Further you utterly destroy disrespect for "All life is to be respected" is and remains...the truth.

You are the only one going on about "respect for all life". Your comments are irrelevant to the point of egregious harm to infants and disrespect of women.

The broad terms in which are going on about "life" convey no coherent meaning.

The God of the old testament endorses the idea of total disrespect for all tribes apart from his "chose" one, so he is deserving of no respect.

Whatever went on in a war, nothing justifies taking it out on the innocents, whether or not they are of your tribe.

I do know the truth, and it is that there is no God except as an idea in the mind of the believer, and that the Bible is destructive of true morality.

Well I guess one would assume that when you get cancer, you want the doctors to get all of it. How much cancer do you want the doctors to leave inside of you?

Fully apprehending one's own mortality and the mortality of one's loved ones is, I think, a grief experience and the processes one goes through when grappling with it are similar to what one goes through in other grief experiences, including the actual deaths of loved ones.  

Two thirds of what I can reasonably expect to be my natural life span is already gone.  Close family members have died.  Good friends have died.  Some day, I will die.  My wife, too.  

Yes, death is ugly.  I hate it when people speak of death as "part of life".  It's bullshit -- trite, disneyish, pseudo-deep bullshit.

The way for me to deal with these unpleasant realities has been to contemplate them, to recognize and dwell on the inevitability and finality of death.  Then, finally, to accept all that and move on.  Yes, there is death and pain and horror but there is also beauty and life and love.

To some extent, I think it's a conscious choice -- a choice to live.

It was a yes-or-no question.  Does God force you to love your family, YES or NO? 

I guess I don't really get the question. I could not know love if I did not know God. Call it forcing if you like. Even knowing it I still diminish its perfect standard which even you yourself claim to know as you wrote  "then you truly do live an empty, pathetic life."

I would like to say that it would be a pathetic life but I cannot. If I did not know love there would be no life at all.

Don't be f**ing stupid. That was not what I was referring to.

Arguing about "all life deserving respect" is inevitably going to lead to contradictions. 

Unqualified, "life" includes everything from every bacteria and horrific parasite to ourselves - trying to argue that somehow 'all' that deserves respect is nonsense, which is what you were running into in your attempt to discuss it.

We personally value our own life, unless it has become overwhelming difficult or painful, so even that is not a universal.

A gut urge to avoid death is inherent in all creatures, for solid evolutionary reasons.

As a social species, we similarly value the continued existence of our friends and relatives. 

Religious dogma provides a way to pervert such inherent values.

Are you eventually going to make some intelligent comments?

Sometimes when we argue with theists I realise that too often belief in god is constructed on top of the ruins of the person we are talking to. Then there's this gelatinous prose.

"You cannot say you love life if you join the armies of the dead...The barbarians in their hordes at the gates of the great city."

I don't know what you do for a living Tr1n but I think you have the makings of a novel inside you.

Well you were the one arguing against your self described "egregious" acts written of in the Bible. I simply offered that I could not think of any reason YOU would have to offer as justification for this position you have chosen to take.

So I went into a "perhaps" mode and offered that perhaps you meant "All life must be respected" or something similar as your iconic standard for calling bashing babies heads in as automatically "egregious". As we were talking about human babies I don't think it matters what you say I must mean. The definition of life I was using clearly was referring to human life or its decisive ending particularly that was being discussed.

I of course argue that it is not automatically "egregious" to bash babies heads in. It would be "egregious" to save babies at the expense of the lives of your entire people. Bashing their heads in is actually quite painless too. Better than letting them die of exposure or something along those lines.

Try to keep up, ok?

*copy/pasted from the wiki page* 

"While in prison, Andrea stated she had considered killing the children for two years, adding that they thought she was not a good mother and claimed her sons were developing improperly. Yates told her jail psychiatrist, "It was the seventh deadly sin. My children weren't righteous. They stumbled because I was evil. The way I was raising them, they could never be saved. They were doomed to perish in the fires of hell."^[53]"

Is this how much you love your children?  Are you willing to kill them if you think they might somehow end up in hell if you don't?

Well certainly I wouldn't know from where she got that insane idea and do not pretend to even guess at it. Sounds like the usual works thing, yeah that's what it is, they'll go to hell cause they'll sin.

Certainly not Christian

But the people that the ancienct Israelites wiped out were not inhumanly evil like the bear people from the 13th Warrior were. If we accept the old testament as historical fact, then we see that the Israelites lived peacefully with various groups of foreigners before deciding to kill them all. Israelites would intermarry with their friendly neighbors and everything would be going well. Then YHWH would get angry that they were allowing themselves to intermingle with people who don't worship YHWH. Then the Israelites would kill everyone who married a foreigner and all of the foreigners (including infants and sometimes including the animals owned by the foreigners). This wasn't the Israelites defending themselves from assaults by the bear people from the 13th Warrior. This was the Israelites living among friendly groups and then deciding to ethnically cleanse the region that they were in and to kill anyone who has an interracial marriage. The Israelites were the savages in all this. If you engaged in an interracial marriage, the penalty was death by impalement. Finding a wife amongst your friendly neighbors and then being killed by your fellow Israelites for contaminating yourself by contact with a foreigner was nothing like defending oneself against the semi-human bear people that had to be wiped out in the 13th Warrior. YHWH's commands to commit genocide and kill people who marry foreigners is not in any way comparable to norse warriors defending themselves against assaults by cannibals. You really want to wipe out all of the cannibal bear people that want to eat every last one of you. You really shouldn't wipe out the friendly neighboring tribe that is your source of non-incest wives.

