Yet you misrepresented some of that documentation as “eyewitness accounts,” which simply do not exist. At some level, that suggests that you lack confidence in your claim.
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Hi @colewd
If him is Israel who is us? I propose the Messiah is him and us is Isaiah and his fellow Israelites.
On the traditional Jewish view, “him” is Israel, and “us” refers to the Gentile kings of neighboring countries, who inflicted many wrongs upon the nation of Israel. Now, God has vindicated Israel and is punishing them.
Here is the Messianic group One for Israel’s argument for Isaiah 53 being about Messiah.
I’m afraid it’s misinformed in its initial premise. Isaiah 53 has never been suppressed by the Jews. See these articles: The Isaiah 53 controversy and The Haftorah and Isaiah 53 and finally, this one: Isaiah 53 Explained.
Look. I’m not saying the Jews are right and the Christians are wrong. What I am saying is that the common depiction of the Jews as being pig-headed in their obstinate refusal to recognize Isaiah 53 as a Messianic prophecy is mistaken. A good case can be made for the Jewish interpretation, and there are problems with the Christian interpretation. In any case, from an unbeliever’s perspective, Isaiah 53 is not a very convincing prophecy anyway. Cheers.
So @vjtorley, you believe Jesus rose from the dead. Why?
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I see.
So, to meet your standards, @Puck_Mendelssohn has to demonstrate that it is possible for non-intelligent life to have a non-intelligent cause. You have no obligation to demonstrate that it is impossible for this to happen.
However, on the question of the “Resurrection of Jesus”, Puck has to show that it is impossible for a dead person to come back to life. You have no obligation to demonstrate that this is possible.
It looks suspiciously like you are just making up whatever rules you need to win the game. That is not an honest way to go about this, I’m afraid.
Hey, Puck, how do you think I would have done as a lawyer?
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Hi VJ
I cannot properly comment for a couple of days other then provide a link discussion from a US Messianic group. Perhaps @swamidass would prefer this discussion move to its own thread?
Hi @swamidass,
So @vjtorley, you believe Jesus rose from the dead. Why?
A good question, which I’ll try to answer as honestly as I can.
First, the character of Jesus Himself, which emerges in the Gospels. I can do no better than to quote from Beverley Nichols’ highly acclaimed book, The Fool Hath Said:
You cannot deny the reality of this character, in whatever body it resided. Even if we were to grant the professor’s [Professor Guignebert’s] theory that it is all a hotchpotch of legend, somebody said, "The Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath’; somebody said, Tor what shall it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul’; somebody said, "Suffer the little children to come unto me, and forbid them not: for of such is the Kingdom of God’; somebody said, "How hardly shall they that have riches enter into the Kingdom of God’; somebody said, "All they that take the sword shall perish with the sword.’
Somebody said these things, because they are staring me in the face at this moment from the Bible. And whoever said them was gigantic. And whoever said them was living , because we are in the year 1936, and I am ‘modern’ and you are ‘modern’ and we both of us like going to the cinema and we can both drive a car, and all that sort of thing, and yet we cannot find in any contemporary literature any phrases which have a shadow of the beauty, the truth, the individuality, nor the indestructibility of those phrases.
What I’m trying to say here is that if God ever became man and lived among us, there is only one serious candidate for that man, and that’s Jesus.
Second, the great moral transformation that Christianity has wrought, worldwide. For instance, nearly everyone now regards infanticide and suicide as morally wrong. Were it not for Christianity (and before it Judaism), which condemned infanticide as an abomination and suicide as the willful taking away of something which does not belong to you (namely, your own life, which is a gift from God), it is highly likely that we would regard these practices as natural. That, after all, is how they have been regarded in every culture, since the year dot. The Greeks, the Romans, the Indians and the Chinese all sanctioned infanticide and suicide, when it was deemed necessary or appropriate. If you ask yourself, “What changed people’s minds about these issues?”, the only intellectually honest answer is: Christianity.
Or again, take another case: human equality. We believe that everyone has an equal right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The rights listed in the American Declaration of Independence may have been heavily influenced by Enlightenment thinkers, but whence came the belief in human equality? The belief is frankly ludicrous, unless it is based on the Judaeo-Christian tenet that we are all creatures made in the image of God, our Creator, who loves each and every one of us in equal measure. Without this fundamental belief, it is difficult to see how one could condemn racism, sexism, ageism and ablism. (I recall paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould’s words on the subject: “Human equality is a contingent fact of nature.” Gould was a Marxist, but let us never forget that Marx himself imbibed the Judaeo-Christian ethic as a child, and it profoundly influenced his own thinking.)
