The Hebrew Exodus and God's character: waxwings vs. seebs

[KnightWhoSaysNi]

This thread has been set up for a formal debate between waxwings and seebs who will debate the following resolution:

"Resolved: The account of the Hebrew Exodus cannot be understood to portray God in a positive manner."

waxwings will affirm and seebs will oppose. The debate will have 5 rounds and waxwings will go first, per the parameters (http://www.iidb.org/vbb/showpost.php?p=4260364&postcount=13).

A Peanut Gallery (http://www.iidb.org/vbb/showthread.php?p=4260934#post4260934) is set up in the General Religious Discussions forum for the rest of us to comment on the debate.

Enjoy the debate!

- KWSN, FD Moderator

[waxwings]

Although it is a safe bet that my opponent knows the story of the plagues God visited upon the hapless citizens of Egypt in Exodus, I should like to give a brief account of the events which we shall be examining in order to discover whether or not we can draw any moral conclusions about God.

The Hebrews had come to be enslaved by the Egyptians for many generations, until eventually their cries of misery reached Heaven and God's own ears:

2:23 And it came to pass in process of time, that the king of Egypt died: and the children of Israel sighed by reason of the bondage, and they cried, and their cry came up unto God by reason of the bondage.

God, who had evidently ignored their pleas for a few generations, 'remembered' his covenant (one might pause to wonder how God forgot it, being omniscient and all, but that is one of many asides we will have to forgo). He resolved to release the Hebrews from their bondage and enlisted the aid of Moses as his spokesmen whilst appearing in the form of a burning bush (one wonders if that particular bush was cannabis, but again we have no time for digression):

3:10 Come now therefore, and I will send thee unto Pharaoh, that thou mayest bring forth my people the children of Israel out of Egypt.

Moses, being a poor spokesman (again I must fight to stay on the path) enlists his brother Aaron's aide as spokesman for the spokesman. Together, they travel to meet with the Pharoh. God informs them:

4:21 And the LORD said unto Moses, When thou goest to return into Egypt, see that thou do all those wonders before Pharaoh, which I have put in thine hand: but I will harden his heart, that he shall not let the people go.

So it goes. After a series of meetings during which the Pharaoh's heart is 'hardened' numerous times, both by God and himself, and during which time the Pharaoh's magicians match God's own plagues (to what end one can only imagine), until God conjures lice, at which point he takes a decisive lead in the plague business, which he retains for the remaining plagues: killing all the cattle, boils, hail (and a perplexing second killing of all the cattle; there's really not enough time in the world to explore all these absurdities), locusts, darkness and finally, his headline act: the murder of every first born child in Egypt (including, once again, those hapless cattle who have by now been killed three times).

Following this final plague, Pharaoh finally releases the Hebrews, though not without attempting retaliation. Here endeth the story for our purposes.

One of the stipulations of the debate is that we compare God's actions here by a human standard, i.e., if we find similar actions reprehensible when committed by a human being, then we ought to find them reprehensible here. The question now becomes: is there a human example which we can use for comparison, and do we find that example reprehensible?

Indeed there are a number of examples we could use, but I will use one in particular, as the parallels are numerous. My example was, like Moses, driven from the very homeland he sought to protect. He cried out against the tyrannical occupation of his land by infidels. Like God, he smote the innocent to make the powerful tremble and acquiesce to his demands.

The man is, of course, Osama Bin Laden. He is a terrorist: one who targets innocent civilians in the pursuit of a political objective. Terrorism is an act we nearly universally regard as atrocious (notable exceptions to this view being religiously motivated; more on that in a moment).

The reasons terrorism is considered utterly reprehensible is twofold. First, we tend to value the protection of the innocent. People who are vulnerable, unprepared and ill equipped to defend themselves are not considered valid targets for aggression because of a moral concept of chivalry. They are to be protected by those who wield power, not subjugated by it.

Second, and perhaps more importantly, is the idea that responsibility is non-transferable (though the Bible makes it all too clear that God does not share this view of morality). We do not find in our modern, civilized societies instances where it is acceptable for the state to send the neighbor or brother of a murderer to prison as a proxy for the murderer himself. Only the murderer can be punished for his crimes.

Terrorism, thus, violates some very strong foundational moral concepts of protecting the innocent and assigning responsibility. While Osama Bin Laden might well have a legitimate complaint with the U.S. government over its foreign policy, we agree that that does not entitle him to take it out on the innocent occupants of the World Trade Center, whose role in U.S. foreign policy is at best tangential and in most cases totally unrelated.

In the case of Exodus, the relationship is even less valid. The Pharaoh was a dictator, ruling by whim. He exercised complete authority over his subjects and not one of them could have stood up to demand a change in policy; protection free speech was not yet even invented. For God to punish the Egyptians is even more morally reprehensible than Bin Laden's punishment of the WTC employees.

We might, at this point, be tempted to excuse God. After all, he was attempting to achieve a very noble goal, which was the release of 'his people' from bondage. Slavery, one might argue, justifies terrorism. While I certainly do not agree with that idea personally, I will address it nevertheless.

If indeed God's sole objective was the release of the Hebrews and terrorism the sole means at his disposal, one might find it an acceptable method, but to do so is to disregard two vital points about the story: one, that God is omnipotent and two, that God deliberately 'hardened' the Pharaoh's heart on no less than eight occasions by my count.

Let us examine the first point briefly. Even assuming God has a just cause (a point I do agree with), it does not follow that terrorism is the best, let alone only, means of recourse available to an all powerful being. God could have, for example, made the Egyptians forget that the Hebrews were their slaves at all. Indeed, he could have taken an action as small and slight as merely changing the Pharaoh's mind (clearly he was both willing and able to do so). God chose instead terrorism. He chose evil where other options were available. No matter what his motives, or his ultimate goal, God actively wanted to be a terrorist.

This is not something we have to infer from his actions, either. God says so himself here:

11:9 And the LORD said unto Moses, Pharaoh shall not hearken unto you; that my wonders may be multiplied in the land of Egypt.

In short, his true motive was to show off. We find now that God, an irresponsible steward of his own people who neglected their cries for generations, now releases them in order to show his 'wonders', by which he seems to mean 'wholesale death and destruction'.

While much is made of God's belief in 'free will' as a justification for human evil, the argument seems to inevitably be reversed by special pleading when God's own 'free will' is discussed. Indeed, the whole 'free will' concept is especially perverse when considering God's 'hardening' of Pharaoh's heart expressly for the purpose of giving God a pretext for more sadism. Here we find not only does God choose evil for his own egotistical gratification, but we also find that he corrupts the free will of his subjects to validate it.

The God of Exodus is a terrorist, by definition, but he is so much more and so much worse than that. He is a sadist who either revels in the horror he visits upon the innocent, or at the very least considers their suffering trivial compared to his own ego gratification, his own desire to see his 'wonders' multiply. He abuses his power to coerce Pharaoh; not to do good, but to reject good, and not only the good of the Hebrews but the good of his own people and himself. The only remaining good in this story is God's seemingly secondary interest in releasing the Hebrews from bondage, a goal he ignored for generations. If anything, his sudden interest in the release of the Hebrews seems merely an opportunistic, capricious attention grab, tainting even that tiny shred of nobility.

We agreed at the beginning that this debate was intrinsically subjective in nature, but also that we would evaluate God as we would a person. I have shown here that God's actions not only equal but exceed the evil of Osama Bin Laden, ostensibly the most notorious terrorist in history (short of God himself). I might point out here that Bin Laden is a devout Muslim, a follower of the God of Abraham and Moses. Who do you think his role model for 9/11 was? Should we excuse Bin Laden for using the very same methods God used, or should we condemn God for using the same--and even more egregious--methods as Bin Laden? These are questions which must be addressed in order to satisfy our requirement of holding God to a human ethical standard. You cannot excuse God's methods without also excusing Bin Laden's.

