A Levite and his concubine

[Esquilax]

So, what you're saying is that there's some context that excuses, off the top of my head, genocide?

What i'm saying is that, according to the bible, God is the creator and is allowed to do what he wants to do with his creation.

Whoa, I'll stop you right there. You're wrong. According to the bible, god is asserted to be allowed to do what he wants to his creation. But an assertion is not justification of itself, and it does not automatically mean that god is morally justified in doing whatever he wants with his creation, because not every use of a creation is moral. For example, I may own a huge amount of food, but if I take it over to some hungry orphans, pretend to give it to them, and then burn it in front of them, I am acting immorally.

Additionally, you are working from the unjustified assumption that property rights of this nature carry over on every type of creation, and this also is not true; my parents created me, but if they harm me they are doing something immoral and I will be taken away by the state. The right of ownership is not automatically granted every time. A privately owned nuclear power plant cannot be driven intentionally into meltdown, even though it is someone's creation. If you're about to argue that this is because it harms others.... well yes. And god isn't when he commits genocide?

Also, one could argue that self awareness and consciousness, at a given threshold of complexity, represents something that should morally be exempt from ownership, given our need for self determination and how that informs our morality.

Now let's talk about free will. Does god not interfere with that? If he doesn't, then he clearly had no creative hand in the existence of any living human being ever, beyond Adam and Eve, as the procreative act is something freely chosen by one or more individuals, and if god so much as nudged that then he is necessarily interfering with free will. You might try to argue that god created the raw materials for humanity and so gains the rights there, but that's also not exclusively the case; increasingly we are recognizing the legal rights of ownership of people who remix the works of others. You don't really have any leg to stand on in just asserting that god has property rights over reality.

No doubt you're just going to argue, at base, that god is special somehow and because he's so magic, he gets all these special rights anyway. But that's not actually an argument, that's just an assertion of authority. In moral systems, authority is granted, not taken by fiat- don't bring up parents or I'll bring up child welfare- and if your only line of defense is "well, that's just the way it is!" then you've effectively given up on any sense of rational argument.

All these terrible things that you attribute to God are attributed to man's sin in the bible.

Of course. And the child abuser is just so sad that his kids make him hit them. The spousal abuser really does love his wife, which is why he corrects her so violently. The drug addict isn't really a criminal, he just needs to rob this convenience store to get his next fix. But it's all okay really.

Blaming all this on man's sins just reeks of rationalization. It's shifting the blame to the victims, but you've yet to actually establish how our sins are harmful to god, nor that lethal capital punishment is a morally justified action, nor that killing babies is morally correct given the sins of their parents. You have a lot of work to do before you can go "oh, but you don't understand! The sins!"

These are consequences of people's sins and it's all just.

Fiat assertions aren't particularly compelling, to someone not working from the same unjustified presuppositions as you.

In the end, God himself, removes our guilt and gives us eternal happiness, free from all this. So yes, we do suffer consequences for our sin. If your father was a gambler and frittered away all the family's money, you would suffer the consequences of that. If you're going to evaluate the God of the bible, take all the bible into consideration before you make a final judgement.

So what context is there, beyond the fiat assertions that it's really okay, actually, do you have that excuses these acts? Because "It's okay because god says it's okay!" is not an argument, it's a circular tailspin into tautology.

You can have your won opinion, but that's not the opinion of the writers. If you don't believe that we're responsible to God for our sins, then you're not interpreting the bible as the writers intended it to be.

Really? If I want to make sense of the bible, then I've got to just assume that everything is morally correct in the bible, as that's what the writers did?

No can do, Lek. The bible wasn't written as some morality play, if we're taking it as a factual account of events then the gloss the writers put onto it does not change the actual moral status of the events. Not to Godwin, but you can find plenty of Nazi propaganda extolling the virtues of the final solution, and just because I won't go along with the egregious moral lies of the authors does not mean I'm somehow missing the point. It means that the writers have asserted something that I find factually incorrect, and can support with much more than the simple "It's god, so it's fine!" nonsense you can support your view with.

Another thing is that I can tell a story about someone doing evil acts without inserting my opinion of whether they were evil or not.

Sure. And if you inserted your opinion that all those evil acts were actually extremely good, would I be missing the point if I didn't agree with you?