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The Ongoing Robert Tulip - Ant Grudge Match - First Bell! Ding!!! Ding!!!

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ant

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Re: Introduction

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Robert Tulip wrote:The racist politics of the Ten Commandments are embedded in new textbooks approved by Texas, and therefore likely to be available for national US use. See http://www.examiner.com/article/texas-t ... -spotlight

http://www.deathandtaxesmag.com/231604/ ... stitution/ is another article showing the systematic inversion of facts promoted by powerful interests who claim to believe in the Ten Commandments, but apparently have no compunction regarding breaking Commandment Nine against lying by bearing false witness against America's Founding Fathers.

The USA was founded in the enlightenment values of the separation of church and state. But now the throwbacks in Texas are rewriting history, claiming instead that US democracy is based on religion, especially the Ten Commandments.

Some further religious debate on this is at http://christiannews.net/2014/11/20/tex ... g-fathers/
:no:
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Re: Introduction

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Flann 5 wrote:I really have to challenge Robert here. This is absurd nonsense. The ten commandments are racist and genocidal!? Of course Robert doesn't believe any of this actually happened. It's all myth remember.
Come on Flann and Ant, you can do better than that! How about actually trying to prove I am wrong in specifics instead of issuing these vague head-shaking condemnations. Everything I say is up for falsification.

My allegedly absurd comments, which I am entirely happy to defend, are above at http://www.booktalk.org/post135217.html#p135217 As I explain there, The extant Book of Exodus documents this "smash their groves" instruction as the first of what it actually calls the Ten Commandments in Exodus 34. It is overt mongering of cultural genocide.

It reads Flann, as though your entirely fallacious reasoning is along the lines of 'Of course the Bible never promotes genocide since that would be unethical and most unhelpful to our efforts to propagate the faith today, given that genocide is not as popular as it used to be. Therefore observations that the Bible says evil things are just myth.'

What is most certainly not myth is the historical observation that a violent monomaniacal patriarchal dogmatic cult overthrew the diverse spiritual traditions of ancient Israel during the early Iron Age, and that this new patriarchal warrior doctrine formed the dominant ideology of the Bible.
Last edited by Robert Tulip on Tue Nov 25, 2014 12:08 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Introduction

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Robert Tulip wrote:It reads Flann, as though your entirely fallacious reasoning is along the lines of 'Of course the Bible never promotes genocide since that would be unethical and most unhelpful to our efforts to propagate the faith today, given that genocide is not as popular as it used to be. Therefore observations that the Bible says evil things are just myth.'
No,that's not what I am saying Robert.
I'm saying that you and Dawkins et al interpret these text to support your agendas.
You ignore Christian responses which show that the command to destroy the Canaanites is not morally equivalent to racist genocide.
For instance the Israelites themselves were exiled to Babylon by God and punished for their sins,so it was not a matter of tribal race.
You just assert that it's racial genocide.Some atheist critics complain that God did not intervene in the holocaust and therefore must be immoral if he exists.
Arguably he providentially judged the Nazis in the outcome of the war but that's an incidental point.So if God judges wickedness historically that's not the same as genocide.
Here's the link to William's talk and you might watch it and engage with his arguments.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=V7B5jokJsqk
As a matter of interest do you think the French revolution was morally justified?
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Re: Introduction

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These matters will always fall on theological deaf ears.

:no:
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Re: Introduction

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ant wrote:These matters will always fall on theological deaf ears.

:no:
Yes, yours. Trolls don't engage on content or evidence. They rely solely on assertion.
Flann5 wrote:Here's the link to William's talk and you might watch it and engage with his arguments.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V7B5jokJsqk
I have done Flann the courtesy of listening to this tedious hour long sermon which he claims without explanation justifies the Ten Commandments. It is a shockingly desperate and typical example of tendentious clutching at straws to rationalise a predetermined faith position.

This video talk opens up by trying to get our trust by citing Nietzsche’s concept of a hermeneutic of suspicion. But unfortunately he uses this to justify Old Testament morality, challenging the secular critique of religious violence. In mocking Richard Dawkins for finding the faith of Yahweh strange and genocidal, the speaker typically uses apologist tricks to justify an empty faith while making vacuous and baseless attacks on secular ethics.

His theme is that God has a proven good character, while atheists are “jolly undecent”. He says we can read the Old Testament just as a story, treated as a whole with integrity. His justification for Joshua’s destruction of Jericho is completely airheaded and confused, with an argument that assumes its conclusion that God is real and good as imagined in Christianity.

Williams tells us the story says the Canaanites are wicked and abominable, so the genocide by the Jews is justified, especially since Israel is the unique chosen race, receiving miraculous commands. He calls this a massive amount of epistemic warrant. I call it bullshit.

Supposedly the Bible authenticates Moses with this miraculous epistemic warrant, conveniently ignoring the fact that Moses did not actually exist but was a pure invention of Jewish propaganda. He says the Bible is self-justifying as supernatural, so attempting to assess it against evidence is an illegitimate technique for the faithful. He says you can’t compare Biblical terror with modern terror, since God was miraculously present for the Biblical cases, due to this bizarre phrase ‘epistemic warrant’, which apparently just means faith in God.

