#644 | Amy: “How could Christianity have changed the ethics of society if it came from the ethics of society? It’s impossible!” < Isn’t this confusion on causal dynamics? {common emotions > common social expectations > religions crystalizing around those expectations} Right?
#641 | The classical Christian view on homosexuals is that they should be killed. How do STR and God feel about this move away from the millennia-long classical view to a liberal view in which homosexuals are allowed to live their lives without fear of lethal retribution?
Greg Koukl often refers to the “classical Christian view“, and considers it worth preserving.
#640 | Can the beauty of the Golden Rule be anything other than a superficial marketing ploy when, once deconstructed and scrutinize, it necessarily includes obeying God’s command to hack Amalekite infants into pieces? Is it not just a facçde behind which lies blind obedience?
#632 | Why do Christians suggest the Golden Rule encapsulates Christian morality when clearly all claims of a respectable Christian morality ultimately distill to raw obedience? The Golden rule was violated very quickly when God commanded the slaughter of the Amalekite infants.
#619 | Amy: “This idea that we create Gods to match our morality…doesn’t seem to be the case.” Gods clearly co-evolve with cultural mores. Review the non-lethal punishments the Church now assigns adultery, heresy, witchcraft, and bad kids. Has the Church been static?
What STR Staff call “morality” distills to blind obedience to the Bible’s God once scrutinized.
#576 | Greg, ignoring the consistently lived position of many, claims “but we all know better [that cosmic evil exists].” Why this head-in-the-sand stance? Will his repetitive claim moral-antirealists can not possibly live their position become true at some iteration?
#575 | If God gave us our moral intuitions, why do they not switch off when God commands us to do something moral by divine command such as the command to kill Amalekite infants? Do we need to weigh this commandment against our intuition at all, or do we unhesitantly kill?
#540 | How can Christians explain away apparent atrocities in the Bible without a coherent and rigorous standard to index? They will claim the throwing of children from the top of a mountain no actual God would command but will defend a God who asked grown men to hack infants into pieces.
#536 | Does it make sense to claim God needed to slowly reveal his moral will over generations? Why could God not have clearly condemned slavery one day and have made slavery worthy of stoning as he did with the rebellion of children? How is progressive revelation coherent?
#534 | Given we have a moral intuition that runs against God’s will (such as wanting to save Amalekite infants from being hacked to pieces), can we not recategorize that misattributed intuition as simply an emotion and not from God? And can we distinguish between the 2 without the Bible?
To what degree can we trust what Christians call our moral intuitions if our innate desire to protect the Amalekite infants is actually a sin worthy of Hell-fire?
#533 | Is it honest to claim God needed generations to slowly wean humans away from slavery and polygamy when other prohibitions required no slow generational progression towards some cultural disposition in which God’s actual intention could be realized?
#531 | Is someone’s moral intuition that hacking Amalekite infants into pieces is wrong not an actual moral intuition in the moral realm created by the Biblical God? And if it is not, how can we differentiate between moral intuitions and this innate abhorrence of killing infants?
#527 | Christians usually abandon moral intuition arguments when asked if it was right to obey God in killing the Amalekite infants. But, once these are abandoned, what then remains to assess whether the God you worship is actually moral (generously granting morality exists)?
#523 | A majority of apologists will acknowledge the distinction between moral wrong and pragmatic wrong, yet, will later equivocate, claiming nonbelievers acknowledge a particular behavior is [unqualified] “wrong”. The omission of the qualifier seems intentional. Is it?
In other words, why do apologists ask questions such as “You know X is wrong” and do not simply add a disambiguating qualifier such as in “morally wrong” or “pragmatically wrong”?
#517 | Greg seems to want to bring the word “noble“ under the semantic umbrella of “morality”. Isn’t the term synonymous with “respectable“, reflecting the aggregate societal attitude toward a particular behavior? What other similar terms do Christians think reference morality?
#515 | Greg continues to claim that not doing something because it’s distasteful or abhorrent Is acting on a “subjectivistic moral standard“. It is not. There is no morality to be found in emotions, neither objective nor subjective. Why keep denying the existence of moral nihilists?
#508 | Greg claims moral nihilists “deny what they know to be true” when a child is murdered, presumably violating their “moral intuition”. Don’t Christians likewise “deny what they know to be true” when defending a God who ordered grown men to hack Amalekite infants to death?
#467 | Greg affirms the notion that God takes pleasure in the pain of the wicked. Why don’t humans consider this divine quality of pleasure in the pain of the wicked as something noble? Why are sympathy and forgiveness more the human response and considered nobler? Are humans wrong?
#466 | Greg says humans intuitively sense moral facts “because they are human beings made in the image of God”. What would have happened if someone were to have acted on their intuitive sense of morality, and had thwarted the killing of the Amalekite infants ordered by God?
#462 | Isn’t looking for a “moral” foundation “to stand on“, as Greg Koukl phrases it, rather silly when you have wings of compassion and reason on which to soar? Have not these wings yielded results far superior than “moral” systems over the ages?
#452 | Where is the demarcation between moral questions and pragmatic questions? For example, is the decision to endure the anguish of cancelling a fishing trip, and instead preaching the Gospel at far greater personal risk a moral or simply a pragmatic decision? How do we know?
#451 | For Christians, does not the command to spread the Gospel trump all other factors in the Christian moral calculus? Why would we not always ignore all risks of suffering to ourselves and our families our preaching might incur when we are likely saving others from infinite torment?
#437 | Many Christians claim non-Christians have no basis for good behavior as they have no coherent moral system. This nakedly ignores the effects of love and compassion. And this is what we see. More love, more loving actions. Why this misrepresentation of reality?
#435 | An STR rep states, “If you had evolved to kill humans, you would have to say killing humans is not evil.” True! For this reason humans don’t punish a killer tiger & those clinically insane. What then is the issue? And is “evil” anything more than emotional abhorrence?
#422 | Consistent with the “hierarchy of moral absolutes”, is not the Christian woman who divorces her Muslim husband to lower the likelihood that her children would reject Christ morally justified? Doesn’t this notion of the hierarchy of moral absolutes hinge on personal values and subjective assessments?
#366 | Doesn’t the existence of the many moral anti-realists falsify Greg’s constant claim “We‘re all commonsense realists when it comes to morality. We betray our commitment to genuine moral truth.” Why ignore those who consistently hold there is no actual moral realm in which moral facts can reside?
#363 | It appears that simple emotions better explain the reality of humans attempting to impose their own values on others rather than an actual objective morality. We emotionally abhor torture and child abuse, and fabricate moral “facts” to correspond to that emotion. Right?
#357 | Isn’t Jon Noyes’ claims that a) evil is evidenced by humans’ “emotional response to suffering and evil in the world” & b) “we have emotional reactions to these evil things” either 1) only evidence of emotions or 2) circular (evil is confirmed by perceived cases of evil)?
#349 | What can the biblical attribution of righteousness to Lot ever mean given his actions? Can we not then also call Trump as righteous given he has only molested women and not offered his daughters to be raped nor impregnated his daughters while drunk as did Lot?
#337 | Is not the Christian notion of morality fully detached from compassion as demonstrated by the presumed punishment of any compassionate Israelite soldier refusing to hack to death Amalekite infants? Obedience alone is the essence of Christian morality, right?
STR Asked... 