Well, when He was dropping manna from Heaven, He could've tossed in a few gold pieces so they could buy the land, as Abraham did.

I can point to numerous occasions in history where man should have bowed to logic but didn't. The inhabitants of Canaan were firmly entrenched there and had no reason to believe a bunch of desert wandering Israelites had any more power to push them out of their property than anyone else did, after all they'd been there a while. I just don't think bribing them away would make them go away. It took two atomic bombs dropped on Japan before they finally threw in the towel. Two. As if the first one wasn't enough, and they even had warning. Germany made 8 year olds fight veteran Soviet units in the ruins of Berlin, and oftentimes they fought to the last man, and the Soviets said they were some of the most stalwart soldiers they faced in the war. Yet it was evident to everyone with half a working brain that Germany was done for. In the 2nd Punic War it was clear to practically everyone that Hannibal had the Romans on the run and had so demoralized them after the Battle of Cannae that the panicked Romans actually started doing human sacrifices that they had stopped doing many, many years before. And by the rules of ancient war Rome should have surrendered, but didn't, and ultimately went on to beat Hannibal several years later.

I don't think the Canaanites had any intention of stepping aside with or without warning, and I think God knew that. After all, there's no way that the Egyptian army, one of the strongest in the ancient world, could have missed a giant flaming column leading the otherwise defenseless Israelites out of Egypt and yet they still chose to attack (and met their demise). That's human nature.

A couple things here. The curse of Ham (Cannan) was not due to him walking in on Noah's naked drunkenness, but his boasting about it to his brothers. Shem and Japeth did something about it and Ham didn't. That was the purpose of Noah's curse.

Because, of course, boasting about the drunken state of your father warrants a terrible supernatural curse. Noah could have prevented the whole problem by simply not being an alcoholic.

I didn't see anything in the original passage implying that Ham was boasting about his father's state to his brothers, but I can understand this interpretation. This still doesn't change the fact, however, that Noah's curse affected thousands upon thousands of people for an honestly rather trivial crime that they didn't even have anything to do with.

You mention sexism. The Bible teaches more respect for women than any other culture in the world.

That's a pretty presumptuous statement. I could write about quite a few cultures, but I'll just discuss Egypt for now as an example.

Egyptian women enjoyed lots of freedoms and rights in their society, and even led the country quite often (the Ptolemaic queens). Though their society still had a long way to go in getting equal rights for all (class distinctions determined a person's fate in life more than gender), the Egyptian view of women was one of equal abilities and rights.

Egyptian women enjoyed the right to make their own marriages. Over time, their rights increased to unprecedented levels in the ancient world. They inherited equally and held property independently. Married women did not have to submit to their husbands’ control. They had the right to divorce and to be supported after a divorce. Until the time an ex-wife’s dowry was returned, she was entitled to lodging in the house of her choice. Her property remained in her possession, thus it could not to be squandered by her husband. The law sided with the wife and children if a husband acted against their interests.

Egyptian women married later than did their neighbors as well. They loaned money and operated barges. They served as priests in the native temples. They initiated lawsuits and hired flute players. As wives, widows or divorcees, the owned vineyards, wineries, papyrus marshes, ships, perfume businesses, milling equipment, slaves, homes, camels. As much as one third of Ptolemaic Egypt may have been under female ownership.

Now, compare Egyptian society to the Hebrews. Sexism runs rampant in the Torah. Here are just a few examples...

Unlike male slaves (who are freed in the year of Jubilee), female slaves are never freed (unless a master is dissatisfied with them). Exodus 21 gives guidelines on how a man can buy multiple female slaves and take them as his wives.

Leviticus 12:1-8 explains that a woman is unclean for 33 days after the birth of a boy, but unclean for 66 after the birth of a girl. Apparently, women are dirty simply for being female.

Leviticus 15:19-30 explains that during that time of month, not only is a woman unclean, anything she touches is unclean for the rest of the day. She must be avoided to the point of not even touching what she has touched. Women are discriminated against simply for having a biological function that the Hebrews didn't know much about, and that God presumably designed himself.

Leviticus 27:3-7 assigns monetary value to humans being offered to the Lord, and women are worth significantly less than men.

Numbers 30 talks about how women can't make vows without their husband's approval.

Deuteronomy 22:23-24 says that if a man rapes a woman and the woman does not cry out for help, then presumably she enjoyed the experience and deserves to be stoned to death.

etc. etc. etc.

Ester was a queen to the most powerful man in the world at the time and could turn his head however she desired.

But one has to remember how Esther became queen in the first place.

Before Esther, King Ahasuerus was married to Queen Vashti who was very attractive. One night, in the middle of a party, the King ordered his Vashti to appear before him and his guests to display her beauty by only wearing her crown. Vashti refused. Angered by her disobedience, the king asked his wise men what should be done. One of them said, "all the women in the empire would hear that the king Ahasuerus commanded Vashti the queen to be brought in before him, but she came not. Then the women of the empire would despise their husbands. And this would cause many problems in the kingdom. Therefore it would be good to depose her."

To find a new queen, the King declared that all the beautiful young virgins be gathered to the palace from all the corners of his kingdom. Each woman underwent twelve months of beautification in his harem, after which she would go to the king. When the woman's turn came, she was given anything she wanted to take with her from the harem to the king's palace. She would then go and lay with the king in the evening, and in the morning go to the harem where the concubines stayed. She would not return to the king unless he was pleased enough with her to summon her again by name.

The King's attitude toward women appears to be that they are objects of pleasure, or nice things to possess, look at, and show off.

Now did women have voting rights or political power? Outside the few given examples, not really, but as I've said many times, you are basing your judgement of the culture based on the mindset of today. This doesn't work.

So I should base my judgement on sexism through the eyes of a culture that is completely dominated by males?

Now you also mention something very big. "Fairness". Trust me. You don't want things to be 'fair'. If things were fair, you and I, as well as the rest of America would be living in the same extreme poverty as the entire rest of the world.

