The Immorality of God - The Canaanites

[athrock]

I understand your response. It's based upon a powerful emotional reaction.

But not upon intellect and reason.

This is a bullshit reply. Emotion and reason can certainly conflict at times, but they are not mutually exclusive.

As far as I can tell, this thread is nothing more than an attempt to resolve the problem of evil by arguing "who are you to judge?". This hardly merits a response.

The God of the Bible is a demonstrably evil prick. Those deeds that can be labeled good don't change this. This ledger accounting of morality is the same as saying "I know he's a rapist, but he's an all around good guy because he also helps feed the poor".

Redefining evil as the absence of good also doesn't work for you. Evil and good are subjective evaluations of moral behavior on a scale that changes not only over time as cultures evolve but at any given point in time between different cultures. This treatment doesn't even survive superficial consideration from your source:
”For thus saith the Lord; as I have brought all this great evil upon this people, so will I bring upon them all the good that I have promised them” (Jer. 32:42).

Your only real option regarding the problem of evil is to evaluate as good the behaviors of God that the vast majority of your fellow humans, believers or not, quickly classify as evil. Good luck with that argument.

Clearly, yours is the minority opinion. A few billion people have read the same texts to which you object and arrived at the opposite conclusion - including, btw, former atheists raised by atheist parents. So, don't give me any of the usual crap about all these people having been brainwashed when they were children. 

I get so tired of the atheist apologists (those who actually attempt to explain and defend atheism) in this forum repeating the same empty lines over and over without any evidence of original thought. Common examples of this:

• All believers were brain-washed by their parents. Not.
  
• Any atheist who becomes a believer is simply reverting to the faith he learned as a child. Not.
  
• God is an immoral monster. Not.
  

The God of the Bible is NOT a demonstrably evil prick, and simply stating this as your opinion in this regard does nothing to prove your case.

It's simplistic. An easy way out for you. A way that requires no real thought.

So, I understand its appeal.

And I understand that there are difficult passages of the Bible that believers and non-believers are going to wrestle with. One attempt at this is found in this book:



Might be worth a read. 

The point of all this, Cato, is simply to point out that it is possible to examine the concerns you and others share about God's actions in the OT and arrive at a reasoned conclusion that God is not a prick. 

But that will require courage and effort...and openness to what the implications of your research might be for your view of God.