My invocation of Thomism here was to give @Frank a reasonable Christian answer to their OP's blatant straw manning of Christianity; which doesn't necessitate that I accept the metaphysics.

On a separate note, I actually do find a lot of Thomism plausible. However, I know you have a lot of knowledge of philosophy and if there's alternatives that you would like to discuss with me then I am all ears.

I was talking about legitimate debt. Are you suggesting that the idea of sin is illegitimate?

You are making my point for me! In my example I am right that they are innocent because they are morally blameless as it relates to the incident; whereas you are right in your example that we could import variables into the hypothetical where they are not morally blameless in ways where it may be justified to kill them.

My point was that murder is considered normally killing someone that is innocent, although I would refine it a bit, and you were asking about what constitutes innocence. In both our examples, it is evident that innocence is about whether or not a person is morally blameworthy in a relevant way for the other person(s) to be justified in what they did to them.

I said you were shifting the goal-post because obviously innocence is a key component of murder: no one disputes that and my original comment was a definition of murder.

I didn't give a reference for that because I do not see the relevance. The OP is arguing that the OT depicts God in a light that is contradictory to God's nature. Even if the NT depicts God accurately or inaccurately, that is a separate issue.

You are just shifting the goal post to a discussion about what constitutes innocence. There is a wide consensus that unjust acts involve a victim and a victim, as the name implies, was innocent.

Innocence, I would say, has to do with being morally blameless as it relates to the incident at hand. Hence, an ex-convict would be an innocent victim if they were shot point blank on a sidewalk because someone didn't like the fact they had been previously convicted of a crime.

I don't think that is true. God may indirectly intentionally kill people or let them die; but He does not directly intentionally kill people (notwithstanding just punishment).

What definition of murder are you using?

It was an account through natural theology of why God would necessarily freely choose to sacrifice the Son (which doesn't necessarily have to be Jesus) and how it is out of love and not wrath. This is philosophical: it is not dependent on revealed theology.

Even if it were (as maybe I am providing why Jesus specifically had to be sacrificed), the part of the argument I gave is not a historical argument from revealed theology even if it presupposes some truths only derived from revealed theology.

E.g., I can make an philosophical argument for the metaphysics of a mind that presupposes some scientific claims which are not themselves philosophical; like so I can give an philosophical account of why Jesus would be sacrificed which presupposes Jesus was God through revealed theology which is not itself philosophical.

@frank is incapable of responding to my argument for some reason and insists that God meaninglessly sacrificed himself to himself out of wrath. It's just a shame they are unwilling to have a productive conversation.

Yep, that's why it has been historical seen as immoral and has been illegal. Same with assisted suicide.

If you don't agree with the definition, then please provide the one you are using and we can discuss with that one.

Because the OT claims God has done things that are evil; and God cannot do evil.

As I tried to explain to @frank (but they rudely ignored it), it is because God is all-just. To forgo the repayment required for an offense is to forgo justice. Oftentimes, mercy (viz., alleviating someone’s deserved misery) is contradictory to justice (viz., upholding what is owed).

God is all-just and all-merciful, so there is a necessary synthesis of both in God. The perfect synthesis of the two for God is to forgive our sins if we are repentant (viz., so as to be merciful) as long as a proportionate price has been paid for them by a representative of the group (viz., so as to be just). In this way, the price has been paid and an alleviation of misery can be done.

Imagine that you knew someone was in debt to you so much money that they never could pay it back. You could absolve them of the debt with the snap of your fingers, but you would be being unjust: they deserve to pay that back and you deserve that money, but you are forgoing it to allow someone to be in a condition that they do not deserve out of some motive (perhaps love or kindness). In this case, you would be having mercy on them, but at the expense of being just.

If you want to be just, though, you cannot do this; but if you make them continue to be in debt (to be just) with no way out, then you are not being merciful.

So, can you be both merciful and just? Is there a way to synthesize them? Yes. For example, in this case, you could take the money from a volunteer who is wealthy enough to pay the debt for this person and thereby absolve them of their debt when they don't deserve it (i.e., be merciful) and preserve the proper respect of desert (i.e., be just).

