The Immorality of God - The Canaanites

[athrock]

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?

Well I'm glad you asked that, I would judge behaviour by the standards of today. If you do judge the actions of the god character through modern morality it falls short and you will see that the actions replicate what you would expect from a poorly written being used to justify the actions of bronze age goat herders.

First, why do you use the phrase "bronze-age goat herders"? Do you think that you are more intelligent than they were? I'm not arguing that you are more knowledgeable about many things (except goat herding perhaps), but do you think that you are superior to them by virtue of the fact that we have advanced the sciences beyond what they understood?

Has this made you MORALLY superior to them? Are you a better man?

And if our society approves of things such as abortion which kills innocent children in their mothers's wombs and the use of drones which results in the deaths of innocent civilians, are we really able to say that we are morally advanced beyond the "goat herders" who would have found those things to be morally repugnant?
 

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.

Again we see theists justifying genocide. A common trend.

Rubbish. I have EXPLAINED why that which you call "genocide" may not be inconsistent with the existence of God. You haven't really undermined that view.

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.

God is supposed to be able to have mind control. In the exodus fable he is said to have "hardened Pharoahs heart" so surely a kinder way of dealing with them would be anything other than what the story says. To be clear the story of the canaanites is just a petty justification for a violent act perpetrated by an evil cult, the cult of the rather silly desert god Yahweh.

To be REALLY clear, the story of the Canaanites does nothing to undermine the existence of a loving, personal God who occassionally acts to wipe out evil.