago.  I call them fuckheads because if you are too sinful to properly repent in the first place, then you are just sinning every subsequent time you repent of your prior repentance...in which case this Puritan soliloquy is little more than a dirge about the inevitability of sin.  Gee, maybe it was sinful also for any Puritan to compose or read Valley of Vision?

Steve continues:

7. Finally, and perhaps most fundamentally, critics of hell approach this issue from the wrong end.

So since many critics of hell are Christians, skeptics observe that even spiritually alive people have no guarantees of noticing important theological truth, making it even more reasonable for the spiritually dead person to stay completely away, if they so choose, from biblical "theology".   So for many non-Christians, it's much safer and more reasonable to just laugh off Christianity.

In Christian theology, the default assumption is that sinners are already lost.

I much prefer what Jesus said, and have fun getting original sin out of anything he said.  It would be like squeezing blood from a turnip.  See here and here.  Plenty of churches today are Pelagian, but its hard to remember that because the Protestants and Catholics usually squeal the loudest through the media.

They didn't start out in the right direction, then take a wrong turn. Rather, sinners are in a lost condition from the outset. They don't have to do anything extra to go to hell.

If you believe infection with original sin makes one worthy of hell, then you have no basis for making aborted babies any exception, as they too are worthy of hell, and apparently only an emotional worldly mammalian dislike of infant torture is the basis for any exception.  And Steve will triumphantly proclaim that if you don't like the idea of god subjecting babies to eternal conscious torment in hell forever, it's only because you aren't sufficiently "spiritual", the excuse cult leaders use to desensitize their followers to the obvious violations of common sense the cult requires them to engage in.  Yet Steve wants non-Calvinist Christians to view him as something other than brainwashed.

They didn't lose their way at some point along the journey. There was no fork in the road where they made a fatal moral choice. To be saved requires divine intervention.

But since the divine doesn't exist, we need not worry.  I only refute idiots on the internet for the benefit of the innocently ignorant people that might otherwise get sucked into all this stupid crap because of their lack of critical thinking skills.  Struggling to pay the rent and raise kids doesn't leave much opportunity to figure out why scholars disagree with each other about hermeneutics and historiography.

It's like a movie villain. He's already a villain when the movie begins.

So babies are already deserving of hell upon conception.  Another reason most spiritually alive Christians find Calvinism about as persuasive as atheism.

There's no backstory about how or when he became a villain. Does it have something to do with his childhood? Did he gradually turn to evil? Was there a crossroads where he made a decisive choice for evil?

Once again, Jesus did not teach the doctrine of original sin, and you are a hypocrite anyway for thinking the word of any follower of Christ could possibly have the same significance as his own words, as there is allegedly an infinite difference between advice from God himself, and advice from people claiming to represent him.  You are more safe depending on God's word, but you open the floodgates of ceaseless questions and uncertainty when you start telling yourself the words of other sinners are "inspired by God too".

That's not where the story begins. As far as the plot goes, there was never a time when he wasn't on the wrong path.

I end this post where I began it:  all attempts by hellers to "reconcile" or "harmonize" the OT texts on God's justice with the NT texts teaching eternal conscious torment, are clearly little more than the word-games you'd expect from a jailhouse lawyer (my scholarly view is that 2nd Temple Judaism became more and more influenced by pagan religion, hence, "hell" in the OT become more and more defined as the centuries go by). God's alleged "need" for justice against sin is itself contradictory to at least one biblical passage.  If God can exempt people from the consequences of sin as easily as waiving his magic wand (2nd Samuel 12:13), you'll find only deaf ears when you try to "explain" that God's holy nature "requires" that he judge sin. 

And expect theological disaster if you trifle that God's killing David's baby was an atoning sacrifice for David's sins of murder and adultery.  But without that type of atonment, you have no atonement, and hence, God can permanently exempt you from the penalty of sin without atonement and apparently nothing more than waiving his magic wand.  Or making you eat burning wood (Isaiah 6:6-7).

Did you notice that when Triablogue comes to town, atheists just scream in terror, run the other way plugging their ears and saying "Fall on us and hide us from the presence of Him who sits on the throne"?

Neither did I.

Frank Turek's absurd belief in objective morality

 Christian apologist Frank Turek increased his popularity with his "Stealing from God" book that he supports with book-tours in which he attempts to argue that morals are objective, so since this requires an objective moral law giver, and atheism provides none, the existence of objective morals necessarily implies the existence of God, hence, atheism is false.


