Morality With God?

[SkepticTheist]

Growing up Catholic, I was taught that God loves us all and that this love is supposed to be greater than any love that we can have for ourselves, family and/or friends. As I read the Bible, I found it hard to believe that the God that I was taught to believe in could do things to people that I would never even consider doing to another person. Is this God’s love? Can it even be considered love? I don’t know … I would like your opinions on what occurs in the Bible as according to God’s rule or those acting in His name or with Him on their side in both the Old and New Testament. I do not mean to shove this on anyone but it is a serious question for me and a major block of my own belief.

About Genocide/Infanticide:
Deuteronomy 2:34
Deuteronomy 3:6
Deuteronomy 7:2
Deuteronomy 7:16
Deuteronomy 13:15
Joshua 6:21
Joshua 10:40
Samuel 15:2-3

About Rape (and murder):
Judges 21:10-24 NLT
Numbers 31:7-18 NLT
Deuteronomy 20:10-14
Deuteronomy 22:28-29 NLT
Deuteronomy 22:23-24 NAB
Samuel 12:11-14 NAB
Deuteronomy 21:10-14
Judges 5:30 NAB
Zechariah 14:1-2 NAB

About Slavery:
Exodus 21:7-11 NLT
Leviticus 25:44-46
Exodus 21:2-6
Exodus 21:20-21
Ephesians 6:5
Timothy 6:1-2
Luke 12:47-48

Human Sacrifice (not including Jesus):
Genesis 22:1-18
Exodus 13:2
Leviticus 27:28-29
Judges 11:29-40
Joshua 7:15
Kings 13:1-2
Deuteronomy 13:13-19

If God’s love is greater than our own, why does He do things to His children that we would never think of doing to our own? (I hope) The argument that God’s ways are greater than our own or that he made us so he can do as he wishes are fine but … my question is … is this love?

 

[Iron_Donkey]

Yes it’s love, you’ve just fallen victim to the old trick of pulling stuff out of the bible, interpreting it in the worst possible way, and acting as though that interpretation is truth.

On slavery for example:

When God choose the Israelites, He didn’t choose a perfect people. Doubtless there were righteous among them, but for the most part they were just people doing what people did at the time. And what people did at the time was pretty brutal.

When God choose them, He could have forced them to act differently by directly overriding their wills, but that would be a worse sort of slavery then what was going on at the time. He could have required that everyone behave perfectly, and executed or otherwise punished those who did not, but that would likely have resulted primarily in a lot of dead Israelites.

So what He actually did was slowly bring the people as a whole towards a better and better understanding of truth and morality. What you find in the bible is not so much mention that slavery is a good thing, but a set of limitations and understandings on and of slavery that limited the harm that it could do and whittled away at it over time, until we all now know that slavery is a terrible thing.

The two things to keep in mind here are that 1) the OT laws were written a long time ago for a people in a different set of circumstances and 2) we should not be so arrogant as to assume that our morality is an inherent part of who we are and that were we around in ancient times that we would have been any better. For the most part, it has been God’s way to guide rather than force, and the guiding started out with baby steps. Had we been born in those times, it is likely that we too would have needed to be told not to beat slaves to death.

So, do not confuse the fact that God guides people from where they are to where He wants them to be with the falsehood that God approves of where they are.

 

[SkepticTheist]

I am confused … I was under the impression that the Bible was divinely inspired and that it is the word of God. I agree that God cannot force people to do as He wishes and that it would not be love if He did. I see the Bible as God’s word and what God wants … so to say that he does not endorse everything it says confuses me. If God did not endorse what the Bible reads than why put it in the Bible? Why not use the Bible to show people what He does endorse even in those primitive times where people may not have listened?

Thank you for your kind response.

 

[mymamamary]

Growing up Catholic, I was taught that God loves us all and that this love is supposed to be greater than any love that we can have for ourselves, family and/or friends. As I read the Bible, I found it hard to believe that the God that I was taught to believe in could do things to people that I would never even consider doing to another person. Is this God’s love? Can it even be considered love? I don’t know … I would like your opinions on what occurs in the Bible as according to God’s rule or those acting in His name or with Him on their side in both the Old and New Testament. I do not mean to shove this on anyone but it is a serious question for me and a major block of my own belief.

