Joshua's conquest

[Wardog]

It goes back to Cain and Able. Go back to Genesis Ch. 4. I don’t believe God ever gave the Canaanites permission to own land or till the soil. It appears even his ancestors were forced to be a nomadic people. Everything was created by God, and thus God is the one who gives property rights at the end of the day. How is it unjust for God to say who can live on what land and where? He created it after all.

I think CH 9 answers the question on what God intended for the Canaanites:

The sons of Noah who went forth from the ark were Shem, Ham, and Japheth. Ham was the father of Canaan. 19 These three were the sons of Noah; and from these the whole earth was peopled. 20 Noah was the first tiller of the soil. He planted a vineyard; 21 and he drank of the wine, and became drunk, and lay uncovered in his tent. 22 And Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father, and told his two brothers outside. 23 Then Shem and Japheth took a garment, laid it upon both their shoulders, and walked backward and covered the nakedness of their father; their faces were turned away, and they did not see their father’s nakedness. 24 When Noah awoke from his wine and knew what his youngest son had done to him, 25 he said, “Cursed be Canaan; a slave of slaves shall he be to his brothers.” 26 He also said, “Blessed by the LORD my God be Shem; and let Canaan be his slave.” 27 God enlarge Japheth, and let him dwell in the tents of Shem; and let Canaan be his slave."

In the Ignatius Bible Study, it appears that Ham seeing his father drunk and naked was an euphemism for Ham having an incestual relationship with his mother, the result of which was Canaan.

 

[Nooj]

Ever heard of original sin? A sin committed by one person that has an effect on every human born after. This does not mean we are to blame for the sin of Adam and Eve, but never the less we feel the effects of their sin. Sin is not “fair” like you would like it to be and you can see examples all around you. You can find the husband who goes and gambles/drinks away the little income he does earn, and his family nears starvation because of it. Sin is not some personal thing between you and God. It has real consequences that branch out and affect lots of other people who are not to blame at all.

Also, this is really simple.

1. God created everything
2. We have no real claim to anything. Everything we have is a gift from God.
3. God can give/take away his gifts to/from whomever he wishes.

You almost have to think of the Canaanites like tenants. God disapproved of how they managed his land and gave it to other people who would be better tenants. When the Israelite’s failed him the land was given to other tenants. If you don’t think God is just and doesn’t apply his justice equally go read War of the Jews by Josephus. Its a firsthand account of the destruction of Jerusalem. If anything God brought even more destruction upon the Jews than the Canaanites because he had given them more gifts to begin with that they had squandered.

Good answer. I think your position is sensible. God punishes collectively. The innocent is punished for the sake of the bad. We just have to deal with it.

 

[SGWessells]

Nate13 wrote: "You can find the husband who goes and gambles/drinks away the little income he does earn, and his family nears starvation because of it. Sin is not some personal thing between you and God. It has real consequences that branch out and affect lots of other people who are not to blame at all. "

But that’s my point: Achan’s family were “not to blame at all”, yet God killed them anyway; a pattern which he repeats ad nauseam throughout the OT. Sin has consequences, yes; but God blames and kills the victim. Ask Uzzah; ask David’s firstborn with Bathsheba; ask the thousands killed when David took the census that God commanded him to take. And on and on.
The whole problem is that people do not define God’s character by the nature of the world he created, they define him from the beginning as morally perfect no matter what. So whenever God does something either in nature or in scripture which cannot fir any conceivable definition of moral perfection, or even moral acceptability, you have to distort logic to painful deformity to justify it, or sinmply invent hypothetical justifications when you have no way of knowing whether they exist, or if they did, whether they would justify the evil. That is why many people cannot accept the existence of a god so defined.

1. God can give/take away his gifts to/from whomever he wishes.

In which case they are not gifts, but like bribes for good behavior. If I give someone something, it belongs to that person, to do with as they wish. If I say, “this is a gift for you, but only if you treat it the way I command; otherwise, I’m taking it away from you”, that is not a gift.

 

[SGWessells]

There is no contradiction if you believe in the mystery of the omnipotent nature of God. Moral principles are absolute. Human understanding and ability to adhere to those morals and God’s revelation of the path to salvation was a long and gradual process. Furthremore we (Catholics) do not “exonerate” God in any sense. We believe He is infinitly good, knowing, loving, and just and do not presume to know all ends and His will. While the killing of the infants is a difficult idea to swalllow we trust that the order to do so was a part of God’s mercy and justice. Mercy, so that the children would go to heaven instead of growing up in and evil society and become lost in sin themselves, and justice, for the wrongs done against Israel. Your position is one of an outsider looking in and you are making assumptions about certain Bibilical passages without considering what is being described in context with salvation history (the whole Bible). Unless, you familiarize yourself with more of the fundamental principles of what Catholics believe about God you will not be able to see why we believe what we do and will forever look at the the OT as a simple “legend.”

First, I was a Catholic for eight years, and read a lot of apologetics. There’s a difference between “not knowing” and “not agreeing.”

