No, you can ASSERT justifications that you BELIEVE God had but you cannot actually explain them because you have no way of actually knowing, any more than you can know that God even exists. Let's just get that out there right now, you've got nothing but blind faith and personal opinion about any of this.
I most certainly can know if he provided his explanations for his actions. I have already said I have no way to prove the explanations came from God but many good reasons to think they did. Unlike your position which is just flat denial without even a theoretical justification possible. If God exists and inspired the bible then if you want to pick an event like the Canaanites or Mt Sinai I can show that God's explanations are perfect justifications.
Neither do you. That's the thing, while I don't pretend to be able to justify any of this, YOU DO! According to you, you know the mind of God, which is more real than you'd want to admit because God is just a figment of your imagination.
You do pretend to be able to deny justification without anything which can permit it, I claim that if God inspired the bible and you pick and event in it which the explanation is given it gives the justification. If you pick one I will provide it.
You're just rationalizing. The Bible is full of God-commanded evil. Heck, let's look at 1 Samuel 15:3, which reads: "Now 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 ***." Want to explain how infants, oxen and sheep are evil? Really? Or how about Judges 21:10-24, which reads: "So they sent twelve thousand warriors to Jabesh-gilead with orders to kill everyone there, including women and children. "This is what you are to do," they said. "Completely destroy all the males and every woman who is not a virgin." Among the residents of Jabesh-gilead they found four hundred young virgins who had never slept with a man, and they brought them to the camp at Shiloh in the land of Canaan.
The Israelite assembly sent a peace delegation to the little remnant of Benjamin who were living at the rock of Rimmon. Then the men of Benjamin returned to their homes, and the four hundred women of Jabesh-gilead who were spared were given to them as wives. But there were not enough women for all of them. The people felt sorry for Benjamin because the LORD had left this gap in the tribes of Israel. So the Israelite leaders asked, "How can we find wives for the few who remain, since all the women of the tribe of Benjamin are dead? There must be heirs for the survivors so that an entire tribe of Israel will not be lost forever. But we cannot give them our own daughters in marriage because we have sworn with a solemn oath that anyone who does this will fall under God's curse."
Then they thought of the annual festival of the LORD held in Shiloh, between Lebonah and Bethel, along the east side of the road that goes from Bethel to Shechem. They told the men of Benjamin who still needed wives, "Go and hide in the vineyards. When the women of Shiloh come out for their dances, rush out from the vineyards, and each of you can take one of them home to be your wife! And when their fathers and brothers come to us in protest, we will tell them, 'Please be understanding. Let them have your daughters, for we didn't find enough wives for them when we destroyed Jabesh-gilead. And you are not guilty of breaking the vow since you did not give your daughters in marriage to them.'" So the men of Benjamin did as they were told. They kidnapped the women who took part in the celebration and carried them off to the land of their own inheritance. Then they rebuilt their towns and lived in them. So the assembly of Israel departed by tribes and families, and they returned to their own homes."
Apparently, God can command his chosen people to go out and rape women too. Murder everyone, evil or not, but keep the virgins for yourself! Yeah, that's some ********* deity you have there.
I can't fully explain dozens of these in a row. Please pick one event and if an explanation exists I will provide it.
Until you narrow this down to a manageable size I will leave it with one explanation for your first claim.
You are thinking about this way too simplistically. You do not build a case at all. You just quote an event and call it evil and say that proves God did evil. That is the worst circular argumentation possible.
Lets look at your first claim:
The Bible is full of God-commanded evil. Heck, let's look at 1 Samuel 15:3, which reads: "Now 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 ***."
There is nothing about that event that proves it is evil, yet before (a priori) you even mention the event you declare God evil. That is like a Judge declaring you guilty then having the trial later.
1. First of all none of those things can even be evil in your world view. They can be evolutionarily inconvenient but not actually wrong. Only with God can killing things be wrong because they actually have objective value that is being destroyed and objective rights being taken away. So the question is was God wrong when he ordered these killings?
2. There is no possible way that you can possibly even begin to determine this. If God exists he is the ultimate moral arbiter of the universe and divine command theory suggests that his nature determines what is wrong or right. God could murder and torture every life form that ever lived and you are simply without the slightest way to go about condemning him for it. However that is no fun at all so lets pretend we can go about seeing if God was right or wrong. BTW I am consistent, if Allah exists I would hate him yet I could not say he was wrong. Me not liking a thing is no basis for determining if the thing is right or wrong.
