In the this and a following post I’m going to provide answers to some of the questions/comments in “Would Jesus stone a misbehaving child?” I will start here with a response to MaxVel. Let’s begin by quoting MaxVel’s comments in full: I think your attempted parallel here doesn’t work well because the original is in […]
morality
Can objective moral value exist without God? Revisiting the Question
Yesterday Kerk commented in the blog: Randal, I keep seeing well educated philosophers such as yourself claiming that on the atheist worldview objective morality is impossible or at least inscrutable. But surely you are aware that there are platonic atheists who believe that morality exists objectively on its own outside the temporal reality just like […]
On reading the Bible’s texts of terror
Over the last several years I have wrestled extensively with what Phyllis Trible memorably called the “texts of terror” in the Bible. Texts that narrate slavery, genocide, assassination, beheading, cannibalism, rape, and many other heinous acts. Some of these texts depict Yahweh commanding, commending, or himself committing violent acts. In other texts the actions are […]
Did God accommodate genocide?
In his 2008 book The God I Don’t Understand Christopher Wright makes the extraordinary suggestion that God commanded the Israelites to commit genocide against neighboring peoples as a form of accommodation to ancient near eastern standards of war. In the theaded discussion to my article “A Few Shades the Other Side of Silly” Jerry Shepherd suggested […]
On killing the dog
Walter asked for an argument against eating meat. Here it is. This is Sonny, a Lhasa-Apso cross. We adopted him several years ago from the Humane Society. Lucky for him. Things could have worked out very differently for the little guy. Imagine a different scenario in which the Humane Society is replaced with the Home […]
The Meat-Eater’s Dilemma Revisited
In “The Meat-Eater’s Dilemma” I explore the morality of people who have moral objections to the killing of animals for meat but who continue to eat meat nonetheless due to the willingness of others to kill the animals. I am one of the people that I place in this category so the dilemma is actually […]
Does Mitt Romney have the moral character to be president?
As you have probably heard, Mitt Romney made a joke yesterday during an election stop in Michigan. In the joke he noted that he and his wife Ann were both born in Michigan and that nobody had ever asked to see their birth certificates. Here’s the (24 second) clip: Of course Mitt is making a joking […]
In Defense of Smokers
The other day I was staying at a hotel with approximately four hundred rooms … and a designated outdoor smoking area the size of a moderately sized living room. As I walked briskly through this area every day while taking the dogs out for a walk I couldn’t help but marvel at the enormous social […]
Christians who are skeptics about moral perception
In “Is rape worse than sacrifice?” I critiqued Crude’s claim that moral atrocity is essentially linked to the infliction of physical and/or psychological suffering on a victim. I did so with the following scenario: “Three year old Billy is watching Sesame Street and eating Pop Tarts when his father kills him with a gunshot from […]
The Problem of the Faulty Moral Perception Faculty
Many Christians apparently believe that an act like killing and mutilating a child as a devotional act toward a deity can be morally virtuous (i.e. if God commands it, and God can command it because he has commanded it) but raping a child as a devotional act to a deity cannot (because God never would […]
What God could and couldn’t do: A conversation with Jerry Shepherd
Let’s take a look at Jerry Shepherd’s response to my article “Rape, moral perception, and biblicism.” Jerry divides his response into two points. Let’s start, reasonably enough, with the first: (1) I could pretty well sum up my response this way. For the most part, your critique of my reply misses the mark, because you […]
Do the hard sayings of Jesus constitute defeaters for his moral excellence?
In the thread of my essay “What if I stumble? Arguing against Christianity from the lives of Christians” Mike Gantt commented on the moral excellence of Jesus as follows: the moral excellence implied by his conduct, and made explicit by his teaching, were so elevated when compared to typical human behavior that even unbelievers will […]
What if I stumble? Arguing against Christianity from the lives of Christians
A few years ago I had an interesting conversation with a couple Jehovah’s Witnesses who came to my door. After a few minutes they realized I was not going to be as easy to b-p-t (biblical proof-text) into submission as the typical mark, and so they suddenly switched tactics. “Do you know,” one of them […]
Allowing is not commanding
Over the last week I have heard on at least three different occasions claims made to the moral equivalency of God allowing x and God commanding x. The argument has been made by Christians to demonstrate that if I accept that God providentially allows evils like genocide and infant sacrifice, I should have no problem […]
