#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.
#551 | The Bible clearly claims the law is written on our hearts. What exactly would the world look like if this were true and if it were not true? Is this not an easy claim to substantiate? Why so much Christian disagreement on proper conduct? Does “written“ mean “scribbled”?
#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?
#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?
#522 | Modern apologists, instead of claiming God can do anything he wants, attempt to explain away alleged atrocities in the Bible, implying that God cannot do anything he wants. How is this threshold established? Or is the question of a threshold off-limits for humans for some reason?
#518 | Greg rightly says meaning is self-centered. How could it not be in light of psychological facts? From this, why not then simply cultivate compassion to make that self-centeredness drive altruistic behavior? Would/does this not outperform “morality“ measured against the standards of most moralists?
#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?
#448 | I’ve often heard from STR that nonbelievers often say “there is no right or wrong, so you are wrong to impose right or wrong on me“. Who has said this? Is this not a fabricated opponent? Is this level of dishonsty a possible cause behind the exodus of youth from faith?
#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?
#425 | Should the American colonist have rebelled given Romans 13:1, and were the loyalists wrong to report them to the British? If this verse is mitigated by other factors, are those factors evidenced and rigorous enough not to render Romans 13:1 completely impotent?
#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?
#421 | Based on the “hierarchy of moral absolutes” introduced by Greg Koukl, is the Amalekite boy, having seen the real God in the “things which are made”, culpable for lying to save his infant sister from the Israelite sword? Would God not be pleased with his presenting his sister to the Israelite soldiers to be killed as God directly commanded them?
#394 | If morality reduces to obeying the God we have chosen, even if that God asks us to commit an abhorrent act such as hacking infants into pieces as in the case of the Amalekite infants, how can we assess prior to choosing that God whether that God is “moral”?
Note: This is an reductio ad absurdum argument that doesn’t assume the existence of morality.
#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?
#336 | Greg: “the world is thick with morality”. Just as spiritualists interpret everything inexplicable as “magic”, Greg finds morality behind every expressed emotion. Emotions exist. Morality does not. Or does Greg have rigorous standards of differentiation? Or is it simplyn the emotions of abhorrence behind the notion of evil?
#329 | Greg: “We know the world is thick with morality”. Assuming Christian “morality” doesn’t equate to blindly obeying God, what actual objective moral principles were available to those Israelite soldiers who had been ordered to slaughter Amalekite infants?
#328 | Claiming “God’s ways are not our ways” insulates Christianity from examination to a high degree, but are there at least ways of an alleged God that can be shown to be clearly unrighteous such as asking that children be thrown off cliffs or hacked into pieces?
#261 | Assuming “Christian morality“ is clear, coherent and minimally practical, is it moral or immoral to kill doctors to protect fetuses? What, exactly, does that moral calculus look like? Or is biblical morality more relative and subjective?
#255 | Both the left and the right fear the unspecified way the other side would legislate their values if they took full power. What punishments for adultery, sodomy, fornication and masturbation would Christians enact, and what is the calculus invoked to decide?
#246 | Greg defends the Amalekite infant slaughter: “You can’t destroy all the adults, and leave the babies laying there.” What would have been God’s reaction had someone with compassion and imagination raised the child instead of hacking it to pieces or leaving it there to die?
#239 | Is the claim “By their fruits you shall know them” of any real evidential value since most individuals threatened with a Hell behave better? If 1,000 random Japanese produce better fruits (by biblical standards) than 1,000 evangelicals, what should we rationally conclude?
#178 | Why doesn’t the Bible simply systematically list sins to avoid the countless hours Christians spend debating what is right/wrong? Why has Biblical morality evolved over the centuries as demonstrated by the beliefs of Christian leaders of each age?
#175 | If, in heeding the moral inclination to love rather than to kill infants, a Israelite soilder had hidden away an Amalekite infant from the other soilders hacking infants into pieces as God commanded, what punishment should he have received?
#045 | Isn’t the notion that “without God, morality is meaningless” simply the tautology that, without God, there is unsurprisingly no God to please? There is no morality. There are only emotions. Is compassion somehow insufficient for a fulfilling life? Why invent a morality?
#036 | It seems uncontroversial that humans have values emergent of desires, and emotions corresponding to those values. We can feel intense anger when a child is harmed, for example. What warrants going beyond this quite sufficient explanation to suggest such harm is “evil“?
#034 | Sean McDowell claims the strong emotions we experience during sex are evidence of a moral code, calling it a “big deal“, rather than simply evidence of strong emotions during sex. Is there a rational justification for this odd jump from cherry-picked emotions to a moral code?
#032 | Why is the anger against atrocities oddly construed to be an exhibition of a moral disposition rather than simply anger? Is love or jealousy also evidence of some cosmic moral realm in the universe? What’s the justification for elevating these emotions to indicators of a moral realm?
#029 | There are unbelievers who believe in morality, and others who don’t. Yet, STR oddly insists that those who don’t actually do, claiming, given enough time, their moral intuitions will inevitably slip out. Would STRask like to test this? Or is it an unfalsifiable claim?
#018 | Greg, stop! Stop claiming “everyone knows morality is objective“ when there are countless people willing to engage you to demonstrate it is not. This has reach the point of mendacity. It takes just a cursory look outside your ideological box to find out differently. [A grumpy-Phil day]
STR Asked... 