The ethics of worship

[Nihilist Virus]

To date, of all the Christians that I've posed this to (on FaceBook, in real life, and the brief period this was up on Christianforums.com), I've seen only one of them actually admit that "Yes, I worship a child-killing god." They can't even let the words come out of their mouths.

To worship a child-killing god out of fear is pitiful, but to worship a child-killing god out of adoration is sick.

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One relatively minor quibble.  The tenth plague did not specifically target children, it targeted the 'firstborn sons'.  If, for example, a man has three sons, one 25 years old, one 15 years old, and an infant, the adult son would be the one to die and the infant would be spared.

Other than that, it's hard to disagree that it's unethical to worship the God of the OT.

Boru

Well I think it did target children, and adult first borns were collateral damage. It's rare even today for siblings to be 25 years apart, so I find that to be quite unlikely to occur back when life expectancy was on the order of 40 years.

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Another issue is the apparent disconnect between ancient people and modern Christians. During my time as a Christian, I very much got the sense that no real Christian would accept a cash payment to bow down and worship, say, a statue of the Buddha. No amount would suffice. Not even a gun to the head would do it, and many of these Christians would not even claim to have experienced anything supernatural in their entire lives. Yet ancient Jews worshiped other gods all the time, despite apparently witnessing their god perform miracles with their very own eyes. How can this possibly happen?

When I was a Christian, I found it inconceivable that God actually "did things" in OT times, but didn't do things now.  I quickly realized that when the bible says "God did X", it just means "X happened, and the writer attributed it to God".

If you read things that way, the only question you need to ask is "why did the writer attribute this event to God?", or "why did the writer invent this story that they attributed to God".

The answer reveals something about the theology of the writer, but tells you nothing about any actual gods (if they exist).  It tells you what the writer needs out of their tribal god, at the time.

The Christians have an "answer" for why God apparently has stopped doing things. Cessationism. Here's how that conversation would go.

Atheist: So why doesn't God do stuff any more?

Christian: Cessationism.

Atheist: That doesn't explain it.

Christian: You must not know what cessationism means. Let me explain it to you. Cessationism means that God doesn't do stuff any more.

Atheist: You must not know what logic is. You've just said that God doesn't do stuff any more because God doesn't do stuff any more.