Second, it is the teaching of the Catholic Church that everything the Bible asserts, whether concerning faith and morals, history and science, is asserted by the Holy Spirit and therefore without error. Thus, when the Bible says God commanded Israel to kill babies, God really issued that command. Those who assert his moral perfection despite that and many similar examples have to justify his conduct. That’s not my problem any more.

Third, what assurance do you have that the babies killed ended up in Heaven? Were they circumcised? No. Is there any reason they had the “circumcision of desire” (if there is such a parallel to “baptism of desire”)? If their culture was so wicked, who around them would desire it? If God foresaw that they would grow up “in an evil society and become lost in sin themselves,” why is he so indifferent to infants who have the same fate in other cultures?

If moral principles are absolute, how come God doesn’t obey them? If he disobeys them, yet remains perfectly good, then moral goodness is not dependent on obeying morality, no matter how absolute. If they are absolute only for us, and not for God, how do we know they are good? Either they are good because they come from God’s perfectly good character, or they are good only because God says they are good. But in the first case, he doesn’t follow them himself, so they don’t come from his goodness of character; in the second, they are completely arbitrary and could change whenever God changes them; in that case,there is no intrinsic reason connected with the action or its consequences which shows that murder, say, is bad, since the badness of murder is an arbitrary decree of God’s which he does not obey himself and orders others to disobey in scripture, and could reverse at any time, in which case murder would be an absolute good.
In short, as long as you adhere to the Catholic teaching of the infallibility and historical reliability of the Bible, absolute morality and God’s moral perfection cannot both be maintained; which is perhaps why so many Catholics either ignore biblical infallibility or explain it away.

 

[SGWessells]

I think CH 9 answers the question on what God intended for the Canaanites:

The sons of Noah who went forth from the ark were Shem, Ham, and Japheth. Ham was the father of Canaan. 19 These three were the sons of Noah; and from these the whole earth was peopled. 20 Noah was the first tiller of the soil. He planted a vineyard; 21 and he drank of the wine, and became drunk, and lay uncovered in his tent. 22 And Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father, and told his two brothers outside. 23 Then Shem and Japheth took a garment, laid it upon both their shoulders, and walked backward and covered the nakedness of their father; their faces were turned away, and they did not see their father’s nakedness. 24 When Noah awoke from his wine and knew what his youngest son had done to him, 25 he said, “Cursed be Canaan; a slave of slaves shall he be to his brothers.” 26 He also said, “Blessed by the LORD my God be Shem; and let Canaan be his slave.” 27 God enlarge Japheth, and let him dwell in the tents of Shem; and let Canaan be his slave."

In the Ignatius Bible Study, it appears that Ham seeing his father drunk and naked was an euphemism for Ham having an incestual relationship with his mother, the result of which was Canaan.

Well, that’s the sort of nonsense I said results when you define Yahweh as good no matter what. First of all, we can’t see why what Ham did was so bad, so we have to make up a worse sin which the Bible says nothing about (though scripture has no qualms about mentioning incest and other crimes in other places, so why does it need a euphemism here?) for this to be a “euphemism” for.
But even if it was incest, how does that make Canaan, the baby, guilty? The Church, unless I’m mistaken, does not support the incest excuse for abortion; why would it do so here? The Ignatius explanation is just the sort of apologetic dodge that gives the devout an excuse to ignore a problem, so they never analyze it enough to see how silly it is. But once the veil of that need to believe gets torn away, we see what’s there and what’s not.

 

[Nate13]

But that’s my point: Achan’s family were “not to blame at all”, yet God killed them anyway; a pattern which he repeats ad nauseam throughout the OT. Sin has consequences, yes; but God blames and kills the victim. Ask Uzzah; ask David’s firstborn with Bathsheba; ask the thousands killed when David took the census that God commanded him to take. And on and on.

Lets say for instance that the Bible said that David’s firstborn with Bathsheba was killed by “natural causes”. Would that be morally acceptable to you? Aren’t all natural causes the creation of God and therefore all those deaths can be attributed to him? I really don’t understand how you can have a problem with God “killing” someone since you would then have to essentially say he “kills” millions of people everyday.
Now if you want to talk about the few instances where God tells someone to kill someone else we can do that, but as far as God “directly killing” someone I don’t see how that makes any sense.

The whole problem is that people do not define God’s character by the nature of the world he created, they define him from the beginning as morally perfect no matter what. So whenever God does something either in nature or in scripture which cannot fir any conceivable definition of moral perfection, or even moral acceptability, you have to distort logic to painful deformity to justify it, or sinmply invent hypothetical justifications when you have no way of knowing whether they exist, or if they did, whether they would justify the evil. That is why many people cannot accept the existence of a god so defined.

The same rules don’t apply to God, because he created the rules in the first place. Think about it. He created humans and we only live for a certain amount of time before we eventually die. It doesn’t matter how good we are or how perfectly we live we all suffer a bodily death. God has a right to do this because he created us. This does not make way for allowing abortions because we are not the creators of children. We are the way by which God chooses to create new life.

