Primer on avoidance mechanisms used by the ultra-Orthodox

The article on the Fludde has a fine explanation of the differences between the J and P texts and also presents each disentangled from the other. Cool.

Its an old claim that the flood accounts contradict each other. They do not! they simply add more info. its not evidence of two sources.
Well. Name your top three, or one, pieces of contradiction!
These Orthodox Jews should read evangelical etc historical commentaries on genesis. They can't be beat.
I have read about Orthodox Jews who agree genesis is the word of God and accurate. I think in Israel thjey are quite active and growing.

Two very interesting books by an Orthodox Rabbi are;

Slifkin, Rabbi Natan
2006/2008 “The Challenge of Creation: Judaism’s Encounter with Science, Cosmology and Evolution” New York: Zoo Torah and Yashar Books

Slifkin, Rabbi Natan
2007 “Sacred Monsters: Mysterious and Mythical Creatures of Scripture, Talmud and Midrash” New York: Zoo Torah and Yashar Books

Robert Byers said: Its an old claim that the flood accounts contradict each other. They do not! they simply add more info. its not evidence of two sources. Well. Name your top three, or one, pieces of contradiction! These Orthodox Jews should read evangelical etc historical commentaries on genesis. They can't be beat. I have read about Orthodox Jews who agree genesis is the word of God and accurate. I think in Israel thjey are quite active and growing.

I think I'd like to try a new troll policy: Known trolls such as Mr. Byers get 1 comment. Other commenters get 1 and only 1 response each; all subsequent responses go to the Bathroom Wall. Yes?

Yes!

SLC said: ravings of bronze age nomads.

The first seven verses of Genesis 7 are plainly an interpolation, a piece taken from another version of the story. The text repeats, in slightly different words, God's statement of his intentions, and his instructions to Noah, and the statement that Noah did as he was commanded, but has a different version of the instruction about what animals he was to take. The repetitions do not advance the narrative, and the differing instructions contradict each other. This is perfectly diagnostic: two different accounts have simply been presented together.

The last verse of Genesis 7 to the end of verse 5 of Ch 8, is also an interpolation. It gives a hundred and fifty days of flood, (calling that "nine months", which isn't true, not even on the 28 day lunar cycle) before the first land reappeared. When the text resumes at Genesis 8:6, that period is given as forty days - presumably the forty days of rain in 7:12 - plus seven or possibly fourteen before the dove came back with a sprig of olive. In the interpolation there was no need for a dove; the tops of the mountains "could be seen".

Fundamentalists attempt various contortions of the text to smooth over these obvious discrepencies. Possibly Byers will regale us with one or more of these - but since Byers has trouble remaining coherent himself, he is poorly placed to evaluate coherency in other writers. But take it to the BW, if you please.

Dave Luckett said: Fundamentalists attempt various contortions of the text to smooth over these obvious discrepencies. Possibly Byers will regale us with one or more of these - but since Byers has trouble remaining coherent himself, he is poorly placed to evaluate coherency in other writers. But take it to the BW, if you please.

Hi guys! Just passing through.

I see Matt has a new policy regarding trolls. That's fine. (I'll only need one post anyway.) None of the following should be construed as an attack.

(1) The Bathroom Wall seriously needs to get rid of that "long-running script". Not sure why PT hasn't done so already. Just wipe out those zillion pages like you did last time, and start over.

I like the BW. Good exchanges. People really putting in some effort at times. Robust fussing and fighting debate and dialogue, honestly.

But there's too many pages and it clogs things up. So, maybe clean off the BW and start again? Make it easier for some people's cheap computers like mine?

****

(2) Matt's topic is certainly interesting; one cannot be less than appreciative on that aspect.

But let's consider something. The 'new policy' effectively means that Matt's not really interested in defending his position, especially not that stuff about "I consider the Documentary Hypothesis to be so convincing that it is frankly a fact that the Bible is composed of four or more threads."

Sheesh, if that was MY position, I'd probably restrict any opposing posters just as heavily, because you and I already know that any evangelical (or any other label) with access to a few cheap textbooks (let alone the Internet) could potentially send that kind of false claim straight to the grave-yard.

I'm not saying this to bait anyone, I'm merely critiquing the 'new policy' for a minute.

This one thread topic has nothing to do with the "Theory Of Evolution" or "Defending Science Education" or "fighting the evil ID supporters." None of that stuff.

This latest thread is nothing but religion. You're openly doing a pure BIBLE topic and even plugging a non-stop BIBLE website, "TheTorah.com", for heaven's sake.

So why in the Hades would it be necessary to restrict the two PT regulars Robert and FL to exactly "one comment" against the Documentary Hypothesis as "fact" (Matt's clearly stated position), while allowing all the other PT regulars to have unlimited comments in favor of the Documentary Hypothesis as "fact"?

In other words, Why pre-empt a potentially robust religious discussion on this patently religious thread, by effectively restricting the comments only to those regulars who ~agree~ with Matt's position?

****

Well, I'll tell you why. It's certainly NOT about making sure Robert and FL stay within the official PandasThumb terms of service. There's nothing outta-line, nothing off-topic, no violations (in terms of TOS) about the one DH comment that Robert has given.

So what's the reason for the 'new policy'? Simple. It's inconvenient having to deal with or defend a claim that extensive refutations have already been offered against.

Simply stated, the DH's problems are so many and so intractable, that it has become a first-class lightning-rod for anybody anywhere who wants to do high-voltage criticism of the DH. The DH is a liability at all times.

So the new policy is not about "troll-control", but merely about protecting an inherently unsustainable position.
The End.

FL

FL, it seems like it is you and not Matt who lumped you with Byers among "known trolls." Byers is consistently incoherent and nearly always off topic. I have seen you contribute to some threads, and not just BW. I almost never agree with anything you write, but there is something closer to a two-way discussion going on. Unlike Byers, you also understand how to move threads to BW when appropriate.

Byers provokes dogpiles of critics just by trying to get out a pet peeve of his (e.g. MDs don't need to study evolution) and failing to make it to the end of a sentence (which should be one he's attempted many times before) without a serious grammatical error. He's really in a class by himself.

As for BW, I think it's fine for it to load sluggishly. It is an extra incentive to avoid posting anything at all. First, I ask myself if my comments belong on the thread (in this case, sadly no, they are meta-comments). Next, I ask myself if I still want to bother posting anything. If I really have to get it out of my system, I will wait for 1238 (and counting) tabs to load twice. If not, nobody is going to miss it.

Re "plus seven or possibly fourteen before the dove came back with a sprig of olive."

If nobody minds me asking (or even if they do), on what piece of dry land did that olive tree grow?

FL, it seems like it is you and not Matt who lumped you with Byers among “known trolls.”

The one observation I've had about biblical crit is that anyone who studies it for years in an academic setting, at the grad school level, comes away thinking the Torah was written over hundreds of years and shows the work of many hands. This includes haredi types (who remain religiously observant) through secular scholars. And, people who read popular books on the topic of biblical crit are not terribly impressed and pretty much dismiss it.... There is just no one who, after that kind of intensive immersion and extensive review of the serious scholarship seems to pop out still thinking Torah is the work of one hand and one period.

FL said: (1) The Bathroom Wall seriously needs to get rid of that "long-running script". Not sure why PT hasn't done so already. Just wipe out those zillion pages like you did last time, and start over.

But let's consider something. The 'new policy' effectively means that Matt's not really interested in defending his position, especially not that stuff about "I consider the Documentary Hypothesis to be so convincing that it is frankly a fact that the Bible is composed of four or more threads."

So why in the Hades would it be necessary to restrict the two PT regulars Robert and FL to exactly "one comment" against the Documentary Hypothesis

So the new policy is not about "troll-control", but merely about protecting an inherently unsustainable position. The End.

Matt Young said:

FL, it seems like it is you and not Matt who lumped you with Byers among “known trolls.”

Yes, indeed. I admit that Mr. FL sometimes engages in trollish behavior, but I would welcome a robust discussion of why the Documentary Hypothesis fails. I object when the discussion becomes incoherent or repetitive.

I would welcome a robust discussion of why the Documentary Hypothesis fails...

In Mark 10:4—8 he (Jesus) quotes Gen 2:24, which would be a J source, in Mark 7:10 he quotes the Ten Commandments which would be an E source, in Mark 10:3 he refers to Deut 24:1 which would be a D, and in Matt 8:4 he quotes Lev 14 which would be a P source. All of these he (Jesus) attributes to Mosaic authorship. If Jesus’ authority is established, then his say on these matters would hold quite some weight. --Christian apologist Thaddeus Maharaj, "Apologetics: In Response to the Documentary Hypothesis, 7-12-2014, "Liberating Lions" website.

This article is about Prof. Schimmel’s 8 posited avoidance mechanisms and related stuff (maybe like: why do they need avoidance mechanisms at all?).

What defense mechanisms do the Orthodox employ to counter the powerful evidence and arguments against Torah-Mi-Sinai [the doctrine that the Torah was dictated by God to Moses at Mount Sinai]? I think there are several at work.

Simply stated, the DH’s problems are so many and so intractable, that it has become a first-class lightning-rod for anybody anywhere who wants to do high-voltage criticism of the DH. The DH is a liability at all times.

FL said: Eric says,

This article is about Prof. Schimmel’s 8 posited avoidance mechanisms and related stuff (maybe like: why do they need avoidance mechanisms at all?).

Yes it is; I don't deny that. But the fact is that Matt cited and discussed TWO articles in his OP, and Schimmel's is but the second one. The first one, which is a longer version of an argument that Matt clearly said he himself has put forth in this very forum (and provided the link to prove it!), is the basis for his OP summary statement, which I am challenging. So that summary statement is fair game for this thread. Not the BW, but the thread in which the statement appears. THIS thread, Eric. Remember, Matt quoted Schimmel saying:

What defense mechanisms do the Orthodox employ to counter the powerful evidence and arguments against Torah-Mi-Sinai [the doctrine that the Torah was dictated by God to Moses at Mount Sinai]? I think there are several at work.

I highlighted the relevant phrase there. It's very clear from Matt's discussion of the first article, and of his summary statement, that Matt regards the DH as part of that highlighted phrase. Matt even said out loud that his summary statement "leads to" the Schimmel article. Which it does, of course. So might as well discuss the DH and Matt's claim that the DH is "fact" right here and now. FL

Those silly rabbis learning all those complicated languages and spending years studying the Torah.

All they really needed to do was listen to FL make up some crap, and completely accept whatever he says uncritically. Just like everybody else. According to FL.

Let us not discuss the shape of the table. The Documentary Hypothesis is fair game. Saying, however, that the hypothesis is wrong because a first-century Jewish preacher said so, is Professor Schimmel's Avoidance Mechanism 6 (my numbering). So let me ask Mr. FL (and anyone who thinks as he does) this: Suppose that you wanted to convince a friend that the DH is false. You know that you will never convince him using the argument from authority, so you have to use sound arguments based on science, or textual analysis, or archeology, or whatever. What do you say? Specifically, why do the verses that say "two of a kind" not conflict with those that say "seven of a kind"?

I consider the Documentary Hypothesis to be so convincing that it is frankly a fact that the Bible is composed of four or more threads.

Not sure I understand -- I extended the DH? Because I said 4 or more? OK. Leave it at 4. The point is that I would like to hear cogent arguments against it, and none of those arguments may fit into any of the Avoidance Mechanisms above.

FL said: My own belief system is biblical Christianity.

Matt Young said: Suppose that you wanted to convince a friend that the DH is false. You know that you will never convince him using the argument from authority, so you have to use sound arguments based on science, or textual analysis, or archeology, or whatever. What do you say? Specifically, why do the verses that say "two of a kind" not conflict with those that say "seven of a kind"?

FL said: [ emphasis added ] I’m just saying that we are ultimately examining the DH issue using different sunglasses. We all have our own sunglasses and just need to be aware of them.) As a Christian I do trust and follow the authority and total-reliability of Christ when He says Moses wrote the Torah. I do not ignore the fact that people have differing belief-systems, and I don’t ask Matt to change his mind about the DH just because of what Jesus said. But I do let people know that trusting the authority and reliability of Jesus Christ, really DOES rationally imply an automatic opposition to the DH. The DH (also called the JEDP theory) will never be compatible with the words of Jesus.

Matt Young said: Not sure I understand -- I extended the DH? Because I said 4 or more? OK. Leave it at 4. The point is that I would like to hear cogent arguments against it, and none of those arguments may fit into any of the Avoidance Mechanisms above.

My original intent, clicking over from the blog reader, was to comment that you wrote a fine post.

I would suggest that the first step towards an enlightening debate is a definition of terms. What, precisely, is meant by the term "Documentary Hypothesis"? Of what terms does it necessarily consist? What further terms or specifications could also be included, and can these be discussed separately?

If I may propose one definition, which I am happy to discard or modify: The Documentary Hypothesis is that specifically the Pentateuch, also called "Torah" in a restricted sense, that is, the books of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy, were assembled and redacted from earlier texts, reaching their final form by about 300 BCE, well after the Babylonian exile. At least some of these earlier texts originated centuries before this assembly and redaction, maybe some of them as far back as a thousand years BCE, but over a range of six or seven hundred years. They were the products of various hands, which can to some extent be discerned in the final product, as the redactors were clearly interested in preserving the ancient writings, without necessarily concerning themselves with detail consistency.

Attempts have been made to attach labels to these originating hands, and this leads to attempts to date and originate the contributions. Once this level of detail is approached, the evidence becomes progressively more and more slight, and the hypothesis more and more speculative. The basic hypothesis, however, is pretty unassailable on the evidence: the Pentateuch is the product of at least three, probably four, basic sources plus other fragments, with various origins, redacted and assembled later. This evidence consists of "doublets"; (ie, passages that repeat or give varying versions of material) abrupt changes in vocabulary; imperfect removal of earlier and remnant concepts, esp. of monolatry or even polytheism; strongly varying concerns and approaches; and the fact that we are told of one such source at 2 Kings 22:8 ff. This source is certainly not the whole of the Pentateuch; it may be the central portion of Deuteronomy. The archeological evidence is extremely slight, but a single silver phylactery scroll - a coil of beaten silver with a form of the Aaronic Blessing on it - has been found and can be dated from other material found with it and its script to the eighth or maybe ninth century BCE.

To answer FL: Jesus referred to the law of Moses. I refer to Finagle's Law ("The perversity of the Universe always increases") knowing perfectly well that Finagle is a fictional character. For that matter, I refer to a person having the courage of Roland, or the nobility of Arthur, or the wit of the devil, without believing for a moment that any of them are real. If Jesus were in fact what Christians say he was, then he is owed the deference of taking his words as exactly what he said, AND NO MORE. He did not say, Moses wrote the Pentateuch. He did not say, the Pentateuch originates from one source at one time. It is improper and disrespectful to put those words in his mouth.

But if he is as non-Christians commonly take him to be, then it is bootless claiming special authority for him. He was, variously, a largely fictional character himself, or a Galilean nabi who was a very important moral teacher, who may also have been a rebel against Rome. In that case, he knew no more than any good Jew of the time - and the Pentateuch was commonly, by then, thought to be the words of Moses.

But that is oral tradition, known not to originate at the time of writing the material itself, for it makes no such claim. It is therefore no more to be relied on than any other legend. No serious historian writes treatises on the land-use systems in Camelot, or the trading links of Atlantis, or the polity of Cibola. To write of the law of Moses as if Moses were something other than a legend is the same.

Oh, legend. Legends often have real roots. There may have been a subroman-briton war leader who was successful for a time against invading Saxons. But they are always, invariably, bulked up with invention. There was no Camelot, no Excalibur, no Grail. There might have been a Hebrew leader of stature who laid down some laws and took steps towards monotheism, but there was no exodus, no Sinai, no whole-cloth creation of the whole Law by one man at God's dictation, and the whole structure of the Pentateuch itself denies that idea.

Dave Luckett said: I would suggest that the first step...

While Floyd is polishing his sunglasses, we should note that neither of the genesis flood myths are compatible with reality. Therefore, it is irrelevant that they are incompatible with each other. That is simply because they are both myths. Floyd just cannot seem to learn this simple lesson. His appeal is always to authority, never to reality. That's why he always loses. That's why none of his responses are rational. That's why he is labelled a troll. That's why he should be banned to the bathroom wall at the very least. He has nothing whatsoever to add to the discussion. For him, Jesus says it, he believes it and that's that. Reality has no place in his little world.

DS said: For [FL], Jesus says it, he believes it and that's that.

So why did Moses give two different versions of something that never happened and is impossible, even theoretically? Didn't he remember what he wrote? Who cares! It never happened in the first place. Making up contradictory stories about exactly how it supposedly happened is not going to convince anyone. You need to at least get your own story straight. You would think that Floyd would be anxious to explain how different people wrote this stuff in order to explain the contradictions. Guess not.

Let us not discuss the shape of the table. The Documentary Hypothesis is fair game.

The point is that I would like to hear cogent arguments against it, and none of those arguments may fit into any of the Avoidance Mechanisms above.

In Mark 10:4—8 he (Jesus) quotes Gen 2:24, which would be a J source, in Mark 7:10 he quotes the Ten Commandments which would be an E source, in Mark 10:3 he refers to Deut 24:1 which would be a D, and in Matt 8:4 he quotes Lev 14 which would be a P source. All of these he (Jesus) attributes to Mosaic authorship. If Jesus’ authority is established, then his say on these matters would hold quite some weight. –Christian apologist Thaddeus Maharaj, “Apologetics: In Response to the Documentary Hypothesis", 7-12-2014, from the Liberating Lions website.

Those silly rabbis learning all those complicated languages and spending years studying the Torah.

"The Torah that we have today is the one dictated to Moses by God." -- the 8th Principle of "the 13 Principle of Faith" given by Maimonides

So Floyd agrees that arguments should not fit into any of the six categories, then repeats his blatant attempt to display category 6 once again! His justification for this, some people wear the same sunglasses that he does, opaque to reality. I call bullshit. Ban the troll to the bathroom wall permanently. That way you don't have to put up with this bullshit every time.

If anyone, anywhere, ever wrote anything that FL agrees with then he wins. And he tells you so. (yawn)

Mosaic authorship is a tradition. It's a belief. It's wrong. The Pentateuch shows the plain marks of multiple texts being combined and redacted. It isn't the product of one author. It didn't arise at one time and place.

But is Mosaic authorship a falsehood,as FL puts it?

Not quite. It's a piece of legend, and from the nature of legend, a fiction. People believed it. The fact that people believed it is not an argument for it being factual. Maimonides, the traditional Jewish position, the authors of the Talmud - they had only the text, not access to other evidence that we lack now. All were reporting only what they'd heard, but what they'd heard were Chinese whispers. They credited them; but they credited legend.

Is it a falsehood to credit legend? No. It's merely an error.

FL said: Hence the battle at hand. These two competitors on the table, the Documentary Hypothesis and the Mosaic Authorship, cannot both be true at the same time. One of them is necessarily a falsehood. FL

While everyone is having the usual argument with the usual people, let me raise another issue. Matt highlights Modern Orthodox views on biblical literalism. One frequently also hears that Orthodox Judaism is generally willing to accommodate evolution into their worldview, unlike conservative Protestant evangelicals. The Wikipedia page on Jewish views on evolution gives much the same impression, though citing some Orthodox sects that oppose evolution.