Finally, there are social advances that would probably never have occurred without Christianity, even though many prominent Christians sincerely but mistakenly opposed these advances. I’m referring to such advances as the abolition of slavery (sanctioned by quite a few Popes, bishops and doctors of the Church, but also condemned by far-sighted Christian theologians, from St. Gregory of Nyssa in 400 A.D. up until the anti-slavery Quakers and evangelical Anglicans of the 18th century), women’s equality (fiercely opposed by many misogynistic bishops and theologians, but upheld by forward-thinking Christians, such as the Quakers and Methodists) and of course, modern democracy (an idea that would never have gotten off the ground without a widespread belief in the spiritual equality of all human beings, among people living in the West). The crimes committed by Christians are enormous, and they stink to Heaven. But if one looks at the big picture, and at the battle of conflicting ideas and beliefs down the ages, what appears truly miraculous is that back in 1948, the General Assembly of the United Nations, representing every nation on earth, unanimously approved the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Would all those countries have approved this document if they had not lived in a world permeated by the Judaeo-Christian ethic? I think not.
There remain areas of outstanding differences of opinion among Christian thinkers: war, the death penalty, our obligations to our fellow living creatures and our attitudes to human sexuality. But the basic moral framework within which these disputes are conducted is a Judaeo-Christian one, even if resolution of these disputes is a long way away. Everyone (or at least, everyone who believes in God) agrees, for instance, that gays and lesbians are human beings made in the image of God, with a rational human nature. Everyone agrees that it would be wrong to desecrate the dead body of a heinous criminal, even if he deserved to die. Everyone agrees that it would be wrong to target civilians in a conflict. Everyone agrees that cruelty to animals is wrong. And so on.
Third, I find the central dogmas of Christianity appealing. I’ll quote from an article I wrote several years ago:
The Incarnation is the central mystery of Christianity: 2,000 years ago, God came down and lived among us as a man. Either the Incarnation grabs you at the level of the heart or it doesn’t. If it does, then you’ll always experience a sense of something missing in other faiths, and they will never satisfy you. When I was 28, I thought the Incarnation was impossible; when I was 43, I finally realized that it was both true and beautiful. Reading the Gospels after a long interval, what struck me was that Jesus was a man without an ego or a human personality; what He had, I realized, was a human mind and will, which were wholly assumed by the Mind and Will of God. His freedom was of a different kind from ours. We each have our own little personality, and we are capable of defying God. But because Jesus is a Divine Person, that’s not a choice His human will can make: sin is out of the question for Him. What He does have is the freedom to do good in whatever way He chooses. “Why didn’t God make all of us like that?” I hear some of you ask. Short answer: if He did, then you wouldn’t be “you” anymore. You’d have to give up your human personality in order to be like that.
By the way, I happen to adopt a Scotistic view of the Incarnation: I think God would still have become man, even if there hadn’t been a Fall, simply because He loves us.
The Trinity is another doctrine that bugs many people. I like to keep it simple: God knows and loves Himself perfectly. The Father, Son and Holy Spirit are the Mind of God, God’s Understanding of Himself, and God’s Love of Himself. They are irreducibly distinct modes of God’s innermost being, which is why when we pray to God, we should have not a two-way but a six-way relationship with Him.
Finally, there is what I might call the habit of faith. Having been brought up in the Christian faith, I am unable to escape its influence or shake it off: it surrounds me, as it were. Even if I were to abandon it, I would only end up looking for a substitute - which is what Communism was for many fervent 20th-century Marxists, and what the “woke” movement is for many young people today. We all know how cruel and tyrannical the former ideology proved to be, and I believe the latter is no less pernicious, as shown by the ugly way in which its leaders wield power when they try to shame their victims.
The bottom line is that human beings are animals with a need to passionate believe in something. You may say that God made us that way, if you like. And in that case, it is incumbent on you to channel that passion very carefully. For my part, I think Christianity is the best way to channel that human need.
I hope that answers your question, @swamidass. Have a good weekend.
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Suicide is an immoral act, and not a manifestation of a disease? Who still believes that?
