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| Author | Topic: Why was there a need for a global flood? | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Granny Magda Member  Posts: 2462 From: UK Joined: Member Rating: 4.1 |
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Granny Magda Member Posts: 2462 From: UK Joined: Member Rating: 4.1 |
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Granny Magda Member Posts: 2462 From: UK Joined: Member Rating: 4.1 |
You know your responses are just too funny! You do not even pretend to have read my post completely. Your retorts demonstrate that you either have no idea what I am saying, or that you are just responding to every line of my post for the sake of argument. I am simply responding to your post in a thorough way, rather than ignoring most of what my opponents say, as you have been doing. You seem to be assuming that I must not have read or understood your post, or I would agree with you. This is not the case. I understand you posts perfectly well, I'm just not swayed by your argument.
I already explained why G-d did not just go poof and destroy all of the evil. This is because he wanted to first give His creation a chance to repent. But, given that chance (and you have not answered how the bizarre utterances of one man can reasonably be considered a chance, indistinguishable as they would have been from the rantings of a lunatic), there was no need for an actual flood. God could have issued his unconvincing warning, given his chance, had it rejected (naturally, it wasn't very convincing in the first place) and then simply disappeared mankind. The flood is pure theatre.
G-d does not enjoy destroying His creation. If it displeases him so much, why is he depicted in the Torah as having killed so many? He doesn't stop at the flood, after all. He gets through quite a body count.
You also ask why one person's evil should affect anyone else. Let me give you a little example, do you know what peer pressure is. Are you really going to put forth the claim that people are not influenced by their surroundings? That is absurd and you know it. I agree that those in evil surroundings will be more likely to be evil, but that still leaves free will. The very fact of free will, which you are so keen on, means that people had the freedom not to chose evil. The consequences might have been dire, but even so, they could have chosen. By simply killing them, including those unable to make their own choices, such as infants, God effectively removed their free will. Given that I do not see Noah's "warnings" as in any way convincing, or see how they could have been made known to everyone who lived, including pre-verbal children and adults with mental disabilities, I don't see any free will at all. God sent an unconvincing warning an then killed everyone when it turned out to be a barmy way of sending a message. Trulyfree will includes the option to chose what God doesn't like. All I see here is free will being trampled on.
Furthermore, this is what Judaism says, and they are the ones that have the story of the flood. If you don't believe in Judaism, don’t believe in the flood. But, you can't pick and choose what you want to believe in, in order to mock a religion. If you really want to know what the religion has to say about its own stories, you have to accept the religious explanations. You are right about my not believing it at all, but that still leaves me free to attack what I perceive as inconsistencies in the story, especially as regarding the morality of God's actions in slaughtering almost every living thing. Even within the realm of fiction, this stands out as being especially nasty. I don't find the apologetics very convincing, that's all.
Op-n M-nd writes: The Torah testifies that the animals were not mating in the normal manner, and even they were engaging in sexual pleasures without the will to have children.
Granny writes: Where exactly does it say this? I have already said that the Torah testifies to this. It says that all flesh had corrupted their ways on the earth. Why not read the Torah before asking me? Don't play dumb. I was asking for a citation. If you want to quote the Torah at me, you should give a chapter and verse citation. I presume that you mean Genesis 6:11-13, but it would be nice if you could actually say what you mean. Where exactly does it say that "animals were not mating in the normal manner, and even they were engaging in sexual pleasures without the will to have children" ? Chapter and verse please.
I was explaining that you do not have any proof that any infant existed altogether.  If there were no children (a perfectly ludicrous proposition), why would God require a flood to wipe out humanty? They would have perished anyway. Did your mother never explain to you where babies come from?
I then go on to explain how the people were using birth control, and they were acting in a selfish manner when engaging in sexual pleasures. Oh, apparently she did, but somewhere along the line, you got the idea that sex was a selfish act or somehow immoral. What a strange idea.
I was trying to point out that no people really desired to have children, and therefore you have no proof that children even existed. Where does it say (in the Torah that is) that they had no desire to have children? You are trying to get God of the hook here, with regards to his slaughter of the innocent. To imagine that a generation existed without children is the height of absurdity. No kids, no next generation, no need for a flood. Even imperfect birth control would leave plenty of innocent children around for God to kill.
Op-n M-ind writes: Granny writes: So they deserved to die because they practised birth control? Do you think that everyone who practises birth control deserves to die? Plus, if they were so keen on preventing births, why not just let mankind wipe itself out? This makes absolutely no sense if you actually understood what I was saying. Again, why must you attack what I am saying all the time? You are picking a fight here, not looking to understand my point of view. This is a debate board, not your pulpit. Don't imagine that I haven't heard all this before. Don't post on here expecting a soapbox, where we sit at your learned feet and have you explain the Torah to us. I've read it (in the regular English translation at any rate). I wasn't very impressed.