There's quite a bit of difference between living in a society that doesn't have adequate access to natural resources because of geography and living in a society where a supernatural force outside of nature has broken the laws of physics and manipulated the environment to limit access to natural resources because of crimes committed by ancient ancestors.

If things were fair, not a single one of us would go to heaven and each one of us would perish in hell.

I don't think that this situation would be fair at all (infinite punishment for finite crimes is not just).

Fairness is nowhere to be found in the Bible or anywhere in life.

I would argue that from a atheistic point of view, there is one universal fairness - everybody has, at the very least, the comfort of mortality. No matter how bad one's life is, one will always eventually be able to escape it through death. Under the Christian worldview, some souls are doomed to be tormented FOREVER.

And why should the Son of God be punished for the sins of His people?

Because God allowed the whole mess of a situation to develop in the first place. I'll even use Biblical Scripture to demonstrate this:

Exodus 21:28-29 If an ox gores a man or a woman to death, the ox shall surely be stoned and its flesh shall not be eaten; but the owner of the ox shall go unpunished. If, however, an ox was previously in the habit of goring and its owner has been warned, yet he does not confine it and it kills a man or a woman, the ox shall be stoned and its owner also shall be put to death.

God is the owner of the ox, and we are the ox. God knows quite well that we have a pre-determined habit of sinning (due to our original sin) and he has every power in the universe at his disposal to stop us but he allows us to commit sin anyway.

The greatest crime in history was that the only innocent man in history was condemned to torture and death.

This isn't a crime because God had an extension of himself be tortured and killed when the entire situation was under his control and he could have stopped the process at any point.

It's not genocide---at least not in any modern sense. People aren't being targeted systematically based on race.

Genocide is defined as "the deliberate and systematic destruction, in whole or in part, of an ethnic, racial, religious, or national group". That definition certainly includes the actions committed in the Old Testament.

See the examples of Rahab or the Gibeonites.

Sparing the life of a treacherous prostitue that aids in the destruction of her city does not disqualify the overall action from being considered genocide. And Joshua simply enslaved the Gibeonites. He wasn't targeting their race - he was targeting their nationality and he destroyed it.

In a sense we all continue to be punished for the crimes of our great-great-granduncles. I am the descendant of convicts, who, as their punishment, were sent to the continent of Australia, and I still reside here to this day. But those who migrated here afterwards, like myself, are also the survivors, and the descendants of survivors of war, oppression, famine and disease. Lots of diseases, particularly the infectious pandemics. And the same is true of Canada, USA, of Aztec Mexico, and of all nations on Earth. Especially in the Middle East, where civilizations and pandemics have been around for a long, long time.

The difference here is that these punishments are brought about by natural causes. By cursing people's descendants, God is heaping upon cultures punishments brought about by supernatural causes. Since these supernatural punishments are carried out deliberately and by a morally neutral system (nature), the motivations behind them can be scrutinized and the fairness of the intended results can be evaluated.

God is the owner of the ox, and we are the ox. God knows quite well that we have a pre-determined habit of sinning (due to our original sin) and he has every power in the universe at his disposal to stop us but he allows us to commit sin anyway.

But here you get into the relationship between God's sovereignty and human responsibility, which is highly complex, particularly when you stress one over the other. It's perfectly fine for God to allow sin, provided that He has a good reason (and the Bible says that He does). But it doesn't mean that you or I will ever comprehend that reason fully. Is it so hard for you to get your mind around the fact that God doesn't owe you an explanation? Instead He offers you something much better: Himself, broken and bleeding. You want to throw stones? Throw them at the cross where your creator hangs, dying---suffering as only a being with infinite emotional capacity can.

This isn't a crime because God had an extension of himself

Extension of Himself? Jesus is fully God. Your Christology is off here.

This isn't a crime because God had an extension of himself be tortured and killed when the entire situation was under his control and he could have stopped the process at any point.

And how exactly does this make the humans involved in putting this innocent man there less responsible? They are acting out of hatred for God---as evidenced by their rejection of God.

Genocide is defined as "the deliberate and systematic destruction, in whole or in part, of an ethnic, racial, religious, or national group".

By this definition, fighting the Japanese during World War II was genocide. What happened in Joshua was a war of conquest, not a genocide. What we have is a war of city-states against a massive invasion force that wipes out everything in its path. The most similar thing that one might imagine to this in modern times would be the creation of the modern Israeli state where you are eliminating political structures in warfare.

He wasn't targeting their race - he was targeting their nationality and he destroyed it.

But he's creating a new nation. What's wrong with getting rid of a nation, and assimilating it exactly?

TBG

Deuteronomy 22:23-24 says that if a man rapes a woman and the woman does not cry out for help, then presumably she enjoyed the experience and deserves to be stoned to death....etc. etc. etc.

Sorry, I see this ruling in connection with the story of Joseph in Genesis. Yes, as a woman I feel for the woman involved. But there seems to be a concerted effort to see that people weren't accused falsely. As the 9th commandment goes; Do not bear false witness against thy neighbour (Exodus 20:16) .

Esther was a queen to the most powerful man in the world at the time and could turn his head however she desired.

Did you know that the man she married was actually the fearsome Persian monarch who is commonly known as Xerxes? The one who lost so spectacularly to the Athenians and Spartans in 480 BC? I think you all need to know this. Especially if you have studied Ancient History. It seems that Ahasuerus = Xerxes.

Now did women have voting rights or political power? Outside the few given examples, not really, but as I've said many times, you are basing your judgement of the culture based on the mindset of today. This doesn't work.

.
So I should base my judgement on sexism through the eyes of a culture that is completely dominated by males?

Sorry, Fencer is right. I couldn't think of a culture more male dominated or more like USA than that of the Antipodes as of 1901. But I've always understood that New Zealand is the first country in the world which enfranchised women, to give them equal voting rights. Coracle can correct me if I am wrong. In neighbouring Australia, much as I hate to see W4J chortling with Croweater glee, , the first state to follow the NZ example was South Australia. With other Australian states following later. America dragged its heels over women's rights for quite some time afterwards, just like some European nations. Some nations, maybe in the Middle East, still have to get to that point.

