I’m going to disagree here (OK, settle down in the back – atheists don’t agree on everything).
I would think that if you really believed that God was commanding you to do something, I don’t think any given Christian would assume the right to question Him on the likely outcomes. I think that it would be incumbent on a Christian to obey without question. Notwithstanding the problem of not doing an evil act so that good may come of it (which I’m sure we’ll circle around to again in due course), what God says goes. Including slaughtering children.
So let me get this straight…
You are okay with women and abortionists slaughtering millions of children every year as a “right” to retain an individual lifestyle, but you are not okay with an omniscient and omnibenevolent God having commanded the killing of a few hundred (perhaps) children, even though from his perspective as the eternal and omniscient Creator of all that exists he determined that to be a necessary act given its repercussions through all history.
Frankly, I don’t get it. I do, however, see your desperate need for resorting to belittling the concept of obedience to make a point.
Yet, not even that makes much sense when analyzed. You promote in your posts your moral loyalty to your own ethical beliefs (and, therefore, your obedience to them,) under the banner of “consistency,” but you insist moral commands given by the omniscient and omnibenevolent God ought not be adhered to when those conflict with the necessarily limited determinations of a quite fallible human intellect, which you contend should always be obeyed as a matter of consistency.
So,
- fallible human knowledge and conscience = good = we always should obey our own moral determinations for consistency sake
- omniscient and omnibenevolent will = questionable = always defer to fallible human conscience
On both counts, your “reasoning” baffles me.
And this is the Number One problem for me. How is it possible to say that you know, without any doubt at all, that it’s not, as Roscoe says, schizophrenia or similar? And if the command is given to a third party, then unless God has a word with everyone that the command affects, you would have no choice other to ignore that third party at best. At worst, you may well be morally obliged to try to stop him carrying out his ‘orders’.
This assumes any supernatural event is, by its very nature, impossible, which leads to your contention that any experience beyond the purely “natural” must be schizophrenic.
It seems to me that if God exists and brought an entire universe into existence, then his prerogative to end life at his determination “goes with the territory,” so to speak. That doesn’t entail any right on our part to assume anything about what acts we can commit “in his name.” However, if an act were commanded by God, the logical implication is that we would be obligated to follow it. Notice, the conditional “if” attached to that statement.
If God can “make Children of Abraham from stones” then presumably he can make babies at will and intact. Therefore, his moral obligations regarding “the care and feeding of babies” may not be the same as ours when babies are put into our hands.
Assessing God’s commands from “this side” of death seems utterly senseless because we do not know for certain what death really entails, do we? If it is akin to the pupa stage of an insect, then death might be a transition into a higher form of life. Your entire argument depends upon seeing death as finality and God as non-existent.
If both of those are true, then, clearly, your argument that Israelites killing babies was heinous holds true. By the same token, if both those are true, then killing babies would seem not much different than a specific arrangement of molecules being changed into a different arrangement of molecules, since, given materialism, there is no abiding “person” and death is meaningless precisely because life is. Materialism is the claim that life, at base, is only matter and matter bestows no enduring meaning, though, perhaps, in an extremely qualified sense, which is the straw required by your position. And the overwhelming need that humans have for clutching at that straw is what makes your argument compelling.
If God does exist and death is not final, but this life is merely a precursor to another and much greater form of existence, then the entire tenor of the debate shifts and your points are far from insurmountable, though helpful in sorting out implications.
Your tactic has been to keep shifting the focus back to “death as final” and God as a human projection. Those who sympathize with your assumptions will be influenced by your points, but only because it is very easy to be taken in by them. Personally, I don’t find your points compelling because my experiences have shown otherwise.
Someday you might come to discover the confines of your pupa to be stifling. At that point you might see a need for “light” but if you are quite content with merely moving the furniture around and coating the walls with fresh paint, then you won’t see past what is sufficient for your current state - until the day it comes to a crashing halt, which it will.
Death for all of us is certain. To presume the gravity of the issue is simply up to us to decide, and meaning is only what we impose on reality, is to begin with the assumption that our determinations are the only ones possible, thus leaving God out completely. If we assume our limitations do not have final say and that meaning is to be gained, and not imposed, because the meaning is embedded in existence itself, not just ourselves, then we have access to a wider scope which changes our perspective from self to all possible truth - which leads to Shakespeare’s quote, Horatio.
