Is the Golden Rule a Foundational Moral Principle or A Rule of Thumb?

[Roscoe_Turner]

No it doesn’t. Go back to the live hockey analogy.

The frequency and extent of intervention in the game would depend entirely on the state of the game. If some thug is out on the ice using a stick to take out people’s eyes, that might allow for “police” intervention, arrest and detention “somewhere else.” However, someone merely tripping another player might involve a spell on the bench or penalty box.

Why is there a need to generalize every instance?

No one is claiming the only recourse ever is to “destroy them,” but rather that in this case at this time it may have been necessary. Only God, with an eternal purview, would be in the appropriate position to make a judgement on that, we certainly wouldn’t be.

It’s special pleading. If God intervenes to save all of Humanity with the incarnation of Christ, clearly He is able to rig the game. Yet with the Canaanite, “Nah, you guys kill 'em all”

I’m not saying the only recourse is always kill them, just here that choice was made. Clearly by other examples we know that other options were available. Omnipotence.

If you claim the ONLY recourse in this particular case was decimation then you must be claiming against God’s omnipotence.

 

[Roscoe_Turner]

Judgement is one thing, how to intervene is entirely different.

The fact that I make a judgement about some behaviour does not by itself, involve any implication about the best way to intervene or whether intervention (by me) is necessary.

That I ought or ought not intervene says nothing about whether God has made a different determination on the matter.

Why would God be obligated to seeing it my way if he has access to a much wider body of evidence and far greater foresight than I do?

What I am claiming is that our judgements and rights regarding intervention are not necessarily identical to God’s. You seem to keep conflating the two as if you have missed that point and its implications entirely.

And you seem to be missing that God didn’t act alone to destroy the Canaanites as He does with the Flood. If God thought decimation was the recourse that was necessary he didn’t need the Israelites to carry it out. He was perfectly capable without them.

What we have is Human agents claiming the divine. Both sides. According to you they should both with hold judgement. How can they intervene if they with holding judgement?

God being omnipotent doesn’t need a human agent to act.

 

[meltzerboy]

And you seem to be missing that God didn’t act alone to destroy the Canaanites as He does with the Flood. If God thought decimation was the recourse that was necessary he didn’t need the Israelites to carry it out. He was perfectly capable without them.

What we have is Human agents claiming the divine. Both sides. According to you they should both with hold judgement. How can they intervene if they with holding judgement?

God being omnipotent doesn’t need a human agent to act.

What I suggested in a prior comment is that, while it is true G-d does not need a human agent to act on His behalf, He often uses them so they may learn something in the process of their actions. Are you not familiar with the basic educational tool of active learning consisting of learning by doing? It is not a question of G-d’s omnipotence but rather of human participation for their own benefit.

 

[Roscoe_Turner]

What I suggested in a prior comment is that, while it is true G-d does not need a human agent to act on His behalf, He often uses them so they may learn something in the process of their actions. Are you not familiar with the basic educational tool of active learning consisting of learning by doing? It is not a question of G-d’s omnipotence but rather of human participation for their own benefit.

By killing babies they learn that killing babies is wrong. That’s your claim?

 

[PRmerger]

PR claimed Adam Broke the Radio and stated that Jesus fixed it.

If it is fixed it would be in it’s original state.

Yes, it is in its original state. Frequently it is. Especially right after receiving fine tuning through the Sacraments.

But then it reverts to its faulty mode because it leaks.

 

[Peter_Plato]

It’s special pleading. If God intervenes to save all of Humanity with the incarnation of Christ, clearly He is able to rig the game. Yet with the Canaanite, “Nah, you guys kill 'em all”

Where did I claim that Christ “rigging the game” entails the complete shutdown of free will for all moral agents?

What I did claim was: whatever it was that Christ accomplished by his death and resurrection at a specific place in time was not available to the Canaanites or to humanity in general at any previous time in history.