It's not genocide---at least not in any modern sense. People aren't being targeted systematically based on race.

Genocide is defined as "the deliberate and systematic destruction, in whole or in part, of an ethnic, racial, religious, or national group". That definition certainly includes the actions committed in the Old Testament.

Unfortunately TBG is right. No genocide doesn't cover what happened or did not happen to the Canaanites, for two reasons. The first reason would include, for people deliberately and systematically practising genocide, the first settlers of Tasmania, even if just making a living in a foreign land was their goal. I'm not excusing them, merely pointing out that a farmer battling with strange terrain and weather patterns, with umpteen children to support, only the eldest son being of much help, is not likely to fuss about genocide when that particular son is speared in the neck, and therefore spends the rest of his life disabled. You might just as well count native-born Amerindian heads that were lost to European expansion.

In both the American and the Tasmanian examples, as well as the so-called Canaanite example you use, I don't think that the destruction of the ethnic groups involved was either deliberate or systematic. Even if it worked out that way. Unlike the German activities in WW2 against Jews and Gypsies.

The second reason is that the Canaanites were nowhere near exterminated at any time. Like most people in the ancient world they lived in city states some of which were rotten to the core. Jericho and Ai are mentioned, I forget which others. But the Gibeonites, the Jebusites and other Canaanites were absorbed into Israel. Maybe later in the north of Israel, some Canaanites joined with Sisera to oppress the Israelites. But though the Canaanites were defeated by Barak, leading the men of Naphtali and Zebulun (not that Barak), I doubt the Canaanites were exterminated then or afterwards under David and Solomon. And certainly not under Ahab.

We Down Under found out that the Tasmanian Aborigines weren't as exterminated as might be believed. After all their womenfolk had associations with whalers, who were far from home, thus passing on their heritage to people alive today. The Canaanites might well have been similarly absorbed by the Northern Israelites in particular. Chances are that the Northern Israelites were also absorbed by the Canaanites. To the point that when Shalmaneser V demolished Samaria, and the 10 tribes of Israel vanished, that the people deported in 722 BC were indistinguishable from anyone else in the Middle East.

The difference here is that these punishments are brought about by natural causes. By cursing people's descendants, God is heaping upon cultures punishments brought about by supernatural causes. Since these supernatural punishments are carried out deliberately and by a morally neutral system (nature), the motivations behind them can be scrutinized and the fairness of the intended results can be evaluated.

No, I don't see it that way. I would have thought that so-called 'natural causes' were God's main way of interacting with his creation. Especially when they get too numerous or too up themselves. I'll answer properly tomorrow to say why. Today I am dropping with tiredness, one reason why people succumb to disease.

What do you guys think about psychic readings? I had my fortune told today and it was pretty good.

I would be very careful around those. They tend to give very vague answers based on very well practiced observation skills. While I am open to arguments that not all psychics have demonic influences guiding them, there are a number that do. And in cases where the demonic is involved, be very wary of opening invitations whether you realize it or not. Once that invitation is made, trouble is right around the corner. And I mean REAL trouble.

Is it so hard for you to get your mind around the fact that God doesn't owe you an explanation? Instead He offers you something much better: Himself, broken and bleeding.

This is only comforting if I focus merely on the salvation of myself and no one else. If I were a Christian and was able to think of all the people around who die every second who will be going to hell, I'd go crazy.

Extension of Himself? Jesus is fully God. Your Christology is off here.

This area Christology has always felt a little bit fuzzy to me. Particularly because Jesus prays to God as if God is a completely separate being, and shouts while on the cross, "My God, why have you forsaken me?"

And how exactly does this make the humans involved in putting this innocent man there less responsible? They are acting out of hatred for God---as evidenced by their rejection of God.

This would depend on if the Pharisees actually believed that Jesus was God. If they didn't, the Jesus was committing blasphemy of the highest order and should have been gotten rid of according to Jewish culture. If the Pharisees actually believe that Jesus was God, and rejected him, then they are idiots of the highest degree.

The most similar thing that one might imagine to this in modern times would be the creation of the modern Israeli state where you are eliminating political structures in warfare.

Not so. The Bible makes it clear that they were not merely taking over and assimilating, or forcing a migration. They were destroying the cities that they fought.

But he's creating a new nation. What's wrong with getting rid of a nation, and assimilating it exactly?

Well, that's not what God does. God simply has the Israelites wipe them off of the face of the earth. And I find problems with this because it contradicts the 6th commandment. God commands or seems to approve of murder. Not all killing is murder, of course, but in some cases it can be described as little else.

Thus says the LORD of hosts, 'I have noted what Amalek did to Israel in opposing them on the way when they came up out of Egypt. Now go and strike Amalek and devote to destruction all that they have. Do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey. (1 Samuel 15:2-3)

Amalekites were at war with the Israelites for hundreds of years, and were probably committing similar atrocities to them. But the children would clearly be innocent in that matter, and the women mostly so.

And obviously nobody is responsible for events that occurred before their birth. (Deuteronomy 24:16)

No, I don't see it that way. I would have thought that so-called 'natural causes' were God's main way of interacting with his creation.

This is the exact same argument that the Westboro Baptist Church uses to justify it's praise of natural disasters as acts of God. (They are on my mind because they protested in my town yesterday.)

I don't find it a compelling argument at all because natural causes all happen in the locations, manners and frequencies that scientists, geologists and meterologists would expect them to. If an earthquake is God's way of punishing sinners, the sinners would all have to live near fault lines. If some horrible disease is God's way of punishing the evildoers, evildoers would have to be poor enough not to afford medicine or health care. If a hurricane is God's way of pouring his wrath on the people who disobey them, then he is only punishing those who did not heed the weatherman's warnings 10 days in advance.

What do you guys think about psychic readings? I had my fortune told today and it was pretty good.

