A simple question for theists

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

And yet the Bible is ripe with instances of god telling people to kill someone who's innocent. So it's not the Bible that tells you you're not talking to god, but your own human conscience and secular laws.

Do you have an example of where any Christian is commanded by God to kill anything? If not then why the stacked/unfair comparison?

Nope. God has never commanded anyone to do anything. That being said, I don't see much difference between the wholesale slaughter of Israel's enemies in the OT and the horrors committed by Christian churches in more recent times. In both cases, the command to kill didn't come from God (any more than the command to be good all year comes from Father Christmas), but people became convinced that God would like it if they did these things.

Boru

[emjay]

If God told you that you absolutely must kill someone who, in your eyes, is 100% innocent, would you do it? Why or why not? Assume that you are also 100% sure that God did indeed tell you this and you did not have a hallucination etc.

This question is not religion-specific in any way and is just a hypothetical situation.

Here's the thing sport.

God told us not to follow any new or direct revelations if the contradict how we are told to live in the bible.

If God told one of us to kill someone period apart from what the rule of law is willing t support, then what that person is talking to is not God.

But that doesn't really make sense when you think about it:

If you live in a democracy then you have some say, directly or indirectly, over the laws of the land. For instance, given that there are some American states with the death penalty and some without, that shows that it is not an absolute... it is arbitrary... and whether it exists in a given state or not presumably comes down to the electorate, either directly - eg if there was a referendum on it - or indirectly by electing a government sympathetic or unsympathetic to it.

Whereas if you don't live in a democracy, then it is just completely arbitrary from your perspective... up to the whims of a ruler.

In either case, even if you didn't directly or indirectly influence the law, you could hypothetically move to a jurisdiction with laws sympathetic to your stance. An extreme example of that would be in one of the Purge films where there are 'killing tourists' who come from all over the world to take part in the legitimised killing on Purge night.

So I don't see how you can ensure the legitimacy of that rule of law when in all cases it is arbitrary and given that you are either indirectly or directly complicit in it or, in the case where you have no say, you have to make a subjective judgment about the validity of it, in order to determine whether you resist or comply with it, and where your own stance can influence your decision in that regard.

And if you argue that you would only recognise a government with Christian values as legitimate in that regard, there's a problem there too because it's still arbitrary... different in different times and places... I'm sure the Spanish Inquisition thought they were doing God's will with their killings. As is always the case, there are always many different interpretations of Christianity, so again there seems to be no way of ensuring - with certainty - the legitimacy of government sanctioned killing without coming back to subjective opinion.

[GrandizerII]

This is absurdity.  If an all powerful being tells you to do something, and eternal happiness is on the line, you do it.  Stab a homeless person.  Eat a baby.  Make sweet love to a rhinoceros.  The question is all built on this flimsy premise that we know it's a specific God in a specific fictional reality, but eternity is a long time.  You don't mess with that unless you're a dope.

If we're talking eternal torture, then, well, this is a tough one.

But if we're talking some other type of eternity, I'd probably say no.

[Brian37]

Do you have an example of where any Christian is commanded by God to kill anything? If not then why the stacked/unfair comparison?

Nope.  God has never commanded anyone to do anything.  That being said, I don't see much difference between the  wholesale slaughter of Israel's enemies in the OT and the horrors committed by Christian churches in more recent times. In both cases,  the command to kill didn't come from God (any more than the command to be good all year comes from Father Christmas), but people became convinced that God would like it if they did these things.

Boru

That makes no sense Boru.

Even without a "direct command", the God character is like a gang leader, a mafia boss. Everyone knows who the leader is, but when you want to protect yourself as that Mafia boss and one of your underlings gets nabbed suddenly you expect them to keep their mouth shut or you throw them under the bus so they don't come after you.

The God character as a motif is written in an age of tribal rival kingships. When that leader tells you to do something, they can do it without telling you directly. Your fear of punishment from that leader is repeatedly ingrained on you mentally so do things for that leader because you already see others in that tribe/gang/mafia already doing it and you know the risk of dissent is deadly.

God " I didn't tell you to do that"


John Gotti " I didn't tell you to do that".

Yep how convenient  the boss never takes responsibility for the conditions he put in place.

Blind loyalty is why a leader is followed and why a dictator can get away with blaming his followers for his own tyranny.

