I don't think it is pacifistic. When Jesus is talking about loving your enemies, he is not intending that you should not stop them from doing evil. He is, rather, noting that you should stop them AND still will the good for them even though they don't deserve it. It is the difference between stopping an active shooter and then beating them viciously; and stopping the active shooter and then trying to rehabilitate them with love.

:up:

I'm not that familiar with it, but it seems pretty good. The only quibble I might have with it is the idea that it has to be sanctioned by a government. That would seem to imply that rebellions can never be just.

Is your position, then, that Samual lied about God commanding the slaughter of all the Amalekites?

I agree with (2), but I am not asking you what the best choice is. I am asking what you would do, and the implication is that you must be able to provide a better option than the one you are criticizing

That’s fair. I think letting them starve, all else being equal, is better than murdering them.

 For example, if the Amalekites and their children were not demonic then the act was immoral

But couldn’t God just drive them out? Why would God murder a child when He could just command the demon to leave the child’s body? Jesus drives out demons all the time in the NT.

This is analogous to if you could snap your fingers to cure this child of some deadly virus that needs to be contained but instead you execute them to solve the problem—how is that morally permissible?

God to pedagogically recommend that Israel carry out an act that is objectively but not subjectively immoral?

I would say no; for example, a judge that knows it is wrong to steal cannot advise to a citizen to steal irregardless if the citizen themselves understand it is a crime. (We are assuming here) God knows it is immoral; so He cannot command it.

Many of the various known contradictions in the Bible (including those I mentioned in 
↪response
 to Carlos) have to do with the perspective of the speaker

That’s interesting, I will have to take a deeper look into that.

For example, if there is an angel of death or a "grim reaper" who works at the behest of God, is the angel of death a murderer?

Yes, but then, again, you have to deny that murder is the direct intentional killing of an innocent person. You cannot have the cake here and eat it too.

If you do deny that definition, then I would like to hear your definition that is consistent with this view that God does not murder when killing innocent people.

Well, even on a modern understanding there is commission, there is "aiding and abetting," there is failing to oppose someone in your midst who is involved in commission, etc. So the idea that groups rather than mere individuals are responsible for abominable, public acts is supportable

Those examples you gave are relative to the individual so they are not examples that support group culpability. E.g., a person or group that aids or abets are culpable because they themselves did something that is involved with that practice—an innocent person who did not aid or abet but happens to be a part of the group would not get charged unless they demonstrate they themselves did aid and abet.

Over the years I have come to appreciate the complexity and ambiguity of the Bible, because it does mirror real life. How one is to resolve the difficult tensions and contradictions that arise in life is not obvious, and in the Bible we see people grappling with this same difficulty

Fair enough. What do you think of the Adam and Eve story?

Are you referring to the story of Adam and Eve? This story is nonsense!

I am unsure how you got to there from what I said: I was saying that God can allow evil—that’s not the same as doing evil. Maybe under your view God cannot allow evil either, but allowing evil and doing evil are still different.

I don’t think the Adam and Eve story is about historical events.

 Adam and Eve were put in a sinful situation in which God knew in advance that they would sin!

Well, that’s true of all of us. God knows ahead of time whether we will sin or not as well as knows how it will end; this doesn’t mean that God is doing evil by allowing you to make your own choices. I think you are thinking of God as if He is in time like us. A being out of time knowing everything that will happen is very different. One of the beauties of absolute goodness—of God—is that He transforms, in the final result, our evil into good. He does not make us do evil, but when we do the totality of the result of His creation over time ends with good coming out of it so that it did not happen in vain.

Yes, but in a perfect creation, all changes are perfect as well. So there could be a creation in which wrongdoing/sin does not exist within

Do you deny the existence of persons? Persons can cause evil in a perfect creation that originally had perfect changes!

:up:

At the end of the day, I was just trying to convey to @Banno that I was agreeing with them in that God's Justice is about restoring the property ordering of things but that this sometimes legitimately includes punishment.

[

The analogical reasoning you employ - arguing that because two things are similar in some respects, they're likely similar in others - is not up to the task of providing a proof

I am not arguing that two things similar in one respect are similar in others: that’s not analogical either. An analogy is a similarity between things in some regard—even if they are dissimilar in every other regard.

You'll have heard the standard existential arguments for the existence of God at the response that existence is not a predicate?

Yes I have and I think this could be a valid objection to Thomistic metaphysics if one accepts that existence is not a predicate whatsoever. I think being is a predicate insofar as an apple has redness as property just like it has being as a property. Some properties presuppose others (e.g., the property of blackness of the chair is necessary for its property of heating up fast due to hyper-absorption of light from the sun). Beingness is just the first property presupposed and necessarily preliminarily for all other properties of a given object.

The issue with the kind of S5 modal logic argument for God’s existence (a priori) is that possibility is thought of in terms of possible worlds: that’s the real issue.

For this ontological arguments from great-making properties like this one:

For example, consider
• God is that than which nothing greater can be conceived.
• Therefore, He must exist.
• Therefore, He must exist necessarily.
• Therefore, He must be pure act, or simple.
At each step, a move is made that runs contrary to the inexpressibility of existence conditions. It's invalid.

