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People throughout the world grow extremely wicked, God destroys them as punishment while protecting a righteous man and his family. Not capricious.
People in two cities grow extremely wicked, God destroys them as punishment while protecting a righteous man and his family. Not capricious.
God demonstrates that his chosen patriarch is willing to sacrifice his son, and also that such sacrifices are not desired by God; that is to say, the absence of child sacrifice is not due to a lack of fervor or obedience on the part of God's people, but rather because God himself considers child-sacrifice abhorrent. Not capricious.
The point of Job is that God is under no obligation to justify his actions to his creation. It is not claimed that God acts arbitrarily, only that we are not owed an explanation for specific things that happen. This is as close to capricious as your list gets, but throughout God insists that he has reasons for what he does. Not capricious, any more than any other need-to-know system is.
The Egyptians enslaved the Hebrews, and attempted genocide against them by ordering the execution of all their male children. Their own first-borns are killed by God as punishment, after they are given repeated opportunities to relent from their actions. Not capricious.
Moses, while acting as God's prophet, has violated the covenant by not circumcising his sons in direct violation of God's command. Not capricious.
The youths treat God's representative with scorn, dishonoring God, and an example is made of them. Not capricious.
The capricious actions are all Jepthah's, not God's. Jepthah is a cautionary story about swearing foolish oaths, and Jephthah himself is no more an example of a righteous man than Samson is.
None of these citations involve a single capricious action on God's part.
Stop claiming that expert-based consensus settles arguments, and I'll stop citing the gold-standard of evidence that expert-based consensus absolutely does not settle arguments.
And if Christians were only made by convincing children, this would be relevant. But they are not, and those convinced as children grow up and have ample opportunity to change their minds. Likewise, adults being convinced of something is not good evidence that the thing they're convinced of is true. There is no such thing as proof by social consensus, so stop citing social consensus as evidence.
I find it unlikely that everyone was uniformly wicked, there were probably at least 10% of the population who - by your standards - shouldn't be slaughtered just because they're adjacent to wickedness. Like, how would you feel if China decided one of their provinces was really degenerate and gassed everyone in the province? It's clearly capricious, and you're clearly using a form of reasoning that provides infinite deference to religious claims.
Pity about the wife though. Looking, that’s a death sentence by transmutive salination according to the comprehensive christian moral system. I can only imagine Lot’s reaction. “Honey...Honey? What the hell….? Why God, Whyyyyy? Oh, now I get it, it’s not supposed to make sense. I needed more salt anyway. “ He ended up fucking his daughters, so it all worked out. I'd say he was more of a pragmatic man than a righteous one.
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To you he’s god, so of course he can walk on water, but if you take him as a literary character, he is consistently behaving in a childish, bloodthirsty and petulant manner. The crimes and behaviour of his enemies, supposedly inviting his ‘just’ punishment, are not in any way worse than his own. How many innocents have to die for his ego? Who is lower than the child murderer? What kind of leader repays the loyalty of his followers with the death of their children?
Are we clear on what he should be compared to (a capricious man) , or do you simply deny that his actions can be interpreted at all, as in your defense of job’s treatment?
He shouldn’t have hardened Pharaoh’s heart, then (exodus 7:3).
A psycho does not need to claim he acts arbitrarily to act arbitrarily. His actions in the examples are not the result of a consistently applied universal rule (which would be barbaric, but not capricious), but depend on his whim of the moment.
@HlynkaCG is the one who first invoked the specter of expert-based consensus to compensate for his lack of arguments. If anyone who disagrees with him must believe the ‘lies’ of experts, then what of his beliefs, whose usual and most fertile ground is found in the overly trustful minds of children? I did not come with a sword, telling him to bow to the experts, but to bring arguments, and he once again found nothing better than to retreat into bulverism and his conspiratorial, anti-intellectual shtick. I merely helped myself to the can of worms he opened.
You seem to be equating "does not adhere to your particular brand of Rousseau-infused consequentialism" with "capriciousness". That's not what that word means. God's behavior may seem arbitrary from a strictly materialist perspective, but as @FCfromSSC ably pointed out above, he is both consistant and predictable.