It's not a perfect analogy, but this is what God did.

GregW, murder is the direct intentional killing of an innocent person and a killing is to end the natural life of a being. By your logic, then, if I go and kill someone it isn't murder because they haven't truly died since their soul is immutable and ends up in heaven.

1. It is impermissible to indirectly kill an infant
2. Killing an infant's parents will indirectly kill the infant (if left to itself)
3. Therefore, it is impermissible to kill an infant's parents (for any reason, so long as you cannot support the infant)

Would you agree with that argument?

No, I wouldn’t. But let’s say I did: is your argument that if it is immoral to kill or leave the infant, then the lesser of the two evils (that should be picked) is to kill it? I do accept the principle that if one has to do evil that they should do the lesser of the evils; but wouldn’t this argument require that God had to do evil?

The reason I wouldn’t accept the argument, on another note, is for two reasons:

1. It is sometimes permissible to indirectly intentionally kill an infant. Going back to our discussion about the principle of Double Effect, the tactical bomber, e.g., is justified in bombing the military base even if he knows with 100% certainty one innocent bystander will be killed.

2. Omissions and commissions are evaluated morally differently, such that if one can only do immoral acts then letting something bad happen is always the permissible and obligatory option. If I can only murder someone else to stop the train to save the five or let the five die, then letting the five die is morally permissible and obligatory; however, all else being letting the five die would be immoral. If you either have to let the children starve or murder them, then letting them starve is bad but morally obligatory and permissible.

I think you would have to, at the very least, deny the principle in 2 that <if one can only do immoral acts to prevent something bad, then it is obligatory that they do nothing>.

that one is permitted to indirectly kill an infant in certain circumstances. In that case a command to kill infants could be reasonably interpreted as a command to indirectly kill infants by killing their evil parents.

Well, this cannot be true. 1 Samual 15 makes it clear God is commanding Saul to directly intentionally kill them all. It even goes so far to explicate that Saul did it but kept some of the animals and God was annoyed with Saul for keeping the animals BUT NOT for directly intentionally killing the people:

“He took Agag king of the Amalekites alive, and all his people he totally destroyed with the sword. 9 But Saul and the army spared Agag and the best of the sheep and cattle, the fat calves and lambs—everything that was good. These they were unwilling to destroy completely, but everything that was despised and weak they totally destroyed.”

 God is allowed to "kill," given that every time anything dies God has "killed" it. Life and death are in God's hands. Can God delegate such a prerogative to the Israelites in special cases, such as that of the Amalekites? If so, then this "mercy killing" of an infant is not per se unjust, and it actually provides the infant with the best option, given the alternatives.

Yes, this seems to be Aquinas’ answer; but then you are saying that murder is not the direct intentional killing of an innocent person OR that murder is not always unjust. Would you endorse one of those?

Note though that collateral damage is part of war, and that it bears on the question of directly intended killing versus indirectly intended killing. 

But this seems disanalogous. The tactical bomber is not indirectly intending to kill an innocent bystander if he successfully bombs the military base, notices he has another bomb leftover, and uses it on an innocent person riding their bike. Going in and winning a war against the Amalekites and then killing en masse the women and children is not indirectly intentional. Technically, one could argue that the women and children were all killed in the heat of battle; but how honestly plausible is that? When has that ever happened in war?

I have not. I haven't had the time to sift through all the posts in here.

There was nothing invalid about the form of my argument. Murder is the direct intentional killing of an innocent person. God did that in the OT, or rather it is purported that God did that. Either God did it and committed murder or He didn't. If He did and murder is unjust, then God is unjust. However, God is all-just, so God cannot commit murder; so the OT cannot be correct. You may not find it plausible, but the argument is logically sound.

Yes, but you are thinking of liberty of indifference and not liberty for excellence; and this is why you will find it incoherent and probably downright contradictory to say that people in heaven cannot sin and yet are free. No different than how if you think freedom fundamentally consists in this indifferent ability to choose from contraries you will find it impossible that God is free, let alone perfectly and absolutely free, and yet cannot do evil.

