Four questions for Christians

[Ryantology]

Secondly, we're making no exceptions for God. God hasn't been shown as a murderer. Genocide (death on a large scale) is no more exempt from justice than killing one person. Your claims are unfounded.

I can't convince you it's murder, if you are of the mindset that genocide is acceptable and righteous under certain circumstances. I couldn't convince a committed Nazi that the Holocaust was wrong. My argument runs into the wall of your obvious disregard for human life and willingness to justify atrocities. The Bible depicts a maniacally enraged God screaming for the blood of infants and children. This is not behavior most people would tolerate in any human being, no matter what the justification. So, it is nothing but a special exception for God.

Atheists here are dodging the responsibility for their claim that God is evil as revealed in the bible. Not one has stepped up to the mark, because the position is indefensible.

That's all a matter of perspective. In my view, you dodge the responsibility of defending the claim that God is good, when so many of his actions in the Bible can be compared 1-1, to actions considered intolerably evil by humans. The position that God is good and just is indefensible, and you never bother doing so. For you, it just is, and it's arbitrarily unquestionable.

I think the idea is that there are two standards. God's standard for himself, and his standard for mankind. They aren't the same: god is a magnificent and powerful being who is far beyond the comprehension of men. We don't think twice about swatting a fly, after all. It boils down to a might-makes-right argument.

To me, this indicates that there are no absolute or objective morals, at least for humanity. In the Bible, there was a time when it was moral to kill a man who performed physical labor on the Sabbath, or who killed another person accidentally. Today, a Christian would not consider those to be moral acts. God's acts are always moral because there is no one who could demand an accounting from him. A dust mite never asked me to explain myself to its satisfaction.

There absolutely should be two standards. The problem is, Christians hold humans to the higher standard, rather than God (note the frequency with which Christians compare God's actions to those of imperfect humans in order to justify them). Humans don't think twice about swatting a fly or cleansing a rug and killing millions of dust mites, but humans are incapable of comprehending and communicating with flies and dust mites. This is not a limitation God is said to have; he "knows our hearts". Flies and dust mites also present problems for humans, and we have no recourse to solve those problems that doesn't involve destroying them and depriving them of desirable environments, which also should not be a limitation for an omnicapable God.

One would imagine that, if we had God's powers and capabilities, along with a respect for life similar to what we currently possess (though of course, we should expect much better), we would consider it immoral to harm these insects, for we would be able to empathize with them fully and, if they presented a problem of any kind (or us to them), we could solve it fully to everybody's satisfaction.