At some point recently, K was reading to the Boy about Moses and the plagues, and as children are wont to do, he zeroed in the most shocking one: the death of the firstborn male. He was trying to figure out who in the family would be the firstborn male.
“Would it be Papa?” he asked.
How does one respond? How does one say the obvious: “No, it would be you”?
“But why would God do that? It’s against the commandments.”
This is the crux of the issue of me of late: how are we to incorporate all those horrible things the god of the Old Testament does with the notion that the Bible supposedly comes from the mind of an omnipotent, omniscient, all-beneficent being? (The story of the death of the firstborn is problematic both for God’s beneficence and his omniscience: the Hebrews are to mark their doorway with the blood of a sacrificed lamb in order to indicate that the angel doing the killing is to pass over that house — why wouldn’t the angel know without that?)
Believers start with the premise that the Bible is from an omnipotent, omniscient, all-beneficent being, and then they work backward to try to explain these horrible passages. A skeptic like me starts with the premise that the Bible is supposedly from an omnipotent, omniscient, all-beneficent being and looks for evidence of that within the pages. The clear evil that the god of the Old Testament does, then, is clear and damning evidence against the supposition that the Bible reflects the mind of an omnipotent, omniscient, all-beneficent being. That god is petty and selfish, jealous and immature, narcissistic and self-absorbed, and above all, that being as portrayed in the Old Testament is evil, toying with some by demanding human sacrifice and then rescinding the order at the last minute (thinking of Issac here) and accepting human sacrifice in other situations (I’m thinking of Jephthah here). He is murderous and rampaging on both an enormous scale, commanding the Israelites to wipe out whole nations, men, women, and children, and a small scale, sending bears to maul children:
He went up from there to Bethel, and while he was going up on the way, some small boys came out of the city and jeered at him, saying, “Go up, you baldhead! Go up, you baldhead!” And he turned around, and when he saw them, he cursed them in the name of the LORD. And two she-bears came out of the woods and tore forty-two of the boys. From there he went on to Mount Carmel, and from there he returned to Samaria. (2 Kings 2.23-25)
Believers have to become apologists for God, coming up with reasons why these horrible actions are perfectly reasonable and in fact good. (Here’s an attempt to explain the bear mauling.) They resort to explaining what it means in that time and culture, failing to realize that they’ve just placed a limitation upon this supposedly-divinely inspired book that counts against their argument. They discuss the nuances of the original Hebrew, failing to realize that they’ve just placed a limitation upon this supposedly-divinely inspired book that counts against their argument. They produce wildly different interpretations and explanations, failing to realize that they’ve just placed a limitation upon this supposedly-divinely inspired book that counts against their argument.
For the skeptic, things are so much simpler. Occam’s razor simple. We mark these passages in the “Against” column and move on. In the end, we look at how many marks are in the “For” column and how many are in the “Against” and make a summary judgment from that. And there are vastly more things in the “Against” column.