Whatever Bob. I gave the philosophical argument and you went to the OT. I also explained the passage. You call a holy God unjust and evil. This is blasphemy.
The problem Bob is that many thinkers and theologians (if there is such a thing anymore) are realizing that much of the old school ‘religious thinking is out the window’ 
So our choice is to hold on to old ways… Or to look at new possibilities.
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Having said what I said,
Bob said:
That is an argument that any cultist can use to insist that we must accept the most perverse claims about God
And that is a premise I abhor. But if we start to think and show beyond that very narrow view we can indeed start to see God for what he is and what He is trying to accomplish.
It appears that you don’t only turn Talbott and Otto upside down. WHERE did I call God “unjust and evil”?? That’s quite opposite of what I affirmed. Do you translate repeatedly declaring that “God IS love,” and “in Him is no darkness at all” as calling God evil?
Your own post argued that God endorses slaughtering innocent infants and other folk, actions that appear to most of humanity as the essence of an unjust evil (and cited some philosophers you claimed also argued God’s uniqueness means that He is the opposite of what our conscience recognizes as love and goodness).
I just affirmed that I whole-heartedly believe that God is good and loves in a way that humans can recognize, and in the understandable senses in which the Bible defines love.
Just a word about “The Monster God of the Old Testament.” If by this phrase, it is meant “the God of ancient Israel” then I hereby affirm that He is NOT a “Monster God”! He is the one and only God. He is the same God whom the apostle John stated to BE “love,” not that love is merely one of His characteristics, but is His very essence.
What has happened is that He is incorrectly depicted in the Mosaic writings and in some of the writings of the prophets.
Moses was in charge of the great nation of Israel. Sometimes he worked out solutions to the many problems that arose, and in my opinion, he mistakenly ascribed some of these solutions (which were very violent), to God. He supposed that God had revealed these solutions to him. And that’s why we read in the Mosaic writings that God told Moses to carry out some of these atrocities, as well as other statements by Moses such as “He reached out his hand to steady the ark, and God killed him.”
Paidion,
Not all the scriptures in the OT come from Moses. If God is love then He must hate evil.
Psalm 5:5 - “The foolish shall not stand in thy sight: thou hatest all workers of iniquity.”
Psalm 5:6 - “Thou shalt destroy them that speak leasing: the LORD will abhor the bloody and deceitful man.”
Psalm 10:3 - “For the wicked boasteth of his heart’s desire, and blesseth the covetous, whom the LORD abhorreth.”
Psalm 11:5 - “The LORD trieth the righteous: but the wicked and him that loveth violence his soul hateth.”
Psalm 53:5 - “There were they in great fear, where no fear was: for God hath scattered the bones of him that encampeth against thee: thou hast put them to shame, because God hath despised them.”
Psalm 73:20 - “As a dream when one awaketh; so, O Lord, when thou awakest, thou shalt despise their image.”
Psalm 78:59 - “When God heard this, he was wroth, and greatly abhorred Israel:”
Psalm 106:40 - “Therefore was the wrath of the LORD kindled against his people, insomuch that he abhorred his own inheritance.”
Proverbs 6:16-19 - “These six things doth the LORD hate: yea, seven are an abomination unto him: A proud look, a lying tongue, and hands that shed innocent blood, An heart that deviseth wicked imaginations, feet that be swift in running to mischief, A false witness that speaketh lies, and he that soweth discord among brethren.”
Proverbs 22:14 - “The mouth of strange women is a deep pit: he that is abhorred of the LORD shall fall therein.”
Lamentations 2:6 - “And he hath violently taken away his tabernacle, as if it were of a garden: he hath destroyed his places of the assembly: the LORD hath caused the solemn feasts and sabbaths to be forgotten in Zion, and hath despised in the indignation of his anger the king and the priest.”
Hosea 9:15 - “All their wickedness is in Gilgal: for there I hated them: for the wickedness of their doings I will drive them out of mine house, I will love them no more: all their princes are revolters.”