It's why the replies from believers consist mostly of repeating doctrine rather than responding to the inconsistency. To reaffirm the creed is to participate in the truth.

I literally responded with a philosophical account of why God had to sacrifice Himself, devoid of faith, and @Frank ignored it. I understand many laymen do not take this approach and your critique here can be generally valid of those who do not have a robust understanding of their Christian beliefs; but I gave the consistent and rational position that Aquinas would endorse: so this isn't even a niche or unlikely position for the Catholic Church to endorse.

How is that relevant to our discussion? Do you see how your depiction of Christianity was a straw man? That's all I was attempting to argue here.

What would you say the sacrifice of Jesus was meant to accomplish?

I explained this in my responses to you:

Imagine that you knew someone was in debt to you so much money that they never could pay it back. You could absolve them of the debt with the snap of your fingers, but you be being unjust: they deserve to pay that back and you deserve that money, but you are forgoing it to allow someone to be in a condition that they do not deserve out of some motive (perhaps love or kindness). In this case, you would be having mercy on them, but at the expense of being just.

If you want to be just, though, you cannot do this; but if you make them continue to be in debt (to be just) with no way out, then you are not being merciful.

So, can you be both merciful and just? Is there a way to synthesize them? Yes. For example, in this case, you could take the money from a volunteer who is wealthy enough to pay the debt for this person and thereby absolve them of their debt when they don't deserve it (i.e., be merciful) and preserve the proper respect of desert (i.e., be just).

It's not a perfect analogy, but this is what God did.

And:

The death itself is not what fundamentally saves you and I: it is that something of infinite dignity was offered to repay our sins. This could be, in principle, done in various ways.
…
Frank, it isn’t the Christian narrative. According to Christianity, when you sin you offend God and you cannot repay that sin; so God, out of love, offered Himself to repay that debt so that you can repent.

But you didn’t address them. Your view is a straw man of Christianity.

God is all-just and all-merciful; so He has to synthesize the two analogous to the debt example I gave. You seem to think God can just forgo punishment for sins and that is best; but that is mercy at the expense of justice. If the judge absolves a person of a rightful conviction sentence out of mercy, then they have sacrificed justice.

@Frank

Imagine that you knew someone was in debt to you so much money that they never could pay it back. You could absolve them of the debt with the snap of your fingers, but you be being unjust: they deserve to pay that back and you deserve that money, but you are forgoing it to allow someone to be in a condition that they do not deserve out of some motive (perhaps love or kindness). In this case, you would be having mercy on them, but at the expense of being just.

If you want to be just, though, you cannot do this; but if you make them continue to be in debt (to be just) with no way out, then you are not being merciful.

So, can you be both merciful and just? Is there a way to synthesize them? Yes. For example, in this case, you could take the money from a volunteer who is wealthy enough to pay the debt for this person and thereby absolve them of their debt when they don't deserve it (i.e., be merciful) and preserve the proper respect of desert (i.e., be just).

It's not a perfect analogy, but this is what God did.

from His own wrath

God sent His Son out of love so that He can be both just and merciful. God is not wrathful: I don’t know why the OT describes Him that way, but the NT makes it clear He is not.

And apparently this strategy worked in spite of the fact that he didn't actually die 

The death itself is not what fundamentally saves you and I: it is that something of infinite dignity was offered to repay our sins. This could be, in principle, done in various ways.

most people didn't get saved

What do you mean?

How does a person who hasn't had a lobotomy make sense of this?

Why do you have such hostility for Christianity? This seems disingenuine, an ad hominem, and mean.

 Could it be that most Christians throughout history didn't know this is the Christian narrative?

Frank, it isn’t the Christian narrative. According to Christianity, when you sin you offend God and you cannot repay that sin; so God, out of love, offered Himself to repay that debt so that you can repent.

Okay, that's fair. I just wanted to try to impress the idea that the Amalekite culture and the Amalekite religion/cult go hand in hand, and if we want to get into the exegesis we could show that it is specifically the abominations associated with the Amalekites that God is concerned with. The question, "Why the Amalekites?," is something we ought to keep in mind. It would be a significant mistake to assume that this is how God/Israel deals with every people-group

That’s fine by me.