What he achieved was not magical in the sense that you think it was. There had to be real dependencies or it was a trivial act. You seem to imply that omnipotence is magical and capricious rather than real and meaningful. If it required those dependencies then it was not available at the time of the Canaanites.

I am not in a position to say why, just that would be a reason for the difference. I am sure we will have answers when and if we need to know.

 

[meltzerboy]

By killing babies they learn that killing babies is wrong. That’s your claim?

I’m not speaking specifically about Deuteronomy, which, as I stated previously, is more of a didactic, homiletic, midrashic text rather than a literal one in this portion, teaching about the subject of idolatry. See post #355 in response to PRmerger’s mention of metaphorical text. I’m speaking in general about the omnipotence of G-d, which you brought up several times. In a sense, we participate in G-d’s creation and learn by doing so.

 

[Roscoe_Turner]

Where did I claim that Christ “rigging the game” entails the complete shutdown of free will for all moral agents?

What I did claim was: whatever it was that Christ accomplished by his death and resurrection at a specific place in time was not available to the Canaanites or to humanity in general at any previous time in history.

What he achieved was not magical in the sense that you think it was. There had to be real dependencies or it was a trivial act. You seem to imply that omnipotence is magical and capricious rather than real and meaningful. If it required those dependencies then it was not available at the time of the Canaanites.

I am not in a position to say why, just that would be a reason for the difference. I am sure we will have answers when and if we need to know.

How can you make the claim it wasn’t available to the Canaanites? What evidence do you have of the claim? Why was God’s omnipotence limited? Who limited it?

 

[Peter_Plato]

Let me address this argument concerning OT events using very basic logic.

There are two forms the argument can take and neither one is compelling.

Form 1.

1. It is morally wrong to kill babies
2. God ordered the killing of babies in the OT

Therefore, God is guilty of a morally wrong act.

Unfortunately, that argument would entail that God is morally culpable whenever anyone dies because life and death is completely in his hands. So if It is morally wrong for God to order the killing of babies in the OT it is just as morally wrong for him to do so every time a baby dies. He could do otherwise, ergo he bears the guilt.

Form 2

1. The Israelites killed babies in the OT
2. God would never have babies killed

Therefore, the Israelites were not commanded by God to do so.

The problem here, once again is that the moral authority or right of God to kill babies is never denied in a general. When a baby dies we do not generally claim God is morally responsible and therefore a cad, even though, according to your claims about omnipotence, he could do otherwise every time. Omnipotence would, in theory, allow him to keep all babies alive when they die, so he must be just as responsible in those cases.

Now for this:

And you seem to be missing that God didn’t act alone to destroy the Canaanites as He does with the Flood. If God thought decimation was the recourse that was necessary he didn’t need the Israelites to carry it out. He was perfectly capable without them.

What we have is Human agents claiming the divine. Both sides. According to you they should both with hold judgement. How can they intervene if they with holding judgement?

God being omnipotent doesn’t need a human agent to act.

God doesn’t “need” a human agent to act, but that does not preclude him from choosing or using human agents or, in general, any form of agency to act.

That would entail that the death of any baby anywhere, where some other agent or instrumental cause is involved, God, ultimately would bear responsibility.

This collapses to a general claim that God is, ultimately, committing moral evil whenever a baby dies for whatever reason because omnipotence entails he has control over all events and agents.

The entire problem here is one assumption.

It is morally wrong for humans to kill babies, therefore is it morally wrong for God to.

The burden is on you to show that God bears identical moral responsibility as human do,

Special pleading is a false charge because you would have to show that your logic is the correct one, entailing, as it does, that two completely different beings should be treated identically in this case, i.e. that God and human beings are always to be treated identically, even though they are different “entities,” with respect to moral responsibility is the case you have to make.

The rule of logic is “Treat like things alike.” Special pleading occurs when like things are treated differently. That is not the case here except where your argument is in question. Get your logic straight, Roscoe.