I would say an Anselm-style argument is invalid not because existence is an invalid predicate but because it also hinges on the S5 axiom in modal logic. I was discussing this with someone a while ago and it was an interesting conversation; but in the end it also does the same trick that the standard argument from modal logic does but instead with greatness. It considers the possibility of greatness an entailment of the necessity of greatness: if something is possibly great, then it is great—and this argument only holds if we think that a great being in one possible world must then exist in all possible worlds. This isn’t how they usually argue it, but I think that’s the real issue: they don’t believe it is possible to speak of a hypothetically maximally great being.
I cannot stress enough that my arguments start a posteriori: not a priori.

Put simply, if your argument concludes “and therefore this thing exists,” but the existence of the referent is not already presupposed, then your inference is invalid.

How am I doing that in my argument though? I didn’t make an argument like Anselm’s.

Folk try to get around this by making use of an explicit first order predication, usually written as "∃!"

I’ve never heard of that: that’s interesting. I don’t think we have to presuppose that a thing we are quantifying over is real in order predicate properties to it: that would entail we can’t think hypothetically or in terms of possibility.

The second issue is not unrelate. Modal collapse will occur when necessity and possibility are rendered the same

Yeah, good objection: let’s break this down. As you know, we have to be careful to note when we are predicating, equating, and positing existential quantification.

Let’s break down your version of the argument:

☐(Father = god)
☐(Son = god)
And so
☐(Father = Son)

But the assertion is, instead,
~☐(Father = Son)

First off, why did you use modality though? I was expecting the transitivity version of this (:

This falls prey to assuming we are equating when we say things like “The Father is God”; but that’s not the standard view (nor mine).

The statement “The Father is God” != “Father = God” because the former is predication and the latter is equivalency. This is the properly translated parody:

☐(Father = God as the knower)
☐(Son = God as the known)

And so
☐(Father != Son)

When we say “The Father is God”, we are saying “The Father has the nature of God”; and when we say “The Father and the Son are both God and not separate Gods”, we are saying “The Father and the Son have the same exact nature of God”.

That's interesting: can you outline an argument for everything being inherently triadic?

Making a religion in the colloquial sense of that term is more about, in my head, coming up with traditions, superstitions, rituals, etc. I am not really interested all that much in that: I went to a Catholic church once and it all seems so superficial to me. They didn't dive intellectually into knowing God better or cultivating the virtues: they just recited some chants, drank out the same cup (which is nasty), and did some recited prayers.

If I were to have a religion, Bobism, it would be to come together out of reverance for what is perfectly good; to learn more about what is good; to practice being good; and to remember what is good. It would look very different I think than mainstream religions that seem to manifest to the populace as a means of checking boxes off their list of to-dos.

Interesting, I thought Aquinas made a similar argument. I guess I just diverged from Tommy on this one.

CC: @Leontiskos @Count Timothy von Icarus @RogueAI

Now we are getting somewhere! I appreciate the elaborate response.

Despite claiming god to be a simple, it juxtaposes will and intellect; subject and object; father and son and so on. But those distinctions are the very thing denied by divine simplicity

I see where your head is at, but I think this is a misunderstanding. God’s properties are predicated analogically and not univocally. We can, and should, in fact, collapse them into the same thing and only refer to them as separate to explain something from different angles.

Firstly:

1. God’s all-goodness (perfection) is just a description of His self-unity [since goodness is just absolute unity]. He does not have a faculty or power of good: He is perfect goodness itself by being absolutely unified.
2. God’s absolute simplicity is just the same as His self-unity.
3. God’s necessity is just His simplicity (lack of parts) which is (from 2) the same as His self-unity.
4. God as Being itself is the same as His necessity as a simplicity (since subsistence in-itself is just necessary being that is simple) which is (from 2) the same as His self-unity.
5. God’s pure actuality is the same as Him as Being itself which is (from 4) the same as His self-unity.
6. God’s changelessness is the same as His pure actuality which is (from 5) the same as His self-unity.
7. God’s eternity proper is just His changelessness which is (from 6) the same as His self-unity.
8. God’s omnipresence is just Him as Being itself which is (from 4) the same as His self-unity (being provided to a thing through creation).

So His all-goodness, absolute simplicity, pure actuality, changelessness, eternity, and omnipresence are identical.

Secondly, His all-lovingness refers to His inability through creation to will the bad of something which is just a description of His how His faculty of willing works; and His non-corporeality is just a description of His inability to be affected by space (being changeless). These are reducible to His will and pure actuality (as analogically descriptions), and do not imply any separation in Him.

Thirdly, His willing, thinking, and power are identical. There’s no mind, will, and power in God in a literal sense: analogically, we speak of the one and same being as like a mind, like a will, like power (of pure act) itself. When I say “this light bulb is the like a sun radiating light”, I am not committed to the idea that the light bulb is a sun. God is like a will; and the shortcut way of describing that is “God is will”.

Fourthly, the Trinity refers to three real subsistent relations in one concrete nature: they are not separations in that nature. So they do not imply parts in God. They all, in fact, collapse into each other as the same (ontologically) rational nature.

God has two aspects we can describe then: His unified faculties and His self-unity; and His self-unity is just a depiction of His unified faculties as unified. So He is just One.

 Let's set aside the issue of how this debars god from thinking about things that are not real - the common "what if..." of modality

Let’s not! Thinking of a hypothetical is not the same as thinking of actuality. God thinks of metaphysically possible things as possible—not real; and so “what if this then that” does not create anything because it doesn’t think of this or that as actual—it posits their possibility. When I think of “what if a unicorn existed?”, I am not thereby thinking “this real unicorn”.

