On Michael Huemer's Scary Bible Quotes

September 3, 2016 • John Vandivier

In this article I'm going to deal with all Michael Huemer's <a href="http://www.owl232.net/biblequotes.htm">Scary Bible Quotes. Watch for the forthcoming article on why virtually none of this matters anyway.

Lastly, I would like to not that <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Huemer">Michael Huemer is a smart dude and I enjoy much of his work. I would like to thank him for producing the Scary Bible Quotes webpage. It seems to do a decent job of testing Christians and that's something which ultimately sharpens, preserves, and benefits the church. As he correctly points out in <a href="http://www.owl232.net/biblecomments.htm">the answer to question 7 in his introduction, it is beautiful that more than 2000 years after the crucifixion, leading philosophers and scholars are still discussing Christ and the Bible. Hate is not the response of a Christian anyway. We should love everyone, <a href="http://biblehub.com/matthew/5-44.htm">whether strangers, friends, or enemies.

To the points:

On Punishing Immorality
1. Broadly, punishing/disincentivizing immorality seems to be both a good idea and also necessary for justice.
2. Specifically, these items are immoral due to God's divine will.
  1. See divine will theory 1, 2, and 3.
  2. Why would this be God's will? A key teaching in Christianity, eg the book of Job or Isaiah 55, is that God's reasons are often properly beyond human understanding, but we might guess it is ultimately to allow Jesus to enter into a planned historical context.
On Destroying Other People
1. Is killing people always bad? Would the world be better off with an early assassination of Hitler?
2. These are one-off commands in a specific historical context, not general principles of Christianity.
  1. The general principle in Christianity is 'thou shalt not kill,' these are exceptions.
  2. A contradiction? No. An exception is not a contradiction. A commandment to do X at time 1 and Y at time 2 is also not a contradiction.
3. There are lots of reasons why destroying a nation could be a good thing.
  1. We don't need to know or prove why that destroying a nation is a good thing. The mere possibility refutes the assertion that it is necessarily bad.
  2. These commands may have been practical moves to ensure a finely tuned historical context receives the person of Jesus.
  3. It may have been in order to fulfill God's other promises, such as the granting of the promised land to the Israelites.
  4. Destroying nations with other belief systems in the long run may contribute to maximizing the number of Christians and saved.
  5. Absolute destruction of an opposing nation may be better than attempting integration in some cases for a variety of practical or higher level reasons. Killing people with wrong beliefs or a history of anti-Israel behavior seems to be a major theme. This is in contrast to allowing them to live and integrating them into Israeli society. The obvious case to be made is that their integration would risk Israel turning away from God, or some other danger from integration failure, rebellions, etc.
  6. Destroying entire nations signals God's desire for moral purity, which is instructional for anyone who cares about God's desires.
  7. We can model this in a utilitarian way. Consider that every individual has a property of morality. If the value of that property is negative then a gain to morality will occur if that individual is eliminated. Now, utility may be objective if the reference frame is God. Eg God's subjective preference is also the objectively correct preference, given God's nature.
On the Evil of Biblical Law
1. The existence of moral evil demonstrates the existence of God, the source of objective morality. And perhaps the substance as well?
2. Evil in the Bible has two meanings. The Bible keeps them logically separated, but individuals often mix them. Suffering is not a moral evil, it is amoral evil.
  1. Suffering is one definition of evil. This is an unpleasant experience, but an amoral kind of evil. It can be extremely unpleasant to die, but is it immoral to die?
    1. One translation (KJV) of Isaiah 45:7 says, \"I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the LORD do all these things.\"
    2. However, this sort of evil is referring to natural disasters, suffering, death, etc. Not moral evil. We can easily see this by looking at another translation or analyzing the source text with a concordance (a great practice, Christians should be in this habit.)
    3. Another translation (NIV) renders it, \"I form the light and create darkness, I bring prosperity and create disaster; I, the LORD, do all these things.\"
  2. The other meaning is moral evil.
    1. Given that moral evil under the Christian concept is the will of God, it is logically impossible for God to do evil.
    2. However, he does allow people to commit morally evil actions. God's allowance of free will per se is a good thing, although it has some unpleasant side effects.
On Slavery and Subjugation of Women
1. This one gets it's own blog article!
Jesus, on His Second Coming
Scientific Errors
Selected Contradictions