I wrote:
I have previously shown that the apostles also believed that God strikes people dead (e.g., Herod in Acts 12, and the Book of Revelation—to mention only a few). Paidon has previous said that these writers were mistaken—meaning that those who kept company with Jesus and with His apostles knew less of the character of Christ (and what is, or is not consistent with Him) than Paidion himself knows. If this is, in any sense, an "honest" treatment of the New Testament writings, it is anything but humble.
To which Timeos responded:
Is that your humble opinion? Or your not-so-humble pronouncement?
I don't understand this question. Please elaborate. I am not sure how the statements of mine that you cited fall into either category of "humble" or "not-so-humble." There is no expression of my motives in the statement—merely a factual observation. I have no idea how the motives behind the presentation could be discerned—or would even be an issue—when considering the validity of the point observed.
Paidion wrote:
I just cannot see how the act of killing people and ordering others to kill people, often in a very painful way, can arise out of LOVE.
A little child often cannot “see how” a parent’s actions, which involve a child’s suffering, could arise out of parental love—even though another adult could see it quite clearly—as, for example, in the case when a gangrenous leg must be sawed off in the absence of anesthesia. The question for us would be whether we can trust that God sees a bigger picture than what we see, and could be acting in love, even in actions that involve great pain or even the ending of a person’s temporal life. If not, perhaps we are more like little children than we imagine ourselves to be.
(Jesus never did it, during his time as a human being).
You have set up this straw man several times, and have been notified of the inadequacy of its use as an argument for your position.
It is clear that the prophets also did not kill anyone, though they believed in the law of Moses, including its prescribed penalties. They also believed that God brings mortal judgment upon apostate Israel and other nations. The fact that they, personally, never killed anyone is irrelevant.
It is also evident that Paul and Luke believed that God judges and kills people in certain circumstances, and that there are crimes that are "worthy of death" (e.g., Romans 1:32; Acts 25:11). Yet, neither of these men ever killed anyone. Their not killing anyone does not enter into any rational argument of what they believed about such things.
After my death, if you were to be discussing my theology on this topic, and you were to say, "Steve believed in capital punishment and also that God sometimes strikes people dead," what would you think of someone countering your position by saying, "You are wrong. I am reliably informed that Steve never killed a single person in his lifetime"?
Would you not see very clearly that the person's argument was absurd?
Paidion wrote:
It seems to me, that if such acts do have their source in love, then we must redefine the very word "love" to accommodate such acts.
Quite right! It is important that our definition of love conform with reality—not to culturally or temperamentally-derived sentimentality. The danger of succumbing to such sentimentality cannot be overestimated. A commitment to reality may require, sometimes, that we change definitions that we have previously adopted, in order to agree with the truth.
"Love" is defined by the commitment to do what is best for others—if possible, for all parties, but if not, then for the greatest number of persons possible. Seen this way, every act of God recorded in scripture can be seen as acts of love—even Jesus’ scathing public denunciations of the scribes and Pharisees (who probably felt considerable angst and mortification in being thus addressed).
In United States and Canada, any citizen who kills the people that he hates would be arrested as a criminal, and if convicted, be given a life sentence or be executed. I just cannot comprehend the rationalization that God can do things that would be immoral if people did them, simply because He is God.
You are criticizing God’s actions on the basis of the punitive policies of the State, which you apparently think justified. You either see such law-enforcement as legitimate or as illegitimate. If you are not saying that the State’s punitive actions are justified, then your argument disappears into the ether. You seem to be saying that some criminal acts require punishment, and that this would apply equally to God's criminal acts. I find it very telling of your prejudices that you place God's actions on the "criminal" side of the ledger, rather than on the "criminal justice system" side.
Your argument, as framed, claims that such criminal actions
deserve this State-imposed punishment and that God would also deserve this punishment if He did all the things that Moses, David, the prophets, Jesus and the apostles claim that He did.
John6809 rightly pointed out that you apparently see criminal justice remedies as legitimate, when carried out by law-enforcement agencies of the State, but illegitimate when carried out by God Himself.
The philosopher John Stuart Mill wrote:
To say that God's goodness may be different in kind from man's goodness, what is it but saying, with a slight change of phraseology, that God may possibly not be good?
John Stuart Mill was an atheist (godfather to Bertrand Russell), and not the best source for views on Christian theology. Perhaps we could follow this up with an insightful quote from Richard Dawkins about the kind of God the Bible portrays. “Evil men do not understand justice, But those who seek the Lord understand all.” (Prov.28:5). The man who denies God His proper role in the universe will never sympathize with God’s proper exercise of that role.