 

[Aloysium]

. . . Why was God’s omnipotence limited? . . .

:twocents:

God’s omnipotence is limited to what is rational.
The irrational, that’s what we’re for.

 

[Roscoe_Turner]

Let me address this argument concerning OT events using very basic logic.

There are two forms the argument can take and neither one is compelling.

Form 1.

1. It is morally wrong to kill babies
2. God ordered the killing of babies in the OT

Therefore, God is guilty of a morally wrong act.

Unfortunately, that argument would entail that God is morally culpable whenever anyone dies because life and death is completely in his hands. So if It is morally wrong for God to order the killing of babies in the OT it is just as morally wrong for him to do so every time a baby dies. He could do otherwise, ergo he bears the guilt.

It wasn’t a natural death that received. Being murdered and dying from disease, disaster etc. are different. Every baby doesn’t die by another’s hand. It is unusual and considered evil if it does happen. Thou shall not murder. God orders but it’s carried out by men. God orders men to act contrary to the morality He has given.

By your logic the Church as the mouth piece of God could order the deaths of anyone they see fit. They work by the authority of God. The Deuteronomic Code could be enforced as an edict from God.

Form 2

1. The Israelites killed babies in the OT
2. God would never have babies killed

Therefore, the Israelites were not commanded by God to do so.

The problem here, once again is that the moral authority or right of God to kill babies is never denied in a general. When a baby dies we do not generally claim God is morally responsible and therefore a cad, even though, according to your claims about omnipotence, he could do otherwise every time. Omnipotence would, in theory, allow him to keep all babies alive when they die, so he must be just as responsible in those cases.

No human agent is needed for God to take the life of an infant. The problem with this formation isn’t the moral authority of God but rather we have no evidence that the Israelites were acting on the authority of God. Since it in direct conflict with the morality that is required by God for humans, the claim for a God given edict is suspect. How would you respond to a claim that God required abortions? He has the moral authority to do so. No?

Special pleading is a false charge because you would have to show that your logic is the correct one, entailing, as it does, that two completely different beings should be treated identically in this case, i.e. that God and human beings are always to be treated identically, even though they are different “entities,” with respect to moral responsibility is the case you have to make.

The rule of logic is “Treat like things alike.” Special pleading occurs when like things are treated differently. That is not the case here except where your argument is in question. Get your logic straight, Roscoe.

It is special pleading because the human agents are acting under two conflicting moralities.
One that killing babies is wrong. The special pleading is that God can and did suspend that moral clause. “Remember that I said killing babies is wrong and that’s why the Canaanites are evil, well isn’t always wrong just most of the time. Go kill some babies.”

It also destroys any notion of absolute morality for humans. Things can change at any moment.

 

[Roscoe_Turner]

I’m not speaking specifically about Deuteronomy, which, as I stated previously, is more of a didactic, homiletic, midrashic text rather than a literal one in this portion, teaching about the subject of idolatry. See post #355 in response to PRmerger’s mention of metaphorical text. I’m speaking in general about the omnipotence of G-d, which you brought up several times. In a sense, we participate in G-d’s creation and learn by doing so.

We participate in the creation everyday of our lives. There is no way not to.

In the events of Deuteronomy if we are to take the killing of the Canaanite babies as metaphorical, then we also must take the claim of Canaanite infant sacrifice as metaphorical. So what we have is a story competing ideas. Then the lesson is crush any competing ideas. Religious intolerance. Is that what you are saying that we should take away? It would also seem to be the lesson that God cannot win the war of ideas without the aid of human agents. Slightly less than omnipotent. Or…Yahweh is an idea or a concept that needs to be perpetuated, not a being.

 

[Bradski]

By the way, are you claiming moral agents do not have a right to judge the actions of others? That no moral agent has the right to judge the practice of human sacrifice as wrong just because the Aztecs practiced it? The implication is that if a substantively large group endorses a behaviour, that endorsement is sufficient to make the behaviour morally right?

