Tuesday, October 31, 2017

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

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


  1. Before we get started, I recently made a debate offer to Dr. Jones concerning his online articles about how sinful the Canaanites allegedly were (i.e., his attempt to convince modern western readers that the Canaanite kids being killed by Hebrews was actually consistent with modern western notions of deserved justice).  He first replied asking where my blog was.  When I told him, he sent a final email saying he is just too busy to debate the issues raised in his articles.  Now, I'm not saying he is lying.  I'm just saying if he really was too busy, he likely would have said this before asking where my blog was.  I think what happened was that he believed he could make the time to debate me if he liked my blog site, but after reading it, then “discovered” that he didn’t have enough time to do such a debate.  
  1. Dr. Jones starts out with the NT and its out-of-context OT quotes for original sin.  So apparently he seeks to restrict his persuasion power not just to "Christians", but to specifically only those Christians who regard bible inerrancy + doctrine of original sin as a foregone conclusions.
That's a problem:  Does Jones recommend that his Christian audience take any of his pro-bible inerrancy apologetics arguments and try them out on atheists?  Or he is just giving the lecture to help those already committed to his version of Christianity, to feel better about serving a Christian god that used to ask his followers to kill children? 

  1. Be that as it may, Jones cites Romans 3 to “prove” that everybody “deserves” to die because of “original sin”.  Unfortunately, Paul here was taking Psalm 14 and Psalm 53 out of context.  Psalm 14:5 says God is with the righteous generation, thus meaning the universal condemnation words immediately preceding weren’t intended in absolute fashion..  In Psalm 53, the Psalmist obviously excludes himself from the others he accuses of having gone astray.  Apparently, Paul was misinterpreting Psalmic hyperbole as if it was literal, and in a way that ignored the context of those passages.  The same is true for the case of Psalm 10:7.  Romans 3:18 quotes Psalm 38:1, but in v. 10 the Psalmist admits the existence of those who are righteous.  Evangelical Inerrantist scholars agree that Paul thought he could help god by "adapting" God’s originally inerrant wording in the OT, to a context the OT author did not have in mind:
"Also a New Testament author would quite often, under the inspiration of God and to accentuate a specific point, adapt an Old Testament verse to serve his immediate purpose. Furthermore, the practice of precise citation and scholarly acknowledgment is a modern phenomenon. It was not at all a customary practice in antiquity."-----------Romans 3:9-12, Mounce, R. H. (2001, c1995). Vol. 27: Romans (electronic ed.). Logos Library System; The New American Commentary (Page 108). Nashville: Broadman & Holman Publishers. 
  1. Clay is apparently only talking to evangelical inerrantists, since his blind presumption of the doctrine of original sin would not be taken well by nearly half of the evangelical world “only fifty-two percent of evangelicals held to the doctrine of original sin.” See also Danielle, MDiv Princeton Theological Seminary, author of Original Blessing: Putting Sin in its Rightful Place,
Even conservative Christians deny original sin, such as the “Churches of Christ".  The bible and especially the book of Jeremiah are full of references to the wrongness of a person in shedding "innocent" blood, which would doesn't make sense if in truth a) nobody is sufficiently innocent to deserve protection from murderers, and b) God numbered our days and thus logically also decreed the act that would take our lives, which often would be murder (Job 14:5).

  1. Clay also overlooks that if he wishes to credit God with the modern Christian moral disdain for murder, he opens the door to the possibility that it is also something from God in the heart that causes many Christians to disdain the doctrine of orginal sin.  Doesn't do much good to talk about how our sense of morality comes from God placing his laws on our hearts, if in truth human intuition really isn't a criteria for deciding what morals come from god.

  1. Clay overlooks that Jeremiah and Ezekiel set forth new dogmas of individual guilt, intended to replace the older dogma of corporate guilt, and the new dogma appears to conflict with original sin, since the new dogma promises protection from the guilty conduct of others: 
29 "In those days they will not say again, 'The fathers have eaten sour grapes, And the children's teeth are set on edge.'
 30 "But everyone will die for his own iniquity; each man who eats the sour grapes, his teeth will be set on edge.
 31 "Behold, days are coming," declares the LORD, "when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah,
 32 not like the covenant which I made with their fathers in the day I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, My covenant which they broke, although I was a husband to them," declares the LORD. (Jer. 31:29-32 NAU)

20 "The person who sins will die. The son will not bear the punishment for the father's iniquity, nor will the father bear the punishment for the son's iniquity; the righteousness of the righteous will be upon himself, and the wickedness of the wicked will be upon himself. (Ezek. 18:20 NAU)


  1. Clay then cites to atrocities committed by other nations on their own people, but this is rather disingenuous, since to be consistent, Clay would have to draw similar inferences from the fact that people and leaders also do much good to their people too.  Why doesn’t America’s creation of the U.S. Constitution show good in people just as much as tyrants of other countries show the bad?  Could it be that we are simple minded idiots and feel more comfortable labeling somebody fully good or bad, and would rather not admit the complex truth that most people are an inconsistent mixture of both?

  1. Clay overlooks the fact that the vast majority of people on earth have not been egregious tyrants or criminals outside of their country requiring them to participate in war or battles.  The vast majority of people in history do not exhibit the atrocities Clay documents from a handful of tyrants like Stalin and Hitler.  The point is that Clay's unwillingness to credit people properly with being good for their good works, makes him inconsistent to say the only works they can be properly credited with are their bad works.

  1. Clay says Jesus never implies that those who die might be undeserving of death, but he overlooks Exodus 32:9-14, where God backs off of his original intent to kill the Exodusing Hebrews, because Moses slapped some sense into the divine head.
  
9 The LORD said to Moses, "I have seen this people, and behold, they are an obstinate people.
 10 "Now then let Me alone, that My anger may burn against them and that I may destroy them; and I will make of you a great nation."
 11 Then Moses entreated the LORD his God, and said, "O LORD, why does Your anger burn against Your people whom You have brought out from the land of Egypt with great power and with a mighty hand?
 12 "Why should the Egyptians speak, saying, 'With evil intent He brought them out to kill them in the mountains and to destroy them from the face of the earth '? Turn from Your burning anger and change Your mind about doing harm to Your people.
 13 "Remember Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, Your servants to whom You swore by Yourself, and said to them, 'I will multiply your descendants as the stars of the heavens, and all this land of which I have spoken I will give to your descendants, and they shall inherit it forever.'"
 14 So the LORD changed His mind about the harm which He said He would do to His people.
 (Exod. 32:9-14 NAU)


  1. Clay presumes that all of God’s judgments are good and right, but in this overlooks the plain fact that given his presuppositions about the nature of sin and man, God either knew or should have known that flooding the world in the days of Noah would not accomplish his goal.  God appears to admit he should have known that the flood was a bad idea.  Genesis 8:21 makes no sense unless it means that God discovered at some point after flooding the world that this response to man’s sin was inappropriate or inadequate:

21 The LORD smelled the soothing aroma; and the LORD said to Himself, "I will never again curse the ground on account of man, for the intent of man's heart is evil from his youth; and I will never again destroy every living thing, as I have done. (Gen. 8:21 NAU)


  1. at timecode 26:20 ff, Clay says Canaanites fully indulged their sins, thus trading on the western individualist ethics of his modern Christian hearers to make Canaanites seem “deserving” of being massacred, but in this he overlooks that the Hebrew god command things just as atrocious.  We are most offended at the idea of Canaanites throwing their live children into burning furnaces, but God commanded death by burning for teen girls who lost their virginity and/or engaged in prostitution during pre-marital sex while living in their fathers house:

9 'Also the daughter of any priest, if she profanes herself by harlotry, she profanes her father; she shall be burned with fire. (Lev. 21:9 NAU)


  1. refers to reader to “we don’t hate sin” article, and at time code 27:17 says bestiality and other sins were ‘rampant’, but as I show in my own blog post, one author Clay relies on for his bestiality comments frankly admits she cannot find any Mesopotamian sources asserting anybody ever had sex with animals. 