I can't say I would accept the credibility of anyone claiming to predict the future. The uncertainty principle in physics dictates that we can't.

I promise this is the last one.

Truly. As much as I've always enjoyed discussing stuff like this, I really don't have the extra time or energy to devote to this thread right now. If I have any self-control, this will be my last post in here for a while. You're free to respond to any points I make in this post if you like, and I'll read them as I get the chance, but don't expect me to continue the debate. I may pop in every now and then to make a comment or ask a question, but for now, this is my swan song.

My thanks to everyone who took the time to respond to me over the past few weeks.

Go back to the part where Christ was tempted while in the desert. Each time, He responded to Satan's temptations with Scripture. If Christ did not treat Scripture as authoritative, why would He fight Satan with it? And that was not the only time Christ used Scripture as authority.

Then I find it pretty bizarre that Christ would cite Deuteronomy 6:13 during his temptations, and then going on to admonish taking any kind of oath during the Sermon on the Mount. Not to mention James 5:12.

Jesus was a radical at the time. But that is less because He came to rewrite Scripture, but rather because He sought to correct the bajillions of extra, non-Scriptural rules and customs that society had come up; many of his Matthew 5 concerns were with some popular mis-interpretations of the past scriptural laws. Christ wanted to bring the Scriptural laws back to their true origin: a Love-based morality.

Where is Jesus talking about laws being misinterpreted? Everything he's quoting was from scripture. The scripture itself was a misinterpretation?

What do you think Christ was referring to when he said, "You have heard that it was said, 'Love your neighbor and hate your enemy'"? There is no scripture that says that verbatim, but I find the idea of it to be written all over the Old Testament—especially since "neighbor" only referred to one's fellow Jews back then, from what I have gathered. I do not see how early scriptures reflect a love-based morality at all, or any one moral theme.

First of all, the law Jesus was referring to, that Moses gave, specifies that the man gives a woman a certificate of divorce if he finds "some indecency" in the woman. Now, I may be presumptuous in saying this, but taking the rest of scripture into account, "indecency" clearly means "adultery" here. And Jesus did give an exception for adultery for divorce, too.

The problem was, people started interpreting that as to mean much lesser faults than that. And God allowed that, though He did not like it.

If he truly cared, he should never have used such loose wording. No one should have to worry about being presumptuous when interpreting such an important law in the Bible. These are laws. They should be plainly articulated. Any less is asking for trouble.

"If a man marries a woman who becomes displeasing to him because he finds something indecent about her. . ."

Something indecent? If that means adultery, then the powers that be should have just come out and said it. It wasn't like they hadn't invented a word for it back then. Folks were hardly bashful about talking of unpleasant things in those days, and God is the very last entity in the universe whom I would expect to pussyfoot around on issues.

Mean what you say, and say what you mean! Just spit it out.

Instead, we get this delightfully vague and abusable wordage that can be twisted to fit almost any situation if need be. From my standpoint, either it was written by someone who hadn't thought it through or knew nothing about human nature (not God), or someone who knew exactly what they were doing when they used such wishy-washy phraseology (evil, better not be God.)

Either way, I don't like it. When Jesus had to spell it out for people in the Sermon on the Mount, I don't think it was because people were deviating from scripture; scripture was never clear enough in the first place. You cannot deviate from a standard that doesn't exist. I do not understand why God, who knows the full depravity of mankind, would leave something as important as that up to sinner's interpretation. It's just a bad idea; unnecessary and counterproductive.

In New Testament scriptures, it is made clear that the only grounds for divorce are marital unfaithfulness. There was no good excuse for having such abusable phrasing in Deuteronomy. God would have known the truth all along, and to withhold something that important. . . it's just irresponsible, and doesn't make a bit of sense. Doesn't line up with who God is supposed to be.

We're back to the system of law fostering sin thing.

For more evidence that the God of the Old Testament hated divorce, see Malachi 15-16.

(This is also in response to Flam. )

Is that the only verse in the OT indicating God's hatred for divorce? Because I really don't find that very comforting. Malachi is the last book in the Old Testament. Based on my research, it seems to be widely believed to have been written sometime in 400 B.C., and if you credit authorship of Deuteronomy to Moses, that puts somewhere around a thousand years between the two. That's just too long to remain silent on something like that. Too late.

Just a hundred years would have been too long, much less a millennia.

You know, if you're really trying to seek the truth earnestly, I would recommend getting rid of that whole "there's no other way to view it" attitude. That is something that someone who is set in their beliefs either way would say (and even then, with the specifics, they usually are open to further learning and correction by trusted sources). But if you're still having doubts and trying to find answers, that kind of "This must be how it is!" attitude is not going to help you.

Well, I'm referring to my viewpoint of these verses, not anyone else's. What doesn't work for me may work for someone else, and I accept that; people are different. I do appreciate the head's up, though, because I don't like barring myself from understanding belief systems, whether wittingly or not. But I'm human, and I get frustrated sometimes—especially when I can't make sense of something.

Such as? Read the Sermon on the Mount, for starters. Whenever Christ references Scripture, we find Him doing so as if it has authority (such as during His temptation). What incidents were you referring to?

Oh, I think it's very odd that that there's this big long thing about respecting the scriptures, and then he goes on to argue against scripture itself. All I can think is he never actually said that and someone else wrote it in, or he was talking about the Ten Commandments, which, to my knowledge, Christ never refutes.

I'll ask you the same thing I asked Stardf: what was Christ referring when he said, "You have heard that it was said, 'Love your neighbor and hate your enemy'"?

Sure, there are verses about giving your enemy bread and water, or returning their escaped ox, but they seem rather weak when you stand them next to verses that detail the indiscriminate slaughter of men, women and children without a word of deliverance. That has nothing to do with love, and the two don't add up. I doubt the former verses were referring to non-Jew enemies. So what else could Christ be talking about here?

On the contrary---He's interpreting the law. Always extending it, making it more exacting, not less. For example, the divorce passage you quoted: his point is that divorce is always the result of sin.