I think it’s more an implication that it would have come across as a little odd to any given Aztec to be told that it’s OK to kill babies if our god says so, but not if yours does.

Take that one up with Bradski. I am sure he doesn’t agree with you. At least, he has been arguing that general agreement is not sufficient to make something “morally right.”

Indeed. But I also thought that doing evil so that good may come of it was wrong. I guess there are exceptions.

But I just have to say, this part of the discussion has a distinct aroma of Python about it. One soldier holding back a screaming mother and telling here: ‘Well, it’s for your own good. And anyway, it’s a lesson to everyone that they shouldn’t treat babies so badly’. All while his buddy is hacking, chopping and slicing away at her children.

Do you think they herded them all together to make it easier or just killed them where they were found? Did they enjoy it? Did they think they were going God’s work? Do you think they raped the women before killing them? Probably. I believe that it was allowed in other circumstances.

But do you think that someone might just have said to the guy next to him at some point: Hey, I don’t care who says we have to do this – it’s just plain wrong.

I’d guess a lot of them were just following orders. It’s happened before. And as we know, that’s no excuse at all.

 

[Peter_Plato]

I think it’s more an implication that it would have come across as a little odd to any given Aztec to be told that it’s OK to kill babies if our god says so, but not if yours does.

You are playing games with words here. It isn’t our god or your god, it is whether God, as Creator of all, sanctioned an act.

We are not speaking of “competing” gods. We are talking about quite different perceptions of God.

Would it be wrong for a super human creature, say an alien with incredible powers, to destroy human beings? Probably. That is the “level of being” that an Aztec god basically represents.

Would it be wrong for the Creator of all that exists, that is the ground of Being or existence itself, whose very essence is existence, to intervene in creation? I am not clear why it would be if this God determines what reality and existence itself entails and has the ultimate power to determine what exists and what does not.

We are not speaking of gods on the same level. We are speaking of entirely different orders of existence.

What an Aztec’s impression would be is neither here nor there. The question is what the reality is. Did the real God of all Creation really sanction the act? could be asked of both the the Aztecs and the Jews. What they believed or not is not the issue. It might affect their culpability, but that is quite different from the wrongness of the command, which is a different matter.

If an Aztec observed a modern cardiac surgeon cutting into the heart of a patient, the Aztec might conclude that what the surgeon and what the Aztec priests are doing are essentially the same thing. The reality is, however, that they are not.

We have to stop equating some concept of gods that Aztecs or any primitive tribe believed in as essentially en par with the actuality of God or one that a conceivable and plausible metaphysical world view would arrive at. What the Aztec’s did out of ignorance does not, in the least, limit every alternative view.

We don’t debunk modern science by asking, “What would the Aztecs have thought of that?”

 

[Peter_Plato]

But I just have to say, this part of the discussion has a distinct aroma of Python about it.

Your post is simply an appeal to emotion.

The surgeon working on an open heart is dealing with blood and internal organs and has to find the stomach (his own) to cut and probe.

The fact that gore is involved does not, on its own, determine the moral implications of an action - which is basically your appeal. You are trying to hide the moral question behind the natural distaste humans have for trauma and violence.

It is not the fact that killing and violence is involved that necessarily makes a war immoral. The morality of war (aggression or defense) is not determined by the amount of blood spilled.

 

[Bradski]

You are playing games with words here. It isn’t our god or your god, it is whether God, as Creator of all, sanctioned an act.

These aren’t word games and to suggest as such indicates that the actual meaning of atheist tends to slip past you quite frequently. You probably play lip service to the exact definition but you cannot get past the idea that an atheist is just someone who doesn’t believe in your god. Even my saying ‘your god’ (lower case) probably jars.

So when I get an argument from a Christian saying that something is perfectly OK because God says it’s OK, it has literally the same amount of credibility (and I mean literally) as the same argument from an Aztec.

