The biggest takeaway I see in this report is that even 2,000 years ago, people had an irresistible compulsion to throw coins in pools.

The case is inferential, but it's not complete nonsense. Relevant passages are collected here. Notably:

Deuteronomy 4:
23 Take heed unto yourselves, lest ye forget the covenant of the LORD your God, which he made with you, and make you a graven image, or the likeness of any thing, which the LORD thy God hath forbidden thee.
24 For the LORD thy God is a consuming fire, even a jealous God.
25 When thou shalt beget children, and children's children, and ye shall have remained long in the land, and shall corrupt yourselves, and make a graven image, or the likeness of any thing, and shall do evil in the sight of the LORD thy God, to provoke him to anger:
26 I call heaven and earth to witness against you this day, that ye shall soon utterly perish from off the land whereunto ye go over Jordan to possess it; ye shall not prolong your days upon it, but shall utterly be destroyed.
27 And the LORD shall scatter you among the nations, and ye shall be left few in number among the heathen, whither the LORD shall lead you.
28 And there ye shall serve gods, the work of men's hands, wood and stone, which neither see, nor hear, nor eat, nor smell.

In other words, "I am a jealous God. Worshiping other gods will provoke me into a jealous rage, and I will cause you to perish." It's perfectly true that the same words applied to a spouse would be considered horrific:

23 Take heed unto yourselves, lest ye forget the covenant [your husband], which he made with you, and [look at pictures of other men, which your husband has forbidden].
24 For [your husband] is a consuming fire, even a jealous [husband].
25 When thou shalt beget children, and children's children, and ye shall have remained long in [your husband's house], and shall corrupt yoursel[f], and [look at pictures of men], or the likeness of any [other men], and shall do evil in the sight of [your husband], to provoke him to anger:
26 I call heaven and earth to witness against you this day, that ye shall soon utterly perish from [your husband's house] whereunto ye go over [to live]; ye shall not prolong your days [in] it, but shall utterly be destroyed.
27 And [your husband] shall [send you out into the streets], and ye shall be... among the [homeless], whither [your husband] shall lead you.
28 And there ye shall [date other men]...

If my wife wants to see other men, it's a terrible thing, and I would indeed consider leaving her (or kicking her out) as described in (my paraphrased) verse 27. However, if I laid a finger on her, let alone caused her to "utterly perish," it would be considered a horrific crime in the eyes of men. The law of Moses ambiguously would give me the option of either having her stoned, or simply divorcing her, although Matthew does praise Joseph for choosing the latter instead of the former.

We could argue that the whole "utterly perish" thing is mitigated by the fact that the general thrust of the passage is about exile, rather than destruction. Alongside that, though, we would need to consider God's praise of Phinehas for killing the man of Israel and the Midianitish woman, "that I consumed not the children of Israel in my jealousy." We would also have to consider the provision of capital punishment for idolatry, which in effect says, "Worship only me, or these people of mine will stone you to death." Again, if I stoned my wife for adultery, it would be considered a horrible crime today--probably even by Christadelphians.

I don't have a perfect answer for this objection, although I have one that satisfies me (and not, I think, folks like Evangelion, who have heard it before). Namely, God is to humans as humans are to cattle. Just as we can slaughter cattle for no better reason than we're feeling peckish and want a hamburger, so God can slaughter human cattle for any reason that suits Him. There be those who object that slaughtering cattle to make snack foods is wrong; without any attempt at moral justification whatsoever, I reply that it is in fact oh, so right.

Viewed from my perspective, then, it IS a horrible crime for humans to kill each other over jealousy. It ISN'T a horrible crime for gods (of which there happens to be only one). Humans may object to this--sorry Ken!--but so what? If cattle could talk, they would no doubt object to cheeseburgers.