In which case they are not gifts, but like bribes for good behavior. If I give someone something, it belongs to that person, to do with as they wish. If I say, “this is a gift for you, but only if you treat it the way I command; otherwise, I’m taking it away from you”, that is not a gift.

Eh good point. Gift is not the correct term for it. A covenant is a better way to describe it. God promises to do this if you do these things and don’t do these things. There is nothing we have claim to over God.

 

[Wardog]

Well, that’s the sort of nonsense I said results when you define Yahweh as good no matter what. First of all, we can’t see why what Ham did was so bad, so we have to make up a worse sin which the Bible says nothing about (though scripture has no qualms about mentioning incest and other crimes in other places, so why does it need a euphemism here?) for this to be a “euphemism” for.
But even if it was incest, how does that make Canaan, the baby, guilty? The Church, unless I’m mistaken, does not support the incest excuse for abortion; why would it do so here? The Ignatius explanation is just the sort of apologetic dodge that gives the devout an excuse to ignore a problem, so they never analyze it enough to see how silly it is. But once the veil of that need to believe gets torn away, we see what’s there and what’s not.

I like the Old Testament because the stories prompt me to think about why God acts the way he does. I could read it like a child and take everything at face value; this makes God a crazy guy who does things for no valid reasons.

Or I can read it with an adult viewpoint and consider the context.
Two ideas come to mind.

1. The world and mankind is still a work in progress. God has not yet chosen the Jews to be His People; he is still shaping mankind to get to that point. We do not consider the rancher who culls his herd to be bad, nor do we consider farmers who are separating the wheat from the chaff to be evil. We don’t consider the chess master who sacrifices a pawn to set up the game to win to be evil. And yes, compared to God, we are pawns. Anyone who considers them on the level of the chess master is committing heresy by placing himself at God’s level; this was the Original Sin.
2. Or consider that Noah replaced Adam as mankind’s representative in the new covenenant. God gave him the dominion over the world as he did to Adam. So when, in a fit of anger, Noah cursed Ham and his children, the curse was real and took. I view it as a cautionary tale for Popes and Bishops to consider when they issue statements on doctrine. Whatever they say on earth, so shall it be in Heaven. Even if it is a curse.
   I don’t view the OT as binding or historical fact; it does describe Truths from God for us to study and consider. The NT replaced the OT for Christians to follow.

 

[SGWessells]

Nate13 wrote: " I really don’t understand how you can have a problem with God “killing” someone since you would then have to essentially say he “kills” millions of people everyday.
Now if you want to talk about the few instances where God tells someone to kill someone else we can do that, but as far as God “directly killing” someone I don’t see how that makes any sense."

Interesting point. My objection was to killing one innocent person (the baby) to punish another (David). And there are a lot more than “a few” instances where God commands someone else to kill someone (as if one isn’t bad enough).

The same rules don’t apply to God, because he created the rules in the first place. Think about it. He created humans and we only live for a certain amount of time before we eventually die. It doesn’t matter how good we are or how perfectly we live we all suffer a bodily death. God has a right to do this because he created us. This does not make way for allowing abortions because we are not the creators of children. We are the way by which God chooses to create new life.

Convenient arrangement for God. My understanding of original sin is that God originally created man to be immortal, and imposed death on all Adam and Eve’s descendants – us – because they, not we, disobeyed him. So we die, not because God created us to die originally, but because of something our ancestors did; once again God punished the innocent with the guilty.
Also, if you say God has the right to do as he wishes with his creation, his creation has the right to judge his character by what he does with us, not just what his crew of hired flatterers says about him. Simply disposing of us at his whim proves only that he is a tyrant, not that he is a loving Father. If he wants to demonstrate that he is loving, he has to act like it. That is not a condition we impose on him, it is a condition imposed on him by his own character. We say God cannot lie because he is truth; we say he cannot punish unfairly because he is just; and so on. These are part of the way we define God. Since God is eternal – another definition – he is all those things before creating the world, right? So according to your theory of God, his nature is primary, and precedes creation. Therefore if anything in creation or his recorded acts in the Bible seems to contradict that definition, you don’t ever seem to question the definition; instead, you simply make up reasons why the contradiction is only apparent and not real, just as you made up the definition in the first place. So when typhoid fever makes a child deaf, blind and imbecilic for the rest of its possibly long life, you say, “God must have a good reason,” or “God is testing our faith” or “God wants to bring us closer to him” even though you have absolutely no guarantee that any of those statements is true, because the alternative is too dreadful to contemplate. But why do you make these excuses? Because you define God from the beginning as loving and all-powerful, but it seems unlikely that such a being would inflict so terrible and needless a fate upon a child. So the definition of a loving God causes these excuses, and the excuses confirm the definition; it’s all one big circular argument.

 

[SGWessells]

1. The world and mankind is still a work in progress. God has not yet chosen the Jews to be His People; he is still shaping mankind to get to that point. We do not consider the rancher who culls his herd to be bad, nor do we consider farmers who are separating the wheat from the chaff to be evil. We don’t consider the chess master who sacrifices a pawn to set up the game to win to be evil. And yes, compared to God, we are pawns. Anyone who considers them on the level of the chess master is committing heresy by placing himself at God’s level; this was the Original Sin.

