Formally Disproving Divine Command Theory

[The Grand Nudger]

Of course not, but I would shelter Israelite spies in Jericho, if you can’t see the distinction maybe you should re-read the OP to get a better grasp on what this thread is about.

Why? If you can't demonstrate the distinction then we have a problem.

It’s unfortunate you feel that way.

Wrong again, I find it very fortunate - having led to my very fortunate life.

Sure I have, your criticism is completely missing the entire point of this thread, refuting Divine Command Theory, so if Rahab was harboring God’s spies she was helping fulfill God’s commandment to take Jericho which is completely consistent with Divine Command Theory. I am surprised you missed that and wasted your time bringing up fugitives in other countries that have nothing to do with the Divine Command Theory.

Why would I give a shit about divine command theory Stat? I simply found it amusing that you thought the verse indicated anything other than the sort of treatment one might expect from collaboration with a given factions spies. You see, this probably should need to be said by now...but I don;t approach any verse in the bible via "if divine command theory" or "if pigs flew" - I just take it for what it is, a book, and try to understand what the people writing it might have been attempting to convey - with their admittedly different frame of reference.

That “organization” was God’s chosen people who had direct commandments from God to take Jericho, so if someone lied in order to protect the lives of those spies and help them carry out God’s decree they were doing something morally acceptable in accordance with Divine Command Theory because they were preserving the higher moral commandment. The point of this thread was to deal with alleged difficulties with the Divine Command Theory, but as I have pointed out the Bible already addresses this issue and makes it clear that a person is morally justified in not telling the truth as long as the desired ends are in accordance with God’s direct commandments or the higher moral law. This is why Christians will smuggle Bibles into countries that do not allow the preaching of the gospel and so forth.

I'm always impressed by the things you manage to read into your verses.

I never said it directly did. However, it does give us an example of how a person is justified in violating a lesser moral law in order to obey a higher moral law.

I don;t see what you see in that verse Stat. How did you determine which was the lesser moral law?

No, I never said that’s what the verse was dealing with; the verse is dealing with why lying can be morally acceptable in relation to Divine Command Theory if it is done to follow a higher moral law.

By reference to gods people, doing gods commands...presumably those are the good folks, and gods commands are the right ones...it really never rises above this criticism Stat.

There is nothing necessarily morally wrong with being a spy from a Biblical standpoint, since this entire thread is dealing with Biblical morality that’s what you’re going to have to stick with.

Hardly, but I appreciate the christian urge to insist that others stick with biblical morality.

Appealing to some other form of morality to argue against the internal consistency or objectivity of Biblical morality is fallacious.

Unfortunately I don't give any sort of primacy to your morality, nor do I think that biblical morality is in any way different than any other morality - so it would be difficult to understand how I might appeal to "some other form" of morality. Your stuff is the same stuff as everyone else's stuff. Nor would the internal consistency of a narrative impress me enough to argue against it as though it were indicative of anything beyond the narrative. One needn't go any further than the lines in the verse to see two examples of conflicting concepts of morality - the spies had to be sheltered from someone.

Whether the King of Jericho felt the spies deserved death is irrelevant from the Divine Command Theory perspective, he’s not the transcendent moral law giver.

Similarly, whether or not god feels that they don't is irrelevant - as he is not "the transcendent moral law giver" either.

I didn’t point to the verse to justify hiding “good” people from “bad” people, I pointed to the verse to answer the question whether or not Divine Command Theory allows for lying in certain circumstances and it obviously does.
No, you’re not philosophically sophisticated enough to believe in objective morality, that’s not my problem though.

To be blunt Stat, you did, but I appreciate that you felt the need to use more syllables than I.

You got destroyed yet again, the sooner you realize that the better off you’ll be. You’re such a contrarian that you jump into these debates just to argue about trivial points while not even having an adequate understanding of the OP.

Well, it may seem a trivial point to you, but not to me. We're obviously free to hold separate opinions on what is or is not trivial with regards to morality - or the various justifications given for any of it's incarnations.

Do you have anything to back that assertion up? I’d love to see you try and prove that something historically didn’t happen. This ought to be entertaining.

The people described in the book are not present in the region until centuries later. Two of the cities described did not exist at the time, two of the cities described (one amusingly, being jericho) had apparently been abandoned long - long before any conquest narrative. Hilariously, we see that the walls of jericho fell often - but not at this time. So...either there was no invasion - there was an invasion sans destruction and violence, or there was an invasion at some altogether different time.