Turek says, in an article entitled Atheists have no basis for morality:

Monday night at UNC Wilmington, despite no cooperation from the school (see my last post), just over 200 people showed up for part 1 of I Don’t Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist. 

Maybe god is punishing you for misrepresenting him and mistaking your marketing bells and whistles for the wooing of the Holy Spirit.  Just a thought.

Several atheists asked questions– actually made statements– and struggled greatly when I asked them to offer some objective basis for morality from their atheistic worldview. 

 Then they were not very educated about matters of morality.  You won't find the atheist writing at this blog to be struggling, to any degree, to answer your ridiculous questions and challenges.

For now, your question was illogically loaded.  The only reason to ask an atheist for an objective basis for morality, is because that atheist thinks morality does indeed have an objective basis.  Any such atheists are wrong.  If atheism is true, morality does not have an objective basis (i.e., a basis that transcends humanity).

Also, the fact that most humans are social mammals logically requires that they find unacceptable any acts that inhibit the thriving and surviving of the members.  Murder reduces the numbers of living things and deceases chances of thriving.  Rape increases the likelihood of additional children that were not planned and thus strain the group's resources.  Since no theory needs to be 100% perfect and explain every last little electron in the universe, the issue is not whether the naturalistic theory is comprehensive, but whether it is reasonable.  It is.  The naturalistic explanations for why most people find rape and murder to be immoral, are reasonable.  Merely calling them 'opinion' does nothing to show the theory unreasonable.  Some moist robots have an atomic configuration that motivates them to care about the survival of others.

On the other hand, the explanatory theory that says "God put his laws into our hearts" is beset by far worse shortcomings and fallacies:

What is the reason we cringe at the thought of burning teen prostitutes to death?  Because the god who required this in other cultures (Lev. 21:9) has put his laws into our hearts?  Or because the culture we are born and raised in can have a very profoundly strong impact in shaping our moral opinions?

Turek's explanation cannot point to any specific empirical evidence of a god putting his laws into our hearts, while the entire business smacks of telepathy and other foolishness that we know is bullshit.  At the same time, the naturalistic theory can point to the lower animal world, those who Turek agrees are not made in the image of god, and we find that those calibrated to care about survival of the group, do indeed also find murder and rape unacceptable.

What standard is Turek using to form his belief that rape is objectively evil?  It cannot be the bible or 'god', since Isaiah 13:16 would then have God causing men to rape women, that is, have God acting contrary to his own nature.

  They kept trying to give tests for how we know something is moral rather than why something is moral. 

That's easy.  Try the Constitutions and Laws of the country you were born in.  They reflect the moral outlook of the majority of the people. 

One atheist said “not harming people” is the standard.  But why is harming people wrong if there is no God? 

If you mean "objectively wrong", then harming people isn't wrong, because there is no objective standard governing the question of which human activities constitute immoral harm.  Furthermore, "harm" is subjective and requires analysis of context.  Doctors cause harm all the time, but most of us say this is justifiable because the harm creates a greater future good.  So it is the same in other areas of life. 

If you "subjectively wrong", then the wrongness of harming people does not go any further back than the human being who is calling it wrong, and perhaps the other human beings in the world who agree with him.  But again, that doesn't establish that the moral opinion is objective.

Another said, “happiness” is the basis for morality.  (After I asked him, “Happiness according to who, Mother Teresa or Hitler?,”  he said, “I need to think about this more,” and then sat down.) 

 Thus indicating that these atheists were woefully uneducated about the matters to justify pontificating about them as they tried.  

This says nothing about the intelligence of these people– there just is no good answer to the question.  

 Incorrect, you appear to have been addressing absolute dolts.  The reason you find a lot of people agreeing with you that morals have an objective basis that transcends humanity is because the vast majority of people have never taken an introductory course in moral philosophy.  You are dishonestly trading on their strong personal views and their ignorance.  Your problem is that the naturalistic explanation for most humans in history agreeing certain acts are immoral, reasonably accounts for all the empirical data, at which point, there is no compelling "need" to invoke god to explain it.

