So… refraining from “God” in general makes us think about our specific God. *By definition*, according to the atheists, this should make us think about how our God doesn’t deserve to be called God.

What? We’re exclusivists, dummy. Gotta love the “Especially Yahweh, Allah, and Elohim” at one point, incidentally. Makes you exceedingly impressed with their giant pulsating brains of sciencereasonlogic. Okay, not really.

My last post examined the bare assertions made by our erstwhile evolving atheist, Jason Burgoyne. In this post, we will examine the comment that he feels sufficiently answers the issues I raised with his eisegetical treatment of 2 Samuel 12, and his previous (now-removed, with the excuse that he failed to “check his source” sufficiently) post wherein he posts a fabricated substitution for a verse in the book of Numbers, as Staks Rosch suggests in this blog.

Unfortunately, the comment amounts to a rambling, emotive, and invective laden screed, devoid of logical argumentation of any sort whatsoever. A friend of mine calls this approach “the three As – asserting assertions assertively.”

He was offered an internal critique of his own position. Instead of answering the critique, he simply repeats the same naked assertions so often leveled by unbelievers. The lack of introspection evidenced in his response, and the amount of personal investment shown is also a clear sign of emotive, irrational argumentation – so-called.

Here is the justification offered for his superficial treatment, and question-begging. My comments will be interspersed throughout.

It was only meant to be a short look into the atrocities in the book that is meant to inform our morality (In the eyes of Christians).

What sense does “atrocity” make when you have no moral foundation save subjective, arbitrary fiat? What sense does it make for a naturalist, evolutionist, atheist to be speaking about subjects such as “morality”? Morality is an immaterial – has no evidence for it’s existence, per the mantra so often chanted by the materialist hordes.

To be speaking of “morality” is to be spouting gibberish, per their worldview. However, not only are we speaking of “morality”, but “atrocity”. What physical scale may we measure the morality of acts by? What empirical measure do we follow to arrive at the dividing line between “immoral” and “atrocious”?

Further, what ever gave you the idea that the Bible is meant merely to “inform” our morality?

It is pretty clear who the rapists would be (the neighbors who would lie with the wives in public)

You know, the neighbors. The word is רֵעַ – a close relative, a friend, someone intimate with you. In just a few chapters, Absalom, David’s son, fulfills this prophecy. If our friend here had done as I had suggested, he would know this. Further, he would know that the phrase “in broad daylight” (in the better translations) is, literally, in sight of the sun. Openly. The immediate context – ie: the very next verse – tells us how we are to understand this. David sinned secretly, but the usurper will sin *openly*. I always find is fascinating when unbelievers approach these issues as if we have no idea about them. This is probably one of the best-known scenes in all of Scripture. There are volumes upon volumes in print concerning just this one passage, and everything surrounding it. God is not saying “there will be a public orgy”. Such a thing makes absolutely no sense in the context of Israel. He’s saying that as he has taken another man’s wife from him, so another man will take his wives from him. Except, while David did so in secret – the other will do so openly.

and the immorality of striking down a CHILD with sickness is evident and needs no further examination.

Why? How does your worldview provide the preconditions for 1) any sort of conception of morality at all 2) a conception of morality which is non-subjective 3) a conception of morality which carries the “ought” along with it?

Second, by whose standard of “evidence”? I haven’t seen you give any evidence to *be* evident. You’ve merely proclaimed, by fiat, that such is the case. Why should anyone care that your opinion happens to be such?

Thirdly, who on earth ever told you facts were “brute” or “uninterpreted”? The central question in any debate is the meaning of the facts. You are simply assuming your own pet meaning for anything you encounter – but unlike me, you’re not laying your cards on the table. Simply calling names like “immoral” without justification for doing so is less that useless – it’s senseless.