That's actually kind of the point of the story of Job. Job is a bronze-age human man with a puny human brain. He doesn't have access to the big picture, nor is he privy to the discussion in Heaven at the opening of the book. Job might not know why these things are happening to him, but we as the audience do and God's canonical reply to Job is basically "There's much bigger things going on here than just you bro".
A recurring theme through both Testaments is that of choice and consequence. Those who choose wickedness beget wickedness. Those who choose virtue beget virtue. Life and death. Blessings and Curses. Internet Atheists like to point to Exodus 4:21 and 7:3 as "proof" that such choice is illusion and free-will is a sham. But that requires us to ignore the wider context both in the specific narrative of Exodus (God doesn't take action until After Pharaoh has chosen the path of destruction) and the Bible as a whole. Jesus has multiple opportunities to escape/save himself but instead goes to the cross willingly. God is constantly warning against the wages of sin, and offering the people he's about to Smite a chance to change course. That the warnings go unheeded, and the opportunities to escape untaken, doesn't mean that they aren't real.
Perhaps you should try to familiarize yourself with the work you're criticizing before accusing someone else's analysis of being "Facile".
Again, it is obviously untrue that the whole world was uniformly wicked and deserved to die, or that an entire city was uniformly wicked and deserved to die. Everywhere has some upstanding people.
Again, compare it to: Imagine if China gassed everyone who played video games, or smoked, or had premarital sex. That'd be pretty capricious, right? How is that different than what God did?
also: this has nothing to do with consequentialism at all. boxing shadows.
They don't have to be uniformly wicked. It's enough for them to all be some level of wicked, which the Bible asserts they are, for reasons that I think, based on my own introspection and observation, they probably are. We all have it coming.
What I (probably obviously) meant with 'uniformly' is that humans are very varied and it's entirely implausible that a nation wouldn't have over 1 in 20 people who, by your standards, it'd be obviously an unforgivable and titanic evil to murder for their 'wickedness'. The sick child, the quiet boy who took the abuse and did nothing to anyone else, the street beggar, the elder who did his best to guide his society towards a better place within its constraints. The man who does his job and doesn't bother anyone.
Again, consider the example of China nuking one of their provinces because it was 'wicked'. Does this strike you as reasonable, by your moral standards?
This just ... highlights ... the absurdity. Okay, God, right now, glasses America. Is this good? Probably not, right? But we all have it coming, so...
You're just giving a billion times as much deference to things in the Bible as you would anything else.
Humans are quite varied in the forms of evils they choose. They do not vary much in whether or not they choose evil. They do. They don't even vary that much in the amount of evil they choose: they generally choose quite a bit. Nor is evil divided into "minor" and "serious" grades. It's divided into the kind whose harmful effects are obvious and the kind whose harmful effects are subtle, but both kinds lead to misery and death, just as both kinds are endlessly justified by the individual engaging in them.
It seems to me that you are looking at people, and assuming the average person is "good" and only the obvious outliers are "bad", somewhat similar to how we handle terrestrial justice, where we mostly leave each other alone against there's an immediate, obvious, grievous offense. Therefore, you're saying that the murderers and the thieves and the rapists are legitimately bad, but most people are okay, and even if we assume most people aren't okay, at least five percent have to be okay. But that's not an understanding I share. The quiet boy who takes the abuse and does nothing in return can still hate the abusers in his heart, and probably does, if my own experience is anything to go by. Likewise for the street beggars and the elders and the men who do their jobs and "don't bother anyone". There are a lot of ways to embrace evil that don't show up in crime statistics.
Further, there have been societies within the last hundred years that were massively more complicit in evil than our own, where either direct participation or at the least complicity in really obvious, immediately harmful evil was more or less society-wide. Revolutionary Russia, Cambodia, and China come immediately to mind. Maybe you are right, and the society we are in has one in twenty who aren't evil. Maybe that's why we survive. Or maybe doom is around the corner, and we'll wake up tomorrow to a few megatons of instant sunshine.
I have no expectation that anything China does is done for reasons of virtue or justice, because the Chinese government, like our own, seems quite wicked. On the other hand, we firebombed Japanese and German cities, incinerating hundreds of thousands of men, women and children, because they were citizens of empires that spread slaughter and atrocity across the globe. I don't think the fact that this was done to them was unjust. Do you?