Actually, I think that the situation is way more dire than this. I have seen Orthodox rabbis from the local Kollel, who were hanging around a local Sephardic Sunday School trying to get followers, argue that evolution didn't happen. Their arguments were straight off right-wing Christian web sites -- no "distinctive Jewish perspective" there at all. Like right-wing Muslims, most "black-hat" Jewish sects are recycling the anti-evolution material of the Christian Religious Right. A friend of ours who attends a Conservative synagogue has a daughter who married an American who was in a black-hat sect and who moved to Israel. The friend constantly finds himself getting into arguments about evolution with his son-in-law, and the son-in-law's views are straight off the web sites of the U.S. religious right.

At least one Orthodox Rabbi, Natan Slifkin "the Zoo rabbi", who wrote books accepting of evolution, had them proscribed by a group of Orthodox rabbis. This caused an uproar within Orthodox Judaism, but my guess is that the black-hat groups will continue to line up against him. The Wikipedia page cites stories of some orthodox rabbis who were "furious" at his banning, but they didn't speak out about it. A previous generation of Orthodox rabbis may have accommodated evolution, but as among Christians, it is becoming a defining issue.

More liberal Jewish denominations are generally accepting of evolution, and very suspicious of, and hostile to, pressure by the religious right to insert religion into government. This is even true of Conservative Judaism, whose congregants are mostly liberal. Jewish Americans show about a 75% acceptance of evolution, behind Hindus and Buddhists but ahead of most other religious categories. But this number is headed downwards owing to the high birthrate in black-hat groups and their proselytization among other Jews.

Basically there is no reason for smugness about this in the Jewish community. In Israel the issues are similar. There is powerful black-hat pressure on the government not to teach evolution and not to make their students learn about it. The Israeli government has actually approved more teaching of evolution in its schools, though not in religious schools. There are fine evolutionary biology groups in major Israeli universities. But with ever-increasing pressure from black-hat groups, we may expect a continued crisis over this.

Speaking of "avoidance mechanisms", there may be one or two posters around here who wish to avoid any serious rational dialogue concerning the fact or falsity of the Documentary Hypothesis.

Statements like "Ban the troll to the Bathroom Wall permanently," tend to be a dead giveaway. (An "avoidance mechanism", as it were.)

Meanwhile, since none of us here are PhD's in Biblical Hebrew or PhD's in Judaic Studies, we're all probably going to be attempting to support our various DH posts and arguments (pro or con) by at least citing and/or quoting various authorities, here and there.

But citing or quoting an authority, is NOT automatically resorting to an "avoidance mechanism."

That sort of thing needs to be proven on a case-by-case basis, not just automatically assumed merely because it appears on some authority's laundry list of avoidance mechanisms.

For as Matt Young wrote: "Argument from authority, I suppose, but authorities at least know what they are talking about."

****

By the way, I sincerely expect that, in the course of this discussion, all of us might occasionally say things that, (even if inadvertently), will reveal something about the beliefs/assumptions/presuppositions we're subscribing to -- in other words, reveal those sunglasses I mentioned earlier.

How do I know this? Because everybody has done it previously, on virtually every PT thread dealing with a religious topic. You know this as well.

So I'm just pointing things out. Yes I agree, let's all be aware of "Schimmel's list", but let's NOT get all fanatical about that list, eh?

FL

FL said: So how is it that for centuries on end, most of those studious Jewish rabbis firmly held that one person, MOSES, was the author of the Torah?

Why does the Talmud, a central text of Rabbinic Judaism, claim that MOSES wrote all of the Torah except the last eight verses of Deuteronomy?

And what do you make of *this* statement?

"The Torah that we have today is the one dictated to Moses by God." -- the 8th Principle of "the 13 Principle of Faith" given by Maimonides

Let's be honest folks: This whole DH mess is but a Johnny-Come-Lately in historical terms, you know.

So typical of a creationist to claim that there are only two possibilities - so he can claim that if the evidence doesn't support x then it automatically supports y. Total Nonsense. 1000s of possibilities exist; an oral tradition converted to written language - bound to be different versions. Just remember there are 4 Gospels, not 1.

Dear FL

Since your are a Biblical literalist who claims to be open to rational discussion, I would very much like to ask you a question. How do you reconcile your belief that the Bible is the Word of God with Deuteronomy 22 verses 13:21 which require that a non-virginal bride be stoned to death at the door of her father's house? And if that passage is not God's Word but an interpolation by some angry scribe, how can we tell which parts of the Bible are from God and which are not? You like to talk about Biblical sunglasses, I would like to know how they, or anything, helps with such questions?

FL said: Yes I agree, let's all be aware of "Schimmel's list", but let's NOT get all fanatical about that list, eh?

I think there is a 2nd component to FL's argument that we are missing - it is cyclical- a snake eating its own tail
he presupposes that the Bible is inerrant (his sunglasses)
when the question is about a property of the Bible - his 'evidence' is to quote the Bible (that he presupposes to be inerrant)
to paraphrase

question about "x":
answer: Jesus said "y" about "x" in this chapter/verse of the Bible - therefore "y" is "true" about "x"

it's like trying to determine if someone is lying - and the only 'evidence' you allow is asking him "are you a liar?"
regardless of how the potential liar answers you have learned nothing (how do you verify?)

Argument? What argument? FL hasn't presented an argument yet, though I believe he has promised he will at some point. All these long-winded posts are just preparatory trash-talk.

FL said: If you are within those two specific groups, the following is VERY important to you when you are studying the DH. This is a standing, unrefuted argument against the DH -- for you.

In Mark 10:4—8 he (Jesus) quotes Gen 2:24, which would be a J source, in Mark 7:10 he quotes the Ten Commandments which would be an E source, in Mark 10:3 he refers to Deut 24:1 which would be a D, and in Matt 8:4 he quotes Lev 14 which would be a P source. All of these he (Jesus) attributes to Mosaic authorship. If Jesus’ authority is established, then his say on these matters would hold quite some weight. –Christian apologist Thaddeus Maharaj, “Apologetics: In Response to the Documentary Hypothesis", 7-12-2014, from the Liberating Lions website.

**** Okay. Now from there, we can start looking at some other, more general "DH is not a fact" arguments from several sources. FL

If anybody is wondering why there are increasing numbers of people declaring no affiliation with religion, look no farther than the behaviors of FL and all the other self-righteous sectarians attempting to impose their pompous illiteracy and ignorance onto society.

Christians and Christianity are NOT under siege, as claimed by sectarian, political demagogues like Mike Huckabee; people are simply revolted by and fed up with the ignorance, idiocy and vile bigotry they see in the fundamentalists of this country and around the world.

So not only has Floyd failed to present an argument, but when he does, if he ever actually does, it will no doubt be a cheap cut and paste job from some bogus religious site. But let's not be fanatical about it. Oh no, that would never do, to be as fanatical as Floyd. Let's give the clown enough rope to hang himself. Meanwhile his sunglasses have blinded him to all of reality, so that gives him an excuse for him pompous posturing, I guess.

Both myths are wrong, just plain fabrications about things that never happened. And the fact that they are incompatible with each other only reinforces the conclusion. So, if indeed they were written by only one person, more is the pity. It just removes one more excuse for the inconsistencies.

John Harshman said: Argument? What argument? FL hasn't presented an argument yet, though I believe he has promised he will at some point. All these long-winded posts are just preparatory trash-talk.

TIme for the bathroom wall booby. Floyd is next.

Robert Byers said: 75%!! I would of thought 97.5%! why do the 25% disagree. It couldn't be these black hats, never heard that term before, . Oppopsition to evolution comes from biblical foundations, possibly some bassic god made man foundations, and then a gerneral sharpness amongst the Yankee and southern peoples in the nation with a historical skepticism about ideas not proven with hard facts. urban immigrants since the 1900/s easily would agree with evolution as they agree with anything seeming to be from authority. Hmmm. 25 % seems high. Could be in the questions.

Mike Elzinga said: If anybody is wondering why there are increasing numbers of people declaring no affiliation with religion, look no farther than the behaviors of FL and all the other self-righteous sectarians attempting to impose their pompous illiteracy and ignorance onto society. Christians and Christianity are NOT under siege, as claimed by sectarian, political demagogues like Mike Huckabee; people are simply revolted by and fed up with the ignorance, idiocy and vile bigotry they see in the fundamentalists of this country and around the world.

eric said: Oh my gosh, you mean it only makes sense if we assume humans learn things they didn't used to know? Matt, add another coping mechanism: 9. "Golden Age" or "Ancient knowledge" thinking. Presume age confers credibility on a claim, that knowledge of the world has actually decreased over time rather than improving, and that ancient people were privy to secrets we can only guess at. There must be something to chi and acupuncture, those ideas are 5,000 years old!

FL said: at comment 340867 But citing or quoting an authority, is NOT automatically resorting to an “avoidance mechanism.” That sort of thing needs to be proven on a case-by-case basis, not just automatically assumed merely because it appears on some authority's laundry list of avoidance mechanisms.

FL said: at comment 340831 But I do let people know that trusting the authority and reliability of Jesus Christ, really DOES rationally imply an automatic opposition to the DH.

Good morning twinkle toes! It's time to get started again, whether you like it or not. Time to take off your sun glasses and see the light.

The crap written in the bible is not original. It was copied from more ancient flood myths. And those myths do not refer to a world wide flood, it was probably a local flood that only affected most of the then known world. So, even if Moses did supposedly write all that self contradictory nonsense, he plagarized it. And anyway, Moses wasn't there, so how could he possibly know? See Floyd, the whole thing is just one big fairy tale. You haven't got any evidence at all, not one scrap. That's why you rely entirely on the avoidance mechanisms, same as you do when denying the reality of evolution. You're a one trick pony and the trick is getting pretty old. Everyone is wise to your crap Floyd.

"The climate and weather referred to in Exodus are typically Egyptian, not Palestinian (cf. the reference to crop sequence in connection with the plague of hail, Ex. 9:31-32.)" (p.46)

"The trees and animals referred to in Exodus through Deuteronomy are all indigenous to Egypt or the Sinai Peninsula, but none of them are peculiar to Palestine." (p.46)

"(Moses) states that the Jordan Valley "was like 'the land of Egypt, as you go towards Zoar' (Egyp. 'T-;-r'.) "Nothing could be plainer from this casual reference than that the author was writing for a readership unfamiliar with the appearance of regions in Palestine but personally acquainted with the scenery of Lower Egypt. "Such could only have grown up in Egypt, and this fits in only with a Mosaic date of composition for the Book of Genesis." (p.47)

"Suffice it to say that a far greater number of Egyptian names and loan-words are found in the Pentateuch than in any other section of Scripture." (p. 48)

The unraveling of JEDP is found primarily in the discovery of artificial literary structures in the text of the Pentateuch which demonstrate that the text is overwhelmingly the work of a single author. The purpose of such structures, in the context of the biblical world, was to make the stories easier to remember: typically, ninety to ninety-five percent of people in the ancient world were illiterate, so information had to be transmitted orally, and for the average person, it was necessary to make a story easy to remember by telling it in familiar and memorable patterns—often requiring the elimination, streamlining, or summarization of details that members of a literate, writing-based society would typically include. The JEDP theory was composed under the premise of a graphocentric (a prejudice in favour of writing) view, and thus the artifacts of oral transmission were either completely unknown or were misread as signals of ‘inefficient and careless’ literary practice (p. 40). Phelan notes several examples of artificial literary structures in the Pentateuch called chiasmus. A chiasmus is defined by the Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms as, ‘a figure of speech by which the order of the terms in the first of two parallel clauses is reversed in the second’. A short, non-biblical example of a chiasmus would be the saying of Winston Churchill, "Some men change their party for the sake of their principles; others their principles for the sake of their party." ... A short and very good biblical example comes from Genesis 9:6, which laid out in a chiastic pattern looks like this: A Whoever sheds B the blood C of man C’ by man shall B’ his blood A’ be shed One of the largest chiasms in Scripture, M.W.P. Phelan notes (p. 114) occurs between Genesis 6:1–9:19, the account of the Flood: A - Noah and his family: the only righteous people on earth (6:9–10) B - God promises to destroy the earth and its inhabitants by a global Flood (6:11–22) C - God instructs Noah, his family and the animals to enter the Ark (7:1–10) D - The floodwaters come upon the earth (7:11–16) E - The floodwaters rise and cover the earth (7:17–24) F - God remembers Noah (8:1a) E' - The floodwaters recede from the earth (8:1b–5) D' - The floodwaters disappear and the earth is dry (8:6–14) C' - God instructs Noah, his family and the animals to leave the Ark and fill the earth (8:15–9:7) B' - God promises to never again destroy the earth and its inhabitants by a global flood (9:8–17) A' - Noah and his family: the only people on earth (9:18–19) While Documentary Hypothesists chop and dice this story into portions as small as alternating half—verses, dividing it between the J and P authors, the chiastic structure points to a single author. http://creation.com/debunking-the-documentary-hypothesis

Told you he would try a cheap cut and paste of someone else's nonsense.

By the way, claiming that "no one is trying to use the bible to prove the bible" and then presenting "biblical evidence" is the height of hypocrisy. You still can't even come close to understanding the concept of evidence can you?

So, according to the cut and paste, some of the crap might have been written by someone who might have been in Egypt for a while at some time. Right. That absolutely, positively proves that it had to be Moses who wrote all of it in its entirety.. Right. Nice "argument". Keep it up.

So there you go, it doesn't matter who made up all the crap about things that never happened. Never did, never will. It's all fairy tales start to finish with absolutely no evidence of any kind to support it.

I am sure I would turn first to JP Holding to learn just about anything....
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/J._P._Holding

Btw, nobody’s trying to “use the Bible to prove the Bible.”

The specific claim of Moses authoring the Torah is also totally supported by the Hebrew Bible

Now according to the Bible (Acts 7:22),

Good afternoon. Still no evidence from Floyd. Still no real argument. Just some cheap cut and paste jobs, unintelligently designed to infuriate the rational. Just more using the bible to prove the bible because of the bible and what it says in the bible.

And of course the crap he cut and pasted is complete bullshit as well. It does absolutely nothing to address any of the contradictions in the text. It also is not evidence of a single writer, at the most it might be evidence of a single compiler. But then again, what can you expect from someone who is bound and determined to display each and every one of the avoidance mechanisms and then claim victory? But why be so fanatical as to point that out?

I think I've already demonstrated, (using clear textual evidence and citations),

that the specific question at hand, (Was it Moses who wrote the Torah, or was it the DH guys who wrote the Torah?), is totally independent of the issue of whether one believes the Torah to be fiction or fact.

So is it possible for DS to specifically reply in detail to that one issue? Hmm?

Give it a try, DS. Try to address that one issue coherently, using some sort -- any sort -- of rational or textual **evidence**.

If you can.

FL

FL said: I think I've already demonstrated, (using clear textual evidence and citations), that the specific question at hand, (Was it Moses who wrote the Torah, or was it the DH guys who wrote the Torah?), is totally independent of the issue of whether one believes the Torah to be fiction or fact. So is it possible for DS to specifically reply in detail to that one issue? Hmm? Give it a try, DS. Try to address that one issue coherently, using some sort -- any sort -- of rational or textual **evidence**. If you can.

It seems that the classic ploy of the ID/creationists is to copy/paste material that they haven’t read and couldn't comprehend if their lives depended on it. It is this pattern of bending and breaking concepts to fit dogma that makes them so profoundly illiterate and ignorant while being proud of the state that they are in.

Arguing with these idiots always plunges one into a labyrinth of nested arguments about words and the meanings of the meanings of the meanings, who said what, and what was said. The arguments over trivia can go on for years.

I am sure that everyone here is familiar with Uncommon Descent where the denizens there hone this process endlessly while accusing their enemies - of which they have many - of engaging in exactly the same behaviors that they, the ID/creationists themselves, have practiced their entire lives.

The sad result of extended engagement with ID/creationists is that many, without realizing it, start arguing just as ID/creationists do; citing abstracts of papers they haven't read and can't comprehend, and repeatedly coming back over and over to reengage with the idiocy they claim to find so repulsive. The Skeptical Zone has fallen into this pattern; and it reflects pretty much of the same mentality prevalent at UD. The people at TSZ constantly pine for engagement with UD and take umbrage at being banned from UD. Their engagements have turn into a symbiosis of obsessive/compulsive arguments that degenerate repeatedly into mind-numbing trivia about mind-numbing trivia.

Our FL troll uses the same ploys to suck people into engaging him; outrageous assertions, stupid citations, and blatant falsehoods presented with a pompous air of "authority" that pisses people off.

These fundamentalist don't care about a proper education, or science, or what is true; they want all attention focused on themselves. They all have god complexes; and they all believe they are morally superior to everyone else because they have their holy book.

First you need to demonstrate that Moses was real, and not just a legend.

Typo correction: The phrase should read, "every single Jewish person mentioned in the Bible after God power-slammed Pharoah"

FL said: I think I've already demonstrated, (using clear textual evidence and citations), that the specific question at hand, (Was it Moses who wrote the Torah, or was it the DH guys who wrote the Torah?), is totally independent of the issue of whether one believes the Torah to be fiction or fact.

How did Moses write the part about his own death?

FL said:

First you need to demonstrate that Moses was real, and not just a legend.

Not at all, Phhht. (good to see you again, btw.) You've got a ton of Bible writers -- in fact, literally ALL of them, plus every single Jewish person mentioned in the Bible) and a ton of millenia-strong Jewish rabbis who, even down to this present day, at least agree that Moses existed.

W. H. Heydt said: Therefore, if you wish to contend that Moses wrote the Torah, you have to show evidence of Moses' existence from sources outside the Bible and in a time period no later than the original composition of some of the source materials that were compiled to make the Torah as it is now known. That would, presumably, require *Egyptian* sources for his existence.

It seems that the classic ploy of the ID/creationists is to copy/paste material that they haven’t read

CJColucci said: How did Moses write the part about his own death?

FL said:

First you need to demonstrate that Moses was real, and not just a legend.

Actually.…NO. If the Torah is fiction, then Moses, as a character within that fiction is fictional as well.

FL said: So, you know, please feel free to actually address the evidence offered to you.... FL

May I suggest, first, that everyone watch The Bible's Buried Secrets, as Mr. English has suggested? When doing so, (a) try not to assume that every word in the Torah is true, and (b) try not to assume that every word in the Torah is false.

Additionally, I have to agree with Mr. FL that we all wear glasses, though I would not necessarily call them sunglasses. FL's glasses have a very limited field of view, and it seems as though they are stuck in one place; FL cannot even conceive that the Bible contains fictions or myths. A couple of others have glasses that, while less distorting than FL's, have equally limited fields of view; they cannot even conceive that parts of the Bible may be based on things that really happened (whether or not Moses and God are fictitious). Unfortunately, FL's and their fields of view do not overlap, so they cannot communicate.