The verse following clearly states that GOD strick him with illness and that he dies 7 days later YOu attempt to defend this immoral and terrible verse with a mocking look at how short it is, but no amount of explanation can undo the evil of killing a child who i innocent for the crime of another

Typing in all caps denotes yelling, thus giving the impression that you are being emotive in your assertions here – I decline to grace them with the term “arguments”. By your standard, every person who dies makes God a murderer. Such a standard is not only ludicrous, but egregiously arbitrary. Second, you use terms like “terrible” – on what grounds do you apply this to the actions of God? Third, you use “immoral”, yet again. You have yet to offer anything non-arbitrary as a supposed foundation for these seemingly odd assertions.

“Morality is a subjective conversation that best decides on how to enact the “My rights begin where yours end” tenet.” – From this post. Okay, so if morality is subjective – where do you get off telling anyone else what is and is not moral, please? Subjective morality is solely self-referential, by definition. Second, on what possible basis can this immaterial concept make any sense whatsoever in a naturalistic worldview? The very notion is absurd, when you are sufficiently self-reflective concerning the inconsistency between the various parts of your worldview.

Finally – I will note this only in passing – I sure hope our erstwhile atheist is against the murder of unborn children in the womb, for consistency’s sake in the immediate sense. Ultimately, however, he still has no reason to be.

Second, I have thanked you for pointing out my error in not checking my source for the original post, but you continue to delight in your childish victory after I apologized and posted a retraction.

Not in the slightest, and your insistence on seeing it as such begins to look like simple projection. Your “source” is entitled “create your own Bible verse”. I’m still finding it amazingly difficult to believe you could be that clueless. That boggles my imagination.

The point remained the same, and your defense of the actions that I referenced was weak and immoral.

The point remained the *same*? Gang rape as “penance” for sin? Penance is a Roman Catholic invention. There is no such thing in the Old Testament. The sacrifices atone for sins – a symbol pointing forward to the atonement of Christ to come, in which they have faith in as Old Testament believers. Further, repeated gang rape? Really? How is that even *remotely* similar to your second objection? In that case, it’s one man and a bunch of women. If you actually knew the context, that is.

Further, saying my “defense” was “weak and immoral” is completely unsubstantiated. You don’t even TRY to prove your assertions. You just, dare I say it, dogmatically spit your preconceptions back when challenged – instead of making any sort of rational case. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say there was indoctrination involved. You yourself say your morals are subjective. Yet *constantly* you assign your subjective “oughts” to the objects you are writing to. That is the opposite of subjective, Jason.

The fact that you choose to defend the murder of a child as “not heavily examined enough” is terrible and an insight into your own morality. The fact that you can hear, “a child was murdered” and you need to hear the whys and how comes before you can determine if it was a moral act is very telling of you.

So, because I don’t bow to King Jason’s subjective feeeeelings, I’m being a nasty ‘ol rotten scoundrel. Gee, thanks. Here I was thinking I’d get an actual argument, finally. Okay, no, not really. I’m still expecting naked assertions and emotive, unsubstantiated nonsense. That’s all I get, as we can see. Does Jason even attempt to make an argument, or does he, throughout this response, resort solely to autobiography? Given that he simply assumes “murder” – simply assumes “rape” – with neither being present in the text itself, I think it’s safe to say that we have mere rhetoric (and rather heavy-handed and wooden, I might add) being substituted for reasoned argumentation. Yes, Jason, it’s customary to consider things for greater than 1.4 seconds before reaching one’s conclusion on a matter. It’s actually customary to study what is being presented, instead of inserting one’s own preconceptions willy-nilly. Yes, it’s customary to consider that words actually mean something, instead of assigning whatever meanings we prefer them to have, regardless of the author’s intent, the context of the text, and the easily-found references made to the surrounding story, of which it is part. Yes, Jason, when reaching a conclusion foreign to practically every reader of this text in history, it would, actually, be beneficial to offer an actual argument to substantiated your novel claim; reaching, as you seem to have, a conclusion missed by millennia of Biblical scholars, in a very well-known text, which you have proceeded to butcher with the ham-fisted rapacity of a Vandal intent on Roman spoils.

