"No, as a believer I can simply say that his guidelines for man are not binding on himself."
Somewhere along the line there is a glaring miscommunication between theists and atheists on this point. I simply do not understand your position. Let me try to illustrate and maybe you can enlighten me:
With no rights to do so, speaking on behalf of atheists, my understanding of the theist position is that God is supposedly the perfect being. Something like Jesus being without sin but the part of God that isn't Jesus (as you can see I still don't get the trinity thing either - but lets not go there).
The acts of God described in the Bible are not those of a perfect being. This isn't a case of the rules he made don't apply to him - they (and more besides - we are aiming at perfection here) HAVE to apply to anything that claims to be perfect.
Your examples of how we treat lower orders of animals is fine for imperfect beings such as ourselves (although there are Buddhists that go out of their way to never kill or harm any living thing) but a perfect being should not be a lowly as we are. At the very least he should be able live up to the Buddhist ideal (if they can).
OT God is vengeful, proud, wrathful, vain, impulsive, malicious and a variety of other things besides (I know the last 2 aren't in the original list - but they are generally not considered signs of good character).
??????
Somewhere along the line there is a glaring miscommunication between theists and atheists on this point. I simply do not understand your position. Let me try to illustrate and maybe you can enlighten me:
With no rights to do so, speaking on behalf of atheists, my understanding of the theist position is that God is supposedly the perfect being. Something like Jesus being without sin but the part of God that isn't Jesus (as you can see I still don't get the trinity thing either - but lets not go there).
The acts of God described in the Bible are not those of a perfect being. This isn't a case of the rules he made don't apply to him - they (and more besides - we are aiming at perfection here) HAVE to apply to anything that claims to be perfect.
Your examples of how we treat lower orders of animals is fine for imperfect beings such as ourselves (although there are Buddhists that go out of their way to never kill or harm any living thing) but a perfect being should not be a lowly as we are. At the very least he should be able live up to the Buddhist ideal (if they can).
OT God is vengeful, proud, wrathful, vain, impulsive, malicious and a variety of other things besides (I know the last 2 aren't in the original list - but they are generally not considered signs of good character).
??????
