"The bible test" Answered.

[xpastor]

Well, Drich, you will recall that I challenged you to respond on some divine commands from the Bible outside the quiz, and I pointed out that they read like a manual for the Taliban: stoning people to death for changing their religion, cutting off hands, killing women and children in time of war.

In your usual manner you dodged the challenge, but referred me to another thread on Man's morality. Thank you. Your very first post makes clear that the God of the Bible does not meet the standard of absolute righteousness which you claim characterizes God, so Yahweh is indeed an immoral bastard according to the presentation in the Bible.

Morality is man's attempt to establish a righteous standard based on the sin he or the society he lives in is willing to except Incorporated into that standard.

Morality is not true Righteousness or God's Righteousness. God's Righteousness is a sinless standard no one can achieve.

Morality says: It is ok to lie to save your friend's life.

Righteousness says: it is always a sin to lie no matter what the reason.

God's righteousness is absolute, and never changes.

Man's Morality is on a sliding scale always identified by the lessor of two evils.

That said know that 'morality' is not the universal standard of good. Morality is a constantly changing to suit the the personal or civil righteousness of a community of people. What once was moral could now be considered a crime, and vise versa.

I say that to help those looking to frame questions based on "morality." Most of the time it is used an absolute standard when in fact it is not. To say "God is not moral" is not the insult you think it is. That is like a death camp nazi saying a German citizen is not 'moral, because he is hiding Jews from the Gestapo. Why? Because your morality like the death camp nazi's morality is based on ever declining scale. The fact there is so much distance between what you think is right and what God has declared as righteous only points to how far you and your 'morality' has fallen beyond true righteousness.

Before I get into the main issue, I have to point out that your reasoning is totally fucked up as usual. First, you say that God's absolute righteousness says it is a sin to lie under any circumstance versus man's relative morality which says it is OK to lie to save a friend. Then at the end you give an example which is exactly contrary to the rule you laid out. You compare a human criticizing God's morality to a death camp Nazi, and by implication you compare God to a righteous citizen hiding Jews from the Gestapo.

But put that aside. We will run with your assertion that "God's righteousness is absolute and never changes." We will even start off with your example that it is always a sin to lie.

Yahweh fails the test:

Now therefore, behold, the Lord hath put a lying spirit in the mouth of these thy prophets, and the Lord hath spoken evil against thee." (2 Chron 18:22)

That of course was directed against Ahab whom God hated, and he sent a lying spirit to 400 prophets to encourage Ahab into a war he would lose.

He does something similar to one of his favorites, David, and to Israel.

On another occasion the Lord was angry with Israel, and he made David bring trouble on them. The Lord said to him, “Go and count the people of Israel and Judah.” (2 Sam 24:1)

God himself tells David to conduct a census, and then he punishes David and the whole nation by killing 70,000 people with a plague. It's just a fable, but if it were true as you believe, it would make God out to be on the level of a schoolyard bully, tempting a smaller kid to do something and then smacking him for it.

Now the Bible certainly claims that God forbids lying. According to the Zondervan Topical Bible there are at least 19 prohibitions of falsehood. But it seems that God sometimes winks at it or even approves.

In Genesis 27 Jacob lies several times to his old blind father, claiming to be the older brother Esau, so Jacob gets the blessing, and God lets him have it.

In Joshua 2 the prostitute Rahab hides the Israelite spies and lies to the king of Jericho that they are no longer in her house. In return she and her whole family are spared when the Israelites sack the city. She is not criticized at all. On the contrary, she is praised in the New Testament:

It was faith that kept the prostitute Rahab from being killed with those who disobeyed God, for she gave the Israelite spies a friendly welcome. (Hebrews 11:31)
It was the same with the prostitute Rahab. She was put right with God through her actions, by welcoming the Israelite spies and helping them to escape by a different road. (James 2:25)

How is this different from the example you gave of lying to save a friend's life, which you say is an example of human morality and not up to the standard of God's righteousness, but the Bble itself says that her act of lying "put her right with God."

I could go on at great length about other moral issues, but I will limit myself to the one great crime of killing another human being.

I'll go back to the passages I quoted in the post you never replied to. There are plenty of OT laws where God prescribes the death penalty for seemingly minor infractions like gathering wood on the Sabbath, but I will only mention one death sentence, the punishment attached to the First Commandment:

Even your brother or your son or your daughter or the wife you love or your closest friend may secretly encourage you to worship other gods, gods that you and your ancestors have never worshiped. Some of them may encourage you to worship the gods of the people who live near you or the gods of those who live far away. But do not let any of them persuade you; do not even listen to them. Show them no mercy or pity, and do not protect them. Kill them! Be the first to stone them, and then let everyone else stone them too. Stone them to death! They tried to lead you away from the Lord your God, who rescued you from Egypt, where you were slaves. Then all the people of Israel will hear what happened; they will be afraid, and no one will ever again do such an evil thing." (Deuteronomy 13:6-11)

When skeptics say they need a sign that gives greater certainty than reading the Bible, Christians like to blather on about how God doesn't want to violate our free will, that he wants us to freely choose to come to him. Well, if a death threat doesn't violate free will, I don't know what else you would call it.

Then there are the war crimes.

Do not spare them [the Amalekites] put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys. (1 Samuel 15:3)

God's orders. Kill them all. The word translated infants specifically means "nursing babies." Even the animals are to be killed for fuck's sake. Don't bother telling me how evil the Amalekites were and how they deserved to die. Nursing infants are not evil.

Can we find something worse in the Bible? Slightly. The above passage presupposes that the genocide will happen in the heat of battle when warriors go crazy. However, look at the next passage. The Israelites have supposedly defeated the Midianites and killed all the men in battle. The women and children are being held as prisoners, and speaking on behalf of God, Moses orders:

Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man, but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man. (Numbers 31:17-18)

That would include boys down to nursing infants and all the women who have just lost their husbands and fathers and brothers in battle. Talk about your death camp Nazis! And despite the bullshit you will probably spout, the virgin girls were being kept for sexual purposes.

According to the Bible this God commanded, "Thou shalt not kill" but then the Bible records a whole lot of cases where God orders men to kill women and children in cold blood. You fundamentalists will piss and moan that it is murder if a girl has a first trimester abortion or even if she uses the morning-after pill to expel a blob of a few cells, but you will justify the most outrageous stories if they happen to be recounted in that book with the black covers and the gilt lettering.

So I have showed that the God of the Old Testament was an immoral bastard on his own terms, quod erat demonstandum.