I did not even come close to telling you what you think. You say that you disagree and you don't even explain yourself. Also, to start, why not look at some of Agobots posts for starters. He wrote this in the Evidence of G-d thread. From the content of Agobot's posts, I'm not sure whether or not he or she is an atheist. I confess I may have missed that post, but it is not particularly relevant here, since I disagree. What other people think, including other atheists, is a matter for them, not me. Take it up with them. Since you ask, I do not see that God had any right to punish anybody. What would give him such a right? That he created us? Clearly the evidence is that he did not and besides, even if he did, it would not magically bestow upon him the right to murder his creations. That's what I think.
Does this mean that you are against abortion? But this is a side issue. You're not kidding! Let's not open that particular can of worms, shall we? I don't see how the two issues are related. No-one is in favour of aborting babies in case they grow up to be evil.
I must ask you nicely to start posting as if you are serious about the debated topics. You seem to be doing nothing but attacking every single word that I write. Then you accuse me of not being open minded. Please pretend to be having a serious debate or I will discontinue any correspondence with you. You have to explain where I go wrong, and ask me about things you don't understand. If all you are going to do is attack everything I say for no good reason, there is no point in my continued response. I just disagree with you, that's all. This is a debate board. Without disagreement, there would be little debate. But, since you ask, I'll do you a deal; I'll ease down the tone a little and stop putting hyphens in your name, if you stop starting sentences with "Atheists will say..." or some such. Deal?  Mutate and Survive "The Bible is like a person, and if you torture it long enough, you can get it to say almost anything you'd like it to say." -- Rev. Dr. Francis H. Wade
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Granny Magda Member Posts: 2462 From: UK Joined: Member Rating: 4.1 |
Hi Open Mind. Firstly, I would like to say that I appreciate your detailed response. You have clearly put a lot of effort into t, and I hope that if I must describe your arguments in less than flattering terms, you will not take it too personally.
Whether the warning was sufficient or not is moot because they did not even deserve a warning to begin with. You are the one who first brought up the issue of warnings, in Message 22, where you said;
Open Mind writes: The real reason given for the flood and not any other method of destruction was to give the people of that generation a time to repent. Make your mind up. If the entire reason for the flood was to avail humanity with a chance to repent then the believability of the warning is of obvious and vital importance. Giving a chance to repent but not giving a sufficient warning would be equivalent to giving no chance for repentance at all.
You are recommending a revelation of G-d's presence and then a destruction of some sort. The problem with this proposal is that it goes against the whole reason for the worlds existence. G-d does not want robots or puppets. {snip } If there was scientific evidence of G-d performing miracles all of the time, humans would not be able to have the proper amount of free will, and the world would not serve its purpose. Therefore, a revelation of G-d's glory is completely useless for the purpose of this world. There is a major problem with your explanation here. If proof of God’s existence denies free will and if this is undesirable to God, why does he reveal himself to Noah? God spoke to him directly. According to your argument, this should leave Noah, God’s favourite, without the requisite free will. This is absurd. Again, you can’t have it both ways.
Now if G-d wanted he could have destroyed the world in a miraculous manner having given the humans enough time to repent. However, where would Noah and his children have their free will from. Seeing the power of G-d, they would have no choice to do bad anymore, and there would be no purpose in the world anymore. This is clearly false, for two reasons. Firstly, your argument about proof of God denying humanity free will does not follow. A revelation of the divine would certainly make the choice to worship God a no-brainer, but the choice to not worship would still exist. That’s what free will is. You said yourself that people at the time of the flood completely believed in God, they just chose not to follow his law or worship him. You can’t have it both ways Open Mind.Secondly, the idea that a global flood could be construed as a natural phenomenon is bizarre. Even by the scientifically stunted standards of the time 40 days and nights of rain would have stuck out as being very far from normal. What’s more, the fact that Noah’s family were warned in advance what would happen rubbishes any idea of them explaining the flood by reference to natural forces (as a side note, the dichotomy between natural and supernatural forces seems quite a modern concept for such primitive and superstitious people). If my father warned me that God was going to flood the world and we needed to build an ark, I would think that he had lost it. When the world really was flooded however, I would convert on the spot! What more proof of God could one require? Even a personal appearance from the big man himself could be more easily explained away (as a hallucination). If the flood is only necessary to preserve the free will of Noah’s family, then it is not fitting for that purpose.
It happened in a natural manner, and even Noah and his sons had no evidence that G-d actually made the flood. Get real. Noah was warned by God himself! What more evidence could you want?! Don’t be silly.