His red hot zinger argument is that Hitler supported Darwin, so anyone who supports the evil dogmas of the Old Testament is no worse than a Darwinist. Ouch!

People wonder both why I have patience to engage with Flann and ant, and why I treat their comments with impatient disdain. The abysmal quality of the arguments that Flann has raised here to call my opinions absurd illustrates that this is really like a cat playing with a mouse, a morbid fascination.

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Re: Introduction

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Just so we're clear on this point: Atheist Mind, Humanist Heart has nothing to do with the sort of take-no-prisoners discussion we're seeing here about religion. No one should shy away from the book thinking it's just more of the same.

That said, and continuing on the tangent, I don't think we need to make arguments tinged with politics to show that the only good option is to reject God as warlord, to condemn what that character commands. We don't need to call him racist or genocidal; all we need to do is ask anyone who defends him if he has a child or a wife. In any circumstance whatsoever, could dashing their heads against rocks, raping, beheading, or slaying them be justified, unless that person is willing to cede his humanity? It's dismaying to see attempts to moralize murderous orders, to harmonize this God with a loving universal God. It suspiciously resembles the moral relativism that people of religion condemn in other circumstances: "It's okay in this case when you take into account the special circumstances, and the fact that God is God."

God is supposedly a moral exemplar, but he can't be if he's going to say it might be all right to murder my family. People who claim otherwise are trying to square the circle. This God is an artifact of Iron age tribalism whose morality is, to say the least, as imperfect as any human's.
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Re: Introduction

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Flann 5 wrote:you and Dawkins et al interpret these text to support your agendas.
Yes, exactly right. And the agenda I try to share with Richard Dawkins is to promote an accurate scientific understanding of reality, and to expose the false delusions of traditional religion. By contrast your foolish agenda is to promote error.
Flann 5 wrote:You ignore Christian responses which show that the command to destroy the Canaanites is not morally equivalent to racist genocide.
I watched that feeble apologetic video you linked, and it shows nothing of the sort. Your assertion that it does reveals your intellectual incapacity. If anything, that video gives a good basis to understand how genocide is justified by stigmatising the victim, with the speaker explaining how the Bible condemns the Canaanites as wicked and abominable. The appalling thing is that Williams takes this assertion as Gospel Truth, saying that since God called them wicked it must be true. How many racial genocides have started that way?
Flann 5 wrote:For instance the Israelites themselves were exiled to Babylon by God and punished for their sins, so it was not a matter of tribal race.
What a completely illogical argument! The Bible notes that the Jews were taken into captivity by the Babylonian Empire because of their evil behaviour, and somehow this is meant to justify the genocidal Bible dogmas such as the Real Ten Commandments beginning with smash the groves of the heathen. I understand that Flann and ant will go into denialist meltdown over that comment, but it is very simple for anyone to read it and form their own view from Exodus 34.
Flann 5 wrote: if God judges wickedness historically that's not the same as genocide.
That is an extremely disturbing view you are presenting Flann. You start from the assumption that God is revealed to some and not others, and that this revelation can then be used to accurately and absolutely define a culture as “wicked” so its land can be stolen and its culture obliterated. Don’t you get why that is an evil dogma?
Flann 5 wrote: Here's the link to William's talk and you might watch it and engage with his arguments.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V7B5jokJsqk
See my comments in previous post on this disgraceful justification for genocide.
Flann 5 wrote: As a matter of interest do you think the French revolution was morally justified?
Justification in politics is an extremely complex question. The revolutionary ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity involved a moral advance over the old regime dogma of the divine right of kings, as an effort to bring modern reason to bear on politics. But the revolution had its own dogmas and bigotries, seen in the destructive use of terror as an instrument of total war, paving the way for Napoleon. I like Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France as a great statement of conservative values, indicating how the English approach to common law precedent provides more sensible outcomes than the French civil code with its effort to apply coherent rational principle.
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Re: Introduction

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Robert Tulip wrote: If anything, that video gives a good basis to understand how genocide is justified by stigmatising the victim, with the speaker explaining how the Bible condemns the Canaanites as wicked and abominable. The appalling thing is that Williams takes this assertion as Gospel Truth, saying that since God called them wicked it must be true. How many racial genocides have started that way?
You are supremely confident,Robert, that God does not exist and therefore could not have pronounced judgement on anyone for their wickedness. And if there even is such a thing as wickedness from your naturalistic evolutionary worldview is itself questionable.
So from your worldview perspective God could not have commanded this and therefore it must be Israelite stigmatizing of them for racial genocidal justification.
You ignore of course the warning to the Israelites (in the same book) not to imitate the abominations of the Canaanites or the land would vomit them out too,as it colourfully puts it.This happened in the Babylonian captivity which for you is simply a coincidence of history.So the issue was not race but wickedness.