[The Grand Nudger]

I think that Brian's commenting on the reality of whether or not a god ever commanded a genocide..for example.  Not on the belief that god did, or the story that some genocide particpant told about their complicity.

There is no boss, there are stories about a boss...but that's it.

[Drich]

Here's the thing sport.

God told us not to follow any new or direct revelations if the contradict how we are told to live in the bible.

If God told one of us to kill someone period apart from what the rule of law is willing t support, then what that person is talking to is not God.

But that doesn't really make sense when you think about it:

If you live in a democracy then you have some say, directly or indirectly, over the laws of the land. For instance, given that there are some American states with the death penalty and some without, that shows that it is not an absolute... it is arbitrary... and whether it exists in a given state or not presumably comes down to the electorate, either directly - eg if there was a referendum on it - or indirectly by electing a government sympathetic or unsympathetic to it.

Whereas if you don't live in a democracy, then it is just completely arbitrary from your perspective... up to the whims of a ruler.

In either case, even if you didn't directly or indirectly influence the law, you could hypothetically move to a jurisdiction with laws sympathetic to your stance. An extreme example of that would be in one of the Purge films where there are 'killing tourists' who come from all over the world to take part in the legitimised killing on Purge night.

So I don't see how you can ensure the legitimacy of that rule of law when in all cases it is arbitrary and given that you are either indirectly or directly complicit in it or, in the case where you have no say, you have to make a subjective judgment about the validity of it, in order to determine whether you resist or comply with it, and where your own stance can influence your decision in that regard.

And if you argue that you would only recognise a government with Christian values as legitimate in that regard, there's a problem there too because it's still arbitrary... different in different times and places... I'm sure the Spanish Inquisition thought they were doing God's will with their killings. As is always the case, there are always many different interpretations of Christianity, so again there seems to be no way of ensuring - with certainty - the legitimacy of government sanctioned killing without coming back to subjective opinion.

The reason it doesn't make sense is because I was not referring to the rule that govern countries, but individuals.

Men's laws are arbitrary at best. which is why we can free move away from those who do not wish to live as we do.

[emjay]

But that doesn't really make sense when you think about it:

If you live in a democracy then you have some say, directly or indirectly, over the laws of the land. For instance, given that there are some American states with the death penalty and some without, that shows that it is not an absolute... it is arbitrary... and whether it exists in a given state or not presumably comes down to the electorate, either directly - eg if there was a referendum on it - or indirectly by electing a government sympathetic or unsympathetic to it.

Whereas if you don't live in a democracy, then it is just completely arbitrary from your perspective... up to the whims of a ruler.

In either case, even if you didn't directly or indirectly influence the law, you could hypothetically move to a jurisdiction with laws sympathetic to your stance. An extreme example of that would be in one of the Purge films where there are 'killing tourists' who come from all over the world to take part in the legitimised killing on Purge night.

So I don't see how you can ensure the legitimacy of that rule of law when in all cases it is arbitrary and given that you are either indirectly or directly complicit in it or, in the case where you have no say, you have to make a subjective judgment about the validity of it, in order to determine whether you resist or comply with it, and where your own stance can influence your decision in that regard.

And if you argue that you would only recognise a government with Christian values as legitimate in that regard, there's a problem there too because it's still arbitrary... different in different times and places... I'm sure the Spanish Inquisition thought they were doing God's will with their killings. As is always the case, there are always many different interpretations of Christianity, so again there seems to be no way of ensuring - with certainty - the legitimacy of government sanctioned killing without coming back to subjective opinion.

The reason it doesn't make sense is because I was not referring to the rule that govern countries, but individuals.

Men's laws are arbitrary at best. which is why we can free move away from those who do not wish to live as we do.

Fair enough... thanks for the clarification.

At first sight it didn't look much different for the case of individuals vs governments... individuals are also given arbitrary rights regarding violence depending on where they live... America with its inalienable right to bear arms vs the UK without such rights, different gun laws in different states, or different self-defence laws in different places. But ultimately they all come down to self-defence so that's perhaps a different moral issue. Is that what you mean?

But even in that situation there still seems to be at least the potential for the sorts of problems above... where a government blurs the lines between murder and self-defence... arbitrarily raising or lowering the bar of what is deemed acceptable provocation/threat to warrant a lethal reply.