  1. Mr. Jones than cites to a Baal poem of the Canaanites saying baal committed rape incest bestiality a lot, and he says we may thus infer the people worshipping said god did the same.   But that is ludicrous.  Christians believe their God is responsible for all murders (Deut. 32:39), should we assume that Christians imitate this divine practice?  Christians believe their God causes ceaseless conscious torment in mind-numbing pain for those who die in unbelief (hell), should we assume Christians do something similar?  Christians believe God credits himself with why pagan nations brutalize the Hebrews by beating children to death and forcing women to endure abortion by sword (Isaiah 13:15-16, Hosea 13:15-16), should we assume Christians engage in whatever acts they believe their god does?

  1. 28:15 ff says our modern liberal culture is against death penalty because sin has corrupted us, but one wonders how strongly Jones would fight to save his daughter, should she be falsely convicted of murder and sentenced to capital execution.  Would he tell her that her deserving death from original sin, and suffering for righteousness sake for Christ, was more important than the fact that she was actually innocent of the charges?

  1. Clay at timecode 21:45 ff deflects question on whether some Canaanites might have been moral among the many depraved, like Lot, by assuming that because God destroyed Sodom despite promising to spare it should he find 10 righteous people (Genesis 18:32), the slaughter of the Canaanites can only have taken place by reason that not even one of them were righteous.  But the possibility that some of the Canaanites weren’t deserving of death is found in the story of Rahab the innkeeper or “harlot”, wherein she is the only person spared in the sacking of Jericho because she assisted the Hebrew spies.  But nothing in the story from Joshua 2 expresses or implies that Rahab was doing anything more than pretending to align herself with the views held by spies whom she believed were part of an army easily capable of massacring her city, when in fact she didn’t really give up her pagan faith, she was only pretending so as to save her own skin.  There’s no evidence that she actually repented, and the Christian view is even more unlikely if she was actually a prostitute and not mere innkeeper.  What she did is what anybody in her position would have done had they felt the coming destroyers of her city would be successful. And if she was a Canaanite prostitute, she probably had much practice in pretending to believe things she didn’t really believe.
  
  1. Matthew Flannagan who co-authored the “Genocide” book with Paul Copan, believes no children were present in Sodom when it was destroyed, because Genesis 18-19 indicate God would spare it if 10 righteous people could be found there, but then he didn’t spare it.  Flannagan thinks children are righteous by default because of their innocence.  But despite Flannagan’s belief being unlikely given that Sodom and the cities of the plan were a rich metropolis, the point is that Jones and Flannagan still disagree about the moral status of kids.  Can they blame the atheist bible critic for saying such disagreement is not likely if their god is true and they both seek god’s truth sincerely as equally authentically born again Christian scholars?  How many times must you pray for God to lead you into a correct understanding of the bible, before it becomes God’s fault that you continue to misunderstand it?  If God can make even pagans willing to do whatever he wants or believe whatever he wants them to believe (Ezra 1:1), then why does God prefer to “toy” with you and make you plead for truth over and over before he implants the truth and right motive in your heart? 

  1. Jones then adds to the word of the Lord by saying God’s choice to kill Canaanites is based on his foreknowing who would respond to the truth and who wouldn’t.  But that is unfalsifiable nonsense.  Had the story of Rahab the harlot ended with her being accidently killed in the sacking of Jericho, Clay would have just as blindly assumed that God “knew” Rahab’s “faith” was fake.  Jones treats his view of God’s goodness as some untouchable icon of presuppositional glory, when in fact it is the bible itself that testifies that God often learns and regrets his own actions no less than imperfect humans often learn and regret their own prior acts.

  1. Jones’s assumptions would require that he view Lot as righteous and godly, no matter what, all because the NT characterizes Lot as righteous and godly (2nd Peter 2:7-9), when in fact, if today’s apologist doesn’t already have his defense mechanisms on red alert, he would automatically conclude that any “Christian” who sought to protect his house-guests from homosexual rape, by appeasing the mob with invitation to rape his own virgin daughters, was not righteous nor godly in any sense of the word, yet Lot committed such atrocity:

8 "Now behold, I have two daughters who have not had relations with man; please let me bring them out to you, and do to them whatever you like; only do nothing to these men, inasmuch as they have come under the shelter of my roof." (Gen. 19:8 NAU)

If today’s atheists do not stoop this low into immorality, would it be fair to say that they are more righteous than Lot?

  1. Jones at time code 32:20 ff uses his foster parenting history to argue that kids who are corrupted at early age simply do not learn better regardless of whatever new parents they are placed with,  but he overlooks that child-rearing was much stricter and violent by OT policies than he would have been as a modern Christian foster parent.  The OT advocates beatings with a rod that leave welts, believed to be the body removing evil (Proverbs 20:30), and that specifically the rod must be used on children to cure them of their foolishness:
 15 Foolishness is bound up in the heart of a child; The rod of discipline will remove it far from him. (Prov. 22:15 NAU)

13 Do not hold back discipline from the child, Although you strike him with the rod, he will not die.
 14 You shall strike him with the rod And rescue his soul from Sheol. (Prov. 23:13-14 NAU)

How can Jones know that the child abuse policies approved by God in proverbs likely wouldn’t have changed the disposition of disobedient Canaanites kids orphaned by Joshua?  Did Jones use a rod to beat his foster kids, only to find there was no positive change?  If so, was that true even in those cases where he beat the child to the point of leaving the bruises and welts the bible says perform the good of cleansing away evil (Pr. 20:30)?  Or can he not answer because he never actually did use a rod to beat his foster kids?  Doesn’t matter if the Proverbs are guarantees.  If Christians are still supposed to apply the proverbs in faith and not discard them merely because they don’t promise guaranteed success, then Jones cannot argue that the risk of discipline failing to correct the child was sufficient to justify Joshua in putting Canaanite kids to the sword.

  1.   Again, when Jones assures us the Canaanites would not have repented, he is ignoring the important bible teaching from Ezekiel 38:4 – 39:7 that God can and does force people to do whatever he wants them to do, and that God can cause even pagans to become motivated to do God’s will (Ezra 1:1)

  1. Jones at time code 32:55 ff, says such kids will bring their bad behaviors with them, as if this justified killing them, and at 33:20 ff Jones asks if we have any logical reason to believe Canaanite kids would not have retained the sinful ways of their parents.  Yes, Jones overlooks how his “these kids were incorrigible” excuse gets him in trouble with bible texts where Hebrews, presumably knowing this truth Jones gives us, nevertheless chose to assimilate pagan kids into their lives anyway by God’s authority. In Numbers 31:17-18, Moses requires his people to kill the male babies and boys of the pagan POW’s, but allows his men to take alive the little virgin girls for themselves (v. 18).  If Jones denies the interpretation that says this was permission for the men to marry and have sex with prepubescent girls, then he is committed to the premise that these girls would become house-servants…in which case Jones must say Moses intended for Canaanite kids to be assimilated into Hebrew homes and family life.  So… did Moses require this because he disagreed with jones and believed proper training could purge a pagan child of her prior rebellious conditioning?  Or did Moses require this because he knew about, but didn’t care about, the ability of pagan kids to corrupt the Hebrew culture? 

  1. Will Jones foolishly trifle that because it was only Midianite virgins who were spared here, they were spared solely because they did not participate in the sexual sin at Peor (Numbers 25:1) that was being avenged here in Numbers 31 (i.e., these kids exhibited potential for not corrupting the Hebrews)?  Last I checked, virgin girls can do plenty of sinful sexual acts without losing their virginity, so that the unbroken hymen tells you NOTHING about whether she became involved with and helped facilitate the sin in question.