A pawn is not animate; a cow is not made in God’s image. Nor is the typical chess master an all-powerful being who created the world and loves us. If we are pawns on God’s chess board (and who is his opponent?) then he can sacrifice us at will, but how does that fit the definition of a loving act?

1. Or consider that Noah replaced Adam as mankind’s representative in the new covenenant. God gave him the dominion over the world as he did to Adam. So when, in a fit of anger, Noah cursed Ham and his children, the curse was real and took. I view it as a cautionary tale for Popes and Bishops to consider when they issue statements on doctrine. Whatever they say on earth, so shall it be in Heaven. Even if it is a curse.
   I don’t view the OT as binding or historical fact; it does describe Truths from God for us to study and consider. The NT replaced the OT for Christians to follow.

God told Noah that the animals would fear him, not that Noah had dominion over them. Since Noah now had permission to eat the animals, their fear is understandable. Nor did Noah curse Ham, the offender – which is my point; he cursed the innocent Canaan. The Bible nowhere says that the judgments and decrees of Noah are irreformable and cannot be overruled by a higher authority. Your statement is an example of the excuses people make up to exonerate God, as I mentioned in my previous post.
But if you do not regard the OT as historical, all this is academic, and we have nothing to say about Noah except to rank him with the other legendary flood figures of world mythology. First, let me applaud you for a sensible judgment of historical likelihood. However, it brings up a problem: if the OT is not historical, what truths can it tell us about God? Is Gen. 1:1 historical? How about Noah’s flood? If that is not historical, your whole excuse about Noah’s dominion is irrelevant. Is Exodus historical? If not, where did the ten commandments come from? There’s no proof that they came from God. Besides which, Jesus thought that Adam, Abel, Noah, David, and Jonah were all historical, since he refers to them as such. By what standard do you divide the true stories from the false? And if some of the OT is not historical when it claims that it is, then it cannot be without error as the Church teaches.

 

[Nate13]

Nate13 wrote: " I really don’t understand how you can have a problem with God “killing” someone since you would then have to essentially say he “kills” millions of people everyday.
Now if you want to talk about the few instances where God tells someone to kill someone else we can do that, but as far as God “directly killing” someone I don’t see how that makes any sense."

Interesting point. My objection was to killing one innocent person (the baby) to punish another (David). And there are a lot more than “a few” instances where God commands someone else to kill someone (as if one isn’t bad enough).

Convenient arrangement for God. My understanding of original sin is that God originally created man to be immortal, and imposed death on all Adam and Eve’s descendants – us – because they, not we, disobeyed him. So we die, not because God created us to die originally, but because of something our ancestors did; once again God punished the innocent with the guilty.

You assume death is a punishment. I think a better word would be a consequence. When they sinned they turned away from God. When the angels turned away from God it was a one time choice that lasted forever and condemned those angels to spend eternity away from God. Before Adam and Eve sinned the Kingdom of Heaven was present on Earth, and God was among us. Once we chose to sin, it was a choice to live away from God since nothing that was not perfect could be in Heaven. By God allowing us to die he made it possible for us to have a chance once again of spending eternity with him. Yeah it sucks that our ancestors screwed up but I’m not even sure you can argue the current situation is worse than what Adam and Eve had originally. While there may be greater opportunities to do bad, there are also greater opportunities to do good. Us doing good also means more to God since doing good is not just the “norm”. Almost every act of good is done in favor on doing something bad.
In other words yes, what Adam and Eve did was bad, but God has taken what the wrong they did and made something even better out of it than what they threw away originally.

Also, if you say God has the right to do as he wishes with his creation, his creation has the right to judge his character by what he does with us, not just what his crew of hired flatterers says about him. Simply disposing of us at his whim proves only that he is a tyrant, not that he is a loving Father. If he wants to demonstrate that he is loving, he has to act like it. That is not a condition we impose on him, it is a condition imposed on him by his own character. We say God cannot lie because he is truth; we say he cannot punish unfairly because he is just; and so on. These are part of the way we define God.

Your assuming death is a bad thing in relation to how it was before. Read above. Death is not objectively a punishment. Death is morally neutral. The circumstances around a death are what determine whether it is “good” or “bad”

Since God is eternal – another definition – he is all those things before creating the world, right? So according to your theory of God, his nature is primary, and precedes creation. Therefore if anything in creation or his recorded acts in the Bible seems to contradict that definition, you don’t ever seem to question the definition; instead, you simply make up reasons why the contradiction is only apparent and not real, just as you made up the definition in the first place. So when typhoid fever makes a child deaf, blind and imbecilic for the rest of its possibly long life, you say, “God must have a good reason,” or “God is testing our faith” or “God wants to bring us closer to him” even though you have absolutely no guarantee that any of those statements is true, because the alternative is too dreadful to contemplate. But why do you make these excuses? Because you define God from the beginning as loving and all-powerful, but it seems unlikely that such a being would inflict so terrible and needless a fate upon a child. So the definition of a loving God causes these excuses, and the excuses confirm the definition; it’s all one big circular argument.