Is the Son then the same as that thinking, and so not more than a thought, or is the Son a second being caused by God's thinking of himself - in which case he is not simple, not One Being?

Both. Remember, under this view, God’s thinking and willing are the same: we are not thinking of two different faculties in God when we posit them. Consequently, God’s “abstact” knowledge is abstract but not like our abstract knowledge because our abstract knowledge is distinct ontologically from our willing powers (and consequently we can think without creating—God cannot do this!!!!).

Therefore, the Son is abstract knowledge of God and also thereby eternally generated out of God as created. This is necessarily entailed from God’s willing and thinking as identical.

Does this mean that there are two ontologically distinct beings—the Son and the Father—like two gods? No. Because when something is willed that is how it is created and to will is in accord with an object of desire or thought (which is to be realized/willed into existence); and the object of this thought of God is Himself who is ontologically simple. God then is willing the creation of an absolutely simple being which then would have to collapse into Himself (in nature).

In more modern terms there is a play on the use of the existential operator,

I didn’t really follow this: can you elaborate with an example?

Then there is the point I made earlier, the use of anthropomorphic language on which the charge of presuming what you wish to conclude rests

But we can only know what God is not from His effects; so we have to use analogies.

It's not a syllogism, since it misses the hidden assumption that thinking of something as real necessarily makes it real. God, then, can' think of things that are not real, something that is routine for us. So what we have here is a loaded metaphysical claim, not a deduction, as well as the contradiction in being an absolute simple and yet having identifiable will and intellect.

I didn’t give a syllogism: I recognize that and it was on purpose. I think everyone can see the premises going on in it. It would be painfully overkill to give a series of syllogisms for the entire argument: this one fatal flaw of analytic philosophy—it depends these rigid and superfluous graveyards of syllogisms. If you want, I can write it out that way: the argument is logically valid in classical logic.

Not really.

I think that, in answer to my question, "wouldn't you also have to say that (a') is condoning abortion during the first six weeks?", your "Yes" meant "No", because you went on to say "a' does not."

Sorry, I may have misread your original question. Yes, I would say that “No”; (a)’ does not condone abortion prior to six weeks: it omits that from the discussion. If you could demonstrate, in the given example, that the author is omitting it because they intent for it to be legal; then maybe that author is intending an implicit endorsement, but someone else could vote for it and not condone it because the verbiage itself does not condone it.

I take it that your objection to (a) is because (a) positively mentions exceptions for rape and incest, but you do not similarly object to (a') because it does not positively mention an "exception" for before 6 weeks, although it implicitly allows it because it only prohibits after 6 weeks?

Exactly.

Similarly, then, your objection to the legislation concerning slavery is that even if it greatly ameliorates the evils of how slavery is practiced, it still recognizes a right of masters to own slaves? And where exactly does it say this?

I believe I already responded to this, but I can provide it again if you would like.

:up:

Their view leads to the unhelpful absurdity that murder never happens on earth.

Would you make a car that you are sure will not take you to the end of a long journey

This is disanalogous to allowing evil. An analogous version of your example would be: “Would you make a car that works fine but you knew someone else could come and mess it up?”.

Perfect God can only create perfect things

Yes, but this doesn’t mean that those things are not subject to change.

In my dictionary, which present my word view, good is related to pleasure and evil is related to pai

But this makes your argument weaker; because then perfection isn’t about goodness necessarily, since God could create being without pain or pleasure—e.g., a rock.

 there are evil creatures who prefer evil too, like masochists.

A masochist doesn’t prefer evil; they does mis-hierarchize or misunderstand the goods. Specifically, they will in accord with getting a euphoric high where pain is the means and not the end. To truly prefer evil, is to will it as an end.

:broken:

No, I was thinking of offering a reductio ad absurdum against the argument, but it looks as though you agree that killing with indirect intention is not necessarily unjust.
…
Okay, I think you are reasoning well in this. :up:

:up:

What would you have decreed if you were instructing the Israelites?

The difficulty in this question is that:

1. It shifts the discussion from what a perfect being would do to what a nuanced, particular human would do; and

2. We don’t have to have knowledge of what the best choice is to know some of the bad choices. I can say that a pizza-lover does not throwaway a perfectly good pizza without speaking to what a pizza-lover’s best choice is in terms of what to do with it.

If I had to answer, I would say that I would have told the Israelites to focus on themselves and ignore the immoralities of the Amalekites: they don’t have a duty to sacrifice their own people in just wars against abominable nations. I think it is a, e.g., just war to conquer North Korean but I wouldn’t advocate for the US to start WWIII over it.

If I had to decree the just war, then I would say to:

1. Eliminate the enemy combatants while limiting innocent and non-combatant civilians;

2. Assimilate any of the people that they can without assuming significant risk to their own sovereignty and stability;

3. Segregate those who cannot be assimilated into their own areas and give them the freedom to leave (and go somewhere else) if they want;

4. Give as much aid as feasible to those segregated.

I would hold a significant weight to the in-group over the out-group; so I wouldn’t probably decree any commandments to sacrifice one’s own people to free another people.

Likewise, those who are not assimilated would not be citizens of Israel; so they would, in necessary, be left to themselves if Israel cannot afford to help them; and this could be all the way up to starvation, disease, and death.

