A Levite and his concubine

[abaris]

In other words, your authority is your own conscience, but someone else's conscience may justify it.

And I would not hesitate to call them evil. Believe me, inside I'm barfing at the concept, but the Nazi's conscience was perfectly OK with killing jews. Does that make it right?

Actually, if you look at evolution, it appears that the fittest survive.

What you mean is social Darwinism, which again points to Nazi ideology and Eugenics that actually originated in the USA. Darwin used it in a different context: "better designed for an immediate, local environment". Which doesn't necessarily mean the strongest. In fact, if there's little food, the weakest may be best suited.

I get my ultimate morality from the bible. The bible tells me that genocide is immoral, but it also tells me that governments have the authority to punish wrongdoers by treating them in ways that would be otherwise be immoral. God is our creator and ultimate authority and he has the right to punish us for our wrongdoings. The greatest thing is that because of his love for us, instead of the penalty of eternal death that we should suffer, he paid the price for us. So now, instead we have eternal life, even though we must suffer certain consequences for our sin, such as living in this messed up world.

You believe what you want. That's the beauty of it. According to the above, I certainly don't agree with that, since you're not using your own conscience or head or whatever you want to call it, but what an ancient book tells you to believe in.

[Lek]

You believe what you want. That's the beauty of it. According to the above, I certainly don't agree with that, since you're not using your own conscience or head or whatever you want to call it, but what an ancient book tells you to believe in.

You just showed that someone's conscience could be way off.

[Fidel_Castronaut]

Wow. You are truly a disgusting human being.

Why? Because I wish to treat one another with love and respect?

Even women?

How magnanimous.

[vorlon13]

You left off verse 29.


The BEST part, you twit !!!!

Oh, so I did.

29 When he reached home, he took a knife and cut up his concubine, limb by limb, into twelve parts and sent them into all the areas of Israel.

While I don't agree it's the best part, it is definitely disturbing.

So in a few days to a few weeks later, all the corners of Israel get a helluva a surprise in the mail.

"Oh, look! The Levite sent us something!! Wonder what's in the package?"


{rustle, rip, tear, GASP!!!!}


"EEEEEEEEEK !!! OMG, the perv sent us a jism saturated twat !!!!!!!

[Astrogod07]

But there is no hard scientific evidence showing that genocide is unjustified. I get my ultimate morality from the bible.

Morality is not a scientific concept. It is based on things like empathy, past experience, and your own subjective judgement. You may have moral ideas that you consciously set, but no two people that share the same ideals will always make the same decisions. You get your morality from the bible, while a muslim gets his morality from the Qaran, and a Hindu gets his morality from the Vedas. How do we decide that the bible has the "true" moral standard? We could have a long discussion on deciding morality, but that is an entire conversation of its own.

The greatest thing is that because of his love for us, instead of the penalty of eternal death that we should suffer, he paid the price for us. So now, instead we have eternal life, even though we must suffer certain consequences for our sin, such as living in this messed up world.

But it is god that decides what sin is, and what the punishment for sin is. Therefore, god does not get to play the savior from the punishment for sin when it is he himself who created that punishment. He could just forgive us. He is the one who decided that blood had to be shed to atone for sin, and there is no reason that he needed to do that. The entire idea of an eternal punishment of suffering for a finite transgression is evil. It isn't even possible to do wrong against god. He is omnipotent and cannot be harmed. To be punished under a system in which we have no say and to be judged and manipulated by a being that exercises absolute authority over us is unjustifiable. The god of the bible is a despot and a tyrant.

In Numbers 31 Moses, under the direct command of god, orders his soldiers to slaughter all the Midianite men, woman, children, and infants, EXCEPT the young girls that had never slept with a man. Them, they were told to keep the virgin girls for themselves Are you seriously going to tell me that this is acceptable in your biblical-based morality? These are the direct orders of Moses to his soldiers, on God's authority. Even if you can justify the slaughter, are you really going to argue that there is ANY context in which it is morally acceptable to force young girls to be wives or sex slaves for their conquerors?

[Esquilax]

So, what you're saying is that there's some context that excuses, off the top of my head, genocide?

What i'm saying is that, according to the bible, God is the creator and is allowed to do what he wants to do with his creation.

Whoa, I'll stop you right there. You're wrong. According to the bible, god is asserted to be allowed to do what he wants to his creation. But an assertion is not justification of itself, and it does not automatically mean that god is morally justified in doing whatever he wants with his creation, because not every use of a creation is moral. For example, I may own a huge amount of food, but if I take it over to some hungry orphans, pretend to give it to them, and then burn it in front of them, I am acting immorally.