  1. If virginity of pagan girls overshadows the question of their specific propensity to sin, in Numbers 31:18, we have to wonder how Jones explains that the virginity of young Canaanite girls in the promised land doesn’t overshadow their propensity to sin in the case of Joshua massacring the Canaanites in the promised land.  Will Jones trifle that the pagan corruptions of the Midianites at Peor (Numbers 25) were somehow less grostesque than the sinfulness of the Canaanites in Jericho?

  1. Jones is confronted the same problem of God’s people appearing arbitrary in whether to spare pagans, from Deut. 21:10-14, which allows the Hebrew man to marry a female pagan war captive.  Tellingly, the text nowhere expresses or implies that the captive first repent of her paganism, nor that she make clear her adoption of the YHWH cult beliefs, as a pre-condition to the marriage.  And if the GNT is correct in saying the sexual consummation was rape, then it is even more clear from the context that here God was authorizing his Hebrew men to marry pagan women unwilling to be with them, which justifies the inference that such pagan women still clung to their pagan religious beliefs the whole time.  God’s basis for massacring some and sparing others is truly arbitrary and likely the result of commingling disparate Hebrew religious traditions by the OT editors, than that God really does things like this for sovereign mysterious reasons.
  
  1. Jones at 33:38, says God doesn’t do wrong in taking the life of children because God foreknows they wouldn’t repent, but if so, he opens the door to the possibility of those kids going straight to hell for the same reason (i.e., they wouldn’t have repented).  Jones is also deceptive since he gives the impression God could be proven immoral if we should show God kills kids despite believing they would repent later in life.  Not true.  If we found such biblical text, Jones would simply insist that God’s ways are mysterious, he always does good, and that we are nobody to question God’s reasons or his morals.  Jones is thus deceptive for pretending God’s goodness can be substantiated on the merits, when in fact he removes the issue from the merits whenever expediency dictates.  Jones would NEVER accept ANY evidence that God ever did anything immoral.

  1. At 33:50 ff, Jones agrees with Paul Copan there is possibility god by killing pagan kids thus saved them from further harm since their death placed them into heaven, but if removal from sinful earth is good, then neglecting children and leaving them to grow up in the sinful earth is bad, and God certainly allows children to strive on the earth and slowly die of starvation and abuse.  Once again, Jones gives the appearance that God’s goodness can be demonstrated by reasoned argument on the merits of God’s acts, but in fact is quite willing to say God’s ways are good even if they don’t prove to be good by human examination on the merits.  Hence, the effort to show goodness on the merits in god is deceptive, since they don’t believe the merits actually matter anyway.  They will pick and choose that which looks like it can be argued, and insist the yucky stuff be resolved into the mystery of God. 

  1. Jones at 34:00 ff says Joshua’s conquest of the promised land was not genocide but capital punishment, but a) the dictionary definition of genocide does not take the motives of the killers into account, only that they systematically remove some religious or political group; and b) it wouldn’t matter if Joshua’s conquest wasn’t genocide, the brutal war-atrocities God causes the pagans to inflict on the Hebrews as revealed by Isaiah 13:15-16 and Hosea 13:15-16 and 2nd Samuel 12:15-18, show God willing to do worse than genocide, and cause children to suffer horrific miseries before experiencing the release of death.  Will he say God also “knew” the fetuses of the pregnant Hebrew women God caused to endure abortion by sword (Hosea/Isaiah, supra)  would otherwise have grown up to imitate their sinful parents?  Then how does Jones explain God allowing to live those kids that never repent and die of old age as unbelievers?  God must have known they wouldn’t repent either, yet the fact that he allowed them to live means God did not feel “compelled” simply by reason of foreknowing a person’s consistent stay in unbelief throughout their life, to just kill them in their infancy.  If God can allow some incorrigibles to live despite his foreknowledge, then his killing off only some is nothing he was morally compelled to do.  Once again, Jones’s god is utterly arbitrary in a way that reference to god’s mysterious ways will not fix.

  1. Clay’s pessimistic outlook on disobedient children overlooks the other reality that many kids enduring a horrible childhood turn out better than their parents?  Are we quite sure that the Israelites, so infected with original sin, surely had no selfish patriotic genocidal motive in killing non-Hebrew kids?  Can we really say it was at all “likely” that allowing the orphaned Canaanites to live would have led to infecting Israel with idolatry/corruption?

  1. Jones says the best proof that the Canaanite massacre was capital punishment and not genocide was that God exacted the same punishment when Israel did the same type of sins.  But that the Hebrews imposed on themselves the same ethics they imposed on others only shows they weren’t as inconsistent as they could have been.  This argument doesn’t take away from the fact that the Hebrews and other ANE nations were far more brutish than evangelicals are today. Clay further blindly presupposes the people who authored these stories were just passing down intact traditions, when critical scholars have made it pretty clear that it is later editors that are taking Israel’s military histories of various origins, stitching it together and infusing it with explanatory glosses about how losses were the result of sin and wins were the result of obeying God, etc.  Not much different than a reporter who takes raw footage of what happened, and turns it into a documentary where her after-the-fact commentary “explains” the footage.  For all we know, Moses and Joshua were genocidal maniacs who thought they were their own gods, and it is only dishonest priests and scribes of hundreds of years later who infuse these earlier raw stories with theological commentary to make it seem like Moses and Joshua only did what they did after being given moral and theological justification by God.  The conservative view that all we read in the current canonical form of the Pentateuch was written by Moses before he died, is precarious.  Even such an evangelical commentary as the Word Biblical Commentary finds that stories like those in Numbers 31 have “little realism”:
  
In an idealized way this section tells of a battle against the Midianites, and of its consequences…The story has little “realism,” and is best understood as a midrashic construction,
Budd, P. J. (2002). Vol. 5: Word Biblical Commentary : Numbers. Word Biblical Commentary (Page 332). Dallas: Word, Incorporated.
  

  1. Jones at 34:30 ff says God promised capital punishment to them if they mingled with Canaanites, but a) we don’t see this happening in Numbers 31:18 where virgin pagan girls were spared despite the fact that virgin girls can do plenty of sexual sins without losing their virginity and b) we don’t see God imposing the death penalty on anybody in any consistent way in the Monarchy, particularly the time of Solomon and other kings who allowed intermarriage and mixed Yahweh and pagan worship.  So we have to entertain the prospect that, like many other matters, exactly to what degree to enforce Mosaic legislation was often unclear, justifying the belief that the law of Moses was an ambiguous thing that developed throughout an inconsistent history between Moses and the exile.

  1. Clay’s blind trust in Deuteronomy 20:18 and in God’s alleged belief that the pagans would surely corrupt Israel if allowed to live next to each other, overlooks that Saul believed the Kenites worthy to be spared despite living so close to the doomed Amalekites (1st Samuel 15:6…did the Amalekites corrupt the Kenites by close living proximity?  If so, then apparently, Saul believed a prior act of kindness from the Kenites overshadowed the fact that they were equally as deserving of death as the Amalekites.  If the Kenites kept free of Amalekite corruption despite such close proximity to each other, then Deut. 20:18 and other passages speaking in absolute terms about how Hebrews sparing the pagans will surely cause the Hebrews to imitiate the pagan sins, are the passages that must be viewed as hyperbole…in which case the urgency to rid the land of the pagans was nowhere as extreme as the biblical narrative makes it seem.).