The reason I don't personally find the critique overwhelming is because, faced with that situation, I have no clear alternative.* I guess I could say, "Assuming the children are not demonic, make sure to only intend to kill them indirectly." Yet such an approach would be incongruous in an ancient text and an ancient paradigm, and it would also somewhat undermine the whole "remove evil at its root" meaning of the text. I think the nub for you is that the text presupposes that a child can be deserving of death, and this is seen as incredible.

Yeah, but wouldn’t you agree it would be immoral what they did since it is directly intentional? I’m not saying they would have had this level of a sophistication in their ethics back then; but we know it to be immoral.

Interpret the text to be talking about indirect intention, and adjust one's interpretive hermeneutic (to deviate from the literal meaning).

This interpretation seems to superficially reinterpret the text though; given that it explicitly details directly intentionally killing children. Wouldn’t this interpretation jeopardize the entire Bible? If someone can reinterpret what is obviously meant one way as another, then why can’t I about anything therein?

Hold that life and death are in God's hands, that for God to kill is not murder, and that God can temporarily delegate this power.

This is the most plausible out of them all, and is the one Aquinas and Craig takes. Again, though, the bullet here is that one has to hold that murder is either not the direct intentional killing of an innocent person or that murder is not always unjust. That is a necessary consequence of this view.

Hold that the Amalekites were demons and demons can be justly killed

This is an interesting one I am admittedly not very familiar with: I’ll have to think about that one.

Hold to some form of group morality rather than a strict individual morality.

This has to be immoral: it would conflate culpability and innocence with the individual and group.

Hold to a pedagogical approach on the part of God.

Perhaps, taken singly, none of those are satisfactory. It is worth noting that the last option, which 
↪Hanover
 alluded to, seems to be supported by later texts such as Ezekiel 18:20. This goes to the fact that, read literally, the Bible does contradict itself. For example, if God does not change, God killed the Amalekite children for the wickedness of their parents, the Amalekite children were human, and Ezekiel 18:20 holds, then we have a contradiction. Indeed the literary genres found in the Bible are not really meant to support that level of scrutiny. This does not dissolve the problem, but it does complicate it.

Yeah, that’s true. I am not sure how to interpret the texts. Maybe it is all spiritual lessons; but then what isn’t and what is the lesson?

* Also, I am not willing to abandon Christianity on this basis. I would need a foundational alternative to Christianity to which to turn before I would be more comfortable with such a move

I am working on an alternative that I will share with you when it is ready to hear your thoughts.

I take it that your objection to (a) is because (a) positively mentions exceptions for rape and incest, but you do not similarly object to (a') because it does not positively mention an "exception" for before 6 weeks, although it implicitly allows it because it only prohibits after 6 weeks? — Gregory of the Beard of Ockham

Exactly. One explicates an endorsement; the other omits a discussion about it.

Similarly, then, your objection to the legislation concerning slavery is that even if it greatly ameliorates the evils of how slavery is practiced, it still recognizes a right of masters to own slaves? — Gregory of the Beard of Ockham

Yes.

And where exactly does it say this? — Gregory of the Beard of Ockham

All over the place. For example here:

20 “Anyone who beats their male or female slave with a rod must be punished if the slave dies as a direct result, 21 but they are not to be punished if the slave recovers after a day or two, since the slave is their property.

-- Exodus 21:20-21.

And here:

44 “‘Your male and female slaves are to come from the nations around you; from them you may buy slaves. 45 You may also buy some of the temporary residents living among you and members of their clans born in your country, and they will become your property. 46 You can bequeath them to your children as inherited property and can make them slaves for life, but you must not rule over your fellow Israelites ruthlessly.

Leviticus 25:44-46

(a') Abortion is prohibited after six weeks of pregnancy.
(b') A woman has a right to an abortion during the first 6 weeks of pregnancy.
For the same reason that you thought (a) was condoning abortion in cases of rape and incest, wouldn't you also have to say that (a') is condoning abortion during the first six week? If not, why?

Yes, b’ is immoral to endorse: it positively affirms abortion; whereas a’ does not.

Think of it this way, which is harder to revoke: a bill that merely omits something that you could pass legislation on later or a bill that explicates the permissibility of something that you want to ban later? The latter of course. This also runs on moral lines: I can’t positively endorse abortion, but I can pragmatically endorse prohibiting abortion in as many cases as I can.

We can agree to hold God to at least as high a standard as ourselves.

Sort of. We usually consider culpability relative to what one can do, what they know, and what they do. God is absolutely free; whereas we are limited severely. By ‘standard’ here, I was really referring to culpability. I am culpable for voting for b’ but not for a’; and God is culpable for inspiring positively affirming rules about slaves in Exodus and not if He omitted affirming slavery in them; and I am less culpable than God because I have limited freedom, knowledge, and power.

Think of it this way. If an ordinary citizen votes for b’ and I think we both would hold them less culpable (granted it is immoral) than dictator that decrees b’. This is because that dictactor by way of having the power to decree it themselves could have decreed it differently. Imagine a being that has perfect knowledge and power that simply endorses b’ instead of a’: wouldn’t that be a weird mistake?

But that's not what I pointed out. The conclusion that god is father, son and spirit is not a cogent consequence of natural theology, but is dependent on revelation.