There does seem to be achaeological evidence supporting the biblical claim of ritual child sacrifice being practiced and what can be known of their religion and gods is sordid at best.
You hedged your bets on the revolution of reason. I wonder why?
Last edited by Flann 5 on Thu Nov 27, 2014 9:43 am, edited 3 times in total.
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Flann 5 wrote: You are supremely confident, Robert, that God does not exist
My confidence is that in principle natural explanations are superior to supernatural explanations. I had an interesting chat about God the other day, around the hypothesis that the laws of physics could be driven by an entity outside our universe. But that cosmological speculation makes no difference to our ethical understanding of wickedness, and there is absolutely no evidence to support the existence of God. We have no way of knowing whether the laws of physics are intrinsic or extrinsic to the universe. And the relevant point here is that the laws of ethics, if such can be said to exist, can best be understood within an evolutionary scientific framework as intrinsic to natural reality.
Flann 5 wrote: and therefore could not have pronounced judgement on anyone for their wickedness.
When people proclaim that others have been judged by God, they violate the Biblical principle ‘vengeance is mine saith the Lord’ (Romans 12, Deuteronomy 32). I do think the Bible is correct in saying the wrath of God is against those who destroy the earth (Rev 11:18), so God=Nature has pronounced judgement on the wickedness of current destruction of biodiversity. I disagree with the traditional imperial Christendom line that the unbaptised will go to hell, although the psychology around baptism is complex. I especially disagree with the history written by the victors which says the vanquished deserved their fate, as for example in Joshua’s condemnation of the Canaanites as abominable. It is a self-serving hypocritical claim that might is right and that God is on our side.
Flann 5 wrote: And if there even is such a thing as wickedness from your naturalist evolutionary worldview is itself questionable.
Anything that reduces natural complexity is wicked from my naturalist evolutionary worldview. The arrogance of traditional dominion theology is supremely evil with its alienated creationist nonsense.
Flann 5 wrote: So from your worldview perspective God could not have commanded this and therefore it must be Israelite stigmatizing of them for racial genocidal justification.
Yes. The Bible agenda is to justify land theft. As Joseph Conrad said in Heart of Darkness, the conquest of the earth is not a pretty thing.
Joseph Conrad wrote:They were conquerors, and for that you want only brute force—nothing to boast of, when you have it, since your strength is just an accident arising from the weakness of others. They grabbed what they could get for the sake of what was to be got. It was just robbery with violence, aggravated murder on a great scale, and men going at it blind—as is very proper for those who tackle a darkness. The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much. What redeems it's the idea only.
Flann 5 wrote:You ignore of course the warning to the Israelites (in the same book) not to imitate the abominations of the Canaanites or the land would vomit them out too, as it is colourfully put it. This happened in the Babylonian captivity which for you is simply a coincidence of history. So the issue was not race but wickedness.
Flann you are so taken in by propaganda, what Conrad calls the redeeming idea. The Jews went to captivity because the Babylonians did not want to allow them to be free. It was not because the Jews worshiped idols. The claim that the Jews conquered Canaan is entirely unsupported by archaeological evidence, which shows that the Exodus never happened. To say the Canaanites deserved their fate because they worshipped idols is a thoroughly arbitrary assertion of divine right to rule, a post hoc moral justification of conquest. We still see this principle of power today in the British Royal slogans God and My Gun (Dieu et mon droit) and Fuck You (Honi soit qui mal y pense). Pardon my rough translations from the Latin.
Flann 5 wrote: There does seem to archaeological evidence supporting the biblical claim of ritual child sacrifice being practiced and what can be known of their religion and gods is sordid at best.
The relation between monotheism and cultural evolution is highly complex. Many former cannibal societies welcomed Christian evangelical missions as representing the coming of the light. But others say the church taught them to close their eyes to pray, so when they opened them again their land would be gone. Child sacrifice is a purported practice that sits on a moral continuum which also includes modern practices of adoption and abortion, and the common practice in primitive societies of allowing disabled children to die. It is not a simple matter to suggest a hunter-gatherer society should have the same compassion practices as a modern industrial society. Ancient Judaism can also be depicted in a negative light, as seen in the writings of the Biblical Jewish prophets who were highly critical of their own society. Demonising the Canaanites as child murderers to justify the theft of their land plays into an ongoing colonialist trope.
Flann 5 wrote: You hedged your bets on the revolution of reason. I wonder why?
It is simple. Ethics equals reason plus evidence. Revolutionary morality severs reason from evidence, placing ideology above facts. By contrast, an evolutionary morality seeks to learn from precedent, retaining what is good in existing practices. The problem with the Ten Commandments, both in their well known version from Ex20 of the tablets of stone broken by Moses and in the lesser known version from Ex34 of the replacements supplied by God, is that they present a revolutionary morality (have no other Gods = smash their groves) which denies any value to the society it is conquering.
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Re: Introduction

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ant wrote:These matters will always fall on theological deaf ears.

:no:
But you're not providing any arguments at all, cogent, nonsense or otherwise...
I am just your typical movie nerd, postcard collector and aspiring writer.
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