Additionally, you are working from the unjustified assumption that property rights of this nature carry over on every type of creation, and this also is not true; my parents created me, but if they harm me they are doing something immoral and I will be taken away by the state. The right of ownership is not automatically granted every time. A privately owned nuclear power plant cannot be driven intentionally into meltdown, even though it is someone's creation. If you're about to argue that this is because it harms others.... well yes. And god isn't when he commits genocide?

Also, one could argue that self awareness and consciousness, at a given threshold of complexity, represents something that should morally be exempt from ownership, given our need for self determination and how that informs our morality.

Now let's talk about free will. Does god not interfere with that? If he doesn't, then he clearly had no creative hand in the existence of any living human being ever, beyond Adam and Eve, as the procreative act is something freely chosen by one or more individuals, and if god so much as nudged that then he is necessarily interfering with free will. You might try to argue that god created the raw materials for humanity and so gains the rights there, but that's also not exclusively the case; increasingly we are recognizing the legal rights of ownership of people who remix the works of others. You don't really have any leg to stand on in just asserting that god has property rights over reality.

No doubt you're just going to argue, at base, that god is special somehow and because he's so magic, he gets all these special rights anyway. But that's not actually an argument, that's just an assertion of authority. In moral systems, authority is granted, not taken by fiat- don't bring up parents or I'll bring up child welfare- and if your only line of defense is "well, that's just the way it is!" then you've effectively given up on any sense of rational argument.

All these terrible things that you attribute to God are attributed to man's sin in the bible.

Of course. And the child abuser is just so sad that his kids make him hit them. The spousal abuser really does love his wife, which is why he corrects her so violently. The drug addict isn't really a criminal, he just needs to rob this convenience store to get his next fix. But it's all okay really.

Blaming all this on man's sins just reeks of rationalization. It's shifting the blame to the victims, but you've yet to actually establish how our sins are harmful to god, nor that lethal capital punishment is a morally justified action, nor that killing babies is morally correct given the sins of their parents. You have a lot of work to do before you can go "oh, but you don't understand! The sins!"

These are consequences of people's sins and it's all just.

Fiat assertions aren't particularly compelling, to someone not working from the same unjustified presuppositions as you.

In the end, God himself, removes our guilt and gives us eternal happiness, free from all this. So yes, we do suffer consequences for our sin. If your father was a gambler and frittered away all the family's money, you would suffer the consequences of that. If you're going to evaluate the God of the bible, take all the bible into consideration before you make a final judgement.

So what context is there, beyond the fiat assertions that it's really okay, actually, do you have that excuses these acts? Because "It's okay because god says it's okay!" is not an argument, it's a circular tailspin into tautology.

You can have your won opinion, but that's not the opinion of the writers. If you don't believe that we're responsible to God for our sins, then you're not interpreting the bible as the writers intended it to be.

Really? If I want to make sense of the bible, then I've got to just assume that everything is morally correct in the bible, as that's what the writers did?

No can do, Lek. The bible wasn't written as some morality play, if we're taking it as a factual account of events then the gloss the writers put onto it does not change the actual moral status of the events. Not to Godwin, but you can find plenty of Nazi propaganda extolling the virtues of the final solution, and just because I won't go along with the egregious moral lies of the authors does not mean I'm somehow missing the point. It means that the writers have asserted something that I find factually incorrect, and can support with much more than the simple "It's god, so it's fine!" nonsense you can support your view with.

Another thing is that I can tell a story about someone doing evil acts without inserting my opinion of whether they were evil or not.

Sure. And if you inserted your opinion that all those evil acts were actually extremely good, would I be missing the point if I didn't agree with you?

[vorlon13]

So, what's the biblical way to divvy up a corpse into 12 pieces ??

Head
lower right leg
upper right leg
lower left leg
upper left leg
lower right arm
upper right arm
lower left arm
upper left arm
shoulders/boobies
midriff
pelvis/naughty stuff


adds up to 12, but knowing how touchy God is, we should take care to do it right.

[Godscreated]

Judging one era of time from another holds little value. To criticize a time and people without understanding what life was like then is not a responsible action.

GC

well lets see you can die by doing any little thing back then they were immoral. god loved death in the bible so it made it easier for him to get souls and send them up or down.

I think you need to prove your misrepresentation, please.

GC

---

Judging one era of time from another holds little value. To criticize a time and people without understanding what life was like then is not a responsible action.

GC

Wait, what? Are you suggesting that moral standards are relative?

No, times change the human mind set.

GC

[Jackalope]

Wait, what? Are you suggesting that moral standards are relative?

No, times change the human mind set.

GC

That doesn't exactly square with your previous statement.

Is it, or is it not your belief that we have an objective, universal, timeless standard by which we can judge moral behavior?

If so, then your statement that we can't judge the morality of cultures from past eras is utter horseshit.

[Mudhammam]

At first I read the title as A Lesbian and her porcupine.

But then I was seriously hoping A Levite and his concubine was going to be the title to a children's book, complete with pictures. That would have been cool.