Miracles and Anti-supernaturalism

[Mister Agenda]

The question lurking here is "Is God good or evil?" God is loving to the point of rejection, so I follow Him. If He turned out not to be loving--an evil god--I would not follow him. But that's the difference between you atheists and me. You believe that if God exists, he would be evil.

It would be more accurate to say that if the specific God most Christianists describe existed as described, he would be evil, based on the description (I think Christians should jettison the OT, Jews seem to be the only people who can handle it).

I know that He is good.

You believe he is good. If there is a God, you are not in a position to know its true nature.

If we keep using the word "atrocity", we talk at each other with two definitions, one with the "atrocity" done for judgmental reasons, and another with "atrocity" done for malicious reasons.

Good intentions don't make atrocities okay. Omnipotence makes atrocities unnecessary.

We must be careful when replacing God's moral code with our own.

He doesn't even follow the rules he's supposed to have authored.

We have a tendency to be biased.

True enough.

If the whole world was in anarchy and we had each killed at least one person, we would be less likely to prosecute a murderer.

I'm with you so far.

God is good or evil quite apart from His deeds.

Deeds are the only thing that matter when judging whether someone is good or evil. When someone says they are good and they do bad things, we don't believe them. And we shouldn't.

And our labeling a deed "atrocious" is bias from the start.

Something that is atrocious is appalling and horrifying. Like killing everyone in a village, including the children. Do you think an unbiased person would not consider that atrocious?

So ronedee gave the correct answer: that if God did something atrocious, or "undeservingly cruel" as the definition goes, he would stop following God.

Based on the evidence, most Christians are fine with God doing atrocious things, they just usually say that it's not an atrocity when God does it...presupposing the atrocity is entirely justified as though an omnipotent being can be backed into a corner where commanding an atrocity is its only option. Perhaps ronedee considers God to have been misrepresented in the biblical accounts that attribute those commands to him.

But let's put the real question on the table: is said deed really cruel/atrocious, or is it deserved?

Do all the people in a town deserve to be killed if one of them worships a different God? Deuteronomy 13:13-19

Does your brother, wife, or child deserve that if they worship a different God? Deuteronomy 13:7-12

Do they deserve death for working on the Sabbath? Exodus 31:12-15

Do the sons of sinners deserve death? Did all the first-born of Egypt? The children of conquered towns?

I would think the answers to each of these questions would be 'no', and that your choice would be between accepting the God in question as at least not benevolent; or accepting that not everything in the Bible that says it is describing the will of God is actually doing so.