But not just any sin. Adultery, and only adultery.

You can't interpret what's not there in the first place. Loving your enemies, for instance, is so completely adverse to much of the behavior in the Old Testament, and from what I have read, loving your neighbors only applied to one's fellow Jews. Christ was disagreeing with scripture, not extending it. Hate and love are on opposite ends of the spectrum.

Because He's quoting tradition, not Scripture.

Uh, let's look at what Jesus is quoting.

Matt 5:21. You have heard that it was said to those of old, 'You shall not murder; and whoever murders will be liable to judgment.'

Matt 5:27. You have heard that it was said, 'You shall not commit adultery.'

Matt 5:31. It was also said, 'Whoever divorces his wife, let him give her a certificate of divorce.'

Matt 5:33. Again you have heard that it was said to those of old, 'You shall not swear falsely, but shall perform to the Lord what you have sworn.'

Matt 5:38. You have heard that it was said, 'An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.'

Matt 5:43. You have heard that it was said, 'You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.'

If those quotations are tradition, then you could say the same for everything else in the Old Testament. Also rather interesting that each of those quotes is followed up with, "But I say. . . ."

The only quotation that is not directly lifted from scripture or paraphrased from scripture is "You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy"—there's no blanket statement to hate one's enemies in the Old Testament that I'm aware of, anyway—and I've already talked about that. It seems to me that Christ is backing up what I've been saying.

He believed that the early scriptures taught to love your neighbor and hate your enemy, too. It would not make sense for him to be accurately quoting and paraphrasing actual scripture five times, and then suddenly start talking about an extra-Biblical concept without one word to say that he was switching gears. If so, he would have gotten called out for not knowing the scriptures, which he was frequently berating the Pharisees for, and I do not think Christ was the kind to make such a mistake. He was/is God, after all.

No, he believed that the idea of hating one's enemies came from the early scriptures. And he disagreed with it. Separated himself from the Old Testament, right then and there.

I'm not sure I see your point here. My point is that the Christian life must be lived in submission to Divine authority. We must live in fauthful dependence upon God rather than in autonomy. The ambiguity you mention is just as present in your position.

And I'm not sure I see your point, because I do live like that. But for me, Divine authority doesn't automatically equal a collection of ancient scriptures, written and handpicked by humans.

The Church Catholic---the Church Invisible---the Communion of the Saints.

I've always wanted to use one of these things on here, so I might as well take the opportunity now.

But what of the counsel of the Church?

Who is a member of this counsel, and who appointed them?

They don't (Romans 1:19-the end).

So all cultures outside of Christianity are completely and utterly evil, with not even the faintest understanding or display of love, fairness and righteousness? Wow. I believe even animals are capable of love, so you're going to have a hard time selling that idea to me. There is a lot that is messed up about humanity, but there are beacons of truth everywhere, because God is everywhere and we are still a part of him, even though we have done so much to distance ourselves.

The law wasn't meant to give you a righteous life. The law was supposed to show you that you couldn't live a righteous life.

Have you even read the Old Testament? Yeah---they broke every commandment time and again.

You're missing the point of the law entirely. Just because something is permitted doesn't make it right. Jesus' whole point is that the law isn't about righteousness but showing you that you are unrighteous.

I've read some of the Old Testament. I've never claimed to have exhaustive Bible knowledge. Just trying to learn at this point.

I don't expect humans to be able to live completely righteously. It's impossible. I'm fully aware of the basic concept of Christianity that says that all humans sin, and no one (except for Christ) ever lived a sinless life.

But God's law should certainly be righteous; to expect it to be anything else would be wrong. If what they needed was an unrighteous law system to prove they were depraved, then why didn't God just let them devise their own? If you sin, it should be because it's your fault, not because God neglected to tell you that it was wrong. You cannot be shown you are unrighteous if you do not know that what you have done/are doing is unrighteous.

I do not expect God to sabotage humanity by polluting his word, by intentionally clouding and contradicting the concepts that are of him. Trying to trick humanity into sinning is the devil's forte, not God's. I don't know if that's what you're driving at, but it sounds like it to me.

I expect you know that (. . .)

Don't expect I know anything. I'm not much of a history buff, and since I'm not familiar with a lot of the references you make in your post, it's difficult for me to know how to respond. Sorry.

Well, that's it for now. It's been an interesting experience. Catch y'all on the flipside.

Don't expect I know anything. I'm not much of a history buff, and since I'm not familiar with a lot of the references you make in your post, it's difficult for me to know how to respond. Sorry.

That would be because many of the quotes I made are from a book I have been reading, not a website. But I should say where I got the info just the same. The book is Germs, genes, & Civilization: how epidemics shaped who we are today (2010), written by David P. Clark, Department of Microbiology, Southern Illinois University, and is as relevant to laboratory technicians, nurses and other medical personnel as it is to historians.

The difference here is that these punishments are brought about by natural causes. By cursing people's descendants, God is heaping upon cultures punishments brought about by supernatural causes. Since these supernatural punishments are carried out deliberately and by a morally neutral system (nature), the motivations behind them can be scrutinized and the fairness of the intended results can be evaluated.

Ancient people didn't know about so-called 'natural causes'. And when we dismiss so-called 'natural causes' that can't be helped, we are at risk of forgetting the things we did or did not do to contribute to the disaster. In many ways Genesis, in particular, is one of C.S.Lewis' true myths, this time of the change from a hunter-gatherer existence to a more settled farming life, involving first agriculture then animal husbandry. It seems that in those days humans probably were healthier, and lived longer lives. The trouble is it wasn't likely to last.

The more crops are bunched together on increasingly exhausted soil, the more animals are herded together under human control and the more humans, themselves, bunch together in overcrowded cities the more likely they are to fall victim to whatever opportunistic diseases are going around. Whether plants, animals, even in the wild, or humans, once a critical population point has been reached, something like 500,000, then there is a chance for diseases to spread like wildfire, to thin out the population.