[seebs]

The affirmative's stance is based firmly in the assumption that the Hebrew account of Exodus is factually accurate both as to the course of events and as to God's state of mind and intent during those events. I do not think this assumption is justifiable.

"History is written by the victors," said Winston Churchill, but the Hebrews had already proved him wrong two millennia earlier. The Hebrew historical account presented in the Bible is written by people who were in many cases the losers, but their account rarely reflects this. Like many "historians" of their time, they were unconcerned with the question of what happened, and more concerned with the question of how to best portray it. These portrayals are often full of speculative inquiries into the nature of God.

Thus, when reading this account, it is useful to distinguish between the message the writer intends to communicate, and the way the message was expressed. The factual claims made are, often enough, blatant nonsense. What, then, is the point of the material? If you know the claims are nonsense, how can you derive any information from them at all? The answer is to look at the spirit or essence of the claims.

The Hebrew account of Exodus is intended to portray God as loving and protective. To a naive reader, the account may succeed; to a sophisticated reader, it may at least be comprehensible. However, to a hostile reader, it fails miserably. Why?

Failure of empathy

Throughout human history, humans have been quick to demonize their opponents in any battle. The Bible's collection of such depictions is quite impressive, and more than a little disturbing. The key component of successful demonization is that, after one has successfully painted one's opponent as a monster, the opponent ceases to be thought of as truly human. This is hardly unique to prehistoric times; a casual read of the letters and opinions pages of American news papers since late 2001 turns up any number of articles praising the wonderful folks in uniform who are out there killing "terrorists". Terrorists have become an idealized bogeyman; even in a religious debate about exodus, you might see Osama bin Laden held up as an example of human evil.

If the Hebrew account of Exodus was filtered through such a failure of empathy, this might account for how an allegedly loving and protective God could be portrayed as such a brutal killer. God's wholesale destruction of "Egyptians" is of no more interest or significance to the reader than a hypothetical account in which God delivers cattle to be slaughtered, or causes a flood to wipe out a nest of venomous scorpions; all that is being revealed is that God provides food, or eliminates threats. The question of what the threats (or food) might think about this is simply outside the writer's scope of inquiry.

As an analogy, consider a child who (like many) is harassed at school. The child might write a fictional story in which his father defeats the bullies that have harassed him. When reading this story, should we take it as a clear statement that the father is a vicious bully himself, reduced to beating on school children? Of course not! The writer hasn't even considered the notion; all he's communicating is his firm belief that his father is of a supportive and protective nature. I believe the Hebrew account of Exodus is analogous to this child's story; it is an account of God protecting the Hebrews from threats, written by authors who had experienced a dire failure of empathy.

Is any information left?

It is easy to argue that the Hebrew account of Exodus tells us nothing at all about God. Between the lack of archeological support and the well established tendency of Biblical accounts to, at the least, gloss over some events and over-emphasize others, it is easy to dismiss the entire passage as uninformative. We don't know what happened; how can we draw conclusions?

However, when people make up a story about someone, it often reflects their view of that person. That tells us something about their experiences, even the parts of their experiences they aren't talking about. When a child talks about his dad beating up the bullies at school, it is quite probable that no such event occurred; nonetheless, we can infer that his interactions with his dad led him to see his dad as a protector, as a person who overcomes evil and defends against it.

The Hebrew account of God is fragmentary in spots, and often not particularly flattering to modern eyes. However, understood not as a final and flawless statement, but as a recording of how these people understood God, as a basis for further exploration, it has the potential to suggest positive characteristics that we might look for in other accounts of God's nature. The account could be seen as asserting that the Hebrew God is exceptionally powerful, moreso than other gods. It asserts that God is protective, and keeps promises, and that God is patient, giving people many chances to reform. Of course, the way in which it states these things is not nearly so flattering if you think of the Egyptians as actual people.

The resolution under discussion is whether it's possible to view this story as portraying God positively. If we allow for the demonstrated lack of empathy of the writers doing the portraying, I think it is possible to reasonably understand them to be expressing, however badly, a positive view of a loving and protective God. Their expression is abysmal, but then, humans who view themselves as being in a dire conflict often fall into the same simplistic portrayal of "good" as meaning "destroying our enemies", without any real consideration for whether those enemies have value. This is an essentially human failing, and that the portrayal in Exodus attributes a human failing to God is simply par for the course; even today, we have people in war claiming that an "all-loving" God obviously prefers their side in a war. The failing is one of the empathy of the portrayer, not necessarily of the one portrayed.

A reasonable reading?

It would be excessive to state that only a "hostile" reading of the Exodus account reflects poorly on God. In fact, any reading which tries to treat the account as purely factual will inevitably conclude that God is, at best, very confused and inclined to kill people when unsure of how to proceed. However, a reading which tries to treat the authors as fallible humans, and look past their weaknesses or flaws to see what they might have been trying to express may well separate out the obvious hatred the Hebrews had for the Egyptians and find a kernel of good in what is left. The notion that the Hebrews might be more hostile to their opponents than God would is amplified throughout much of the Bible; in fact, their callous disregard for outsiders is a recurring theme in a great deal of the text. When the Hebrews write an account of a war, God is portrayed as backing them unequivocally. When the prophets come 'round, however, the portrayal is not nearly so one-sided or favorable. Reading the rest of the text gives insight into the mind of the author.

A naive reader can simply bypass this; accepting the account at face value, the naive reader dismisses the Egyptians entirely as bogeymen, not even fully accepting that actual humans died during the making of this film. With such a view, the story portrays a God who is loving, powerful, and protective of God's chosen people. This view, however painful it may seem to us, is probably actually enough to rebut the affirmative's resolution; it is a possible reading of the text which is positive, even though it is attained only through simply ignoring the implications of the text.

What is more interesting is the potential for a serious reader to come away from the tale feeling anything but disgust. We must make no excuses; the behavior depicted, if ascribed to a human under normal circumstances, would strike most people as despicable. But was that what the writer intended? A sincere attempt to understand a text nearly always implies an attempt to understand the writer's mindset and intent. Is this a flatly accurate historical account? Is it a parable? Is it a historical account with which liberties have been taken? What biases might the writer have had, that would affect his reporting of events?

With questions like these in mind, a reasonable reader may find many ways to interpret and read Exodus. I think that, in general, the more attention is given to the question of the writer's understanding and intent, the more apparent the influence of the writer's bias on the text becomes. The writer didn't just experience some conflict with the Egyptians; the writer hated them. The writer's portrayal of God reflects this, and at first this threatens to overrun any possible positive evaluation. However, even with this in mind, the portrayal is influenced by the writer's personal view of what God is like. God is ultimately described as protective of the Hebrews. That the writer explores this by attributing mass murder to God detracts from the effectiveness of the presentation, but the underlying claim is still there.

[waxwings]

Thank you for your prompt response, seebs. I would like to turn first summarize my understanding of your argument as having two key points, the first of which you state here:

The affirmative's stance is based firmly in the assumption that the Hebrew account of Exodus is factually accurate both as to the course of events and as to God's state of mind and intent during those events. I do not think this assumption is justifiable.

While I wholeheartedly agree that the this is not a justifiable assumption, I completely disagree with the idea that my stance requires such an assumption. Let us both assume for the sake of this argument that, in fact, the account of the Hebrew exodus is purely fantasy; a myth written as you suggest, by primitive barbarians who were filtering their ideas about God through the lens of their culture. This is, in fact, how I do read and have always read this particular myth.

