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@disgusted
I think (I always have to say that!) this story is probably historically accurate. It tells how a Benjamite rapes a Levite woman, resulting in a civil war amonsgt the Hebrew and the near annihilation of the Benjamites. The other Hebrew tribes are unwilling to allow a fellow tribe to disappear so they kill the males of the non-Hebrew Machir tribe and give the Machir females to the few remaining Benjamite warriors.
None of that is described as being commanded by YHWH - it was all decided by the 'congregation', presumably some sort of council of elders.
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@Stephen
I think the glories of Solomon were very exaggerated. The writers wanted to create an image of a glorious golden age of israel which can exist again if the people are obedient to their god, YHWH. Archaeology casts doubt that the empires of David and Solomon were as grand as the scriptures state.
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@Stephen
I think the logic is that the Christians imagined they would - by their sacrifice of earthly things - be the elite in the new order. The 'ordinary' poor would have a place in the new earth but landlords, corrupt priests etc. would not.
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@Stephen
Acts 5 indicates the early church resembled millenarian cults such as the Branch Dravidians and Heaven's Gate. Human psychology has changed less in 2000 years than migt be supposed.
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@PGA2.0
No one is pointing a finger at you, PG. Gus's point is that you wrote:
"I could also tell you of how God has looked after us financially in times of need and many other circumstances." so it seems God cares more about you than he does about thousands of starving kids in Yemen.
I don't know what financial assistence you got, but I am willing to bet it wasn't 10 dollar bills miraculously appearing in your wallet. You were helped by people, not God, and if the starving in Yemen are to be helped it has to be people who do it because there is no god.
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It is rational advice if this world is about to end and be replaced by a new order. Luke's advice is even stronger:
Lk 12:33 Sell your possessions and give to the poor. Provide purses for yourselves that will not wear out, a treasure in heaven that will never fail, where no thief comes near and no moth destroys.
The early church expected the faithful to follow that advice. Acts 5 tells of what befell a husband and wife who did not follow it:
Acts 5:5 But a certain man named Ananias, with Sapphira his wife, sold a possession,
2 And kept back part of the price, his wife also being privy to it, and brought a certain part, and laid it at the apostles' feet.
3 But Peter said, Ananias, why hath Satan filled thine heart to lie to the Holy Ghost, and to keep back part of the price of the land?
4 Whiles it remained, was it not thine own? and after it was sold, was it not in thine own power? why hast thou conceived this thing in thine heart? thou hast not lied unto men, but unto God.
5 And Ananias hearing these words fell down, and gave up the ghost: and great fear came on all them that heard these things.
2 And kept back part of the price, his wife also being privy to it, and brought a certain part, and laid it at the apostles' feet.
3 But Peter said, Ananias, why hath Satan filled thine heart to lie to the Holy Ghost, and to keep back part of the price of the land?
4 Whiles it remained, was it not thine own? and after it was sold, was it not in thine own power? why hast thou conceived this thing in thine heart? thou hast not lied unto men, but unto God.
5 And Ananias hearing these words fell down, and gave up the ghost: and great fear came on all them that heard these things.
6 And the young men arose, wound him up, and carried him out, and buried him.
....
10 Then fell she down straightway at his feet, and yielded up the ghost: and the young men came in, and found her dead, and, carrying her forth, buried her by her husband.
You have been warned!
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@Stephen
So do we agree that what we call 'Christianity' today differs from judaism more than Jesus' original message did?
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@Greyparrot
Whatever...meek and weak people still end up inheriting mass graves while the strong fertilize their civilizations on their bones. It's a matter of history.
The reason for the beatitudes is because that principle of history was about to be over-turned. Matthew was not writing banal platitides - he was making promises of radical change, quite the opposite of 'platitudes'.
But the promised change didn't happen and jesus was executed. The remakable thing is that was not the end of Christianity.