In fact, according to the Torah and the Jewish tradition, the Tower built in Genesis Chapter 11 verses 1-9, was made (among other reasons) to prevent the sky from falling as it had in the time of the flood. They considered the flood to be nothing more than a natural occurrence that could be prevented with the right technology. It says no such thing in the Torah. Jewish oral tradition may say this, but unless you can provide a citation to substantiate this claim, it is indistinguishable from something you just made up. It is no use you simply claiming that “Jewish oral tradition says...”, without providing a citation to back up this claim. I am not accusing you of anything, this is simply how a debate works. If you want to cite a source, you have to provide a proper citation. Further, what Jewish oral tradition may say is of no importance to me. It is merely supposition, made after the event, a vast collection of post hoc rationalisation. So far as I am concerned, it is of no more value than your opinion, my opinion or anyone else’s opinion. If you want to make references to the arguments made by Jewish oral tradition, fair enough, but don’t expect me to attach any more significance to their opinions than I would attach to “This bloke I met in the pub says..”.
The world was created with precise laws of physics that seem to always follow a pattern in order to hide G-d's presence and give everyone free will. If this is the case, then why does God so often talk directly to his favourite humans? By your argument, he is turning all his most favoured into robots.
Why did G-d not just let the evil continue, after all, the humans should have free will? To answer this question you must first realize that the evil in this world pains G-d tremendously. G-d has created this world with the sole purpose of giving pleasure to people who chose good. Imagine how G-d would feel if these people disobey G-d and chose to not earn the reward. Tough. You don’t seem to understand what free will is. Free will is not “free unless you do something that displeases me”. That is not freedom.
Furthermore, evil is actually self destructive to the sole. Evil destroys fish?! The fiends! 
It is also possible that their soles had been completely tarnished with the evil that G-d knew that there was no return. This is because according to Judaism, the evil that a person does impacts his sole and creates a stronger desire to do more evil. When a certain point of evil is reached, it may not be possible for true free will to take place because the evil is just to strong. As far as I can tell this is just waffle. You have no idea whether the soul even exists, let alone whether it can be corrupted. Even if it can be corrupted, that is God’s fault; he is the one who made t after all. God seems to be blaming everyone else for his own shoddy design here. He must have known from the beginning that all this would happen and yet he deliberately engineered it, before acting as though the failure of his little project is some kind of surprise.
I think you are saying that free will always exists no matter what a persons surroundings are, and you consider it wrong for G-d to kill people because it necessarily removes their free will. Pretty much. Unfortunately, this line of argument has been deemed off-topic by Adminnemooseus, so I’m not really able to pursue it further. Suffice to say I don’t agree with your concept of what free will is or how it works.
It sounds like you are saying that you consider G-d's actions to be immoral. Yup. Unfortunately, I think we are veering off-topic with this as well. All I will say here is that I do not accept God-based definitions of morality, but that really is another argument.
You were right about the actual verse. Genesis Chapter 6 Verse 12 states that all flesh had corrupted its way upon the earth. This verse does not mean anything particularly to someone that is just reading the text. In fact, this verse does not really have any basic translation that would mean anything. It certainly is pretty nonsensical . I am glad that you have admitted that your original claim about what the Torah says is not true though.
The Jewish oral tradition gives the meaning of this verse to be exactly what I have told you. I suggest that you give this verse some thought to see exactly how this explanation makes perfect sense over here. Well, (surprise, surprise) it’s not making much sense over here. By what mechanism can human evil corrupt a starfish? Or a mole, or a stick insect? This is a blatantly absurd claim that would appear unnecessarily far-fetched in a bad sci-fi novel. It’s just silly. What could the concept of evil possibly even mean for lichen? Further, free will (the only reason you have so far provided for a flood) doesn’t seem to stand out as being relevant to animals and plants. Why not just cure them? God could surely just snap his divine fingers and solve this problem, without any need for death. You did say that he doesn’t enjoy killing his creations. If my pet animals have a problem, I take them to the vet. I would only euthanize them if there was no other option, a contingency that clearly could not apply to God...
The point of the flood was not to wipe out humanity but to remove the evildoers. G-d felt that the amount of evil in the world had reached a limit beyond which would not be considered acceptable. Also, Noah was having children, and G-d wanted to give his children a chance of having the right to choose good and not be overcome by the evil. Something he could easily have achieved by simply moving the Noah family to a physical location where they would have remained unmolested. Again, no need for mass murder.
Just as a side note, the Torah gives the ages of the people in that generation as being much more than 100 years. It would have taken a long time for humanity to disappear even if nobody would have children. What, is God short of time or something? This argument has him coming across as somewhat impatient for a supreme being.