This leaves us with a metaphorical take on the exodus. God's actions here are not literal actions, but rather they are metaphorical representations of the kinds of actions God might take. However, this realization does nothing to alter the central point of this debate: how God is represented by the story. Committing a metaphorical genocide is no more flattering a representation of God than a literal one; it's just mercifully not real.

Metaphor and allegory are excellent literary devices for representing the real world in a symbolic way, but at the end of the day, the symbols still must tie to a literal to have any real meaning. Consider the following popular fable of Aesop:

A fox came upon a bunch of grapes hanging high on a trellis. The fox, who was very hungry, determined to eat the grapes and began to leap at them, snapping his jaws. He leapt and leapt, but always the grapes were just out of reach, and he was unable to grasp them. Eventually, he became exhausted and gave up.

As he walked way, he looked over his shoulder and thought to himself 'Those grapes were probably sour, anyway.'

In the fable we understand that the fox could be a person, and the grapes could be any object we desire, and that the metaphorical message is that when things don't go our way, we often rewrite history to make it seem like they did, hence the expression 'sour grapes' and the idea of cognitive dissonance (a concept I encourage all Christians to investigate).

What is not relevant here is that it was a fox or grapes. What is relevant is how one reacts or behaves in a given situation. If the fox had jumped after pomegranates instead of grapes, the moral of the story would be the same. Similarly, God might have rained scorpions instead of frogs on the Egyptians, but the moral is the same: God still deals with his problems by attacking the innocent.

A literal reading of exodus is not required to draw the conclusions I drew.

Your second key point so disingenuous as to leave me somewhat flabbergasted. You say:

If the Hebrew account of Exodus was filtered through such a failure of empathy, this might account for how an allegedly loving and protective God could be portrayed as such a brutal killer. God's wholesale destruction of "Egyptians" is of no more interest or significance to the reader than a hypothetical account in which God delivers cattle to be slaughtered, or causes a flood to wipe out a nest of venomous scorpions; all that is being revealed is that God provides food, or eliminates threats.

Essentially, the idea here is that if we ignore all the parts where God is killing or raining horror and destruction down upon the people of Egypt, then we are left with a story of God as a protector. I certainly agree. I also agree that if we ignore the part where Osama Bin Laden killed thousands of innocent people, we are left with a man who stood up for his people. God's protective motive in other words, was never the issue here. What is the issue is his methods, just as they are in Bin Laden's case.

I realize that many readers, including you, might be tempted to write of the comparison of God to Bin Laden as a sort of reductio ad hitlerum (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductio_ad_Hitlerum), but this does nothing to diminish the relevant similarities. Both personages are acting in the service of an ostensibly noble goal (though as noted in my opening argument, God's own motives appear far, far less noble than Bin Laden's), but they rely on barbaric methods. You quite literally must find Bin Laden's actions representative of an overall positive impression in order to find the same of God in this example, or you must explain how they are different from a moral standpoint.

To avoid this logical cul de sac, you have taken a page from the handbook of the moral relativist. I cannot begrudge you this and I leave it to you and our readers to decide for themselves which position is more reasonable. Essentially, you say that having invented the story of the exodus via their own cultural bias and experience, the Hebrews have done this:

As an analogy, consider a child who (like many) is harassed at school. The child might write a fictional story in which his father defeats the bullies that have harassed him. When reading this story, should we take it as a clear statement that the father is a vicious bully himself, reduced to beating on school children? Of course not! The writer hasn't even considered the notion; all he's communicating is his firm belief that his father is of a supportive and protective nature.

and you go on to say this:

It is easy to argue that the Hebrew account of Exodus tells us nothing at all about God. Between the lack of archeological support and the well established tendency of Biblical accounts to, at the least, gloss over some events and over-emphasize others, it is easy to dismiss the entire passage as uninformative. We don't know what happened; how can we draw conclusions?


Thus, according to the Hebrew cultural context and perspective, it was okay to represent God this way. One might well wonder why they didn't invent a story in which God defeated his enemies via more humane methods, but that is missing the point. The point is that you seem to believe that the Hebrews, to put it bluntly, got God wrong, thanks to their childish naivete. And while this may be true, it does nothing to alter whether or not the representation is a positive one. We are bound by what the Hebrews said to draw our conclusions, not whether they got God right or wrong, or whether their views were culturally filtered. Right or wrong, you are as constrained to their account as I am.

I invite you to consider now an alternative account, wherein God visits plagues upon the Hebrews to induce them to remain in servitude to the Egyptians. In this instance, God is acting in the interest of protecting another group of followers. We should rightly expect the Hebrews to feel horrified and victimized by God, even while the Egyptians feel vindicated. Should we then determine that this kind of moral double standard leads to a reasonable conclusion that God is good? In both cases we have one group that is satisfied with his actions and one that is deeply hurt and offended. Who are we to side with in our own judgement in the here and now? Is our evaluation of this representation, from a moral standpoint, any different if we substitute 'God' with 'Osama Bin Laden'?

In closing I would like to point out to you that you have not taken a single moment to address the central topic: the Hebrews account. You have talked around it, and you have gone to great lengths to explain how irrelevant it is, but you have not performed your due diligence, which is to explain how it is relevant. You have for all intents and purposes cherry picked the bits that make God look good while ignoring the bits that make Him look bad. We are duty bound to examine both instances to find a conclusion.

In your response, I would like to see:

1) How the Hebrew representation of God is morally different from the way many arabs view Osama Bin Laden.

2) Possible metaphorical interpretations which depict the plagues in a positive light. Perhaps, you might argue, the Passover murders are metaphorical representations of God giving hugs and kisses to little Egyptian children (sarcasm notwithstanding).

3) A reasonable argument which finds God's actions netting an 'overall positive' review, not merely 'some good'. You (and I) have cited the 'good' in exodus. You (but not I) have ignored the 'evil'. I would like to see how the good in this story outweighs the evil in some reasonable manner. We might easily say Hurricane Katrina was beneficial to the colonies of mold that thrived in the aftermath, but that does not in any reasonable sense make for an argument that the net effect of Katrina was positive. Again, for this to happen, I expect you to be able to show that the same applies to Osama Bin Laden, or that Osama Bin Laden's objectives (the 'good') are less noble, or his evil is somehow greater.

4) In accomplishing 3, I expect you to address a very relevant matter to the morality of God, and that is his omnipotence. We might, for example, defend Osama Bin Laden's actions as the resulting from the desperation of fighting an overwhelmingly superior force. What is God's excuse for resorting to terrorism? I remind you, sir, that like it or not, it is the Hebrew's depiction we address here, not your own.

[seebs]

I think the focus of this debate is going to end up revolving around what we mean when we talk about a "portrayal". The issue is not just one of coming up with an explanation for the events described; it also extends to determining whether the events described even occurred. The explanation "they just put that in to make it sound neat" is sometimes the most accurate.

I think the affirmative's analysis makes some sense. Certainly, if "killing the firstborn" is not a literal action, but merely a metaphor for how God would really treat the Egyptians, it's still a metaphor that portrays God as totally insensitive to the Egyptians.

What if it's the people who are the metaphor? What if the "Egyptians" of this story, rather than being living humans with emotions, are metaphors for danger and hostility? Then, it's not as clear. Few people would be as concerned about a portrayal of God striking scorpions dead; it's our perception of the Egyptians as real people that makes the story horrific. The question is, how should we understand the Hebrew account? Is it best understood as an attempt to portray God's character in terms of how God deals with others? I don't think so.


Representation and portrayal

The affirmative's argument is that, whether we think the Hebrews depicted God accurately or not, they portrayed God negatively. They describe God as killing innocents, therefore, the portrayal is negative. It's a pretty good argument. I think the central point is how we understand a portrayal. When we read an account by an unreliable source, there are two ways we can talk about what it portrays. One is to state that our best efforts at recreating the reality are the portrayal, another is to talk about the account as we understand it without such filters as the portrayal. Both are at least sometimes at issue.