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@Stephen
We only agree only if you believe that Jesus - if he existed at all - was 100% human with no supernatural powers nor any special relationship with God (who does exist).
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@3RU7AL
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@3RU7AL
"Any other course of action would have killed many more people".
I think the calcuation was that it saved a lot of American lives.
I think Americans have been salving their conscience with the absurd notion that nuking was actually the 'humanitarian' option and they only did it to save lives ever since 1945. It is a common failing that people never see themselves as the bad guys. If 'they' do someting bad its because 'they' are evil - if 'we' do something wrong it gets minimised and explained away.
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@Stephen
I don't want it both ways... it is both ways. If by 'jesus' you mean a supernatural being then "Jesus did not exist". If by 'Jesus' you mean a flesh-and-blood preacher about whom various legends were woven then "Jesus (probably) did exist".'It is sitting on the fence. You want it both ways. But you cannot have it both ways. You painted yourself into a corner simply by dismissing the scriptures outright.
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@Stephen
I note that not all MPs share your MPs attitude.
They will behead her if she is caught and not a peep from her Christian brothers and sisters in the west.
I would say there are a lot of peeps.
It is clear that Pakistan is itself riven by this. Obviously not every Pakistani - nor every Moslem - wants Bibi dead. I'd like to see a demographic analysis of the mobs baying for her blood and those who - so far - have managed to keep her alive.
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@Stephen
"Did Jesus exist?" seems a simple enough question but it's complicated by what is meant by 'exist' in this context. As an atheist I do not accept Jesus as an actual divinity walking on the face of the earth, but I don't discount the possibility that Jesus was an 'ordinary human' around which legends developed. If that is the case (as it may well be the case with, say, Robin Hood) should we say 'Jesus existed'?See, it is there again. You do know he couldn't have possibly delivered this sermon because you tell us often, that you don't believe he existed, it all fairy tales and they are all characters in a story - or words to that effect.
The entitity that walked on water and raised the dead never existed; the entity that gave the sermon on the mount very possibly did exist. Neither 'Jesus existed' nor 'Jesus did not exist' is the full and proper answer. That isn't fence sitting - it's a problem with the ambiguity of 'exists'.
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Stepen wrote:Again, here you say you cannot see why Jesus couldn't have delivered the sermon" one one hand but yet believe the character is "fictional".but its not impossible that it is was inventedBut are not " fictional stories" as you believe them to be, invented?
Suppose I made up a story about you to help explain your beliefs to a wider audience. The story would be a fiction and 'Stephen' would be a character within that fiction - 'real Stephen' never did or said what is in the story.
In such circumstances, is 'Stephen' in the story a real person or a fictional character?
I don't know if Jesus really delivered the speech or the episode was made up as a means to tell people what the Christian message was - and neither does anybody else.
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@ethang5
I have no strong opinion on whether Jesus delivered the sermon on the mount. I can see no reason why not, but its not impossible that it is was invented in order to state Christian doctrine in an accessible way. The gospels can be viewed as a popular, story-style account aimed at ordinary folk and the epistles as written for more theologically inclined academics.
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@Stephen
But you have said that - "'jesus' as a character in a story" ! so how could even be "probable"? You just love that fence don't you.
I don't like the fence at all! On certain points I am not on the fence - I firnly believe the beatitudes represents the world-view of the earliest 'Christians', but I am on the fence as to whether Jesus made the public speech as described.
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--> @keithprosserjesus is describing conditions in a new world to come; they are promises.how would you know? You have made it clear on more than one occasion that the stories in these scriptures are fairy tales and that you don't believe them. yet here you are, telling us "what jesus meant".
I'm treating 'jesus' as a character in a story, i.e. the gospel writers put those promises in their character's mouth. But I think it likely that a human 'jesus' (on whom the story is based) would have said very similar things. Even if the sermon on the mount never happened i think the passage reflects the world-view of early Christians. I don't claim it is certainly so - only that i consider it probable.
