ARCHIVE: Fool is only fooling himself

[Stripe]

Sure I do. I just think it's interesting you immediately take it upon yourself to declare yourself "exonerated" as though you had something to prove. I always thought the truth was self-evident. Interesting choice of words, that's all.:cheers:

ive made obscure remarks throughout this discussion that any input from the christian side is foolhardy in the extreme. once one enters this debate one is 'on trial .. i think im justified in using that analogy. i only make my points because i think it might help others understand how one can logically and with 'moral safety' hold onto the bible and its author
and from what i can see of what i have wirtten and the response ive received - the truth is evident. the original question is either irrelevant or dishonest. i have no case to answer (given that i volunteered to stand).
i could tell you exactly the wording youd need to make in the original question if you wanted to convict me. that would be the easiest thing in the world. unfortunately too easy for this situation.

 

[Granite]

ive made obscure remarks throughout this discussion that any input from the christian side is foolhardy in the extreme. once one enters this debate one is 'on trial .. i think im justified in using that analogy. i only make my points because i think it might help others understand how one can logically and with 'moral safety'
and from what i can see of what i have wirtten and the response ive received - the truth is evident. the original question is either irrelevant or dishonest. i have no case to answer (given that i volunteered to stand).
i could tell you exactly the wording youd need to make in the original question if you wanted to convict me. that would be the easiest thing in the world. unfortunately too easy for this situation.

Dismissing the question as "irrelevant" or "dishonest" makes this comment of yours a little troublesome: "I believe the story, I can't imagine how it's justifiable." So either the story's irrelevant and doesn't matter one way or another, or the story is somehow dishonest and still justifiable.

Belief in something so terrible you can't justify it seems like a very big quandary for a Christian. Do you see the problem you've created for yourself by lacking any moral justification for this account?

 

[Balder]

An atomic bomb does not discriminate.

I would have had no problem dropping the atomic bomb on Afghanistan or Iraq or any of those Muslim countries directly after 9-11.

I would have had no problem turning the entire region into a glass factory.

So you believe in indiscriminate killing in wartime.

Would you mind taking a stab (pun intended) at the question I asked you previously, without resorting to a question in return?

Here it is again:

"What is the difference between a suicide bomber who walks into a crowded public area and blows himself up with the intent of taking out civilians, including the children who he sees are present, and intentionally dropping bombs on urban areas with the intent of killing civilians, including the children you know must be there?"

 

[Stripe]

Dismissing the question as "irrelevant" or "dishonest" makes this comment of yours a little troublesome: "I believe the story, I can't imagine how it's justifiable." So either the story's irrelevant and doesn't matter one way or another, or the story is somehow dishonest and still justifiable.

Belief in something so terrible you can't justify it seems like a very big quandary for a Christian. Do you see the problem you've created for yourself by lacking any moral justification for this account?

i didnt dismiss this question, i subjected it to a thorough examination.
i dont need to justify everything i believe in. in fact if youd pursued the bait i left for you youd have discovered i can justify nothing. i can however tell you if a question is irrelevant or dishonest.
its not a quandary to "believe" this story as a christian. i can hold this story as fact and assert with all confidence my actions if a similar command were made of me.

the next step is to adjust the question. which means i stand justified in my analysis that the original question was irrelevant.

or fool could admit the dishonesty of the original question. thereby i would stand justified in my assertion that the original question was dishonest.

 

[Granite]

i didnt dismiss this question, i subjected it to a thorough examination.
i dont need to justify everything i believe in. in fact if youd pursued the bait i left for you youd have discovered i can justify nothing. i can however tell you if a question is irrelevant or dishonest.
its not a quandary to "believe" this story as a christian. i can hold this story as fact and assert with all confidence my actions if a similar command were made of me.

the next step is to adjust the question. which means i stand justified in my analysis that the original question was irrelevant.

or fool could admit the dishonesty of the original question. thereby i would stand justified in my assertion that the original question was dishonest.

Refusing to justify your beliefs has disastrous consequences (as well as some good). In any event, if you cannot justify your beliefs or the actions of your "God", why should anyone listen to you?

If you can't see the problem in butchering infants per the commands of your deity, you have my best wishes and sympathy. And automatically assuming fool must have been dishonest in asking the question in the first place once again shifts the burden from the Christian God back to fool, which is of course a clever diversion.

 

[Nathon Detroit]

So you believe in indiscriminate killing in wartime.

Of course!

That's what war is all about! Why do you think wars are rarely won anymore? If you really want to win a war and it's imperative you take no chances of losing, you might need to do whatever is necessary to win. You might need to bomb your enemy into submission in an effort to saves the lives of your own countrymen.