In this debate, the question of using other material to guide our interpretation comes up. I think this places us clearly in the former case; it is not the unfiltered account, but our attempt to figure out what the writer or writers were trying to express, that is at issue. If the writers described God inaccurately, in a way that we can discern from the other material available, we have enough information to start talking about what they were attempting to portray, even though it may contradict the sense of the original naive reading.

The Hebrew lack of empathy is a critical weakness in the Exodus account. Much of the account reads like a revenge fantasy; it's not hard to draw a connection between the opening account of the Egyptians ordering Hebrew babies killed, and the later retribution of Egyptian children dead. God's role in the story is constrained by the needs of the revenge fantasy. Understanding this, we can try to extrapolate what characteristics God might have had, that the Hebrews would put God in this place in their revenge fantasy. This is the real "portrayal"; the things the story tells us about God.

Who here wants to dash some infants?

A brief digression is perhaps in order. In Psalm 137, a passage most readers will be familiar with, the Psalmist cries out "Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones." The Psalm is ascribed to the Babylonian captivity. Oddly, Jeremiah talked about this same captivity; in the prophet's words, "And seek the peace of the city whither I have caused you to be carried away captives, and pray unto the LORD for it: for in the peace thereof shall ye have peace."

These passages express two things which shed light on how to understand the Hebrew captivity. One is, they seem to have a real problem with the children of anyone who takes them captive. Another is, God does not seem to agree. And yet, the Hebrews seem to feel it important to speak at some length about their hatred of Babylon and its people.

This may be a useful thing to keep in mind when looking at how the Hebrews describe captivities, and events during them. The portrayal of killing children as a positive thing appears to be a Hebrew view, which is then ascribed to others. Could a Hebrew scribe, trying to pretty up an account of a harrowing escape, have added the deaths of children as an attempt to depict some extra justice? It seems likely enough.

The big question, then, is what they were attempting to express about God. Was the belief that God would kill children the point of the passage? I don't think it was. I think the point was to express the belief that God shares the outrage of the Hebrews, and cares for them. That the Hebrews expressed this in terms of a revenge fantasy is hardly surprising; their writing tended to this at the time. (I understand a lot of tribal records from the period are comparable.) The question is whether that's part of their portrayal of God. Is this a story focused on describing what God is like, in which the story's characteristics reflect God's, or is it a story in which the description of God reflects the needs of the story? If it's the latter, then God's "portrayal" is indirect. What we are curious about is not the lines of "First Angry Deity" in Exodus, but the decision to cast God in that role. Was it the strong jawline?

The story calls for the protector of the Hebrews to utterly lose it on some people and really mess them up. Various plagues, death of children, and finally the destruction of most of their army. Was God selected for this role because God was really destructive? If so, the portrayal is indeed a negative one. If God was selected because it had to be someone who would protect the Hebrews, then it's not such a negative one. The storyline is developed based on the human author's view of how to go about protection -- a view that need not be especially accurate, as we find later in the text.

Questions and answers

The affirmative poses some particular questions of some interest.

1. How the Hebrew representation of God is morally different from the way many arabs view Osama Bin Laden.

The depictions are fairly similar in many ways. The obvious difference would be that Osama bin Laden actually affirms that he goes around trying to cause lots of people to die. Sometimes, it's hard to separate a person out from the descriptions one hears.

2. Possible metaphorical interpretations which depict the plagues in a positive light. Perhaps, you might argue, the Passover murders are metaphorical representations of God giving hugs and kisses to little Egyptian children (sarcasm notwithstanding).

Not aware of any. I think the entire thing is a revenge fantasy.

3. A reasonable argument which finds God's actions netting an 'overall positive' review, not merely 'some good'. You (and I) have cited the 'good' in exodus. You (but not I) have ignored the 'evil'.

I'm not ignoring it, but rather, ascribing it to the biases and errors of the writer. I believe the writers added a great deal of what we would call "evil" to this story, because, not perceiving it as evil themselves, they thought it was a good way to emphasize other traits, such as protectiveness.

4. Omnipotence.

Omnipotence, as we use the term today, was invented a long time after this material was written. It is irrelevant to the story; the writers did not believe God to be omnipotent as we understand the concept. "More powerful than their gods" is as far as anyone had gotten.

This does open the doors to a prospective defense, although not one I'm very impressed with: Within the limits of power ascribed to God at the time of the story, there may have been no less-destructive ways to attain the freedom of the Hebrews. I don't know that this is a good defense, as it doesn't answer the question of why this freedom was worth killing so many people for, but it's an argument at least.

Conclusions

The central issue in this debate seems to be the distinction between an account of events and its portrayal of the participants. Harking back to the hypothetical example of a child's revenge fantasy, in which his father is depicted beating up school bullies, it is often the case that a given account is inaccurate in its expression, even though it is an attempt to encapsulate or capture an accurate statement about people portrayed. The child portrays his father as protecting him and preventing bullying; these are positive traits. The way in which he depicts this could be interpreted as a portrayal of his father as a bigger bully, but this is a misreading of it. The child is, due to his own limitations, thinking in terms of bullies. This leads to a description of his father that looks just like a bigger bully, but that's not a fair summary of the portrayal. To understand the portrayal, we must account for the limitations of the person writing it, as best we can.

Taking into account the clear limitations of early Hebrew depictions of God and events, I think it can be reasonable to conclude that the Exodus account's essential portrayal of God as is a protector of the weak (namely, the Hebrews in this context). That the way in which God's protectiveness is described looks horrible if you view the Egyptians as other living humans is not part of the writer's intent or awareness; it is not part of what they were portraying. A careful reading and attempt to understand the character of the persons portrayed argues against a naive reading of the events as characteristic.

In short, I don't think it's that these events were metaphors for other ways of abusing real people, but rather, that the people targeted were metaphors for hostility and danger. The use of the death of enemies as a way to depict successful protection is absolutely endemic in human writing, to this day, and rarely reflects accurately on the persons depicted as protectors.

[waxwings]

Seebs, you say potatato, I say....errrr...potato (damn that one doesn't work well in text, oh well).

Nevertheless, let be begin by addressing the marginal distinction between the events in Exodus being metaphors and the events being purely made up as the result of childish/cultural bias rather than artistic license.

Insofar as they are both made up, i.e., the factual reality of them is not the relevant issue, they are the same. Thus, whether the Hebrews poorly chose their metaphorical representation of God's actions, or they chose fantasies based upon the sort of childlike bias you cite, the net result is the same: God comes off as a horrible, horrible entity.

Regarding your claim that all the nasty bits about God are, therefore, part of a "revenge fantasy", leaving only the good parts for you to draw your infinitely more favorable conclusion, I can only say two words which seem to occur in every single debate with every single Christian I have ever met:

Special Pleading

Honestly, it would be nice if, just once, special pleading was not introduced in a religious debate, but that, i suppose is too much to ask. All faiths are, at their cores, based on special pleading and the only way out of the special pleading is...more special pleading.

It is, I submit, quite convenient that when push comes to shove, rather than looking at what the Hebrews actually wrote about God, you dismiss instantly and without any rationale, the nasty bits, retaining only a vague notion of God as a sort of a kind hearted big brother, a conclusion that can only be drawn not by reading the Hebrew account, but selectively ignoring it.