Your interest is not accuracy sir, it is in trolling. I attempted MANY times to engage you in conversation on this, and you choose instead not to reference my questions on twitter but to attempt further attacks on me here.

Yes, sir, it is in accuracy. Twitter is not a medium suited to conversation requiring any sort of precision or care. Given your lack of either quality in your handling of the Biblical text, I can see why you prefer to discourse there on topics requiring disciplined study and effort to speak to cogently. Since you seem to lack even the bare minimum of ability to examine the text at a depth greater than an eighth of an inch, I’ve undertaken to show you where, precisely, your ignorance of the subject leads you. First, the ignorance necessary to mistake your first attempt for something in Numbers, let alone Numbers 35, let alone an accurate English translation, is our first clue. The second clue is the lack of familiarity with this text in general. This is the biggest, most public fall of a Biblical character in the text of Scripture. It is the Old Testament pinnacle of the expression of God’s mercy as well as His justice, being exercised in tandem, as they should. Your twin accusations are neither present in the text, nor are they remotely sensical. Your reading of this passage is absolute, and utter brainrot – and that’s putting it mildly. It has taken this much time, and this many words to address, because you have screwed up your attempt *by the numbers* – pun intended.

Infantile at best.

Given what you consider a good objection, I’ll take that as a compliment.

I see now that your goal was NOT to attempt to keep the posts accurate and to ensure that sources are cited, but to attack anyone with any ammunition that you can get because your faith was insulted.

Actually, it was just to respond to one of the worst sequences of Biblical “criticisms” I’ve ever encountered. I do dislike it when people ignorantly make claims they both cannot and will not back up, however – which has been precisely what you have done.

Sad and infantile.

For pity’s sake, at least be original with your ad hominem. Be creative – make me work for my expected insult. It’s not as if I don’t hear this half a dozen times a week from every sort of garden variety atheist “intellectual.” Seriously – if you’re going to take the line that we’re irrational, reasonless drones, at least bother to use something a tween couldn’t equal in the cafeteria.

I gave the bible fairness for 30 years, now I simply can’t excuse its evils any longer.

Well, it’s quite apparent you aren’t fair to it now. Are you sure you were back in the day? I don’t see why you couldn’t excuse any evil, though, really. You’re a subjectivist. Just change the standard when it’s convenient to do so.

I am sad that you can see morality in the death of a child and the rape of women, and see only immorality in the mistaken posting of an erroneous verse.

I’m still wondering why you’re asserting either is even found in this text. Or why you think we should care, being little Mr. Subjectivist. Is truth supposed to be objective now?

The fact that you find your offense in that, and not in the terrible acts depicted in the bible that I revealed, is telling of the indoctrination and dogmatic view that keeps you from the ability to think critically about such things.

I find the fact that your reading comprehension is so abysmal, and your studies so superficial, compelling reasons to reject any claims you have to offer, and find your ignorance of the Biblical text indicative of your dearth of experience with critical thinking. Further, your own stated worldview gives you no reason to even forward your objections in the first place. I find it telling that you can parrot all your little catchphrases about “immorality”, “indoctrination”, and “dogmatism” with a straight face. The sheer effrontery of such accusations in the face of your utter lack of epistemological, moral, and logical justification for any of your claims is staggering.

This is my last post with you, as you have revealed yourself to be too dogmatic to converse, and too proud of yourself to accept thanks when given.

Peace

I hate to burst your bubble, man, but a steady string of assertions, made with no attempt at support or argumentation, simply on personal authority, is definitional dogmatism – and exactly what you’ve presented here. Perhaps where you hang out, they call that “arguing your point” – but around people who actually do debates, that’s called a “logical fallacy”. ie: “Proof by assertion” – “Repeated assertion fallacy”, ad nauseum, Ipse-dixit, etc.