Todays modern clinical warfare is only effective if you have complete dominance over your enemy like we do in Iraq. If Iraq were a real threat we wouldn't be able to fight as "nice" as we are now.

Would you mind taking a stab (pun intended) at the question I asked you previously, without resorting to a question in return?

Here it is again:

"What is the difference between a suicide bomber who walks into a crowded public area and blows himself up with the intent of taking out civilians, including the children who he sees are present, and intentionally dropping bombs on urban areas with the intent of killing civilians, including the children you know must be there?"

A suicide bomber is normally not part of the military. He is acting on his own killing targets that are not part of the war effort but instead in acts of terrorism. When countries are at war with each other they may in fact drop bombs on each other, that is the distinction (in your example). War effort verses individual terrorism effort.

 

[Stripe]

Refusing to justify your beliefs has disastrous consequences (as well as some good). In any event, if you cannot justify your beliefs or the actions of your "God", why should anyone listen to you?

heh .. you limit my ability to project my own shortcomings onto the entire human race methinks. i cannot justify my beliefs. i have no right or ability to justify anything about god. nobody should listen to me, but if you accept that i cannot justify myself then you must assume i consider the same to be true of all people. yet this theory falls down on itself because we are forever talking to each other, trying to justify ourselves. whatever you make of my stance you cannot hold me accountable to the original question. i see your frustration, you want me to take responsibility for the actions of someone else just because i love him .. but i wont accept that responsibility. i cant, i wont.

If you can't see the problem in butchering infants per the commands of your deity, you have my best wishes and sympathy. And automatically assuming fool must have been dishonest in asking the question in the first place once again shifts the burden from the Christian God back to fool, which is of course a clever diversion.

dear grantie .. i CAN see the problem with butchering infants at the command of god. i WONT do it. i DONT KNOW how HE COULD! this is why the question is irrelevant or dishonest because it refutes those two statements. and those two statements dont refute each other.

i give fool the benefit of the doubt and welcome any alteration to the original question. if he cannot do that then he is being dishonest in maintaining it to me. if he is being dishonest with me then he runs the risk of being potentially dishonest to every christian.

 

[Granite]

heh .. you limit my ability to project my own shortcomings onto the entire human race methinks. i cannot justify my beliefs. i have no right or ability to justify anything about god. nobody should listen to me, but if you accept that i cannot justify myself then you must assume i consider the same to be true of all people. yet this theory falls down on itself because we are forever talking to each other, trying to justify ourselves. whatever you make of my stance you cannot hold me accountable to the original question. i see your frustration, you want me to take responsibility for the actions of someone else just because i love him .. but i wont accept that responsibility. i cant, i wont.


dear grantie .. i CAN see the problem with butchering infants at the command of god. i WONT do it. i DONT KNOW how HE COULD! this is why the question is irrelevant or dishonest because it refutes those two statements. and those two statements dont refute each other.

i give fool the benefit of the doubt and welcome any alteration to the original question. if he cannot do that then he is being dishonest in maintaining it to me. if he is being dishonest with me then he runs the risk of being potentially dishonest to every christian.

So you see the problem and acknowledge you would not follow this order. So you'd run the risk of disobeying the almighty himself? Why or why not?

 

[fool]

heh .. you limit my ability to project my own shortcomings onto the entire human race methinks. i cannot justify my beliefs. i have no right or ability to justify anything about god. nobody should listen to me, but if you accept that i cannot justify myself then you must assume i consider the same to be true of all people. yet this theory falls down on itself because we are forever talking to each other, trying to justify ourselves. whatever you make of my stance you cannot hold me accountable to the original question. i see your frustration, you want me to take responsibility for the actions of someone else just because i love him .. but i wont accept that responsibility. i cant, i wont.


dear grantie .. i CAN see the problem with butchering infants at the command of god. i WONT do it. i DONT KNOW how HE COULD! this is why the question is irrelevant or dishonest because it refutes those two statements. and those two statements dont refute each other.

i give fool the benefit of the doubt and welcome any alteration to the original question. if he cannot do that then he is being dishonest in maintaining it to me. if he is being dishonest with me then he runs the risk of being potentially dishonest to every christian.

The question is not dishonest.
It's taken right from the Bible, if you believe the Bible is historicaly accurate then it's not a hypothetical, it's a decision that was faced by real people.
If you believe that the story is not accurate then you can feel free to treat the question as a hypothetical.
Also, showing that the God of the Bible is immoral doesn't prove he's not real.
And, saying that God wouldn't ask you to do what you can see he has asked of people before is a cop out.

 

[allsmiles]

Of course!

That's what war is all about! Why do you think wars are rarely won anymore? If you really want to win a war and it's imperative you take no chances of losing, you might need to do whatever is necessary to win. You might need to bomb your enemy into submission in an effort to saves the lives of your own countrymen.