I think it is reasonable to assume that there were Amalekite children and that they were part of the ban.

:up:

In the first place I would want to note that in our Western society which strongly values individualism, the individual is the central agent and the child is often seen to be his own person, so to speak
…
A second consideration is the question of support mechanism.

I am having a hard time parsing your argument. Let me offer some arguments I think might be extractable from your elaboration. I’m going to use loose arguments and I am not intending to put words in your mouth.

Argument from Group Agency

1. A person’s innocence or guilt is determined relative to the group’s innocence or guilt.
2. A person that has done nothing wrong themselves but is a part of a group that is guilty is thereby guilty (just the same).
3. Murder is the direct intentional killing of an innocent person.
4. The Amalekite group was guilty (of relevant crimes to potentially killing them).
5. The Amalekite children had done nothing wrong.
6. The Amalekite children were guilty by association with the Amalekite group (2).
7. Therefore, killing the Amalekite children was not murder.

Is this an argument you would endorse?

Briefly, I would say that I would deny 2. Ethics is person-centric, not group-centric; but then, again, maybe you would rejoin that this is ‘libertarian modernism’.

Argument from Mercy Killing

1. A person that could be mercy killed or left to endure a serious and fatal life (such as leaving them to starve to death because no one can feed them) should be mercy killed.
2. The children of the Amalekites would have been left to starve, because the Israelites lacked the resources to integrate them into their society properly, and inevitably die in insufferable ways.
3. Therefore, the children should have been mercy killed.

Is this an argument you would endorse?

Briefly, I would say this is consequentialistic; and I would deny it on those grounds. Murder is not allowable if letting a person live would result in grave consequences for that person—including insufferable death.

Argument from Evil Cleansing

1. An extremely evil idea deeply rooted in a society, culturally, should be eradicated.
2. Eradicating such an extremely evil idea is infeasible without killing off most of the population.
3. Therefore, one should kill most of the population of a society that has a deeply rooted extremely evil idea.

Is this an argument you would endorse?

Briefly, I would say that this also is consequentialistic at heart. I don’t think it is permissible to do evil in order to eradicate evil.

P.S. The reason you aren't getting a lot of direct answers to your argument in this thread is simply because it is a very difficult argument to address. For that reason I'm not sure whether I will succeed in giving you a satisfactory answer either, but I think these considerations complicate the initial picture quite a bit.

That’s fair, but aren’t you a Christian? I’m curious what you make of these difficult passages: does it affect your faith?

Considering other common forms of death in antiquity, death by flood isn't exactly a bad way to go. Would you also think, e.g., death by tuberculosis or dysentery to be God "murdering?"

Are you confusing an action with an allowance. God is doing the flooding (by willing it); whereas a person with cancer right now was through privations of what God wills—God is not willing it.

It’s the difference between me killing someone and letting them die.

Secondly, if a set of pre-existent rules binds God, then he is not God. Creation (which includes rules) proceeds from God.

God is not bound by rules; but that doesn’t mean He isn’t bound by His nature. His nature is perfectly good which binds Him: the modality of ‘rules’ is irrelevant to that point.

Again, you are taking a divine command theorist approach and this is very flawed. Things are not good merely because God wills them: God has to will them in a way that is good because He is goodness itself—His nature is perfectly good.

Yeah, but don't those seem like highly ad hoc explanations? The Rabbi, granting Chatgpt even got it right, is inventing a new kind of light to explain it when the simpler answer is that the author had no clue how light works OR the author was trying to convey something spiritual.

Does it? It says Noah has his sons when he is 500 years old. His sons are all a century old when the Flood comes, when Noah is aged 600. Noah's sons are the last births mentioned in the text. If one reads this literally, I'm not sure how fair it is to make assumptions about human life cycles at these scales, particularly if one considers the radically different biology that is being suggested elsewhere.

I see your point: upon thinking about it more, I think this is a fair and reasonable rejoinder. I don’t think the great flood mentions or implies there are children and there are plenty of mentioning of abnormal biology.