Zechariah 11:8 - “Three shepherds also I cut off in one month; and my soul loathed them, and their soul also abhorred me.”
Malachi 1:3 - “And I hated Esau, and laid his mountains and his heritage waste for the dragons of the wilderness.”
hollytree, None of these are Scriptures that urge slaughtering children and the innocent, or the contentions of yours that we have questioned such as philosophers you cited who have God predestining his offspring to damnation. No one has argued that God does not abhor evil! Only that he chastens sinners in a righteous way consistent with his love for sinners that pursues their welfare and salvation.
I never said they did Bob. There’s plenty of scriptures where all are destroyed in a nation or city. Even in the flood all are destroyed. Animals included. I know it’s hard being a blasphemer to understand what’s being said. You even distort and misrepresent the doctrine of predestination.
Hyper-Calvinism believes in Positive - Positive predestination. Reformed Calvinism believes God positively chooses a remnant by grace through faith. He passes over the reprobate. It’s positive - negative.
As I understand it… evangelicals have been totally hoodwinked by ‘Calvinism’ in that Calvin has been allowed to determine what the nature and boundaries of issues like election and predestination actually are; and all this to the detriment of both believers and those beyond.
I will act with furious rage against you, and I Myself will punish you sevenfold for your sins. 29You will eat the flesh of your sons and the flesh of your daughters. ~~ Lev. 26:29
1 Samuel Chapter 15
Hosea 13:16 - Samaria shall become desolate; for she hath rebelled against her God: they shall fall by the sword: their infants shall be dashed in pieces, and their women with child shall be ripped up.
Deuteronomy 2:34 - And we took all his cities at that time, and utterly destroyed the men, and the women, and the little ones, of every city, we left none to remain:
Deuteronomy Chapter 3
5 All these cities [were] fenced with high walls, gates, and bars; beside unwalled towns a great many.
Here’s a whole list
https://www.kingjamesbibleonline.org/Bible-Verses-About-Genocide/
Repeatedly shouting “Blasphemer” is a curious way of winning over those unconvinced by your post exalting the slaughter and torture of children and the innocent. But I wear your name-calling proudly if it comes from those who celebrate a deity who chooses a few in a remnant, and leaves most of his offspring to be reprobates who have no chance of avoiding his “furious rage.” (And I admire Piper for admitting that for classic predestinarians, this choice to damn most folk surely is as sovereignly ordained as everything else.)
Thanks for the reminder that I take joy in standing with the Jesus who conveyed the Abba who even loved reprobate sinners, and was accused by the Bible teachers in God’s religion of being a Blasphemer.
As long as God has morally sufficient and justifiable reasons for hell it’s not unjust to allow it. I gave 50 justifiable reasons for the death of Christ. The burden of proof is on you who thinks God can’t have justifiable reasons for hell. Grace is unmerited favor and never owed. God’s never obligated to be merciful to someone. He owes us nothing.
But I wear your name-calling proudly
I rest my case.
Talbott & I have never doubted that there are very good reasons for hell or for the death of Christ. Do you not realize that those are crucial to the classic view of God’s victorious reconciliation of his creation?
But I don’t at all see why you think Christ’s glorious sacrifice and absorption of our sin and evil, somehow proves that his Abba is bound to exalt the slaughter of God’s offspring or innocent kids by those called to be a light to the pagan nations. Such logic simply appears to me to be a non-sequitur.
That’s fine, just wanted to reinforce the existence of that view as a [possible] valid explanation/justification for OT violence committed/commanded by God. Of course, I understand that you reject OT violence altogether.
