If God ordered you to kill your child, would you do it?

Dyslexia is NOT a jerk

"Everybody must get stoned"

I must admit Terry, i wonder exactly where you are going here; what you expect to find out; what point you have in mind to make?

I have always found that hypothetical situations never lead to very interesting (or meaningful) places.

I had to vote for 'which child', because if I ever have more than one, and one is a complete terror despite great parental rearing, I might just fake voices in my head saying that god told me to do it. I'd go for a temporary insanity plea, and spend a few months in a nice cushy room. Seems worth preventing a lifetime of grief.

G_d didn't stop Joshua because he was the appointed leader of Israel after Moshe passed on. He didn't stop Jephthah, but the bible doesn't explicitly say he killed his daughter, only that he gave her to G_d. In those days that typically meant keeping her a virgin her entire life.

G_d isn't going to stop anyone from killing anyone, or tell you to kill your kids, that is just ridiculous.

Anyone who says, "G_d told me to do it." is a complete nut job.

"If god ordered you to become an atheist, would you do it?"

That's a tough one. I suppose if I really believed in that God and that he was speaking directly to me, I should probably do what he says. But I don't know if I could. I wonder if he'd then send me to hell for refusing? hmm...
I just think it's an excuse. Always.
Do you, Terry, believe that God talks to people and asks them to slaughter their children?

Any god who attempts to trap its followers in goddamn paradoxies is not worth believing in - so I would revert to the default position in sheer spite.

God doesn't talk to me, I've never heard his voice as in a conversation. Should a voice claiming to be God start telling me to do things, I'd be seeking medication. However, if God established communication with me to the extent that I believed it to be God, I'd obey His voice. I guess the gyst of the answer for me would be; determining if the voice were God's.

The Old Testament is full of such examples of scurrilous behavior, and the faithful seem willing to engage in any number of intellectual gymnastics to justify them. On the issue of Lot and his daughters, the Rabbi at AFUZZ asked me, apparently in all sincerity, if i would understand the need to assure that Lot's male line would not fail. Even he didn't have the chutzpah to claim that Lot got screwed by his daughters and slept through the whole affair. This is a collection of folk tales, it is malevolently partriarchal, misogynistic, racist and religiously elitist. The book of Genesis even inferentially acknowledges the existence of other gods. There is little to admire in the characters who inhabit those pages, and nothing worthy of emulation. It is pathetic to see how the faithful attempt to defend the text; and would be humorous, were it not for all the blood spilled in the name of religion, and the ever-present, very real threat of our polity being manipulated by those sufficiently credulous to take such nonsense at face value. Why should society tolerate your contention, or anyone else's, that god had instructed you to behave in a way which society justifiably condemns, simply on the strength of your conviction, and absent all other evidence?

All of the text of the Torah (old testament) can be interpreted in many many different ways. Remembering that the modern text has been "roughly" translated and passed down for thousands of years.

Splitter wrote:

All of the text of the Torah (old testament) can be interpreted in many many different ways. Remembering that the modern text has been "roughly" translated and passed down for thousands of years.

Yes, I understand that there are four levels of interpretation (p'shat= literal, drash=allegorical, remez=hidden, sod=secret). But do you think that the literal meaning is ever "wrong"?

That is the point of this whole exercise. If a society claims to be "under God" and to derive its morality from God's Word, who resolves the conflicts between the Bible and ethical behavior?

If someone claims that God ordered her to kill her kids, and the Bible backs her up, on what basis can we say she is wrong for acting on her beliefs?

The Bible advocates slavery, stoning rebellious sons, slaughtering your neighbors, killing witches, homosexuals, adulterers and false prophets, and denying women a voice in government.

So where does our morality come from if not from the God of the Bible?

Wrong if interpreted as a historical account of an actual event. To me it is pretty obvious for example that Jonah wasn't eaten by a big fish and spent three days inside its belly. It's of course an allegory.

"To me it is pretty obvious?"