The scholars in the video (mostly) have a wider field of view and use both textual and archeological evidence to come to some interesting conclusions. Most pertinently to the present discussion: Some people or tribe may have brought the worship of the god YHW (who became YHWH) to Canaan while on the way from Egypt. Importantly, that claim is independent of any religious or theological claim; it may be true whether or not YHW or YHWH is real.

In short, those whose glasses have the widest field of view evaluate the evidence, whether it is textual or archeological, and try to deduce what happened and when. They try not to let their religious beliefs or their lack of religious belief influence their conclusions, as I am afraid some people on this thread may be doing.

FL said: I think I've already demonstrated, (using clear textual evidence and citations), that the specific question at hand, (Was it Moses who wrote the Torah, or was it the DH guys who wrote the Torah?), is totally independent of the issue of whether one believes the Torah to be fiction or fact. So is it possible for DS to specifically reply in detail to that one issue? Hmm? Give it a try, DS. Try to address that one issue coherently, using some sort -- any sort -- of rational or textual **evidence**. If you can. FL

FL said:

CJColucci said: How did Moses write the part about his own death?

He didn't. That's why the Jewish Talmud does NOT ascribe the final eight verses of Deuteronomy to Moses. It merely ascribes all the REST of the five-book Torah to Moses. It's okay if you and I do the same thing. FL

FL said: WH Heydt says,

Actually.…NO. If the Torah is fiction, then Moses, as a character within that fiction is fictional as well.

That's like saying that if the story of "George Washington and the cherry tree" is nothing but fiction, then George Washington himself, (as a character within that fictional story), must be fictional as well. FL

Yes, he did. This Jewish tradition has been handed down for over 3,300 years by the entire Jewish nation, and accepted by Christians and Muslims as well. Moses is mentioned many times in the Torah and Rabbinic literature. He is also mentioned by ancient non-Jewish writers going back over 2,300 years, including Hecataeus, Strabo, Alexander Polyhistor, Manetho, Apion, Chaeremon, Tacitus, and Porphyry. Non-religious ancient Jewish sources mention him too, such as Artapanus, Eupolemus, Josephus and Philo.

"I doubt that the miracles attributed to him ever took place. I don't think he led three million Israelites out of Egypt in an exodus across the Sinai. I don't think he was the founder of Israelite religion, but I think there was a Moses." -- William Dever, a professor of archaeology from Lycoming College, speaking to ABC News, Dec 28, 2012, "Did the Exodus of Moses and His People Happen?"

Footnotes:

(1) The most recent post is primarily meant for Heydt and Phhht; it was not primarily directed at CJColucci (but Colucci is very welcome to respond to it or other posts as well.)

(2) I will also try to take a peek at "The Bible's Buried Secrets", while checking out the NBA Playoffs.

FL

You have been told repeatedly that the bible is not evidence.

...ancient writers from OUTSIDE of the religion of Christianity, even writers hostile to Him, at least affirmed or wrote that He existed.

FL said: WH Heydt says,

Actually.…NO. If the Torah is fiction, then Moses, as a character within that fiction is fictional as well.

That's like saying that if the story of "George Washington and the cherry tree" is nothing but fiction, then George Washington himself, (as a character within that fictional story), must be fictional as well.

There are other considerations besides "oral traditions" that play into "biblical truth." We already know about the tendency of humans to embellish stories in order to make them memorable, or to "reinforce" them with other stories to make them seem true. Religious leaders and sectarians continue to do this to this very day; and we can all observe the process going on even within our own lifetimes. We know the socio/political reasons behind the process.

But there is also abundant physical evidence that events like a worldwide flood didn't happen. Nor are the stories of the creation of the "Heavens and the Earth" consistent with external evidence. These inconsistencies - along with our knowledge of human history - comport with the notion that books like the Christian bible are conscious compilations of oral traditions put together to create a narrative that achieves some desired set of social and political objectives.

The very fact that fundamentalists continue to distort science in order to "prove" these stories are true at least suggests that they have some subliminal awareness of what "external evidence" means; and they are clearly afraid of such evidence.

I think it is safer to assume that humans will lie, cheat, steal, and engage in self-deception in order to preserve positions of power and authority, and that they will continue to oppose anyone who discovers that there are more objective ways of getting at what really happens in the world. Otherwise, why would such deceivers and self-deceivers be so aggressive at preventing objective evidence from being known?

Despite their claims that they love science, ID/creationists are so terrified of science and the processes of scientific investigation that they have to continuously and systematically distort these to fit their sectarian beliefs. "Objective evidence" becomes only what somebody else said or wrote that can be quote-mined in a way that agrees with those beliefs.

FL said: You know, there's something else to consider. (Well, if you're rational.) If you're going to say, "Prove Moses existed", then let me ask you this. "Who's got the burden of proof here?" But that's an easy question to answer, isn't it? YOU do, if you deny that Moses at least existed historically. American Jewish Rabbi Dan Galilee, on YahooAnswers, directly answered the question "Did Moses Exist" thusly:

Yes, he did. This Jewish tradition has been handed down for over 3,300 years by the entire Jewish nation, and accepted by Christians and Muslims as well. Moses is mentioned many times in the Torah and Rabbinic literature. He is also mentioned by ancient non-Jewish writers going back over 2,300 years, including Hecataeus, Strabo, Alexander Polyhistor, Manetho, Apion, Chaeremon, Tacitus, and Porphyry. Non-religious ancient Jewish sources mention him too, such as Artapanus, Eupolemus, Josephus and Philo.

He's right, of course. I have highlighted the last two paragraphs because in the OT university classes that I've taken, it makes a ton of difference with the professional PhD religion scholars when a gang of ancient writers from *OUTSIDE* the given religious tradition start saying somebody existed, (in addition to a consistent and widespread affirmation by ancient folks on the *inside* of the given religious tradition). For example, the reason why you skeptics can't ever get any traction with the PhD religion scholars when you say falsehoods like "Jesus never existed historically," is because ancient writers from OUTSIDE of the religion of Christianity, even writers hostile to Him, at least affirmed or wrote that He existed. Such affirmations add up and pile on with the "inside the tradition" historical testimonies, and together they tip the scale. The burden of proof thus shifts to the guy who denies Jesus exists. PhD Religion scholars, even the super-liberal ones like the Jesus Seminar, simply do NOT blow off that one aspect. **** Well, that same phenomenon is going on with Moses as well. In fact, you got some seriously visible ancient writers (sources) who are NOT Jewish, but who are at least affirming that Moses at least existed. That "outside the box" ancient stuff, adds up and piles on to the tons and tons of Hebrew Bible and Talmud and other Jewish affirmations of Moses' existence. So in terms of what professional religion scholars consider to be evidence when it comes to historical claims found in ancient literature, yes we DO have evidence that Moses at least existed. If you reply, "well there's no archeological proof yet", then that's merely an argument from silence, nothing more, just like the now-defunct skeptical argument that the Hittites didn't actually exist. (What happened there? One day archeologists discovered the Hittite capital. End of skeptical argument from silence.) There is NO question but that any claim of "Moses never even existed", carries the burden of proof.

"I doubt that the miracles attributed to him ever took place. I don't think he led three million Israelites out of Egypt in an exodus across the Sinai. I don't think he was the founder of Israelite religion, but I think there was a Moses." -- William Dever, a professor of archaeology from Lycoming College, speaking to ABC News, Dec 28, 2012, "Did the Exodus of Moses and His People Happen?"

Just something to consider. Ready to shoulder the burden of proof, Phhht? FL

FL said: American Jewish Rabbi Dan Galilee, on YahooAnswers, directly answered the question "Did Moses Exist" thusly:

Yes, he did. This Jewish tradition has been handed down for over 3,300 years by the entire Jewish nation, and accepted by Christians and Muslims as well. Moses is mentioned many times in the Torah and Rabbinic literature. He is also mentioned by ancient non-Jewish writers going back over 2,300 years, including Hecataeus, Strabo, Alexander Polyhistor, Manetho, Apion, Chaeremon, Tacitus, and Porphyry. Non-religious ancient Jewish sources mention him too, such as Artapanus, Eupolemus, Josephus and Philo.

He’s right, of course. I have highlighted the last two paragraphs because in the OT university classes that I’ve taken, it makes a ton of difference with the professional PhD religion scholars when a gang of ancient writers from *OUTSIDE* the given religious tradition start saying somebody existed, ...

If you reply, "well there's no archeological proof yet", then that's merely an argument from silence, nothing more, just like the now-defunct skeptical argument that the Hittites didn't actually exist. (What happened there? One day archeologists discovered the Hittite capital. End of skeptical argument from silence.)

FL said:

"I doubt that the miracles attributed to him ever took place. I don't think he led three million Israelites out of Egypt in an exodus across the Sinai. I don't think he was the founder of Israelite religion, but I think there was a Moses." -- William Dever, a professor of archaeology from Lycoming College, speaking to ABC News, Dec 28, 2012, "Did the Exodus of Moses and His People Happen?"

Just something to consider. Ready to shoulder the burden of proof, Phhht?

FL is deliberately missing an important point here. Nobody is denying that oral traditions can be hints of events that happened in the past; some of these have indeed been confirmed by later scientific and archeological evidence.

The problem is much deeper for the fundamentalist. Oral tradition isn't correct about lots of things. Medieval Christians even thought that "natural philosophy" and other precursors to science would reveal their deity.

Thomas Aquinas, for example, saw man as the intersection between a "spiritual world" and a physical world. If his deity made the physical world, then a seeker of truth should find evidence of the deity in the real world. However, given the concept of "sin" that Aquinas inherited from religious tradition, he thought man's senses can be expected to be corrupt. Therefore, if there were any discrepancy between data coming from the real world and data coming from "scripture, meditation, and prayer" - i.e., the purported spiritual world - then that latter should take precedence over the former.

So it is not surprising - given Western history - that practitioners of the emerging science would be trying to understand the handiwork of their deity in order to better understand their deity. The problems began when many of these practitioners of science began arriving independently at the same conclusion that the scientific evidence was not confirming the "spiritual" traditions; their deity either wasn't what they thought it was or, quite possibly, simply wasn't.

Putting all that together with the long, dismal history of sectarian blood feuds, with the formation and splintering of religions into mutually suspicious sects, and with the murderous tendencies of religious leaders dealing with "heretics," it isn't all that surprising that the people who thought about these matters would begin to conclude that the "spiritual world" and oral traditions may not be as reliable a source of knowledge as they were purported to be.

Fundamentalists are still back in the Middle Ages when it comes to matters of epistemology and ontology. Science is not allowed to be an arbiter of anything because dogmas come first and science must be distorted to fit dogma. Unfortunately, there are literally thousands of different dogmas; and sectarians continue to splinter and have blood feuds while distorting the objective evidence that hits them in the face every second of their existence.

Good evening. Still no evidence from Floyd. Still no rational argument. Still can't even prove that the person he attributes all the crap to ever existed. Still don't care who wrote what anyway. How boring. Just let Floyd go on and on in his bibleolitry. Bo one cares.

Matt Young said: Oops, forgot:

...ancient writers from OUTSIDE of the religion of Christianity, even writers hostile to Him, at least affirmed or wrote that He existed.

Josephus? Tacitus? Neither was even alive at the time of the Crucifixion. If Jesus existed (and I imagine that he did), there is no surviving contemporary, extra-Biblical mention of his name.

stevaroni said: That's right, and since we all know that it's a well established principal that researchers cannot use historical evidence to build their cases, and Josephus and Tacitus were unable to experimentally meet a live Jesus, using creationist logic that means Jesus cannot have existed.

“(Moses) states that the Jordan Valley “was like ‘the land of Egypt, as you go towards Zoar’ (Egyp. ‘T-;-r’.) “Nothing could be plainer from this casual reference than that the author was writing for a readership unfamiliar with the appearance of regions in Palestine but personally acquainted with the scenery of Lower Egypt. “Such could only have grown up in Egypt, and this fits in only with a Mosaic date of composition for the Book of Genesis.”

And Lot lifted up his eyes and saw that the Jordan Valley was well watered everywhere like the garden of the LORD, like the land of Egypt, in the direction of Zoar. (This was before the LORD destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah.)

Now, on the uses of oral tradition as they relate to Mosaic authorship.

FL wants to treat, not only the text, but oral tradition about it, as completely credible. All the textual sources he refers to rely on tradition, for sure. But is it reliable?

The answer, alas, is no. Oral tradition is especially unreliable when speaking of the stature of personalities said to be at the origin of great events. These are invariably expanded vastly. Detail accretes around them - often this is taken from other legend. Further stories, other events, are added. Causes for these events are invented and incorporated. Usually these details, events and causes are fantastic, involving the supernatural.

We see this process at work in material as familiar as the matter of King Arthur. We see it in the Iliad and the Odyssey; in the Mabinogion; in the Song of Roland and the later accreted stories of him; in the Persian tales of the fantastic adventures of Iskander, who turns out to be a version of Alexander the Great. As was said above, it occurs in the story of George Washington and the cherry tree, and in even more recent history than that. We find it at work in every case whatsoever where oral tradition can be compared with reliable contemporary records. Ancient rulers particularly were concerned to foster the process, for obvious reasons.

Relying on the literality of the scriptures themselves cannot be defended rationally, and the only cause for doing it is dogma and faith. But to advocate Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch one must go further, for the text itself makes no such assertion. FL has to credit oral tradition. That goes beyond even scriptural inerrancy, into wilds of frantic speculation that make even the most fanciful extension of the documentary hypothesis seem sober and evidential. But residing in a glass house has never deterred FL from throwing stones.

Dave Luckett said: We see this process at work in material as familiar as the matter of King Arthur. We see it in the Iliad and the Odyssey; in the Mabinogion; in the Song of Roland and the later accreted stories of him; in the Persian tales of the fantastic adventures of Iskander, who turns out to be a version of Alexander the Great. As was said above, it occurs in the story of George Washington and the cherry tree, and in even more recent history than that. We find it at work in every case whatsoever where oral tradition can be compared with reliable contemporary records. Ancient rulers particularly were concerned to foster the process, for obvious reasons.

Mosaic Authorship of the Pentateuch is similar to the Omphalos Hypothesis.

The OH says that the world was created with the appearance of having existed previously. It cannot be logically refuted.

The MA says that the Pentateuch was written with the appearance of being written at a later author.

As far as the world bears testimony to its origins, it testifies to billions of years. As far as the Pentateuch bears testimony to its origins, it testifies to its completion after the settlement in Israel.

Yet MA makes an exception, for most people cannot bring themselves to accept that the ending of the Pentateuch, which describes the death, burial and later popular status of Moses, could have been written by Moses. Why that is made an exception, when there are other passages in the Pentateuch which are just as hard to accept as having being written by Moses, or in the time of Moses. It is just as easy to believe that Moses could have been granted knowledge of the future in one case as the other.

One can grant a certain consistency to the OH. Yet most MA believers, for some reason, cannot bring themselves to consistency.

But this undermines nearly everything else FL wants to claim, as his own example makes clear.

Good morning.

Good afternoon.

Good evening.

Good night.

Good bye.

The time has long passed for scholars of every theological persuasion to recognize that the Graf-Wellhausen theory, as a starting point for continued research, is dead. The Documentary Hypothesis and the arguments that support it have been effectively demolished by scholars from many different theological perspectives and areas of expertise. Even so, the ghost of Wellhausen hovers over Old Testament studies and symposiums like a thick fog, adding nothing of substance but effectively obscuring vision. Although actually incompatible with form-critical and archaeology-based studies, the Documentary Hypothesis has managed to remain the mainstay of critical orthodoxy. One wonders if we will ever return to the day when discussions of Genesis will not be stilted by interminable references to P and J. There are indications that such a day is coming. Many scholars are exploring the inadequacies of the Documentary Hypothesis and looking toward new models for explaining the Pentateuch.

FL said: More nauseating bullshit.

The question of who exactly originated which portions of the Pentateuch continues to fascinate, the evidence being tantalisingly slight and vague. But it's plain that various sources made various contributions, which were assembled, smoothed over to some extent, and edited by other hands still.

FL's truly irritating method of dealing with argument from evidence is simply to ignore it and reiterate. He does it again above.

FL said: By the way, TomS says that "Mosaic Authorship of the Pentateuch is similar to the Omphalos Hypothesis." But that can only be true if the Documentary Hypothesis is a "fact", and so far there are some very visible textual evidences that are outright ruining that particular claim.

(shrug)

Whoever wrote Acts 7:22 was just continuing the tradition.

More circular reasoning.

Of course there are mnemonics in oral tradition. Ask any scop.

You could all these same arguments about Beowulf.

But in this case as in that: why bother?

Yawn.

... could have all these...

Mike Elzinga said:

stevaroni said: That's right, and since we all know that it's a well established principal that researchers cannot use historical evidence to build their cases, and Josephus and Tacitus were unable to experimentally meet a live Jesus, using creationist logic that means Jesus cannot have existed.

Hee hee; a pure "KenHamist" ye be, eh? ;-) Are you anticipating a job opening as historian on the Ark Encounter?

...and you are a bigoted narrow-minded fool romping all over my freedom for questioning it.

If you're going full AiG you'll know the shiny new airplane will carry the passengers safely to their destination. It's better to suffer for doing right than to suffer for doing wrong.

No, if your are going full AIG you will charge passengers four thousand dollars, refuse to pay taxes on the income, get them on the plane and tell them it is a boat, taxi down the runway and let them off at the entrance to the creation museum, charge them another four thousand dollars and lie to them about dinosaurs and people living together. And if they complain just say "were you there" as if that were a rational argument.

Marilyn said: If you're going full AiG you'll know the shiny new airplane will carry the passengers safely to their destination. It's better to suffer for doing right than to suffer for doing wrong.

To briefly recap, we've already seen:

(1) Multiple examples of Floyd making a fool of himself by trying to use the bible to prove the accuracy of the bible.

(2) People pointing out that Floyd needs evidence before his claims will be taken seriously.

(3) Floyd ignoring (2) and blathering some more about the bible.

Malcolm said: To briefly recap, we've already seen: (1) Multiple examples of Floyd making a fool of himself by trying to use the bible to prove the accuracy of the bible. (2) People pointing out that Floyd needs evidence before his claims will be taken seriously. (3) Floyd ignoring (2) and blathering some more about the bible.

DS said: And of course not a single original argument, just cheap cut and paste jobs that he probably doesn't even understand. And as always, no evidence of any kind whatsoever, just bible quotes and a lot of tortured logic about bible quotes. And that after claiming that he wasn't trying to use the bible to prove the bible! How predictable.

It stretches the imagination to suppose that the structure of the flood story is the result of a patchwork of two complete, contradictory documents. The chiastic structure not only renders the documentary approach unlikely, but also helps to resolve the issue of the chronology of the narrative. -- Duane Garrett, "The Documentary Hypothesis"

The Documentary Hypothesis must be abandoned. Regardless of the theological presuppositions with which one approaches the text, and regardless of whether one wishes to affirm the tradition of Mosaic authorship or move in new directions, one must recognize the hypothesis to be methodologically unsound.