Most humans are social animals who desire the company and fellowship of other humans.  Since unrestrained murder and rape would clearly hamper the human's instinctive goal to both survive and thrive, it is instinctive for humans to view murder and rape as unacceptable behavior.   You don't think the insects are made in the image of god, yet the social insects like wasps will attack you if you do thinks to disrupt their social goals, such as throwing dirt clods at wasp-nests.  The same is true for most of the higher order mammals.  Anything that inhibits their ability to survive or thrive as a group, is automatically deemed unacceptable and deserving of suppression.

You cannot avoid this rebuttal by doing what you do best, and pretending that an endless series of "but how do you know that?" will help you save face. Humans are instinctive social animals, so that is quite sufficient to explain why those who desire most to live in groups agree that things like rape and murder are unacceptable.  Questions about how humans were created, etc, are another topic.

Without God there is no basis for objective morals. 

Correct.  That doesn't mean subjective morals cannot exist.  There is no proving to another person that the subjective morals of modern-day America are "better". All we can say is that if you act contrary to those morals, you will be put in jail or killed. 

And God himself in Genesis 6:6-7 must have come to feel that his prior decision to create mankind was immoral, or else he wouldn't have "regretted" doing so.  No, Turek, there is nothing in the grammar, immediate context, larger context or genre of Genesis 6 to suggest that this oassage is an "anthropomorphism", so it is reasonable to take it equally as literally as the other events in the context.  In that case, your own God contradicts his own morals, since it was HE who created mankind, and HE who later discovered that said creative act was immoral.  If God didn't think creating man was immoral, what does it mean to say God "regretted" making mankind?  If you think your prior decision was morally good, could you ever "regret" it?  No, not unless you start thinking that decision wasn't as good as you had first thought. 

And Christians must be without god, because they are often dogmatic in their moral disagreements with one another:

• Does the Christian god think it morally good for a Christian adult to join a worldly military?  How long must the atheist analyze this in-house debate among Christians, before they are justified in drawing the conclusion that there is no objective moral law governing the question?  2 weeks?  20 years?
• Does the Christian god think it morally good for voluntary abortion to end a pregnancy caused by rape?  How long must the atheist analyze this in-house debate among Christians, before they are justified in drawing the conclusion that there is no objective moral law governing the question?  2 weeks?  20 years?
• Does the Christian god think it morally god for married Christian couples to use condoms?  How long must the atheist analyze this in-house debate among Christians, before they are justified in drawing the conclusion that there is no objective moral law governing the question?  2 weeks?  20 years?
• Is corporal punishment of kids morally good?  How do you know what level of non-lethal pain is the maximum that objective goodness will allow?   Why would Proverbs 22:15 and other passages require striking kids with a "rod", if the level of force it is talking about would not produce any more pain or injury than what could be produced by the "tap" of an open hand that so many Christians think is the limit?  Proverbs 20:30 has only good things to say about beatings that produce bruises, and contrary to popular belief, "immediate context" does not always prevail when dealing with Proverbs.  While some commentators try to get away from a moral nightmare by pretending that the "immediate context" of Proverbs 20:30 restricts that passage to mere judicial beatings of adults in criminal courts:

20:30 In context this is not parental discipline but beatings administered by the king’s officers as punishment for crime. Yahweh can peer directly into a person’s innermost being (v. 27), but the king can touch the criminal’s soul by harsh retribution.

Garrett, D. A. (2001, c1993). Vol. 14: Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of songs (electronic ed.). Logos Library System; The New American Commentary (Page 179). Nashville: Broadman & Holman Publishers.

 Other equally Christian scholars maintain that the way different Proverbs about different matters are often strung together, you cannot limit what one of them is talking about by appeal to "immediate context":

With the book of Proverbs one can select at random a single verse or two and observe a complete unity of thought in them that may not have any real connection with what precedes or follows. Yet this does not hinder interpretation of its meaning

 Ardel B. Caneday, Qoheleth: Enigmatic Pessimist Or Godly Sage?, 
GTJ—V7-#1—Spr 86—31

