(June 8, 2014 at 11:51 am)rasetsu Wrote: I presumed this was open to all gods, not just Yahweh.
I assume all good atheists if presented with a god of unimaginable power and were asked to do something horrific, they would all refuse.
Or, at least, that's the story....
Well the only out if one were to do that would be under duress. In civil society with most crimes, if someone has a gun literally to your head and says "Harm this other person or you die yourself", there is more sympathy in that context.
What god belief does and what religion does is distorts natural reality which is not a neat utopia in terms of either/or blanket solutions. The truth of reality is that it is messy and never simple like religion wants to make it.
There was a real case of a bank robbery where the the robbers did a home invasion on a bank manager, held his family hostage, and forced the manager to rob the bank himself. Not that famous pizza guy one who blew himself up, but another one. Quite a few years before the pizza guy.
God, in the context of this story is far worse, because he has absolute power and from the entire book teaches you to obey. So if the story had God not backing off Abraham would have killed his kid, just like the bank manager had no choice but to rob the bank.
The entire book teaches you to obey and God is the final authority. There is no morality in a concept that teaches you to ignore a power when you know something is wrong. It is one thing to recognize something is wrong but be powerless to do anything, like living under a dictator. So if the believer claims they are not helpless then the conflict comes in to the point where they have to justify the horrible acts of this God, or admit that the concept is broken.