Quote from: MoominDave on Dec 14, 2015, 03:41AMI do still enjoy the Narnia stories. I know some find the allegory in them a bit hit-me-over-the-head-with-a-crowbar in its application, but it's never bothered me. Perhaps because I first read some of them at a young enough age (must have been 6 or 7) that it wasn't originally obvious to me.
This does touch on an interesting point, and one at which the Christian narrative feels emotionally vulnerable. As you hinted, and Byron explicitly referenced, it's important to avoid asserting that
"God ought" to have particular properties. Happily, I don't think we've trodden over that boundary in this particular corner of the thread yet?
Btw, you guys are almost certainly better read on general philosophy than me. I haven't read Hume, but the little snippets of his I have run across, I have always found in close accord with my lines of thought (which is reassuring!).
To return to the point of the possible vulnerability of faith that one might expect in the face of this angle, as Byron's noted on quite a number of occasions,
people tend to come to religion for broadly emotional reasons; it is rare indeed to find someone who argued themselves into it using cold logic that is completely independent from any emotional motivations.
Naively, I would expect people who come to faith 'emotionally' to be at least shaken in that faith by something like this - the supreme being whose concept they've bought into, and who is definitionally able to control every aspect of their lives turns out to be a sadist who treats his creations like a child playing with toy soldiers in a sandpit (a harsh way of putting it, but fair). They make the observation "Ouch. God isn't interested in playing fair by everyone, is he?", and get the response "God is not tame, he doesn't take any notice of what you or I think is fair". To be satisfied by that, one has to double back rather - "Hey, this isn't the straightforwardly pleasing thing that I thought it was". And then it's quite natural to ask oneself "So why did I buy into this again?" and review the evidence anew. At which point I would expect many to walk away from their faith, particularly now that our society has decided that penalising people for differing views of faith is a Mediaeval way of running a society.
But does my little chain there correspond to what happens in reality?
No. Pharaoh and his operatives are the bullies. The majority of ordinary Egyptians would have led lives of dull oppression under him similar to the lives of the Israelites. But still their first-born children are murdered by God. God answers the crime of one man and his support with a genocide of his own.
We have seen innumerable times over the years that this spreading of the motivation for hatred is how truly appalling local conditions get started. It's what terrorists aim to do - with 9/11, Osama bin Laden's aim was to shake the American people out of their comfort, where the actions of their politicians overseas never impacted at home.
An appropriate punishment would be to inflict retribution on Pharaoh and those that supported him in what he was doing to the Israelites - which would be a fair sized set of people, but a very long way short of the whole Egyptian population.
Murdering lots of children that had nothing to do with it, and belonged to families that had nothing to do with it. That's terrorism.
Totally fair. I think it's far from a compelling demonstration too, as it stands - too much coincidence required. Which is not to say that some aspects of it may not delve quite accurately towards the truth of how the stories got started. But tbh, we'll never be able to join the dots satisfactorily - it's just too hard a problem when this much time has passed.
For the record, the line I take on the whole plagues thing is that what is described violates our understanding of reality time and time again, supplying an explanation ("God did it") that in fact explains nothing ("So what did God? And how come we've never been able to document God in action?") and can be easily constructed to be a motivated product of the 'behaviour control' of the society of the time (not many police forces back then). And so I shrug and say, "Well, the motivated behaviour policing people wrote something down to impress people with, to awe them into line. Let's move on to stuff that sounds less obviously fiddled with."
Dave, as an orthodox Reformed Christian, the only proper response is that of Jesus in John 6 when he discoursed on the doctrines of sovereign election-- a doctrine that even many orthodox Christians find very hard to swallow. Let me put the whole passage in, but the key response is that of Peter-- "Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life, 69 and we have believed, and have come to know, that you are the Holy One of God."
Here's the whole passage to get the context;
"60 When many of his disciples heard it, they said, This is a hard saying; who can listen to it? 61 But Jesus, knowing in himself that his disciples were grumbling about this, said to them, Do you take offense at this? 62 Then what if you were to see the Son of Man ascending to where he was before? 63 It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh is no help at all. The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life. 64 But there are some of you who do not believe. (For Jesus knew from the beginning who those were who did not believe, and who it was who would betray him.) 65 And he said, This is why I told you that no one can come to me unless it is granted him by the Father.
66 After this many of his disciples turned back and no longer walked with him. 67 So Jesus said to the Twelve, Do you want to go away as well? 68 Simon Peter answered him, Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life, 69 and we have believed, and have come to know, that you are the Holy One of God. 70 Jesus answered them, Did I not choose you, the Twelve? And yet one of you is a devil. 71 He spoke of Judas the son of Simon Iscariot, for he, one of the Twelve, was going to betray him."
