Ok, it seems we agree it is equally immoral to kill a slave or your own child, so we can dispense with comments like "killing a slave would be far more immoral".

I think I quite clearly explained I considered them equal, and in my original comment I did not say killing a slave would be less evil. I'm sorry if you interpreted it that way.

I agree that in the Bible Abraham loves Isaac more than Ishmail which is pretty unfortunate. Maybe he shouldn't have committed adultery and trusted that God would fulfill his promise of offspring with his aged wife.

Thanks for those citations in which killing children in other nations is denounced. But that speaks of killing your own children, not human sacrifice. I would have thought it would be easy to just put it in one of the hundreds of commandments to "never kill, or beat a child, never engage in any sexual activity with a child" but maybe that's asking too much.

According to me it's always bad to kill a child as a religious practice, and it's immoral for god to tell Abram to kill Isaac. Even if he was kidding.

I'll defer to you on on the ending of human sacrifice. I'm not altogether sure it doesn't still happen. But like you say the Romans didn't do it and they didn't need the story of Abraham and Isaac to explain bit to them. It was already an abomination during the Punic wars.

Oh goodness, bloodbath entertainment wasn't abolished by Christians. Public executions and torture were widely viewed. And bear bating. But this is an aside.

No I don't see the Isaac story as God being amused to see people squirm. Rather it follows a pretty solid theme throughout many of the books in the OT, obedience to God's commands is the most important rule. The story is pretty obvious, the most valuable thing to Abraham is to have a male heir, lineage is extremely important. But God's orders are even more important. Whatever god says you must do irrespective bad or how abhorrent. Whether killing you child as Abraham was ordered to or killing the children of others as Saul was ordered. Strict adherence to divine commands is all that matters. Uzzah found out the hard way.

I'm more inclined to think the Jews wrote this story because they'd given up, or abhorred human sacrifice, rather than the other way round. I'm open to the theory that an earlier version Isaac is in fact sacrificed.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/when-abraham-murdered-isaac/

It certainly didn't end human sacrifice. The practice continued into this century.

Yes I agree that even in the Bible god is unable to enforce this commands effectively and all kinds of immoral behaviour is not condemned, it is often celebrated.

No I don't believe the story would be morally better if he'd been ordered to kill a slave. I think it would be better if say Abraham was going to sacrifice his son but god tells him not to, or as I said above, if Abraham refuses to do it and god explains thst that is the right response when someone tells you to kill your child.

Your right when I encountered this story in university I was shocked it appeared in a Miracle play from the middle ages. I felt that. I felt it impossible to think Abraham was a good person when he agreed to kill his son. I was confident this was a bastardization of what the Bible said, as I couldn't believe such an abhorrent story was in the Bible. But it is. And I'm still pretty surprised that people try and defend it as in any way moral.

Incorrect. Romans abhorred only child sacrifice. They were perfectly happy with the gladiatorial games--not just the skilled fighters but also the mass slaughter of war captives for a religio-social institution. Though they'd dropped some of the trappings of the funeral human sacrifice that they'd started as, they still had that root and that reason for existence. Truly mass sacrifices of humans emerged infrequently and those cultures were obliterated pretty aggressively, but a low-scale level of background human sacrifice was extremely common in the ancient world, and human sacrifice during times of excessive stress more normal than not.

I think you can only be being obtuse on purpose to misunderstand what I said. I did not say that it was not immoral to kill a slave. YOU said that it would be LESS immoral to kill a slave--you thought the story would have made God less cruel if Abraham had been told to kill a slave. That was your argument! And I disagreed with YOU. It would have been easier for Abraham to kill a slave and so the evil would have been equal but the emotional burden on Abraham lighter. To feel the weight of what he was setting himself up to do, Isaac, who was absolutely everything to him, was the only possible choice, because no one could have affected him more deeply than that.

Once again you show your utter ignorance of the Bible.
Human sacrifice is prohibited in MULTIPLE places. There is a death sentence for anyone who sacrifices their children twice in Leviticus and then they're forbidden again in Deuteronomy. (Child sacrifice was the form of human sacrifice practiced in that region.)