About Genocide/Infanticide:
Deuteronomy 2:34
Deuteronomy 3:6
Deuteronomy 7:2
Deuteronomy 7:16
Deuteronomy 13:15
Joshua 6:21
Joshua 10:40
Samuel 15:2-3

About Rape (and murder):
Judges 21:10-24 NLT
Numbers 31:7-18 NLT
Deuteronomy 20:10-14
Deuteronomy 22:28-29 NLT
Deuteronomy 22:23-24 NAB
Samuel 12:11-14 NAB
Deuteronomy 21:10-14
Judges 5:30 NAB
Zechariah 14:1-2 NAB

About Slavery:
Exodus 21:7-11 NLT
Leviticus 25:44-46
Exodus 21:2-6
Exodus 21:20-21
Ephesians 6:5
Timothy 6:1-2
Luke 12:47-48

Human Sacrifice (not including Jesus):
Genesis 22:1-18
Exodus 13:2
Leviticus 27:28-29
Judges 11:29-40
Joshua 7:15
Kings 13:1-2
Deuteronomy 13:13-19

If God’s love is greater than our own, why does He do things to His children that we would never think of doing to our own? (I hope) The argument that God’s ways are greater than our own or that he made us so he can do as he wishes are fine but … my question is … is this love?

Thats a whole issue of Biblica Ethics. You must also remember that GOD is the author of life, and as the surpeme Author, can give or take it.

 

[R_C]

Oh, the usual presumption…but don’t worry, we all go through this trial at one time or another…the trial of the creature of finite, imperfect intellect setting himself as the judge of the Creator.

A man who was in fact a genius and one of the greatest philosophers of Western civilization (besides being one of the top theologians the Church ever had), Thomas Aquinas, goes over these and other doubts from a very sound and logical standpoint in Summa contra Gentiles. You can find it in print, or online (ex. here). Reading this magnum opus will give you the basic, rudimentary knowledge that can lead to understanding just how erroneous the creature-judge stance is.

Surely you may tell me that not everyone, not even all Catholics, read the Summa contra Gentiles. To which I may reply that those who have the gift of faith do not sit God in the defendant’s sit of the courtroom, but rather we humble ourselves before that majestic library that is the Magisterium of the Catholic Church, filled with 20 centuries of books written by people who spent their entire life studying the Bible, and who have gone over these things again, and again, and again, and we learn how they teach us to understand the Old Testament in the eyes of the New Testament, and we learn that the Bible is the word of God, but Christ is the living Word of God who in the beginning was with God and was God, and became flesh, and said: “if you see me, you have seen the Father”. And it is intellectually dishonest to affirm, after having read the Gospels, on the certain, scriptural premise that Christ is God, that God does not truly love us. Aquinas employs his gift of outstanding intellect to explain through reason (for he shows that we do not need revelation to grasp the truth of Catholicism) but anyone who can meditate for 5 minutes on Christ stopping the teachers of the Law from stoning the adultress and forgiving the crucified thief, or in general anyone who can humble himself for 5 minutes at the sight of a crucifix, cannot avoid falling in love with Love himself.

Mind you, I am afraid you did not put together that list. You are reading anti-Catholic, anti-Christian sources that do not seek the truth, but only to spread their beliefs. That is harmful and not reasonable. The right place to go for information about Catholic belief, in fact the only place to go for complete and authoritative information, is the Catholic Church herself.

Paul Whitcomb wrote a short book called The Catholic Church has the answer, where he collects the basic answers that lead to his conversion to the Church, and writes:

The Catholic Church is the world’s largest, and Christianity’s oldest, religious body. Her [1.2 billion] members inhabit the width and breadth of the earth, comprising almost one-fifth of the total human population. She is far and away the most popular religious concept the world has ever known.

Paradoxically, however, the Catholic Church is also the world’s most controversial religious concept. Catholic belief is different, too different to be orthodox, say Protestants and Christian cultists.

Catholic belief is too ethereal to be logical, and too strict to be enjoyable, say the humanists and agnostics.

Hence to millions of people, Catholicism is not only a colossal success, it is also a colossal enigma.