EDIT: It is worth noting, though, that the lineage part does suggest that they are procreating (instead of God manually creating them), so it's still kind of suspect that there are no children at all. Especially if people are said to be doing immoral things: that usually involves sex.

What are your thoughts on the other two examples I gave in the OP?

There is no "principle or parsimony" for reading historical texts that says: "stick to just one text." Really quite the opposite. We try to confirm things through as many traditions and texts as possible. I am not sure where Rashi got that idea though, if it might have been in an earlier tradition.

What I was referring to is the principle that the simpler explanation that explains the data is the one we should use. I believe this would be used by historians.

The religious view is that God has the right to take and give life as He sees fit.

But, then, murder is not the direct intentional killing of an innocent person. It would have to be defined some other way, and different than it being merely an illegal killing.

I sympathize with your position, since it does seem to me that the OT counts, all else being equal, against God being all-just OR that the OT is not describing God (or potentially divinely inspired).

The point of this OP is to see what people would say who would hold that the OT is divinely inspired

.

Exactly, and most Christians have the Church itself as an interpreter, and its most respected saints as anchors. You have the Church Fathers as an anchor point, and within them the "Universal Fathers" who are doctors of the Roman Catholic Church and also among the most respected saints in the East, e.g. the Capaddocian Fathers, Saint Maximus the Confessor, etc., as well as the Apostolic Fathers who wrote within living memory of the Apostles or those they directly taught.

Islam has a similar set of texts and interpretive system. Evangelical Christianity, as dominant as it is in the Anglophone world due to its influence in the US, is quite unique in the Abrahamic tradition in how it deals with scripture and tradition.

But how are they interpreting it? How do they respond to the things @Hanover said? If you would like to respond to a specific example, then here's one: why does Genesis describe God making light for the earth before the sun?

By your definition, a person would kills an innocent child in society that has not made killing humans, in any way or means, illegal has not committed murder and, most crucially, apparently, has done nothing wrong.

Murder is the unjustified killing of a person: the direct intentional killing of an innocent person.

Moreover, "God being the law" is partially true and partially false. God IS perfect goodness and perfect justice: His commands are not themselves what grounds what is good or just---it is His nature.

So you are right that there is no other being above Him: He is constrained by His own nature to be perfectly good. So my argument is perfectly valid: if God is all-just (because it is in His nature to be all-just and not merely because you are defining arbitrarily God's commands as what defines justice) and murder is unjust, then God cannot commit murder; but God does commit murder in the OT, so that is not God or they got the facts wrong.

Aquinas doesn't think the word "best" makes sense in that context, given the infinite possibilities

I'll have to think about this: maybe if there are an infinite range of possibility then God would have an infinite amount of 'best' worlds He could create. I am not sure.

As noted, the story only mentions men, most of whom are several centuries old.

Your argument seems to hinge on the idea that there were no children on earth during the Flood; but the very previous chapter, 5, outlines in detail the lineage as normal procreation and Noah is said to have three sons in chapter 6.

Also, it is worth mentioning that these kinds of rejoinders, like Rashi’s, seem to fall prey to violating the principle of parsimony. No where in the OT does it suggest remotely that there were no children or that the beasts were shapeshifters: you’d think it would mention that, or at least not mention things which imply the contrary.

With all due respect, I can't seem to follow what your rejoinder is to the arguments I gave in the OP. Can you take one of my three examples from the OP and demonstrate what interpretation you hold of it that is immune to my critique?

I think you are giving me a lot of substantive information on the topic, but I'm having a hard time relating it to the OP.

Bob, I always feel respected by you without you saying it, so no need. Have at it! I hope you see that Inrespect you as well.

:up:

Do you think God is all good and all just?

Yes I do.

Do you think God is not capable of committing evil?

Yes.

Do you think the OT tells history, or it does not?

I don’t know: it seems to be both history in a more literal sense of events, dates, and people and also literary. It’s hard to decipher what was meant to convey a lesson vs. a mere exposition of historical fact; and it becomes dangerously close to confirmation bias, IMHO, with some of the interpretations I’ve heard.

Do you think the Bible ever tells lies to us, purporting to describe events that are fictional as if they were historical?

