(February 22, 2021 at 11:38 am)The Grand Nudger Wrote: The story of abraham and his son is instructive without the need to hear from any of those guys. It's not a story about an evil god, it's a story about virtuous people. Uniting people into a moral community is the business of a religion. In this case, asserting the virtues of sacrifice, obedience, and filial duty. The performative brinksmanship of the god in the narrative is just a convenient setup for those assertions.
What do you think of those assertions to moral truth? Are they virtuous attributes?
(even more specifically to your question - do you believe that there are faithful people who might take them to be moral truths?)
I wasn't referring to the story in a specific sense but as a tongue in cheek example of a boundary to obedience. What if God told you to kill your child(with no expectation that an angel would stop you)? That is my question. Is it something a theist could just trust and do? Could they trust in God that much that they might assume they would be stopped? Could they trust that whatever their God commanded them to do was automatically right? Or is a God that would tell you to kill someone called into question merely for demanding such a thing of you, when he is supposedly powerful enough to do it himself? If killing your kid is a "no", my question then is "why?" What disagreement do you have with being commanded to do something hard and distasteful? If he's all powerful and perfectly good, what is the problem? What couldn't you justify with "God told me to"?
The actual story of Abraham and Isaac has nothing to do with this topic, so, it's allegorical origins aren't relevant. Sorry for the casual language of my post making it confusing.
I said it in my OP but my thesis is, I don't think theists have thought very hard about their beliefs. Those who said, "Most people believe what their fathers believed or follow the religious traditions they were raised in" are reiterating my point in a different way. That belief is flimsy and devotion and sacrifice to a religion is only tolerated because of "I like this" and could be abandoned/replaced if there was a big enough "I don't like that." I'm not calling into question their morals so much as I'm proposing God and religious commands are nothing more than a reflection of the believers' own feelings.
