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Ken Ammi:
Friend, you may recall that I never claimed that he did not kill her and wrote a very detailed consideration as to the two main interpretive options. I also find it fascinating that you still excuse Pagan merely charging them with ignorance and end up besmirching the Bible.
I am afraid that you are piling unfounded assertion upon unfounded assertion.Your goal of securing societal health but why and just your society or that of, say, ISIS as well?
You have empathy but why? This may be a Darwinian misfiring as you should be striving to survive as the fittest much like the Allied Forces survived and the Nazis did not.
You don’t want to die but the rate of death is currently one per person: you may not want to but you will. Others don’t want to die but why appeal to someone’s arbitrary desire to stay alive for a mere few more years?
It is illogical to calculate that the reason to not “kill anyone that I feel like” (in which case you are referring to “murder”) is because you “don’t want it to happen to me” as there is no known metric that would, necessarily, equate the one action with the other.
You merely assert that Pagans acted upon ignorance when they sacrificed humans but for all you know it was societally healthy as it lowered their population and made for more resources for the rest, or they sacrificed their enemies which made for lowering of the enemy’s morale, or they could have sacrificed the evolutionarily less fit as a form of eugenics, etc.
Now, you assert that they didn’t know better but that may be exactly what the future will say about you and your empathy, desire for societal health, etc. They will say that you were ignorant in keeping the less fit alive, etc.
You claim that you can’t impose today’s understanding on a past civilization but you do exactly that when you besmirch the Bible’s contents. But you attempt to side step this contradictory dilemma by referring to the Bible as a book (it is a volume and not a book: 66 books by 40 authors) that was inspired by God. Well, the human sacrificing Pagans also claimed to be divinely inspired so please spend circa 99% of your time polemical time condemning them. You assert that God should tell people not to do something like that even when you have already admitted that you know that God condemns human sacrifice.
It seems to me, and please do correct me if I am wrong, that at least in moments of clarity you can see that Atheism has left you unable to condemn anything at all on any basis but whatever unfounded assertion strikes you at any given time—and that makes for no condemnation at all.
Yes to empathy. Yes to societal health. No to human sacrifice.
But these conclusions are ultimately interpretations of bio-chemical neural reactions occurring with the haphazardly evolved gray matter of a temporarily existing bio-organism, sitting atop a spinning rock, orbiting an average star in the backwaters of a temporarily existing universe—so what is the problem again?
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