No it is based upon the fact that we can only choose to love God if we have free will. He could have created mindless slaves but their “love” would be a forced love and therefore not really love at all. In order for the possibility of being able to love to exist it is necessary for the possibility not to love to exist. Both of these possibilities have existed from the beginning of man, but just because the possibility to not love God existed doesn’t mean God wanted anyone to do just that. The story of Adam and Eve shows this and we also see that God took their decision not to love him at one point and brought even greater good out of it.

 

[Wardog]

A pawn is not animate; a cow is not made in God’s image. Nor is the typical chess master an all-powerful being who created the world and loves us. If we are pawns on God’s chess board (and who is his opponent?) then he can sacrifice us at will, but how does that fit the definition of a loving act?

God told Noah that the animals would fear him, not that Noah had dominion over them. Since Noah now had permission to eat the animals, their fear is understandable. Nor did Noah curse Ham, the offender – which is my point; he cursed the innocent Canaan. The Bible nowhere says that the judgments and decrees of Noah are irreformable and cannot be overruled by a higher authority. Your statement is an example of the excuses people make up to exonerate God, as I mentioned in my previous post.
But if you do not regard the OT as historical, all this is academic, and we have nothing to say about Noah except to rank him with the other legendary flood figures of world mythology. First, let me applaud you for a sensible judgment of historical likelihood. However, it brings up a problem: if the OT is not historical, what truths can it tell us about God? Is Gen. 1:1 historical? How about Noah’s flood? If that is not historical, your whole excuse about Noah’s dominion is irrelevant. Is Exodus historical? If not, where did the ten commandments come from? There’s no proof that they came from God. Besides which, Jesus thought that Adam, Abel, Noah, David, and Jonah were all historical, since he refers to them as such. By what standard do you divide the true stories from the false? And if some of the OT is not historical when it claims that it is, then it cannot be without error as the Church teaches.

There is a difference between Truth and facts. Take Genesis; I believe that God created the universe. I believe this not only because of my faith, but it makes sense that a logical ordered universe with clear coherent rules and laws was created with intelligence and not a result of cosmic randomness. But when it comes down to how it was created, I don’t know, nor does anyone else. We weren’t there. Did it really take 6 days, to 6 billion years, or some other amount of time. Beats me.

To clarify about Noah’s curse,he did curse Canaan. I said it was a cautionary tale. Maybe he did not really mean it, just was angry for getting caught drunk. But once said, it could not be unsaid.
Or it was part of God’s plan as he looked ahead. When the Jews reached the promised land, one of the first territories they took over was Canaan, presumably the land of the people cursed by Noah.
God may look cruel to us as he builds his plan. I think there is a lot of cruelty and injustice in the OT that is not in the NT. I have often wondered if this meant that God changed, or the people writing about him changed their perceptions of him.
In both testaments, the writers are drawing upon their own experiences and the ethos of the time to describe what is going on. Did the Flood cover the world? Don’t know. Was there a big event in the area that the OT writers considered the whole world? Probably. The Flood is not only recorded in the Bible, but in other epic stories from that age such as the story of Gilgamesh. Something happened. and a new covenant with God was made by survivors. Truth, not facts.

 

[SGWessells]

There is a difference between Truth and facts. Take Genesis; I believe that God created the universe. I believe this not only because of my faith, but it makes sense that a logical ordered universe with clear coherent rules and laws was created with intelligence and not a result of cosmic randomness. But when it comes down to how it was created, I don’t know, nor does anyone else. We weren’t there. Did it really take 6 days, to 6 billion years, or some other amount of time. Beats me.

To clarify about Noah’s curse,he did curse Canaan. I said it was a cautionary tale. Maybe he did not really mean it, just was angry for getting caught drunk. But once said, it could not be unsaid.
Or it was part of God’s plan as he looked ahead. When the Jews reached the promised land, one of the first territories they took over was Canaan, presumably the land of the people cursed by Noah.
God may look cruel to us as he builds his plan. I think there is a lot of cruelty and injustice in the OT that is not in the NT. I have often wondered if this meant that God changed, or the people writing about him changed their perceptions of him.
In both testaments, the writers are drawing upon their own experiences and the ethos of the time to describe what is going on. Did the Flood cover the world? Don’t know. Was there a big event in the area that the OT writers considered the whole world? Probably. The Flood is not only recorded in the Bible, but in other epic stories from that age such as the story of Gilgamesh. Something happened. and a new covenant with God was made by survivors. Truth, not facts.

One of the wonders of science is that we don’t necessarily have to "be there to know "; we can discover the distance to other galaxies and calculate how long it took their light to reach us, and so on. We can reliably date fossils by many different radiation decay rates; there are many ways we can deduce things that happened when we weren’t there by things we can measure when we are here.

Whether God changed or the perceptions of the OT writers changed, the Bible contradicts itself and is therefore unreliable either way.