  1. Jones at 35:25 ff. cites to Jeremiah 5 where God says he will forgive the sinful city if even one person who deals honestly can be found therein.  Jones overlooks that this supports the doctrine of corporate responsibility (i.e., that doctrine that says a group will be found equally as guilty as the actually guilty member even if the rest of them didn’t partake of his sin, the doctrine that most modern western Christian cannot stand).  Jones also overlooks that this passage from Jeremiah contradicts the statements in Numbers 14:18 saying God will “by no means” clear the guilty.  In this, Jeremiah has a friend in 2nd Samuel 12:13, where God, with nothing more than a wave of his magic wand, clears David from guilt deserving of capital punishment, or at least chooses to exempt David from the capital punishment requirement otherwise mandated by his acts of adultery and murder of Uriah.  Dr. Jones isn’t being biblically consistent in pretending that God feels some type of moral compulsion to hold people guilty for sin.  God could have waived his magic wand and exempted Canaanites from their death-deserving sins of bestiality and child-sacrifice no less than he did when exempting David from his death-deserving acts of adultery and murder.  Biblically, Jones gets nowhere pointing out that somebody “deserved” the fate god imposed on them.  God does not impose punishment and sparing in a uniform way, strongly suggesting that the real reason is that there is no god behind this stuff, it is just a canonical bible of today that is the result of a long process of stitching together ancient stories and adding theologically appropriate commentary where expediency dictated.


  1.  Jones at 36:15, cites to Ezekiel 14:12 ff, but Ezekiel’s statements that the three most righteous men in bible history could only save themselves when god’s wrath hits the sinful city, contradicts the deal god made with Abraham to spare Sodom if even 10 righteous people could be found in it.  How can God be willing to spare Sodom on the basis of 10 righteous men, but be unwilling to spare the Jews if a few righteous men were found living among them?  It’s called theological evolution, not bible inerrancy:
 12 Then the word of the LORD came to me saying,
 13 "Son of man, if a country sins against Me by committing unfaithfulness, and I stretch out My hand against it, destroy its supply of bread, send famine against it and cut off from it both man and beast,
 14 even though these three men, Noah, Daniel and Job were in its midst, by their own righteousness they could only deliver themselves," declares the Lord GOD.
 15 "If I were to cause wild beasts to pass through the land and they depopulated it, and it became desolate so that no one would pass through it because of the beasts,
 16 though these three men were in its midst, as I live," declares the Lord GOD, "they could not deliver either their sons or their daughters. They alone would be delivered, but the country would be desolate.
 17 "Or if I should bring a sword on that country and say, 'Let the sword pass through the country and cut off man and beast from it,'
 18 even though these three men were in its midst, as I live," declares the Lord GOD, "they could not deliver either their sons or their daughters, but they alone would be delivered.
 19 "Or if I should send a plague against that country and pour out My wrath in blood on it to cut off man and beast from it,
 20 even though Noah, Daniel and Job were in its midst, as I live," declares the Lord GOD, "they could not deliver either their son or their daughter. They would deliver only themselves by their righteousness."
 21 For thus says the Lord GOD, "How much more when I send My four severe judgments against Jerusalem: sword, famine, wild beasts and plague to cut off man and beast from it! (Ezek. 14:12-21 NAU)

  1. Jones at 37:52 ff, says we have no basis to intuit that Canaanites would have repented had they been allowed to live, but Jesus made clear the exact opposite concerning other cities and how they would have repented had they been allowed to see more of God:

20 Then He began to denounce the cities in which most of His miracles were done, because they did not repent.
 21 "Woe to you, Chorazin! Woe to you, Bethsaida! For if the miracles had occurred in Tyre and Sidon which occurred in you, they would have repented long ago in sackcloth and ashes.
 22 "Nevertheless I say to you, it will be more tolerable for Tyre and Sidon in the day of judgment than for you.
 23 "And you, Capernaum, will not be exalted to heaven, will you? You will descend to Hades; for if the miracles had occurred in Sodom which occurred in you, it would have remained to this day.
 24 "Nevertheless I say to you that it will be more tolerable for the land of Sodom in the day of judgment, than for you."
 (Matt. 11:20-24 NAU)

12 "I say to you, it will be more tolerable in that day for Sodom than for that city.
 13 "Woe to you, Chorazin! Woe to you, Bethsaida! For if the miracles had been performed in Tyre and Sidon which occurred in you, they would have repented long ago, sitting in sackcloth and ashes.
 14 "But it will be more tolerable for Tyre and Sidon in the judgment than for you.
 15 "And you, Capernaum, will not be exalted to heaven, will you? You will be brought down to Hades!   (Lk. 10:12-15 NAU)

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

  1.  Jones at 38:05 ff, says Lord is indifferent to whether we die of old age or by tooth and claw, and that seems to be a pretty good case for God’s sadism, confirmed in Deut. 28:63, where God says he gets the same “delight” in inflicting atrocities that he gets in prospering the faithful.  Some atrocities God would delight in (v. 63) include rape (v. 30) and parental cannibalism (v. 53-57).

  1. Jones at 38:30 ff specifies the biblical descriptions of atrocities are not metaphor or hyperbole, therefore making perfectly clear that he is not impressed with the thesis of evangelicals Copan/Flannagan, that most such descriptions are hyperbole.

  1. Jones again at 39:15, argues that since god foreknew who would repent, we can be sure he did no wrong in killing children.  This is deceptive, because he implies he would accept that god’s judgment is immoral if god killed kids despite knowing they would have repented, when in fact even if confronted with such a nuanced bit of theology from the bible, Jones would simply run to sophistry fortress #521 (God’s acts can never be immoral or evil regardless of how they might appear to us).  But Exodus 32:9-14 forbids trust in the goodness of god as if it was some untouchable icon or foregone conclusion.

  1. Jones quotes Genesis 6:5 about man’s heart being always evil, but the next verse shows god regretting his own prior choice to make man, and because a) context favors literal interpretation while b) anthropomorphic interpretation is premised on nothing more objective than the need to maintain biblical inerrancy, the open theist interpretation here, asserting God’s regret signifies his imperfection, is more objective.

  1. At 40:20 ff Jones says there is a cosmic lesson for “free beings”, but a) the sinner’s ability to repent is hotly disputed within conservative Christian scholarship, and b) if God knew the kids he killed would not have repented, and if God’s foreknowledge is infallible, then those kids were not “free” to deviate from their foreknown fate (i.e., not free to make freewill choice to repent).  If God’s foreknowledge is infallible, then whatever it contains in incapable of failing.  If God infallibly foreknows what will actually happen, and thus infallibly foreknows you will actually drop a pan on your foot tomorrow at noon, then dropping a pan on your foot tomorrow at noon is not capable of failing.  How you reconcile that with “freewill” is immaterial and will not change the definition of “infallible”.

  1. Jones at 40:45 ff ends with preaching, but the entire experience of “getting saved” and “new nature” and “adopted into god’s family” is 100% theoretical and has no empirical justification beyond a few bible verses which talk the same way.  It is deception to say the least to speak about the born-again experience with the same type of language one uses to describe how one became a member of a local organization.

  1. Jones at 41:20 ff, answers question as to why other peoples on earth, allegedly as deserving of death as the Canaanites, aren’t killed off by God too.  Answers the Canaanites had given themselves over more thoroughly to evil.  But as I show in my blog post cited above, the specific accusations that Canaanites burned children to death and engaged in bestiality cannot be verified by actual literary or epigraphic evidence.  Jones may point to the bible, but we accuse the bible of misrepresenting the Canaanites, so it would be the fallacy of begging the question to quote the bible as proof when the reliability of the biblical record is precisely the issue. Furthermore the bible has two stories indicating “pass through the fire” was a symbolic rite not intended to cause pain or death to a child.  2nd Kings 16:3, Ahaz made his “son” (singular) pass through the fire, but then his “son” (singular) Hezekiah took over the throne (v. 3) (!?).  Well gee, because God can do miracles, maybe Hezekiah took over the throne as a zombie rising from the ashes?   Manassah also made his “son” (singular) pass through the fire (2nd Kings 21:6), but then his “son” (singular) Amon took over the throne (v. 18).  Since the context provides no reason to think the kings had more than one son a piece, it appears the Kings author did not believe the “pass through the fire” was a ritual intended to cause the child to die.
  
