To dunsscot:
:: You're comparing apples and oranges, dunsscot, when you compare a direct command from God to Abraham, to an arguable interpretation of the Bible by the Watchtower Society. TD's comments are dead on.:
: I have pointed out in other posts that I am in process when it comes to the Governing Body's understanding of blood transfusions.
That's good. I knew there was hope for you.
: Of course, I recognize that there is a difference between Abraham's suspension of the ethical
Abraham's actions were nothing of the kind. Since for true believers, whatever God says is ethical, is ethical, Abraham made no suspension of his ethics -- he changed his ethics due to God's command, just as surely as worshipers of Jehovah changed their ethics when they went from being under Jewish Law to being under Christian principles.
: and a modern JWs refusal to take blood. I even stated that I think blood tranfusions should be a matter of conscience, period.
You are to be commended for this stand. It could get you DA'd, you know.
: And to answer Jerry's question, if a Witness examines Scripture (thus listening to qol YHWH) and thinks that he or she can in all good conscience take blood or allow his or her child to have blood, then by all means, they should listen to their internal witness-bearer and the voice of YHWH.
Good! Why then, do you follow and give verbal support to men who declare wicked those who do exactly as you suggest? Here is an example of wicked men declaring the righteous one wicked.
: But while Abraham's case is not identical with that of modern JWs, I think his case is analogous in a Thomistic sense.
Try using words that make sense to us simple folk.
:: If Jehovah is the Supreme Creator who determines right and wrong, what is ethical and what is not, then by definition what he tells someone to do is right and ethical. Therefore, if Abraham had killed Isaac by God's command, it would have been ethical by definition.:
: If a voluntarist delineation of God's nature is correct, THEN whatever Jehovah commands is right or wrong. But I'm not so sure the voluntarist is right when he or she contends that the voluntas of God takes precedence over the intellectus dei. Michael Gillespie's _Nihilism Before Nietzsche_ highlights the difficulties with positing a God who is omnipotent in a strict sense. The difficulties involved here can also be observed in Plato's "Euthyphro."
This is a large question, true, but it is irrelevant to the teaching of Jehovah's Witnesses, which after all is what you're on this board supporting. For JWs, your words are meaningless. If a standard of morality exists apart from God, then God did not make it. If such exists, then God of necessity must be obeying someone else -- whoever created that standard. But according to JWs, God is omnipotent and answers to no one else. That's pretty much what the Bible says, too.
Oddly enough, the Bible paints a contradictory picture of God with respect to morality. When Abraham argued God down to allowing that if only ten righteous men could be found in Sodom and Gomorrah, he asked, "Is the Judge of all the earth not going to do what is right?" Obviously in this instance, he held God to a higher standard than "whatever God told him". Yet we're quite certain that if God had told Abraham, "Listen you little snipe! It's not your business to question me! Do what you're told or you're toast!" Abraham would have meekly obeyed and likely convinced himself that God was acting properly after all.
:: Various pagans around Israel interpreted their holy writings or whatever so as to understand that their God or gods required child sacrifice. Yet the Bible says of its God that such a horrible thing never came up into his heart.:
: We both know, I think, that the God of Moses (the writer of the Pentateuch) did not want Abraham to sacrifice his beloved son. As you rightly point out, such sacrifices never came up into His heart.
Right, but remember that this story is told in a cultural context in which child and animal sacrifice was common, even the norm. Listeners of Abraham's day would not consider such a sacrifice to be nearly as horrendous as we do today. Just suppose a person from patriarchal culture was hearing the story for the first time. He of course would not know how it turned out. He would be on the edge of his seat right up to the last second, just before Abraham was stopped from killing his son. That's a major theme of the storytelling.
: This fact does not mean that an action is right because God commands it. Duns Scotus thought that if God commanded us to commit adultery, then marital infidelity would be permissible. I disagree in toto, pace Duns. If we favor such an interpretation of the divine potentia, we open up Pandora's box, and allow nihilism to run rampant.