FL said: Well, I certainly don't want to "excruciatingly bore" anybody...

And Lot lifted up his eyes and saw that the Jordan Valley was well watered everywhere like the garden of the LORD, like the land of Egypt, in the direction of Zoar. (This was before the LORD destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah.)

Lower Egypt is symbolized by the papyrus plant. It is essentially the Nile delta, which is a large triangle extending 125 miles north from Memphis to the Mediterranean Sea. The delta is about 155 miles wide at its northern extremity along the coast. This region is very flat, green, and generously watered.

4 This is the history of the heavens and the earth when they were created, in the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens, 5 before any plant of the field was in the earth and before any herb of the field had grown. For the Lord God had not caused it to rain on the earth, and there was no man to till the ground; 6 but a mist went up from the earth and watered the whole face of the ground.

"Nothing could be plainer from this casual reference than that the author was writing for a readership unfamiliar with the appearance of regions in Palestine but personally acquainted with the scenery of Lower Egypt. “Such could only have grown up in Egypt, and this fits in only with a Mosaic date of composition for the Book of Genesis." -- Encyclopedia of Bible Difficulties

FL said: And while I'm at it...

phhht said:

FL said: And while I'm at it...

Boring.

I tried to define terms, back at the start of this. Of course FL simply ignored that. He wishes to give the impression that if any elaboration of the ducumentary hypothesis is overblown, then the whole idea is refuted. That simply isn't so. Darwin conjectured that a bear-like animal might be the ancestor of whales. That was wrong. Does that invalidate the theory of evolution? Of course not.

FL might succeed in showing that it is unsound to attempt to classify every word in the Pentateuch by its supposed source. For what it's worth, I believe that's correct. Such an attempt is unsound. It goes beyond the evidence. That's what this business about "chiasmus" is about. I actually agree that whoever is trying to classify single verses and half-verses by originator has most likely mistaken an ancient poetical repetitive device for different hands.

But I read the conflicting instructions to Noah; I read the conflicting periods of total flooding; I read the conflicts between Genesis 1 and Genesis 2; I read the variant wording and even the specifics of the two sets of Ten Commandments; I read the passages where God is only described by title, and those where he is only described by name; I read the variant "elohim", which is the plural and would mean "gods" were it not for redaction of the rest of the text to the singular; I read the evidence showing that the very grammar of the language changes for various passages, demonstrating that they had different origins in time and place; I read of other ancient works known to be edited and assembled from multiple sources in the very same way.

All of these observations lend credibility to the basic documentary hypothesis, which is this: The main sources for the Pentateuch were four or more sets of texts, plus, perhaps, other fragments, assembled, redacted, and edited later. The texts themselves did not originate at the same time and place. There is no one author. They are by varied hands, over a period. It is possible to some extent to separate them, and to label them, although that process is easily overdone.

For let's be quite clear about this. It is not sufficient for FL to show that the documentary hypothesis can be, or has been, taken too far. He is not arguing that some aspects or extensions of it are unsound; he is arguing that it must be rejected root and branch, every last bit of it. No alternative to Mosaic authorship can be allowed, for FL.

Therefore, his seizing on verse forms is mere quibbling. As for his repeated assertion that there is textual evidence that whoever wrote the Pentateuch had been brought up in Egypt, there is no such evidence. There is only a desperate and usually fraudulent attempt to wring meaning that simply isn't there from the text, plus an occasional whopper, like Gleeson Archer's dicreet excision. Even worse are FL's attempts to invoke oral tradition from a thousand years or more later. I think even he knows that's a crock.

Not that it'll stop him doing it all over again.

FL points out what I pointed out, as if it were a point in his favour, when it's a point against.

Yes, the Jordan valley and the Nile Delta are both "well watered", and I said exactly that. But it doesn't require any special knowledge of Egypt to know that the Nile waters it well, and Archer was simply wrong to say that it's evidence for being brought up there. But I also pointed out that Archer went further, and excised words from the text that indicate that the writer thought of lower Egypt and the "Garden of the Lord" in similar terms, ie, exotic and fabulous, which would imply that he WASN'T an Egyptian. FL and Archer simply ignore that part of the text, because ignoring it is convenient to them.

So I'm right, and they're wrong, and more than wrong. These are people who say they regard the text as sacred, but ignore what it says if that happens to be inconvenient. I'm not going to call that behaviour what it is, because FL gets off on being villified, but no doubt the terms will occur to others.

DS, Just Bob.... ..I didn't mean AiG as in the Answers in Genesis movement. I meant that the Ark did make it to safety as described in Genesis, because it was planed to do from the beginning of the project. At that time it was because Noah had proved himself worthy of the transportation by his conduct no money was involved, there is no mention of having to buy anything and his reward so to speak was that he made it through the flood.

Dave Luckett said: These are people who say they regard the text as sacred, but ignore what it says if that happens to be inconvenient.

Good morning.

Good grief.

More pompous posturing. More cut and paste crap. And of course the ubiquitous "I declare victory, you guys aren't even trying" bullshit.

Look dude, I demolished your chiasmata bullshit with a single sentence. Go back and read it. Your crap proves nothing, absolutely nothing. You are grasping at straws because you are drowning in your own crapulence. Besides, no one cares who wrote the fairy tales. Give it up already.

Marilyn said: DS, Just Bob.... ..I didn't mean AiG as in the Answers in Genesis movement. I meant that the Ark did make it to safety as described in Genesis, because it was planed to do from the beginning of the project. At that time it was because Noah had proved himself worthy of the transportation by his conduct no money was involved, there is no mention of having to buy anything and his reward so to speak was that he made it through the flood.

Two quick questions for Dave:

Where does Gen. 10:13 say the phrase "exotic and fabulous"?

Where does Gleason Archer say anything about "exotic and fabulous"?

Looks like you're the only person coming up with that phrase.

The fact is that Gen. 10:13 only notes ONE specific similarity between the Jordan Valley of that time, the Garden of Eden, and the land of Egypt going in the direction of Zoar (Lower Egypt):
they're all WELL-WATERED.

That's as far as the verse goes. It's odd that you keep trying to say that Archer "excised words from the text" when in fact I'm using **your** quotation of Gen. 10:13 that you provided, and nothing appears to be "excised" at all. Archer's commentary doesn't try to add or subtract words from Gen. 10:13 but simply points out the obvious aspect of it:
a geographical reference indicating familiarity with Lower Egypt.

You say that 10:13 doesn't "require" familiarity with Lower Egypt, but from the text's own wording, you are necessarily and completely unable to RULE OUT that somebody familiar with Lower Egypt wrote such a text. Like, ummm, Moses. Clearly somebody familiar with Lower Egypt COULD have written that 10:13 text.

And remember, Gen. 10:13 doesn't appear in a vacuum. As Archer pointed out, you have this geographical reference COMBINED with clear references to climate/weather, trees/animals of Egypt and Sinai, Egyptian names, and Egyptian loan-words -- all of which unavoidably point to a writer who was clearly familiar with Egypt, as if he'd grown up there.

(By the way, you and the other Pandas have been totally radio-silent on the climate/weather, trees/animals, Egyptian names & loan-words evidences. And you're the only one who's even trying to barely challenge the Lower Egypt geographical reference. Hmmm.)

So it looks to me that Archer has made his case, and done so without over-stating or under-stating it. He's right. You're wrong.

There is a already a ton of unanimous Hebrew-Bible testimony that Moses wrote the Torah, (and absolutely ZERO Hebrew-Bible testimony about four DH guys writing any Torah).

This additional "personal-familiarity-with-Egypt" factor that Archer pointed out, is effectively a textual Pile-On-on-top-of-a-Pile-On', in support of of Mosaic Authorship.

FL

"What writer writes with a consistent style? Yes, there are styles to writers, but the subject matter affects the content. A technical work is different from a narrative or historical piece. The Pentateuch has components of all of these. Therefore, different styles are expected. Additionally, what the writer has in mind can easily cause him to use a different concentration of words. Should the intention change so would the word usage. Did Moses sit down at one sitting and write everything out? Of course not. Upon reflection, reading, prayer, etc., his focus and purpose within sections of Scripture can change as he moves to a new subject." -- from the one-page essay "Answering the Documentary Hypothesis", CARM https://carm.org/answering-documentary-hypothesis

Marilyn said: ... Noah had proved himself worthy of the transportation by his conduct ... his reward so to speak was that he made it through the flood.

FL,

Are these consistent with an all powerful and unconditional loving, moral, and ethical god?

You seem to use type 5 above and avoid discussion on these topics.

Marriage by rape: Deuteronomy 22:28-29 "If a man happens to meet a virgin who is not pledged to be married and rapes her and they are discovered, he shall pay her father fifty shekels[a] of silver. He must marry the young woman, for he has violated her."

Abortion and Murder: Hosea 13:16 “The people of Samaria must bear their guilt, because they have rebelled against their God. They will fall by the sword; their little ones will be dashed to the ground, their pregnant women ripped open.”

Child Murder: Ezekiel 9:5-6 ‘As I listened, he said to the others, “Follow him through the city and kill, without showing pity or compassion. Slaughter old men, young men and maidens, women and children,…” ‘

Daughter Sex Slavery: Exodus 21:7-11 “And if a man sells his daughter to be a female slave, she shall not go out as the male slaves do. If she does not please the master who has selected her for himself, he must let her be redeemed. He has no right to sell her to foreigners, because he has broken faith with her. If he selects her for his son,…”

Baby Murder: Samuel 15:2-3 “This is what the Lord Almighty says: ‘…Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.’”

Joyful Baby Murder Psalms 137:8-9 “…happy is…—he who seizes your infants and dashes them against the rocks.”

Baby Murder and Rape: Isaiah 13:15-16 “Whoever is captured will be thrust through; all who are caught will fall by the sword. Their infants will be dashed to pieces before their eyes; their houses will be looted and their wives ravished.”

Young Woman Murder: Deuteronomy 22:13-21 Not virgin upon wedding “...Then they shall bring out the damsel to the door of her father's house, and the men of her city shall stone her with stones that she die.”

Woman Torture: Genesis 3:16: To the woman he said, “I will make your pains in childbearing very severe; with painful labor you will give birth to children. Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you.”

Genocide: Deuteronomy 2:33: “And the LORD our God delivered him before us; and we smote him, and his sons, and all his people. And we took all his cities at that time, and utterly destroyed the men, and the women, and the little ones, of every city, we left none to remain”

DS said:

Marilyn said: DS, Just Bob.... ..I didn't mean AiG as in the Answers in Genesis movement. I meant that the Ark did make it to safety as described in Genesis, because it was planed to do from the beginning of the project. At that time it was because Noah had proved himself worthy of the transportation by his conduct no money was involved, there is no mention of having to buy anything and his reward so to speak was that he made it through the flood.

Marilyn, There was no world wide flood, there was no magic ark. And I notice that you refused to answer the question about AIG. I will take that to mean that you think that it is OK for them to lie and break the law in order to tell more people more lies about the imaginary flood and the magic ark.

Besides, no one cares who wrote the fairy tales.

What is clear from FL's comments on "Moses in Egypt" is the typical creationist inability to use induction or to use induction very selectively. If you have seen a few river valleys, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to make inferences about what one will see in any river valley.

Genesis 10:13 says that the Jordan valley was well-watered, FIRST "like the Garden of the Lord" and THEN "like Egypt, as you go towards Zoar".

Which indicates the writer had heard that the delta of the Nile was well watered and fertile, which it is, but the terrain is mostly swampy, requiring much stoop labor in the hot sun to drain. Eden, not hardly. But the "Garden of the Lord" was a place that the writer had never seen, and he put Egypt after that but in the same category. Why would lower Egypt be like the "Garden of the Lord"? The Garden was supposed to be a paradise, but the Nile delta isn't one, unless you're deeply into swamp, flies, heat and mud. The writer is evidently thinking of both of them as places of mythic fertility. So that would imply that he wasn't an Egyptian, since anyone who's actually been there knows that the fertility of the delta comes at the cost of much sweat of the face, which is exactly what the Garden wasn't supposed to be like. That was why Archer discreetly removed the words "like the Garden of the Lord". He did that because it was convenient to him. Of course FL thinks that's just fine. He'd do the same, or with equal insouciance, add to it.

Archer sure does spend chapters on contorted attempts to crowbar the words of the text into meaning what he wants. Of course this effort is possible, because the words of an ancient, imperfectly understood language are always somewhat contentious. You can do it in the case of Genesis 2 by changing the tense of some of the verbs to the past pluperfect - relatively easy because ancient Hebrew has no tenses. But you can only do that by special pleading - that these specific verbs, but not other verbs in the same voice in the same passage, have to be taken that way to fit the reading wanted, so therefore they should be taken that way. It would be funny if it were not so pathetic.

Elohim means "gods". It is pluralised. There's no getting around that. The OT Hebrew always uses the singular when referring to it, though. What is the explanation for this? The simplest one is that the plural was used in the original documents, and it meant the plural, but by the time of the redaction it was being taken as a title rather than a common noun. Other explanations are sometimes attempted, and fall foul of Occam's Razor.

Using "Matt Slick" and "scholarship" in the same paragraph will tell you all you need to know about FL's pretensions.

"Grammar" means "the rules by which the language is constructed". Grammar changes slowly over time. It, ahem, evolves. English, for example, has become less inflected over the ten centuries or so that it has been a separate identifiable language, and it has added at least five different ways of forming the plural to the original Anglo-Saxon. Now, vocabulary changes - that is, changes to the actual words used and their precise meaning - do occur in the Pentateuch, but that can, with a bit of a stretch, be put down to stylistic variation. It's more than a bit odd that these changes often occur abruptly, and for no particular stylistic reason, mind, but that's the defence the fundies always try, as above. But the rules by which the language is constructed also change slowly, over time, and the reason isn't style, it's the evolution of the language. Such evolutionary changes are observed in the Hebrew of the Pentateuch. They can only be explained by assigning the passages containing the changes to different dates.

The documentary hypothesis is not the only possible explanation of the construction of Pentateuch. Many more sources might have been used than the four classic ones. Moreover, as already conceded, some analyses of text that attempt to assign provenance to every word go well beyond the evidence. Nevertheless, anyone who wants to advance a different explanation for the Pentateuch has to explain the same features that the DH does explain; and these are not explained at all by Mosaic authorship, or any such thing.

And that's the nub of this: It does FL no good at all to argue that the DH is wrong. What he's arguing is that Mosaic authorship is right, and he hasn't got a prayer of pulling that off.

Matt Young said:

Besides, no one cares who wrote the fairy tales.

Many people care who wrote the stories and when, even if only as a solution to an interesting puzzle. Idle curiosity -- are you implying that none of the Bible is veridical, or only the Noah story?

Dave Luckett said: ... And that's the nub of this: It does FL no good at all to argue that the DH is wrong. What he's arguing is that Mosaic authorship is right, and he hasn't got a prayer of pulling that off.

Amen.

Amen

Oops.

Dave Luckett said: Darwin conjectured that a bear-like animal might be the ancestor of whales.

FL said: trees/animals of Egypt and Sinai

FL said:

And Lot lifted up his eyes and saw that the Jordan Valley was well watered everywhere like the garden of the LORD, like the land of Egypt, in the direction of Zoar.

Obviously this text supports what Gleason Archer said about the writer of the Torah being somebody who was intimately familiar with Egypt, as if he'd grown there. You're getting a straight geographic reference that helps to prove it

(This was before the LORD destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah.)

Matt Young said:

Besides, no one cares who wrote the fairy tales.

Many people care who wrote the stories and when, even if only as a solution to an interesting puzzle. Idle curiosity -- are you implying that none of the Bible is veridical, or only the Noah story?

paulc_mv said:

Matt Young said:

Besides, no one cares who wrote the fairy tales.

Many people care who wrote the stories and when, even if only as a solution to an interesting puzzle. Idle curiosity -- are you implying that none of the Bible is veridical, or only the Noah story?

Exactly. Floyd wants everyone to conveniently overlook the fact that the magic flood never happened. Just limit the discussion to an endless debate about authorship and pretend that this is somehow an important issue. Don't present any independent archaeological evidence, or any real evidence of any kind, just quote the bible and quote people quoting the bible ad nauseum. You don't have to learn any science. You don't have to address any scientific issues. You can pretend that you are having a debate with the infidels and amuse yourself for years blubbering on and on about nothing. If anyone is interested in playing this game, the bathroom wall is the perfect place. (At least it would be if it had not already accumulated 1500 pages of this crap). Clearly people care, just as it would be interesting to know more about the authorship of the Iliad (attributed to Homer, but who knows), the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Mahabharata, etc. But I think DS's point was that the authorship has little bearing on the historical accuracy of any of these myths. I have resisted the urge to respond to Floyd's comment that he was only interested in the question of Moses as author, not e.g., the factuality of the burning bush. In reality, Floyd's belief requires that the Bible is the inerrant word of God, and it is disingenuous for him to limit the scope of the discussion to authorship when previous posts have made his agenda clear. I just read a little about the DH, and it seems to be one of a number of authorship hypotheses. I don't see any reason to believe it at any level of detail, but I also find a single author theory to be unlikely. It would require independent evidence. That said, I am befuddled as to how this has any bearing on whether to believe the content of the Bible.

Sorry, that was supposed to be in response to paulc. The formatting got all screwed up.

Marilyn said:

DS said:

Marilyn said: DS, Just Bob.... ..I didn't mean AiG as in the Answers in Genesis movement. I meant that the Ark did make it to safety as described in Genesis, because it was planed to do from the beginning of the project. At that time it was because Noah had proved himself worthy of the transportation by his conduct no money was involved, there is no mention of having to buy anything and his reward so to speak was that he made it through the flood.

Marilyn, There was no world wide flood, there was no magic ark. And I notice that you refused to answer the question about AIG. I will take that to mean that you think that it is OK for them to lie and break the law in order to tell more people more lies about the imaginary flood and the magic ark.

Well you can take that back.... I'm not in agreement with breaking the law and lying about the flood and ark. Before the ark was one thing, what happened after is another. I agree it didn't altogether go good, there was a lot of endeavor and faith for the Jewish nation to go through as it's said in the book, and a lot of wrong doing that's why God got angry He didn't want it that way, He did and said to people what He could to turn things round for the better. There is something not right in the world there is too much suffering what with natural disaster and then the wars. People know it's wrong but yet it still goes on and there is ways and means of stopping it. There are great people who still go to the aid of people who are in devastated areas. Also more effort is being put into predicting and detecting natural disaster, more should be done to end war. People should enjoy plenty and safety.

In addition, it has been allowed to completely take over this thread, which was supposed to be about avoidance mechanisms, not enabling those who use them.

It also seems completely inappropriate to have the discussion on a web site dedicated to science.

It's an explanation an example an illustration as to how this planet could be still inhabited after all these millions of years, after all the disasters it's been through and sprung back, it took someone who cared enough to make sure of some survival after world disaster, an illustration as to how the planet inhabitants could survive in any era, and that would be to gather the species and protect them from harm till it was safe to roam again. We know disaster but we haven't been through world catastrophe, unless at the movies, but we do know what we would have to do to save the inhabitants or some of them or as many as we could. It seems like an impossible task. If succeeded animals would still be animals and humans would still be humans whether or not survival would make for better people, I hope it would.