I gave you as a response an argument for it that was not dependent on revelation. I’ll give to you again:

God is purely actual and an intellect (nous).
1. An intellect that has the ability to learn has potential.
2. God has no potential (since He is purely actual).
3. Therefore, a part of God being fully realized as an intellect is that He must know everything perfectly that could exist or does exist.
4. He must, then, immediately know (prior to creation) Himself perfectly.
5. When He creates, He is willing something as real.
6. Since He is absolutely simple, His willing and thinking are identical.
7. Therefore, Him willing something as real is identical to Him thinking of something as real.
8. Therefore, when He thinks of something as real it must create something.
9. His perfect self-knowledge is Him thinking of Himself as real.
10. Therefore, His perfect self-knowledge creates something real.
11. What is created as real when He thinks of something as real is that something which is the object of His thought (e.g., He thinks of a man as real and the man, the object of thought, becomes real).
12. What is the object of His thought when self-knowing is Himself.
13. Therefore, He creates (generates) Himself as the object of His thought by Himself as the subject of thought.
14. This creation cannot create a god separate (ontologically) from Himself; because He is thinking of a being, as the object of His thought (which is Himself), that is absolutely simple and no two absolutely simple beings can exist.
15. Therefore, His creation of Himself out of Himself produces a real relation between Himself distinct in origin but not concrete nature.
16. This real relation, His self-knowledge’s generation of Himself, is subsistent because it is real.
17. This real, subsistent relation is a person because He is thinking of Himself and He is a being of a rational nature; so, too, Himself as created must be a being of a rational nature and a being of a rational nature is a person.
18. This person, His self-knowledge, is the Son; and He is called the Son because the Son is begotten (is generated or created) by God as the one thinking which is the Father (and He is the Father, metaphorically, because He gives life to the Son as opposed to receiving it like pregnancy).
19. Since God has perfect self-knowledge, He must know Himself as perfectly good (and He is perfectly good because goodness is the equality of a thing’s essence and existence and His essence and existence are absolutely identical).
20. His willing and thinking are identical because He is absolutely simple.
21. Therefore, Him thinking of Himself as perfectly good is identical to Him willing Himself as perfectly good.
22. Love is to will the good of something for its own sake.
23. God, then, in knowing Himself as perfectly good wills Himself as perfectly good and this is done purely for its own sake because He cannot be affected by anything (because He is purely actual).
24. God, then, perfectly loves Himself.
25. The degree of love for a thing is proportionate to how much one wills its good for its own sake and how good that thing is.
26. God wills Himself as perfectly good as what is perfectly good.
27. Therefore, God loves Himself the most.
28. Him creating something, as noted before, is just Him willing something as real.
29. He wills as real His own good supremely.
30. Therefore, something is created (generated) out of the love between the Father and the Son.
31. This generation is not a knowledge of Himself, like the Son, but a willing of what is good—Love.
32. This willing of the good has as its object Himself.
33. This willing, then, is a generation or creation of Love for Himself out of Himself.
34. Being real, a generation or creation, this Love cannot be merely the kind of love directed towards things (like when we, as one being, will the good of another) but, rather, must be a real relation in God distinct in origin between Himself and Himself but not in concrete nature (because what is being willed, and thusly created, is nothing but Himself as the object of that willing).
35. This Love must be, then, a person because a person is a being of a rational nature, God is a being of a rational nature, and this real relation between God and Himself refers to Himself which is a being that is absolutely simple (so it doesn’t generate a new god out of it).
36. The person of Love is the Holy Spirit.

What about this requires divine revelation? Are you referring to each person being semantically called the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit? If so, those are metaphors: they’ve always been metaphors. The fact these have historical roots in Christianity doesn’t mean this argument depends on divine revelation. You could call them Perfect Knowledge, Perfect Knower, and Perfect Self-Love if you want.

I'm trying to address what you have written.

You never address what I write though: you keep referring to Christianity as if that has any bearing on the arguments I have given. I would be willing to bet you will ignore my elaboration on the Trinity above like last time and appeal to Christianity somehow. This is like the third time I’ve outlined the Trinity argument from natural theology to you.

Those terms are at least specialised Thomist terminology with their own language game, or perhaps just language on vacation, verging on word salad.

Irregardless, do you agree that it is natural theology?!??

It appears that you are trying your best to give a logical and reasoned account of a narrative that is inherently incoherent. I'm sorry if pointing this out appears disrespectful, but looking into logic and language is what we do here. You seem to be justifying an iron age myth using Greek logic. We might have moved on since these things were fashionable.

That’s not insulting: that’s fine. I’ve been trying to get you to engage in the metaphysics instead of straw manning me with Christianity this whole time. Please feel free to show me why this metaphysical framework fails.

I apologize: I thought retribution semantically referred to restoration. Retribution actually refers to punishment. I was referring to restoration this whole time with the term retribution.

I can see, either way, that the God of the OT is inconsistent with my understanding of God's nature; including His wrathfulness. So we aren't in disagreement there.

(a) Abortion is prohibited after 6 weeks of pregnancy not resulting from rape or incest.
and
(b) A woman has a right to an abortion during the first 6 weeks of pregnancy and in all cases where pregnancy is due to rape or incest. All other abortions are prohibited.

I would agree if you remove the “not resulting from rape or incest”. I get the appeal to vote for it because it is like “well, it’s better than nothing!”; but it is condoning, in law, abortion during rape or incest; which is distinct from omitting it from the discussion.