As for your last sentence, whether “something happened and a new covenant was made” is the issue. If something in “fact” did NOT happen, there is no “truth” as a result. The truth here, as elsewhere, depends on the facts being factual. How can an event that never happened teach us “truth” about anything at all, except perhaps the power of us human beings to delude ourselves?
If Noah’s flood as not worldwide, then there were people somewhere unaffected by it. Therefore those people were not parties to the covenant God supposedly made with Noah, and were not bound by it.
Even if Noah’s curse of Canaan could not be reversed (and I still don’t see why not), how does that affect Canaan’s descendants? They were not included in the curse. All Noah said was the individual Canaan shall serve Shem and Japheth. It said nothing about Canaan’s descendants serving Shem’s descendants thousands of years later. It’s the same sort of story invading countries invent to justify their conquests throughout history, all the way up to George W. Bush and his WMDs that weren’t there.

 

[SGWessells]

By God allowing us to die he made it possible for us to have a chance once again of spending eternity with him. Yeah it sucks that our ancestors screwed up but I’m not even sure you can argue the current situation is worse than what Adam and Eve had originally. While there may be greater opportunities to do bad, there are also greater opportunities to do good.

While it is tricky to quantify things like good and evil, what I’m reading here requires it. Are you really saying that a world as full of murder, torture, theft, lies, cruelty, oppression, war, destruction, child abuse, racism, bigotry, (not to mention morally neutral events like fires, floods, tornadoes and hurricanes) is better than the world would be without these horrors? Then God should have given Adam and Eve a medal (though I don’t know where he would have pinned it ). It is true that certain virtues like mercy, forgiveness, courage, and fortitude, are impossible to practice without evil in the world…but why do we need so much of it?
I guess that’s a judgment each person must make from their own judgment, depending on how invested one is in upholding God’s love and goodness. But the “felix culpa” argument only works with those who agree that this world is better than Eden
That raises a question about Heaven, though. Do the saved have free will in Heaven or not? If so, then it is possible for God to make a world where people have free will, yet no one sins; in which case, our world is not the best alternative to the Garden. If not, they are the “robots” everyone assumes are the only alternative to free will, yet live in perfect bliss. Why couldn’t God have made us the same way? The only answer I can see is that he preferred the constant and unremitting evil of this world, in which a child dies of hunger every seven seconds (and how would feeding them interfere with their free will?) to a world in which everyone is happy. If that is how God is, how can his love be infinite? Even most of us sinners can love better than that.

 

[Nate13]

While it is tricky to quantify things like good and evil, what I’m reading here requires it. Are you really saying that a world as full of murder, torture, theft, lies, cruelty, oppression, war, destruction, child abuse, racism, bigotry, (not to mention morally neutral events like fires, floods, tornadoes and hurricanes) is better than the world would be without these horrors? Then God should have given Adam and Eve a medal (though I don’t know where he would have pinned it ). It is true that certain virtues like mercy, forgiveness, courage, and fortitude, are impossible to practice without evil in the world…but why do we need so much of it?

I did not say evil acts are necessary for great good to exist, but rather that the possibility to do evil needs to exist in order for us to do good and to choose to love God. At the end of the day we are the ones that choose to do evil and God does allow it because it he prevented it from occurring we would be incapable of loving him. Now if you want to ask why God cares so much about having us love him, why don’t you ask yourself why you care so much about being loved by other people? We were created in God’s image, and if we desire more than anything else to be loved that should be a pretty good hint as to what God wants more than anything.

Also, why do you think all the morally neutral events were not around before Adam and Eve sinned? They are a part of nature and why we have a planet to live on.

I guess that’s a judgment each person must make from their own judgment, depending on how invested one is in upholding God’s love and goodness. But the “felix culpa” argument only works with those who agree that this world is better than Eden
That raises a question about Heaven, though. Do the saved have free will in Heaven or not? If so, then it is possible for God to make a world where people have free will, yet no one sins; in which case, our world is not the best alternative to the Garden. If not, they are the “robots” everyone assumes are the only alternative to free will, yet live in perfect bliss. Why couldn’t God have made us the same way? The only answer I can see is that he preferred the constant and unremitting evil of this world, in which a child dies of hunger every seven seconds (and how would feeding them interfere with their free will?) to a world in which everyone is happy. If that is how God is, how can his love be infinite? Even most of us sinners can love better than that.

Heaven is full of people who have chosen to live fully in God’s love. Free will does exist in Heaven, but what makes Heaven different is that we are capable of conforming our will’s to perfectly reflect our intellects. We are given knowledge of exactly how our sins have offended other people and God as well as knowledge of God’s plan, and therefore any sin after that point would be similar to the sin of an Angel. You either choose to accept God’s plan or to deny God’s plan. All of your conclusions are based on the assumption that free will ends in Heaven and there is no reason to assume this. Don’t the angels still have free will?

 

[SGWessells]

the possibility to do evil needs to exist in order for us to do good and to choose to love God. At the end of the day we are the ones that choose to do evil and God does allow it because it he prevented it from occurring we would be incapable of loving him.

