Tip #33 Good or Exempt?
Sep. 8th, 2015 09:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
wingedbeastNorth Korea gets regular employment as an analogy for certain forms of Christian theology. There's a reason and it applies to this question. This question applies to one of the ways people try to avoid Evil Jesus.
According to the bible, Jesus once told his followers to take a donkey from someone without asking permission or purchasing. According to Ray Comfort, the reason that this wasn't theft was that Jesus, being God incarnate, already owns everything.
In the Old Testament, there are more than a few divinely commanded genocides, each with express commandment to kill infants. According to William Lane Craig, one of the reasons this doesn't make God bad is that God doesn't issue commands to himself, and therefore has no moral obligations.
James White uses a similar argument to absolve God of any wrong-doing in his own, very Calvinist-like theology.
Still, some will go outright with it, claiming that morality doesn't apply to God at all... therefore God is good no matter what he does.
The contradiction, to me at least, is obvious. You can't be good if "good", as a concept, doesn't apply.
These arguments don't argue that God is good, that God achieves any high standard of morality (either by effort or by nature). These arguments say, instead, that there is a pure technicality by which God avoids being guilty of... anything.
In North Korea, Kim Jong Un is perfectly law-abiding. When he has someone killed for, say, falling asleep during a show, that's not illegal... because it was Kim Jong Un that commanded it. Tell me, are you impressed by Kim Jong Un's fine, upstanding adherence to the law? Are you impressed by the wisdom of the ethic underlying that law?
According to the bible, Jesus once told his followers to take a donkey from someone without asking permission or purchasing. According to Ray Comfort, the reason that this wasn't theft was that Jesus, being God incarnate, already owns everything.
In the Old Testament, there are more than a few divinely commanded genocides, each with express commandment to kill infants. According to William Lane Craig, one of the reasons this doesn't make God bad is that God doesn't issue commands to himself, and therefore has no moral obligations.
James White uses a similar argument to absolve God of any wrong-doing in his own, very Calvinist-like theology.
Still, some will go outright with it, claiming that morality doesn't apply to God at all... therefore God is good no matter what he does.
The contradiction, to me at least, is obvious. You can't be good if "good", as a concept, doesn't apply.
These arguments don't argue that God is good, that God achieves any high standard of morality (either by effort or by nature). These arguments say, instead, that there is a pure technicality by which God avoids being guilty of... anything.
In North Korea, Kim Jong Un is perfectly law-abiding. When he has someone killed for, say, falling asleep during a show, that's not illegal... because it was Kim Jong Un that commanded it. Tell me, are you impressed by Kim Jong Un's fine, upstanding adherence to the law? Are you impressed by the wisdom of the ethic underlying that law?
