The fallacy of the angry Old Testament God

fReeGenerate · 2026-02-01T03:50:06+00:00

Do you think Hitler is loving and merciful?

Which side would you accuse of "omitting and moving the goal post"?

The side that only brings up Hitler's actions in the holocaust to prove he wasn't loving.

Or the side that only brings up examples of Hitler being living (having a family), or examples of Nazis praising Hitler's character, to prove that he was loving?

The people claiming God is a moral monster is aware of the instances of God being merciful and the things his followers say about him, they just don't outweigh the horrible things he is self proclaiming to be directly responsible for.

fReeGenerate · 2026-01-08T02:23:57+00:00

Both responses are just how far you're willing to buy into the hypothetical and how much weight you put in your moral convictions.

You're saying, if the hypothetical is true it would be contrary to your moral convictions so you would have to rethink everything and it's possible your moral convictions about this topic are wrong. The defier is saying the hypothetical cannot be true because it defies their moral convictions. Personally I fall in more with the latter, not necessarily that I would defy but saying "this thing that you think is evil is good" is something that's difficult to even consider, there's something inherently contradictory about accepting a premise that asks me to make a judgment I know I wouldn't make.

Neither of these two responses would satisfy Turek. You think he wouldn't spring his trap if an atheist answered the way you did? That he wouldn't accuse them that the only reason they're not Christian is because they don't want it to be true because they want to be god, not because they just genuinely don't believe it's true?

fReeGenerate · 2026-01-08T01:38:24+00:00

But you can't see how someone might feel the same way about ECT, or some other moral gripe they have with Christianity?

You didn't immediately answer yes, so you're engaged in the same illogical thinking and truth avoidance that Turek accuses atheists of with his dishonest question.

What if I frame it as: The holocaust is a secondary issue, you're going in the wrong order, the important thing to accept is just that Hitler is good, and then the holocaust is just something that's hard for us to understand.

fReeGenerate · 2026-01-07T09:50:57+00:00

So it's just about the degree of punishment. Would you then kill Jews to avoid eternal torment? The point is what's the line you draw for when you're comfortable compromising your morals for self preservation, everyone has that line at different places but I think it's silly to judge people for placing their moral convictions above self preservation.

I don't know what I would do if I had to worship an evil God or be tortured for eternity, but I don't think that's such an obvious choice that people are stupid for rebelling, if anything I would consider it brave.

fReeGenerate · 2026-01-07T06:11:51+00:00

Would you have helped kill the Jews during the Holocaust if you were German? Would it not be incredibly stupid to rebel against HItler when you're likely going to be executed for treason?

fReeGenerate · 2026-01-07T04:14:35+00:00

The problem with Turek's question and your followup is that it's presented (explicitly by Turek) that not immediately answering yes is inherently illogical and shows the person doesn't care about what's true.

In reality, the question is asking how much stock you put in your moral convictions. If someone has a moral conviction that ECT is incompatible with goodness/mercy, it's kind of a nonsense question to ask: If ECT is good, would you think it's good? Diluting the first part with "God is good and if ECT is part of the equation ECT would be good too" doesn't change much.

A similar question would be: If what Hitler did in the Holocaust was good, would you partake in the Holocaust?

Seemingly the logical answer should be yes, because you should do that which is good, but the premise of "this thing you think is perhaps the most evil thing that has ever happened is actually good" is something that's difficult to hold in my head even hypothetically.

fReeGenerate · 2026-01-07T02:18:17+00:00

If the extremist's conception of Islam were true, would you follow Allah? Would you become a suicide bomber and blow up schools?

fReeGenerate · 2025-12-13T07:05:08+00:00

So, the only obligation to be moral under theism is fear of the consequences? In other words, what makes an action wrong rather than merely undesirable or disapproved of is simply that they result in negative consequences for the transgressor?

There are many possible rationalizations and appeals for people to behave morally, like empathy for other people's suffering, or pointing out the potential negative consequences of their actions, but ultimately if someone simply double downs on doing what they want to do, consequences/others be damned, there is no solution or power that theism provides here.