Well, on the one hand, it facially tells inaccurate information and is not inerrant; however, on the other hand, most of the text I would be referring to can be interpreted as allegorical, metaphorical, etc. Still then, it seems unsuccessful at solving the issues.

For example, the beginning of Genesis outlines the creation of the world prima facie and it blatantly incorrectly states that God created the light that shines on earth before the sun. However, somebody could say that it is metaphorical for God creating the universe. Still then, why would God divinely inspire His message to be conveyed in a manner where it gets facts blatantly wrong like that?

Whether or not the Biblical writers are lying is a separate question; and I would lean towards no. I don’t think the author was intentionally messing up the facts to deceive people.

Do you think God reveals himself to us through the OT or not? If so, is God a historical figure in the OT or the NT or both, or neither?

That’s what I am evaluating and why I started this OP. I believe if God voluntarily creates a world, then He will always have to (1) create the best possible world and (2) freely will to incarnate Himself through hypostatic union as a representative member of the species of any that are persons to save them. I think, and @Leontiskos can correct me on this, this would be a heresy for Christianity of God being forced to always pick the best.

Did Abraham and Moses live and worship the same God whom Jesus called Father and whose Holy Spirit remains with us to this day, or no?

I would find it plausible that Abraham and Moses were real people and worshiped the same God who Jesus called the Father.

So God is good, but the alleged God of the OT is not good, and so the OT is false history of what God did; God didn’t actually do what the OT says God did. That’s what you think.

That’s what I am arguing and what I would find most plausible right now. I don’t have a strong intuition or position on this yet though. The point of this OP is work through my thoughts and see what other people bring to the table for me to digest.

So killing of innocents is bad, but killing of Canaanites is justified, but not killing all Canaanites; God was ok killing some innocent Canannites, but not ok committing genocide of all Canaanites, innocent ones or not. That can be inferred from what you just said here.

I am fine with that assessment. My minor quibble would be that a just war does not entail it is just to have as your end to kill all the adults engaging in evil: a just war entails that you are justified in fighting with them to stop the evil—which should be done with a principle of proportionate response in mind. If I can stop someone from committing child sacrifice without killing them, and this can be done with reasonable safety to myself and others, then that’s what I should do. I would be being disproportionate in my response to the evil by still killing them anyways (unless that is a proportionate punishment, such as capital punishment, for their past sins of sacrificing children).

And the alleged historical God of the OT is not about love, peace, justice, eternal life, goodness, hope, faith, charity, humility, mercy, forgiveness and redemption - but instead, in the OT, alleged God is basically a God of wrath and enforcement of law and demonstration of power, and sometimes evil deeds. We should read the OT to learn lessons, but not as containing any facts.

I see, so you are taking the spiritual approach of interpretation—correct? What lessons are we learning from portraying, according to your own view, God purposefully incorrectly? What do you think about the aspects of the OT that seem to be historical (such as lineages, outlining laws, the people, the places, etc.)?

Is God capable of committing sin or not, and is God a moral agent or not?

God is a moral agent because He is a rational agent that has absolute freedom; but His freedom is supreme freedom which is sometimes referred to as liberty of excellence. He does not have liberty of indifference: the liberal idea of freedom being having the ability to have chosen otherwise.

God is both absolutely free and incapable of sinning. A rational agent that is absolutely unimpeded by anything external and of which has absolute knowledge of the good necessarily will always freely choose to do what is good; and, here’s where I think (@Leontiskos) the heresy maybe smuggling in here, to choose what is best.

If you think the two are incompatible, then Moses and Abraham were only fools; Peter and Paul were the first to know God

But how can you say the God from the OT through the NT is the same God if you acknowledge that the OT portrays God in ways God is not?

Are you saying Jesus was tricking the Jewish people when He upheld all of the law of Moses and referred to the God the Jews knew and lived as Farher?

I think Jesus was, in good faith, referring to himself as related to the Father of the OT; which to me means that your view that God can be portrayed incorrectly for the sake of a spiritual lesson as false. Was he lying about being the Son of God? I doubt it, but I don’t know.