Sentience is relative. Although I'm sure our ability to reason and dialogue is important to our relationship to God, nevertheless I suspect that the pleasure we offer God is very like the pleasure my cat gives me. We are much too grotesquely stupid to discourse on anything like equal terms with God. So what He gets from us can't possibly be intellectual stimulation. I'm doubtful that an intelligence that superior would find us recognizably sentient. The difference between us and a Holstein (which clearly also doesn't want to die) must seem slight indeed.

It's my general feeling that we Christadelphians avoid talking about that particular passage. I'm not sure exactly what would happen if brethren argued a similar position about it within the ecclesia.

A much milder passage is John 5:4. It reads differently than the rest of the Bible generally. Do angels really amuse themselves by splashing in a pool, healing the first sick person to struggle into the water, and presumably having a bit of a laugh at the poor disappointed losers who didn't make it? We Christadelphians believe that Lourdes is a fraud--it's one of our distinctives. In this case I've casually accepted the theory that verse 4 is a scribal gloss that leaked from the margin into the text, and not felt motivated to argue about it. I think most brethren read it without anything like the dissonance that Matthew's passage causes--and so without avoiding it, but without particularly questioning it either.

(On a hermeneutical note, I can point to other places where the writers of scripture report others' beliefs without comment. Did the scribe believe that the witch at Endor really did raise Samuel? I don't think it's clear-cut; the scribe reports the scene as Saul perceived it, without affirming or denying its veracity. It's a prime example why we should really hesitate to make an inferential case for a doctrine. That incident supplies plenty of ammunition to argue by inference that ghosts and mediums are real.)

Agreed, Fort. Nor other "victimless crimes," either.

It's a different situation, but still apropos, to note that Solomon's first judicial act was to give justice to a prostitute. It doesn't say he seized and executed her; it says he awarded her custody of her child. Would a modern court do the same? These days "undesirables" are often denied justice, have their children seized, etc. And we personally are likely to deny others just treatment because of our prejudice against the victim. TV cop shows illustrate this with the trope of cops expressing indifference when "low lifes" murder each other.

What Fort said. Some evidence suggests that Goliath's kit was much more deluxe than the average Philistine's, and Samuel supports this: if he were dressed like any other Philistine, they wouldn't describe his armor in such detail. (A later writer would probably not have described the Greek kit in detail, BTW, since he would assume all Philistines dressed like that.)

But my remarks about the "Judean Lourdes" aren't about historical debates like that. My point is that those bits read like superstition in an otherwise not superstitious book. They don't fit. Even references like demons are not done superstitiously. No girls levitating over their beds and rotating their heads 360 degrees like the Exorcist. No description of horned beasties running away from the scene after being expelled. The parable of "seven other demons" hints at a popular superstition, but in a restrained way. And this idea of an angel offering periodic healings as a lark would, apart from that one verse, read like another popular superstition. It's plausible that a marginal note explaining the superstition crept into the text, where it suddenly reads like an endorsement and not just an explanation.

I guess secular law sets us up to fail as well, seeing that most people break at least one piece of legislation at least once in their lives. It's not impossible to keep, but you'd hardly know that from our prison populations and the amount of money raked in by speeding fines.

Not the best example, since traffic law is tweaked to maximize fines. People actually are set up to fail: the law intentionally sets onerous limits not needed for safety, knowing people of good sense will break them. In some cases the law creates unsafe situations, in fact, where only a dangerous fool would comply.

"Social contract" morality--ugh. If the social contract authorizes gay sex and requires that Jews be handed over to the heimatsicherheitsdienst, would that make it moral?

Also, is it necessary to personally sign onto this "contract" in order to be bound by it? Or is it like a shrink-wrap license you "agree to" by being born and not expatriating?

I'd like to be encouraging about your project, and I hope it's very successful. As far as looking up, and commenting on, every use of the word "one" in scripture, I think it's good to remember that the Hebrews were ordinary humans, and "one" was an ordinary word to them. If you imagine what it would be like to look up every occurrence of "one" in Moby Dick, say, or War and Peace, I think you would conclude that it was a huge effort likely to bear only a very little fruit.