Ancient peoples, whether Egyptians, Greeks, Canaanites or Israelites, simply didn't know about diseases, attributing their onset to the will of whatever gods they believed in, though the Israelites should have learned a thing or two about the value of hygiene in preventing disease, and how cleanliness is next to godliness. It was the Bible which dreamed up that very evocative image of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: War, Pestilence, Famine and Death. They said nothing about Death because of 'natural causes', such as earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, floods, tornadoes or volcanic eruptions, although all of these groups were well aware of such natural phenomena, likewise attributing their occurrences to whatever gods they believed in.

Even if they knew of what happened in their own vicinity they would not have known about events on the other side of the planet, which nevertheless influenced world climate. It seems that in the 13th century BC there was considerable geological instability around the Mediterranean, which brought an end to Mycenaean Greece, and a beginning to the Philistine presence in what is known today as the Gaza Strip. Which in turn caused war and strife, involving both the Canaanites and the Hebrews, even the Egyptians. When people are forced to move on they might suffer from famine, they might either spread diseases or contract others. The Israelites had suffered illness on the march themselves, and it isn't too far fetched to think that such plagues, once the Israelites recovered, infected some of the Canaanite cities they came up against.

Last night I was watching a program about Thutmose IV, the successor to the 1400's BC queen, Hatshepsut. Thutmose invaded Canaan, in particular the city of Megiddo, because of its alliance with the Mitanni to the north against him. He took Canaanite children to be hostages in Egypt for the good behaviour of the Canaanites. Sounds vaguely familiar in any way?

We know so much more about natural causes these days, and yet we still cannot always deaden their effects on us.

This is the exact same argument that the Westboro Baptist Church uses to justify it's praise of natural disasters as acts of God. (They are on my mind because they protested in my town yesterday.) I don't find it a compelling argument at all because natural causes all happen in the locations, manners and frequencies that scientists, geologists and meterologists would expect them to. If an earthquake is God's way of punishing sinners, the sinners would all have to live near fault lines. If some horrible disease is God's way of punishing the evildoers, evildoers would have to be poor enough not to afford medicine or health care. If a hurricane is God's way of pouring his wrath on the people who disobey them, then he is only punishing those who did not heed the weatherman's warnings 10 days in advance.

I don't see that such disasters are so predictable. Take tornadoes for example. These are things you get only in America, right? So how is it we have been getting some here, last summer? Out at sea they aren't much trouble, or even in sparsely inhabited areas, but what happens when they hit a heavily populated area? Same with earthquakes etc. Three days before the 9.0 Boxing day earthquake and tsunami, in 2004, which killed hundreds of thousands of people, there was another severe earthquake, at least 8.0 magnitude, but it was out at sea, between Tasmania and Antarctica, and so did not hurt anyone.

And I don't see how my arguments are at all the same as those of the Baptist church you mentioned. The many people who died in the Haiti earthquake a year or so ago, didn't die because of an act of God against them, because they were worse behaved than anyone else. But they did suffer unduly because of the shoddy building codes, the corruption, bribery and venality of their past governments and the failure of its present government to overcome these disadvantages. When the Japanese earthquake and the ensuing tsunami damaged a nuclear power plant, maybe it is time for us all to reconsider nuclear power, especially in geologically active areas like Iran, USA, China and in Japan, itself. And when scientists warn of global warming and how it would impact weather patters, or of human impact on the planet, it might be a good idea to rein in wastefulness and polluting habits, and to learn to share resources more equitably.

I would agree that those horsemen of the Apocalypse have grown restless of late, and that possibly we are in for another geologically active spell, just like the ones in the 13th century BC or the 550's AD, 750's AD and 1200 AD which brought the Anglo-Saxons, the Vikings, the Magyars, the end of the Roman Empire and the rise of Islam and much else. If that is so, then maybe we need to take more care of ourselves.

This is only comforting if I focus merely on the salvation of myself and no one else. If I were a Christian and was able to think of all the people around who die every second who will be going to hell, I'd go crazy.

Minotaur, I suspect that you know what I'm about to say: no one goes to Hell who doesn't want to be there already.

This area Christology has always felt a little bit fuzzy to me. Particularly because Jesus prays to God as if God is a completely separate being, and shouts while on the cross, "My God, why have you forsaken me?"

It's because Jesus is a man. Fully God, fully man, yet one person.

This would depend on if the Pharisees actually believed that Jesus was God. If they didn't, the Jesus was committing blasphemy of the highest order and should have been gotten rid of according to Jewish culture. If the Pharisees actually believe that Jesus was God, and rejected him, then they are idiots of the highest degree.

No more idiots than anyone else, for Romans 1 points out that all of humanity is in blatant denial about God. The Pharisees did not believe that Jesus was the Christ because they did not want to believe.

Not so. The Bible makes it clear that they were not merely taking over and assimilating, or forcing a migration. They were destroying the cities that they fought.

Which was fairly standard practice for invading armies that weren't interested in tribute but in settlement.

Amalekites were at war with the Israelites for hundreds of years, and were probably committing similar atrocities to them. But the children would clearly be innocent in that matter, and the women mostly so.

Yes, leave survivors who will remember and take revenge: makes sense in the culture of that time.

"You have heard that it was said, 'Love your neighbor and hate your enemy'"?

Rose, I think Jesus isn't quoting the law at all: he's quoting a rabbinical saying of the time.

What Jesus is doing is saying that righteousness means much much more than simply following the law. Righteousness has to do with having a new heart, not simply following a set of rules. He's not contradicting the law: he's taking his listeners beyond the law. He saying, "you want to truly follow God? Then show that your heart is in the right place." The Pharisees went beyond the law by putting up little ceremonial boundaries that missed its point. Jesus goes beyond the law by interpreting its Spirit, not just its letter.

And I'm not sure I see your point, because I do live like that. But for me, Divine authority doesn't automatically equal a collection of ancient scriptures, written and handpicked by humans.