3. If killing animals is wrong then every human on earth is pure evil including you. We require them to be slaughtered by the millions just to gratify a physical desire. On your view a gnat is worth no less than a human so you are probably guilty of thousands of murders your self. Lets cut the insanity out, killing animals or even people (we ourselves do it all the time) is not inherently evil if justifiable.
4. I think you made the initial claim that God has done evil and so it is your burden to show that God lacked justification but you do not do so. You condemn him before hand, then list some shocking events, but do not even attempt to show justification was lacking.
5. It is not my burden but here are some reasons God may have had that justify these acts (many events the explanations are given, this one they can only be inferred theoretically).
6. You conveniently left out the previous verses where it says: ‘I will [
b]punish Amalek
for what he did to Israel, how he set himself against him on the way while he was coming up from Egypt. So Amelek is accounted for but what of the animals and other people. It does not say specifically but there are parallel events that did. God told the Israelites to not keep the animals and possessions of those they fought against on the way to Israel. As usual Israel did so anyway and the entire camp was thrown into disorder, people were stealing from others, accusations made, people killed others for loot. Given this it is easy to see why God wanted their possessions destroyed that just leaves the people. The same king spared only the king and wife of a tribe they fought. The wife escaped and had a child named Haman. He became a leader in Persia and ordered that every Jew in Persia be killed. In fact the Jews never killed off any cultural group and the entire OT records how they intermarried and adopted the ways of those people with a few practicing the human sacrifices the Canaanites and others had practiced. God can see the future where as we can not. We may have aborted the guy that would have cured cancer but God can see it and may order the death of a few to save many.
7. On top of all of this the Jews were the chosen conduit for his revelation. They were to be a unique people so as to make the revelation have maximum impact. Every time the Jews disobeyed orders to kill the people they spared led them into sin and they became as corrupt as the other tribes and they suffered terribly.
This was far to brief but the summary would be:
God purposed a people to carry his message to the world, that necessitated they by a peculiar and moral people, that necessitated the corrupt influences around them be eliminated, that necessitated that total war occur on rare occasions. If this had not been done then the message of hope given to a minor tribe in a Roman backwater would not have changed the world more than any other teachings in history.
History is full of people who have killed in the name of lots of supposed gods, you are right. That doesn't mean they did, many of them were insane, many of them were just trying to justify their actions. Hitler claimed he killed because God commanded it too. But what you're not catching here is that nobody has proven God is any more real than Thor. If you burn down my house and claim God told you to do it, it's entirely on you, not on God because God, so far as any objective evidence has shown, isn't any more real than Thor is. Saying "God was only a dick for part of the OT" really isn't that impressive.
Exactly so listing instances where Christians have used God to justify their actions do not necessarily have anything to do with God or the bible so why did you do so?
But Stalin never acted because of his atheism, he acted because of his communism. He never once ever said he killed anyone because he was an atheist. Never. Not once. The same goes for the others. Atheism was no more involved in Stalin's crimes than he having a mustache was.
Oh yes he did, he was specifically chosen because he was a failed seminary student with a hatred of faith. A founding principle of communism is the eradication of faith. His militant atheism made him a well qualified communist.
I have. That doesn't change the fact that he made just as many statements claiming Christianity, the RCC supported him and his regime, even after the war when they smuggled Nazis out of Germany under Catholic Red Cross visas. You can't claim that they were afraid of Hitler's vengeance, he was dead. Whether you like it or not or agree with it or not, he said he was a Christian, I'm going to accept that he was a Christian, the same way I'll accept that Stalin was an atheist. After all, Stalin was raised to be a Catholic priest and, once in office, resurrected the Russian Orthodox Church, re-opened many theological schools and the Moscow Theological Academy Seminary, thus doing away with the ridiculous idea that Stalin outlawed religion in communist Russia. But hey, I can accept he was an atheist.
But most of his statements being positive about Christianity took place when he was courting the Church's influence. When he no longer was doing so his later statements show his true state of mind. Saying anyone who could say what I quoted was ever a Christian is just pathetic. Since what the Church did is not relevant and this post is long I won't speak on it for now.