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@Stephen
I think it refers to the mass of people, that is ordinary people who are economically poor and pollitically weak.Who are " the meek"?
The beatitudes are not platitudes - i.e. they are not banal truisms; they state what manifestly does not occur in this evil world. jesus is describing conditions in a new world to come; they are promises.
jesus' message was aimed at the poor and powerless. To the tenant struggling to pay his rent to a rich landlord the message was to 'meekly' accept it because the tables will soon turn and there rich and powerful would be brought low, e.g.
Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God. (matt 19:23)
Christianity was a religion born of a feeling that there was no prospect of successful revolt or rebellion against the status quo that kept the poor poor.
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@SkepticalOne
I am a bit of an Orwell nerd - I 've read just about every novel, newspaper articles and poem he ever wrote and I couldn't place that quote - so this is interesting! https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2016/11/george_orwell_is_stealing_my_work.html
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Is it the case that the first Christians did not conceive of 'eternal life' in terms of the survival of ethereal souls in heaven? I get impression that the new order was imagined more like a re-establisment of a pre-fall Eden right here on Earth, where life was easy and there was no death or suffering,
It was only when that failed to materialise that it was re-interpretted in terms of posthumous survival of souls.
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@janesix
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@MagicAintReal
Brutal is being modest...he did it himself in post #21 https://www.debateart.com/forum/topics/775/post_links/34438.
As it says in the best book in the Bible,
"What has been will be again,
what has been done will be done again;
there is nothing new under the sun."
Ecclesiastes 1:9 (NIV)
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@Mopac
You did exactly what i expected you to do, as predicted in the last line of my post.
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@Mopac
If you were to say 'Money is God' then must I deny the existence of money?
I believe the ultimate truth is something like an ultra-fundamental physical law, something from which the laws of thermodynamics, quantum physics and space time all derive. It is usually called a 'theory of everything'.
Why it is not a god is that it has no mind,just as the 2nd law of thermodynamics has no mind.
God - it is said - so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life."
A 'theory of everything', a law of physics does not love, nor beget sons nor grant eternal life to those who believe in it - it only defines the charge on an electron and the strength of gravity. Everything else is a consquence, a playing out of what follows from that rule.
If you want you can call such a ToE my 'god' and say I am a believer - I can't stop you doing that, but I'll still call myself an atheist.
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@Mopac
What I believe the ultimat reality to be does not resemble a god.
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@EtrnlVw
You read far too much into the word 'delusion', or rather I read too little. I should have denied i think thests are delusional because 'delusion' has such a strong negative overtone. I took it mean no more than 'mistaken'.
Obviously if I believe god does not exist I must believe theists are mistaken. Few theists are 'deluded' in the strong sense of the word.
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@janesix
my mistake... it should have gone to stephen.
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so if they can suffer, then what? still ok?
by 'still ok' i suppose you mean that very early abortions are not really problematical. I believe that is so. The only people who don't think that way are fanatics and extremists who are not going to be swayed by reason anyway.
I think if we are going to protect peoples lives with the law then it should extend back to the point when the foetus can suffer. That isn't an easy point to identify, but 24 weeks has emerged as a common guesstimate.
In this imperfect world where pragmatics trumps morality I'd say abortion should be possible almost upto full term, but only in extreme cases and after (say) 32 weeks an abortion would be illegal. The approriate punishment is hard to say - why would woman wait so long? Hopefully such late abortions would be rare enough to be considered on a case-by-case basis.
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@TheDredPriateRoberts
I don't care if its called a baby or a foetus.... I prefer to echo Jeremy Bentham
"The question is not, can they reason? Nor, can they talk? But, can they suffer?"
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@janesix
And this extremely violent verse about "smashing children's heads against rocks" Psalm 137:9 KJV,
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@Plisken
As I read history the US extended the war by demanding unconditional surrender.America made the outcome clear and offered reasonable terms of surrender.