Humans guided by the Holy Spirit. Remember what St. Paul says: all Scripture is given by inspiration (and he primarily has the OT in mind here). What Divine authority do we have if not Scripture?

Who is a member of this counsel, and who appointed them?

You're equivocating here: the full counsel of the Church refers to the Spirit's working in the body of Christ. This is why we have such things as Biblical canon, the creeds, etc.

So all cultures outside of Christianity are completely and utterly evil, with not even the faintest understanding or display of love, fairness and righteousness? Wow. I believe even animals are capable of love, so you're going to have a hard time selling that idea to me. There is a lot that is messed up about humanity, but there are beacons of truth everywhere, because God is everywhere and we are still a part of him, even though we have done so much to distance ourselves.

But that's Paul's point: we have the knowledge of God that is plain and yet we systematically reject it, so God judges us.

But God's law should certainly be righteous; to expect it to be anything else would be wrong.

The problem isn't with the law, it's with people, as Jesus points out.

You cannot be shown you are unrighteous if you do not know that what you have done/are doing is unrighteous.

On the contrary: For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. .

Remember that you are judged not based on what you do, but based on who you are: are you a son of Adam, or a son of God by adoption through Christ?

TBG

I would be very careful around those. They tend to give very vague answers based on very well practiced observation skills

Dunno if it was observation or not. I asked this pendulum board what my future looked like and it pointed to the same answers three separate times. Then my friend asked a question and it pointed to a different answer. I can't see how it would be rigged but hey, it might have been. Either way it was pretty cool. Also maybe the psychic was just messing around and giving observations, but some things she said about me were quite specific. So I'm not entirely sure.

As I mentioned, be very careful. You don't know if there are demonic beings involved. They are capable of manipulating physical objects and will tell people things they normally wouldn't know. I know this from experience. It will appear pretty cool at the time, but you may have opened a door that is not so easy to shut. I don't know if that's the case because I don't have enough information, and at this point it would be too soon to really say anyway. I'm just warning you about the very dangerous road this can lead to. And it may take you places you don't want to go much sooner than you realize.

Minotaur, I suspect that you know what I'm about to say: no one goes to Hell who doesn't want to be there already.

According to the doctrines of Christianity, I'm going to hell. I don't want to go to hell, though. I'd much rather die like the mortal that I am than have my consciousness be extended for eternity.

Almost nobody wants to go to a place of eternal torture.

It's because Jesus is a man. Fully God, fully man, yet one person.

Under this statement, in isolated situations where Jesus acts like God, it is easy to explain Jesus's actions - it's because he's God. In other isolated situations where Jesus definitely does not act like God, it is also easy to explain Jesus's actions - it's because he's a man. But when one looks at the big picture, there's a bit of a problem.

Oh, but this is just another divine mystery, right? So I guess I'll just have to rationalize a blatant contradiction with faith.

No more idiots than anyone else, for Romans 1 points out that all of humanity is in blatant denial about God. The Pharisees did not believe that Jesus was the Christ because they did not want to believe.

All Romans 1 does is claim that it's obvious that God exists, so anyone who denies the existence of God is just living in denial.

Well, I don't think it's obvious that the God of the bible exists.

When I had a debate with a Christian who insisted that every atheist secretly believed in God, I laughed on the inside. I don't secretly believe in God.

Which was fairly standard practice for invading armies that weren't interested in tribute but in settlement.

I find it interesting that your defense would be, "Well, all the other cultures around the Israelites at the time did it, so that means it's okay."

When we discussed the issue of slavery and other iffy Hebrew laws, your side ranted quite a bit about how cultures around the Israelites were atrocious, and that their laws were far worse. Fair enough.

But if you start using the actions of other cultures as justification when the Hebrew foreign practices are the same, we have an issue. At best, this proves that Israel is no worse than the heathens.

Yes, leave survivors who will remember and take revenge: makes sense in the culture of that time.

God is all-powerful, I'm sure he could have worked out something that didn't involve the mass murder of innocent people to protect his Chosen Ones. Why not just design history so that no one settled in the Promised Land in the first place?

Since Rose has left CR&P, I'll respond to your responses to her.

Humans guided by the Holy Spirit. Remember what St. Paul says: all Scripture is given by inspiration (and he primarily has the OT in mind here). What Divine authority do we have if not Scripture?

What about the Catholic Church? After all, Jesus never talks about the authority of the "Bible". He never gives prophecies about it's eventual existence. But he does talk an awful lot about establishing his church.

And remember that in the first couple centuries, there were about 50 different Gospel accounts floating around, and many churches accepted books that aren't in your biblical cannon as scripture based on the knowledge they had at that time. Were those people not Christians? Who could they get their divine authority from?

You're equivocating here: the full counsel of the Church refers to the Spirit's working in the body of Christ. This is why we have such things as Biblical canon, the creeds, etc.

So either we have a schizophrenic Holy Spirit who scampers around the earth inspiring different people to create different Biblical cannons, or the Devil is so powerful that he can cause the vast majority of Christians throughout history to have the wrong bible.

The problem isn't with the law, it's with people, as Jesus points out.

So why didn't God point this out long beforehand? By giving the Israelites a set of impossible rules, he was setting them up for failure.

Remember that you are judged not based on what you do, but based on who you are: are you a son of Adam, or a son of God by adoption through Christ?

I'm a son of my momma. See, life is a self-replicating process...oh, never mind.

Ancient people didn't know about so-called 'natural causes'. And when we dismiss so-called 'natural causes' that can't be helped, we are at risk of forgetting the things we did or did not do to contribute to the disaster...We know so much more about natural causes these days, and yet we still cannot always deaden their effects on us.

Uh...thank you for typing up several giant paragraphs that essentially proved my point? People back in the day had no access to the knowledge of modern science, so they saw it fit to attribute any odd natural activity to Gods. Nowadays we know better. The point is that even a disaster that humans might have caused (global warming) was simply brought about by natural causes (human actions towards the environment) that any scientist would expect if given the adequate data.