On your question, I know that Malachi never heard of the "Holy Trinity," had no conception of the Holy Spirit as a person, and had never in his life heard of "God the Son." So he couldn't possibly be arguing for or against any of those ideas. Just like the verse says, Malachi was saying, "We all have the same God, so we should all be true to each other and our religion."

Yep, that's my grandpap!












Just kidding; I dunno if he's any relation. But wow.

His science is incredibly garbled, but I give him full marks for not trying to blame tornadoes on teh gayz.

Sentience is relative. Although I'm sure our ability to reason and dialogue is important to our relationship to God, nevertheless I suspect that the pleasure we offer God is very like the pleasure my cat gives me. We are much too grotesquely stupid to discourse on anything like equal terms with God.

Budster, when God spoke to Moses they spoke as friends...

But not peers.

Adam had a personal relationship with God before his sins seperated him. God would not have created us in His image to be his friends and to do His will (which is our will) and wish us to think of ourselves to Him as a cat...

You underestimate cats. They make excellent friends. In any case, I understand your emotional arguments here: it seems demeaning to think of yourself as God's cat. But I was talking about intellect. Do you think you're smart as God? Or even a millionth as smart as God? That's pretty much your answer.

You cannot love an animal like another human being or like we are promised God loves us. Or what would be the point of even bothering?

I don't really understand the question, because I never thought of myself as God's intellectual equal. I'm perfectly comfortable being unimaginably stupider than God.

A Father is wiser than his son, but does not see him as a cat, that was all I was saying.

A father is of comparable intelligence to his son. He is not infinitely smarter. I have no idea precisely how God views a human, but I can say that we are MUCH dumber compared to Him, than a cat is compared to a human.

I'm really not getting why you're so worried about this. Does it really bother you that much to consider the fact that we will never impress God with our cleverness--that by His intellectual standards, we have no intellect worth speaking of? Do you have that great a need to try and convince your self that God would actually find us challenging opponents at chess, say?

Since no data is available on God's IQ, nothing can be said dogmatically, of course. I'm under the impression, from reading my Bible, that God is actually all-knowing, though. If God ever decided to have a conversation with me, or a chess game, he would know what I was going to say next, or what my next move is. There's really no scope here for God to be surprised, and intellectual stimulation depends vitally on surprise. When we already know what the other person is going to say, we're unspeakably bored.

God says He loves us, which suggests He isn't bored with us, but it's not for lack of knowing exactly what we're going to say next. My reading of scripture indicates that He appreciates our love, and our gratitude. Nothing I read suggests that He finds our conversation scintillating--and if He does, given that He knew what we were going to say a million years before we said it, He must have a very different sense of scintillation than we do. Which is of course possible, but in that case we're describing something that's foreign enough to our way of thinking that we can't really imagine what that's like.

On the whole, I think it's a compliment to say that our intellect is to God's intellect as a cat's intellect is to a man's intellect. The cat can at least surprise us, which is something we can never do for God.

To get away from cats, did you know that 99% of the population has an IQ between 61 and 139? If so, do you have any idea what it's like for someone with an IQ around 145 to have a conversation with someone with an IQ of 100, or 60? "Stimulating" is not the word for it. It may be very enjoyable, but it is not intellectually stimulating. Any enjoyment is going to come from somewhere other than the intellectual front.

Again, I have no idea what God's IQ is. I'd hazard a guess that it's higher than 145, though. Our poor little Mensa member, impressed as he may be with himself, is not going to be providing God with any intellectual stimulation. God may take pleasure in him, but it won't be for that.

Joshua must be a real problem for you. If God really commanded it, then some sort of justification is necessary, or else the conclusion would be that God did wrong.

On the other hand, I can't begin to imagine how you justify meat eating. I'm not an IQist, so I don't buy the argument that it's OK because they're stupid. If that were the standard, we could also eat babies and very stupid people.