In Deuteronomy 12, child sacrifice is listed as the number one reason why God had passed judgment on the nations he was sending the Israelites to crush: "29The Lord your God will cut off before you the nations you are about to invade and dispossess. But when you have driven them out and settled in their land, 30and after they have been destroyed before you, be careful not to be ensnared by inquiring about their gods, saying, “How do these nations serve their gods? We will do the same.” 31You must not worship the Lord your God in their way, because in worshiping their gods, they do all kinds of detestable things the Lord hates. They even burn their sons and daughters in the fire as sacrifices to their gods."

But according to you, it's okay? I said saying this wasn't SUFFICIENT, not that it didn't happen. It did. We still had Japhthah after the fact--one despite all the prohibitions and the example of Isaac to be made a further example of.

In fact, this is the reason why Abraham doesn't immediately get the land that his descendants are promised. God foreknows that the people of Canaan will do this, but this is not yet a very popular practice that they were spreading around yet, and so they were not yet under the full weight judgment that would come. In Genesis, we read, "In the fourth generation your descendants will come back here, for the sin of the Amorites has not yet reached its full measure." (That's only the generation of the patriarchs, not the full generations of descendants--there are no patriarchs between Joseph and Moses.)

But I guess that you'd say that it's both bad to sacrifice people and also bad for God to punish people for spreading the practice of human sacrifice because it simply doesn't give you enough warm fuzzies.

Human sacrifice was ended only by three means. Before Christ, it ended only by the violent destruction of one culture by another. After Christ, it was wiped out either through conversion, governmental pressure by a Christian-informed government, or by violent destruction. It was wiped out in China when the Shang were obliterated by the Zhou. It was almost entirely wiped out the Levant by the Israelites. It was wiped out in the Western Mediterranean by the Romans. And it was eventually wiped out everywhere by Christians. That's the cold and honest truth. The God of the Bible operates through both the free will of man and his own sovereignty. Since Christians ended human sacrifice as an institution in places as far apart as Mexico, Peru, Hawaii, West Africa, and India...it seems pretty ridiculous to say that they didn't. You could have made this argument a couple of thousand years ago. You can't make it now.

In India, Hindu priests complained that is was their Hindu custom to burn widows, to which a British officer replied, "“Be it so. This burning of widows is your custom; prepare the funeral pile. But my nation has also a custom. When men burn women alive we hang them, and confiscate all their property. My carpenters shall therefore erect gibbets on which to hang all concerned when the widow is consumed. Let us all act according to national customs." The human sacrifice of widows was ended by the British rule, along with many similar practices.

And yes, this British custom all came only from the lesson of the sacrifice of Isaac, because the Celts and the Germans before they were Christianized were entirely comfortable with human sacrifice, and the Romans killed people for sport in their arenas, which was abolished (again) through the influence of the church.

The fact that you're imagining this as the mercurial and cruel ploy of a god amused to see people squirm shows your idiocy and blindness. It was very rare for a culture to categorically reject human sacrifice. The Jews did BECAUSE OF THIS STORY. Because of the way it was written. This story ended human sacrifice around the world because it cultivated in people a horror of it when before it had been praised--the "wise" Greeks respected human sacrifice, even. And again, the story of Jephthah's evil vow was recorded (among countless small events that might have been recorded) to show how very necessary the story, in addition to the prohibitions (which were so easily ignored), actually was. There are many people who do bad things in the Bible who don't get editorially condemned by the writers. Lot's daughters aren't editorially condemned, nor is his drunkenness. Neither is Lamech. You're supposed to be morally competent enough to figure out that these people are being described doing bad things. But you clearly aren't. You think the story would have been morally better if Abraham had been told to kill a slave--because you entirely miss the point.