If you thought this post was about you – you’re only partly right. It’s partly about the lack of serious contemplation evidenced in your objections, and responses to challenges to them – but primarily, it’s an object lesson for anyone reading this. If you’re going to make a claim – please, please, please, have something – *anything* to substantiate it. Please give any sort of argument – whatsoever. Please bother to study what you’re objecting to. Please invest at least a modicum of effort into the due diligence required to offer an intelligible response. Thank you.

The first instance of atheist hermeneutics can be found to follow.

As anyone who has picked their Bible up recently can tell you, this doesn’t even resemble Numbers 35. In fact, Numbers 35 instantly recalls “cities of refuge” (Num 35:6) to the Biblically literate. Since this is a stock phrase to this day, it’s always stuck in my mind – as I’m sure it has in many of yours. Secondly – the “verse” quoted is so antithetical to Biblical doctrine, as taught elsewhere, that it is amazingly obvious that our forger has no sort of accurate conception of what is taught in the Old Testament. Since this is so, it would follow that they also have no accurate conception of what is taught in the new – as Christ, in His own words, came not to abolish the law, but to fulfill it. (Matt 5:17) This has significance, also, in the trial of Christ, where it is mentioned that a man cannot be put to death without more than one witness. This also is found in Numbers 35 (vs 30). These are two common referents for this chapter.

I introduce it this way due to a common theme we often see in atheistic writing. “Reading the Bible cover to cover is the surest path to atheism” – or some derivative phraseology. In my experience, the “reading” done by atheists is most often cursory, acontextual, arbitrary, and guilty of more wooden literalism than any fundamentalist I could name. Further, these readings are guilty, in every case I have ever examined, of “eisegesis.” Eisegesis is the importation of your own views, ideas, or the like to the text, and reading in your *own* context, instead of the context the text presents to you. The correct way to consider the Scriptures is via “exegesis” – the “drawing out” of the meaning of the text – by use of the languages, context, background, references given in the text itself, or those made to it.

In the case shown above, there is no exegesis whatsoever – as there is no text to exegete. There is simply gross insertion, utterly foreign to the text itself. In fact, there is simply no other reference to this supposed text to be found, anywhere, save in the blog post, since deleted with a “noted and corrected, Thanks!” This is the worst conceivable form of eisegesis imaginable, due to the fact that it simply inserts their own text AND context, wholesale.

The successor to that (thankfully) abortive attempt to “educate” us on what the Bible “really” says is better only in that at least it attempts to deal with an actual text of Scripture. As we will note, it fares only marginally better as an attempt at exegesis. The (new, replaced) link is below.

Now, he insists (on twitter) he got it from some blogger, and just didn’t check his source. However, as you can do for yourself, do a search on the “verse” he provided – entire, by phrase, any way you like. I just wanted to see if he’d admit it… but here’s the source I found for what he posted, apart from the initial hit on his site.

Okay – so… not only is this a source that *specifically says* it’s a “create your own” bible verse – but the post in which it is promoted seems to think that those “religious people” will fall for it. So, either we have something posted on facebook, found by someone purporting to tell us “what the Bible says,” and… the atheist “falls for it” – or we have an atheist trying to “pull a fast one,” trying to defend his poor attempt – or we have the originator of Alex’s verse. However… if you read Mr. Burgoyne’s tweets, he is trying to give the impression that he *thought* this was a real verse. From the *comments* of a post that says “Create your own Bible verse?” Without even reading the passage? Interesting view regarding accuracy.

The Bible REALLY says that – Part 1

Jason Burgoyne offers us the following passage (cited in the NAB – a Romanist translation, but linked to the TNIV, a liberal “Protestant” version)

Thus says the Lord: ‘I will bring evil upon you (David) out of your own house. I will take your wives while you live to see it, and will give them to your neighbor. He shall lie with your wives in broad daylight. You have done this deed in secret, but I will bring it about in the presence of all Israel, and with the sun looking down.’ Then David said to Nathan, “I have sinned against the Lord.” Nathan answered David: “The Lord on his part has forgiven your sin: you shall not die. But since you have utterly spurned the Lord by this deed, the child born to you must surely die.”

