The Bible is full of nasty bits!

Some Christian apologists take the view that God is perfectly moral, and would never resort to the sort of evil that incorporates practices like slavery or genocide. The Old Testament fairly resounds with pretty horrible stuff, including the genocide of the Amalekites, including infants and small children. On other occasions we hear how everyone is to be killed except virgins of shaggable age (over 11 in the Ancient Near East), who can be taken as concubines. Such atrocities are committed with the express sanction and command of The Lord.

Now leaving aside the questionable historicity of many of these episodes, we're still left with a bit of a problem if we want to rescue God and Christianity from accusations of rather poor ethics. Theistic Apologist Paul Copan has written a book "Is God A Moral Monster?", and of course comes down on the point that no, God is very much not a moral monster, but is profoundly moral. The Amalekites deserved it, and anyway it wasn't as bad as all that. His points are refuted entirely (and laboriously) by the indefatigable Thomas Stark - quite a task!

But be that all as it may - how should Atheistic Christians respond to the horrible genocides, human trafficking, slavery and rape ordered by God? We can hardly make excuses for the behaviour, nor can we suggest with our modern ethical humanist heads on that this was anything other than appalling abuse. We are wiser now. We do have better ethical standards. But what can we do? How can we remain within the Christian tradition and condemn the god of our ancestors?

Well, there are a couple of points. First, it does have to be condemned. The God of the Old Testament (and indeed the New Testament) is indeed a "moral monster". The abstraction we created seems to be all too capable of getting out of control, and leading us into evil that we can somehow resolve into "good". The priest and the Levite walking past the injured man on the road to Jericho similarly can justify their actions based on their idea of divine command. But those options are not available to the Christian Atheist. We can't change the past, and we can't wash our hands of it either.

These episodes in our past and in our bibles serve to show what can happen if dogma is taken to be proscriptive. If we invest our energies in following divine or earthly authority, we are setting ourselves up to becoming moral monsters. We need to recognise the mistakes and evils of the past as mistakes and evils, and ensure that we really do practice the most important thing Jesus ever said: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.