The Immorality of God - The Canaanites

[athrock]

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.
 
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.
 
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?
 
Third, if believers in the Judeo-Christian God are to answer for God’s actions in their scriptures, then it seems reasonable to examine the justifications for and explanations of those actions as offered by them including:
 

1. 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.
   
2. The Canaanites had the opportunity to flee; by choosing to stay and fight, they resisted God and sealed their own fate. 
   
3. 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.
   

 
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.

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.

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.