Marilyn said: It's an explanation an example an illustration as to how this planet could be still inhabited after all these millions of years, after all the disasters it's been through and sprung back, it took someone who cared enough to make sure of some survival after world disaster, an illustration as to how the planet inhabitants could survive in any era, and that would be to gather the species and protect them from harm till it was safe to roam again. We know disaster but we haven't been through world catastrophe, unless at the movies, but we do know what we would have to do to save the inhabitants or some of them or as many as we could. It seems like an impossible task. If succeeded animals would still be animals and humans would still be humans whether or not survival would make for better people, I hope it would.

DS said: I'm implying that I could care less about any religious text.

Marylin, I'm just curious: Do you really think there was a worldwide flood and an ark as described in the Bible, or do you think that might be more like a fable or parable-type lesson, and not a real historical event?

Just Bob said:

DS said: I'm implying that I could care less about any religious text.

[English teacher mode] It's "couldn't care less". Just think about it and you'll see why. [/teacher]

Hey Matt, it might be considered "courteous" to allow a poster a final comment here, given that said poster did NOT violate your stated criteria for remaining on the thread.

You're the moderator here, and I sincerely thank you for choosing to allow dissenting opinions on your thread. The quality and dialog of this thread would have been much different -- much less robust and lively -- without it. I'd like to think that everybody -- yourself included -- really contributed well to create a thread that truly reflected what you call "interesting discussion."

Yes, people sometimes turn to "avoidance mechanisms" (such as the "Schimmel list") when faced with uncomfortable, irrefutable fact. But the Documentary Hypothesis, as we have seen, is clearly NOT an irrefutable. The DH can be seriously challenged, rationally, textually, scholarly, evidentially, with counter-arguments that remain on the table for both scholars and laypeople.

However, there IS one other "avoidance mechanism" that Schimmel failed to mention. CENSORSHIP is a well-known, historically very successful means of avoiding things that some people want to see avoided. You could have taken that course of action. But you didn't.

So I close by thanking you for taking a **different** course of action, one involving freedom of speech and robust debate, one that serves both Reform Judaism and Biblical Christianity (and even Atheism, though some folks may not realize it) quite well.

FL

FL said: But the Documentary Hypothesis, as we have seen, is clearly NOT an irrefutable.

FL said: I'd like to think that everybody -- yourself included -- really contributed well to create a thread that truly reflected what you call "interesting discussion."

The failure of FL, as with all literalists and fundamentalists, is in applying modern standards to ancient writings. Science and History are two fields that arose in their modern forms only about 300 years ago. Before that people didn't propose to write objective histories - they wrote morality tales and hagiographies - lives and stories were embellished with supernatural deeds and symbolism to help people live better lives. One has to assume most of the stuff in the Bible didn't happen the way it is written; what actually happened wouldn't be adequate.

Michael Fugate said: The failure of FL, as with all literalists and fundamentalists, is in applying modern standards to ancient writings. Science and History are two fields that arose in their modern forms only about 300 years ago. Before that people didn't propose to write objective histories - they wrote morality tales and hagiographies - lives and stories were embellished with supernatural deeds and symbolism to help people live better lives. One has to assume most of the stuff in the Bible didn't happen the way it is written; what actually happened wouldn't be adequate.

FL said: Two quick questions for Dave: Where does Gen. 10:13 say the phrase "exotic and fabulous"? Where does Gleason Archer say anything about "exotic and fabulous"? Looks like you're the only person coming up with that phrase. The fact is that Gen. 10:13 only notes ONE specific similarity between the Jordan Valley of that time, the Garden of Eden, and the land of Egypt going in the direction of Zoar (Lower Egypt): they're all WELL-WATERED. That's as far as the verse goes. It's odd that you keep trying to say that Archer "excised words from the text" when in fact I'm using **your** quotation of Gen. 10:13 that you provided, and nothing appears to be "excised" at all. Archer's commentary doesn't try to add or subtract words from Gen. 10:13 but simply points out the obvious aspect of it: a geographical reference indicating familiarity with Lower Egypt. You say that 10:13 doesn't "require" familiarity with Lower Egypt, but from the text's own wording, you are necessarily and completely unable to RULE OUT that somebody familiar with Lower Egypt wrote such a text. Like, ummm, Moses. Clearly somebody familiar with Lower Egypt COULD have written that 10:13 text.

Mike Elzinga said: It is their own lack of self-awareness and cockiness about their memorized dogma that makes them so meddlesome and annoying. They think they are experts in just about anything because they can word-game endlessly; and they think this debating "prowess" is the mark of high learning. This is what they strive for in order to reach the pinnacle of being a feared and revered authority figures within their churches. They know nothing of the real world outside their narrow sectarian world view.

FL blathered nonsensically: a geographical reference indicating familiarity with Lower Egypt. You say that 10:13 doesn't "require" familiarity with Lower Egypt, but from the text's own wording, you are necessarily and completely unable to RULE OUT that somebody familiar with Lower Egypt wrote such a text. Like, ummm, Moses. Clearly somebody familiar with Lower Egypt COULD have written that 10:13 text. And remember, Gen. 10:13 doesn't appear in a vacuum. As Archer pointed out, you have this geographical reference COMBINED with clear references to climate/weather, trees/animals of Egypt and Sinai, Egyptian names, and Egyptian loan-words -- all of which unavoidably point to a writer who was clearly familiar with Egypt, as if he'd grown up there. (By the way, you and the other Pandas have been totally radio-silent on the climate/weather, trees/animals, Egyptian names & loan-words evidences. And you're the only one who's even trying to barely challenge the Lower Egypt geographical reference. Hmmm.)

Just Bob said: Marylin, I'm just curious: Do you really think there was a worldwide flood and an ark as described in the Bible, or do you think that might be more like a fable or parable-type lesson, and not a real historical event?

I recently read somewhere (Science Daily?) that beliefs the children have been indoctrinated with before age 10, they tend to believe for the rest of their lives. Seems to mean it's been incorporated into their mental constitution.

I was spared that. I have been curious all my life. I early began to wonder about what to make of the Bible, and after studying some science and comparing it with the Bible, the Bible lost. It just didn't make sense.

No wonder, it wasn't meant to be read literally. How could a kid know that?

Later in life I've of course discovered the origins of the Bible from the realm of objective research and analysis.

I don't think the apoologetics are aware of the power of scientific research.

Apologetism is as old as the Bible itself. Liek f.i. when Eusebius makes a pooint about why there are only fouir gospels:
It is like there are four corners of the Earth, and four principal winds. We are convinced by that,aren't we?

Of course, with an argument like that there just isn't any possibility of other gospels around.

There are many reasons to believe that the Gnostics actually were the original Christians, so obviously they were slated to become the #1 enemy of the fundamentalist church. The Inquisition was established for the purpose of gettimg rid of them. The Qatars were about the last of the Gnostic strongholds.

Marilyn said:

Just Bob said: Marylin, I'm just curious: Do you really think there was a worldwide flood and an ark as described in the Bible, or do you think that might be more like a fable or parable-type lesson, and not a real historical event?

When I was a child I believed it happened, I never questioned it, as to me it was a freezable explanation as to what happened when there was a flood, -save every thing on a boat-. These days I wonder what the people would do to save the world if there was an impending disaster ahead, they would still have to at least have two of a kind, and a safe container to protect them all. If it didn't happen it is still a good illustration as how to do it. These days I think space exploration is the equivalent and planed colonization of such as Mars if it's possible, or even a great big space station. And if the Earth still stands after it all that is awesome.

FL said: Yes, people sometimes turn to "avoidance mechanisms" (such as the "Schimmel list") when faced with uncomfortable, irrefutable fact. But the Documentary Hypothesis, as we have seen, is clearly NOT an irrefutable.

Avoidance mechanisms:

1. Claim your position is plausible.

Floyd:

You say that 10:13 doesn’t “require” familiarity with Lower Egypt, but from the text’s own wording, you are necessarily and completely unable to RULE OUT that somebody familiar with Lower Egypt wrote such a text. Like, ummm, Moses. Clearly somebody familiar with Lower Egypt COULD have written that 10:13 text.

Now I don't want to be fanatical, but this is the perfect example of exactly what this thread was supposed to be about. Floyd displays every single avoidance mechanism, some multiple times. It doesn't really even matter what he is trying to argue about, he just can't help himself. He must always be as loathsome and reprehensible as possible, even on a thread about being loathsome and reprehensible. Notice that none of the sources that Floyd cites even name an individual, let alone Moses. And even if Moses was to somehow have written all of the contradictory fairy tales, so what? They still aren't true. That's the point that Marilyn seems to have missed. Instead of arguing endlessly about authorship, which will probably never be settled to anyone's satisfaction anyway, why not concentrate on things we do know, such as the magic flood never happened?

Yet, how does one make the argument that "all of the Pentateuch except Deuteronomy 34 was written by Moses"?

Does one allow that it is unseemly to say that Moses wrote those last verses, yet accept that he wrote about other events in the future? Or that those authorities do not specify that Moses wrote Deut 34 - do they also not specify explicitly Deut 1 or many other passages?

Mike Elzinga, I am not saying that their scholarship is any good and of course it is apologetics all the way down. It is that a literal reading is both very modern and assumes that those who wrote the text were moderns in their thinking - the authors were in the habit of both writing objectively about the past and using post-enlightenment science. Nothing could be further from the truth - scholarship no matter how diligent is always going to be wrong because - as you say - of the apologetic goal and the faulty premises. It is a tenuous existence, once one verse fail the truth test the rest falls like a house of cards.

Jesus said it ...well, no... the Bible says it ...umm, well, not really... I learned it in Sunday School ... wait...this is better... We RESEARCHED it in Bible Study!

Mike Elzinga said: It is their own lack of self-awareness and cockiness about their memorized dogma that makes them so meddlesome and annoying. They think they are experts in just about anything because they can word-game endlessly; and they think this debating "prowess" is the mark of high learning. This is what they strive for in order to reach the pinnacle of being a feared and revered authority figures within their churches. They know nothing of the real world outside their narrow sectarian world view.

Yardbird said:

Mike Elzinga said: It is their own lack of self-awareness and cockiness about their memorized dogma that makes them so meddlesome and annoying. They think they are experts in just about anything because they can word-game endlessly; and they think this debating "prowess" is the mark of high learning. This is what they strive for in order to reach the pinnacle of being a feared and revered authority figures within their churches. They know nothing of the real world outside their narrow sectarian world view.

When I look at what Floyd writes, and I take him for a particularly egregious example of the type, it makes a lot more sense to consider that he's not addressing anyone reading what he's written. He's talking to God. He's jumping up and down and waving his arms and shouting, "Look at me, Daddy!!! I'm a GOOD boy!!!!"

DS said: Why should we provide him with a forum to discuss his religious beliefs?

What a predictable turd.

Sorry Bob, just trying to come up some relatively innocuous scatological references.

Marilyn said:

Just Bob said: Marylin, I'm just curious: Do you really think there was a worldwide flood and an ark as described in the Bible, or do you think that might be more like a fable or parable-type lesson, and not a real historical event?

When I was a child I believed it happened, I never questioned it, as to me it was a freezable explanation as to what happened when there was a flood, -save every thing on a boat-. These days I wonder what the people would do to save the world if there was an impending disaster ahead, they would still have to at least have two of a kind, and a safe container to protect them all. If it didn't happen it is still a good illustration as how to do it. These days I think space exploration is the equivalent and planed colonization of such as Mars if it's possible, or even a great big space station. And if the Earth still stands after it all that is awesome.

it might be considered “courteous” to allow a poster a final comment here, given that said poster did NOT violate your stated criteria for remaining on the thread.

You’re the moderator here, and I sincerely thank you for choosing to allow dissenting opinions on your thread. The quality and dialog of this thread would have been much different – much less robust and lively – without it. I’d like to think that everybody – yourself included – really contributed well to create a thread that truly reflected what you call “interesting discussion.” Yes, people sometimes turn to “avoidance mechanisms” (such as the “Schimmel list”) when faced with uncomfortable, irrefutable fact. But the Documentary Hypothesis, as we have seen, is clearly NOT an irrefutable. The DH can be seriously challenged, rationally, textually, scholarly, evidentially, with counter-arguments that remain on the table for both scholars and laypeople.

However, there IS one other “avoidance mechanism” that Schimmel failed to mention. CENSORSHIP is a well-known, historically very successful means of avoiding things that some people want to see avoided. You could have taken that course of action. But you didn’t.

So I close by thanking you for taking a **different** course of action, one involving freedom of speech and robust debate, one that serves both Reform Judaism and Biblical Christianity (and even Atheism, though some folks may not realize it) quite well.

W. H. Heydt said:

Marilyn said:

Just Bob said: Marylin, I'm just curious: Do you really think there was a worldwide flood and an ark as described in the Bible, or do you think that might be more like a fable or parable-type lesson, and not a real historical event?

When I was a child I believed it happened, I never questioned it, as to me it was a freezable explanation as to what happened when there was a flood, -save every thing on a boat-. These days I wonder what the people would do to save the world if there was an impending disaster ahead, they would still have to at least have two of a kind, and a safe container to protect them all. If it didn't happen it is still a good illustration as how to do it. These days I think space exploration is the equivalent and planed colonization of such as Mars if it's possible, or even a great big space station. And if the Earth still stands after it all that is awesome.

Actually, it's a really bad example of how to save enough to restart an ecosystem after a disaster, Not only are a lot of things missing, there aren't enough of any one species to stably propagate any species, but the balance of species is all wrong (you need a *lot* more prey animals than predators). It is, however, pretty typical of early flood myths and is the kind of thinking one would expect from people who didn't understand the issues and complexities of restarting an ecosystem following a disaster.

Matt Young said:

it might be considered “courteous” to allow a poster a final comment here, given that said poster did NOT violate your stated criteria for remaining on the thread.

Fine; you've got it!

You’re the moderator here, and I sincerely thank you for choosing to allow dissenting opinions on your thread. The quality and dialog of this thread would have been much different – much less robust and lively – without it. I’d like to think that everybody – yourself included – really contributed well to create a thread that truly reflected what you call “interesting discussion.” Yes, people sometimes turn to “avoidance mechanisms” (such as the “Schimmel list”) when faced with uncomfortable, irrefutable fact. But the Documentary Hypothesis, as we have seen, is clearly NOT an irrefutable. The DH can be seriously challenged, rationally, textually, scholarly, evidentially, with counter-arguments that remain on the table for both scholars and laypeople.

Forgive me, but you have not laid a glove on it, and that is one reason that I think it is time to terminate the discussion -- or rather move it to a different venue.

However, there IS one other “avoidance mechanism” that Schimmel failed to mention. CENSORSHIP is a well-known, historically very successful means of avoiding things that some people want to see avoided. You could have taken that course of action. But you didn’t.

PT is a private non-profit. It is not a government entity. Editorial decisions as to who and what to publish are not censorship. You are completely free to express your opinions any time you want to -- but not necessarily here. If you do not like that condition, start your own blog. No one will censor you.

So I close by thanking you for taking a **different** course of action, one involving freedom of speech and robust debate, one that serves both Reform Judaism and Biblical Christianity (and even Atheism, though some folks may not realize it) quite well.

Thank you for your, um, persistence!

DS said: But Floyd wants us to ignore all that and just keep arguing about who made up or copied the myths, not what they really mean or what they might really represent.

If you want to see examples of "censorship", look to the bible colleges. What happens to a person who dares to suggest that maybe the Deluge was not global, or that maybe Moses did not write everything (except Deuteronomy 34) in the Pentateuch? What you find is a person who loses the possibility of being employed in the only job being trained for? Positions in theology are difficult enough to find for people with first-rate credentials. What are the other chances for a middle-aged person whose only employment has been in a bible college?
How many teachers are forced to teach what they can no longer believe?

W. H. Heydt said: Actually, it's a really bad example of how to save enough to restart an ecosystem after a disaster, Not only are a lot of things missing, there aren't enough of any one species to stably propagate any species, but the balance of species is all wrong (you need a *lot* more prey animals than predators). It is, however, pretty typical of early flood myths and is the kind of thinking one would expect from people who didn't understand the issues and complexities of restarting an ecosystem following a disaster.

Mike Elzinga said: Especially a disaster with the minimum energy scenario of 40 kilotons of TNT going off for every square meter of the Earth's surface for 40 days and nights and which would raise the temperature of the atmosphere to over 10,500 degrees Fahrenheit within less than a week.

Mike Elzinga said:

Mike Elzinga said: Especially a disaster with the minimum energy scenario of 40 kilotons of TNT going off for every square meter of the Earth's surface for 40 days and nights and which would raise the temperature of the atmosphere to over 10,500 degrees Fahrenheit within less than a week.

And that would be every second for every square meter of the Earth's surface.

Just Bob said:

Mike Elzinga said:

Mike Elzinga said: Especially a disaster with the minimum energy scenario of 40 kilotons of TNT going off for every square meter of the Earth's surface for 40 days and nights and which would raise the temperature of the atmosphere to over 10,500 degrees Fahrenheit within less than a week.

And that would be every second for every square meter of the Earth's surface.

They just don't get that, and they never will. The concept of heat being released by falling water just doesn't register with their ordinary experience of rain. And even if they did get it, it wouldn't matter, because God kept it cool. And kept the animals in hibernation. And shifted the continents around and raised mountain chains. And whatever other magic was necessary to cover other impossibilities. Oh, and you're going to hell.

W. H. Heydt said: I'm not sure if anyone has ever actually used those arguments on a YEC.

W. H. Heydt said:

Just Bob said:

Mike Elzinga said:

Mike Elzinga said: Especially a disaster with the minimum energy scenario of 40 kilotons of TNT going off for every square meter of the Earth's surface for 40 days and nights and which would raise the temperature of the atmosphere to over 10,500 degrees Fahrenheit within less than a week.

And that would be every second for every square meter of the Earth's surface.

They just don't get that, and they never will. The concept of heat being released by falling water just doesn't register with their ordinary experience of rain. And even if they did get it, it wouldn't matter, because God kept it cool. And kept the animals in hibernation. And shifted the continents around and raised mountain chains. And whatever other magic was necessary to cover other impossibilities. Oh, and you're going to hell.

Quite a few years ago, I was able to point out that Dendrochronology had a timeline long enough to show that YEC was false. I did the post on talk.orginis. An omphalos argument works against it, but then one can point out that a god creating the world to *look* old (when it isn't) is using the world to lie. I'm not sure if anyone has ever actually used those arguments on a YEC. So it's not just the problems with "The FLood" and the ark.

W. H. Heydt said:

Just Bob said:

Mike Elzinga said:

Mike Elzinga said: Especially a disaster with the minimum energy scenario of 40 kilotons of TNT going off for every square meter of the Earth's surface for 40 days and nights and which would raise the temperature of the atmosphere to over 10,500 degrees Fahrenheit within less than a week.

And that would be every second for every square meter of the Earth's surface.