Why, one might ask, do you dismiss so quickly the specific instances where God is depicted as hostile, arrogant, violent and cruel, leaving nothing more than a barely implied sense that God is concerned about the Hebrews' welfare? God was quite vocal about making sure the Egyptians saw his 'wonders multiply' and thereby suffered, yet this motive is dismissed out of hand as a mean-spirited Hebrew invention. If all the nasty parts are merely a 'revenge fantasy', why aren't those heart warming big brother parts a 'protecting big brother fantasy'? Clearly the whole thing is fantasy, so why don't we agree and move on to what we can conclude based on the fantasy?

If it is logically valid or remotely reasonable to dismiss all of the graphic, explicit, horribly detailed nature of God as described in Exodus, based solely on this quote:

"And seek the peace of the city whither I have caused you to be carried away captives, and pray unto the LORD for it: for in the peace thereof shall ye have peace."

which you elaborate upon as follows:

These passages express two things which shed light on how to understand the Hebrew captivity. One is, they seem to have a real problem with the children of anyone who takes them captive. Another is, God does not seem to agree. And yet, the Hebrews seem to feel it important to speak at some length about their hatred of Babylon and its people.

...then it is equally valid to draw upon other examples in the Bible to form conclusions about God. Shall we then, explore the stories of Abraham, Job, Sodom as well? Will you, in those instances blithely dismiss the particularly cruel and sadistic parts by citing the Beatitudes? Should we then tally up how often God comes off as a barbaric monster and how often he seems genuinely concerned with the welfare and happiness of mankind (and of course how often He just seems nuts)? Who do you think will win that effort? When we're done throwing out Genesis, Leviticus, Exodus, Deuteronomy, Kings, Judges, Revelation, etc, (save for the brief snatches of verse advocating peace and brotherly love, of course), how much Bible will be left? Finally, having included the entire Bible in our evaluation, have we not gone beyond the scope of the debate topic, which we mutually agreed upon?

If you are going to cite a quote for further elaboration, shouldn't it at least expound upon this topic specifically?

You have not have proved by any means that the Hebrews were misrepresenting God; you will have only demonstrated that the Bible contradicts itself (possibly) with regards to how Babylonian prisoners ought to be treated, to say absolutely nothing of whether or not God really is the sort of God who likes killing Egyptian children (perhaps God especially despises the Egyptians, but feels more sympathy is owed the Babylonians). You scrapped the entire story we are dealing with for a single, unrelated verse.

I find it shameful and dishonest when self-described liberal or moderate Christians speak with pious certainty about what a great and loving being their God is, even while pointedly ignoring a substantial portion of the holy text. While such special pleading may help ease a crisis of faith, it will not help you any in a debate. Neither one of us has the luxury of just ignoring the parts of the story which do not help our case.

I have acknowledged that God can be read to have noble motives in Exodus. Please extend me the courtesy and the honesty of acknowledging the rest of the story, which remains entirely relevant to the discussion.

Allow me to summarize some key points below, that you may more easily respond to them:

1) Ignoring the plagues, the greed, the sadism and the egotistical insensitivity of God is special pleading. If it is valid for you to ignore the nasty bits, and me to ignore the good ones, we are at a stalemate from which no conclusion can be drawn. At the very least we are both indulging in logical fallacies which, while helpful in dealing with cognitive dissonance, serve no function in a debate. Let us therefore dispense with them.

2) The parts of the story which support my conclusion comprise the vast majority of it, whereas God's pledge to liberate the Hebrews seems to take a back seat to his need to see his 'wonders multiply' at the Egyptians’ expense. In addition to special pleading, in other words, you are disregarding those themes which are intrinsic to the the story in favor of one which is barely paid lip service; one which God himself actively rejects by 'hardening Pharaoh's heart' in order to give him a pretext to more violence. If the actual theme of the story is 'God's a great protector', we ought to have seen that idea given more emphasis (a good start might have been leaving out the part where God had to be reminded of his oath to look after the Hebrews--after generations of suffering no less).

3) Your single verse, intended to show God as compassionate, (following one which seems to depict him as barbaric) really only shows that the Bible contradicts itself (seemingly) in that one place. More importantly, it does not have any relevance within the scope of this debate.

4) Assuming, briefly, that we were to introduce other parts of the Bible for corroborating evidence, we would find the Hebrew's sadistic representation with God is far, far more consistent, demonstrating at best that the Bible seems to contradict itself elsewhere, but in no instance conclusively showing that He is 'positive' in the context of our modern morals, let alone addressing the specifics of this discussion. In any case, let us keep to the road, and not deviate into the numerous other horrors of the Biblical God, since we are preoccupied with this one.

Let me remind you now of your response to my comparison to Osama Bin Laden and the moral similarities between his actions and those of God.

Having established that:

1) your entire argument in defense of God hinges on special pleading and

2) that you said:

The depictions are fairly similar in many ways. The obvious difference would be that Osama bin Laden actually affirms that he goes around trying to cause lots of people to die. Sometimes, it's hard to separate a person out from the descriptions one hears.

thereby claiming that your instance of special pleading forms the basis for the moral distinction between God and Bin Laden, and that further:

5) The entire account of the Hebrew Exodus remains relevant including

6) The fact that God did, in fact, set out with full knowledge and intention to kill people, just as you agree Bin Laden did in 2.

I can only conclude that you presently do agree--or at the least have not yet demonstrated otherwise--that the God of Exodus is not morally different from Osama Bin Laden. Certainly this particular case made to distinguish him fails.

Let us return briefly to the idea that we have agreed to evaluate God by a 'human' standard. I should like to point out to you that my premises here are numerous and provide you with many possible ways to try to invalidate the argument. Given, as I pointed out earlier, the intrinsically subjective nature of this debate, I am surprised that you have not focused your efforts on the subjective part of finding 'good' in God's (Bin Laden's) actions. Instead, your one distinction does not withstand the fact that it is special pleading, leaving you, it appears, in agreement with me.

I suspect you are reluctant to do try and find a positive spin on Bin Laden not just because it is just difficult to argue, but also because it likely causes you some personal distaste to even contemplate defending such a person. Yet the glaring similarities, morally speaking, remain un-addressed and until they are, we are left with the conclusion that God is on even shakier moral ground than Osama Bin Laden. I am also left with the distinct conclusion that you have entered this debate intending to rely on solely on weasel worded evasions rather than an honest, fair reading of the relevant text--which does not, to my mind, suggest a very confident position. Why does my point still stand when we include the full text of the Exodus scene while yours requires that we dismiss most of it?

There is a certain irony worth noting here: a devout Muslim supporter of Bin Laden would have, at this point, already kicked my ass citing his perfectly consistent belief that slaughtering innocent people is just fine the service of God. If you were a bit more faithful, or more inclined to be brazenly disingenuous in the interest of winning a debate, you would have a much more powerful case.

Finally, I should like to offer a quick word in response to your view that the Hebrews had a limited concept of 'omnipotent' where, essentially, you said that they lacked the imagination to consider all the things an omnipotent being might do to resolve a conflict non-violently. To that I can only point to my opening argument where I said:

If indeed God's sole objective was the release of the Hebrews and terrorism the sole means at his disposal, one might find it an acceptable method, but to do so is to disregard two vital points about the story: one, that God is omnipotent and two, that God deliberately 'hardened' the Pharaoh's heart on no less than eight occasions by my count.

Note the last sentence especially. The Hebrews, it seems, did not lack any imagination at all when it came to precisely the sort of non-violent solution I proposed (changing the Pharaoh's mind). God just chose to apply this power in a particularly nasty and sadistic way. It should also be worth noting that any people who can come up with raining toads and rivers of blood are not lacking in imagination. What they are lacking in, as you pointed out, is empathy, a lack they chose to bestow upon their God. The alternative, I should point out, is even more chilling: that God bestowed His lack of empathy on his 'chosen people'. Either way, the God of Exodus remains a thoroughly villainous character.

