The Immorality of God - The Canaanites

[Esquilax]

Hold on...I'm not being disrespectful in any way.

If I say, "Well, of course this person cheers for the Patriots...what do you expect from a native Bostonian?", am I being offensive? No, I'm offering an explanation as to why someone might cheer for the team.

Similarly, if I suggest that someone might have an issue with God because he was raped by a priest or because she was threatened with hell by her baptist parents, am I being offensive? Or simply offering an explanation for an observed enmity?

Sorry, but when you distract focus away from the arguments you're being presented with, when you ignore them completely (as you did earlier on the page you posted this on, for one) in favor of speculating on what defects of intellect and character a person might have that leads them to disagree with you, that is being disrespectful. Aside from the obvious, frustrating implication in that, that a person cannot rationally disagree with your position, the fact is that you're trying to impugn someone's character at best, and at worst taking events in their pasts that would clearly be painful and traumatic to use as leverage to score rhetorical points on the internet. If you can't see how that's different from ribbing someone about their preference in sports teams, I don't know what to say to you.

This thread is all about tacking the arguments...well, one of them, anyway. The idea that God must be a moral monster because he ordered the destruction of the Canaanites. I have offered explanations for that order...though they are not sitting well with most.

If this thread is about tackling arguments, your failure to do so in favor of imputing biased motivations for daring to disagree with your (apparently presupposed to be infallible) position is only thrown into greater relief.

But the fact is, the destruction of the Canaanite cites has not been shown to be incompatible with the concept of a loving, personal God. And this is significant, because many in this forum falsely assume that God of the OT is a "prick" as one poster put it, and this misunderstanding supports their atheism.

Ah yes, and now we're at the favored logical fallacy of the theists: "Prove me wrong, or else I'm right!"

My earliest response to your claims, on about page three or four, meanwhile, remains completely ignored while you desperately scrabble to show that we're all meanie-pants who are against you, instead of approaching the arguments you've been given on their own terms.

And if someone slowly, carefully shows you otherwise? What then?

Then you would have an inoffensive, yet still empirically unevidenced, proposition on your hands.

That said, what we have now is an offensive position being defended by an apologist who thinks far too highly of his own arguments and seems incapable of even considering that they may be wrong.

Did you read what Dr. Francis Collins wrote here?

Are you always in the habit of making wild claims and then expecting us to do your homework for you in backing them up?

I respect Francis Collins as a professional, but I don't respect his justifications for his faith, nor will I let his scientific pedigree blind me to the fact that intelligent people can and will be wrong about things. In this case, a person swayed by the rhetoric of Lewis Carrol, in any sense, is most likely wrong in the belief it prompted them to come to: Carrol's defenses of christianity are sad and anemic, and the assertion that rational people could totally come to god by rational means similarly thinly supported, though I suppose it must come as great comfort to those who do believe. You, like them, will say that over and over, but when you were asked to justify or support it, all you did was accuse the questioner of bias, earlier today.

When it comes to actually accounting for these comforting assertions, all you were able to do was dodge the question. That hasn't escaped anyone's notice.