Hi @Faizal_Ali,
I don’t doubt that many (perhaps most) people who commit suicide are mentally ill. But all? Surely not. Some people can and do choose to commit suicide. And that’s a bad choice, as I’d hope you agree.
Your claim was that “nearly everyone now regards…suicide as morally wrong.” Is that actually your position? Can you substantiate it?
Can you substantiate your objection?
The marvelous thing about that question is that I can answer it either way, and it’s arguably a compliment whichever way I go!
But I do admire your argumentative style. When someone is throwing up chaff and trying to distract, pointing out the core hypocrisy of his position is a good move. It defeats the distraction and it clarifies, in this case, how absurd his various procedure-over-substance positions actually are.
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That is truly one of the strangest things I have heard anyone say lately. Is it actually difficult for you to see that? Really?
Equality under the law, and equal regard for people as individuals rather than as mere representatives of groups (e.g., racial or ethnic groups) to which they may belong do not in any sense depend upon a notion that human beings are fundamentally themselves “equal.” They depend only on the notion of not pre-judging a situation based upon the mere identity of those involved. This notion flows from fundamental fairness, which flows from human experience: every person has had the experience of being pre-judged, and none of us like it very much (at least when the pre-judgment is not to our advantage).
The idea that the ONLY conceivable source of such ideas is some Christian theological position ignores the fact that equality under the law, or the tendency to deplore racism, is neither unique to Christian (or ex-Christian) communities nor a consistent feature of them.
Surely you don’t believe this. Surely you do not think that equality in these senses is “frankly ludicrous” without a specific theological underpinning.
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Hi @Faizal_Ali,
Try Gallup polls, and scroll down to Suicide.
Next, I’m going to read you a list of issues. Regardless of whether or not you think it should be legal, for each one, please tell me whether you personally believe that in general it is morally acceptable or morally wrong. How about …?
Suicide
2019 May 1-12
[Morally acceptable] 17% [Morally wrong] 79% [Depends] 2% [No opinion] 2%
I am aware that public opinion is split on the separate issue (in this poll) of doctor-assisted suicide. However, the latter can only be requested (in certain states) for strictly medical reasons - e.g. severe and untreatable suffering from a terminal illness. A doctor may not help kill a patient simply because they believe that their life is no longer worth living, or because they feel emotionally distressed or perpetually disgraced, while they go on living. That’s the kind of thing I was talking about. In Japan, where I live, suicide to preserve one’s personal honor would have once been seen as the right thing to do, as it was in ancient Greece and Rome. That’s largely changed, not only in Japan but all across the world. Christianity has helped make suicide a sacrilegious act, because it destroys something infinitely precious: you. That’s a taboo we should try to maintain, for the sake of our civilization. People’s lives are too precious to throw away.
Surely you don’t believe this. Surely you do not think that equality in these senses is “frankly ludicrous” without a specific theological underpinning.
The reasons you cite for supporting equality under the law are merely reasons for opposing prejudice against certain groups of people (e.g. people of other races). But prejudice is just that: judging before the facts are all in. What would you say to a person who told you, “Look, I had no opinions about members of group X before I met them, but now that I have, I see no reason to treat them as equals. They are manifestly inferior (or superior).” You might cite scientific opinion, but be aware that science is a fickle ally. Scientific opinion, by and large, supported racism and sexism until a few decades ago, not to mention ageism and ablism. And I think many scientists today would still support ablism (see below).
The Rawlsian position you put forward is too metaphysically thin to support our ethical judgments. The moral injunction, “Don’t judge me by my skin/sex/age/disability” cannot yield the moral conclusion that killing is (objectively speaking) equally wicked, no matter what the race, sex, age or level of ability of the victim may be.
Think about it. The law regards the killing of a person in a vegetative state and the killing of Einstein as equally reprehensible acts, and most people share the moral intuition that they are equally wicked acts. You can’t possibly justify such a position without the belief that Einstein and the PVS patient both equally possess a rational human nature, even if it is prevented from fully expressing itself in the case of the vegetative patient. In other words, the belief appeals to the mystical notion that there’s someone inside the PVS patient, even if we can’t see any sign of their personality. If that’s not a religious belief, I don’t know what is.