Of course, there has to be an explanation for these contradictory opinions, and there is an explanation: Protestants and others who have questions about Catholic belief too often make the mistake of going to the wrong place for the answers.

Too often books written by religious incompetents are consulted. The result is incomplete and distorted information. With such information, one cannot help but see the Catholic faith as a colossal enigma.

Hence, dear reader, if you are an outsider, an unaffiliated Christian, or an agnostic, who wants to know the truth about Catholic belief, take this friendly advice: Seek out a Catholic priest and put you questions to him. You will find him a very understanding and obliging person.

Or read this little booklet. This booklet was written by a Catholic who knows the questions you are likely to ask, as well as the answers, because once he, too, was outside of the Catholic Church, looking in. The questions in this booklet are basically the same ones he put to a Catholic priest, and the answers are basically the same ones given him by that priest. Read this booklet; then forget all the fiction you have heard about the Catholic Church, for you will have the gospel truth.

I hope some of the above helps. I embrace you in the holy embrace of Christ, who seeks your heart, that Christ who as God needs nothing, and yet as Christ Jesus, the Son of Man, needs love, my love and your love.

 

[SkepticTheist]

Perhaps I should start with the basics … What is love?

 

[SkepticTheist]

Mind you, I am afraid you did not put together that list. You are reading anti-Catholic, anti-Christian sources that do not seek the truth, but only to spread their beliefs. That is harmful and not reasonable. The right place to go for information about Catholic belief, in fact the only place to go for complete and authoritative information, is the Catholic Church herself.

You are correct I did obtain those versus from an atheist website however I have also read the Bible and (I gave references) they are there. I do not see the relevance to the discussion. Does not the Catholic church base many of its moralities and rules from the Bible?

 

[Iron_Donkey]

I am confused … I was under the impression that the Bible was divinely inspired and that it is the word of God. I agree that God cannot force people to do as He wishes and that it would not be love if He did. I see the Bible as God’s word and what God wants … so to say that he does not endorse everything it says confuses me. If God did not endorse what the Bible reads than why put it in the Bible? Why not use the Bible to show people what He does endorse even in those primitive times where people may not have listened?

Thank you for your kind response.

Indeed it is divinely inspired, but the question is: what sort of divinely inspired thing is it?

The laws came from God (perhaps some from Moses acting as the agent of God), and a fair amount of that law was timeless moral law that always applies. Some of the law was not meant to be timeless and not communicated in such a way as to imply that.

The history, in so far as it is supposed to be history in the sense that we understand it (which isn’t very far) also had morals built in. For example, you see many people doing things that we know is bad, without the bible directly saying right at that time that they are bad, but with bad consequences. That is sort of a hint.

Then there are the stories involving such things as the “ban” on the Amalekites. But even with these we must be a bit careful: what is scripture actually saying?

First, there’s the direct sense that life and death belongs to God, and if He calls someone to Him at any given time that is within His rights, so it is just. Second, if we’re going to read such books as God actually ordering things, we must read the books in the context of the soul being immortal and God being in fact God - so such people would have been judged at their death fairly. We can in no sense say that we know such actions, done by God, would be unloving because we have absolutely no way whatsoever to know what the state of those souls were, what the state of those souls would have been at another time, or what would have happened had such action not taken place.

Third, we must keep in mind that history was not practiced then as it is now. For example, the Amalekites are actually mentioned again after they supposedly were exterminated in the passage that everyone loves to attack. So even though God certainly could have ordered the deaths of anyone justly and without contravening His loving nature (since loving doesn’t actually mean warm and fuzzy, but rather valuing the ultimate good of the other whether they know what it is or not), it is not clear that he actually did. And sense the authors at the time did not use history like we do now, this does not contradict the divine inspiration of scripture because scripture was not divinely inspired to be a 21st century history book.

The question then remains: why would such a passage be in there at all, if it’s possible that it is not historically accurate? And to answer that we go back to what we said about their history not being literal history, but rather stories based on the past meant to illustrate a point.

In this example, the war against the Amalekites illustrates the battle against sin. God commands that sin be annihilated entirely. The king at the time gets rid of most of it, but wants to keep those parts that he sees as mostly harmless and as useful or pleasurable to him. That isn’t acceptable. Sin must be annihilated.