You pointed out that the amount of damage a natural disaster causes is entirely subjective to the density of the population in the location. There is no divine intervention regulating punishment here. "Maybe we need to take more care of ourselves" is something we can figure out without God.

If God's way of interacting with his creation is to cause a disastrous hurricane that kills millions, this is not a God fit for worship. This is a God badly in need of a lesson in effective communication.

I don't see that such disasters are so predictable. Take tornadoes for example. These are things you get only in America, right? So how is it we have been getting some here, last summer?

It's because your premise is incorrect. Tornadoes do not only happen in America.

I didn't have a wrong assumption about tornadoes, merely a wrong assumption about how parochial it sometimes appears to outsiders, that Middle America can be in reading the news. Reading the BBC, CNN and other news services, it would be reasonable to assume that USA is the only place in the world that gets tornadoes. Especially really horrible ones.

Read the news. The International news, not just your local ones. You will see even on the International news - read the BBC or Google News for example - and there is always heaps about American tornadoes during your tornado season. Some years it is worse than others, depending on whether it is an El Nino or a La Nina. We get tornadoes also, but do you ever hear about them on the International news? Of course not. We are more sparsely populated, and a tornado is more likely to rip through countryside with nothing more than paddocks or trees to damage.

Of course the ancients did blame everything that happened to them on God's wrath. Or the other various gods they believed in. But just because we know a bit more about evolution, about plate tectonics, weather patterns and why diseases caused by bacteria and fast mutating viruses can rapidly turn so very deadly, doesn't mean that there isn't a God either. Evolution, I repeat, is merely a mechanism without ethics, and with a sole purpose of cleaning out the weak to give the best chance for the strongest to survive and multiply.

So are the other 'natural phenomena' that happen from time to time. After the Romans desecrated and destroyed Jerusalem's temple in 70 AD, the Jews went on record as attributing the later eruption of Mt Vesuvius 9 years later, which destroyed Herculaneum & Pompeii as God's vengeance on the Romans. Similarly, Attila the Hun was turned back at the gates of Rome because his men were getting ill with malaria. Pope Leo justifiably felt that Rome being spared was due to God's providence. Because Rome at the time was weak, itself, a sitting duck, ready for Attila to take, with the Pope Rome's only leader of any consequence.

That such events suited some people and hurt others neither proves or disproves there is a God. Justice, famously, is blind. But don't you think that those in peril might have good reason to pray that they might be spared? To pray for help? And isn't that a good reason to believe in a merciful God, having prayed for help, and if by some 'lucky' chance they do manage to survive after all?

You pointed out that the amount of damage a natural disaster causes is entirely subjective to the density of the population in the location. There is no divine intervention regulating punishment here. "Maybe we need to take more care of ourselves" is something we can figure out without God

.

Yes, the amount of damage a natural disaster causes is affected by the number of people in its path. That is why humanity should worry. The planet is totally overpopulated by humans at the moment, a direct result of medical and technological discoveries in the last two centuries. It is a matter of time before we get another influenza outbreak, for example, which is every bit as deadly as the 1919 Spanish flu epidemic, or some disease as powerful as the Black Death of the 14th century AD in Europe. At least, get your flu shots up to date this winter.

However, I never said 'the amount of damage a natural disaster causes is entirely subject to the density of the population in the location', which is what you choose to think. For that is not the only reason why natural disasters are worse in some places more than others. I did mention that the Haiti 7.0 magnitude earthquake of January 2010 caused rather more suffering than it should have done, mainly because of past corrupt and venal governments, such as those of Papa Doc and Baby Doc Duvalier, which had shoddy building codes, shoddy law enforcement and no concern whatever for the people under their control. Thus Haiti suffered, and continues to suffer for the sins of its past leaders.

When later last year, Chile's city of Concepcion suffered a magnitude 8.8 earthquake, this much more strongly built city, with much better building codes, was still damaged severely. But although many people died in this very strong earthquake, in the series of earth tremors that followed, and in the following tsunami, the total death toll was nowhere near as bad as it was for Haiti.

Likewise, when Christchurch which had already suffered an earthquake late 2010 of magnitude 7 or more, and this year suffered a series of earthquakes almost as heavy as the Haiti earthquake, it, too, did not suffer anything like the death toll that was endured in Port au Prince in 2010. And thank God for that!

However, no amount of good building codes, good government or wealth or power is going to withstand a really nasty earthquake, like the 9.0 magnitude earthquake which afflicted Japan this year, along with the ensuing tsunami and the damage to the nuclear power plant in that area. Japan is notorious for its nasty earthquakes, along with New Zealand, Chile or Indonesia. But when New York, Adelaide, North Queensland, or Melbourne have suffered earth tremors in the past year, I wouldn't be too complacent that such a huge earthquake, or worse, couldn't happen somewhere else in a highly populated area.

I don't agree that you don't need God to learn to look after yourself. You might need God's inspiration before you are ready to help others, though, who are worse off than yourself. Yes, people can be ethical without God, and some can behave disgustingly whilst saying they believe in a just and merciful God.

However, I do believe that times of crisis can be ameliorated or worsened by the ethics of the governments and the behaviour of the peoples affected by them, and that it is God, and in particular Jesus Christ, who gave us the best ethics to follow and our best protection in times of trouble. Especially when having learned so much we, humans, may find that we are the disease which is polluting the world, afflicting God's marvellous creation of the life-bearing Earth, and when it is us humans who may be the cause of global warming.

Quick note on global warming. That's pretty much a big joke which is far more politics seeking more control than any real science. Is the planet warming? Yes it is. In comparison to what? Yesterday? 30 years ago? We've only been keeping track for 150 years, nowhere near enough time to assess the large scale global warming/cooling patterns. And while humans have added to the problem (I do believe in good stewardship of our resources.), a single volcanic eruption adds more greenhouse gases and such than what America has ever done combined. It is also interesting to note that the hole in the ozone is actually under a volcano in Antarctica. Population? 0.