So what? That's the way it is. Old Duns was right. God, being the creator, can declare any actions he pleases to be right. That he does so is demonstrable from Bible stories. It was just fine for patriarchs -- and certainly kings -- to have as many wives and concubines as they could handle. Such practices were regulated, but that does not negate the fact that, as implied by Jesus, God changed his standards for marital fidelity sometime between Adam and Abraham. The original was supposedly one man, one woman, period. The faithful among the patriarchs held strictly to the standards God set for them -- including screwing their wives' servants when their wives allowed it -- and so, if later Bible writers held these men up as paragons of morality, then they were righteous -- by definition!
Conversely, if God declared that from now on marriage was a dead institution (new scrolls opened and all that), and men and women should be like bonobos and free have sex with whoever they pleased, what humans could properly tell him that he had set up an improper standard? You? Me? Not likely. JW leaders and other Pharisees? More than likely.
:: The JWs interpret their holy writings so as to understand that their God requires that they sacrifice their children on the altar of their 'no blood' doctrine. Yet nothing in the Bible indicates that revering the symbol of life over life itself ever came up into Jehovah's heart.:
: You may be correct, but I think you're only telling part of the story.
Not "may" -- I am correct, and you know it. The rest of "the story" is mere window dressing and red herring smell, as I will show.
: JWs do not have a death wish for their children. They do everything in their power to give their children, happy and content lives. Furthermore, the JW life by its very nature is life-promoting.
Irrelevant. Exactly the same can be said of many Christian groups that practice a small number of hurtful or deadly things. You will no doubt disagree with them, yet not quite be able to see why you should apply your standard of disagreement to your own religion. Why is that? Simple: to admit it would be to admit that your religion is no better than so many others, and that would kill off your incentive to stick with it, which is emotionally unacceptable.
For example, do you think that the crazy Christian Pentecostal snake-handlers of Tennessee love their children any less than JWs do, or do less than everything in their power to give fine lives to their children? Not likely. But these people, who give their children poison to drink and make them handle poisonous snakes -- sometimes resulting in death -- you'll certainly condemn them for going against common sense. At least, I hope you would. Does the "life-promoting" conduct of such people in most areas negate their death-promoting behavior with respect to snake-handling? Clearly not. These people are nuts, and they prove that they really don't respect life even though they claim that they love life and are only showing faith in God by putting themselves unnecessarily in harm's way. And just like with the JWs and their blood doctrine, the mere claim that the snake-handling doctrine is "biblical" does not make it so, and does not negate the gross disrespect for life that all these people show.
: Lastly, I find it ironic that those who worry so much about the POTENTIAL death of a child who refuses blood transfusions do not care enough about the spiritual welfare of their children to teach them spiritual and ethtical guidelines. Some parents even smoke in front of their children or abuse alcohol. They also fail to teach them biblical truth or transcendent values as a whole. Are they any better than Witnesses who MAY permit their children to die if suitable alternatives to blood cannot be found?
Who are you to judge what is right for others to teach their children? Can you prove apodictically that God exists, that this God is the God of the Bible, and so on? No? Then don't judge those who act responsibly on that knowledge.
More important for our present discussion, though, is that you're raising another red herring. The propriety of the JW position on blood has nothing to do with the living habits of anyone -- including those who choose to discuss the issue.
: If God permitted the slaying of the innocents in the first century, and he allows abortions today and so many other evils, why would He not permit His worshipers to make certain decisions that mean life or death?
Yet another non sequitur. The fact that all these deaths occur shows nothing whatsoever about whether God "allows" such things. They could equally well occur because God explicitly permits it, or that God is off playing cosmic golf and is unconcerned, or that there is no God to be concerned.
As the apostle Paul was asked, dunsscott, why do you keep kicking against the goads? The answer to "the question of blood and JWs" is obvious and you know it. Why not act on your gut, follow through, and do the right thing?
AlanF