Pretty much every OT passage can be read like that. We are to read the OT in light of the new, and to follow the interpretations of the Church in understanding what it means. The bible has been around for a while now, and the Church has been reading it for a while now (it’s not likely that after 2000 years someone is suddenly going to discover something in the list of books that the Church itself declared divinely inspired that disproves the Church. I mean, they did read the books before putting them in the cannon), so when in our reading we run into issues like these, we can generally be assured that they’ve been answered already.

 

[Southern]

If you received this all off an athiest then you have been deceived. Even Satan tempted Christ in the desert using scripture. Remember scripture also has it that “Thou shalt not tempt the Lord your God.” Scripture was Christ’s rebuddle. Be careful that you do not consult bible versus with an athiest. Remember also that Satan knows scripture as well and also uses it to tempt us. He has planted the seed of Doubt and now you said yourself you are confused. People make their own destiny according to their choices. Christ Said he condems no one. We condem ourselves. Only we can send our selves to Heaven, Hell, or Purgatory. Repeat this over and over again. “Jesus I trust in You” Seek and you shall find, knock and the door shall be opened to you, ask and you shall receive. God Bless!

 

[PetrusRomanus]

OP, you have to read verses from the Bible in their proper context. You cannot pick and choose excerpts and then come to a conclusion.

Moses allowed divorce. If you stopped there you would assume divorce was acceptable. If you read further, we see Jesus correcting this saying “It was not so from the beginning.”

 

[R_C]

You are correct I did obtain those versus from an atheist website however I have also read the Bible and (I gave references) they are there. I do not see the relevance to the discussion. Does not the Catholic church base many of its moralities and rules from the Bible?

The Bible can be used to justify any human belief you can possibly think of. This is why an angel awoke the apostle Philip and commanded him to walk in a certain road, where he meat a foreigner, an Ethiopian, reading the Bible, specifically the verse:

He was led like a sheep to the slaughter,
and as a lamb before its shearer is silent,
so he did not open his mouth.
In his humiliation he was deprived of justice.
Who can speak of his descendants?
For his life was taken from the earth

What does this even mean?? The humble Ethiopian, too, had read the Bible. Yet, when Philip asked: “Do you understand what you are reading?” he replied: “How can I, unless someone explains it to me?”

This is the basic understanding behind the word Magisterium - the teaching authority of the Church. Reading the Bible is not enough. Christ told the apostles: “To you it has been granted to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven”, and further: “He who listens to you listens to me; he who rejects you rejects me; but he who rejects me rejects him who sent me.” The teachers of the Law that confronted Jesus had spent their entire existence too, reading and studying Scripture, and yet they did not recognize the Messiah, nor did they fully grasp the spirit of the Law. Why, they too had read the Bible, but they were exceedingly astonished when Christ said: “God has made the Sabbath for man, nor the man for the Sabbath”, or when He taught: “You have heard: “do not murder”, but I tell you that anyone who insults his brother will be subject to judgment”.

We must understand that the Bible is not God. Not God. And also that it is a great mystery. Follow my premise: if we hold that the Bible is a Sacred Scripture and that the writers were under the guidance of the Holy Spirit who spoke through the prophets, can we at the same time think that each of us can simply understand what each thing means? No, the gift of Understanding and of Knowledge are needed, and the Holy Spirit grants them and increases them to those who are humble and approach their teacher rather than becoming their own teachers. This is why I said: don’t worry, we all go through this. For “we are all blind, and if we are blind, then we have no fault”. However, if we say we are not blind, then most certainly our fault remains. If the blind man leads the blind man, both will fall. But if the one had said: “I can see”, then surely the other will blame him for the fall!

 

[R_C]

Let us go over an example together. Do you think it makes any sense that God would ask an old man to take his son to the top of a hill and murder him? Does an omniscient God have any need to do such trials to find out if a man is faithful to Him? This is enough for the majority of those who do not seek truth, but just to discredit the Church and Christianity.