This may sound nitpicky, but if they said something like:

m (a): Abortion is prohibited after 6 weeks of pregnancy in the case that the sex was consensual that resulted in the pregnancy or the sex was performed by a man and woman that are not immediately related.

“M (a)” is permissible to endorse; “(a)” is not. In practicality, to your point, I honestly would just vote for “(a)” since it is basically saying the same thing as “m (a)” for practical purposes. The reason I am splitting hairs here, is because God—who can decide completely freely what to endorse and what not to—would not divinely inspire, by analogy, “(a)” but could inspire “m (a)”.

I hold God to a higher standard then myself; because, as you noted, we may tolerate laws because we don’t have the power and freedom to inspire what we really think. Can we agree on that?

Edit: I would view myself voting for "(a)" as a tolerance and not an endorsement although technically it is an endorsement. Does that make sense?

P1) Perfect Being, like God, cannot do wrong/sin
…
C2) So, creating an imperfect creation is wrong

You conflated God doing wrong with allowing wrong. There is no possible world where a perfect being can exist that is not God; which you may use this to argue God shouldn’t create anything then. However, many people like myself would say that there is nothing wrong with allowing evil if the creation is properly ordered to what is perfectly good. Remember, by evil I am taking a privation theory position. Evil is a lack of goodness: it is not a real property of things but a privation of the real property of goodness. God cannot will for a privation to happen; but He can will things that are good and privations happen somewhere in the interactions between those things.

I think you also might be claiming that if God willed the creation of only good things then they would never be deprived of goodness; but that’s not true. For starters, person’s have free will to will the deprivation of goodness.

I don't understand you! Good God can only will good.

What I meant to say is that God only wills what is good; and badness is a privation of that good which can occur afterwards.

Please find my definition of good and evil in my thread that I mentioned in this post.

Goodness as a property is not identical to “pleasurableness”; nor is badness identical to “sufferingness”. Pleasure is good all else being equal and suffering is bad; but that is not to say that what makes something good is that it is pleasurable or what makes something bad is that it causes suffering. You are confusing what can be predicated to be good or bad with what goodness and badness themselves refer to.

Again, goodness is the equality of the thing’s essence and existence: it is oneness; and oneness is that which all things aim at, which makes it always desirable.

:up:

Well yeah, that's the point. Gratuitous pain sucks. It's useless.

You are assuming there is such a thing as pointless pain. I don’t believe that.

Why would it be metaphysically impossible? The human body has some very poorly "designed" features. I don't see why it would be metaphysically impossible for God to have tweaked evolution in a way to give us better bodies with better features and still keep up naturalness appearances. Do humans have to get so much cancer? Lower back pain? Dementia? When you hamstring God by saying, "well, it might be metaphysically impossible for God to do that", you're making God sound very impotent. I get why Christians like Leibniz do that, but it's a very weak ad hoc move. Prima facie, this is obviously not the best of all possible worlds.

I agree prima facie this doesn’t seem like a part of the best of possible totalities of creation—which is more than just the world itself—but it has to be (from a theistic perspective). I can go through the argument if you would like.

In terms of the metaphysical (im)possibility of a pain killswitch, I am not contending that it is metaphysically impossible for a natural organism to have that switch. I am contending whether or not it is metaphysically possible to create a world that is ordered in totality to what is perfectly good and be able to have organisms like that. You can’t just think about it in terms of one particular entity in the world: you have to analyze it from the entirety of the creation. You also have to factor in that the totality of creation is not the totality of the world.

We're just not going to agree on mercy and justice, but I'm curious why you think Jesus made such a sacrifice

I don’t believe Jesus did; but that the Son has to at some point: it doesn’t matter to me when it happens.

Why does the Son have to be incarnated by the Father as a human to be sacrificed for our sins?

 ETA: Scratch that. Let's say we have two people, Bob and Alice. Alice is an atheist who lives a decent life and does no great harm to anyone, just minor sins here and there. Bob is a serial killer who's tortured and killed untold numbers of kids. On his deathbed, Bob accepts Jesus into his heart. Alice doesn't. What do Alice's and Bob's punishments look like?

This is an interesting, provoking, and common counter-example to the idea of mercy and acceptance of the Son—although it isn’t necessarily only facially applicable to Jesus’ forgiveness—and I understand where you are coming from here. I also used to think this way.

I would say, to be honest, that both would end up in heaven. Let me break down the general theory first and then address your questions directly.

1. I do not believe that one has to rigidly accept the Son of God (which may be Jesus if you would like) to be saved or that they have to participate in rituals (like baptism) to be accepted. As you alluded to with your example, someone can love God—love love itself: love goodness itself—without knowing the word “God”, having a concept of God that is robust, or having been exposed to some particular religion. God is judging us based off of our choices we make given the fact that we are not absolutely in control of ourselves (as natural organisms) and is evaluating how well we exhibited the virtues and, generally speaking, loved love (Himself).

2. For the vast majority of us, we have sinned before we die (although infants, e.g., haven’t if they are killed young); so for most of us we have offended God and, as I noted to @frank who ignored me, retribution is evaluated primarily based off of the dignity of the offended party (hence why shooting a rabbit illegitimately is lesser of an offense and deserving of less of a punishment than shooting a human the exact same way). With finite dignities, which are beings that are finitely good, there is a proportionate finite retribution (at least in principle) for every sin which one could, potentially, pay before they die (and thusly “serving their time” for the sin as it relates to the immanent victim—e.g., the human who was murdered). However, a sin is always also an offense against God and God is infinite goodness which is infinite dignity; so no proportionate retribution to something finite whatsoever can repay what is owed. This is why any sin, insofar as we are talking about the aspect of it that is an offense against God, damns us in a way where we ourselves cannot get out.