[KnightWhoSaysNi]

waxwings, please note that your recent statement slightly exceeded the word limit as agreed to from the parameters thread. We'll leave your statement as it is, but please try to keep future statements within the limit.

Thank you,

- KWSN, FD Moderator

[seebs]

The whole bin Laden thing

I just don't see this one going anywhere. There's lots of assertions about what I have or haven't admitted, and they are neither true nor visibly relevant. You may consider the buttons duly pushed, but I really don't think this leads to anything substantive or relevant. People often view their leaders as good for destroying enemies. What matters, for our evaluation of a person, is whether that person actually destroyed any enemies, or whether that was just a revenge fantasy. It is not hard to imagine some enthusiastic Hindu writer writing about Gandhi crushing the British; outside of Wierd Al's UHF, however, no one with access to other sources would take the notion seriously.

Special Pleading

I do not think the affirmative's understanding of special pleading is correct. It is not special pleading to treat two things differently, no matter what; it is only special pleading when there is no difference between them. In fact, the reading I have advocated for does not completely disregard some things while accepting others. Rather, it tries to integrate things into a coherent whole. We recognize that the Hebrews showed little capacity for empathy towards foreigners, especially foreigners they believed had harmed them. Given this, we should expect that their stories will be written from a generally unempathic perspective, in which "evil" people are not really explored as persons, but rather, used as props to show off how strong or good other people are.

The interpretation I have proposed does not "ignore" the plagues; it treats them as expressions of hatred and anger by the writer. Indeed, comparing them with the more typical fare of the time, it seems that they are mostly unusual in how restrained they are, and how long it takes before we get to the real smiting. This is a secondary defense with some merit; the account of the plagues is noticeably unlike many other contemporary accounts, with multiple warnings and gradual escalation. Even this might be enough to justify viewing the Hebrew God in a positive light; the comparison with other cultures' views of the divine suggests that the God of the Hebrews was more patient than many others.

To take the writer's limitations into account is not special pleading; in fact, it is rather unusual to not do this when trying to understand an account written by people whose worldview is far from one's own. This is not a special treatment extended only to this text; it is simply the baseline one follows in trying to learn about people from what's been said about them. A case could be made, to the contrary, that it is special pleading to treat the Biblical account as though it is always entirely factual; we certainly don't do that with other texts from the same general time period.

Protection and Destruction

It is commonplace in literature, whether written by Hebrews or by modern authors, to see a character's willingness to destroy enemies used as a proxy for that character's desire to protect loved ones. Sophistication in this is often limited to the degree of effort put into depicting the hostile characters as worthy-of-destruction. However, it's fairly rare for anyone to seriously raise the question of whether there might be alternatives to destruction of the "evil" characters.

The Hebrew account of Exodus, at this level, is not especially sophisticated; while Pharaoh is certainly depicted as promoting evil actions (including, perhaps as foreshadowing, his decree that Hebrew male babies be slaughtered), little thought is given to "the Egyptians"; they don't even rate a description at the level of "second tall man" in the credits. They are not actual people; they are cardboard cutouts labeled "villain".

Our tendency to conflate protecting friends with destroying enemies is deeply rooted in our instinct. This makes it quite possible for accounts of such things to get reversed, and indeed, sometimes when people say they are "protecting" one thing, they are in fact attacking another without provocation. Similarly, some things depicted as "attacks" are in fact simply defenses in which no one is necessarily getting hurt. The viewer's perceptions often shift the way these things are described, without changing what happened.

Interpreting a fantasy

The affirmative makes the argument that, if we are not going to treat the whole thing as literal truth, but instead argue that some of it is fantasy, we should focus on what we can learn from the fantasy. That's a good start! However, the affirmative then approaches the question as though there were no difference at all between interpreting a purely factual account, and interpreting a fantasy.

Not so!

First off, it is not clear at all that the entire thing is a fantasy; old histories often wobble uncertainly between history and fantasy, adopting fantastic elements at some junctures. How many ships did Helen of Troy's face really launch? There may be some actual events which led to the development of the story. There may not. It can be very hard to tell, especially given only one account.

However, even if the entire thing is a fantasy, fantasies often reflect some aspects of the life experience of the people writing them. A child's revenge fantasies may include adults the child knows, but depict them acting in ways that cannot be reconciled with their actual characters. Does this, then, mean that we can never learn anything from reading such a thing? It does not. It means that we may never be able to justify certainty in a conclusion, but it does not mean that we cannot draw conclusions. People will tend to be placed in roles that fit the writer's experience of them.

In the Exodus tale, God is used, by the Hebrews, both as the protector of the Hebrews, and as the destroyer of the Egyptians. To find out what this tells us about God, we must factor out what we know about the Hebrews.

The Hebrews, throughout the Old Testament, were pretty warlike; so was everyone else they knew. It seems reasonable to suspect that they might view things through a warlike filter, whether or not those things were actually warlike. We counter for this, when reading their accounts; we recognize that, in all probability, many of the people they gloriously triumphed over were no worse than the Hebrews. But why should we view the Egyptians as more sympathetic than their depiction, but not consider doing the same to God?

The reading I propose makes a good faith effort to decipher why the Hebrews chose God, rather than some mortal hero, as the actor. What was it about God that made the story work? God was their protector; when danger threatened, it was God the Hebrews turned to, because their own experience of God was that God would protect them from danger. And so, when a story is written in which danger threatens, God has to be the one to stop it.

All-or-nothing

The affirmative argues that, if we dismiss the horrific plagues as a revenge fantasy, we might then also dismiss the depiction of God as protective as a fantasy as well. We might. Must we? Should we? I don't think it's clear. We have good reason to treat Hebrew accounts of violent destruction of enemies as being the work of the writer, not the truth of the subject; I am not sure we have corresponding good reasons to dismiss the more subtle aspects. When dealing with unreliable sources, it is often the case that the more obvious conclusions are wrong, but the subtle implications are quite accurate; this is especially true when dealing with an unsophisticated source.

If a child, much bullied at school, wrote a story in which his father overcame the bullies, probably with violence, no one would take it as evidence that the father was inclined to beat up small children; they might, however, see it as evidence that the child trusted the father. When a person is borrowed to serve as a character in a story, not everything ascribed to the character is a statement about the person's nature. It could be anything from the person's sense of humor to a serious effort to depict how that person would really act. In the latter case, the actions may be taken to reflect directly on the writer's view of the person; in the former, actions may be selected for plot reasons, and may really not reflect anything about the person. The actions are not reflective of the person, but the choice of the person for the role likely is reflective in some way.

I have presented a way in which someone might come to view this account, in which the ultimate statements made about God's character are positive, albeit indirect. Getting past the cultural referents and the writer's biases, one could legitimately conclude that the entity the Hebrews were writing about had been, in their experience, patient, protective, and kind. This reading is not the most obvious, and is certainly far from what we would conclude with a naive literal reading, but it is not an impossible one, and more than one person has come to it independently, while trying to make sense of these strange and often contradictory accounts.

[waxwings]

I would like to take a moment to revisit briefly what I regard as our duties in this debate.

Please review the topic, which, if you recall, we discussed here in the Debate Proposal (http://www.iidb.org/vbb/showthread.php?t=199128) section, where I said:

Finally, a quick note regarding the aforementioned intrinsically subjective nature of the debate topic: While it is true that whether god is a 'positive' or 'hateful' is a matter of opinion, that does not mean that arguments for both opinions cannot be made in a reasonable manner (emphasis added). However, I would suggest that we place one constraint on that opinion, and that is that we judge god…according to the same standards we would a person, i.e., if we agree that the actions god takes would be considered monstrous by human standards, then we should agree they are monstrous, rather than pulling some special pleading rabbit out of a hat (emphasis added) and extending to god a wholly unique and inexplicable ethical standard. I'd further add that if Seebs feels that the latter applies, we need not bother having a debate at all as he will already have defined a requirement by which any behavior on god's part can be rationalized and no behavior condemned.