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I gave the philosophical argument and showed that there is a possible world where the death of Christ was justified. I gave the argument and provided the evidence from the philosophy of law. Therefore, your moral principle “killing the innocent is wrong” isn’t a necessary moral truth. It doesn’t hold in all possible worlds. Your response was to quote a passage from the OT to which I answered. Again, here’s Swinburne’s argument on what a necessary moral truth looks like:
We might say that acts of telling lies in such and such circumstances are bad. But it must be said that if there is a world W in which a certain action A having various non-moral properties is bad, there could not be another world W* which was exactly the same as W in all non-moral respects, but in which A was not bad. The concept of the moral is such that it makes no sense to suppose both that there is a world W in which A is wrong and a world W* exactly the same as W except that in W* A is good. It follows that there are logically necessary truths of the form "If an action has non-moral properties B, C, and D, it is morally good, if an action has the non-moral properties D, E, and F, it is morally wrong and so on. If there are moral truths some of them are necessary moral truths. - Richard Swinburne
My Examples:
- Necessarily, telling a lie in such and such circumstances is wrong
a) telling a lie just to see if you can get away with it when it would harm
others is wrong.
- Necessarily, cheating in such and such circumstances is wrong
a) Copying someones Ph.D. dissertation just to get a Ph.D. to look smart is wrong
- Necessarily, killing in such and such circumstances is wrong
a) Murdering an innocent 13 year old girl in a drive by shooting for fun
is wrong.
- Necessarily, stealing in such and such circumstances is wrong
a) Stealing money from your mother to buy drugs just to get high
is wrong
“Killing the innocent is wrong” isn’t a necessary moral truth as I showed. You still haven’t given a philosophical argument for your position. Instead you quoted a passage from the OT. I gave my argument and evidence from the philosophy of law. Even if God has established a system of justice among human beings in the OT that forbids the punishment of the innocent, He Himself is not so forbidden. What they meant for evil God meant for good. We see this all through the OT when God judges His people. He will use evil to judge His people and then turn around and judge those who brought evil against His people. (Judges 2:11-19; Isaiah 10:5-6) One act two intentions. Mans intentions are evil God’s intentions are holy and good. I gave 50 justifiable reasons for the death of Christ. Glad to see you are in agreement.
The Bible doesn’t say that’s the only reason. God is infinite in wisdom and knowledge and logical explanations are infinite in number. Even the staunchest of contemporary retributivists, Michael Moore, recognizes that the demands of retributive justice are prima facie demands that can be and are overridden in specific cases. This is why Moore is not committed to moral legalism Moore says that we must not confuse the intrinsic goodness of retribution with the categorical duty to carry out retributive justice on every possible occasion. He calls himself a threshold deontologist, that is to say, he abides by the categorical norm of morality until doing so produces sufficiently bad consequences to pass some threshold. So in the extreme case where one must punish an innocent person or else the whole world would be tortured forever one should punish the innocent person. By waiving the prima facie demands of retributive justice and punishing the innocent person he has mercifully saved the whole world from being tortured forever and was therefore acting compatibly with moral goodness. I gave 50 justifiable reasons showing that this is how God operates. He has justifiable reasons for punishment and logical explanations are infinite in number. Especially when we are dealing with a being who is infinite in wisdom and knowledge.
The secret things belong to the LORD our God , but the things revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may follow all the words of this law.
The Bible would say I’m punishing them just for retribution. It doesn’t. In fact when we look at another example of where the innocent is punished for others sins (Christ) we find at least 50 justifiable reasons for retribution on the innocent. God is a being infinite in wisdom and knowledge and logical explanations are infinite in number. Moreover, all events in the past lead up to the cross and culminate at the cross. Therefore, we look at all the justifiable reasons at the cross. Moreover, Job underwent suffering and had no idea why.
FWIW My personal conscience sympathizes with Qaz’s that ANY using of the sins of others to justify brutalizing little children or the innocent appears to conflict with any intelligible sense of righteous justice. I love the 50 things that Jesus’ willingness to absorb the wrongful punishment of sinners accomplishes, but have no idea how his loving submission would show that it can be morally good for the righteous to brutalize the innocent. But I admire Hollytree’s willingness to try to explain why such acts appears appropriate to him.
Still waiting for the argument Bob. I wouldn’t blaspheme the Holy God of the Bible over an intuition.