Most cultures throughout history would have thought that the actual sacrifice of Isaac would have been entirely normal for a god. There is nothing more ridiculous than having moral quibbles at a polemic AGAINST it because you want to project a stunted teenager's impressions in the twentieth or twenty-first century on something that was understood perfectly well for millennia. But your reading has to be right because you FELT it. Good grief.

No you would not. Rather few societies at that time performed human sacrifice. Consider the Romans sone years later, they abhorred human sacrifice.

I disagree, i think killing a slave or an Isaac is just as immoral. Neither Isaac or the slave is deserving of being killed in this story. It's disturbing that you make such value judgments on human lives based on lineage and circumstances. On my morality all life is equal.

The old testament is clear when it prohibits things. It does not prohibit human sacrifice. To the contrary, god orders one and Abraham obeys. God never says this is prohibited or wrong or that tomorrow he won't require human sacrifice.

Even with this story human sacrifice continued worldwide for centuries. It is ridiculous to think this was how a god would try to stop it.

Jeptha's sacrifice of his daughter is not denounced anywhere in the Bible. It would seem god accepted the offer to exchange a win for the killing of the daughter.

Yaweh did ask Abraham to kill Isaac, then apparently changed his mind. It's easy to re-write the story as a prohibition on human sacrifice. E.g. it's Abraham's idea to sacrifice Isaac for some earthly desire, win a war or endba famine or something. But when he tries, the knife breaks, he uses a stone, it turns to dust, then the lamb appears, or better yet god says don't sacrifice anything to me, I'm infinite and perfect, and all that you would sacrifice is mine already, you are not the barbaric Carthaginians or Inca who's gods are transactional, etc.

But that isn't the story. Just the telling of Abraham to kill his son is abusive, abhorrent, and entirely gratuitous.

It's rather sad that some theists feel they need to justify this terrible story as perfectly good.

If you insist on quantifying beauty for it to exist, then you're a very confused person. It is precisely because there are things that are not quantifiable but are nevertheless real that materialism can't be real. If you could take a measure to it, then you wouldn't need a non-materialist answer.

Kierkegaard is an idiot, then, who has no idea of human history at that point. Killing people for a god was entirely normal. The more powerful the god, the more blood it could demand. He should have known of the Greek human sacrifices at funerals and the sacrifice of Iphigenia. ALL other gods could ask for human sacrifice at will and actually get it. Were ALL the Phoneticians insane? The Aztecs? Or was God teaching that they worshiped corrupt and evil gods?

Typical sloppy German logic. Obsess about the anthill and miss the mountain.

Because Abraham was told not to sacrifice Isaac at the end, so the Jewish people didn't practice human sacrifice like their neighbors did. If not for Abraham being so clearly instructed in the real nature of sacrifice that he wanted, it would not seem to be against the nature of God. It certainly wasn't against the nature of many, many gods (non-human beings worshipped by pagans throughout history). The Egyptians, Babylonians, Greeks, and Chinese all practiced institutionalized forms of human sacrifice during their history. The gladiatorial games were based on human sacrifice during funeral rites. The ancient Celts and Germans all sacrificed humans to their gods pretty regularly. The Incas were pretty enthusiastic about it. The Hindus still practiced institutionalized human sacrifice when the Brits took over. The Phoenicians and the Aztecs were just about crazy for human sacrifice.

In ALL of these religions, it would be perfectly reasonable for a god to ask for human sacrifice. Abraham didn't know God well, so it might have been hard for him to hear, but it was entirely normal within his milieu for a god to demand a man's son. But God stopped him and taught him explicitly that this was NOT the sacrifice that he was to do, and no one could use the argument that the Israelites just needed to love their God enough to kill people for them like everyone else did.

Because of all these things, you think that having people fight to death for fun is terrible, not something totally acceptable (as 99.9% of cultures of the past would see it as). Because of God stopping Abraham, the Judeo-Christian world powerfully rejects human sacrifice.

This teaching came from somewhere. It's the exception, not the rule. And it came from the very thing you decided not to understand.

Kevin, that's some moronic modern rabbinism there, with nothing at all behind it.