Quote Originally Posted by Tacitus View Post
So the Christian God commands his followers to love their enemy. He’s got a funny way of showing it. You wouldn’t know it from actually reading the Bible. Here is just a short list of the record of atrocities this God endorsed, commanded, or participated in.

People of Judah shout and God helps them kill 500,000 Israelites (2 Chr 13: 15-18)
God kills 70 men for simply looking into the Ark (1 Sam 6:19)
Korah questions Moses’ leadership and God makes the earth open up and swallow his people: men, women, and children (Num 16:20-49)
God drowns almost everyone on earth (Gen 7:21)
God orders and joins in on the genocide of all of Canaan (all through the book of Joshua, the killing just never stops)
God threatens people with having to eat their children’s flesh (Lev 26:29, Jer 19:9)
Sons of Levi are blessed for randomly slaughtering cow worshippers (Exo 32:27-29)
God, after hardening Pharaoh’s heart, kills all the Egyptian babies for Pharaoh’s stubbornness (Exo 11:10, Exo 12:29)
God kills the meat eaters (Num 11)
God allows people to sacrifice their babies to him to teach them a lesson (Ezek 20:26)
God kills a man for not impregnanting his sister-in-law (Gen 38:9-10)
God comes out of the sky to kill David’s enemies (2 Sam 22:9-16)
God allows babies to be dashed and pregnant women to be ripped open (Hosea 13:16)
God threatens to have wild animals carry away the Israelite’s children (Lev 26:22)
God tells people to kill their loved ones if they worship other gods (Deu 13:6-10)
Bible says beat your child with a rod (Prov 23:13)
Bible says beating and wounding people is good for them (Prov 20:30)
God promises to punish children for their parent’s sin (Exo 20:5)
God terrifies and causes tumors (1 Sam 5:6)

If one was to make an argument that a Supreme Being that has ultimate authority has the right to kill innocent children if he so desires, then I concur. But I take issue with the idea of such a Deity being “good”, “benevolent” or “loving.” Such a deity has a death fetish, He is petty, and deserving of not worship, but contempt.

For the record, I was forced to attend a Southern Baptist church every Sunday as a kid. I have recovered from the experience, thank you very much. I tend to find that generally Christians gloss over these atrocities. After all, if they question God they may get the same fate as those mentioned in the Bible. I think that a lot of Christians live in a state of denial about these Scriptures. They just pretend that the atrocities don’t exist in the “inspired, infallible, inerrant word of God.” Fact is these things DO exist in the Bible. Probably because it is the word of man, not God—in particular, the word of an ancient barbaric people who used “God” or “Yaweh” to justify their genocide and blood lust.

There is simply no other explanation, otherwise you have to reconcile a homicidal, genocidal, bloody ogre of a monster God in the Old Testament with the supposedly gentle peacenik hippy Jesus in the New Testament. Good luck reconciling the two.

This is the same problem the Muslims have. The militant, homicidal ones find their passages in the Koran to back up their divinely sanctioned violence. No matter what other good things are there--and they do exist, this backdrop of violence and murder sacnctioned by the Supreme Being just can't be avoided.
In my post, I was referring to the ideal of Christianity. I would submit that the examples you provide in your response do not represent the ideal of Christianity. In fact, they were mostly examples from the Old Testament or pre-Christianity. I think to pick and choose certain portions of any religion is not the best way to understand its penultimate ideal. I am interested in the highest ideals of Christianity and Islam, not the evidence of how well people did or did not live out these ideals.

I respect your view on the existence or, in your case, nonexistence of a Supreme Being. However, I would submit that your tendency towards anthropomorphism may cloud your judgment. If a Supreme Being does exist, he would not be anything like a human; therefore, standards applied to it would be different than those applied to a mere mortal. Again, I am not trying to convince you of anything.

Have a good afternoon.