  1. Jones at 42:20 ff,. resorts to Genesis 15:16 and the story bit about how God refused to clear out the Canaanites since the time of Abraham because their sin was not yet complete.  But there are serious problems with this verse;  a) all scholars admit the Pentateuch was edited to include information moses didn’t write, so it remains a possibility that this blurb is a bit of theological explanation that was added to the text of Genesis between authorship by Moses and its current canonical form; b) the very idea that god would spare people so they could fill up the measure of their sins, contradicts the Christian interpretation of this verse saying God waited those 400 years for them to repent.  No, he was waiting them to become exceedingly sinful, he wasn’t waiting for them to repent.  And if God’s foreknowledge was infallible, then i) infallible means incapable of failing, which would mean the Canaanites could not deviate from becoming more and more sinful, since god cannot be surprised,  and ii) God therefore wasn’t “hoping” the Canaanites would prove his foreknowledge wrong, anymore than you wait two years “hoping” your two year old will prove wrong your predictions about their behavior two years into the future, and pass college tests in advanced statistics.  The standard Christian view that God waits around “hoping” for an outcome that by his infallible foreknowledge he is perfectly certain has no chance of actually materializing, is a serious blight on Christian doctrine.


  1. Basically, Jones’s traditionalist stance makes it ironic that he seeks to appeal to our human reasoning to make his 44 minute argument justifying God’s acts as good, since he has already committed to the premise that human reason is corrupt.  Jones would be more consistent to bypass human reasoning altogether and simply quote the bible without his imperfect commentary.  How can it be meaningful for Jones to satisfy our sense of justice by saying Canaanites deserved to die for acts like bestiality and child-sacrifice, if in truth he will merely run and hide behind the mysterious ways of God when confronted with biblical instances where God killed others in ways that don’t satisfy modern western reasoning?


Monday, October 30, 2017

Are The Gospels All Just Hearsay? Yes, thanks for asking

This is my reply to an article entitled 
One of the more popular arguments at a lay-level against the reliability of the gospels is that the evidence for the life, death and resurrection of Jesus is all based on hearsay. While you won't find too many scholars or historians making this point, it is such a prevalent assertion among the masses that I think it's important to take a critical look at the argument and determine whether or not it impacts our ability to trust the content of the New Testament documents.
Most bible scholars believe the only two gospels allegedly claiming to be eyewitness accounts (Matthew and John) were not written by the eyewitnesses.  So while they might not explicitly say the gospels are mostly hearsay, this is the effect they create by denying eyewitness authorship.  Regardless, the testimonies to the resurrection of Jesus which come down to us in first hand form, generoulsy granting highly disputed apostolic authorship, would be Matthew, John and Paul.  Anything else in the NT asserting Jesus rose from the dead is either vision, second-hand, or something other than first-hand.
Courtroom One Gavel by Lambda Chi Alpha / CC-BY-NC-SA-2.0
So firstly we need to ask the question: What is hearsay? One atheist website I looked at defined hearsay as "information received from other people that one cannot adequately substantiate". Often when people use the word hearsay, they are referring to information that comes from a third-hand source. It's important to note that these are common usages of the term, because there is also a legal definition that is considerably different in meaning.
 Hearsay in the Legal Setting In a day and age of fictional legal dramas, everyone is familiar with the idea that hearsay is inadmissible as evidence in a court of law. In U.S. law, hearsay refers to a statement made out of court that is then used in court to assert the truth of a matter. Under the Federal Rules of Evidence, only statements made in a trial, under oath, by someone who can be cross-examined, can be used as evidence. In a simple example on the Wikipedia page for hearsay in US Law, if a witness makes a statement such as "Sally told me Tom was in town", this would be inadmissible evidence that Tom was in town, because it relies on a statement made by Sally outside the courtroom. To satisfy the requirements for evidence, Sally would need to make this statement herself in court. The hearsay rules are similar across most legal systems around the world. However the common misconception that hearsay is never permitted in court is factually incorrect. Under U.S. law there are nearly 30 exceptions to the hearsay rule, which mean that out-of-court evidence may be used if it falls into a particular category, such as business records, spontaneous or excited statements, recorded past recollections, or my personal favourite - statements in authentic ancient documents (more than 20 years old).
Correct, but a) the ancient documents rule wasn't intended to govern matters arising from documents authored 2,000 years ago, that's why they are called ancient at 20 years; b) the ancient documents rule requires that the hearsay copy be found in a place it likely would have been found it authentic, for example:
{¶ 59} Documents can be authenticated under the ancient documents rule contained in Evid.R. 901(B)(8) if, "[e]vidence that a document * * *, in any form, (a) is in such condition as to create no suspicion concerning its authenticity, (b) was in a place where it, if authentic, would likely be, and (c) has been in existence twenty years or more at the time it is offered."---Source
 (a) is in such condition as to create no suspicion concerning its authenticity,
Rule 1003. Admissibility of Duplicates------"A duplicate is admissible to the same extent as the original unless a genuine question is raised about the original’s authenticity or the circumstances make it unfair to admit the duplicate."  Of course, with most scholars and apologists being unwilling in assert that modern canonical Greek Matthew and John are accurately reflecting of what Matthew and John the apostles had to say, and with nobody being able to know to what degree, if any, these men gave freedom to their followers to do the writing, the question of the authenticity of the originals of Matthew and John is genuine, hence, you need the original if you wish to get them in under the ancient documents rule

 (b) was in a place where it, if authentic, would likely be,
This obviously cannot be fulfilled:  How could anybody pretend to know that the place they found an ancient copy of Matthew, was a place that, if authentic, the copy would likely be?  We have no reliable traditions on where Matthew was when he wrote a gospel.  This is to say nothing of the fact that the place our existing gospel ms. came from ("provenance") is often clouded in secrecy.  Exactly where Alexandrinus came from is hotly disputed.  The earliest gospel manuscripts are trifling scraps also plagued with unknown origin or origins not connectable to Matthew.  P1 contains Matt. 1:1-9, 12, 14-20, and it was found in a dig in Oxyrhynchus (now called El Bahnasa), a city in middle Egypt, and any church tradition that might have Matthew passing that way hardly qualifies as the place a Matthew gospel copy would "likely" be "if authentic".

Suffice it say that there is too much scholarly disagreement on the authenticity authorship of the canonical gospels, to pretend they could possibly fulfill these tests of admissibility.