I posted this clarifying text for a reason, and I consider it binding upon both of us. The key word in that text is 'reasonable'. While you might well argue that Exodus can be read to depict God in a favorable light, provided we simply chop these bits out here, rewrite this bit some here, and take this part here to mean rather the opposite of what it appears to mean, you will not have made a case that it is remotely reasonable to do so.

If such conditions were all that was required to win the debate, I would not have agreed to it in the first place, as you and I could both simply declare our own little realities to be equally valid and left at a stalemate (or more accurately a victory for you, as such 'anything goes' mentality invariably helps the more unreasonable position while undermining the more reasonable). We are not testing a scientific hypothesis here, we are evaluating a matter of subjective opinion which may vary wildly from person to person, so we must accept that all conclusions will be subject to some (perhaps even many) exceptions. The question then becomes: which of the conclusions is better? When we agree to discuss whether Exodus cannot be read in a positive light, we mean: can it be read in a positive light in any manner which is consistent within our morals and reasoning?

Thus it is not my (or your) responsibility to demonstrate whether or not it is possible to read Exodus in a good light. The Hebrews clearly thought God was a super duper guy; end of debate, assuming such a narrow view. It's also possible that a group of top secret scientists clandestinely built and launched a rocket into space with a teapot on board, just to confound Bertrand Russell. But it's far from reasonable. Again: we are not debating what is possible. We are debating what can be read in a reasonable manner.

In this regard, I find the merry-go-round we seem to be on decidedly unproductive and disheartening. I had hoped for a riveting debate over the implications of various moral and ethical models. I had hoped for us to devise some accounting system by which we might evaluate God and arrive at, if not a consensus, at least some framework within which to make the decision. Instead, I see you have repeated your special pleading, only now with the strenuous insistence that it's not special pleading because, as you say:

Our tendency to conflate protecting friends with destroying enemies is deeply rooted in our instinct. This makes it quite possible for accounts of such things to get reversed, and indeed, sometimes when people say they are "protecting" one thing, they are in fact attacking another without provocation.

I should note briefly here that you have taken issue with my rhetorical use of the word 'ignore' to describe your reasoning, when I would have hoped it was quite obvious that by 'ignore', I meant that your criteria for dismissing the nasty bits were tantamount to simply ignoring them. We seem to have, as I posited at the opening of my previous post, a case of you saying potato, and, well, you know the rest.

Essentially you have not provided a rationale for dismissing the nasty parts that does not apply equally well to the good bits. In order to have a good argument, you must be logically consistent. If, for example, it is valid to dismiss the plagues because we know the Hebrews were engaged in primitive wishful thinking (or whatever you choose to call it), then it must be equally valid for them to depict God as their protector for the same childish/misinformed reasons. You invalidate your own argument as well as mine, hence the maddeningly circular nature of this debate. Meanwhile far more compelling points remain untouched.

Still, you do provide a few interesting, if half baked ideas that we should turn to now:

Indeed, comparing [God's actions in Exodus] with the more typical fare of the time, it seems that they are mostly unusual in how restrained they are, and how long it takes before we get to the real smiting. This is a secondary defense with some merit; the account of the plagues is noticeably unlike many other contemporary accounts, with multiple warnings and gradual escalation.

I would like very much to see what other 'contemporary accounts' make the Hebrew God seem especially 'restrained'. Are we talking about other religions entirely? Even so, I remain under the distinct impression that we are evaluating God according to our modern moral standards. 'Restrained' in the bronze age might mean chopping someone's tongue off for lying, but neither you nor I would find such barbarism morally appropriate today. Under no circumstances can I imagine punishing innocent people with death because of the Pharaoh’s individual (and God compelled) actions as ‘restrained.’

The affirmative makes the argument that, if we are not going to treat the whole thing as literal truth, but instead argue that some of it is fantasy, we should focus on what we can learn from the fantasy. That's a good start! However, the affirmative then approaches the question as though there were no difference at all between interpreting a purely factual account, and interpreting a fantasy.

Not so!

Fine. It's part fantasy. It's all fantasy. It's all truth. These points remain irrelevant unless you have some criteria for determining which actions God was 'really' responsible for. I will presume based on your heretofore inability to do so in a logically consistent manner that you don't, and we remain left to judge God according to what the Hebrews said (again).

If a child, much bullied at school, wrote a story in which his father overcame the bullies, probably with violence, no one would take it as evidence that the father was inclined to beat up small children; they might, however, see it as evidence that the child trusted the father.

This from the fellow who says ‘I do not think the affirmative’s understanding of special pleading is correct.’ Obliviousness to irony remains in effect. What if we reverse your situation? What if we say the child has a father who brutally beats him and fantasizes that he is actually kind and loving? Certainly the child’s wishful thinking here is equally to blame for an inaccurate depiction. Similarly, what if the child’s father really would beat up a classmate to defend the child? Where does that get us?

It gets us exactly nowhere. You still have zero criteria for determining which part of this fantasy is fantasy. I find it very interesting that you seem to be so confident of your understanding of the Hebrews that you can extrapolate an entirely opposite image of God from their depiction. One is left with the distinct impression that you consider yourself a telepathic time traveler who just knows that the Hebrews were making up A but not B. While such extreme cognitive dissonance is fascinating, it simply has no relevance here.

Meanwhile, the meat of my arguments remain entirely ignored. You've yet to touch on the idea that the sadism of God in Exodus is not only intrinsic to the theme of the story, but is also entirely consistent with other depictions of God in the Bible. What of the stories of Abraham, Job, Genesis, etc.? One can only conclude that all the authors of all the myths where God is equally or more sadistic got it wrong, too, and that you are, by virtue of some as yet unexplained intuition, privy to the 'truth' about what a fantastic fellow God is. Perhaps you should write your own scripture and we can debate its merits.

Finally, once again, we return to my original point regarding Osama Bin Laden which, as you say:

I just don't see this one going anywhere. There's lots of assertions about what I have or haven't admitted, and they are neither true nor visibly relevant. You may consider the buttons duly pushed, but I really don't think this leads to anything substantive or relevant. People often view their leaders as good for destroying enemies. What matters, for our evaluation of a person, is whether that person actually destroyed any enemies, or whether that was just a revenge fantasy.

Well, you are quite right that this isn't going anywhere, as you have not responded to it. Having declared it a dead end, however, does not make it so any more than accusing me of button pushing makes the comparison invalid. God and Bin Laden occupy morally analogous situations, and we have already agreed that we will evaluate God as we would a person. We must either find some relevant difference or agree they are morally similar. Given the latter, we must then determine whether or not we can or should find God morally 'positive' by any reasonable means. We must, in other words, explore this argument’s merits and deficiencies to decide whether it’s ‘going anywhere.’

A quick side note, btw: I'd like to say that while you might find it easy to imagine some enthusiastic Hindu writing about Ghandi 'crushing the British', I confess that I do not find it terribly easy to imagine. Perhaps it's because Ghandi was so strenuously opposed to violence. The Hebrew God, however, is an entirely different matter.

To summarize:

1) Your special pleading remains special pleading, as it does not distinguish itself from invalidating arguments using the same method.

2) You have ignored the my points relating to the consistency of the barbarism depicted in Exodus when compared with other examples from the Bible. I.e., if the Hebrews were wrong, so were most of the other authors of the Bible.

3) You continue to evade the still-relevant comparison to Osama Bin Laden.