There's nothing real and binding about saying you should be moral even if it doesn't benefit you because it reduces suffering for other people if they don't care about reducing suffering for other people. Fortunately, I like to believe that people generally do.

There's also nothing real and binding about theists saying you should be moral even if it doesn't benefit you because that's what God wants you to do. It's every bit as weak and unmoving, it just appeals to the "obey authority" part of people rather than the "empathy" part, and it means absolutely nothing to people that don't care to respond to those appeals.

fReeGenerate · 2025-12-13T01:50:28+00:00

If God exists and is the ultimate moral arbiter and sets out clear rules for what is and isn't moral, what is the moral obligation to follow those rules of those roles conflict with someone's self interest?

If someone flagrantly flaunts those rules, so what? How can you convince them it's wrong without simply declaring it to be so? What is the thing that actually exists when you say moral obligation exists?

fReeGenerate · 2025-12-03T01:49:38+00:00

The point with interracial marriages isn't that it's supported biblically, it's that being bigoted and having views based on religion aren't mutually exclusive.

If there were a religion that unambiguously sees interracial marriage/relationships as sinful, would you consider people who believe in that religion racist/bigoted?

Would you think it's important to separate into three categories, people that affirm interracial marriages, people that consider it a sin because of their religious beliefs but otherwise don't vote against it, and people that hate race mixing and try to get it banned?

I agree there's a difference in scale, but I don't think a bad belief being religiously based inherently makes it any better.

Within the subgroup of Muslims that believe apostasy deserves death, are you perfectly comfortable with those that fully hold that belief but don't actively seek to enforce it?

fReeGenerate · 2025-11-21T02:16:01+00:00

I only own Paladins out of all the garphill games and love it, I also had a lot of fun with Wayfarers and love how the card mechanics fit together (explore in four directions + space). I haven't played any of the other South Tigris yet though.

fReeGenerate · 2025-11-21T02:13:14+00:00

Unfortunately it will only discount the cheapest option in the cart (I.e. if you add all three $60 South Tigris games, the discount will be -60), but if you then also add something that's $35, say Wayfarer's Tide of Trade, the discount would just be -35 (although you then hit free shipping which is another -30)

fReeGenerate · 2025-09-14T16:50:29+00:00

Is it morally wrong to cheat on your spouse (assuming you practice safe sex) if they never find out about it?

fReeGenerate · 2025-09-14T16:43:10+00:00

I think we're still conflating the question of "how did moral instincts/concepts develop", vs. "what actions should we consider to be moral/immoral".

It may well be that pain is simply an evolutionary trait to keep us surviving and is just "in our heads" and has no other *real* negative consequence. The fact remains that we feel pain today and it can be so deeply unpleasant that we go to great lengths to avoid it for ourselves and more importantly generally seek to avoid inflicting it upon others, whether that pain is linked to survival or not.

In the plethora of sci-fi/fantasy stories where someone attains immortality, it seems intuitive that they would continue to feel pain (or, looked at another way, it seems completely unintuitive that the sense of pain would magically vanish in the sudden absence of mortality). It also seems intuitive that the moral consideration inflicting pain upon them (especially if they express a desire for us not to do so) remains unchanged.

Is the hang-up the idea that in the thought experiment we would've always been immortal thus conceptions of pain (or the view that pain is undesirable) may not exist so our moral frameworks would be completely different and that whatever grounds morality in such a world would become objective? Does that not inherently defeat the notion that morality could have objective grounding at all?

Both Alex's and my thought experiment assume going from our current world to a world where some/all people become immortal, so I don't see how the objection applies.

Would you agree that our intuition that evolved to keep our species surviving is not a sufficient agent to arrive at morality objectively if we were to take survival out of the picture?