Update: December 29, 2017
See my latest comments criticizing J. Warner Wallace of "Cold-Case Christianity" for studiously avoiding that rule of evidence that would toss his cold case out the window.
So it's not enough to say that hearsay is unreliable evidence - such a blanket statement doesn't accord with the reality of the legal courts, where precision in the use of evidence is sometimes literally a matter of life and death. The truth is that certain kinds of hearsay evidence are used to prove the innocence or guilt of a defendant on a regular basis.
It is equally true that lawyers and judges disagree with each other and the lower and higher appeallate courts on whether circumstances had justified characterizing some testimony as qualifying as non-hearsay.
This is a great system for determining truth in contemporary legal matters, where we can examine witnesses directly in a court setting and compare their claims to the evidence provided by the prosecution and defense attorneys. Here only the strictest rules for evidence apply.\
  Hearsay in Historical Inquiry
 But is such a high standard of proof logical or even workable when it comes to determining the truth of past events in which all the witnesses are no longer alive? Under such circumstances, documentary evidence is all we have. While this would be considered hearsay in a court of law, historians have developed more appropriate methods for establishing historical truth.
By examining primary and secondary source documents, and cross-checking these with external sources such as archaeological evidence, historians formulate hypotheses about what happened in the past and determine the probability of an event having occurred.
Correct, and since the case for eyewitness authorship of Matthew and John sucks like a Hoover vacuum, you don't have any "primary" records of the life of Jesus by which to ascertain the likely level of truth/falsity in the hearsay sources like Mark and Luke.  Paul could not be considered a primary source because he characterized his experience on the road to Damascus as a vision (Acts 26:19).  Visions are are even more inadmissible than hearsay.
Using this process, professional historians have come almost unanimously to the conclusion that Jesus was a real person who actually existed, on the basis of the New Testament documents, along with some brief external evidence from the historians Tacitus and Josephus.  As fiercely critical atheist scholar Bart Ehrman puts it:
  “He certainly existed, as virtually every competent scholar of antiquity, Christian or non-Christian, agrees.”
 Beyond this, historians use criterion of authenticity to sift through statements in the New Testament writings to determine their historicity. Rather than deciding on the reliability of the books as a whole, individual sentences are compared to the criterion to determine their historical credibility one-by-one.
I don't see the point: the authorship nand literary interdependence of the Synoptics is so complex that we cannot know which statements constitute first-hand reports and which constitute second-hand, so the job of preparing argument to the court for admissibility cannot even be done.
As for ancient historians, the vast majority of what they have recorded for us must be considered hearsay by the consistent critic.
We only accept their hearsay reliability in tentative fashion, forever open to the possibility that the historian's remark was misleading or false.  There is no confirming the truth to such a point that we find it just as reliable as the report from the school principle that our daughter just died in a school shooting.
Given the limits of technology in early times, what alternative did historians have other than to record their own testimony concerning the statements they had heard from eyewitnesses?
Maybe god could have convinced the gospel authors to record their orignals in stone, the way the Eyptians and Sumerians did, so there would be no doubts about what the originals said?  Does there come a point where the "god's mysterious ways" excuse can be abused, or does that excuse just always infallibly work whenever you need it to?
In the words of Polybius, one of the founders of Roman historiography:
  "For since many events occur at the same time in different place, and one man cannot be in several places at one time, nor is it possible for a single man to have seen with his own eyes every place in the world and all the peculiar features of different places, the only thing left for a historian is to inquire from as many people as possible, to believe those worthy of belief and to be an adequate critic of the reports that reach him." (The Histories 12.4C.4-5)
 Neither modern scholars or ancient historians reject indirect evidence as hearsay, instead they probe the sources they have to determine their reliability.
Again, this is mooted by how weak the case for eyewitness authorship of Matthew and John are, and the hearsay in Mark and Luke has never ceased to be subjected to widespread disagreement among Christian scholars.  We also know that the gospel authors felt free to create copies which changed and modified what was asserted in their source material.
Hearsay Can Communicate Truth
 The reliance of historical investigations on documents and recorded testimony to determine the truth of history proves an important point - hearsay can communicate truth. This becomes obvious as soon as we imagine a simple scenario. I was born too late to meet any of my great-grandparents. The only information I have about them comes from my parents, who knew them and could provide eyewitness testimony about them. But as soon as I tell my friends about my great-grandparents, repeating the things my parents told me, that information becomes hearsay.
Which is precisely why your friends' choice to believe or reject what you say about your great-grandparents will be decided by how trustworthy they think the messenger is.  But neither the NT nor church history gives us enough information upon which to decide what type of men the gospel authors were at the time they allegedly wrote or dictated.  Benny Hinn might be considered an honest person if the only info you had on him came from the first two years after he was ordained.  Notice then the gargantuan pitfalls that potentially open when we pretend some sketchy info here and a blurb over there in 2,000 year old sources tell us all we need to know to form a reasonable judgment on the general credibility of the NT authors.
Provided the testimony of my parents is true, the hearsay I pass on is also true. The fact that a statement is hearsay doesn't make it false, it just means that the truth factor needs to be investigated in order to be established as fact - which is exactly what historians do.
And its precisely at the investigation level where NT hearsay breaks down.
In the meantime, should my friends be automatically skeptical about the details I give them about my great-grandparents?
If you were capable of levitating using only their mental powers alone, yes.
Should they reject my claims until I provide further evidence?
If you were capable of levitating using only their mental powers alone, yes.  If you were only asserting your great-grandparents owned some farmland, then no...unless there is reason to believe you assert such a thing to gain some type of benefit or advantage.
If we presume that all hearsay is untrustworthy, then we should reject any kind of indirect news reporting out of hand - yet nearly everybody believes that there is a basis of truth to current events news stories that they hear from a reporter who was not an eyewitness to the actual events.
No, the problem is not that hearsay is typically untrustworthy, but that it often cannot be determined with any reasonable degree of confidence whether it is, in fact, trustworthy, especially where the hearsay is sourced in documents authored more than 2,000 years ago.
This kind of hyper-skepticism is unworkable and impractical.
No it isn't.  I say 99% of the gospels, as well as any other sources for equally ancient religion, are a hopelessly tangled mess of hearsay and exaggeration.  I do not see whatever ill-effect you think this skepticism should have in my life.  If you can depend on your own presupposition of Christanity being true to justify you in avoiding investigation into the Muslim version of hell, then you cannot find fault in others who depend on their presuppositions to justify avoiding investigation into the Christian versions of hell.  In fact, you'd probably say Christian scholars cannot even agree on it, so if spiritually alive people cannot figure it out, spiritually dead atheists will only fumble even worse.  A perfect reason for spiritually dead people to say "fuck you" to all biblical theology.
By all means critically examine the New Testament texts to see if they tell the truth - but don't reject them because they contain hearsay. This is a historical investigation, not a criminal trial.
Which means you probably shouldn't have brought up the fact that American courts sometimes allow hearsay. This is a historical investigation, not a criminal trial.
Are The Gospels Even Hearsay? The last consideration we need to make is whether or not the gospels, along with Acts and the letters of Paul, are even products of hearsay in the first place.
 Using the common definitions in regards to hearsay, we want to determine how many mouths each gospel passed through to determine whether it is second or third-hand. We also want to decide whether or not the information within the gospels can be adequately substantiated.
 In the case of John and Matthew, much of what occurs in their gospels is their own eyewitness testimony.
No, most scholars agree the author of alleged eyewitness Matthew borrowed extensively from non-eyewitnes Mark's earlier text, which is not what we'd expect an eyewitness to do, even if you could trifle that an eyewitness might possibly rely on hearsay to report something he saw himself.