This this getting too long, so I will stop here and let you respond (:

I am ok with granting this, because you are excluding the kinds of people that would not be defectors but would not be meaningfully an Amalekite. I am just being careful to note that, e.g., a disabled person being taken care of by Amalekites would seem to count as an Amalekite in the sense you mean. Are you saying that the correct interpretation of the text is that God was specifically referring to an Amalekite in this strictest sense that would preclude children, disabled people, etc? If so, then how do you explain the fact that God punished Saul for sparing some animals? Doesn't that suggest that God was including everything that lived in the City itself?

It seems like part of your argument is <The OT God told Saul to kill all of the adult Amalekites, even though only some of them were evil>. — Leontiskos

Sort of, but that would be immune to the strongest part of my argument; which involves the children. We could dispute plausbly either way if, for example, there were any healthy adults which could be held to be an Amalekite proper and I am willing to concede, given the seemingly identity relation between being an Amalekate and a part of the cult, that there weren't any. We also could dispute whether or not there were any disabled adults, such as cognitively disabled adults, which would be harder to classify as meaningfully an Amalekate even though they lived with them.

At the end of the day, I emphasize the children, although I understand you are setting that aspect of it aside for a second, because it is really implausible in my mind that there were no Amalekate children and it seems like they would be a part of the ban.

:roll: You obviously don't know what neoplatonism is which is evident from the fact that you can't explain it. I have.

Agreed. @frank brought up the claim and then "justified" it by saying I am clueless. Frank, can you elaborate on what you mean?

Why do you refuse to defend your own position? I outlined mine clearly: can you do the same?

Frank, I've read about neoplatonism. What do you mean by it and how does Plato argue for the Trinity? I don't that happened. Just explain it briefly to me.

To clarify, I am saying that Christianity holds that the OT God is God; but that my OP is objecting by way of an external critique from classical theism to claim that it couldn't be God. Most importantly, I am interested to hear what Christian's think of my critique.

Also, I could make an internal critique that would suffice: if Christ is about love and mercy, then how does that cohere with the OT?

Either way, I think it is an issue Christian have recognized is noteworthy and something they need to respond to.

What do you mean by neoplatonism? I mean any view that adopts but sublates Plato's view.

Aristotle adopted Plato's views but sublated it; and in turn Aquinas did the same with Aristotle. I would consider them both neoplatonists.

Also, do you believe Plato was a Trinitarian? I'm not aware of him believing in that: I thought it arose in classical theism with thinkers like Aquinas who were Christians.

You don't think Aquinas or Aristotle were neo-platonists?!?

This of course leaves unanswered the purpose of suffering not caused by humans, like babies dying in floods.

What you are raising is the problem of evil, which is not relevant to the OP.

The answer to natural evil is that you need a world where there are regularties of behavior of the environment for anything’s good to be realized. I can’t live a virtueous life if the floor randomly turns into TNT once a week. You need natural laws to allow for the good of anything at all; and that necessarily allows for natural evil.

 If you say we have the free will to commit atrocity because without it the world would be lesser, you'll have to commit to the idea the free will we are deprived of (like the choice to fly like a bird) is an acceptable limitation.

I am talking about freedom to live in accord with one’s nature: not the nature of something else. It isn’t good for a human to be able to organically fly: it’s not in our essence.

Why was Pharaoh"s free will imposed upon (hardened his heart) but not Hitler's?

Yes, this is a fair Biblical objection; but this is another example of exactly what my OP is arguing. It seems like God in the OT is not really God.

I don't place particular significance on love with God. It's overly anthropomorphic and reductive and it de-emphasizes doing as opposed to believing.

Well, that’s a big problem; as love of God is love of love itself: It is to orientate one’s will towards what is perfectly good. If you reject that, then you do not want what is perfectly good for anything.

 I'll just point out that the centrality of love to God is idiosyncratic to Christianity and not a necessary primary component of theism.

I am not arguing from Christianity here. In this life, if you don’t love God, then you don’t love love itself or goodness itself. If you don’t love that, then you aren’t orientated towards what is good: that hurts you and everything around you.