They just don't get that, and they never will. The concept of heat being released by falling water just doesn't register with their ordinary experience of rain. And even if they did get it, it wouldn't matter, because God kept it cool. And kept the animals in hibernation. And shifted the continents around and raised mountain chains. And whatever other magic was necessary to cover other impossibilities. Oh, and you're going to hell.

Quite a few years ago, I was able to point out that Dendrochronology had a timeline long enough to show that YEC was false. I did the post on talk.orginis. An omphalos argument works against it, but then one can point out that a god creating the world to *look* old (when it isn't) is using the world to lie. I'm not sure if anyone has ever actually used those arguments on a YEC. So it's not just the problems with "The FLood" and the ark.

DS said:

W. H. Heydt said:

Just Bob said:

Mike Elzinga said:

Mike Elzinga said: Especially a disaster with the minimum energy scenario of 40 kilotons of TNT going off for every square meter of the Earth's surface for 40 days and nights and which would raise the temperature of the atmosphere to over 10,500 degrees Fahrenheit within less than a week.

And that would be every second for every square meter of the Earth's surface.

They just don't get that, and they never will. The concept of heat being released by falling water just doesn't register with their ordinary experience of rain. And even if they did get it, it wouldn't matter, because God kept it cool. And kept the animals in hibernation. And shifted the continents around and raised mountain chains. And whatever other magic was necessary to cover other impossibilities. Oh, and you're going to hell.

Quite a few years ago, I was able to point out that Dendrochronology had a timeline long enough to show that YEC was false. I did the post on talk.orginis. An omphalos argument works against it, but then one can point out that a god creating the world to *look* old (when it isn't) is using the world to lie. I'm not sure if anyone has ever actually used those arguments on a YEC. So it's not just the problems with "The FLood" and the ark.

Oh yes. It's all been done before. Dendrochronology, radio carbon dating, continental drift, antarctic ice cores, magnetic pole reversals, etc. None of it has any effect on those who refuse to honor the evidence. You can even point out that each of these independent lines of evidence gives the same answer and they still don't care. How sad.

W. H. Heydt said:

DS said:

W. H. Heydt said:

Just Bob said:

Mike Elzinga said:

Mike Elzinga said: Especially a disaster with the minimum energy scenario of 40 kilotons of TNT going off for every square meter of the Earth's surface for 40 days and nights and which would raise the temperature of the atmosphere to over 10,500 degrees Fahrenheit within less than a week.

And that would be every second for every square meter of the Earth's surface.

They just don't get that, and they never will. The concept of heat being released by falling water just doesn't register with their ordinary experience of rain. And even if they did get it, it wouldn't matter, because God kept it cool. And kept the animals in hibernation. And shifted the continents around and raised mountain chains. And whatever other magic was necessary to cover other impossibilities. Oh, and you're going to hell.

Quite a few years ago, I was able to point out that Dendrochronology had a timeline long enough to show that YEC was false. I did the post on talk.orginis. An omphalos argument works against it, but then one can point out that a god creating the world to *look* old (when it isn't) is using the world to lie. I'm not sure if anyone has ever actually used those arguments on a YEC. So it's not just the problems with "The FLood" and the ark.

Oh yes. It's all been done before. Dendrochronology, radio carbon dating, continental drift, antarctic ice cores, magnetic pole reversals, etc. None of it has any effect on those who refuse to honor the evidence. You can even point out that each of these independent lines of evidence gives the same answer and they still don't care. How sad.

The one advantage to using dedrochronology over some of the other methods (e.g. radio-isotope dating, which requires at least a basic understanding of Physics) is that any fool can count tree runs, and kids generally grow up accepting that trees add one ring (pair) each year. This then presents the problem of the YEC trying to explain why this common knowledge is "false". I'm not saying that they won't twist themselves into knots attempting to do so, but they're going against the old dictum of not trying to use the Bible to make claims that others know from their own experience just aren't so. And then there is the point that there are bristlecone pines in the Sierra Nevada that are old enough to have lived through the time typically ascribed to "The Flood".

TomS said: ... when they are told that radiocarbon will not work on dinosaur bones.

Just Bob said: Oh, it'll "work", and they'll work it for all it's worth: Some creationist will (at least claim to have) run a dinosaur bone through a radiocarbon test, and mirabile dictu arrived at an age of 5,000 years or some such. Then when you try to explain why that's an inappropriate test and the probable cause of the spurious date, they'll smirk because you're "squirming" and "making excuses".

Floyd's hermeneutic is summed by Colbert from 1:03 to 1:20 of the following clip:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_tc2H6SbJY

He's an internalist, a subjectivist, and an unwitting relativist.

Floyd's hermeneutic is summed by Colbert from 1:03 to 1:20 of the following clip:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_tc2H6SbJY

He's an internalist, a subjectivist, and an unwitting relativist.

Floyd's hermeneutic is summed by Colbert from 1:03 to 1:20 of the following clip:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_tc2H6SbJY

He's an internalist, a subjectivist, and an unwitting relativist.

Floyd's hermeneutic is summed by Colbert from 1:03 to 1:20 of the following clip.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_tc2H6SbJY

He's an internalist, a subjectivist, and an unwitting relativist.

Floyd's hermeneutic is summed by Colbert from 1:03 to 1:20 of the following clip:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_tc2H6SbJY

He's an internalist, a subjectivist, and an unwitting relativist.

Sorry about the multiple post. Once the Google permissions issue hit, I signed up via movable type as "Matt," not thinking at the time that this would be easily confused with "Matt Young." So I signed up again as "mattdance18," my old handle via Google, but got error messages on multiple attempts to post. Signed back in as "Matt" to see what would happen, and everything dumped at once somehow.

Again, sorry for the multiple post. Hopefully signing in as mattdance18 from now on will work, and keep the difference between myself and the moderator clear.

mattdance18

Matt, you posted your comment five times in a row.

Matt, you posted your comment five times in a row.

Matt, you posted your comment five times in a row.

Matt, you posted your comment five times in a row.

Matt, you posted your comment five times in a row.

Matt, you posted your comment five times in a row.

Matt, you posted your comment five times in a row.

Matt, you posted your comment five times in a row.

Matt, you posted your comment five times in a row.

Matt, you posted your comment five times in a row.

Matt, you posted your comment five times in a row.

Matt, you posted your comment five times in a row.

Matt, you posted your comment five times in a row.

Matt, you posted your comment five times in a row.

Matt, you posted your comment five times in a row.

Sorry about that Joe. Seems to be related to my sign in issues. I've contacted the PT crew.

I see weirdness too when posting comments. Let's get Reed onto it.

This is weird.

So you keep saying. ;-}

So, is everything working now?

Possibly, unless it's the seventh day.

The least money to get Gleason Archer's "Encyclopedia of Bible Difficulties" is about $9.00 US plus shipping, for a used copy. New, it's $79.00, plus shipping. It's too much. It is not in the local State library system, either. I am reluctant to spend that much money. From the reviews, most of it is devoted to apologetic attempts to reconcile clashing details between Biblical texts, many of them moral rather than factual, and many of them trivial. Rahab (the harlot of Jericho) lied about the whereabouts of the Hebrew spies she sheltered. How come this is condoned? Stuff like that.

Reading the reviews, I understand that Archer's major focus is to assert the unity and consistency of the whole Bible. Of course it would assist that thesis if the Pentateuch were understood to be the product of a single author. If, on the other hand, it were derived from several or many sources, this would necessarily require a process of editing and redaction, which would render it less surprising that the result is internally consistent, or mostly so; but would necessarily imply that the original texts were somewhat inconsistent in themselves, since they were not preserved or presented without this editing.

Hence Archer's insistence on Mosaic authorship, and his desperate search for clues in the text that would point that way - for the text does not say anywhere who wrote it, or when, or where.

But if the assertions quoted by FL are Archer's best shots, that search has come up seriously short. Whoever wrote Genesis 13:10 can at best be said to have heard about lower Egypt and the town of Zoar, much the same as he had heard about the Garden of the Lord. To assert with a straight face that it must mean that he'd been born in Egypt requires more chutzpah than scholarship. A list of the plants and animals mentioned in the Pentateuch includes many found in Egypt, but nothing that requires the knowledge of an Egyptian. It should be remembered that Egypt and Palestine were closely linked by trade and politics throughout the entire period. Much actual correspondence and records have been discovered. All the more surprising that the only possible mentions of Hebrews were as people already present in Palestine as far back as 1800 BCE, and there is not the faintest suggestion anywhere of the Exodus. But in any case no Palestinian literate enough to have written the materials of the Pentateuch could have been ignorant of Egypt, and would certainly have spoken to Egyptians.

Egyptian loan-words are found more often in the five books than in the rest of the OT. Not surprising, since much of the action of the Pentateuch is set in Egypt or concerns Egyptians, but very little of the rest of the OT does. What is more surprising is that one of those loan-words, "Pharaoh", is used throughout as the epithet and only address of the King of Egypt. That does not reflect the period practice of 1200-1400 BCE, and is more typical of that of the tenth century BCE - well after Moses. That would imply that the text originated at least three centuries after Moses's time, but may be later still.

As I say, if those are Archer's best shots, they fall seriously short. And single authorship does not explain the evolving vocabulary and Hebrew grammar of the Pentateuch, nor its evident repetitions of material in similar but not identical terms, nor its evident detail clashes. Special pleadings are necessary to do that, but the attempt at best lacks credibility, and is better described as shoddy.

The documentary hypothesis is reasonable, but although it does explain the salient features of the Pentateuch, it can be pushed too far. Single authorship is to be rejected as not explaining those features. Mosaic authorship is nothing more than a rumour from centuries later, and is completely unsupported by the text.

Dave Luckett said: Mosaic authorship is nothing more than a rumour from centuries later, and is completely unsupported by the text.

Just Bob said:

Dave Luckett said: Mosaic authorship is nothing more than a rumour from centuries later, and is completely unsupported by the text.

I always wonder why they have to commit so strongly and non-negotiably to that, since it's NOT part of the Bible text. Why does it have to be Moses and only Moses? I suspect that it's partly because a bunch of old KJVs (like mine) have headings like "... called The Books of Moses", just like they have a 'biblical chronology' dating Creation at 4004 BCE. So that stuff is in the bible, right? Surely no one could print something in the Bible that didn't belong there!

Just Bob said: I suspect that it's partly because a bunch of old KJVs (like mine) have headings like "... called The Books of Moses", just like they have a 'biblical chronology' dating Creation at 4004 BCE. So that stuff is in the bible, right? Surely no one could print something in the Bible that didn't belong there!

paulc_mv said:

Just Bob said: I suspect that it's partly because a bunch of old KJVs (like mine) have headings like "... called The Books of Moses", just like they have a 'biblical chronology' dating Creation at 4004 BCE. So that stuff is in the bible, right? Surely no one could print something in the Bible that didn't belong there!

Warning: tribalism ahead. Just want to get this off my chest. I often wonder if a lot of Evangelicals realize how alienating their KJV fixation is to Catholics. I add two caveats to this: (1) at one time, they were perfectly happy to alienate "papists" (2) plenty of ignorant Catholics probably don't realize that the KJV is not recognized by their church. KJV doesn't even number the commandments the same way as Catholic translations. Putting "graven images" in a separate commandment was explained to me as a dig against Catholics. Who knows? Personally, I think it is somewhat enlightened to have distinct commandments for coveting your neighbor's spouse and coveting their possessions. On the other hand, it seems reasonable to go with the Jewish numbering of commandments, which is the same as KJV as far as I can tell. Finally, you might wonder at the significance of ten when the text is so fuzzy about where to split them. Whatever the KJV might be, it is not an especially faithful translation of scripture. Treating it as authoritative is a mistake on the order of appreciating Shakespeare in the original Klingon.

Just Bob says: I always wonder why they have to commit so strongly and non-negotiably to that, since it’s NOT part of the Bible text. Why does it have to be Moses and only Moses?

And aside from the ten that made it into print, what about the other five, on that third tablet that Mel Brooks dropped?

The Ten were all that the Lord wrote on the stones. But any good orthodox Jew will tell you that there are six hundred and thirteen laws of Moses, all enumerated and considered in all their permutations in the Talmud. And would then add, "Now go and study."

I suppose I could reflect on the difference between "study" and "believe", but meh.

Just Bob said: As a teacher in South Texas (90+ % Hispanic) I more than once heard a student ask another, "Are you Catholic or Christian?"

I never quite understood the whole sin of 'coveting' business.

eric said: I don't think the proscription is against wanting stuff you buy, its against wanting stuff you can't buy.

Just Bob said: Granted. I've heard that explanation (or maybe rationalization), but I still don't get why it should be a sin to want something, even if I can't buy it.

Besides, how can one 'turn off' wanting (or coveting)? It sounds like IBIG arguing that I can decide to believe in Jesus: that I can consciously decide to believe in something that I know isn't true.

Still, it sounds like a proscription against thoughtcrime, or maybe precrime (Minority Report). And, according to the story, it seems like those Hebrews, shortly arfter getting those commandments, definitely coveted the Land of Canaan -- enough to invade, wage war, and ethnically cleanse. Maybe it's OK if your god tells you that you should covet some territory enough to spend many of your own tribe's lives to steal it.

Dear Pastor,

Is it a sin to covet Salvation and Everlasting Life and Heaven?

Just Bob said: Dear Pastor, Is it a sin to covet Salvation and Everlasting Life and Heaven?

Just Bob said: Dear Pastor, Is it a sin to covet Salvation and Everlasting Life and Heaven?

TomS said:

Just Bob said: Dear Pastor, Is it a sin to covet Salvation and Everlasting Life and Heaven?

One covets something which one does not have a right to. One does not have a right to salvation. (All of us being unworthy wretches.)

Well, if you want to get picky (and what Bible Literalist isn't also a language lawyer), it says not to covet your neighbor's stuff. It doesn't say anything about coveting what God has that you might want. And Salvation and Everlasting Life and Heaven are certainly not things that belong to your neighbor.

Also, if the Canaanites aren't your neighbor, can you covet their stuff?

Jesus was asked who counts as a neighbour. Do you remember how he answered?

See, that's one reason why I think he was one of the greatest, if not THE greatest, moral thinker who ever lived.

Screw it. I ENJOY coveting.

Just Bob said: Screw it. I ENJOY coveting.

Just Bob said:

TomS said: ... when they are told that radiocarbon will not work on dinosaur bones.

Oh, it'll "work", and they'll work it for all it's worth: Some creationist will (at least claim to have) run a dinosaur bone through a radiocarbon test, and mirabile dictu arrived at an age of 5,000 years or some such. Then when you try to explain why that's an inappropriate test and the probable cause of the spurious date, they'll smirk because you're "squirming" and "making excuses".

Scott F said: Well, if you want to get picky (and what Bible Literalist isn't also a language lawyer), it says not to covet your neighbor's stuff. It doesn't say anything about coveting what God has that you might want. And Salvation and Everlasting Life and Heaven are certainly not things that belong to your neighbor. Also, if the Canaanites aren't your neighbor, can you covet their stuff?

One presumes, perhaps without justification, that the Big Ten that God personally handed Moses, are the top ten: more important than the other 600-odd commandments. Thus violation of any one of them must be a worse sin than violation of any of those further down the list.

So: Coveting my neighbor's fully restored '58 Thunderbird, even if I don't steal it, is a sin WORSE than rape. Having the hots for his wife, even if I never do anything about it and no one ever knows, is a WORSE sin than buying and selling humans like cattle and keeping young girls as sex-slaves -- which are NOT SINS AT ALL.

Good ol' biblical morality (not a jot or tittle of which Jesus wished to change).

I have a couple of thoughts about coveting. I agree with the simplest explanation that it refers to desiring what you cannot possibly get by legitimate means, hence leading the way to other forms of immorality. I also think it ties into a more general notion of detachment, as found in Eastern religions http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detachment_%28philosophy%29 From a Christian perspective, desiring worldly things (however attained) is inferior to desiring salvation (camel through needle's eye, etc.) so it may include coveting your neighbor's Ferrari even if it means you'll work hard to buy your own.

The world economy, particularly in the US, would collapse if it weren't for "covetousness." The whole point of advertising is to create desire for things you could definitely get along without. You might be happier or even more productive with a product you found in and ad, but if they are necessities, you will find your way to them (generally speaking) without the need for a clever marketing campaign.

In my experience, Evangelicals are not models of detachment. I have seen televangelists brag about their airplanes and satellites. Having a big house and a lavish lifestyle is not seen as a distraction from God, only a few bits of hedonism are discouraged, specifically drugs and sex (and as far I as I can tell that's only for "the little people" or if you get caught). So I wonder how the injunction against coveting is interpreted, maybe just don't desire what you'd have to steal to get.

The main problem I see is including covetousness in the wrong category. I believe that people are happier if they don't agonize about stuff they'd like but don't need. So it's a good guideline. But making it a sin in itself just leads to a situation where you're unsatisfied and also potentially feeling guilty about the thoughts that got you there. I don't see the benefit to that.

Why aren't our frequent apologists speaking up here?

Apologists: Why is desiring (just desiring--there's another Commandment against stealing) something you're not entitled to such a terrible sin?

This is pure speculation on my part; but I wonder if "coveting" was seen as a simmering motivation that eventually leads conquering and stealing. What if other civilizations also saw coveting as a threat to their own security because it would eventually lead to their being attacked by others wanting their stuff?

If these documents were a compilation of salvaged writings that occurred after a long series of the Israelites being conquered and robbed by other civilizations, and after some introspection about what they, the Israelites, must have been doing to offend their god, perhaps "not coveting" was seen as a way of appearing non-threatening to their neighbors.

If one covets and projects one's desires and temptations onto others while understanding that others may not be able to stop at just coveting; then coveting is a perceived threat to security against internal and external attacks aimed at taking your things.

Human populations were expanding quite rapidly with the development of agriculture and the taming of animals. Expanding populations would be constantly up against the need for more land and food. We may be facing that problem again on a worldwide scale in the coming century. What kind of internal motivations will be most effective in generating behaviors that lead to long-term survival?

You do realise, don't you, that what this has turned into is a discussion about what the Bible says and its moral implications as a guide to conduct?

Dave Luckett said: You do realise, don't you, that what this has turned into is a discussion about what the Bible says and its moral implications as a guide to conduct?

Mike Elzinga said: Morality evolves from human experience; it isn't handed down from deities, even if someone says so.

I have in the back of my mind that someone suggested a ninth avoidance mechanism, but I cannot put my finger on it -- was it the Argument from Antiquity, so to speak: that many people have believed this stuff for many centuries?

Just Bob said:

Mike Elzinga said: Morality evolves from human experience; it isn't handed down from deities, even if someone says so.

And one who says so is invariably pushing his own agenda and backing up his bullying with threats of his 'big brother' god. Excellent social/historical analysis, BTW.

Matt Young said: I have in the back of my mind that someone suggested a ninth avoidance mechanism, but I cannot put my finger on it -- was it the Argument from Antiquity, so to speak: that many people have believed this stuff for many centuries?

Scott F said: ... Imagine all the fun you can have "interpreting" the words of the Ancients from dramatically different cultures and technologies from documents written in multiple different languages thousands of years ago. It's a whole bonanza of "Argument from Antiquity", just ripe for the picking.

