If God told Abraham to kill his son, would God be right?
Is there autonomy, for the child, the right for the child?
Who gets to say who has the right to die and who does not?
Divine command theory? What God says, it is justice !
Then again, when Abrahmam did obey God without question, the angel Gabriel said to him, you have past the test, and did what god have told you, for that reason, you will be proclaim the father of all nations.
And if you're a good human, you'll obey your monster God and keep your opinions on the matter to yourself- see Job.
Dan~, I see what you're saying, but your view here doesn't jive at all with the world Abraham was living in, or the theology he accepted. What, disobey God because what He's asking you to do seems to violate the judgement and sense of right and wrong that [i]He[/i] put in your head in the first place?
Basically if God is the moral law giver, he decides. I hope your not trying to disprove the moral law giver with his own moral laws, because if he doesn’t exist you have no argument against him. You’d have to prove God then use his moral laws, then try to disprove him, but that would seem contradictory.
Courage is a virtue, and defying God can be courageous, I suppose- but someone can courageously do the wrong thing, too.
As to points about submission and so on, what does it matter? We both know you aren’t making any real attempt to understand Judaism, you already think you know everything that needs to be known about it. So, what are you after really?
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I think what this means is that man has many mini-gods he worships that are enslaving him. Your mini-gods are the love of your life, that things you love to do and want, and hate to part with willingly that you become a slave to these gods. These mini gods might be your love of :power, money, booze, women, etc. Too much of these mini gods are enslaving you. God is asking you to “kill” (sacrifice) these minigods as symbolized by Abraham’s son Isaac. A good father loves his son very much and it is very hard to sacrifice him. is the love of power enslaving your mind? or too much love of money that all you do is work, work, work or steal, steal, steal. lustful thoughts besides your wife of husband? Drinking too much alcohol? these mini-gods are destructive to your life. Kill them, sacrifice them, or have moderation then.
I’ve often wondered about this story myself… the traditional apologist answer is that god was testing abraham’s, therefore god wasn’t really asking Abraham to kill his son. BUT, Abraham didn’t know this, and couldn’t have known this, he was a moment away from thrusting the knife into his son’s side, because of his fear of god…
It’s really a cultural gap. Let’s face it even god fearing christians, don’t fear god to the point where they’ll kill their own flesh and blood, because if they don’t they fear what god will do. I don’t even think modern judaism fears god like that. It’s a cultural gap made wide by time and reason.
The question then becomes… what else can we learn from the story? That sacrifice is noble, and sometimes we have to sacrifice the thing most dear to us to ensure a good future. That’s the truth.
But I can gaurantee that it won’t be accepted by the squishy liberal types in here. “sacrifice like that is bad”, “god is a monster” etc. The real monsters are fear to act because you are unwilling to do the right thing. Doing the right thing is never the easy thing. If it were easy, it wouldn’t be right.
But an action is not good SIMPLY because God commands it. If that were the case, you’d just fall into the Euthyphro problem. God surely commands good actions because they ARE good, irrespective of any divine command.
Well, it's not the Euthyphro problem, it's the Euthyphro dilemma- your option, that God commands things because they ARE good, would mean that there's such a thing as Goodness that is over God, that God is beholden to, which would affect his free will and omnipotence as I see it.
My cautious solution to the dilemma is that God has established what is Good because of His aims -what He wants the world to be like- , and thus goodness is subjective, but very close to objective for us. When I say "God is good", I mean that His rules and aims work towards the benefit and happiness of mankind.
Anyways, that's very tentative. What do you think?
I’d say that “goodness” is a property which actions/people can have independent of a perceiver. In that sense, moral judgements can reflect an objective truth (for example, it is not just my opinion that the Holocause was immoral - it was, in fact, immoral). It is also my view that one can affirm objective morality without believing in God.
I’m not sure if an independent good does diminish God’s omnipotence or free will, though I’ve heard arguments to that effect. Why do you think that it does that?
I think that divine command meta-ethics presents us with 2 great problems:
Can we really say WHY God prefers love to hate if it is just a subjective preference of God’s? Who’s to say that God’s subjective preference is wise (for if morality is non-cognitive, his omniscience does not help him)?
It raises problems for us describing God as omnibenevolent, in my view. If God is all-good, and divine command ethics is true, then that really just means that God always decided to follow divine directives, doesn’t it? Which strikes me as odd.
I acknowledge the problems you’ve citied with divine command theory- my notion of God as ‘good’ is not as robust as I’d like it to be, precisely for the reasons you’ve outlined. I think my problem with Good as as a concept to which God is beholden is mainly conceptual. What sort of law is a moral law? A law of physics can easily be explained as devine fiat- the speed of light is what it is because God likes it like that. Logical ‘laws’ are all based on necessity- and may just be functions of grammar, after all. Is a moral law an essential thing that can’t be compared to either of these, or is there some way to make sense of it in terms of other sorts of laws?
The easiest explanation I have so far is that moral laws are laws of personal interaction that God has set up, because he wants His story to play out a certain way- they aren’t precisely objective, they are relative to a paradigm- but it’s a paradigm we can’t escape from, that of our Creator/created relationship to God.
There is one law indeed, maybe go into deeper on what point you’re trying to make?