The Immorality of God - The Canaanites

[Esquilax]

Many people argue that God acted immorally in the Old Testament when He ordered the Israelites to destroy the Canaanites who were living in the land that God had promised to Abraham and his descendants. However, there are several reasons why this is a poor argument.

Okay, let's see what we can do, then.
 

First, if God does not actually exist, then the accounts of His deeds in the Old Testament are meaningless fables, and it does not matter what these stories claim about God.

Sure, but we can entertain an idea and consider it within its own contextual framework without accepting it to be true, I hope.
 

Second, if the purpose of objecting to Old Testament accounts is to hold God and His followers to a standard of behavior, then it is reasonable to ask whose standard should be used and why?

Yes, it is reasonable... but I think you haven't fully reasoned it out yourself. Believers tend to do this a lot, they ask this exact question, "what standard should we use?" but not a one of them realize that the same question could be asked of them: what standard are they using, and why? To avoid beating around the bush, we both know it's god's standard, but why should that be the one? Aside from irrelevant, non-sequitur temporal appeals ("god made us, therefore he gets to set our morality!") and mystical claims with no justification at all ("god's nature is inherently good, therefore it's the standard!") there generally isn't a reason given. God being the standard is generally just a circular argument, routing back to god's own standards in order to judge god good: how does one come to the conclusion that god's standard should be morally acceptable, using only readily demonstrable claims that do not simply circle back to god?

On my part, I use a rational consideration of the situation at hand, within the objective framework of the reality we all inhabit. It's a big topic, not one I'm going to be able to comprehensively explain here, but essentially, I take what I know about human beings as life forms use what is objectively good or bad for them as a basis for what is and is not moral to do to them. My standard isn't a "who," it's not just what somebody else says, it's reality.
 

[*]The Canaanites were actually a perverse people, and God patiently waited 400 years (from the time of Abraham to Joshua) allowing the Canaanites time to amend their evil ways. Instead, their wickedness actually increased, so God used the Israelites to punish the Canaanites for their sins – just as He had punished all mankind by means of the flood earlier, the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, and even the Israelites themselves by means of forty years spent in the wilderness and the Babylonian captivity. Clearly, God was no harder on the Canaanites than He was upon His own people.

"Wickedness," in this case, because god is the standard, simply being "the things god does not like." So when you say the Canaanites were wicked and hence worthy of being wiped out, you're playing a bit of a shell game and what the bible actually means can be represented as "the Canaanites were doing things god didn't like, and so god was right to have them all murdered." Doesn't sound so good when you aren't automatically assuming the primacy of god's moral commandments, eh?

Moreover, I disagree that genocide is ever the correct response to evil: just ignoring the fact that the Canaanite children were slaughtered too despite not being morally culpable for the actions of their forebears, it's easily within god's power to change their minds or otherwise resolve the situation without having to kill them all. Life ought to be preserved, and there was a peaceful option here that god just plum didn't want to take, cuz he was mad. And before you give me any free will crap, god clearly didn't care about their free will when he sicced his hitmen on them, so that's wrong from the outset.

[*]The Canaanites had the opportunity to flee; by choosing to stay and fight, they resisted God and sealed their own fate. 

They were being driven out of their home by what was, from their perspective, a band of invading barbarians set on killing them all. Look, I know you really, really, really think god has the authority to decide that, but "resisting god," is not some automatic crime worthy of a death sentence unless you're capable of arguing why that is, and that's a big thing you don't even seem interested in doing. All you've got right now is this might-makes-right claim that they fought back, therefore the deserved to be slaughtered, which is no different than "of course I had to kill her, she kept resisting me when I was raping her. She knew what was up."

God's not getting automatic credit for being perfect and just being cosmically bestowed with the authority to do whatever he wants in my classroom: you gotta earn that shit.

[*]It is evident that the Israelites didn’t literally kill every single Canaanite man, woman and child, because the Canaanites continued to appear in the Bible long after the time when they were allegedly wiped out. It is more likely that the authors of the Old Testament books used metaphorical or hyperbolic language to express the message they wanted to convey about Israel’s victories over the Canaanites.

Gee, I'm sure "hey, we only wiped out most of your people and took the only home you'd ever known on the whim of a capricious invisible spirit," was huge comfort to the survivors.

Each of these points suggest that there is nothing inconsistent or contradictory about the Judeo-Christian view of a God who is both loving and capable of wiping out evil.

... Just so long as you follow the christians along in just presupposing, sans argument, that god is the ultimate moral authority because god says so.

Ironically, atheists often ask, “If God exists, why doesn’t He prevent evil?” The destruction of the Canaanites is an example of God putting an end to evil practices (such as child sacrifices to a false god) just as these atheists demand. Unwilling to let go of this convenient (if impotent) cudgel, however, atheists continue to object to God’s judgment and destruction of the Canaanites—a clear example of wanting to have it both ways.

No man: the destruction of the Canaanites is an example of god paying a greater evil to stop evil, even assuming that the Canaanites were evil in the first place. Within the context of the bible's morality but without presupposing the primacy of that morality, the only thing the Canaanites were guilty of was offending the delicate sensibilities of some invisible guy. That's the "sight unseen," version, but even working from the idea that the Canaanites really were performing harmful actions, god had a whole suite of more peaceful, morally acceptable solutions available to him than indiscriminate slaughter. There is no sense in which genocide was anything but an enhancement of evil.

Finally, while objections to the immorality of the God of the OT may explain why one may not be Jewish or Christian, they offer only an incomplete explanation for why someone is an atheist since there are many alternative views of God that do not require acceptance of anything from the Bible.

So what? I don't think you'll find an atheist here who'll state that they came to their belief system solely on the basis of a single argument. That'd be a deeply simplistic view, don't you think?