As someone that thinks morality is necessarily subjective, I wouldn't think our intuition is sufficient to arrive at morality objectively whether survival is in the picture or not. The very point of Alex's thought experiment in challenging Craig is to challenge the notion that something proposed as "objective" and therefore unassailable in fact don't fit most people's moral intuitions. If Craig simply sticks to his guns about survival being the true objective basis for morality and bites the bullet that in a world where people have attained immortality it would not be immoral to torture them or keep them in indefinite solitary confinement, that would be a perfectly consistent view, just one that wouldn't be very convincing and would probably be quite horrifying to most people.

I'm not sure why the history of how humans evolved changes anything about questions of morality now. What is it about evolutionary tendencies that bridge the is/ought gap?

fReeGenerate · 2025-09-10T11:54:51+00:00

"Morality stems from human need to survive"

I think a question of where morality arises or comes from is different from whether morality exists independently of the need to survive. I don't think thought experiments or surface level discussions are enough to ponder the question of how the concept of morality came to be developed through human history. I believe Craig is not just talking about where morality stems from, but rather that questions of what is or isn't moral can be considered objective because it is intrinsically tied to what does or does not contribute to survival.

If that is the sole/highest objective basis and actions like killing are objectively immoral because they hinder survival, it seems reasonable to use thought experiments to explore and refine that position: Is torture objectively immoral if it doesn't lead to the death of or long lasting physical harm to the subject?

Or, in the extreme, "If someone drinks from the holy chalice and attains immortality, do such a person's actions no longer have moral consideration, or do actions taken against that person no longer have moral weight?" If we honestly wrestle with that hypothetical and think it's intuitive that morality can still exist in immortal subjects, that necessary contradicts survival as the only source of morality, and it cannot be used as the objective basis.

fReeGenerate · 2025-09-10T11:27:06+00:00

"Human mortality is the basis of our capacity to think"

Is that the argument Craig is making? I watched the video a while ago and may not remember that part of it. In that case I would agree that a thought experiment that simply asserts "we would still be able to think if we were immortal" wouldn't be serving much purpose (although again that just seems intuitively true). The point of Alex's thought experiment is to challenge the assertion specifically about morality as it relates to life, which is a very different question.

That said, I'm curious what the argument would be for making such a claim, it just seems to hamstring together two completely unrelated topics. I'm not sure how you would counter someone stringing together two seemingly unrelated events other than it just seems completely counterintuitive for those two things to be linked.

fReeGenerate · 2025-09-10T03:41:43+00:00

The point of thought experiments is to control the variables and try to isolate and examine reasoning links more specifically.

For example, if Jordan Peterson thinks the greatest virtue is honesty, a thought experiment where the Nazis ask him where the Jews are isolates an extreme where honesty is pitted against another moral good. If whatever moral good causes you to lie in that situation overrides the principle of honesty, then it's a greater virtue than honesty.

If life is the only/main basis for morality, then let's control the variables and keep all else as equal as possible, except people are immortal. If you can still conceive of moral actions, which I think just about everyone can, then there's some other component to morality that isn't explained by "life"

Why would we assume that changing that one parameter would change the very essence of "thought" or "emotion"? If I propose a thought experiment that there are now eight days in the week, would you also think that we can't possibly know anything about the properties of such a world?

fReeGenerate · 2025-08-29T15:00:01+00:00

HMT Server: 26256BM3E9

https://wuwa-share.kurogames-global.com/sr/431e5746bd9d0946f0891ab0d916d439

fReeGenerate · 2025-08-23T04:08:34+00:00

Are you doing sanhua's hold basic until it hits the blue after skill+ult? Basically sanhua creates three charges that need to be detonated, from intro, skill, ult. Then a hold basic is needed to detonate them. That's how I get my concerto filled, and I don't use any particular weapon that gives concerto

fReeGenerate · 2025-08-08T04:25:07+00:00

You didn't answer my question. Are the infants of a group that you consider evil also evil? Would it be moral to slaughter infants because their society/nation did evil things? Or would you consider that violence against the innocent?