Just Bob said: Screw it. I ENJOY coveting.

One would have thought that the all-wise creator-designer would have put in place barriers both to the epidemic of obesity we may observe in affluent societies around the world, as well as the disastrous overpopulation looming on the horizon of the not so remote future.

We got the reins to manage the world in our hands but we haven't been up to the challenge.

stevaroni said:

Just Bob said: Screw it. I ENJOY coveting.

I've always been bemused by the evangelical claim that American laws are "based on the 10 commandments", and this particular commandment has always provided me with extra mirth. Not only is coveting in all its forms not outlawed in modern society, but it's become practically a spectator sport. An enormous amount of popular culture is all about coveting. The television shows like the various incarnations of "The Bachelor season infinity", "The Kardashians do something" and "Real housewives of X" are all about people coveting people you're supposed to covet, living a lifestyle you're supposed to covet, are actually interrupted by commercials for things you're supposed to covet.

stevaroni said:

Just Bob said: Screw it. I ENJOY coveting.

I've always been bemused by the evangelical claim that American laws are "based on the 10 commandments", and this particular commandment has always provided me with extra mirth. Not only is coveting in all its forms not outlawed in modern society, but it's become practically a spectator sport. An enormous amount of popular culture is all about coveting. The television shows like the various incarnations of "The Bachelor season infinity", "The Kardashians do something" and "Real housewives of X" are all about people coveting people you're supposed to covet, living a lifestyle you're supposed to covet, are actually interrupted by commercials for things you're supposed to covet.

Just Bob said: By my reckoning there are only 3 of the 'commandments' that are generally prohibited by law in the US: killing, stealing, and 'bearing false witness'. The other 7 are mostly not illegal at all. A few places may still have some Sunday 'blue laws,' but hello! Sunday ain't the sabbath referenced in the decalogue. Adultery isn't punished as a crime, but may serve as a cause for divorce. I suspect a few jurisdictions still have laws on the books about things like 'taking the Lord's name in vain,' but no one is dumb enough to try to enforce them.

• #1 I am the Lord, your God
• #2 No false idols/graven images
• #3 No name-in-vain
• #4 keep holy the sabbath

• #5 Thou shalt not kill
• #6 Thou shalt not steal

• #7 No false witness

• #8 Honor thy folks

• #9 Don't cheat on spouse

• #10 Don't covet

And I'm still (sadly) amused that while 'coveting' is one of the Big Ten, rape is WAY down the list somewhere, and slavery is not prohibited at all, but in fact commanded.

If we're talking about the US Constitution, there is very little in it about commandments in the Constitution. It is mostly a matter of structure of government. And the only form of government endorsed any place in the Bible is a monarchy. Israel before the kings is condemned in the last verse of the Book of Judges.

I just took a look at the Constitution, and it seems that the only crimes that are explicitly mentioned are piracy, treason, counterfeiting and escaping from slavery. Isn't that last one only covered also by the Ten Commandments?

TomS said: ...and escaping from slavery. Isn't that last one only covered also by the Ten Commandments?

Just Bob said:

TomS said: ...and escaping from slavery. Isn't that last one only covered also by the Ten Commandments?

By which commandment? Stealing? Maybe. Jim, in Huckleberry Finn, considered himself guilty of stealing himself from his mistress.

stevaroni said:

Just Bob said: By my reckoning there are only 3 of the 'commandments' that are generally prohibited by law in the US: killing, stealing, and 'bearing false witness'. The other 7 are mostly not illegal at all. A few places may still have some Sunday 'blue laws,' but hello! Sunday ain't the sabbath referenced in the decalogue. Adultery isn't punished as a crime, but may serve as a cause for divorce. I suspect a few jurisdictions still have laws on the books about things like 'taking the Lord's name in vain,' but no one is dumb enough to try to enforce them.

Well, yeah. That's what I always tell FL and his ilk. Go down the list...

• #1 I am the Lord, your God
• #2 No false idols/graven images
• #3 No name-in-vain
• #4 keep holy the sabbath

Not only are these 4 not embedded in American law, but the First Amendment specifically forbids enforcing them. In one go we're already down 40%

• #5 Thou shalt not kill
• #6 Thou shalt not steal

True, these are part of the law, but c'mon - if you need holy writ to tell you that killing and stealing are wrong, you have serious moral compass issues.

• #7 No false witness

Only illegal in certain situations, such as under oath in court. Not applicable at all in politics under any circumstances.

• #8 Honor thy folks

Good advice, but sadly, no legal impact.

• #9 Don't cheat on spouse

Again, solid advice, but alas, only a matter of civil law.

• #10 Don't covet

Actually a widely shared, culturally enforced, American spectator sport. I'm with you, Bob. I count 2.5 out of 10 max. And it's the obvious 25% at that, the part that I'm pretty willing to bet that we as a species would have come up with even if the stories of Moses and his tablets had never made it out of the Sinai.

rob said: These are supposed to be written directly by the great inerrant bible god?

Mike Elzinga said: One of the most frequent arguments being made by the UD people is that, because they are theists, they have an "objective moral code." I haven't figured out what that really means, but it raises some interesting questions.

A little closer look at the claims of these "theists" about the objective nature of their morality - I think it means they get it from their Christian bible - reveals that it all falls apart when placed within the context of their long, dismal history of sectarian blood wars and splintering.

eric said: A claim of objective morality just means they think some acts are intrinsically/inherently good and evil; that the morality of an action is not determined by human preference or culture but has some independent value. It doesn't necessarily mean anyone (theist or non) behaves morally. So it doesn't fall apart because they do bad things. It falls apart because (1) they have no evidence for an objective morality, and (2) Euthyphro-like arguments have identified a theological problem with this claim; namely that "God-given morality" /= "objective morality."

In the old testament the coming of the Messiah was proclaimed and that was fulfilled by Jesus and he brought the new covenant and ended the old. It was because of the new covenant that the people in the old testament were saved, that's reason He said go out and preach the good news it was so that people new this. The Christians after Pentecost were persecuted until one of the persecutors realized the new way was right after a revelation by God. There is no reason to follow the example of the old history, not when a new way has been put forward that has better implications. So why persecute God for something he put an end to. You say there is no evidence of God but yet you have plenty to say about what the people did to each other from the Bible. So it's only the parts that are acts of war that are real they happened, the sacrifices happened but there is no God. What about the morality then where did that come from.

Marilyn said: In the old testament the coming of the Messiah was proclaimed and that was fulfilled by Jesus and he brought the new covenant and ended the old. It was because of the new covenant that the people in the old testament were saved, that's reason He said go out and preach the good news it was so that people new this. The Christians after Pentecost were persecuted until one of the persecutors realized the new way was right after a revelation by God. There is no reason to follow the example of the old history, not when a new way has been put forward that has better implications. So why persecute God for something he put an end to. You say there is no evidence of God but yet you have plenty to say about what the people did to each other from the Bible. So it's only the parts that are acts of war that are real they happened, the sacrifices happened but there is no God. What about the morality then where did that come from.

What fraction of the Bible is to be followed? That is, rules that are to be obeyed, or statements that are to be believed? What fraction pertain only to a local society of thousands years ago? What fraction are relevant all times and all places? When did currency transactions become OK and slavery not OK? (Jesus resorted to violence against one but didn't say a word about the other.)

BTW, what reason is there to believe that people actually did those things as they are described in the Bible? Did the Israelites actually win their land by genocidal wars, or are those just products of imagination? Justification of their occupation of the land by winning it by war sanctioned by their god, showing that their god was stronger than other gods?

Marilyn said: There is no reason to follow the example of the old history, not when a new way has been put forward that has better implications.

What always makes me laugh is that God supposedly sent Jesus to "save" his chosen people and who does he save? Everybody but the Jews. How could a father and son team with so much potential screw up a seemingly straightfoward job so badly? They probably are still arguing over strategy - sort of like the RCC is right now over the vote in Ireland.

Mike Elzinga said: What I was alluding to in my reference to their long history of sectarian blood feuds is the fact that, even among believers in the same deity, sectarians can't agree on what is moral; their ideas of what is punishable by death varies with time.

eric said: Anyone who claims to be a nonbeliever or a member of another Christian sect is just pretending to not know so that they can go out and sin. As paranoid conspiracies go, its a pretty good one.

Mike Elzinga said: They proclaim loudly that "Christianity and Christians are under siege"

Marilyn said: In the old testament the coming of the Messiah was proclaimed and that was fulfilled by Jesus and he brought the new covenant and ended the old. It was because of the new covenant that the people in the old testament were saved, that's reason He said go out and preach the good news it was so that people new this. The Christians after Pentecost were persecuted until one of the persecutors realized the new way was right after a revelation by God. There is no reason to follow the example of the old history, not when a new way has been put forward that has better implications. So why persecute God for something he put an end to. You say there is no evidence of God but yet you have plenty to say about what the people did to each other from the Bible. So it's only the parts that are acts of war that are real they happened, the sacrifices happened but there is no God. What about the morality then where did that come from.

"But gods are not real, Marilyn.

Your Bible is a book of myths. Of fiction. Like Bram Stoker’s Dracula or Marvel Comics’ The Avengers. It is not a book of true stories.

The fact that no one can explain the origin of morality to your satisfaction is not evidence for the reality of gods. That’s a classic god-of-the-gaps argument. It’s logically fallacious."

The thing about this statement is that it's said in general of your opinion.
My opinion differs from yours, but your idea of gods is different than my opinion of
the eternal presence of God, because when all the evil passes away their is one thing that remains
and that is love. You might want it to be the other way round well I say God forbid that.

Marilyn said: "But gods are not real, Marilyn. Your Bible is a book of myths. Of fiction. Like Bram Stoker’s Dracula or Marvel Comics’ The Avengers. It is not a book of true stories. The fact that no one can explain the origin of morality to your satisfaction is not evidence for the reality of gods. That’s a classic god-of-the-gaps argument. It’s logically fallacious." The thing about this statement is that it's said in general of your opinion. My opinion differs from yours, but your idea of gods is different than my opinion of the eternal presence of God, because when all the evil passes away their is one thing that remains and that is love. You might want it to be the other way round well I say God forbid that.

Mike Elzinga said: All of these arguments are essentially about their own self-righteous vanity; "Mirror, mirror on the wall; who is most moral of us all?" "Obviously we are, you vile, god-rejecting materialists!"

The worst part of all this is that demagogue politicians like Mike Huckabee, Ted Cruze, Rick Santorum, and several other presidential candidates know exactly how to exploit this type of self-righteousness. They proclaim loudly that "Christianity and Christians are under siege" at a time when they are as meddlesome as they have ever been.

The only way one of those three is a realistic threat to win is if Frank beats Clinton in the Dem primary, or Clinton has a heart attack in October 2016.

Michael Fugate said:

The only way one of those three is a realistic threat to win is if Frank beats Clinton in the Dem primary, or Clinton has a heart attack in October 2016.

And even that is a stretch given how out of touch with the majority of the electorate these guys are.

eric said: The only way one of those three is a realistic threat to win is if...Clinton has a heart attack in October 2016.

Just Bob said:

Michael Fugate said:

The only way one of those three is a realistic threat to win is if Frank beats Clinton in the Dem primary, or Clinton has a heart attack in October 2016.

And even that is a stretch given how out of touch with the majority of the electorate these guys are.

My reason for worry is that "the electorate" is not the same thing as the people who actually show up at the polls. Notice how the tea-party-craziest unelectables often win the early GOP primaries and straw polls.

Just Bob said: My reason for worry is that "the electorate" is not the same thing as the people who actually show up at the polls. Notice how the tea-party-craziest unelectables often win the early GOP primaries and straw polls.

Scott F said:

Matt Young said: I have in the back of my mind that someone suggested a ninth avoidance mechanism, but I cannot put my finger on it -- was it the Argument from Antiquity, so to speak: that many people have believed this stuff for many centuries?

That sounds about right. The "Ancients" (or "Founding Fathers" or "gods" or "Reagan") knew more or better than we do today. Or, they had ideas that have "stood the test of time". Or some such. I see the Argument from Antiquity as a variant on the Argument from Authority, except that a) conveniently, one can often "interpret" the writings of the "ancients" to justify just about anything one pleases, and b) (even more conveniently) one can't go back and interview the "ancient" authorities any more, so that they can't contradict your interpretation of what they would have done (or said or meant) in the current circumstances. Were the Founding Fathers "atheists"? The term would have had no meaning for them. Were the Founding Fathers "Christian"? Well, yes, sort of, but not by today's standard use of the term in the U.S. Did the Founding Fathers believe in a Right to Privacy? Did they put a Right to Privacy in the Constitution? Again, this is a modern term. I read recently somewhere (perhaps on Salon) that 300 years ago the Founding Fathers would have understood a "Right to Privacy" to mean a right you use the toilet. They would have been very perplexed by the question in those words. The point is, that even in just 300 years, even though they spoke the same language, we would have to "interpret" the words of the Founding Fathers in order to understand their meaning today. Imagine all the fun you can have "interpreting" the words of the Ancients from dramatically different cultures and technologies from documents written in multiple different languages thousands of years ago. It's a whole bonanza of "Argument from Antiquity", just ripe for the picking.

Marilyn said: There is no reason to follow the example of the old history, not when a new way has been put forward that has better implications.

The thing about this statement is that it’s said in general of your opinion. My opinion differs from yours, but your idea of gods is different than my opinion of the eternal presence of God, because when all the evil passes away their is one thing that remains and that is love. You might want it to be the other way round well I say God forbid that.

Mike Elzinga said: One of the most frequent arguments being made by the UD people is that, because they are theists, they have an "objective moral code." I haven't figured out what that really means, but it raises some interesting questions.

Does it mean that theists are morally superior to non-theists?

mattdance18 said: To claim that God -- and more particularly, God as conceived by a particular religious tradition -- is necessary in order to be able to make any moral judgments is a favorite claim of religious conservatives. But it doesn't hold up to much scrutiny.

For Marilyn and anyone else who thinks that morality has been dictated by God, my version of the Euthyphro problem: Is something moral because God said so, or did God say so because it is moral? If God can decree what is moral, can he then decree that murder is moral?* If God cannot decree what is moral, then is God merely a pipeline that is bound by some universal moral code that supersedes his will?

* Just for the record, I once had a colleague who "explained" to me that it was moral to stone adulterers until Jesus canceled that law with his famous "cast the first stone" speech. He did not know why it was moral at one time but not at another, but he was very certain it was.

There is a way that the question of morality resembles the question of creationism.

There is a fallacy in confusing necessity and sufficiency.

Let's not dwell on the details of how people think that there are fatal flaws in evolution.

If we decide that "pure chance" is not enough to account for "why is there something and not nothing". Or that materialism cannot provide a basis for morality. Or, let's go to an extreme and allow that the existence of God is a necessity. Even with that, we have not shown that God is a sufficiency.

Theism suffers from the same supposed fatal fault.

Strange... trying to see page 9 gives me this: Error: entry id '7096' invalid.

I get p. 9 fine. If the problem persists, pls let me know, and I will tell the webmaster. Pls include your browser and version.

I don't believe that the Euthyphro dilemma is rigorously tractible. I do believe that some form of moral kludge, something along the lines of "what is morally permissable is that option which does the least nett harm to others; what is morally estimable is that which does the most nett good" is the only way forward. I also apply Jesus's aphorism that you should judge by the practical observed results, not by the intent: "By their fruits you shall know them". I don't trust intent, which is why I'm an instinctive conservative. And the measurement of "harm" that I accept is that it damages the rights of human beings to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness", and everyone knows where I take that standard from.

Why should I think human weal or woe, thus defined, are respectively "good" and "bad"? I can only point to reciprocity. Both tend to be returned. Both are thus multiplied. The good sustains and improves the society in which it appears. The harm must be controlled, or it will destroy the human society that produces it. That human society is what sustains me. Therefore, I apply "Do as you would be done by"; I understand that "Those to whom evil is done, do evil in return". Those are purely pragmatic effects, of course. So ultimately, I find the question of "What is moral?" either impossible to answer, or too abstruse to bother with. What is moral is what works.

How shall I judge this question of what works to do harm or good? What effects will this action have? Is there some further principle I can apply? I think not. I look to the Common Law, and I find that "circumstances alter cases" and "hard cases make bad law". I think that sometimes the renunciation of principle is a principle. So I can't answer a question like "Is abortion moral?" or "Can there be a just war?". I can only answer in a specific case, once I know everything of significance about that case. And I must recognise that in many cases, I cannot judge, or have no right to judge, and therefore should not judge.

What gives me the right to judge? Another vexed question. I think I can judge where the question affects me. I think I can judge when I can reasonably expect that it will affect me. Beyond that, again, I can only make a decision case-by-case.

So, is there an absolute morality? No. Are there principles that can be applied? Yes, but don't trust them too far. And that's as far as I've come.

paulc_mv said: I often wonder if there is a basis of ethics beyond that. I feel, for example, that destruction and waste can be immoral even without a conscious victim. I have considered a thought experiment. Imagine that there is a planet with (somehow we know this) no self-aware life or anything that feels pain, but a nonetheless vibrant ecosystem. Imagine it is too far away to study close up but (again for some reason) it could be obliterated from a distance. Would it be wrong to do so? I believe in deep intuitive sense that it would obviously be wrong. This belief has absolutely nothing to do with belief in God by the way, but it may be a belief in beauty. So is it actually wrong? Is there any philosophical argument that could reach that conclusion in a rigorous way. (Of course, I may deprive conscious entities of appreciating the beauty, but can we revise the thought experiment to eliminate that line of attack?)

What about the destruction of something which is not alive - something which is beautiful or just unique? Would it be wrong to destroy Mount Fuji? Or even Balanced Rock? Pluto?

Marilyn said: There is no reason to follow the example of the old history, not when a new way has been put forward that has better implications. So why persecute God for something he put an end to.

So it's only the parts that are acts of war that are real they happened, the sacrifices happened but there is no God. What about the morality then where did that come from.

Matt Young said: * Just for the record, I once had a colleague who "explained" to me that it was moral to stone adulterers until Jesus canceled that law with his famous "cast the first stone" speech. He did not know why it was moral at one time but not at another, but he was very certain it was.

eric said:

Matt Young said: * Just for the record, I once had a colleague who "explained" to me that it was moral to stone adulterers until Jesus canceled that law with his famous "cast the first stone" speech. He did not know why it was moral at one time but not at another, but he was very certain it was.

This is called Divine Command Theory. Among current fundies, William Lane Craig is probably the most well known proponent of it in its purest form (meaning he doesn't pull any punches about horrific commands: if God commands you to kill someone, killing that person is good, because God commanded it).

"I was only following orders"

eric said:

Matt Young said: * Just for the record, I once had a colleague who "explained" to me that it was moral to stone adulterers until Jesus canceled that law with his famous "cast the first stone" speech. He did not know why it was moral at one time but not at another, but he was very certain it was.

This is called Divine Command Theory. Among current fundies, William Lane Craig is probably the most well known proponent of it in its purest form (meaning he doesn't pull any punches about horrific commands: if God commands you to kill someone, killing that person is good, because God commanded it).

