A continuation of describing God's morals.

I was reading in the bible and I came across this:

Deuteronomy 13:6-11 (NIV)
"6 If your very own brother, or your son or daughter, or the wife you love, or your closest friend secretly entices you, saying, “Let us go and worship other gods” (gods that neither you nor your ancestors have known, 7 gods of the peoples around you, whether near or far, from one end of the land to the other), 8 do not yield to them or listen to them. Show them no pity. Do not spare them or shield them. 9 You must certainly put them to death. Your hand must be the first in putting them to death, and then the hands of all the people. 10 Stone them to death, because they tried to turn you away from the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery. 11 Then all Israel will hear and be afraid, and no one among you will do such an evil thing again."

I interpret this as that God does not care what the individuals are believing, all he want is to suppress them from sharing their religious beliefs with others. And the way he achieves that is by creating a fear from expressing your opinion by brutally killing those who do share their opinions.
So lets say there were two guys who had a belief in the same God, but a different God than "the Lord". One of the guys expresses their beliefs, and he is killed under God's command. The other guy sees that, so he does not express his belief and lives happily ever after. That is God violating freedom of speech, which is a moral way of thinking that human society developed later in our history which has proven to be a good thing.

Just some more food for thought.

Extract from one of my online debates on God's morals.

Thanks for a nice reply "name1"!

My reply here got aggressive again, it seems like that is inevitable haha. I would very much appreciate an answer to this post as well. Ps. "name2", this builds up my previous argument you are to talk to you dad about, so take this into consideration as well :)

You start by claiming to be confused by why I find God’s actions shockingly cruel. If you try to see it from my perspective, it becomes quite obvious why I find him cruel. I will try to make it very clear to you why, and I will be surprised if you are able to read all this without agreeing that something is iffy.

Genesis 6:6-7 (New International Version (NIV) ):

“6 The Lord regretted that he had made human beings on the earth, and his heart was deeply troubled. 7 So the Lord said, “I will wipe from the face of the earth the human race I have created—and with them the animals, the birds and the creatures that move along the ground—for I regret that I have made them.”

Ignoring the problem with an omnipotent God regretting something, any omnipotent ‘thing’ should NEVER kill the whole population of a planet. It is wrong in so many ways, and it cannot be justified. It is also most definitely not an action worthy of any worship by anyone.

Furthermore the list of God commanding to kill for various reasons is very long, and I won’t quote them, but I’ll give you the source of it. I went through all of them and checked them up against the version of the bible that you are reading – they are really there for you to see yourself:

Kill People Who Don't Listen to Priests (Deuteronomy 17:12 NIV)

Kill All Who Have Sexual Relationships With Animals (Exodus 22:19 NIV)

Kill Witches (Exodus 22:18 NIV)

Kill Fortunetellers (Leviticus 20:27 NIV)

Death for Attacking Parents (Exodus 21:15 NIV)

Death for Cursing Parents (Leviticus 20:9 NIV)

Death for Adultery (Leviticus 20:10 NIV)

Death for Fornication (Leviticus 21:9 NIV)

Kill Nonbelievers (2 Chronicles 15:13 NIV)

Kill False Prophets (Zechariah 13:3 NIV) & (Deuteronomy 13:1-5 NIV) & (Deuteronomy 18:20-22 NIV)

Kill the Entire Town if One Person Worships Another God (Deuteronomy 13:13-19 NIV)

Kill Women Who Are Not Virgins On Their Wedding Night (Deuteronomy 22:20-21 NIV)

Kill Followers of Other Religions. (Deuteronomy 13:7-12 NIV) & (Deuteronomy 17:2-5 NIV)

Death for Blasphemy (Leviticus 24:10-16 NIV)

Infidels and Gays Should Die (Romans 1:24-32 NIV) & (Leviticus 20:13 NIV)

Kill Anyone who Approaches the Tabernacle (Numbers 1:48-51 NIV)

Kill People for Working on Sabbath Day (REALLY??)(Exodus 31:12-15 NIV)

If the bible is God’s word, then based on all his commands of killing it cannot be that God is all-loving. So even if God was to exist, I would simply not care about his morals because I know that my human morals are superior to his. I would not kill people for such pathetic reasons as presented by your God, and if I was all-powerful as he is claimed to be I would stop this from ever happening as it is morally wrong. Do you agree with your God on all the justifications to kill mentioned above? If you do then you will be considered a horrible person in today's society. That is why I have just as much respect for your God that I would have for any random person holding these views because they are morally incorrect. I would be very surprised if it actually is such that killing people for working on a Sabbath Day is beneficial for the greater good, and I laugh of the thought of it. I am not saying that the existence of this evil is proof that God does not exist. This is only proving the God you believe in is a limited God, not all-knowing, all-powerful or all-loving, thus resulting in that the question of if he exists or not is a question we should simply not care about because we are better than that God.