His attempt to object here is extremely short, but we’ll examine it nonetheless.

So the punishment for David killing a man and taking his wife? To have his innocent wives raped, and to kill his innocent child.

Notice – there is not even an attempt to deal with Psalm 51 and David’s confession and cry to the Lord. There is no attempt to substantiate the accusation of “rape” – no identification of who it was that was doing this “raping”, nor is there any attempt to go to where this is fulfilled. In the first case, David attests that it is against God, primarily, that he has sinned. Nathan tells David, in this same passage, why it is that David’s punishment is to be what it is. He has given the enemies of the Lord occasion to blaspheme. Note, also, that there is no attempt to deal with the hope David expresses later on in this chapter, concerning his son, nor is there any attempt to deal with Bathsheba’s next son – a boy named Solomon. The nature and character of God, as is sadly common with atheists, is not addressed at all, save in a highly cursory fashion. His foundation – the position from which these objections are made – is likewise not offered, or argued for. it is merely assumed.

How is this a moral story, and how is any book that contains it supposed to be informative of our (or our children’s) morality?

How is his objection moral? How is any objection, or any putative contrary position supposed to be informative of our, or our children’s morality? For instance – how does a purposeless, meaningless bag of protoplasm, supposedly evolved from “lower” (so-called) life, supposedly meaningful, in any non-arbitrary way, in the first place? On what grounds does he assume there is any semblance of universality of experience which concepts like “morality” can be considered intelligible? What, in his worldview, makes this “morality” he is appealing to in what appears to be a non-subjective fashion, even an intelligible concept in any sense whatsoever? The incredible nature of this lack of self-reflection evidenced by atheist objectors never ceases to amaze me. Not because I don’t expect it, but because it’s so heavily addressed by the pages of Scripture, and they so accurately depict it.

Unbelievers so often throw out words like “moral” or “morality” as if they were some sort of invariant universal. On what grounds do they do so? I offered to debate Mr. Burgoyne on the subject of morality previously, and have not received a reply as of yet. I’ve yet to see a coherent answer for why he seems to object on “moral” grounds, when it seems to me that his worldview offers no consistent basis for a non-arbitrary, non-subjective conception of “morality” in the first place.

It was clearly a book written by iron age sheep herders based on their own skewed “morality”.

Clearly, Mr. Burgoyne’s post was written by an individualistic North American whose “moral” opinions are skewed by temporal prejudice, a notion of class superiority, and ultimately based on his utterly subjective, completely arbitrary conception of his own notions as universally applicable.

Clearly.

Now, let’s be frank. Do the sort of assertions he has offered hold any sort of persuasive appeal, let alone stand up to any rigorous logical objection? Do they come from his own worldview? Are his objections even intelligible, given his atheism? I don’t see how they could be. As easily as they can be turned around on him, they can be dismissed.

He first offered a wholesale forgery, then followed that up with a four sentence “indictment”, borrowed whole cloth from a worldview which actually *possesses* an objective moral code – in order to *object* to that same moral code. I find such lackadaisical treatment of the subject to be par for the course, sadly. Here is what we want, my unbelieving friends. We would like an objection which even attempts to move beyond the superficial, shows even the slightest grasp of context, Biblical theology, or the text itself. We would LOVE for you to actually engage even the barest *fraction* of the mountains of literature surrounding each and every verse of Scripture, or show even the slightest interest in reading it as you’d like to be read yourself. In short, we would love to interact with an intelligent, knowledgeable objector. It is incredibly tiring to deal with the same tired, endlessly dealt-with objections that show not the slightest inkling of interest in fairness, and fairly reek of ignorance. Please, if all you care to do is congratulate yourself on your brilliance, while showing not the slightest knowledge of the field you are claiming knowledge in – do yourself a favor – at least do the cursory study in the field in which you are “educating” us in.

“Not to know the King James Bible is to be, in some small way, barbarian.” – Richard Dawkins