The gospel of John has very high christological sayings of Jesus that the Synoptic authors never mention, which they surely would have had they believed Jesus said such things.  Clement of Alexandria says John wrote a spiritual gospel in the sense of writing for a reason other than to relay the external facts about Jesus as the Synoptics did, which warrants us in supposing John's gospel presents Jesus as doing and saying more than he actually did in real life.
Both men were members of the inner circle of Jesus and were positioned to hear and record statements directly from other eyewitness as well.
So are those with front row seats to Benny Hinn healing crusades, but you are singularly unimpressed with their eyewitness testimony explaining how many people were healed.
 In addition to multiple secondary sources that link Mark's gospel to the eyewitness testimony of the apostle Peter, notable scholar Richard Bauckham points out internal evidences within Mark that support this claim.
So?  The apostles are often unspeakably dense and stupid throughout the gospels, including after they "experience" the resurrected Christ.
An inclusio device bookends Peter's involvement as a disciple and witness of Jesus, indicating that he is the original source of the material.
Indicating that Peter never preached that Jesus was born of a virgin.
There is also a literal framing device throughout Mark that records events initially from a plural perspective ("we went there", "we did this") that moves to a singular perspective as the action gets underway. This is as clear an indication of eyewitness testimony as we can get from a writing system that didn't have a mechanism like speech marks for indicating quotations. At worst, Mark's gospel is secondary reporting of Peter's eyewitness testimony, and on par with anything recorded by Polybius.
Please quote the section of Mark where he uses the first person plurals.
Luke seems more vulnerable to the claim that his gospel is hearsay. While the evidence shows he was closely connected with Paul, there aren't too many links to the original disciples who were eyewitnesses of the life of Jesus. Nevertheless, the material he shares fits with the things established in the other gospels, and in fact Luke often uses portions of Matthew and Mark directly and unabridged.
Which means Luke gave a misleading view to the reader by revealing he relied on eyewitnesses, but kept silent about his reliance on hearsay, which was great, since he too incorporates much of Mark.
He explains in the prologue to his work that he has carefully interviewed eyewitnesses and is connected enough within the early church to plausibly gain access to them.
Josephus similarly says he carefully checked his facts, but that hardly means you trust him when he reports miracles not already found in the bible.  Do you seriously think a cow gave birth to a lamb?  Are modern skeptics "stupid" for rejecting this ridiculous nonsense?
Luke benefits more than the other gospel writers from the corroborative historical evidence that has validated him as an outstanding and accurate recorder, so even though he is further from the inner circle of Jesus than the others, we can be confident that he has carefully recorded the events as they took place.
In Acts 15 he limits his representation of the Judaizers with a single summary position statement once repeated, while he takes about 40 verses to tell all about the apostles, their arguments, what they actually said, what they did afterward, and how their views were conveyed to their followers afterward.  Some would say Luke isn't a whole lot different than Fox News.  Does he tell the truth?  Yes.  Does he do it in a misleading prejudicial way?  Yes.
The gospels are a mixture of direct eyewitness testimony, along with secondary reports from eyewitnesses.
You cannot show which parts of the gospels are direct eyewitness testimony.
While some of this would not be admitted as evidence in an actual court, this is no problem for the Christian, since this is not a legal matter but a historical one. The fact that there are four separate accounts of the life of Jesus, each of which contains original material not found in the others, mean that the accounts can be substantiated.
No, most of John cannot be found in the Synoptics.  That hardly "substantiates" John's version.

Friday, October 27, 2017

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 (2nd 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?

Thursday, October 26, 2017

Was dispossessing the Canaanites worse than killing them? Yes: a reply to Matthew Flannagan

Paul Copan and Matthew Flannagan co-authored the book Did God Really Command Genocide? Coming to Terms with theJustice of God. Grand Rapids:Baker Books, 2014.

Therein, they argue that a careful reading of the OT makes clear that God, nowhere in his instructions for taking over the promised land from the Canaanites, told the Israelites to kill pagan children, God only required the Hebrews to displace or "dispossess" the Canaanites from the promised land.

Apparently, Copan/Flannagan thought that the dispossession hypothesis doesn't make the bible-god look quite as bad as the "kill'em all" hypothesis they intended to refute.

I posted the following to Dr. Flannagan's blog, arguing that given the harsh historical realities of the ANE in the days of Joshua, forcing women and children to flee their homes caused them to endure far more suffering than had they simply been put to the sword as the traditional Christian interpretation holds.

Barry Jones
Oct 21, 2017 at 1:01 pm
 Matt,
 There are several fatal problems with your hagiographic exaggeration hypothesis:
 (no, I am not attempting to answer your specific arguments on this page, I am attempting to show how other arguments, not directly related to what you say here, nevertheless crush what you say here and render it moot. Bringing Wolterstorff into the fray is like bringing a tack hammer to a war.
 1 – Joshua 2:14, the Hebrews did not intend the pagans to flee, but sought to keep tight-lipped about their intended invasions, that is, to achieve the obvious military advantage of surprising the city when it would be too late for the pagans to ready the military to repel the attack. Whoever told the Jericho king that the Hebrews were spying, it probably wasn’t the spies, who apparently allowed Rahab to hide them when the king sought them out.
 2 – Keeping in mind Joshua’s desire to take advantage by surprise attack, any pagans that fled, would not have done so until they luckily happened to notice the Hebrews closing in. That is, the pagans would have no time to pack, but flee in a panic with the kids and not much more. That puts the kids out into the ANE specifically lacking in critical supplies, thus subjecting them even more quickly to dying slowly and painfully from starvation, thirst, disease.
 3 – The pagans themselves were not necessarily in agreement with each other, Joshua 10. So no, it is not “likely” that any women and children who fled their cities would find hospitality or charity in the next town. Especially since resources were scarce anyway, so other pagans, if as sinful as you think, would likely turn away non-combatants where there was no advantage to be gained from giving charity to them.
 4 – There is no evidence that the pagans knew the outer limits of the promised-land area. If pagan women and children fled from Joshua’s armies, they would likely stop somewhere inside the promised land at the first city that would extend them the least hospitality, if any. But then that means they’d have to flee again because the Hebrews were advancing through the entire territory. Now the children aren’t just subjected to starvation and thirst at the first fleeing, but multiple times, and yet we have no evidence that the Hebrews ever told these women and children of where the safe areas were. We have instead a rather ridiculously ambiguous divine promise that God will send his terror in advance of Joshua, Exodus 23:27, which means the only way you can overcome purely historical arguments based on actual ANE realities, is to appeal to the supernatural, which seems to indicate the only people who would find your apologetics persuasive are other Christians who adopt bible inerrancy.
 5 – We have an example of what it means for pagans to flee to outside the promised land, and it proves the Hebrews wished to cause slow miserable painful death to children: when God tells Saul to attack the Amalekites, (1st Samuel 15:1-3), Saul chases them as far as “Shur” (15:7, we would expect women and children to take cover at the military outposts on the eve of battle, so that if Saul set Amalekite military members to flight, he was also doing that to kids as well). Shur was a place where the Israelites went three days without finding water, and would have perished but for a divine miracle of water (Exodus 15:22). And it’s no coincidence why Shur isn’t part of the promised land, that place really sucks for everybody, apparently including groups who have direct pipeline access to the creator of the universe.
 If what apologists say about the Amalekites be true, they were horrible savage brutes, so that if some of them end up surviving next to other fringe groups near Shur (27:8), this likely wasn’t a case of the existing pagans voluntarily welcoming the desperate Amalekites with open arms of charity offerings, but something on the order of truce called likely after several battles were fought and Amalekite raids repelled, i.e., for women and children to be shooed out past the promised-land borders is to force them to take more desperate measures to keep fed and hydrated, such as raiding other settlements and otherwise stealing and other violence.
 Apologist Glenn Miller says life in the ANE outside one’s established town or province was unbearably hostile and could not be sustained except by routinely stealing and raiding of others, with threats to the dispossessed of forced slavery and prostitution being ever-present. If he is correct, the Hebrews knew it too as they chased any fleeing pagan woman and children outside the promised land. http://christianthinktank.com/rbutcher1.html
 Finally, given these historical realities of the ANE, doesn’t that provide the Canaanites with rational justification to refuse to flee? Can you blame a pagan city who says “if we flee, we have no idea how far we can go to avoid the Hebrews, there are cities that would do battle against us, and any places with food or water we might find would likely already be claimed by others”. If you lived in the middle of a desert region surrounded only by a few other cities whose attitude toward you was not known and possibly hostile, would you “flee” the only source of dependable food and water as soon as you learned of a coming invasion. Would you flee like this if you thought you stood a fair chance of successfully repelling the invasion?
 Please do not do what you did last time and accuse me of “avoiding” or “evading” just because you might find something in the bible you think overcomes this criticism. This issue is vast, and I have to balance making concise relevant points, with the need to avoid posting 15 pages that would be necessary to make sure you have nowhere to run when you reply . I could refute your hypotheses in numerous ways, but what I’ve written will suffice to give you plenty to respond to.
 I contend that you won’t be able to do what you need to do, and show in your reply that your hypothesis is more plausible than mine.
 barryjoneswhat@gmail.com

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

As of October 26, Flannagan has been responding to my other replies at his blog, but he has chosen to leave my above remarks without reply.  Will update regularly.