Now consider this:

• God asks a Father to offer his only son, his firstborn.
• the man knows that God is life itself, and not just that, but goodness itself. In humility he does not disobey, but he knows that God will not harm his son.
• when they reach the hill, the father tells the servants: “we will worship, and come back to you”. We, not I.
• the son carries the wood for the sacrifice. He sees that there is no animal to be offered, and keeps moving forward. The son said: “Father, behold the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb?” And the father: “God will provide Himself the lamb.”
• the son let his father tie him on the wood. At this point there was no doubt of what was going on, yet the son remained quiet.

He was led like a sheep to the slaughter,
and as a lamb before its shearer is silent,
so he did not open his mouth.
In his humiliation he was deprived of justice.
Who can speak of his descendants?
For his life was taken from the earth

At this point, God speaks to him. First an angel holds his hand, sparing the son’s life - Isaac’s life. A lamb is not offered, but a simple ram. God speaks to the father, Abraham, and says:

By Myself have I sworn, saith the Lord, because thou hast done this thing, and hast not withheld thy son, thine only son, that in blessing I will bless thee, and in multiplying I will multiply thy seed as the stars of the heaven …] and in thy seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed; because thou hast hearkened to My voice

Fast forward about **1800 **years, to the birth of Christ, the Son of God, of whom a poor prophet from the desert said: look, here comes the Lamb of God. His life ended by carrying on his shoulders the wood on which he was willing to be sacrificed. Unlike the other son, he tasted death, but did he truly die? Surely not, for He had said: “I am the resurrection and the life” and “I have power to lay down my life and to take it back again”. This man was called Son of David, and the angel that spoke to his mother said: “God will give him the throne of his ancestor David and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever” David was a descendant of Jacob, who was son of Isaac, son of Abraham. In Christ was then fulfilled the promise of blessing all the nations of the earth - not just the chosen few, but all the nations - and we should go on for a while to show what this blessing is and how it developed. However, it was ultimately because of Christ that Abraham and Isaac had to undergo that trial, and that event took place. It was so that 18 centuries later, the people would be able to understand what it meant: “Behold, the Lamb of God”, so that a humble Ethiopian would be able to understand who was this man who was silent as a lamb before its shearer, who in his humiliation was deprived of justice. So that 28 centuries later a billion people may look at that only Son who willfully lets himself be tied to the wood of the sacrifice, the Son of Man who out of love dies in place of the son of a faithful man.

Do you want to know what is love? Love is to let yourself be hit so that your brother will be spared, even though you did nothing and he is guilty of a lot. Love is to forgive someone who tortures you because he does not know what he is doing. Love is to give freedom to your children, yet remain discretely by their side - in fact, within their heart - so that if only they were to try and be good, they would receive incredible gifts that would allow them to do so. Love is to love for the sake of loving, without asking for anything in return, always ready to forgive, like an old father with his little child. Love is a God that becomes Man so that men may partake in the divine nature and before a world that calls him a product of randomness and the descendant of apes, he may remember that “what is from the flesh is flesh, what is from the Spirit is spirit” and that “the flesh accounts for nothing, for it is the spirit that gives life”, and that “we were born once in the flesh, but we must be born again of water and Spirit”, and that in this rebirth we have the full right to call ourselves the children of God.

Love is to look at those who did wrong and are condemned by others, to look at those who are sick, poor, suffering…to look at them, cry, and then turn towards the others and tell them: whatever you do to these, you do to me! If you mistreat them, you mistreat God himself. If you leave them hungry, thirsty, abandoned, and sick, you are doing this to God. And do you want to be forgiven? Well, then learn to forgive! Love is to give hope to those who have no reason to hope, and to send those who have something to help those who have nothing. Love is to let us know with infallible certainty that there is a heaven to which we are all called to go, in which we see God face to face in what can only be described as a perfect, eternal joy, and that this life of sorrow will only last an instant and be quickly forgotten once we attain that heaven in which we were always meant to be and from which we removed ourselves by our own actions. Love is for me to know that those kids whom a crazy man shot are now in a state of eternal joy, watching over their own parents, and to know that a man whom a century ago killed a young girl called Maria Goretti repented and loved God with all his heart after he was told that the last words of the dying girl were: “I forgive him, and I want him in heaven next to me!” The power to do this, and the strength to do it. That is love.