Knight, i don't want to be a one note band with my Sun Tzu veneration, but don't you see the quality of waging a war with the intention of causing the least amount of damage and blood shed possible? do you think victory cannot be acheived unless the most damage is done? how do you know that "whatever is necessary to win" is causing your enemy and his populous the most harm possible? don't you think there's any value to Sun Tzu's stragey of defeating the enemy with the least amount of damage possible?

Todays modern clinical warfare is only effective if you have complete dominance over your enemy like we do in Iraq. If Iraq were a real threat we wouldn't be able to fight as "nice" as we are now.

dominance can be asserted any number of ways, and according to Sun Tzu the highest and best moral and humane strategy is to assert dominance with the least amount of blood shed. do you not find value in that?

A suicide bomber is normally not part of the military. He is acting on his own killing targets that are not part of the war effort but instead in acts of terrorism. When countries are at war with each other they may in fact drop bombs on each other, that is the distinction (in your example). War effort verses individual terrorism effort.

i'm not convinced that any of us are qualified to judge the status of an insurgent or his motivation. their definition of "war effort" is obviously vastly different from ours, but that has to do with the culture they've been brought up in, and the position they have been forced into. it's easy for us to sit back and judge the insurgents, but we really have no clue as to the world they must face on a day to day basis and how they perceive us.

i'd still like to know a few things:

in the Jericho genocide, was the city already taken at the point when the massacre began? was victory contingent upon the slaughter of the non-combatants? if it was, why? if it wasn't, why? why did they have to die? what was the tactical advantage? what was the economic or political advantage?

 

[Stripe]

So you see the problem and acknowledge you would not follow this order. So you'd run the risk of disobeying the almighty himself? Why or why not?

do you realise how far AROUND this position youve run? now you want me to reconsider my complete abhorrence of the mention of deliberate harm to a child. i run no risk, i will simply NOT DO IT. and id thank you to cease and desist with any line of questioning that puts the merest hint of reproach on my stance.

i have explained myself thoroughly, the burden is now totally upon fool. either he retracts his question altogether, rephrases it (please god no!) or admits his dishonesty...

there .. i gave him another option.

i also offer the following to anyone else reading:
either the god i love is real or fools entire line of questioning is illogical in the extreme in any attempt to disprove him.
each of you who reads this has three options:

• either admit that fools question was illogical, irrelevant and/or dishonest, or
• admit the god of the bible is real, or
• run and hide.

 

[Balder]

A suicide bomber is normally not part of the military. He is acting on his own killing targets that are not part of the war effort but instead in acts of terrorism. When countries are at war with each other they may in fact drop bombs on each other, that is the distinction (in your example). War effort verses individual terrorism effort.

Do you see any moral difference between the acts? If a country considers itself at war with another country but doesn't have the resources to rally a big army, may they engage in such acts with the same "moral justification" that you allow for bombers to kill civilians indiscriminately? Because there's not much difference between the acts themselves, other than the atomic bomb (or the like) being much more destructive overall.

 

[allsmiles]

dear grantie .. i CAN see the problem with butchering infants at the command of god. i WONT do it. i DONT KNOW how HE COULD! this is why the question is irrelevant or dishonest because it refutes those two statements. and those two statements dont refute each other.

if you aren't a moral relativist then your god certainly is.

and genuinoriginal, your comparison of executing two civilians to an entire civilian population of a metropolis fails for more than obvious reasons. trying to justify tyranny by comparing it to tyranny won't work :nono:

 

[Stripe]

The question is not dishonest.

ah .. the man of the moment. this is your time fool. ok, im sorry - i will remove the 'dishonest' option from any further comment. i know a lot has been posted since you were last here so i will address everything in this post even though it may have been addressed already.

It's taken right from the Bible, if you believe the Bible is historicaly accurate then it's not a hypothetical, it's a decision that was faced by real people.
If you believe that the story is not accurate then you can feel free to treat the question as a hypothetical.

i take the story as fact. the question was a hypothetical unless you have a time machine and can send me back to the time it happened...

Also, showing that the God of the Bible is immoral doesn't prove he's not real.

uh .. im not sure what you mean. i have no comment on the morality of god. my post 179 assumed three options for your intention when posing the question.

And, saying that God wouldn't ask you to do what you can see he has asked of people before is a cop out.

i didnt say that god wouldnt ask me .. i said i wouldnt do it.

 

[allsmiles]

stipe, you may be unwilling to evaluate the moral competence of your god, as depicted in the OT, but a non-christian has no problem doing it. compare the humanity and tactics of your OT deity to those of Sun Tzu.

