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Originally Posted by Splendour
You made several typical mistakes nonbelievers make:
1. You think you can derive motive from words without knowing anything about the culture or the situation.
You make the same mistake all believers make trying to rationalize away clearly written biblical passages that describe an evil god.
If we can't understand the the "true" meaning of those rather clear passages, then we can't understand anything else written in the bible, either.
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2. You think you are good enough to judge God.
3. You think you are intelligent enough to judge God.
Yes, he's sufficiently intelligent to understand those passages, and he's sufficiently moral to be repulsed by them.
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4. You forget your judgment has no force or power with God.
5, You utterly discount God's ability to read men's future intent.
6. You challenge God's right to rule over men.
In other words, if God wants to commit mass murder, it's his right as cosmic dictator, and none of man's business to question it. Just have faith that it's all somehow for the best!
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7. You forget the Israelites were actually there and they claimed to experience God and act on his orders. (God saved them from Egypt) And that there's quite a bit of world history validating the bible.
He didn't question the bible's validity, at least not in this thread. Rather, he's morally outraged by God's capriciously cruel acts. Any sane, rational person possessing moral conscious would be.
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8. You utterly discount that God can have a future plan for the WHOLE world that he is putting in motion.
"Trust me, mass murder is really for the best."
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10. You constantly take things in the Old Testament out of context without even considering a lot of the action in it is from people of fallen natures whch means they almost always operate from wrong motives or forget God or misinterpret how God wants them to act.
You'd think God could communicate more clearly. If these apparent moral outrages only appear so because we can't understand the "context," then we really can't understand anything. This is just more feeble rationalization.
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(Then when this is pointed out to you you take refuge in: God is an absurd concept. You can't have it both ways though atheists on here constantly vacillate between the two positions. )
LMOA! Don't you see the irony in this statement? You just spent and entire post trying to rationalize God's apparent evil by claiming He's really good in some cryptic, ineffable sense that we can't really understand. Then you complain when atheists say that the Christian God is incoherent.
YOU can't have it both ways. Either we can in fact understand the OT, in which case God is hideously evil, or God is nevertheless "good" in a sense we can't comprehend, which (yet again) makes him sink into a muck of contradictions and absurdity.