To: Tova7
Debate, argumentation, discussion - all these things are not about personalities nor about relationships outside the debate. I found your 'tone' a little surprising but took no offence, nor did I intend any.
I was once a college-level teacher (the equivalent of what in America is known as an Associate Professor) and the proper structure of an argument is important to me - and I tend to be harsh towards those who (intentionally or not) flout that structure. More so than I should be, perhaps; nonetheless, it was a habit of mind that served me well as a teacher, since my students reported that it made it easier for them to see the flaws in their arguments and so make progress in clear, concise argumentation - which was at a premium in my classes.
| I can debate issues from any side I choose (especially since at one time I DID in fact believe many of those positions). In fact I do it in my head all the time just to test the solidity of my belief. |
Debate with yourself is one thing: as you say, it's a way of testing one's own position and clarifying thought. But in order to debate with another, one
ought not to take a standpoint that is a mere representation of your internal dialogue - especially when your conversation with yourself includes positions you know yourself to have abandoned previously - in the interest of the
debate itself - its clarity, concision, and logical cohesiveness.
It's patently obvious from even a fleeting and superficial study of the Old Testament that a concept of justice is at work therein that precludes the condemnation of innocents. One of the primary moral standpoints of the Old Testament is that God is a righteous judge, a defender of widows and orphans. The ethical content/context of God's command to the Israelites to give a particular people over to complete destruction lies in the abhorrent and abominable forms of worship (such as the child-sacrifices to Baal Molech) indulged in by those who possessed the Promised Land before Israel came into it.
| God COMMANDS the death of "innocent" civilians in the OT when he tells the Jews to slaughter the people on the promised land. Not just slaughter them, but even their animals! Not to leave a single person alive. |
Placing the word 'innocent' in quote marks does
not indicate that you disbelieve in that innocence. At most it indicates that you consider such innocence to be questionable. However, in the context of the whole comment, such a questioning of the innocence of those indicated renders the comment incomprehensible: if they were not innocent, and if God is indeed a righteous judge, then why should they not have been destroyed? If they should have been destroyed then what is the source of your apparent outrage (or, at the very least, surprise/consternation - as indicated by the exclamation point - that they were?
I chose to interpret you as saying that there were such innocents, that they were unjustly destroyed by God, because that's the
least logically inconsistent way of understanding what you said.
| Now I am not saying 9-11 was God's will. I don't think he works like that personally. Scripture has God using nation against nation with war to "punish" or get the people's "attention." |
The above is your response to the egregious nonsense propounded by that moral insect, KFC. Whatever you intended to say, whatever you thought in your head that you were saying as you wrote the words, the text on the 'page' can be interpreted in only one way; a) that you don't believe that God is responsible for 9/11; and
that God used 9/11 to get the 'attention' of the American people. Apart from any other consideration, your first position is immediately contradicted and nullified by your second - and your second position is a heretical and blasphemous contradiction of the moral content of the idea of God as righteous judge. Which, in a rather more contracted form, is the point I made against you.
And the evidence I cited against you is contained in the Biblical accounts of God's direction to the Israelites to give over certain peoples to total destruction - which does not occur without a public declaration, made via the mouths of the Judges and Prophets of ancient Israel, and which is at no time directed against any but idolaters and those who opposed the progress of the ancient Israelites to the Land of Promise. And neither of these cases in any way fits the circumstances of 9/11, which cannot in any sense by construed as a righteous judgment publically decreed, but were in fact a series of acts of murder in flagrant violation of the commandment, recorded in both Deuteronomy and Exodus. This is often mistranslated as 'thou shalt not kill' but ought to be read as 'thou shalt not murder'.
I twisted nothing of what you said. I was merely too concise in my rejection of it.