But there are a lot of evils God could prevent without interfering with anyone’s free will. He could warn people when there is about to be an earthquake or tsunami in their area, if he doesn’t want to eliminate them entirely. The people could still choose to heed or ignore the warning, just as people do in this country when the National Weather Service warns of a hurricane.
He could eliminate disease. I just filled out an online survey that listed over 50 different diseases, and that was not an exhaustive list. How do malaria, sleeping sickness, typhoid, cholera, and all the rest help us love God, when we reflect that he could eliminate them with a flick of his will? How would eliminating three-fourths of the world’s illnesses (presuming he insists on having any) interfere with people’s free will or ability to love God? It would not. All it would eliminate is the immense suffering of millions of people he allegedly loves.

What about the people who find it more difficult to love him because of the evil things he allows?

What about dictators who eliminate the free will of others? If God is so concerned about our freedom, surely it is better to eliminate the free will of one person rather than allow that person to eliminate the free will of millions. He still comes out way ahead in the free will department.

why do you think all the morally neutral events were not around before Adam and Eve sinned? They are a part of nature and why we have a planet to live on.

Show me where the Bible says they existed before Adam and Eve.

Heaven is full of people who have chosen to live fully in God’s love. Free will does exist in Heaven, but what makes Heaven different is that we are capable of conforming our will’s to perfectly reflect our intellects. We are given knowledge of exactly how our sins have offended other people and God as well as knowledge of God’s plan, and therefore any sin after that point would be similar to the sin of an Angel. You either choose to accept God’s plan or to deny God’s plan. All of your conclusions are based on the assumption that free will ends in Heaven and there is no reason to assume this. Don’t the angels still have free will?

Why can’t God give us that knowledge here and now? Wouldn’t that help us love him more, if that’s what he wants? I don’t assume that free will ends in Heaven; I simply ask this: if the souls in Heaven have free will and yet do not sin, why didn’t God make the same thing happen in our world? If you say, “he did – look at Adam and Eve,” that would be a parallel only if souls in Heaven could sin. If they did, would they be kicked out and cast into Hell? Since everyone in Heaven is a sinner, do they still have that sinful tendency inherited from Adam? If so, who can be secure in Heaven? And if souls are not secure, how can their happiness be perfect?
And how do we know the answers to any of those questions? Nobody I know has been to Heaven and told us about it. Yes, there are a lot of books claiming that, but they are not any more consistent than the bible, so how can we trust them? How do we know whether the unfallen angels – if they exist – can sin or not? It’s all just mist and daydreams.

 

[Nate13]

But there are a lot of evils God could prevent without interfering with anyone’s free will. He could warn people when there is about to be an earthquake or tsunami in their area, if he doesn’t want to eliminate them entirely. The people could still choose to heed or ignore the warning, just as people do in this country when the National Weather Service warns of a hurricane.
He could eliminate disease. I just filled out an online survey that listed over 50 different diseases, and that was not an exhaustive list. How do malaria, sleeping sickness, typhoid, cholera, and all the rest help us love God, when we reflect that he could eliminate them with a flick of his will? How would eliminating three-fourths of the world’s illnesses (presuming he insists on having any) interfere with people’s free will or ability to love God? It would not. All it would eliminate is the immense suffering of millions of people he allegedly loves.

You consider people dying from natural disaster to be “evil”. It appears you also consider suffering by which you see no apparent reason for to be “evil”. For one you should realize that all suffering has a purpose. All suffering makes us realize our weakness and need for God. The Old Testament elegantly portrays God attempting to show the Israelites this idea. Instead they kept relying on themselves or other gods. Only in times of great tribulation would they finally admit their weakness and turn to God. Nature reminds us of our relationship to God and how much we really need him. There are many other reasons that we can see for suffering, but this is one that holds for all suffering.

 

[fisherman_carl]

was it moral? I’m reading a book by protestant author who is going to some lengths to prove that it was all perfectly just, but I’m not sure how I feel about that. What’s the Catholic view?

Read Wisdom 12

"for your imperishable spirit is in all things! 2 Therefore you rebuke offenders little by little, warn them, and remind them of the sins they are committing, that they may abandon their wickedness and believe in you, O LORD!

For truly, the ancient inhabitants of your holy land, 4 whom you hated for deeds most odious— Works of witchcraft and impious sacrifices; 5   a cannibal feast of human flesh and of blood, from the midst of. . .— These merciless murderers of children, 6 and parents who took with their own hands defenseless lives, You willed to destroy by the hands of our fathers, 7 that the land that is dearest of all to you might receive a worthy colony of God’s children.

8 But even these, as they were men, you spared, and sent wasps as forerunners of your army that they might exterminate them by degrees. 9 Not that you were without power to have the wicked vanquished in battle by the just, or wiped out at once by terrible beasts or by one decisive word; 10 But condemning them bit by bit, you gave them space for repentance. You were not unaware that their race was wicked and their malice ingrained, And that their dispositions would never change; 11 for they were a race accursed from the beginning.