If a friend were to tell you that his uncle was responsible for denying the freedom, and for the subsequent ruination of the lives, of hundreds of citizens, you might think the man a monster—until you learned that the uncle was a civil magistrate, and that every person whose life was adversely affected by his actions was a deserving criminal. It is all a matter of perspective. Is there a God in charge, or not?
Goodness is the same, in principle, with God as with men. Those who recognize God’s role as the supreme maintainer of justice in the universe have no problem seeing that His good administration of justice operates on the same principles as any other proper governmental administration of justice. The protection of the general citizenry always requires the removal of criminals from the general population. You approve of the State doing this, but not of God doing so. It seems that you are the one who does not apply the same standard of “goodness” to God as to human (i.e., governmental) behavior.
From your earlier comments, I conclude that you approve of the removal of violent criminals from the general population. You apparently do not approve of capital punishment, but the alternative, in many cases, would be life-imprisonment of offenders.
The approval of one of these punishments over the other is arbitrary. Both punishments, if deserved, are legitimate; and both are evil, if undeserved. Saying, “It is all right to take a man’s life and freedom away for as long as he breathes, but it is wring to take his breath as well,” is an arbitrary, subjective ethic without biblical or rational justification. Justice involves the giving of penalties that are deserved. Some say that capital punishment is evil because innocent parties sometimes are wrongly condemned. However, life imprisonment is also a great evil, if the party condemned was innocent. If we say, “But the man in prison can be exonerated by DNA evidence at a later date, while the executed man cannot be,” we are still not thinking clearly. The man exonerated after 20 years in prison has still had irreplaceable life taken from him unjustly.
The problem with punishing innocent men—whether in taking 20 years of life from them, or by taking the duration of their lifetime from them—is a problem with the
court system, not the
prison system. There may be corruption or incompetence in the criminal justice system—leading to the wrongful conviction of innocent men upon inadequate evidence—and this must be decried and remedied. But this does not change the fact that all undeserved punishment is unjust, and all deserved punishment is just. Our court systems often err in determining what is or is not deserved—but such errors are not in the picture when discussing God’s judgment.
If we say that God is unjust when He punishes someone deserving of punishment, then we have created a bizarre, subjective definition of justice that cannot be supported by any rational ethic. If we, rather, argue that no person could commit any act deserving of death, rendering God unjust for executing any guilty criminal, then we have departed from Christian theology altogether, and ought to be arguing on a secular forum, rather than here.
John wrote:
What are you saying, Paidion? You seem to be giving approval for the state to arrest or execute murderers but saying God doesn't have that same right.
To which Paidion wrote:
No, that is not my point. My point is that killing other people out of anger or hate is wrong, whether the killing is done by man or by a deity.
It is the sure proof of an indefensible position that, when challenged, one must mischaracterize the opponent’s position in order for his argument to avoid admitting defeat. If a position can only be shown to be wrong after it has been reduced to a caricature, this is pretty good evidence that it is a correct position in its real formulation—and that the caricaturist is in a desperate position.
Paidion’s statement cited above is simply not true. What would be wrong would be the
unjust killing of a criminal
by unauthorized parties. Soldiers at war, and State executioners, are not in the same position, in such matters, as are private citizens. God is not a private citizen.
Paidion has changed-up the whole discussion by identifying God’s objectionable behavior as “killing other people out of anger or hate.” I don’t know why the actions of a judge who rightly condemns a serial killer should be condemned, simply because that judge may also feel anger or hatred toward the miscreant. It is the
actions of a judge, not his
emotions, that prove him either to be a just or unjust magistrate.
If there were a god who executed righteous judgment, and did so with a disposition of either anger or hatred, this might not seem to be much like the God we worship, but, since the judgment rendered was just, his actions could not be impugned by reference to his emotions.
The Christian who takes the biblical position that God judges evil men according to justice and desert, however, does not necessarily involve any consideration of His emotional state in doing so. To introduce the wild card of God’s doing this “out of anger or hate” is to deliberately muddy the waters and obscure the issues, by introducing an emotional element that does not comprise a part of anyone’s argument.
If we are to trust the Old Testament (as I do, though Paidion does not), then God is loath to punish sinners. He is slow to anger, and plenteous in mercy. He does not keep His anger forever. He has no pleasure in the death of the wicked. This is the position I am taking, and, seemingly, the one which anyone who believes the Bible must necessarily take, because it says these things rather unambiguously.