It's not hard to think of reasons why we'd richly deserve it. A couple centuries of slavery, sixty million abortions, endless lawlessness, routine acceptance of evil and injustice... The list of potential reasons is long. We are not a righteous nation. I am certainly not a righteous person, nor are most of those I know, even those who, like myself, put some effort into actively trying to be more righteous than we've been in the past. I believe the peaceful, happy life I enjoy is an example of divine mercy, not something that I deserve for my goodness. This has served to calm me considerably through the culture war, a reminder that as furious as I grow with those on the other side, I am in no way better than they are, and so have no right to hate them. What they do is fundamentally no different from what I have done, and will doubtless do again.
A billion times seems like an exaggeration. I give it a fair bit more deference than I give to other things, because it provides the best axioms I've found. Or to put it a bit closer to the local parlance, it pays considerably more rent than any other worldviews I've been able to test.
You reverse-reasoned your way to the evil of mankind from god’s commandments. Since he condemned everyone unless they obey his arbitrary commands, they must deserve it. So a kid who makes a bald joke deserves death, and mankind deserves hell. They don’t, and god’s orders are evil.
If god was actually merciful he would just forgive everyone instead of pretending to. Or like, let them out on parole after ten million years at least. Man’s Justice is infinitely more merciful.
There’s that binary thinking again. When we call someone ‘good’ or ‘honest’, we do not mean they are flawless and have never told a lie. We mean, compared to others. “All of mankind is evil and dishonest” is meaningless. You mean like laughing children are evil, that kind of evil? It’s a linguistic trick: because mankind is quote-unquote “evil”, god is quote-unquote “good”.
The only way you can deny that god is evil is by effectively erasing the distinction between good and evil. So you have to argue that not only can god not be compared to human standards, humans cannot be compared to each other.
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Is it?
And the Lord said, “If I find at Sodom fifty righteous in the city, I will forgive the whole place for their sake.” Abraham answered, “Let me take it upon myself to speak to the Lord, I who am but dust and ashes. Suppose five of the fifty righteous are lacking? Will you destroy the whole city for lack of five?”
Spoilers for a 3000 year old story, but Abraham manages to talk God down from 50 to 10 and is then only able to find 1. At which point God basically tells them "RUN, and don't look back".
Yeah, but, that just isn't true? I've written fiction before, and grand statements like that are very compelling in fiction. In real life, though, I don't really see how the three month old fetuses, or slaves, or even farm animals are all going to be wicked enough to deserve instant annhilation!
In logic, there's the 'principle of explosion'. With a false statement, you can prove anything. We're seeing something - different, but related - here. It's the principle that, to cover for a lie, if you aren't skilled, you end up inventing more and more complicated and implausible lies. God destroyed a city - okay, sure, whatever. But God is benevolent and fair, too! Hm. Okay, A->B and B->C so A->c, everyone in the city deserved it. And now we run into problems - the babies deserved it? The deaf, blind, and mute deserved it?
And isn't that just beautiful! Exactly one! Poetic. How likely is it that that, like, actually happened though? Versus just being poetic?
Says who?
As likely as the US/Japanese war in the Pacific ending with the invention of some implausible superweapon that doesn't ever get used again despite multiple alleged existential threats. Reality is unrealistic.
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God’s behaviour appears arbitrary when compared and applied to a man, real or fictional. Of course if you put him outside the norms of human behaviour, he isn’t going to be capricious or not-capricious, he isn’t going to be just, or anything. We’ll need new qualifiers for this peculiar kind of entity, like “gobelficious”.
Why would you defend his behaviour as consistent or predictable? Can you, as a christian in good standing, predict you will receive Job’s treatment? Of course not, "There's much bigger things going on here than just you bro". You’re not supposed to understand what he did, or to predict what he will do. That’s not arbitrary, that’s gobelficious.
I suppose I should consult the Experts in black so they can tell me what to think on what I can plainly read. I am familiar with the work I’m criticizing, far more than it deserves. My family, my entire society, has viewed it as a sort of “holy book” for centuries, you see.
Because being "consistent or predictable" is the opposite of being "capricious"
Likewise, You don't need to "consult the Experts in black" you just need to at least read the book. Otherwise, next thing I know you're going to be telling me that Hank Hill's profession in King of the Hill is left unspecified.
There are plenty of people in history who were wicked who weren't killed by god, though.
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