• And if Proverbs 20:30 is extolling the goodness of the criminal receiving bruises and welts from the corporal punishment inflicted by a court....do you agree that human courts achieve objective moral good by physically beating convicted criminals, yes or no?  Or did you suddenly discover that god's objective biblical morals don't apply if the culture in question is too different from the biblical culture?  Sound like cultural relativism to me.
• How do you know that vigilante justice is objectively immoral, given that Peter in Acts 5:29 appears to have found an exception to Romans 13?  If there are pacifist exceptions to Romans 13 wherein you can safely disregard worldly law, then how do you know that pacifist exceptions are the only types that exist?  How do you know where to draw the line?  What makes you so sure that God doesn't wish to act through you personally to murder the convicted and self-confessed pedophile living locally in your neighborhood?  Before you answer, ask how many tears you'd shed if you found that this man was found gunned down in a ditch earlier this morning.  You won't exactly be clearing your schedule just to make time to attend his funeral, amen?  And your own bible requires that the person who murdered the pedophile was doing the will of God regardless of how the death was actually achieved (Deut. 32:39, Job 14:5). 
• Is it morally good to torture babies to death?  If not, then you must think your god once violated his own objective morals in torturing to death the baby born to King David and Bathsheba:

  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.
 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. 12:13-18 NAU)

The baby obviously wasn't "deserving" of this torture, and yet v. 18 indicates the torture lasted for seven days.  Oh, did I forget?  This doesn't even qualify as the child being punished for the sins of the father.  Before the child was stuck by God, Nathan the prophet said God had "taken away" David's sins (v. 13).  God's torture of the baby cannot be considered "punishment" in any way, since the "taking away" obviously operated to exempt David himself from the death penalty required for adultery and murder.

• If God really is the author of all murder and death (Deut. 32:39) and has set a specific number of days for each human to live, a number they cannot increase or decrease (Job 14:5), then how can you say murder is immoral?  If a man pulls out a gun and shoots the Christian bank teller dead, this is also God calling that bank teller home...it is not limited to the earthly perspective of "murder".  if those bible passages are true, you are calling God's own actions objectively immoral when you call murder immoral.  How long must the atheist analyze this in-house debate among Christians, before they are justified in drawing the conclusion that there is no objective moral law governing the question?  2 weeks?  20 years?
• Does god approve of a legislature taking the death penalty, usually applicable only to murder, and extending it to other crimes such as child rape?  Not a few people were angered when a man who nearly fatally raped his daughter, escaped Louisiana's death penalty for that crime when the US Supreme Court found such law to be cruel and unusual. 
• Does God think it is moral or immoral that America's courts have a general rule generally excluding hearsay?  The fact that most of the bible is in hearsay form and allegedly comes from God, requires that the answer is "immoral".  Yet if Christians were to start a movement to overturn the court rule banning hearsay, it would likely trigger a legal war that would produce various degrees of harmful collateral damage, such as wronged Plaintiffs preferring to take the law into their own hands instead of having the matter adjudicated in a court that foolishly allows hearsay.
• If rape is objectively immoral, why does God claim responsibility for causing men to rape women in Isaiah 13:16?  Even conservative Christian commentators admit God was "taking responsibility" for these and other atrocities in the immediate context, such as beating children to death:

 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.   (Isa. 13:13-18 NAU)

17–18 As the macabre scene resulting from the cosmic quake passes, the finger points to historical movement. Yahweh calls attention to stirrings among the feared Medes for which He claims responsibility.

Watts, J. D. W. (2002). Vol. 24: Word Biblical Commentary : Isaiah 1-33.
Word Biblical Commentary (Page 198). Dallas: Word, Incorporated.

What now, Turek?  Do atheist bible critics have an intellectual obligation to study the convoluted tortured reasonings of Christianity's 500-year old in-house Calvinist-Arminian debate on the biblical extent of God's sovereignty (or the 1500 year old Augustinian/Pelagian debate),  before they can be justified to draw conclusions here?  If so, how long must the atheist study such debates before they can justifiably draw conclusions about it?  2 weeks?  20 years?

And don't forget, Turek:  Calvinists are Christians who say the bible teaches that God secretly wills for us to violate his revealed will:

If someone disobeys God's revealed will, that's because God "secretly" willed them to disobey his revealed will. (Steve Hays, from Triablogue)

• When we jaywalk, would it be objectively morally good to consider this sufficient to prove us guilty of murder?  Before you balk at the stupidity of such a suggestion, read James 2:10-11 for the first time in your life, and ask yourself how feverishly stupid it would be to try and make such careless sophistry apply in real-world situations:

 10 For whoever keeps the whole law and yet stumbles in one point, he has become guilty of all.
 11 For He who said, "DO NOT COMMIT ADULTERY," also said, "DO NOT COMMIT MURDER." Now if you do not commit adultery, but do commit murder, you have become a transgressor of the law. (Jas. 2:10-11 NAU)

Then tell yourself that such sophistry does apply in the allegedly real-world situation of your guilt before god.  Then tell yourself that the only people who are allowed to invoke the mysterious ways of God to get their asses out of a theological jam are Trinitarian bible-inerrancy-believing evangelical Protestants.