September 13, 2021.
I haven't updated because there is nothing new to add.  Flannagan had no problems replying to other issues I raised elsewhere, such as the matter of objective transcendent morals.  But he chose to completely avoid reply to the above post.  That post is still accessible at his blog.  http://www.mandm.org.nz/2011/01/god-and-the-genocide-of-the-canaanites-part-ii-ancient-near-eastern-conquest-accounts.html.

There are other problems too.  The search tool at Flannagan's blog cannot find any "barry" in any posts before 2010, even though I always included "Barry" in my posts and didn't start posting there until 2017.  http://www.mandm.org.nz/?s=barry+jones.

And yet "barry" shows up routinely in my posts at that blog in 2017.
http://www.mandm.org.nz/2017/10/richard-carrier-on-the-moral-scepticism-objection-to-divine-command-theory.html#comment-232113

Tuesday, October 24, 2017

Frank Turek's dishonesty concerning pagan child sacrifices

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




Tuesday, October 24, 2017
Edited Jan. 16, 2020

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

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

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

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

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

Worse, when Turek at 2:30 ff says the music players played loud with intention to drown out the screams of the  babies being “cooked to death”, this is a dishonest representation of the sources.  Plutarch in the only source that mentions this loud playing of music to drown out the crying, but makes clear it is the crying of the parents beingdrowned out so they would not reach the ears of the other people.
“…No, but with full knowledge and understanding they themselves offered up their own children, and those who had no children would buy little ones from poor people and cut their throats as if they were so many lambs or young birds ; meanwhile the mother stood by without a tear or moan ; but should she utter a single moan or let fall a single tear, she had to forfeit the money, 6 and her child was sacrificed nevertheless ; and the whole area before the statue was filled with a loud noise of flutes and drums so that the cries of wailing should not reach the ears of the people. Yet, if Typhons or Giants were ruling over us after they had expelled the gods, with what sort of sacrifices would they be pleased, or what other holy rites would they require?
Note also that Plutarch there says the child's throat was cut before being placed on the altar, obviously necessitating the conclusion taht the child was killed before being put into the flames.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 10 "There shall not be found among you anyone who makes his son or his daughter pass through the fire, one who uses divination, one who practices witchcraft, or one who interprets omens, or a sorcerer, (Deut. 18:10 NAU) 
 3 But he walked in the way of the kings of Israel, and even made his son pass through the fire, according to the abominations of the nations whom the LORD had driven out from before the sons of Israel. (2 Ki. 16:3 NAU) 
NAU 2 Ki. 16:3  But he walked in the way of the kings of Israel, and even made his son pass through the fire, according to the abominations of the nations whom the LORD had driven out from before the sons of Israel. 
NAU 2 Ki. 17:17  Then they made their sons and their daughters pass through the fire, and practiced divination and enchantments, and sold themselves to do evil in the sight of the LORD, provoking Him.
NAU 2 Ki. 21:6  He made his son pass through the fire, practiced witchcraft and used divination, and dealt with mediums and spiritists. He did much evil in the sight of the LORD provoking Him to anger. 
 10 He also defiled Topheth, which is in the valley of the son of Hinnom, that no man might make his son or his daughter pass through the fire for Molech. (2 Ki. 23:10 NAU) 
NAU 2 Chr. 33:6  He made his sons pass through the fire in the valley of Ben-hinnom; and he practiced witchcraft, used divination, practiced sorcery and dealt with mediums and spiritists. He did much evil in the sight of the LORD, provoking Him to anger. 
 35 "They built the high places of Baal that are in the valley of Ben-hinnom to cause their sons and their daughters to pass through the fire to Molech, which I had not commanded them nor had it entered My mind that they should do this abomination, to cause Judah to sin. (Jer. 32:35 NAU)
NAU Ezek. 16:21  "You slaughtered My children and offered them up to idols by causing them to pass through the fire. 
NAU Ezek. 20:26  and I pronounced them unclean because of their gifts, in that they caused all their firstborn to pass through the fire so that I might make them desolate, in order that they might know that I am the LORD."' 
NAU Ezek. 20:31  "When you offer your gifts, when you cause your sons to pass through the fire, you are defiling yourselves with all your idols to this day. And shall I be inquired of by you, O house of Israel? As I live," declares the Lord GOD, "I will not be inquired of by you. 
NAU Ezek. 23:37  "For they have committed adultery, and blood is on their hands. Thus they have committed adultery with their idols and even caused their sons, whom they bore to Me, to pass through the fire to them as food.
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There's also biblical evidence that "pass through the fire" did not mean "use fire to kill the child":

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

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

NAU  2 Kings 16:1 In the seventeenth year of Pekah the son of Remaliah, Ahaz the son of Jotham, king of Judah, became king.
 2 Ahaz was twenty years old when he became king, and he reigned sixteen years in Jerusalem; and he did not do what was right in the sight of the LORD his God, as his father David had done.
 3 But he walked in the way of the kings of Israel, and even made his son pass through the fire, according to the abominations of the nations whom the LORD had driven out from before the sons of Israel.
 4 He sacrificed and burned incense on the high places and on the hills and under every green tree.
 5 Then Rezin king of Aram and Pekah son of Remaliah, king of Israel, came up to Jerusalem to wage war; and they besieged Ahaz, but could not overcome him.
 6 At that time Rezin king of Aram recovered Elath for Aram, and cleared the Judeans out of Elath entirely; and the Arameans came to Elath and have lived there to this day.
 7 So Ahaz sent messengers to Tiglath-pileser king of Assyria, saying, "I am your servant and your son; come up and deliver me from the hand of the king of Aram and from the hand of the king of Israel, who are rising up against me."
 8 Ahaz took the silver and gold that was found in the house of the LORD and in the treasuries of the king's house, and sent a present to the king of Assyria.
 9 So the king of Assyria listened to him; and the king of Assyria went up against Damascus and captured it, and carried the people of it away into exile to Kir, and put Rezin to death.
 10 Now King Ahaz went to Damascus to meet Tiglath-pileser king of Assyria, and saw the altar which was at Damascus; and King Ahaz sent to Urijah the priest the pattern of the altar and its model, according to all its workmanship.
 11 So Urijah the priest built an altar; according to all that King Ahaz had sent from Damascus, thus Urijah the priest made it, before the coming of King Ahaz from Damascus.
 12 When the king came from Damascus, the king saw the altar; then the king approached the altar and went up to it,
 13 and burned his burnt offering and his meal offering, and poured his drink offering and sprinkled the blood of his peace offerings on the altar.
 14 The bronze altar, which was before the LORD, he brought from the front of the house, from between his altar and the house of the LORD, and he put it on the north side of his altar.
 15 Then King Ahaz commanded Urijah the priest, saying, "Upon the great altar burn the morning burnt offering and the evening meal offering and the king's burnt offering and his meal offering, with the burnt offering of all the people of the land and their meal offering and their drink offerings; and sprinkle on it all the blood of the burnt offering and all the blood of the sacrifice. But the bronze altar shall be for me to inquire by."
 16 So Urijah the priest did according to all that King Ahaz commanded.
 17 Then King Ahaz cut off the borders of the stands, and removed the laver from them; he also took down the sea from the bronze oxen which were under it and put it on a pavement of stone.
 18 The covered way for the sabbath which they had built in the house, and the outer entry of the king, he removed from the house of the LORD because of the king of Assyria.
 19 Now the rest of the acts of Ahaz which he did, are they not written in the Book of the Chronicles of the Kings of Judah?
 20 So Ahaz slept with his fathers, and was buried with his fathers in the city of David; and his son Hezekiah reigned in his place. (2 Ki. 16:1-20 NAU)

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

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

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

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

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