Marcia, what do you mean "non-communicative"? Humans can talk. They just don't have anything to say that's intellectually stimulating. Imagine yourself surrounded by three year olds for 1,000 years, if you like.

Where you are former Muslim or something? Only this is just the sort of division they create in mind between man and God?

No, I'm just elitist.

I've consistently talked about INTELLECT ONLY, and it seems like that part of it is not coming through to you. Ken spoke of sentience as a reason that destroying humans is bad, while destroying cows is not bad. I remarked that by the standards of someone with an IQ of 145, someone with an IQ of 55 is no more sentient than an animal. This is something that must be experienced to be truly appreciated.

If you've experienced it, it should be obvious that a surprisingly small difference in intelligence--on the order of 30 IQ points, say--is enough to create an unbridgeable gulf. People on one side of the gulf are not only incapable of thinking the thoughts that people on the other side can; they're incapable even of imagining in their dreams what those thoughts might be like. As a result, they're probably unaware that the gulf even exists. To folks on the other side, however, it can be like belonging to a different species entirely. You're not just speaking a foreign language when you communicate across the gulf: you're forced to do like the cowboys in a racist movie from the 1950s. "You like 'em fire water? Me bring heap plenty fire water! You bring 'em buffalo hide!"

Now I don't know what I look like to a genius. Part of not being one is that I can't see the world as he sees it. But based upon considerations as above, I know he sees a different world that I can't see. So merely knowing that God is "awfully awfully smart" is enough to know that His idea of an intellectual conversation is something I can't even envision in my dreams. Whatever pleasure He gets out of me, an intellectual conversation is not one of them.

So back to Ken's question. I've seen my cat exhibit what looks like love, hate, fear, and even conscience. In its own way it wants to live, and doesn't want to die. Why is that not enough to make it wrong for me to decide whether it lives or dies? Who says its own brand of self-awareness isn't enough to make it deserving of life?

It seems remarkably self-serving, not to mention circular, to suggest that human sentience is the threshold at which murder becomes wrong. An alien race with an average IQ of 300 (on human IQ tests) would probably call us charming little animals with digital watches. They might well reason precisely as Ken does, but decide that we're below the threshold of intelligence that entitles us to our own lives. They'd probably keep us as pets, or perhaps servants. They would probably call us "self-aware, but not sentient," or perhaps, "sentient, but not intelligent." Of course yet another alien race, with an average IQ of 500 on human IQ tests, would probably call THEM charming little animals, and call us insects with digital watches...

Now I've no clue, nor do I care to guess, as to what God's IQ is. Nor, for that matter, do I claim that IQ really means anything. NOR, for that matter, do I claim that there's no upper limit to intelligence. For all I know, there's an upper limit to how intelligent any being can be, and the "300 IQ aliens" might be possible but the "500 IQ aliens" impossible.

None of that really affects my basic point. Namely, that Ken's attempt to use intelligence as a standard with which to bootstrap a prohibition against murder that at the same time justifies hamburgers, suffers from the defect that this threshold he posits is entirely arbitrary.

Not sure I can help you, Mercia. I reason with kids and stupid people all the time. I assure you it's a one-way process, in which I try to find the best way to crowbar information into their heads.

Do you actually think God is requesting a mutual exchange of ideas, in which He has a few good points and you have a few good points? Is that what you think?

Of course that's true. Nobody said any different.

Aren't you one who is at a loss to explain suffering?

Thanks, your videos explain a lot.

In a recent exhortation I got this right: I said that Mark, specifically, borrowed elements of a "heroic" narrative style for his gospel, but then (purposely) "betrayed" the readers by having the hero die a criminal's death, and then denying the readers any triumphal climax by ending on an ambiguous note with confused women at an empty tomb.

(I suggested that verses 9-20 of Mark 16 should be treated as an "afterward," and that the reader should pause after verse 8 for a bit before reading on.)