3. Loving love—being the a truly exceptional human being—will not repay the debt owed to an offended party with infinite dignity: Alice, or anyone of a high-caliber of virtue, is facially damned if they have sinned at least once.

4. God is all-just and all-merciful. He is all-just because He is purely actual and a creator, and so He cannot lack at anything in terms of creating; but to fail to order His creation properly is to lack at something as a creator. Therefore, God cannot fail to order His creation properly; and ordering His creation properly is none other than to arrange the dignity of things in a hierarchy that most reflects what is perfectly good—which is Himself. He is all-merciful because He is love and love is to will the good of something for-itself even when that something doesn’t deserve it. Mercy and justice, however, as described above, are prima facie opposed to each other: if, e.g., I have mercy on you then I am not being just and if I am just then I leave no room for mercy. To be brief, the perfect synthesis of the two is for a proper representative of the group of persons that has an appropriate dignity to pay the debt of their sins so that if they truly restore their will to what is right they can be shown mercy.

5. God must, then, synthesize justice and mercy by allowing a proper representative of humans to pay for our sins; but no human can repay it. It follows, then, that God must incarnate Himself as a human to be that representative. EDIT: I forgot to mention that God is the only one that can repay the debt because He is the only one with infinite dignity to offer as repayment.

6. The Son must be the one out of the Godhead that is incarnated because God creates by willing in accord with knowledge; His knowledge of Himself is what He uses to incarnate Himself; and the Son is His self-knowledge.

So, let me answer your questions with that in mind:

1. Alice and Bob have NOT committed equal sins: I don’t think that the fact that any given sin is unrepayable to God entails that all sins are equal. It just entails that all sins require something of infinite dignity to properly repay. Admittedly, it gets kind of weird fast working with retribution for infinite demerit. For example, in hell both of them will be punished for eternity but Alice’s punishment would be something far far less than Bob’s.

2. Since God saves us through His mercy (as described before), God does not have to punish us if we repent; and repentance is not some superficial utterance “I am sorry!” or, for your example, “Jesus I accept you!”. Repentance is normally through the sincerity of heart and through actions. A person who has never heard of God at all could be saved, under my theory, because they sincerely love love itself—God Himself—through action and this doesn’t need to be a perfect life that was lived (since God must sacrifice Himself to Himself to allow for mercy upon us). Alice, I would say, would be repentant in action and (most probably in spirit) for any minor sins she commits because she is such a good hearted person. If she were to do a lot of things that are virtuous but have the psychological disposition that doing good and loving her community, family, friends, etc. is horrible and something she despises; then she isn’t really acting virtuously. That’s like someone helping the poor as a practical joke or something instead of doing it out of love.

3. For Bob, it gets more interesting: your hypothetical eliminates the possibility of the good deeds part of what is normally a part of repentance since he is on his death bed when he has a change of heart. I would say that assuming he is not superficially saying “I am sorry (psst: hopefully I get into heaven this way!)”, then I would say that God’s mercy would allow him into heaven—at least eventually. Maybe there’s a purgatory faze where he is punished a bit for it first: I don’t know. However, what I do know is that Alice will be rewarded more than Bob; because reward is proportionate to the good deeds you have performed and goes beyond giving someone mercy from punishment. I do not believe that everyone in heaven is equal; or that God loves us all the same. That’s hippie bulls**t.

I am not sure the relevance of that point, but to answer: the primary cause of incarceration is, without a shadow of a doubt, the culture in which a person lives. The reason thugs in rough neighborhoods don't make it through high school is not because the high school doesn't give them the opportunity to get a basic education: it's because they are too busy being enveloped in crime, and I'm not saying they are primarily to blame necessarily for that. When your dad is in prison, your mom in at work constantly with no one supervising you, no one parent or father figure teaching you how to be a good person, and constantly being around thugs....that's a recipe to becoming a thug yourself.

Likewise, if you just throw the opportunity to get a decent job to a gangbanger, that won't solve their problems. They are still stuck in that culture. Address the culture, and you make real change.

My response would be that you can't ask that question because the OT context must be maintained, meaning that Yahweh is a character in a story with stipulated perfectness, so it must be better that Amalek be destroyed than it not. 

To quickly note, this would be confirmation bias. My argument is an external critique, and there is one fundamental way to contend with it: to demonstrate that my understanding of God’s nature is flawed in a relevant regard where what is spoke of about God in the OT is accurate and immune to my claim it portrays God as unjust. This could be done by depicting God’s nature as differently that is consistent with the Bible, which is something William Lane Craig does for example, or it could be done by noting a flaw in my own logic or position to merely eliminate my critique from the table of plausible accounts of God’s nature. As @Leontiskos noted, my OP is an external critique—not an internal one. A Christian could hold a view of God consistent with the Bible, at least prima facie, and it would be immune to my argument if they simply reject my metaphysics of God.

As in, are we improperly assuming that the OT god is consistently described throughout the OT, and is the God of Genesis and Exodus the same God of Deuteronomy, and is he the same as described in Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Amos? I say that because there is something very different from the God of Genesis who says "Let there be light" and later writings where God ceases to directly interact with the Jews, the prophets cease to exist, and there are no more miracles.