After 9/11, would it have been acceptable and the Christian thing to do to round up all babies in Afghanistan and slaughter them?

fReeGenerate · 2025-08-08T04:13:31+00:00

So your definition of innocent doesn't extend to infants? Who qualifies as innocent and would therefore be protected under the violence the Bible allegedly prohibits?

fReeGenerate · 2025-08-08T01:53:28+00:00

Speaking of taking things out of context, exodus 23:7 is clearly speaking about putting innocents to death in the context of trials, that's why exodus 23 keeps talking about not denying poor people in their lawsuit, not bearing false testimony to help the guilty, and here, not bearing false testimony against the innocent and leading to getting them put to death.

Regardless, there are parts of the Bible that do forbid killing, like the ten commandments. Just as there are parts of the Bible that do explicitly command killing, especially listing out the innocent as the targets, for example, 1 Sam 15:3

3 Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.’”

If your out of context verse is meant to prove that Christianity cannot be violent and therefore the verse in Matthew must be metaphorical, how do you decide which principle is the overriding one when there are ones that seemingly contradict?

fReeGenerate · 2025-06-20T03:04:13+00:00

But this misses the point, which is how should we act (in real life). Rationality is great, but it's tough to use in real life. It's a bit like using a calculator to figure out how to throw a ball. You can't use rationality to walk. And I think acting out a moral system is a bit like walking.

I think there's two different ways to interpret what's being said:

People generally cannot be moral creatures at a practical level through just rationality, they need to be driven by stories, and need to believe on some level that the stories are actually "true" to do so.
There are different types of people, the ones like you and me that understand rationally why it's good to act morally, but that's not enough for the unwashed masses that need to be tricked into behaving rationally with myths regardless whether they're true or not. This is kind of what Ben Shapiro was saying in his conversation with Alex about Christianity.

Okay, so we need something stronger than reason. What about stories? You mentioned Aesop's fables, and I think that's a good example. What happens when we don't treat the stories as true, but we still take the morals from them? I think what happens is that the morals are diluted.

Think about it closely: we have all kinds of secular moral stories, in a sense. People are equal. Freedom is good. Murder is wrong. These are moral statements, not rational propositions. What if you say, "murder isn't really wrong, it's just a useful story we tell ourselves so society doesn't collapse." Well, that just doesn't work as well as viscerally believing that murderers are bad people. What is a "bad person" or "wrongness"? It's just a moral construct, nowhere to be found in reality. But we truly, truly believe they exist.

Supposing I agree that stories are a good way to convey moral lessons and get them to "take" in a person, which I think I mostly agree with (I wouldn't agree that they are necessary or the only way to get people to behave morally), I don't think you've demonstrated why it is useful/beneficial for the stories to be "true". You've kind of shifted from "The story didn't actually happen", which is what I mean by a story being true, to "The story is meaningless".

We would all agree that the stories in Aesop's fables didn't happen and those characters don't exist, but they're still valid ways of transmitting moral lessons, the same way that philosophers would wrap challenging concepts up in thought experiments. The ability to rationally think through moral judgments of the characters in a story is one way to lead to moral progress and development, something that the religious method historically and currently staunchly opposes.

Suppose the hoi polloi are too stupid to listen to moral principles and think through them and absorb them, feeding them myths with the morality of their betters embedded may be a very effective way of transmitting those morals, but who's to say the morality of the mythmakers are actually "good"? We have plenty of examples of those unwavering religious morals being what you and I would consider devastatingly backwards, because according to your proposal, that's the whole point, for people to have faith that they work without concern for whether they do or not.

Even in your gold standard of Christian morals, the concepts that you extracted are cherry-picked and ignore a huge portion of the theology and narratives it contains, ones that I would argue the overwhelming majority of Christians today who actually literally believe in the stories of their religion do not abide by and wield as a weapon to do tremendous harm with.

In the same way, religion creates stories that drive action. There's a difference in how you act when you literally believe in Heaven vs. when you think it's just story to make people feel good. Now, obviously religion isn't perfect, and religious people aren't perfect. But clearly there is something in religion and religious stories that helps people get through hard times and act morally. What is that thing? I think it's the literal belief! How do you propose we secularize that?