I find several problems regarding your focus on free will being the source of this evil. Here I have presented commands from God, and I will use the one that says “Kill nonbelievers” or “people who follow other gods” as an example. If you through some sort of medium got a message from God saying “Kill Magnus, because he is a nonbeliever”. Based on the bible it is not unlikely that that will happen, as God has commanded people to kill countless times. What would you feel if you got that message? Would you kill me? Would you agree with your God that I do deserve to die? (I hope not). But surly a command from God is something you would not say no to, and furthermore by God commanding you to do anything is to remove your free will, which is supposed to be valued very high by God.

Regarding your "name2"and his mom’s example; let me put a twist on it. “A women has a Child, his name is "name2". She loves this child and will do anything to protect him. "name2" is a nice kid, and her mom wants her son to be able to do what he wants. So among other things, "name2" receives a gun by his mom. "name2" then killed a man at the age of 8. Despite killing, "name2" is not guilty, and we blame the creator of "name2", who is his mother, and we call her evil for giving her son a weapon, and throw her in Jail. The end.” That is more how I visualize the God and human relationship. God gave us evil, aka “the gun”, to play with and the free will to do whatever we want with that evil. But “luckily” we don’t have to be concern about the aftermath of what we do with the gun, because we know that whatever sinful thing we do, we will always be forgiven through Jesus. I have huge problems with this as well, because personally, what decides what I find right to do or not is how my actions affect either myself, people around me, society as a whole or nature, and whenever I do something wrong I have to be punished in a reasonable way such that I learn to be a better person. Christians don’t have to have that mindset, as they know that they will be forgiven for whatever they do and no punishment is required and no lesson has to be learned. If it was not for the society we have today to control people, the Christians could in theory do whatever they want without any fear of any punishment. I am sorry to say it, but religion hold the power to poison minds to the extent that it is a threat to a sustainable society

This got long as well. I want to end it by saying that I do not discuss all this because I feel an urge to win my debate. I do not care who wins the debate. The only thing I am concerned about is acquiring the truth. In fact, I hope that I am wrong and that you are right "name1", because I would find it extremely cool, fascinating and rewarding if you were to be right and Christianity's God does exist. But unfortunately deeper investigation on the matter has shown me that so far, the current view I have is the view most likely to be true.

More Adam and Eve

So I just watched this short video on YouTube of Richard Dawkins discussing morals with Howard Conder, and it made me understand the christian position a lot more, in a sense that I feel i can argue against it even more persuasively. I understand the idea of original sin and the need for Jesus' sacrifice now to be that since adam was perfect, there had to be another perfect being sacrificed for our sins to in a sense "redeem" Adam and Eve, because they were perfect. Now, before addressing the moral issues I have with this, i want to look at what has supposedly happened; God gave his own son for the sin of humanity. Christians would argue that this shows how much God loved us, and I do imagine they feel quite deep empathy for this action. However, I find it truly disgusting because God, being omniscient as he is, does not need to play by the rules of "an eye for an eye" and say, 'Oh, well since perfects beings took humanity into sin, I must sacrifice one to absolve them of it'. He could simply, as mentioned by Dawkins, have forgiven us without having to sacrifice Jesus. Now, a Christian might respond that and eye for an eye is what justice is, and because God is just, he had to play by those rules. I find it horrifying that Christians find that that was a moral action to do, along with the whole concept of an eye for an eye. It is the most primitive logic, and I feel it adds to the obvious fact that Christianity was simply thought up by pre-medieval men! The sacrifice of Jesus is comparable to a judge presented with a murderer that is one of his sons. Now the judge loves his son so instead of punishing him he forgives him. This would be amazing, touching even! However, the story is not over there; the judge says he will forgive his son of murder, but must hang his younger, innocent son to be just. This is absolutely horrific! Why do people sympathise with this? This is the premise of the Christian faith and it frightens me. 

Another issue i have with the story of Jesus that I have yet to hear a good counter argument to is the fact that God left humanity to sin for four thousand years before intervening and sending his son down to die. This makes absolutely no sense when you consider God's character; that he 'loves' us. It makes much more sense that humans invented Christianity as they did all other religions, and that's why there's a portion of time where God apparently decided 'eh, not now, i'll let them all go to hell for a while'. Think about that. 