It is reasonable to expect that if the Christian god exists and has imposed 'objective' morals on humanity, he would not remain so silent and hidden from his own genuine seekers, as to facilitate such moral division among genuinely born-again Christians.  One reasonable conclusion is that Christians who read the same basic bible and hold the same theological tenets always disagree about moral issues they find to be "important" because there is no objective moral law giver.

It’s just Mother Teresa’s opinion against Hitler’s. 

 That's exactly right.  Most citizens of most countries are civilized and have common sense.  Nation would not likely rise against nation in war if knowing which morals come from God was the pre-skool matter that Turek pretends it to be.

The atheists’ responses to the cosmological and design arguments– the arguments that show us that the universe exploded into being out of nothing and did so with amazing design and precision– were “we don’t know how that happened.”

 Once again, you capitalize unfairly on ignorant atheists.  That would be like the atheist concluding Christianity is false because of all the stupidity he can find in a KJV Only Pentecostal church that allows its members to play with live rattlesnakes.  Stop pretending that defeating an ignorant atheist means defeating atheism.  It is illogical.

As far as the cosmological arguments, Turek has a serious problem:  Genesis 1 and 2  would NEVER have caused its originally intended pre-scientific audience to think the "beginning" started with an explosion, as nothing therein is expressed or even implied.  Nothing could be a more flagrant example of eisogesis than Truek reading modern science's big-bang theory into Genesis 1-2.  He may as well read macro-evolution into it as well.  Not only does the Big Bang contradict Genesis 1 and 2 (which set forth God's work as the result of a carpenter or artist), plenty of conservative bible-inerrancy-believing creationist Christians agree the BB is bullshit, such as Institute for Creation Research.

Now Turek cannot say it is the blinders of atheism and rebellion toward god that cause an atheist to be blind to the Big Bang in Genesis 1 and 2, unless he wishes to accuse his own born-again Christian brothers of being atheists.

   This is simply an evasion of the evidence that clearly points to an eternal, immaterial, powerful, intelligent, personal and moral First Cause of the universe.   Since nature itself was created, this Cause must be beyond nature or “supernatural.”

Sorry, the arguments for the universe being created, are unpersuasive to say the least, while the evidence that the field of planets and stars extends infinitely in all directions is rather clear from the fact that astronomers continue increasing their estimate of the number of stars with each passing decade:  "There are a dizzying 2 trillion galaxies in the universe, up to 20 times more than previously thought, astronomers reported on Thursday."

Even astronomers who disagree with the infinite-space model agree it is at least possible, and that's a serious problem for the lemon-head apologists who want us to think an infinite universe model is "illogical" or otherwise not a valid option:

GREENFIELDBOYCE: So it goes on, but is it infinite? Chuck Bennett is an astrophysicist at Johns Hopkins University.  

CHUCK BENNETT: It is somewhat unimaginable, but quite possible that our universe simply goes on forever.

The issue is not which cosmological theory is "true", that is a child's approach.  The issue is whether theories of the universe that make it harder for you to "prove god" can be reasonable.  They can.  It isn't like the infinite universe model is on the order of flat-earth or ancient astronauts.

I end with a challenge to the stupid fundamentalists who believe hell's fire is more literal than symbolic, and who deny any possibility of second chances for those who die after knowingly rejecting the gospel:


Suppose you are the parent of a 10 year old girl who hasn't actually believed the gospel just yet, she simply goes through the motions like so many other kids.  She is invited to a church that promotes whatever  specific doctrinal bullshit you consider minimally necessary to true orthodoxy.   She goes, they tell her the true gospel, they ask if she wants to repent, she says no, and on the way home, while having no personal faith in Christ, dies in a car accident.  That is, she died immediately after knowingly refusing to obey the revealed gospel.  God then shows you a vision of her being tormented by the flames of hell, and tells you this torture will go on for all eternity, because God thinks 10 years old is the age of accountability for that particular child.

Suppose every time you attend church thereafter and sing songs about God's eternal 'love', God puts this vision of your daughter's real, current, irreversible and eternal suffering into your mind.  Your daughter is screaming in mindless agony in this torture-by-fire WHILE you are smiling and happily clapping your hands in church to songs about about the wonderfully comforting love of the God who is, at the same time, torturing your child.

