Making Excuses for God's Psychopathy

The Battle, Nicholas Poussin (1594-1665)
Sporting contest, biblical style.

Christian Apologist: God’s Calls for Genocide Were Just “Figures of Speech” | Hemant Mehta | Friendly Atheist | Patheos

It's a mark of just how far decent Humanist values have penetrated into Christianity that Christian apologists are now having to make excuses for the things God supposedly ordered in the Bible that nowadays would be thought of as barbaric and unacceptable - the actions of a tyrannical war-criminal.

When it was written in the Bronze Age, no doubt the terrible things they wrote about God ordering were the sort of things you would expect a powerful despotic tribal leader to order his people to do, so, naturally, any self-respecting god would be expected to behave the same way. A brutal, merciless tyrant who rewards his loyal followers with plenty of land, war-booty and women captives and in return sanctions and glorifies their savage and brutal behaviour.

Now, however, human society's morals having evolved and been refined over our cultural evolution from an ignorant, superstitious, tribal, warrior culture to a settled, industrial society where cooperation and tolerance have produced a safer, more secure and settled society, we think of this savage brutality as wrong and unacceptable and have enacted laws against it.

This is of course a major problem for Christian apologists who need to try to present the brutal, psychopathic god of the Bible as a source of morals to be admired for his love and compassion.

To that end then we find the hapless James Warner Wallace, performing mental gymnastics by claiming the god who ordered the total destruction of entire people and every living thing was merely using a figure of speech and was really urging his followers to win the contest, in much the same way one team 'totally destroys' another on the football field, or an Atheist totally destroys a Christian apologist in debate (actually, that last one was my metaphor, not Wallaces!).

So, when we read in the Bible:

But of the cities of these people, which the Lord thy God doth give thee for an inheritance, thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth: But thou shalt utterly destroy them; namely, the Hittites, and the Amorites, the Canaanites, and the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites; as the Lord thy God hath commanded thee: That they teach you not to do after all their abominations, which they have done unto their gods; so should ye sin against the Lord your God.

Deuteronomy 20:16-18

And when the LORD thy God shall deliver them before thee; thou shalt smite them, and utterly destroy them; thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor shew mercy unto them.

Deuteronomy 7:2

And thou shalt consume all the people which the LORD thy God shall deliver thee; thine eye shall have no pity upon them.

Deuteronomy 7:16

Thou shalt surely smite the inhabitants of that city with the edge of the sword, destroying it utterly, and all that is therein, and the cattle thereof, with the edge of the sword.

Deuteronomy 13:15

But of the cities of these people, which the LORD thy God doth give thee for an inheritance, thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth.

Deuteronomy 20:16-17

So smote all the country ... he left none remaining, but utterly destroyed all that breathed, as the LORD God of Israel commanded.

Joshua 10:40

Thus saith the LORD of hosts ... go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.

1 Samuel 15:2-3

We should read this to mean that God was telling the Israelites to go play a football match against these people and trounce them, not go commit a terrible war-crime at all.

This also neatly explains why when earlier in the Bible it describes the utter destruction of a people, including the children, and the dire threats of what God will do it his instruction isn't followed to the letter, their descendants turn up again later on, as we read in:

And all the people that were left of the Amorites, Hittites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites, which were not of the children of Israel, Their children that were left after them in the land, whom the children of Israel also were not able utterly to destroy, upon those did Solomon levy a tribute of bondservice unto this day.

1 Kings 9:20-21

Clearly, to a modern Christian brought up in the civilised ways of Christianity with its large injection of Humanism, the Bible is literally true, except when it's too embarrassing, then it's just a figure of speech. And the morals in it are objective, eternal truths, except when they have been civilised.

One wonders what Moses' instruction "But all the women children, that have not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves." (Numbers 31:18) was a figure of speech for.

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