I don’t have to. @vjtorley did it for me. Gallup polls show that 21% of people do not consider it immoral. That still shows, to me, a shocking misunderstanding of the issue. But that is a separate question from his claim that “nearly everyone now regards infanticide and suicide as morally wrong”. The poll did not ask about infanticide, probably because that would be pointless. That is one where it is true the nearly everyone regards it as morally wrong. The very fact that suicide was included in the poll shows Vincent was wrong; the poll was clearly designed to highlight issues where there is controversy over their morality.
I would also be interested in seeing how the question was worded. What do people actually mean if they say suicide is “immoral”? Are they saying that a person who has committed suicide has committed an immoral act? Or that we are morally obliged to prevent someone from killing themselves if we can? For that matter, what does @vjtorley mean? If the latter, then I am in agreement. But not the former. To me, that would be like saying it is immoral to die of pneumonia.
Well, it would depend upon the group, and the context, wouldn’t it? Equality under the law is not equality regardless of actions, so for example, we treat murderers differently from non-murderers, once we have followed due process. And one needn’t believe in the equality of the races in order to believe that individuals ought to be judged as individuals. All one needs for that is the observation that individuals vary. Consequently, a generalization like the one you give in your example (if applied to a group distinguished by race or ethnicity, as opposed to some other characteristic) is simply wrong. It would be wrong to treat all members of some ethnic group as simpletons just because you’d met one or two who were a bit dim, for example. Even if the average member of that group were less intelligent than average, this would say nothing, except in a rough probabilistic sense, about any individual member of that group.
But, of course, it actually does support them.
Well, who cares? I don’t go around weighing whether the killings of people of one race or another are “equally” wicked, especially given that there is no reason to suppose them to be unequally wicked. And the god of the Bible actually specifies races to be obliterated without regard to the individual merit or guilt (or, indeed, the individual anything) of, e.g., the Midianites, so clearly one could never get such a position from such a god. You don’t get away from racism by worshipping a racist.
No, why would you need that in order to justify such a position?
And people plainly DO vary in their possession of a “rational human nature”: just look at the prevalence of ID Creationism, for example. And, by the way, whether killing the person in the vegetative state is illegal does depend upon circumstances, e.g., statements of the individual concerning his desires in such an event, medical judgment as to the probability that this condition can be improved, et cetera.
Well, most of us would say that there isn’t actually someone there if the person is beyond any possibility of effective therapy to recover his faculties. You may believe such things as a “religious belief,” indeed, but it has nothing to do with equality under the law, human dignity, or anything else besides the power of private contemplation to generate beliefs.
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Hi VJ
Let’s look at one verse to see if you can make sense of the Rabbinic position on Isaiah 53.
4 Surely our diseases he did bear, and our pains he carried;
Whereas we did esteem him stricken,
Smitten of God, and afflicted.
If the Rabbinic interpretation is correct then substituting the gentile Kings for (us, our, we) should work and substituting Jacob Israel for (he) should also work.
Now can you make a case that gentile kings (Assyria, Babylon, Egypt) believed that Jacob Israel was Smitten of God, and afflicted?
Can you make a case that the gentile kings felt that surely our diseases Jacob Israel did bear?
I will concede that the One for Israel group does not have a strong case here. Thanks for your solid argument.
The issue is not just with Christians but also with Messianic Jews. As far as I can tell this group is growing very rapidly and Isaiah 53 is a very convincing chapter and prophecy that helps bring Jews to faith. Here is an example of Messianic messaging to Jews in Israel using the Tanakh.
From what you’ve written, it appears that you and I don’t share the same deep-seated, visceral moral intuitions. Let me illustrate by quoting a sentence from Jeremy Bentham’s An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (Chapter 17, footnote, p.144)
But a full-grown horse or dog is incomparably more rational and conversable than an infant of a day, or a week, or even a month old… The question is not Can they
reason? or Can they talk? but Can they suffer?
Bentham was here concerned with the question of whether it was right to torment animals, and he was right to point out that in this regard, we have a moral duty not merely towards rational creatures but towards sentient beings. But had you pressed Bentham and asked him, “Well, then, why is the killing of a newborn baby any worse than the killing of a horse or a dog, since the baby lacks rationality?”, I think he would have been at a loss to answer the question. (Appeals to the grief of heartbroken parents are irrelevant, for one can re-frame the question to focus on the killing of orphaned newborns. Nor can one appeal to the future interests of newborns, because future interests cut no moral ice unless they belong to a subject who is already present, and the question of whether a newborn counts as another “self” is precisely what is at stake here.)
