Like Roaches in a Crack: Apologists for Genocide

deconversionmovement:

christusexemplar:

I honestly believe that the people who argue against the moral character of God in the OT and who push forth the problem of evil to try and show the contradiction between an all-loving God and the existence of evil, are not really expressing their sincere and honest reasons for not believing. 

If they discern between the New Testament and Old Testament God as loving and abhorrent, I think if they changed their formula to loving and loving they still wouldn’t change their minds.

The Problem of Evil in this case is a straw man.  There is a clear distinction to be made.  The Problem of Evil and the Problem of Suffering point to contemporary events and examples in our world; one would point to cancer in children for instance.  When singling out the atrocities in the Bible, one isn’t pointing to events that exist independently of god; one is pointing to events that were commanded and/or perpetrated by god.  Correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems that one has to assume his existence in order to blame contemporary suffering and evil on him; there’s no issue in doing so because we’re debating with people who believe he exists.  Yet that isn’t what an atheist does when pointing to the Amalekite genocide for example (1 Samuel 15:3).  What we’re really saying is:  if you want to believe that this god exists, you must reconcile the notion of a perfectly good god with a god who commanded ethnic cleansing — even the death of infants!  Let’s look at what I call The Problem of Child Murder and Infanticide in modal form:

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(via mishamansoor)

Source: christusexemplar