Sun Tzu's tactics are far superior to those of your god's... his treatment of humans, though barbaric at times as GO was astute enough to point out, far out weighs your god's, as depicted in the OT.

it's not that you can't judge your god's morals, it's that you won't. that you must concoct an argument to excuse yourself from the obvious common sense judgement available to anyone unhindered by faith is telling.

 

[Balder]

i also offer the following to anyone else reading:
either the god i love is real or fools entire line of questioning is illogical in the extreme in any attempt to disprove him.
each of you who reads this has three options:
either admit that fools question was illogical, irrelevant and/or dishonest, or
admit the god of the bible is real, or
run and hide.

This is illogical, Grant. It simply doesn't follow. If the Bible says God commanded genocide and the slaughter of children (on more than a few occasions, not a single isolated incident), then it is certainly justifiable to ask why it was done, whether it was really justifiable, and what modern Christians would do if asked to do the same thing. Just because you love God doesn't matter. Perhaps you'd defend an abusive parent this way too: "It doesn't matter what he did! He's not accountable because I love him!" But that's emotionally driven evasion, not facing the facts.

 

[Nathon Detroit]

Knight, i don't want to be a one note band with my Sun Tzu veneration, but don't you see the quality of waging a war with the intention of causing the least amount of damage and blood shed possible? do you think victory cannot be acheived unless the most damage is done? how do you know that "whatever is necessary to win" is causing your enemy and his populous the most harm possible? don't you think there's any value to Sun Tzu's stragey of defeating the enemy with the least amount of damage possible?

It all depends on the battle.

It depends on the strength of your enemy, the strength of your own army. There are a million variables that determine how you wage war.

dominance can be asserted any number of ways, and according to Sun Tzu the highest and best moral and humane strategy is to assert dominance with the least amount of blood shed. do you not find value in that?

Sun Tzu (if he actually existed) was a murderer who is now rotting in hell.

i'd still like to know a few things:

in the Jericho genocide, was the city already taken at the point when the massacre began? was victory contingent upon the slaughter of the non-combatants? if it was, why? if it wasn't, why? why did they have to die? what was the tactical advantage? what was the economic or political advantage?

I suggest you read the stories for yourself.

 

[Nathon Detroit]

Sun Tzu's tactics are far superior to those of your god's... his treatment of humans, though barbaric at times as GO was astute enough to point out, far out weighs your god's, as depicted in the OT.

As a relativist you cannot make that claim.

What you percieve to be "superior" is only "superior" relative to you so who cares?

 

[Stripe]

stipe, you may be unwilling to evaluate the moral competence of your god, as depicted in the OT, but a non-christian has no problem doing it. compare the humanity and tactics of your OT deity to those of Sun Tzu. Sun Tzu's tactics are far superior to those of your god's... his treatment of humans, though barbaric at times as GO was astute enough to point out, far out weighs your god's, as depicted in the OT. it's not that you can't judge your god's morals, it's that you won't. that you must concoct an argument to excuse yourself from the obvious common sense judgement available to anyone unhindered by faith is telling.

sure you can try and evaluate gods morals. i wont try and defend the killing of babies though. but if you want to make any rational sense or statements on reality then you are forced to admit he is real. if you admit he is real then you admit he is far superior to any human being in every way. I CANT AND I WONT pretend to be able to justify what god has done. you are free to try as you like.

i have not concocted an argument. i have answered EVERY issue that has been raised in a clear and precise and consistent fashion. i DONT excuse myself from the obvious common sense judgement. if you have READ anything i have written then you will see that as ABUNDANTLY clear.

my use of CAPITALS indicates my ANGER in that your line of questioning completely ignores the fact that I WANT NOTHING TO DO WITH THE KILLING OF BABIES. if you persist with such lines of inquiry i will be forced to REPEAT MYSELF!

 

[Nathon Detroit]

Do you see any moral difference between the acts? If a country considers itself at war with another country but doesn't have the resources to rally a big army, may they engage in such acts with the same "moral justification" that you allow for bombers to kill civilians indiscriminately? Because there's not much difference between the acts themselves, other than the atomic bomb (or the like) being much more destructive overall.

There is also another factor that hasn't been discussed at all. The motivation for war. For instance it is wrong for a country to bomb another country (no matter who they are killing; military or civilian) if their motivation is simply to conquer them and steal their land and resources etc.

Yet if a country is defending themselves or their interests or allies it is NOT wrong to bomb the offending country.

Similar to.... it is wrong to kill another person with the sole motivation of stealing their money. Yet it is not wrong to kill a person to defend yourself, your family or another innocent human.

The absolute moral cannot be determined at the macro level i.e. is it wrong to kill a human?

Instead the absolute moral can be determined atfer the circumstances are determined.

I.e., is it absolutely wrong to kill another person with the sole motivation of taking their money?