Bob Ross

@"Frank" Imagine that you knew someone was in debt to you so much money that they never could pay it back. You could absolve them of the debt with the...

God sent His Son out of love so that He can be both just and merciful. God is not wrathful: I don’t know why the OT describes Him that way, but the NT...

That’s fine by me. :up: I am having a hard time parsing your argument. Let me offer some arguments I think might be extractable from your elaboration....

Are you confusing an action with an allowance. God is doing the flooding (by willing it); whereas a person with cancer right now was through privation...

Yeah, but don't those seem like highly ad hoc explanations? The Rabbi, granting Chatgpt even got it right, is inventing a new kind of light to explain...

I see your point: upon thinking about it more, I think this is a fair and reasonable rejoinder. I don’t think the great flood mentions or implies ther...

But, then, murder is not the direct intentional killing of an innocent person. It would have to be defined some other way, and different than it being...

I sympathize with your position, since it does seem to me that the OT counts, all else being equal, against God being all-just OR that the OT is not d...

By your definition, a person would kills an innocent child in society that has not made killing humans, in any way or means, illegal has not committed...

I'll have to think about this: maybe if there are an infinite range of possibility then God would have an infinite amount of 'best' worlds He could cr...

Your argument seems to hinge on the idea that there were no children on earth during the Flood; but the very previous chapter, 5, outlines in detail t...

With all due respect, I can't seem to follow what your rejoinder is to the arguments I gave in the OP. Can you take one of my three examples from the ...

:up: Yes I do. Yes. I don’t know: it seems to be both history in a more literal sense of events, dates, and people and also literary. It’s hard to dec...

I am ok with granting this, because you are excluding the kinds of people that would not be defectors but would not be meaningfully an Amalekite. I am...

:roll: You obviously don't know what neoplatonism is which is evident from the fact that you can't explain it. I have.

Agreed. @"frank" brought up the claim and then "justified" it by saying I am clueless. Frank, can you elaborate on what you mean?

Why do you refuse to defend your own position? I outlined mine clearly: can you do the same?

Frank, I've read about neoplatonism. What do you mean by it and how does Plato argue for the Trinity? I don't that happened. Just explain it briefly t...

To clarify, I am saying that Christianity holds that the OT God is God; but that my OP is objecting by way of an external critique from classical thei...

What do you mean by neoplatonism? I mean any view that adopts but sublates Plato's view. Aristotle adopted Plato's views but sublated it; and in turn ...

You don't think Aquinas or Aristotle were neo-platonists?!?

What you are raising is the problem of evil, which is not relevant to the OP. The answer to natural evil is that you need a world where there are regu...

I see. Can you respond, then, to the three examples I gave and explain how they are allegories and what they are allegories about? I find this implaus...

I don’t think it is a form of monism. Aristotle definitely wasn’t a pantheist nor was Aquinas.

I was not aware of that, and that’s fine as long as we agree then that: 1. Not all people who lived in the culture of the Amalekites were Amalekites, ...

With all due respect, this seems like a non-answer that sidesteps the discussion. Is your rebuttle to the OP that we cannot know why God did evil, but...

I commend your cleverness and ingenuity here; but I think this is fallacious. Goodness is not quanitified over like an atom: it isn’t a concrete being...

I will provide some quotes when I have time.

I never denied the existence of good and evil: I noted that goodness is real and evil is not real. Evil is the privation of what is good: so it exists...

What we are talking about is akin to whether it is morally permissible to create a world where it is possible for a child to get lit on fire or not; a...

I agree with that assessment so far. It's the killing of innocents that my OP is objecting to: I recognize that the Canaanites were doing horrible thi...

As far as I know, for Plato God is the One which is unchangeable as a Platonic Form. CC: @"Count Timothy von Icarus" God cannot and is not bargained w...

I am absolutely disagreeing. The quote you gave serves only as a poetic line (even if Elie meant it as more). It's an emotion response, and rightly so...

Origen seems to be arguing that given Christ as love and mercy that the Old Testament has to be primarily spiritual lessons and not conveying historic...

But how would you respond to the three examples I gave in the OP? The OP doesn't treat God as a 'magical alien': it treats God as God in the classical...

Jesus explicitly reveals himself as related to the god of the OT as his son: that's the chasm in your argument. Jesus made it clear he is fulfilling t...

He explained that there are three main categories of responses: 1. That the text should be read at face value (i.e., literally in the strictest sense)...

I never suggested that, but historical there is a predominant interpretation that even fundamentalists agree with. The vast majority of Christians agr...

Evil is a privation of good.

Thank you: I will take a look!

Firstly, even if that contradicts God’s nature, it is not a logical contradiction. Secondly, it does not incohere with God’s nature to allow evil to h...

Can you elaborate on this? I would say that there has to be a best ordering to creation because the thing that has a property the best is the one that...

I would be interested to hear @"Leontiskos" response to this. I am inclined to agree; but I think Christians would say that the Old Covenant paved the...

It is not at all: Christians hold they are harmoniously intertwined. The new covenant and the old covanent relate to each other in manner of successio...

:up: I definitely am not trying to argue in bad faith and am genuinely interested to hear what Christians have to say on this. I listened to Jimmy's v...

How is it logically inconsistent? What logical contradiction arises from the two? I believe that. This OP isn’t an argument for a problem of evil in t...

This is not self-apparent at all! Christians tend to disagree with you here.

It is an external critique of the OT from the perspective of my view as a nuanced, classical theist. I am not commenting on whether or not Christians ...

Yes, but the stereotypical arguments you are describing are low quality. If it is an internal critique, then a Christian could bite the bullet and say...

I appreciate the clarification! I think that the fundamental disagreement between us lies in our approaches. You seem to be basing most, if not all, o...