Finally I would like to answer one of my questions from a previous blog, reinforcing my previous arguments regarding original sin. I asked more or less why would God not just create more Adam and Eve's and just let the humans who eat from the tree die, and those who don't be in harmony with him. it's because, like I argued previously, he knew we would pick sin from the start! The only logical reason he would not simply let every human decide for him or herself whether to eat from the tree is that he realized, whether before or after Adam and Eve, that people would always choose knowledge over him. I've heard the explanation for why we must bear the burden of Adam's decision from many christians and they all have said that it's because we all would have made the same choice as they did. To which I now say, so by by nature you think humans are sinful? Even if we were perfect we would choose to stray from your God? This is a horrible outlook on people in general, and must tear at the emotions of any true Christian, as it would for me if I was also one. Why live like this? From an atheistic perspective it's absolute lunacy to live like that. Wake up. 

Adam & Eve: Why the Christian God is an ASS

I’d like to bring some arguments out regarding free will and original sin as well, because even assuming that the bible has it right, there are some issues I can’t get past when considering original sin:


1. Adam and eve existed before sin and evil came in to existence and were in perfect harmony with god, i.e. the "perfect humans", or "humans as god intended them to be". Correct that if it is wrong. Now, if those two were initially perfect, what does it say about their character that Eve chose to eat from the tree of knowledge in spite of the fact that god said not to? It means that the perfect humans, the ones that were in perfect harmony with god, chose to disobey him. It follows that by even perfect human nature, evil, sin and disconnection from god are more attractive to us or more part of our character than is the love of God. Why would and omniscient, omnipotent and omnibenevolent god create creatures like this in the first place? One might then say, however, that this choice to disobey God came from free will, which was given to us because God loved us (your position, yeah?). Now, if it was out of our own free will that Adam and Eve ate from the tree and you say it is NOT in our nature to disobey God even as perfect, sinless humans, why not just create more Adam's and Eve's until they don't disobey him? Why not just let every person decide on his or her own whether to eat from the tree of knowledge? This brings me to my second argument.


2. Let's say Eve chose not to eat from the tree of knowledge. That's a decision of inaction; there was no "one action" she could have done to ensure that humans would be with god and without sin forever. Her and Adam were just like that (with God) to begin with, and had the choice to take action and eat from the tree, or remain inactive and not eat. That being said, it was incredibly unfair of god to put that tree there because sin is a one-time choice that changes everything forever, whereas staying with god must be a constant choice...

In essence, if one has freedom of action and no knowledge of evil (as Eve did), when there is a choice of action vs. a choice of inaction presented to them, it is guaranteed that at some point in time, that individual will exercise their free will and choose the choice of action. It must logically be true then, that if God is all-knowing, he knew upon creating humans that if he were to give them free will, an option to sin but no knowledge of sin, we would choose evil eventually. It follows that either it was God's intention for his creation to disobey him and be forced to endure the consequences of their inevitable choice (he is not all-loving), or he did not foresee this event happening (he is not all-knowing).

Furthermore, even if God told Eve not to eat from the tree, that means that to remain in connection with god infinitely, Eve could not truly exercise her "free will"! To have truly been in eternal harmony with God, the original humans were required to live with a limiting condition on their free will, imposed by God himself! So, either we had to live without being able to exercise our free will, or we could exercise our free will and be forever plagued with sin. These issues make me very frustrated at God, should he exist.

So about yesterday...

I thought about it more and i kind of agree and don't at the same time... it makes perfect sense that we all came from the same cell sure, but my argument was that the constituents of the cell didn't come from the same chemicals per-say. Also should we use this like a chat or just post complete stuff? Probably just complete ideas...
- Torin

At this point in the discussion it is important do use the definition of life. Wikipedia states that something is called life when it has a self-sustaining process. I'm rusty on my biology but I would dare to claim that nothing  will be categorized as life on a sub-cellular level. Therefore all those constituents off a cell you talk about have not existed with a self-sustaining process, thus not life. The cell constituents that existed in the first self-sustaining cell  back in the days are not remotely similar to the ones we see today and were just mere complex chemical reactions. I believe that when they by coincidence started to collaborate, evolution exploded and all life originates from that one cell. I would think that the odds for all those complex chemical reactions and molecules to come together so perfectly is so small that it is most likely that life originated only once on planet Earth.
- Magnus

I agree we must use the definition of life, and therefore sure, we all came from the same cell. YAY we agree, except that the definition of life is not simply a self-sustaining chemical reaction; Even in labs today scientists have made self-replicating molecules but do not remotely classify them as life. I was looking this up today and that was part of the reason i decided to side with the last universal ancestor theory. What got me is that if you look at all life now, it is composed of one or more very similar, basic cells (human DNA can be transplanted into bacteria and it the human genome will be replicated, even though it's useless to the bacteria), all divisions of a parent cell... so yes, i think we all originated from the same cell :). My point is that the constituents of a cell would've been self sustaining or else they would not have lasted long enough to become integrated into a cell. In other words, a cell is a big sack of self-maintaining chemical reactions that happen to be beneficial to each other?
- Torin

Hlo sir

Test post

HI TORIN