I was trying to explain that it was very possible that nobody was having children, and if they were it was the minority of people and not the majority. A completely unbelievable proposition. As you doubtless know, reliable birth control did not exist until very recently. There is no way that such ancient people could have practised effective birth control and any argument that rests upon such a glaring technological anachronism is ridiculous. You might as well suggest that they had hovercrafts.Unless you can provide some kind of evidence that there were no babies at the time of the flood (hint; you can’t), then the assumption must be that there were, just like during every other period of history. If you want to base your argument upon bizarre and improbable propositions, you need to back them up with evidence, otherwise, they are irrelevant. Now, I have to pull you up on something here. If you are going to quote me, please quote me properly, do not alter what I wrote. This is what I’m talking about;
Open Mind’s version of Granny Magda writes: Oh, apparently she did, but somewhere along the line, you got the idea that was a selfish act or somehow immoral. What a strange idea. The real Granny Magda writes:
I have bolded the relevant word, just for clarity. Now you may find the word “sex” somehow offensive, but I don’t. If you quote me, please leave my words intact. I chose my words carefully and would thank you for leaving my prose unaltered, especially since the version you quote makes absolutely no sense. If you absolutely must shy away from writing the word “sex” (weird behaviour in my opinion), please insert {expletive deleted} or something, so that people know that you have altered my quote.
Oh, apparently she did, but somewhere along the line, you got the idea that sex was a selfish act or somehow immoral. What a strange idea. If you read through my post carefully you will see that I said that the evildoers were engaging in ual pleasures as an act of selfishness. Only the evildoers were doing this. I did not mention that all ual pleasures are evil or immoral. Yet you can’t even bare to write the word...
You have to admit that you did not see me actually express this idea that you claim exists in my head. I will tell you what you have told me many times: Stop telling me what I think. It's insulting. Ooh, touché!  OK, let’s drop this side topic shall we. It’s not really relevant.
I was only trying to point out that your idea of loving parents with children is contrary to the world that was portrayed in the time of the flood. I understand you did not say anything about loving parents. But you seem to be ignoring the horrible world that was portrayed at that time. I am not talking about loving parents, or any other parents. I am referring to God’s massacre of innocent babies and your absurd rationalisation of this based upon a baby-less world (or almost baby-less). This idea of no babies to kill is a pathetic attempt to get God off the hook.
I mention this to anyone that thinks they know what the Torah is saying. Do not think that you have the true story after reading a Christian translation called the old testament. This does not yield the truth about the Torah. In order to understand the Torah you must read the actual untranslated version of the Hebrew text, as well as the oral tradition that was meant to explain the seemingly cryptic written text. So far as I am concerned this is a very dishonest way of hiding the inaccuracies and outrages of the Torah from those who would question them. You are aware aren’t you that the exact same claim is made for the Koran? The Koran is infallible, but can only be properly understood in the original Arabic, indeed, it can only be fully understood by a native speaker of Arabic. If we are to accept your claims for the Torah, how are we to dismiss the same claims when they are made for the Koran? Are you a native Arabic speaker? Have you read the Koran in the original Arabic? If not, how do you dismiss Islam? If there are translation differences between the modern English-language translations (which I acknowledge there are), then please make reference to them on a case-by-case basis, don’t just dismiss the translations with a single arrogant gesture.
I am sorry if certain people are not true atheists according to your standards, but I can't start differentiating between all of the millions of different types of atheists you know. Not what I was saying at all. There is no such thing as a “true atheist”, as you note. The only thing that unites atheists is a shared lack of belief in God(s). All I was saying was that I was unsure whether Agobot self-described as an atheist or not. It’s not really important though.
However, I was speaking for some of the atheist that I have heard here even though you may not consider them to be real. Real or not, I don’t care what other atheists think. I am debating you, not anyone else. Bring me your opinions or discuss mine. Other peoples are irrelevant and I am not necessarily going to support other peoples’ opinions just because they are atheists.
You think that G-d does not have a right to destroy his own creation. That is exactly what I believe, but I think that we are veering off-topic once again, so I’m going to leave this aside in case we bring down the wrath of Moose upon us!
You have constantly been stating that it is wrong for G-d to kill the infants because they did nothing wrong. I am only pointing out that this entire argument would be considered hypocrisy if you yourself do not think anything is wrong with abortion of innocent babies. I do not know what you opinion is, but I was mentioning this as a side note. Well I think it’s best if you don’t mention it. That is another kettle of fish entirely, let’s not go there. In summation, I do not see anything in your posts that would necessitate a flood, rather than a more direct miracle. Your free will-based arguments are self-contradictory. Your other arguments require evidence that is not forthcoming. In short, I remain unconvinced. Mutate and Survive "The Bible is like a person, and if you torture it long enough, you can get it to say almost anything you'd like it to say." -- Rev. Dr. Francis H. Wade
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