Indulge me please, because I've heard this very same argument used against gay marriage and allowing gays to raise children,which is usually an issue with theists mostly.

OK I'm not talking about "a people" killing other peoples' babies right now.  I'm talking about a woman who was convinced by a sermon preached by her preacher that she was a bad parent and that her kids would go to hell because she was raising them wrong.  Granted, she was clinically depressed and nobody should have left her alone with the kids in the first place, but she felt so convicted that killing her own children was better than letting them potentially go to hell that she actually went through with it.  My question was whether or not you felt that strongly about your faith that you would kill your children to prevent them from sinning.  They'd just go straight to heaven, right? 

I don't know what "the usual works thing" is.  And your answer is what, exactly? 

He is trying to say that genocide is great. He doesn't want to come out and phrase it that way, so he uses analogies with cancer and the cannibals from "The 13th Warrior" to try and show us why bronze age tribes wiping out other bronze age tribes is a moral thing. He wants you to support Israelites wiping out their neighbors (infants and all) in same way that you would support a doctor completely wiping out a cancer. He hasn't put all that together at once in one post, but I'm pretty sure that is what he is trying to say. He is very coy about his statements and claims. You get fragments of an argument in each post. I guess that we were supposed to add together his posts about cancer, "The 13th Warrior," and people complaining about genocide and infanticide in the Old Testament to understand his views on the matter. That's my interpretation anyways. He refuses to just come out and say what he means, so I'll just guess and compile a few of his posts together to turn it all into a coherent set of claims or arguements.

He hasn't come out and said it, but I suppose that he is a salvation by grace and not a salvation by works Chrisitian. Some of them think that you earn your way into heaven by your works (salvation by works). Others think that you enter heaven by god's grace alone (salvation by grace). Christians who believe in one of those two propositions tend to think that those who believe otherwise are hell-bound and/or not "true" Christians. It would be nice if he would just come out and say what he means. Playing this guessing game in which we fill in the blanks to try and turn his idea fragments into meaningful comments is a pain in the ass.

Perhaps I am misrepresenting tr1nity in all this. But, given his refusal to be clear and specific, this kind of vague guessing at his propositions is the best we can manage.

Well how does it not make sense...to you.

You are an educated atheist. well done. You're spot on.

Other than the genocide thing, I never said anything like that was "ok", I just explained it's necessity as an option offering the argument against the automatic default to the claim of the description of the killing of women and children in the bible as being this something called "egregious".

I was accused of committing some type of failure here, so I offered that even the decision of what IS egregious is subject to debate. I do not recognize those scriptures as being evidence of this "egregious" thing.

I further believe I have clearly written my argument as to why these acts were not egregious within the context of their described occurrence.

You, on the other hand remain unable to offer your argument as to why it IS egregious. Just saying it is over and over again isn't an argument. It's called a "bald" or unfounded assertion.

So why then are my arguments wrong? (You should deal with key points, qoute if you like,  and use post #'s as a reference)

And what are your arguments for these acts being "egregious"? If this is done, then I may respond. If it is not I might comment on the madness some of you spew because it entertains me.

Ok, I believe it is good that those tribes ,as described in the bible, were removed from the face of the earth. It allowed us to "live" here and now versus being dead or more likely non-existent as our ancestors would have wiped themselves out long ago.

I further argue that this cannot be looked upon as a general rule or some type of self standing iconic truth. We are not to run around and find people to wipe off the face of the earth randomly.

We ARE however called to respect all life and further to destroy its disrespect at the most fundamental level. May it be that this earth would never have to experience such horror and barbarism again.

But it will...

Well that assertion is beautiful let me tell you. Certainly ALOT going on in there. I'm sure there's a religious debate forum that covers this very argument. I assert that the jewish people ceased to exist once the covenant was removed at the time and date of Christ's death on the cross and culminated in its absolution at the time of the fall of the temple in 70 a.d.

A mother murdering her own child, and any that assist such a thing, should be subject to the death penalty as applied , if convicted, by the appropriate laws of the land within the context of due process.

Can't say, don't know anything about that crazy woman's religion. A world that pursued that particular thing as some kind of truth claim would wipe itself out very suddenly I think. Alot of dead kids, wow!

I can't seem to find a scripture reference where killing your kids would save them. I do however know that killing people here and now does not judge them to hell. THAT particular judgment IS made in the next life.

You are wrong.  See for yourself.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article571206.ece

http://moses.creighton.edu/JRS/2005/2005-11.html