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@TheDredPriateRoberts
Generally the NHS does abortions upto 24 weeks.
I know FA about embryology so I had an opinion on the actual figure it would be worthless.
My view is that the balance betwen options change during pregancy. I have considerable moral qualms about very late abortions
but I would pemit them because forcing women to bring unwanted babies to term does not result in happy mothers and babies but in unsafe illegal abortions and misery. But the termination of late term preganancies is not an light matter and I don't think that pro-lifers get that pro-choicers such as myself do get that.
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@ethang5
If fireboming japanese cities is a good thing then there would be no need to wait for a war to do it.
killing 100,000 people is a bad thing... it remains a bad thing even if not killing them would be worse.
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It may be worth repeating that this isn't between good and bad but a choice between two bads;
1- the birth of an unwanted child
2- the premature termination of a life.
Neither of those is desirable so it's a question of choosing 'the lesser of two evils'. Most people think that the evil of 2) varies in that it is much worse if the life being terminated is well-developed; if you are talking about aborting a 32 or 64 cell blastula the evil is almost non-existent (unless you are a total extremist!)
I think research is always needed to better determinine when a foetus can actually suffer, but I think the 24 week guideline used by the NHS in the UK is resonable.
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@secularmerlin
I think 90% of philosophy is providing justification - or at least rationalisation - of one's gut feelings!
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@ethang5
It's debatable if 'quantum teleportation' has much to do with 'star trek teleportation'. To quote wikipedia,
"Although the name is inspired by the teleportation commonly used in fiction, quantum teleportation is limited to the transfer of information rather than matter itself. Quantum teleportation is not a form of transportation, but of communication: it provides a way of transporting a qubit from one location to another without having to move a physical particle along with it."
Either way I get theimpression that for most reliously inclined peoplehe soul is not of a form amnable to an engineer manipulating it mechanically.
I would say that if 'soul' in the religious sense exists it would not be picked up by a teleporters scanners, so not transcribed into data and not reconstituted at the end - that is assuming teleporters operate on anything like the principles of engineering we understand today.
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@secularmerlin
Somebody has said everything - and its opposite.
--keithprosser.
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@Wylted
I will enjoy delving into the 'lesswrong' world you have made me aware of!
I just hope i can do so without becoming a convert...
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@secularmerlin
A teleported computer is not 'the same computer' as the original, but it is not immediately apparent the difference has any significance. indeed, a computer moved by teleporting may be more like how it started out than one sent by DHL!
I view the 'self' as something produced by the operation of a brain, somewhat as an electric current is produced by a dynamo. If you disasemble a dynamo and re-assemble it, i don't think it maes sense to say it thereby produces a different current - at least no more different than if a dynamo is stopped and restarted.
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@secularmerlin
i suppose no one would object to teleporting inanimate cargo (which would include complex mechanisms such as computers), so any objection to teleporting a person must be based on the idea that a human being is not 'merely' a complex mechanism.
A Christian who belives in the reality of the soul could well baulk at teleporting, but i think a monist materialist shouldn't really have a problem.
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So would you use it as a routine means of transport?
btw - i am a tos purist.... teleport malfunctions have been a plot device from the start. There are other ways to explore the nature of self and identity, but star trek is more fun than dry philosphy!
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So - in your opinion - does a teleporter move 'you' or does it kill 'you' and create a clone?
As the original is lost (if it works properly) we don't know what the exprience of the original is. It is certainly possible it is very painful and terrifying for the oiriginal but that is not apparent to the clone.
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Human babies are born helpless and are helpless for a long time and require considerable effort and sacrifice for their survival. Thus we are programmed to value babies highly so we put in the effort and sacrifice required.
However suppose we had evolved along a slightly different track such that a mother eating her child in times of stress in order to survive and have a another baby at a more propitious time was how things have been since the beginning. it is probable we would have a very different view of what was and what is not 'moral' in that case.
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