4) This debate is about finding the most reasonable conclusion we can draw about God, morally speaking, from reading the Hebrew Exodus. Not only are flying teapots and other flights of fancy unlikely to help you here, but neither are weasel worded appeals to subjective opinions which cannot at least be validated by some standard of logical consistency (e.g. reversibility).

It is now the fourth round and I am terribly disappointed that we have danced in circles without once addressing the core moral implications of killing innocent people to achieve a political objective. There are, I am sure, many moral conclusions we might have drawn, and perhaps there is even a solid, consistent moral framework under which we could define and quantify the exact moral positioning of such actions, but it is unlikely that this late in the debate we ever will.

[seebs]

Scope

The goal is not to find the most reasonable reading, but to discuss what is a possible reading. Now, there's some room for arguing that the reading offered by the defense must meet some minimal standard of reasonableness. What it does not have to do is be the most reasonable. The affirmative's focus on the seductive appeal of naive readings does not constitute an effective argument.

The affirmative has presented a number of arguments about alternative, negative, readings. That's nice, but it doesn't prove anything. This is the reason that the whole bin Laden thing is a pure red herring; it confirms the existence of a negative reading, but that was never disputed. It doesn't disprove the possibility or viability of other readings. It's a pure sound bite, with no argumentative content beyond a straight up appeal to emotion.

My task here is to present a way of reading the Exodus account and showing how someone could, given that account, come to ascribe a positive trait to God from that account. The affirmative's task is not to present other readings, but to show that this one is somehow impossible or unviable.

With that in mind, I'm going to focus on presenting this reading more clearly, as it seems that the point of this interpretation has not been clearly understood.

A proposed reading of Exodus

When people write stories, the stories often reflect both the writer and the world the writer has experienced. From these stories, we can learn things about both the writer and the world. In general, when we wish to learn about the writer, we do so by comparing the writer's depictions of the world to our own understanding of it; we try to factor out the parts of the story that reflect the world, to see what the writer has changed, and thus what the story tells us about the writer. When we wish to learn about the world, we correspondingly try to factor out the writer's biases and influences, to figure out what real things would have been described that way.

With a historical text written by someone focused on accurate presentation, there is often not that much to strip away, although even a sincere effort at an accurate presentation may be hampered by the writer's cultural norms or expectations. However, the Exodus account is no such thing; it reads more like a revenge fantasy, or a fable. In such a story, the actual events of the story may well be entirely fictitious, and thus justifiably dismissed; however, the writer's choices in presentation may nonetheless reveal some information about persons or places depicted, even though the information may not be closely tied to the things said by the writer.

The Exodus account was written by people whose interactions with others were quite frequently hostile, to put it mildly. It has the essential character of a revenge fantasy; the horrible actions of the Egyptians (such as ordering the deaths of Hebrew children) are discussed, then the Egyptians get smote. We have no particular evidence that most of these things actually happened. You might expect that, had every firstborn child in Egypt been killed, someone in Egypt would have noticed. We can justifiably conclude that perhaps the events didn't really occur.

The question, then, is what the story tells us about the writers, and what the story tells us about God. In the reading I present, the essential character of the story is ascribed to the Hebrews; they are the ones who wrote a revenge fantasy. What, if anything, in this can we ascribe to God? Why did they depict God unleashing plagues, rather than heroic Hebrew stalwarts doing the fighting? How did this story differ because they used God instead of some other character to tell it?

One way in which this may have changed the story is that God doesn't just wade in and start smiting. It takes a long series of provocations. One reason for this might be the author's awareness that God is not really much of a smiting sort; in this case, the story would be adapted to present reasons for God to go smiting people. If this were the case, it would turn the presentation around entirely; the story's buildup to the deaths of random bystanders would be a testimony that, really, the deaths of bystanders were very much out of character.

But why God? Because the authors viewed God as their protector. This view, not the revenge fantasy, is the reason that God had to be the one in the story, rather than someone else. And, while it may not have been the thing the writer was consciously focused on or thinking about, it is nonetheless indicative of the writer's experience of God. With an unreliable witness, indirect inferences may be more reliable, and more informative, than the witness's direct statements. With a storyteller, this is even more the case; the statements are expressive of something about the storyteller, but the implications and assumptions may reflect the world the storyteller lived in.

Special pleading

Saying something is special pleading does not make it so. The discussion in the debate proposal about special pleading had to do, not with methods of analysis, but with the specific question of whether the negative could rely on such arguments as "killing is moral when God does it". I have relied on so such arguments.

The argument I present treats different aspects of a communication differently, but I have presented specific reasons for making those distinctions. That's not special pleading.

Barbarism and the authors of the Bible

Granted with no real dispute that most of the Old Testament accounts reflect barbarism and a general hostility towards, and lack of empathy for, pretty much all other people. In fact, this is stressed even more heavily in the New Testament, when this aspect of Jewish culture and tradition is specifically attacked. This might be taken as a basis for concluding that later authors perceived the same thing; that the difficulty of Hebrews in recognizing the humanity of other people influenced their accounts of God negatively.

What now?

The reason I have not addressed the moral implications of killing innocent people to obtain political objectives is that it's not relevant to my case. The affirmative has indeed shown that, under at least one reasonable reading of Exodus, God did such a thing. That's fine, and was never disputed. I have presented an alternative reading of Exodus in which we conclude that no such thing happened; this reading is consistent with the historical evidence available to us. The affirmative's job is not to convince us that a negative reading is reasonable, but to convince us that only negative readings are reasonable. However, criticism of the reading I present seems to consist of repeated accusations of special pleading, without addressing the question of what's special about it. Is it that, normally, we should completely disregard our knowledge of a person's perspective and limitations when interpreting an account? I don't think so. Is it that we should never accept an inference while rejecting an outright statement? If so, that would be a directly applicable argument, but it's a very unusual one; we do that all the time when dealing with unreliable sources!

The closest the bin Laden line of "inquiry" (using the term loosely) can come to the topic is to point out that, in some cases, a "positive" interpretation of an account or an event might turn out to be wrong. Yes, it might. However, that is not sufficient reason to dismiss all positive interpretations of all accounts, and no reason has been provided for which it should be taken as absolutely definitional in this case. It's a great sound bite, but a horrible argument. It would be more efficient to just scream "Hitler" over and over; it would have the same effect, and the same relevance to the proposition under debate.

It has been granted since before the debate began that there exist reasonable views of the Exodus account in which one concludes that God has been portrayed negatively. Showing that such readings exist is uninteresting; the point of discussion is the positive readings which also exist. Even ruling out the ones that rely on actual special pleading, such as the argument that it is moral for God to kill innocent people, because hey, it's God, there continue to be other avenues open in which people, reviewing these accounts, might conclude from them that the God the Hebrews had experience of was protective, or patient, or fair, rather than that God was cruel or barbarous. The most obvious path to explore is the recognition that the Hebrew authors may have brought the barbarism we see in the stories, and God's contribution may have been some of the ways in which they were mellowed. For instance, the story could just as well have been that all Egyptian children were slaughtered, or this could have been the first plague and not the last.

An argument for the affirmative that focuses primarily on ways in which a negative reading could be reasonable is not going to succeed. Obviously, a negative reading is reasonable. However, there is more than one way to understand the text, and not all reasonable approaches yield negative conclusions.

To summarize, no, the debate is not about the "most reasonable conclusion", but about the complete set of all reasonable conclusions.

[KnightWhoSaysNi]

waxwings no longer wishes to participate in the formal debate. seebs will now have the opportunity to post a final statement if he wishes to.

- KWSN, FD Moderator

Edit: seebs has declined to post a final statement. The formal is therefore complete. We would like to thanks seebs and waxwings for their participation. Discussion can be continued in the peanut gallery.