For all his broad-minded compassion, Bentham lacked the fundamental moral intuition that killing a month-old infant is something monstrous, a crime of infinite wickedness, and that it is every bit as bad as killing you or me or Einstein. The philosopher-king Marcus Aurelius, for all his fine and noble sentiments, failed to perceive this spiritual truth. It’s a moral intuition that Judaism and Christianity bequeathed to the world.
You wrote:
I don’t go around weighing whether the killings of people of one race or another are “equally” wicked, especially given that there is no reason to suppose them to be unequally wicked.
Let me ask you directly, then: is killing Einstein any worse than killing a mental imbecile? If not, why not? I’m focusing on the question of “ablism” here, as opposed to racism.
For me, the question is a vital one. I see society as sliding inexorably towards meritocracy, as opposed to democracy - i.e. the view that we’d all be better off being governed by a cognitive elite of clever people. Here is an excellent example of the kind of thinking I’m talking about. (By the way, I wear a mask, but I deplore the snootiness of those who view people who refuse to do so as their mental and moral inferiors.) We cannot ground human rights on a person’s present abilities, or for that matter, the existence of an “effective therapy to recover his faculties,” to quote one of your criteria (which would, by the way, have the bizarre implication that major improvements in medical technology would enlarge the set of beings with a right to life).
And the god of the Bible actually specifies races to be obliterated without regard to the individual merit or guilt (or, indeed, the individual anything) of, e.g., the Midianites, so clearly one could never get such a position from such a god. You don’t get away from racism by worshipping a racist.
I wasn’t defending the slaughter of the Midianites, or the Bible itself, for that matter. My concern was to defend Judaism and Christianity, and I don’t believe that either of these religions stands or falls on the doctrine of the inerrancy of Scripture ( a doctrine which even C. S. Lewis rejected, and which no less an apologist than William Lane Craig considers non-essential to Christianity). What I do know is that Genesis 1:26 tells us that humanity was made in the image of God, that Malachi 2:10 declares, “Do we not all have one Father? Did not one God create us?” that Acts 17:26 adds, “From one man he [God] made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth,” and that Galatians 3:28 teaches, “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” There’s enough anti-racist material in the Bible to account for the shared moral intuition that race has nothing to do with a person’s moral worth.
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I don’t know. However, they probably viewed good fortune as a sign of Divine favor. Hence they might well have felt that the nation of Israel, having suffered so many misfortunes, was not favored by God, but rather, cursed.
I’m afraid it wouldn’t have converted me. The missionary begins with the inaccurate statement that Isaiah 53 was suppressed, and follows up with the questionable claim that it was originally regarded by Jews as applying to the Messiah, despite Origen’s testimony to the contrary. I would have been much more impressed had the missionary argued, “Granted that this verse refers to Israel, could it also refer to the Messiah, as Israel’s supreme representative?” Jews have the tradition of a suffering Messiah (the Messiah ben Joseph).
More to the point, nothing in Isaiah 53 points clearly to Jesus (no dates, no names, no details, no crucifixion) and several details don’t gel with the lief of Jesus (“Kings shall stand speechless before him,” “a man of suffering, and familiar with pain,” “He shall see his heirs and be content.”). So there are difficulties in the apologetic case.
Finally, the missionary’s appeal to Ezekiel 18:4 in order to argue that the just penalty for any kind of sin, however, is eternal separation from God, and that we can be redeemed only by believing in the vicarious sacrifice of Jesus, is a misuse of Scripture. Ezekiel 18:4 plainly declares, “The one who sins is the one who will die.” In other words, you get punished for your own sins, and no-one else gets punished for your sins. The writer of Ezekiel 18 would have been puzzled at the notion that someone could die for the sins of the whole human race. That’s a concept you won’t find in the Tanakh; it comes later. Also, nowhere does the Old Testament teach that any sin, however small, merits eternal separation from God. Rather, it teaches that sacrifices can atone for sin.
Think of it this way. Pneumonia is not a choice. But typically, people who kill themselves do have some degree of choice in the matter. Obviously the degree of choice involved varies widely, from case to case. However, my point is that to the extent that suicide is a choice, it’s immoral, because it’s wrong to throw away your life. Cheers.