Could you continue worshiping God in good conscience if you had that much precise information about the ultimate fate of a deceased child?

Or did you suddenly discover that the biggest problem in your life right now can be solved by suddenly discovering that the age of accountability is 37?

How to make all these problems disappear in one fell swoop?  Become an open theist.

Yes, PristineKat, the bible DOES promote child-abuse and sexism

James Patrick Holding's followers are up to their usual blissful ignorance again.

PristineKat18 hours ago (edited)

@Logician_Bones Not surprising because he said he found Sunday school boring, so he never paid attention. Did I mention he’s biblically illiterate? Saying the Book condones “child beating” and “sexism towards women”.

See here.

Holding tries to protect his babies from my challenges, by deleting my posts, so here's how I responded to "PristineKat"

He isn't biblically illiterate. 

Child-beating is approved in Proverbs 22:15, the author says bruises from beatings cleanse away evil (20:30), Christian scholars admit the rule of "context" doesn't help much in the case of proverbs which are often strung together without relation to what follows or precedes ("each proverb is an independent unit that can stand alone and still have meaning. Textual context is not essential for interpretation", D.A. Garrett, New American Commentary, Vol. 14: Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of songs, p. 38), which would mean you cannot use the judicial context of 20:30 to pretend v. 30 is restricted to judicial beatings of criminals.  Therefore it is reasonable to say the Proverbs author thought inflicting wounds on children when they disobey is good.

Since Josephus states the obvious in specifying the Israelites killed the women and children of the pagan nations, I'm going to find his commentary on the "massacre passages" more likely true than the stupid hair-splitting trifles of Copan and Flannagan....in which case the fact that the people who told you to beat your kids, were the type to also slaughter children over religious differences, makes it reasonable, even if not infallibly so, to say the author of Proverbs was advising what we today would call child abuse.  The fools who think "use a rod on your child" meant merely "tap them on the butt" are obviously ignorant of the social and cultural context Proverbs was written in.

As far as sexism toward women in the bible, it is reasonable for skeptics to conclude from Leviticus 19:20-22 that the reason the author makes an exception here to the death-penalty he required for adultery in the next chapter (20:10) is because the girl in 19:20-22 had lower social status as a slave (i.e., the author thinks adultery with a slave girl is less sinful than adultery with a free woman, i.e., misogyny).  And worse for you, the fact that Leviticus 19:20-22 neither expresses nor implies the girl has to do anything to atone for her sin, is because the author doesn't think the sex-act he is addressing was consensual (i.e., the man raped the slave-girl).  Even inerrantist Christian scholars admit this was likely a case of rape:

"Since she was still a slave, the guilty parties were not given the death penalty. Rather there was to be “due punishment”...It is worth noting that only the man was considered blameworthy, not the female slave. Being a slave, the woman may have felt she had little recourse in resisting a male who was a free man and thus more powerful both in the social and economic spheres. That the free man must bear responsibility is suggested by the fact the female slave was not required to bring the guilt offering sacrifice."  (Rooker, M. F. (2001, c2000). Vol. 3A: Leviticus (electronic ed.). Logos Library System; The New American Commentary (Page 260). Nashville: Broadman & Holman)

Gee, how easy would it be to get rid of inerrantist Rooker's interpretation by calling him a black and white fundy?  Where did you learn that empty rhetoric gets you closer to biblical truth?  Peter Ruckman?

The rapist of Leviticus 19:20-22 only has to offer an animal sacrifice to the priests to have his sin forgiven...which isn't much different than limiting the punishment for rape to a "fine"...which means god thinks rape is nowhere near the big deal that today's neo-fundamentalist know-nothings think it is.

But if you carefully restrict your happy blissfully ignorant world to just tektonics and tekton tv, you do a fair job of protecting yourself from getting your teeth kicked out the back of your skull by skeptics who know their bibles better than you.  Whenever you feel like the Holy Spirit is in the mood to do what Jesus promised in Matthew 10:20, consider yourself challenged.  Goto

https://turchisrong.blogspot.com/2017/09/cold-case-christianity-why-would-god.html

and search for "Leviticus 19:20"

Maybe you could gain more from bible study if you knock off the ignorant zeal and exhibit genuine humility when you are actually ignorant of the biblical matter you speak about?

screenshot proving I posted this challenge to tekton tv