The 10 commandments are a JOKE!

Your "conclusions" amount to unwarranted accusations about my beliefs and character. Your "summary" is just a reassertion that no one can prove God exists and the same "quadrillionaire" argument that I debunked in Round 3. You are probably right that I won't convince any atheists to be theists on the basis of this debate. Your ramblings and repetition prevented digging into the substance of the matter. But, unfortunately for you, determining the winner of a debate is not dependent on my making theists out of atheists. The question is, who made the better case? //Who said you worship a god of “gaps”?// You did. And you did again in Round 4 when you say: 'what you believe is because you do not have the answers to something so “therefore it must be god.”' If you didn't know what "god of the gaps" meant, you could have easily looked it up. You have spent a lot of words saying how easy it is for you to win and how ignorant I am, but you have spent very little of them showing that to be the case. You claim my God is "based" on hate, evil, pain, and suffering, but you don't argue it. Look, I don't have a problem with insults or ridicule when you can back them up with thought, or at least make a good effort of a defense. But when you pad your writing with insults and lack substantive argument, it becomes sad. //The 10 commandments, 9 of 10 if not followed were punishable by death.// Not quite. Coveting is not punished by death, neither is theft. And someone who commits perjury is punished by whatever punishment would have wrongly been dealt out as a result of their perjury. So, lying could, but didn't necessarily result in death. I still maintain that the Ten Commandments are the moral law that serves as the basis for much of the civil law found in the Mosaic Law. I think it is my obligation in this debate to argue that the Ten Commandments should be an ethical obligation that this society should follow and I am not obligated to show that all of the Mosaic Law's civil punishments were just or should be implemented. I would say that arguing for the enforcement of penalties found in other parts of the law is not a part of showing that the Ten Commandments are not a joke, or a condition of making them worthy to be followed. Following them is not the same as enforcing the civil penalties associated with them. After all, I can't do that with 10 - I can't do that with coveting, since there isn't a civil punishment. I would say that if that is what you wanted to debate, you should have made that clear. As it stands, you didn't even mention civil penalties until the third round. But, in the interest of not coming off like I am trying to win on a technicality, I will try to at least somewhat address the issue of penalties. But, I will be addressing the penalties in light of the coming of Christ and the New Covenant. While your knee-jerk reaction to this may be that I am cheating or dismissing the question of penalties, I am not. The only one in particular that would change very much is the command about the Sabbath. This is because Christ has come as lord of the Sabbath to give his people rest. But, I do not think the moral value of having a day of rest and ensuring that those that work for you are likewise given a day of rest is negated in any way by this. Commands 1 and 2 (ESV): 1. I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. You shall have no other gods before me. 2. You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or serve them, for I the Lord your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and the fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing steadfast love to thousands of those who love me and keep my commandments. If Christian theism is the case, these make sense. I don't expect that you would object on the ground of the legitimacy of bowing down to a carved idol or a god that is not the God of the Bible. Command 3: You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain, for the Lord will not hold him guiltless who takes his name in vain. I covered this in Round 3. Command 4: Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor, and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, you, or your son, or your daughter, your male servant, or your female servant, or your livestock, or the sojourner who is within your gates. For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy. While I would say that the Sabbath obligation has changed with the advent of Christ, and that now we are to find our rest him (Heb. 3-4), it still stands as good to have a day of rest. In fact, most of us in the U.S. have 2 days of rest. In the New Covenant, it is no longer of importance which day in particular you rest on (Col 2:16-17). Command 5: Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long in the land that the Lord your God is giving you. I dealt with this in Round 1 and you have not argued any particular exception to this that would overturn this as a good rule. Command 6: You shall not murder. You have not objected to this one and I don't think anyone really will. Command 7: You shall not commit adultery. You seemed to implicitly think marriage fidelity is good in your arguments. Command 8: You shall not steal. You have not objected to this one and I think that the most anyone really argues against this one is exceptions to it. Command 9: You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor. You haven't argued against this and I suspect you wouldn't if there were another round. I do think the Bible does permit special cases of lying. But, then again, this isn't so much lying in general as it is perjury or slander. It is against someone. Command 10: You shall not covet your neighbor's house; you shall not covet your neighbor's wife, or his male servant, or his female servant, or his ox, or his donkey, or anything that is your neighbor's. As I've already covered, this is involved in adultery and theft. It has no civil penalty attached, but is warned against. Since I addressed this, you haven't given any counter-argument that coveting is good. The Death Penalty The only penalty that my opponent has objected to is the death penalty. As I've pointed out early, that doesn't apply to coveting, theft, and breaking the Sabbath (since Christ established the New Covenant). And it does not necessarily (or usually) apply to lying. Having the death penalty for murder is obviously proportional. So, that leaves 5 commands. The first three commands, when described with penalties have to with God directly. Don't proselytize other gods, don't take God's name in vain. Why is the penalty so harsh? Consider that following other gods results in damnation. It is better that a few die than a large number end up damned. Now, this is a simplified defense, but you have only given a vague objection that consists mostly of pointing out what the penalty is. The last two are adultery and cursing your parents. If the family is the basic structure of society, then these penalties have to do with the preservation of society. Perhaps the adultery one is obvious in this regard. But, what about the little child who "curses at" his parents? The reality is that the situation being described is more serious than that. This isn't describing a little kid who failed one time to obey, or said a cuss word. In Deuteronomy 21, when this situation is described, it is added that the son is a glutton and a drunkard. In this scenario the son isn't little and his rebellion is prolonged and far greater than making one wrong step. Is God evil? The YouTube videos you link to seem to simply be centered around the idea that God is evil. God killed people, damns people, allows evil to happen etc. I don't have the space here to properly lay out a theodicy or address everything that was said in the videos. But, I will say a few things to address this. God has the authority to kill humans. God created man and has the authority to take man's life. He can authorize others to take lives. Such is the case with the death penalty, and the special cases in the Old Covenant. As to the problem of Hell... I don't have the space left to defend an eternal hell, but neither the moral argument I laid out, nor the Ten Commandments require it. I could just as easily put forward annihilationism for the purposes of this debate. When it comes to the deductive form of the problem of evil, you've got to be able to prove that a sufficient reason could not exist for a good God to allow evil to exist when he could stop it. Anyway, I don't think the videos are "irrefutable," but 10,000 characters is not enough to fully address them and the primary concern of the debate: the Ten Commandments.