(October 26, 2013 at 10:14 pm)Lion IRC Wrote: Noteworthy? Abortion doesn't seem to get much publicity. Herod was not a nice guy. He killed his own relatives too.
You're just baiting, but I'll take you up on it and thrash you. Abortion is by definition NOT the killing of an infant. The majority of abortions take place well before the fetus stage. And in fact, there are legal issues preventing later term abortions in all but extreme circumstances. And to even make this type of argument work for you, you have to make a 'potential life argument', which I'll be happy to do.
I'm not sure what killing his relatives has to do with this. My point was that if such had happened, clearly it was recorded because it was found newsworthy.
' Wrote:It's not a problem for me. Sometimes there are 'end-justifies-the-means' excuses for terrible violence.
1) Not for an omnipotent, omniscient and perfectly-good being. No outcome is of ANY difficulty for it. It contradicts its apparently fundamental goodness. It could have convinced the Canaanites to leave. It could have converted them. But it chose genocide.
Further, using an 'ends-justifies-the-means' ethic means you cannot support God via a Divine-Command morality. And as I just mentioned, it's fundamentally in contradiction with God's supposed capabilities.
Quote:More babies died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki than in Canaan.
You don't hear Lawrence Krauss apologising on behalf of scientists for the physics that produced the atom bomb!
Firstly, that's stupid beyond belief. There were less people in Canaan than Hiroshima and Nagasaki, so more couldn't be killed anyway.
Secondly, the Israelites didn't have the technology to kill that many people. If there were as many Canaanites in the story and the Israelites had atomic weaponry, they could have killed just as many people, and if we take the story seriously, they WOULD have killed that many people.
We don't need Krauss to do that. Einstein (who helped both indirectly and somewhat directly in its creation) apologized for and felt somewhat ashamed in having done so.