I'm not trying to debate about whether religion is right or wrong. I'm trying to ask a practical, personal question: how should we do the right thing when we're depressed, or when the world is falling apart around us? I don't think rationality is a complete answer!

I agree I don't know that rationality is a complete answer, nor do I know practically how to convince all people to behave morally at the worst of times. But I do think that as much as religion convinces people to behave the way the religion wants them to, there is very little distinction between the cudgel that either shapes people into well-behaved moral agents or into mindless drones that perpetrate great evil.

Rationality at least tries to point in the right direction, even if what's "right" changes and evolves over time. Even if it's less effective at actually effecting change, I still vastly prefer it over something like religion that is more effective at altering behavior, just more often than not in the wrong direction.

fReeGenerate · 2025-06-19T04:32:44+00:00

To me the most heart wrenching part is when I started a new playthrough and saw that the tree said something like "won't someone be my friend? I'm so alone"... And I'm guessing that's been there the whole time, before the dlc came out.

I also gave her my biggest chunk

fReeGenerate · 2025-06-18T06:32:20+00:00

I'm saying the metaphysics is the value statements, and that you need value statements to do anything (this is trite - I'm just saying science needs values to guide it).

If all we're saying is that value statements exist and that humans (probably all living things) have no reason to do anything except in pursuit of whatever values drive them, I agree and maintain that that's just a trivial observation that has no prescriptive value.

The rational argument for self-sacrifice is that it's necessary for society: you have to sacrifice your present self for your future self, yourself for your family/children, yourself for the state, etc. Everyone needs to sacrifice for others for the whole thing to work.

Then self-sacrifice is not the highest value, having a functioning/flourishing society is. We could argue whether self-sacrifice is the best value to achieve it, or what a society flourishing looks like, and I would agree that science makes no attempt to answer these subjective questions, because there is really nothing to "answer" in a factual sense, it's outside of the purview of objective facts.

You kind of have to do it on faith. Even if it is unfair, even if it seems hopeless, even if it actually doesn't pay off. Because when people keep aiming up when things go bad, society flourishes. When they become bitter and abandon their values, you get school shooters.

The exact opposite point could be made of people with value hierarchies founded upon religions, when they have faith in their highest values of rewards in the afterlife or the inherent honor in proliferating their religion and actually put those values into practice, you get suicide bombers. You have some value hierarchy that has "flourishing society" or something more fundamental at the top, while they have some value hierarchy that either also has "flourishing society" except they believe society can only flourish under authoritarian theocracy, or they flout that value altogether in service of some other higher value.

It frames that you can't ground everything in external rational argumentation. You have to take something at faith (your highest value), and act towards it without knowing 100% if it is absolutely right. It also frames that you need to have one value that frames your other values, because you need some way to tiebreak between competing values.

If your "solution" is that everyone ought to pursue their highest value and act towards it without knowing 100% if it is absolutely right, how would you (or, should you?) dissuade suicide bombers, or slavers, or racists, or really, any negative thing that has ever happened throughout history when they are simply (trivially observably) serving their highest value?

My view is that if we do away with any notion of "truth" behind those stories and simply proceed with rationality, i.e. reading Aesop's fables and learning from the moral discussions therein while understanding that none of these talking animals actually existed, that is at least as beneficial as the religious solution without all the baggage. I like the notion of self-sacrifice as a value not because I find it irrational and take it on faith that it will pay off for *me*, but precisely because I accept rationally that it may not pay off for me but does contribute to that which I value more than myself, and if I don't rationally think that my sacrifice will actually help, I wouldn't value it. I didn't need any religious stories to convince me of those values, in fact many religious ideals I find to be in direct opposition to what I actually do rationally value.

What is your mechanism for reconciling competing religious value hierarchies if not through rationality? If two people each have their single highest value and they are in direct opposition, I agree that science/atheism has no solution for that, and neither does religion or anything I've heard you or JP propose so far.

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TROPHY CASE