Neither out of fear for anyone did you grant amnesty for their sins. 12 For who can say to you, “What have you done?” or who can oppose your decree? Or when peoples perish, who can challenge you, their maker; or who can come into your presence as vindicator of unjust men? 13 For neither is there any god besides you who have the care of all, that you need show you have not unjustly condemned; 14 Nor can any king or prince confront you on behalf of those you have punished. 15 But as you are just, you govern all things justly; you regard it as unworthy of your power to punish one who has incurred no blame. …"

 

[marine13]

First, I was a Catholic for eight years, and read a lot of apologetics. There’s a difference between “not knowing” and “not agreeing.”

Your next statement shows that you do “not know”.

Second, it is the teaching of the Catholic Church that everything the Bible asserts, whether concerning faith and morals, history and science, is asserted by the Holy Spirit and therefore without error.

The Church only claims infalliblity when it comes to issues of faith and morals. Faith and morals do not include history and science. If you studied Catholic apologetics you would know this as it is clearly defined in the Catholic Catechism.

Thus, when the Bible says God commanded Israel to kill babies, God really issued that command. Those who assert his moral perfection despite that and many similar examples have to justify his conduct. That’s not my problem any more.

Third, what assurance do you have that the babies killed ended up in Heaven? Were they circumcised? No. Is there any reason they had the “circumcision of desire” (if there is such a parallel to “baptism of desire”)? If their culture was so wicked, who around them would desire it? If God foresaw that they would grow up “in an evil society and become lost in sin themselves,” why is he so indifferent to infants who have the same fate in other cultures?

I believe that God is perfectly loving and perfectly just, so faith leads me to believe that God accepted those children into heaven. I don’t require any more assurance than that. The main problem in your argument is that you presume to know the will of God and the plans He has for everyone. Your argument attempts to limit the limitless and confine the infinite into our earthly (and comparitively deminished) understanding of God’s omnipotent nature. My suggestion for you would be for you to study Salvation History according to the Catholic Church so you can gain a better understanding of why God did the things He did. It probably won’t answer all of you questions but at least it will give you a glimps into why Catholics believe in the mystery of His omnipotent nature, the issue of infalliblity, and moral absolutes.

Here’s a good place to start: newadvent.org/cathen/07790a.htm

If moral principles are absolute, how come God doesn’t obey them? If he disobeys them, yet remains perfectly good, then moral goodness is not dependent on obeying morality, no matter how absolute. If they are absolute only for us, and not for God, how do we know they are good? Either they are good because they come from God’s perfectly good character, or they are good only because God says they are good. But in the first case, he doesn’t follow them himself, so they don’t come from his goodness of character; in the second, they are completely arbitrary and could change whenever God changes them; in that case,there is no intrinsic reason connected with the action or its consequences which shows that murder, say, is bad, since the badness of murder is an arbitrary decree of God’s which he does not obey himself and orders others to disobey in scripture, and could reverse at any time, in which case murder would be an absolute good.

In short, as long as you adhere to the Catholic teaching of the infallibility and historical reliability of the Bible, absolute morality and God’s moral perfection cannot both be maintained; which is perhaps why so many Catholics either ignore biblical infallibility or explain it away.

I am just one man with a limited understanding of God. Even though that may be, I believe in God’s omnipotent nature. I can’t accurate explain it because it can’t be explained as it is a mystery. Some aspects of God cannot be fully understood by man’s limited capacity because God is infinite. You might see this belief as ignorant and possiblity even stupid but throughout all of my study and reaseach, questioning and even disagreement with the Church, I have always ended up agreeing with the Church because nothing else makes sense or provides a satisfying answer. I chalk it up to faith… that’s it.

 

[marine13]

Here is something I just considered:

In every other case where God punished man by either killing them directly (the flood) or ordering them to be killed (Sodom and Gamorrah), He always spared the innocent first. This brings me to the following passaage from Genesis 6:5-13

6 The LORD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. 6 And the LORD was sorry that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart. 7 So the LORD said, “I will blot out man whom I have created from the face of the ground, man and beast and creeping things and birds of the air, for I am sorry that I have made them.” 8 But Noah found favor in the eyes of the LORD. 9 These are the generations of Noah. Noah was a righteous man, blameless in his generation; Noah walked with God. 10 And Noah had three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth. 11 Now the earth was corrupt in God’s sight, and the earth was filled with violence. 12 And God saw the earth, and behold, it was corrupt; for all flesh had corrupted their way upon the earth. 13 And God said to Noah, "I have determined to make an end of all flesh; for the earth is filled with violence through them; behold, I will destroy them with the earth.

In the case of Joshua and the Canaanites, the reason why no one was spared was because “every imagination of the thoughts of (their hearts were) only evil continually,” and the people of Canann “corrupted their way upon the earth,” and there were no “righteous (men, woman, or children), blamless in (their) generation, (who) walked with God.”

If there were any innocence in that society God would have spared them. Because that society was completely and irrevocably lost in sin God inacted His just wrath. If there was any other way for God to have handled the situation I believe He would have done so.

 

[Kakieanne]

In reading the Book of Joshua, so many, many people were killed. And I wonder why such savagery. But the Israelites were led by God and were obeying God. There will probably always be things that we don’t understand (at least, that I won’t), but we know that we can trust in God’s love.