I would say that, yes, it portrays the same God: that is the most plausible reading of the OT texts. There’s no evidence that historically they were discussing different gods.

So what do you do? Do you say the OT God is actually different gods during different periods? Do you say he's an evolving god, changing over time? Do you just say the bible is a hodge podge of different books so it just isn't consistent? It would seem that if you can't say the OT God is the same God throughout the OT, you shouldn't be worried that the NT God is different also. On the other hand, if the OT God can be many different things and still be the same God, then he can also be the NT God too.

Yes, but then we run into a new issue that is interesting: why would God divinely inspire a collection of scriptures that portray Himself as a disparate collection of gods? Someone might appeal to the idea that He is giving us spiritual lessons; but then we run into the issue that we aren’t even trying to read the texts in a literal sense—which jeopardizes the NT.

Your argument if I understood it is that the NT description of God is the true God and to the extent the OT God is incongruent with the NT God, it does not descibe God. Yours is therefore both an external critique and an internal critique.

No, the OP itself just leverages the kind of argument @Leontiskos gave you. I do think there is a separate issue that Christians have been trying to solve ever since the birth of the movement which is an internal critique of how the NT and OT seem prima facie to talk about God in mutually incompatible ways. The NT describes God as merciful and loving; whereas the OT version of God is pure wrath and punishment. This is a different argument though.

What does this mean? It means the sacred literature of the Jews and Christians describe an evolving God, which says nothing about God as much as it does the people conceptionalizing God.

But, then, you are denying the legitimacy of the Bible itself; which isn’t a rejoinder to the OP. The OP is challenging those that believe the Bible is legitimate.

Justice is about respecting the ordering of things; and when that ordering is broken it must be restored; and to restore it the offender has to pay a proportionate price. To forgo that price, all else being equal, is to have mercy at the expense of justice.

No I don't think we would; because then most of us would always block pain. Likewise, is it metaphysically possible to block pain as a mental switch: I don't know.

That framing - "the argument from change, essences/existences, contingency/necessity, parts vs. wholes, etc." - is Thomism.

It doesn’t have to be. You are trying to lump me into a broader metaphysical framework so that you don’t have to contend with what I am saying.

I want you to demonstrate to me where the argument from change, going back to Aristotle, depends on divine revelation to demonstrate the existence of God. You can’t, and you know you can’t; so instead you say “well, Aquinas used the argument from change as an ad hoc rationalization for his prior beliefs from the Bible”. So what? What does that have to do with the argument from change itself? Do we disregard arguments based off of irrelevant beliefs that the author may have had?

That second paragraph, for example, in positing such things as an "absolute simple", supposing "pure act of will" makes sense, and so on, adopts a very particular view of how things are. It is very far from neutral, and has been used for centuries to defend christian revelation.

So? Again, instead of contending with what I said you just straw man me with “but Christians have used these same arguments to defend their positions”. I AM NOT A CHRISTIAN. So what? Do you have anything to contend with in terms of the actual concepts of divine simplicity, pure actuality, etc.?

It looks like you have adopted a particular anachronistic account in order to achieve an already chosen outcome.

You are pretending to know my motivations for accepting arguments like the one from change; and you are painfully mistaken. I don’t know what you tell you: I tried to show you but you always ignore what I am saying and just claim that “well, somebody else has used this as an ad hoc rationalization, so you must be too”. It’s nonsense.

Like I've always said, justice is about respecting the dignities of things which is relative to the totality of creation (and how everything fits into it). Justice, then, is fundamentally about restoring the order of things and not punishment; however, what you are missing is that retribution and punishment are not the same thing: retribution is a requirement of restoration, but punishment is not.

What is contradictory with what I said? The phrase "you can't have your cake and eat it too" refers to one holding a contradiction. I noted that a well-regulated militia helps prevent a tyrannical government.

Originally, historically, that was the case; but there are some weapons we have now that had no analogous weapon back then (such as nukes). I am fine with a debate about whether or not we should have those kinds of weapons, but firearms are clearly protected under the 2nd ammendment and so are morters, grenades, etc.

The main point of the 2nd ammendment is to have that balance of power; which doesn't necessarily require that the people have things like tanks: they need to proper weaponry to fight gorilla warfare in civilian areas. The government is not going to nuke their own country: that hurts them too significantly.

Why do you keep straw manning my position?!? I've giving you every reason to believe that I believe that I can justify my claims through natural theology; and you keep acting like I haven't done that.

I can get on board with that.

Well, my argument was an external critique; but one could make an internal critique that the NT is incongruent with the OT: it just isn't as powerful of an argument.

I don't think Europe is a great place to live; and I do think that our guns would help prevent an authoratative regime shift.

I am not sure what the terms in the literature refer to here: I am saying that God would focus on providing retribution and rehabilitation for sins. I don't think this really negates what you are saying, unless I am misunderstanding.

I didn't make the claim that a world without pain is better: @RogueAI did. That's on them to prove that. You can't shift the burden of proof on me for that. I have my reasons for believing this is the best possible totality of creation, which would include having pain in it.

More generically, this has to be the best of possible totalities of creation (or at least one of them) because God has to create, when creating, what is best; and what is best is ordering creation relative to Himself (as perfect goodness).