Literal belief in the flood story

[Esquilax]

Humanicide.

No, he killed all the animals too.

You asked what issues were solved, not was the flood required to solve these issues. Are you changing your initial question?

No, just noting the cruelty with which you seem happy to let your god act.

There is no way you can support this statement as you have it written.

If you have an omniscient, omnipotent god, then there's never any reason for him to do anything other than the optimal solution to a problem. The "murder everybody" solution is just your god trying to dig himself out of a hole, in yet another act of his comedy of errors, but never forget that at any time he had the option to resolve his problems without killing anyone.

Additionally, I'm not even in favor of the death penalty; do I really need to tell you that I believe life has inherent worth and should not be snuffed out, least of all if it doesn't even solve any of the problems it was done to solve?

Why do you continue to misrepresent the position? We've presupposed the Biblical account for the thread. It says that God wiped mankind from the earth because they were exceedingly wicked. You translate that into 'he needed to murder them.' That's not consistent with the account, nor with my argument. I can understand you questioning whether the punishment fit the crime or not. You calling it murder just shows you don't understand the argument.

If he didn't need to murder them, and so far your argument seems to be that he didn't, then he wasn't justified in doing so. If there was any other option, and there was, then god selected one of the most cruel, and just went with it. And that's even with me just accepting out of hand that the bible's claim that everyone was wicked is true, which I don't actually accept; it seems like an ad hoc rationalization to me, even within the context of the biblical narrative.

We have presupposed the Biblical God for this thread.

Certainly, but then we're also presupposing that the only account we have of this god comes from human authors in the thrall of that god: I can assume for the sake of argument that this god exists, but I'm still well aware that in that case the bible is little more than propaganda authored by proxies of the being in question. It's still just a set of claims that can be true or false as any other, regardless of whether or not it's discussing a real being.

So presupposing the biblical god does not mean we're presupposing an inherently just one: his actions will determine his just-ness, and it's my contention that they don't uphold that claim.