iceaura,
So they did cease to exist.
If you regard one's destroyed clothes as the person ceasing to exist, then fair enough.
But that's not the point the book in question.
Forgot about the hobbits and orcs already, did you?
I'll tell you what, show where a hobbit or orc as
murdered, a human being, or any other species for that matter. Or one that has commited genocide, then we'll progress further.
Protagonists in stories - characters with intentions and motives and freedom of action and awareness and so forth - can commit murder. That is kind of obvious, one would think. It's common.
Yes, and I'm saying that God cannot murder, because no one is killed from His perspective, which is a lot greater than any mere human perspective. Or don't you or Maher choose to read that part of His Characterisation?
There is no such law mentioned, in that story - speculation as to the author's alternative constructions is kind of silly.
Go on! Have a guess.
By your description alone, without reference to the various alternatives that could be incorporated into the actual story, of course. Authorities who slaughter entire populations of defenseless people on the grounds that they are evil commit genocide. You need to ask?
God IS.
God, has authorities.
Everyone is ''defenceless'' at the point of death.
Corporal punishment is not murder, not even if it is sanctioned by an authority, let alone the Supreme Being (one without a second).
The children, the pet rabbits, the butterflies and kittens?
It depends if you believe the entire world was flooded.
All we have in the story is the protagonist's claim that they were all evil and He was going to kill them because of that - choosing, among all the means available to an omnipotent Deity, slow drowning and the other miseries of flood.
What other means were there?
His audience is not mainstream,
What are they then?
...not fearful, and by most evaluations less ignorant than average - about Bible stories, as well as everything else.
Can you present the data that concludes this, or is it just wishful thinking on your part?
Nothing he says is particularly and specifically false, or even unverifiable - we can all read the Bible for ourselves, for example, and find a major character committing genocide in the story of the Noachian Flood.
He speaks from the point of view of a simpleton.
And we can read right here the bizarre contortions and flat out amorality the people Maher is impugning find necessary in self defense - it's not murder if the murderer knows the victims's souls are immortal? That's Spanish Inquisition logic.
It's not murder, period. God is not a human being.
Also, God say's ''all souls are mine'', and we understand that all souls are part and parcel of God's spiritual body (it also say's God is pure spirit). So if God believed He was murdering those humans, He would be, in effect, committing suicide. But as He is Pure Spirit, he can't die, let alone commit suicide.
jan.