TomS said: Let it be noted that if God says something, or tells one to write something, which is intended to make us believe something which is not the truth, that is not lying.

I do believe that some form of moral kludge, something along the lines of “what is morally permissable is that option which does the least nett harm to others; what is morally estimable is that which does the most nett good” is the only way forward.

eric said:

Matt Young said: * Just for the record, I once had a colleague who "explained" to me that it was moral to stone adulterers until Jesus canceled that law with his famous "cast the first stone" speech. He did not know why it was moral at one time but not at another, but he was very certain it was.

This is called Divine Command Theory. Among current fundies, William Lane Craig is probably the most well known proponent of it in its purest form (meaning he doesn't pull any punches about horrific commands: if God commands you to kill someone, killing that person is good, because God commanded it).

harold said: Because the problem with claiming that you act on a divine command is that unless God also told me about the command, I have no reason to believe you.

Matt Young said:

I do believe that some form of moral kludge, something along the lines of “what is morally permissable is that option which does the least nett harm to others; what is morally estimable is that which does the most nett good” is the only way forward.

Look up the trolley problem, or see my slides 12-20 here for recent experimental data. It is certainly true that some generally beneficial actions will necessarily harm some people, but how much harm may you inflict on one person for the benefit of a great number?

Mike Elzinga said: One doesn't have to posit a distant planet in your scenario; the destruction of such non-sentient life takes place every minute as a result of our actions. Most of the time we are not aware of our stepping on a bug or destroying some bacterium or other microscopic life forms with our fires or our use of chemicals. We all probably kill lots of things every day; and humans have been doing it in ignorance for hundreds of thousands of years.

Just Bob said:

harold said: Because the problem with claiming that you act on a divine command is that unless God also told me about the command, I have no reason to believe you.

But you have to believe them, because they're, you know, Christian. Disbelieving them is a sin in and of itself. So you're going to Hell. But then we already knew that.

Mike Elzinga said: These are childish excuses for hurting others. They display a mind that stopped developing in early childhood.

paulc_mv said: I have a strong feeling that certain kinds of destructive acts are lacking in virtue, independent of tangible harm. It does not necessarily mean that anyone needs to suffer consequences as a result, but I would think less of them for doing it.

Until we meet another sentient species, it is impossible to know how much of human ethics is universal or and how much is adaptation to our environment. But the only sense in which religion applies is in claiming some superhuman authority. It does not explain the ethical reasoning, nor does it constrain the ethics according to human concerns such as fairness and compassion.

eric said:

Mike Elzinga said: These are childish excuses for hurting others. They display a mind that stopped developing in early childhood.

I agree with the first though would hesitate to say the second. At least in the US, AFAIK the rate of violent crime is no higher in the Christian fundie population than it is in the rest of the populace. So whatever moral calculus they're doing in their heads - Divine Command Theory or otherwise - it translates into statistically similar behavior.

Mike Elzinga said: So, what is the difference between "The Devil made me do it." and "God told me to do it."?

Just Bob said: I have always maintained that whatever a putative devil is alleged to have done has to, by very definition, have been done with the foreknowledge and permission (if not direct commission) of an omniscient and omnipotent god. One who could kill that devil any time he wanted... but chooses not to.

Matt Young said:

I do believe that some form of moral kludge, something along the lines of “what is morally permissable is that option which does the least nett harm to others; what is morally estimable is that which does the most nett good” is the only way forward.

Look up the trolley problem, or see my slides 12-20 here for recent experimental data. It is certainly true that some generally beneficial actions will necessarily harm some people, but how much harm may you inflict on one person for the benefit of a great number?

Matt Young said:

I do believe that some form of moral kludge, something along the lines of “what is morally permissable is that option which does the least nett harm to others; what is morally estimable is that which does the most nett good” is the only way forward.

Look up the trolley problem, or see my slides 12-20 here for recent experimental data. It is certainly true that some generally beneficial actions will necessarily harm some people, but how much harm may you inflict on one person for the benefit of a great number?

The moral of this story is that the lines should have been closed while work was being done.

Matt Young said: Look up the trolley problem, or see my slides 12-20 here for recent experimental data. It is certainly true that some generally beneficial actions will necessarily harm some people, but how much harm may you inflict on one person for the benefit of a great number?

Possibly because killing is incidental in first case, deliberate in second

1. The nature-of-the-act condition. The action must be either morally good or indifferent. 2. The means-end condition. The bad effect must not be the means by which one achieves the good effect. 3. The right-intention condition. The intention must be the achieving of only the good effect, with the bad effect being only an unintended side effect. 4. The proportionality condition. The good effect must be at least equivalent in importance to the bad effect.

Dave Luckett said: So I can't answer a question like "Is abortion moral?"...

...or "Can there be a just war?".

I can only answer in a specific case, once I know everything of significance about that case. And I must recognise that in many cases, I cannot judge, or have no right to judge, and therefore should not judge. What gives me the right to judge? Another vexed question.

I think I can judge where the question affects me. I think I can judge when I can reasonably expect that it will affect me. Beyond that, again, I can only make a decision case-by-case.

So, is there an absolute morality? No. Are there principles that can be applied? Yes, but don't trust them too far. And that's as far as I've come.

Just Bob said:

TomS said: Let it be noted that if God says something, or tells one to write something, which is intended to make us believe something which is not the truth, that is not lying.

What about Intelligent Designers? No, it's LYING. All caps, like when someone writes 'GOD' or 'the LORD'. People lie. Only GOD can LIE.

mattdance18:

Possibly. I don't trust any principle once we come down to cases. Maybe Kant was completely right. My money's on nobody being completely right, simply because nobody is completely anything. I know about the trolley problem. It was carefully constructed to present a conundrum, so it's hardly surprising that it's a conundrum. No possible decision is demonstrably uniquely right. Surely if ever there was a demonstration of the fact that no principle can be unequivocably prescriptive, that's one such.

As for the rest, we agree, I think.

Mike Elzinga said: So, what is the difference between "The Devil made me do it." and "God told me to do it."? Is it a matter of choice? You are innocent if the Devil made you do it because you had no choice? But you are also innocent if God told you to do it and you would be punished if you didn't?

stevaroni said:

Mike Elzinga said: So, what is the difference between "The Devil made me do it." and "God told me to do it."? Is it a matter of choice? You are innocent if the Devil made you do it because you had no choice? But you are also innocent if God told you to do it and you would be punished if you didn't?

Had the angel been a bit late getting to Abraham and Isaac, how would the police report have read?

Matt Young said:

The moral of this story is that the lines should have been closed while work was being done.

Ha! You are the first one who ever said that.

Mike Elzinga said: If such a man has that much mass that he could stop a speeding trolley in an inelastic collision with him, how would you be able to push him off?

Just Bob said:

Mike Elzinga said: If such a man has that much mass that he could stop a speeding trolley in an inelastic collision with him, how would you be able to push him off?

What I always do is put a donut on the end of a fishing pole and make him lean WAY out...

Mike Elzinga said: I have always harbored a bit of "consternation" over the "fat man" version of this dilemma in which you are supposedly able to stop the trolley by pushing a fat man off a bridge and his mass will be enough to stop the trolley.

Mike Elzinga said: I have always harbored a bit of "consternation" over the "fat man" version of this dilemma in which you are supposedly able to stop the trolley by pushing a fat man off a bridge and his mass will be enough to stop the trolley. If such a man has that much mass that he could stop a speeding trolley in an inelastic collision with him, how would you be able to push him off?

eric said: For me, the timing kills it as any sort of relevant problem.

If you have only milli-seconds or seconds to make the decision, then we probably aren't going to assign moral blame to the person for either decision; both will be considered morally acceptable if you have to make a snap call. That's just like the common problem of a surgeon trying to help a dying patient: in hindsight we can say there were better or worse options, but we generally consider it a dick move to attack the surgeon for picking course of action X over Y merely because X ultimately didn't work out for the best. When you've got mere seconds to make such decisions, we generally give A's for effort. OTOH, if you say there is 5 minutes until the accident or something similar (a time in which we would expect someone to be able to exercise sober, considered moral judgment and calculus), it is really hard to see the limited choice as realistic.

I'm still wondering about how can be confident that what God tells us is true.

If God can tell us to kill people and destroy their property, can't God make his prophets tell us things that are not true?

TomS said: I'm still wondering about how can be confident that what God tells us is true. If God can tell us to kill people and destroy their property, can't God make his prophets tell us things that are not true?

stevaroni said:

TomS said: I'm still wondering about how can be confident that what God tells us is true. If God can tell us to kill people and destroy their property, can't God make his prophets tell us things that are not true?

More importantly, God stands back and allows devious agents to tell us things that aren't true. Case in point: Eve. FL, IBIG, and their ilk hold the story of Eve up as the worst betrayal ever... um... betrayed. A grievous bit of treason so terrible that every single human being ever born has to be punished for it via original sin. But at the base of it is the issue that God knowingly allowed one of his creations, the serpent, to make misrepresentations to Eve, a minor unfamiliar with the concepts of "lying", which would result in her total destruction. The lies in question, it should be noted, were information about God and his motivations. Any rational person reading Genesis should immediately jump to the conclusion that you should never listen to authority figures that purport to tell you what God is thinking. They are nothing but trouble.

Genesis 2:17 But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.

Genesis 5:5 And all the days that Adam lived were nine hundred and thirty years: and he died.

4 And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die: 5 For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.

stevaroni said:

TomS said: I'm still wondering about how can be confident that what God tells us is true. If God can tell us to kill people and destroy their property, can't God make his prophets tell us things that are not true?

More importantly, God stands back and allows devious agents to tell us things that aren't true. Case in point: Eve. FL, IBIG, and their ilk hold the story of Eve up as the worst betrayal ever... um... betrayed. A grievous bit of treason so terrible that every single human being ever born has to be punished for it via original sin. But at the base of it is the issue that God knowingly allowed one of his creations, the serpent, to make misrepresentations to Eve, a minor unfamiliar with the concepts of "lying", which would result in her total destruction. The lies in question, it should be noted, were information about God and his motivations. Any rational person reading Genesis should immediately jump to the conclusion that you should never listen to authority figures that purport to tell you what God is thinking. They are nothing but trouble.

My primary objection is that it’s contrived. That makes it useful as an illustration, but leaves in doubt whether it will help anyone make an ethical decision in practice.

If you have only milli-seconds or seconds to make the decision, then we probably aren’t going to assign moral blame to the person for either decision; both will be considered morally acceptable if you have to make a snap call.

Matt Young said:

If you have only milli-seconds or seconds to make the decision, then we probably aren’t going to assign moral blame to the person for either decision; both will be considered morally acceptable if you have to make a snap call.

I like that; it is something else that no one has suggested before (that is, to me).

Just Bob said: Which calls to mind the kinds of instant decisions police are sometimes faced with: protect yourself and other citizens vs. maybe that's not really a gun.

paulc_mv said: Well, how do you judge someone like Gen. Curtis LeMay, who had all of WWII to consider the situation, and made the same call again and again (massive bombing and civilian casualties)? Ethicists may judge him harshly, but he was never tried for his actions (though he himself said he expected to be if the Allies had lost). Anyone enjoying the fruits of the post-war world is in effect giving him tacit approval whether or not they have even heard of him.

You could argue that this is uninteresting from a philosophical perspective, but I don't agree.

Does this just mean that when push comes to shove, most everyone is utilitarian?

Curtis LeMay, on the American side. On the British, the equivalent is Arthur Harris. Or, if we're going all the way to the top, Harry S Truman, who decided to use nuclear weapons on Japanese cities, when he knew that the Japanese were putting out peace feelers, so that it wasn't a straightforward choice between the Bomb and what would have been a very bloody and possibly failed invasion of the Japanese home islands. There was also the possibility of a negotiated peace treaty without either one.

Drop the bomb, or negotiate? Truman's choice. Did he make the right one?

Dave Luckett said: Curtis LeMay, on the American side. On the British, the equivalent is Arthur Harris. Or, if we're going all the way to the top, Harry S Truman, who decided to use nuclear weapons on Japanese cities, when he knew that the Japanese were putting out peace feelers, so that it wasn't a straightforward choice between the Bomb and what would have been a very bloody and possibly failed invasion of the Japanese home islands. There was also the possibility of a negotiated peace treaty without either one. Drop the bomb, or negotiate? Truman's choice. Did he make the right one?

I think it's rather likely that the use of--the rather small by later standards--nuclear weapons on Japan may have had the effect of reducing the risk that they would have otherwise be used, with more and larger yields, in later wars, such a Korea.

Let's face it...when the military gets a new toy, they want to try it out in the field to see how well it really works. Hiroshima and Nagasaki gave various military forces that look, so they didn't have nearly the desire to use them later on. MacArthur, for instance, wanted to nuke Beijing over Chinese support for North Korea, and his signal failure to shut up about the idea when Truman told him to (and that it wasn't going to happen) was what got him fired. This a piece with the development of poison gas warfare from WW1. Both sides developed more and "better" gas munitions during WW2, but both sides pursued a "no first use" policy even if unofficially in some cases. The policies against gas use have *mostly* held since. The failures can probably be put down--at least in part--to use by people who never encountered them in the first place, either directly or through testimony of friends and relatives. Unfortunately, this also argues that some one of these years, the same relaxation of the horror of using nukes will also fade in the same way.

Yardbird, that was my point. In causing massive casualties of non-combatants, especially women and children, the use of nuclear weapons was, as you say, not much different from the firestorm raids on Tokyo, Hamburg, Leipzig or Dresden. It differed only really in the economy of means. Perhaps not even in that, considering how much industrial infrastructure was needed to produce the bombs. Truman had a decision to make, but it was like those taken by the War Cabinet in Britain to support Harris's area bombing, or FDR's go-ahead to LeMay for the Tokyo firestorm raids. The principle had already been accepted: that in war, one may deliberately cause enormous numbers of civilian deaths, not only as a regrettable side-effect, but as a main objective.

So, was it moral?

The awful imponderables gape open. Were there equally effective alternatives to area bombing of cities? If there were, is it reasonable to expect that the Allied top decision-makers could have known of them, and applied them? What of "unconditional surrender" itself? Did it actually cause greater resistance? Possibly so did area bombing. The alternative, however, to "unconditional surrender" was a negotiation over the conditions. Negotiating implies that the other party has standing - that is, legitimacy. Was it acceptable to offer such legitimacy to the Axis governments? Acceptable, that is, in the face of the practical alternatives.

I don't know, I simply don't. I can't judge, anyway. But I do know one thing: even if we agree on the principle that the most moral choice was to attempt to limit the numbers of deaths, there is still no certain outcome. Would more Japanese have died if Japan had been starved, then invaded? Certainly more Allied personnel would have, and one of them might very well have been my father.

All I can tell is that good people of sincere and intelligent judgement, in possession of the knowable facts, can come to differing opinions. Which is evidence that this thing called "absolute morality" is a crock.

IT really goes back to Douhet in the 1920s, though it's likely that he wasn't the only one to come up with the idea. He proposed that one could win a war through strategic bombing by (1) destroying the opponents industrail base, and (2) demoralizing the enemy population to the point that they would no longer support the war and their leaders. *Both* sides in WW2 bought into Douhet's argument, and each said, 'sure, but *our* people are tough and can take it without breaking.' The Allies came closer to making it work than the Germans did (the Japanese were never in a position to really make the attempt). The Allies had heavy bombers (in quantity), which the Germans never did. Even so, it wasn't until the Allies put enough bombers on target to actually create a firestorm that German civilian morale took a serious hit.

Note that I am not attempting to make a moral case for either side, only describing what the thinking was. If the relevant people had been asked at the time, they probably would have justified it with some combination of 'he started it!' and some version of the line from the movie "Patton"...Your job is not to die for your country; it's to make some other bastard die for his country. That is, the leaders on each side would rather kill a lot of people on the other side before anyone on the other side did it to their own people.

I was once at a book reading/lecture by Luis Alvarez. Since it was in Berkeley, the inevitable question was asked about his feelings about having worked on the bomb. One of the points he made was that more people died in the fire bombings of Tokyo than died from all causes (both immediate and long term) from nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki. (He also commented that he had read the minutes from the Japanese War Cabinet meetings following the bombings, and that the subject of those attacks didn't even come up.)

Dave Luckett said: Curtis LeMay, on the American side. On the British, the equivalent is Arthur Harris. Or, if we're going all the way to the top, Harry S Truman, who decided to use nuclear weapons on Japanese cities, when he knew that the Japanese were putting out peace feelers, so that it wasn't a straightforward choice between the Bomb and what would have been a very bloody and possibly failed invasion of the Japanese home islands. There was also the possibility of a negotiated peace treaty without either one. Drop the bomb, or negotiate? Truman's choice. Did he make the right one?

Dave Luckett said: I don't know, I simply don't. I can't judge, anyway. But I do know one thing: even if we agree on the principle that the most moral choice was to attempt to limit the numbers of deaths, there is still no certain outcome. Would more Japanese have died if Japan had been starved, then invaded? Certainly more Allied personnel would have, and one of them might very well have been my father. All I can tell is that good people of sincere and intelligent judgement, in possession of the knowable facts, can come to differing opinions. Which is evidence that this thing called "absolute morality" is a crock.

W. H. Heydt said: MacArthur, for instance, wanted to nuke Beijing over Chinese support for North Korea, and his signal failure to shut up about the idea when Truman told him to (and that it wasn't going to happen) was what got him fired.

This a piece with the development of poison gas warfare from WW1.

Unfortunately, this also argues that some one of these years, the same relaxation of the horror of using nukes will also fade in the same way.

Being ethical is like many other things.

It is impossible to do it "perfectly", because at the highest levels you run into conflicts between competing immediate goals, e.g. the "deliberately kill one man versus passively watch many others die" dilemma described above.

You can can try to overcome these conflicts by conforming to a rigid ideology (e.g. a Soviet Communist ideologue might argue that there is no conflict because the benefit to the many always over-rules the benefit to the individual, so the fat man must obviously be tempted with the donut on a fishing pole), but that won't work, because no ideology covers every possible conflict. In addition, rigid ideological systems tend to lead to actions that are unethical by every possible standard except a very pedantic interpretation of that particular system. It should also be noted that the mere existence of an ideology does not mean that its tenets are ethical. Lastly, the paradox of contemporary right wing American fundamentalism should be noted. It disguises itself as an ideology that demands adherence to ethical precepts, yet on closer examination is actually a carte blanche system of nihilism, literally claiming that its privileged "real American" adherents can do anything and suffer no consequences, while paradoxically judging others harshly.

A more flexible system such as the "Golden Rule", "Eightfold Path", or even, for that matter, "Ten Commandments" (at least the five that describe ethical rather than specific religious behavior), tends to be much better for covering diverse situations. Yet the price of flexibility is the inevitable ambivalence when a conflict between two goals arises.

Fortunately, as with most other things, the perfect does not need to be the enemy of the good.

Any effort to apply one of the flexible approaches described above will generally lead to more ethical behavior than no effort at all.