Your post is simply an appeal to emotion. The fact that gore is involved does not, on its own, determine the moral implications of an action - which is basically your appeal.

Who says I’m saying that it must be immoral because it’s gory? Now that would be a silly argument. I’m just bringing in a little reality to the picture.

The arguments have bounced back and forth, mainly asking on one hand, or explaining on the other, how God could not just condone such acts, but to instigate them. But what is being left out of the picture is the fact that men, people like you and me, the vast majority of whom had no idea at all whether what they were doing was for the greater good (as if that would in any way excuse it in any case), butchered children like pieces of meat because they were told to do it.

Can I just repeat that? They hacked and stabbed and chopped and slashed small children and babies to death. And it ain’t like you see in the films where people die nice and quickly and easily. It takes a lot of work to kill someone with a blade. They can take an awfully long time to die. And I’ve read enough reports of men who have worked themselves into a state where they can kill with their bare hands to know that the women (and very young girls) would not have been quickly despatched with a neat sword strike.

If you’ve ever read reports on massacres in Nanking and My Lai and Wounded Knee and Myall Creek then you’d have to be emotionally dead not to be greatly affected. I could quote reports from any of them but they are simply too distressing. I could even post pictures of some, but it would be too upsetting.

If we had eye witness accounts and pictures of the dead and maybe even film of some of the atrocity, then I really don’t believe we’d have anyone at all trying to justify it in any way whatsoever. Actually, why not try to imagine being there at the time yourself and in charge of some of the men. God doesn’t want to do it – He wants you personally to do it. Do you urge them on in God’s name? Do you swing that sword yourself?

If it was the right thing to do, and you’ve spent quite some time trying to convince us that it was, then what choice would you have had.

 

[meltzerboy]

We participate in the creation everyday of our lives. There is no way not to.

In the events of Deuteronomy if we are to take the killing of the Canaanite babies as metaphorical, then we also must take the claim of Canaanite infant sacrifice as metaphorical. So what we have is a story competing ideas. Then the lesson is crush any competing ideas. Religious intolerance. Is that what you are saying that we should take away? It would also seem to be the lesson that God cannot win the war of ideas without the aid of human agents. Slightly less than omnipotent. Or…Yahweh is an idea or a concept that needs to be perpetuated, not a being.

I have stated before that G-d does not need our human agency; He did not even need to create us. The purpose of Creation is not for the benefit of G-d in any way, but for our benefit in many ways. I fail to see the logic of your argument regarding taking the Canaanite infant sacrifice as metaphorical. The midrashic lesson is for the purpose of pointing out the dangers inherent in idolatry. If the latter were metaphorical, there would be no danger and no need for a lesson. I am not in favor of religious intolerance. The irony is that I agree in large measure with your argument concerning moral relativism (which does not mean I lack a personal viewpoint on moral values); however, I disagree with your interpretation of the teaching found in the Hebrew Bible.

 

[Roscoe_Turner]

Repeating myself a bit here but for clarification.

The Canaanites could have been idolaters with out being child murders. If we are to accept that the story is metaphor to teach a lesson, not fact.

It is essentially two religions battling for the supremacy of their concept of the divine. We can leave baby killing out of it entirely. We can leave any killing out. We can see it as a culture war.

YHWH gives a command to his people to carry out the war. He didn’t do it himself.

You say it was so that the Israelites would learn the love of god. It would also seem if devestation was called for that any other religious view is not to be tolerated but wiped out completely. Not unlike St. Patrick driving the “snakes” out of Ireland.

I think also it may be showing that YHWH is conceptual. It needs people to propagate it. That is why god didn’t desomate the Canaanites himself.

 

[PRmerger]

That is why god didn’t desomate the Canaanites himself.

I am not recognizing that word. What are you trying to say?

 

[Roscoe_Turner]

I am not recognizing that word. What are you trying to say?

Sorry should be - Decimate.