Reddit reviews Is God a Moral Monster?: Making Sense of the Old Testament God

Wow! That portion of the article reeks of an atheist agenda and is totally false. God's character has not changed. It is the same throughout the bible, from Genesis to Revelation. While it is true God allowed His people to be enslaved, it was not that He necessarily caused it. In each case, the Israelites turned from Him and began worshiping false gods and idols. God merely took His hand off them and let things happen. He ceased protecting them to show them what happens when they reject Him. But this God loved His people. When they relied on Him, He didn't let them down. They defeated armies greater than they. Their crops and livestock grew in abundance. Sickness and illness were minimal. It reads like He caused it only because He knew what would happen when He removed His protection. God's strength comes from man's weakness.

I recommend to pick up, "Is God a Moral Monster?: Making Sense of the Old Testament God" https://www.amazon.com/God-Moral-Monster-Making-Testament-ebook/dp/B004EPYPY4

It was written to challenge many of the beliefs of modern atheist, but it does a good job of demonstrating the consistency of God's character.

In terms of the New Testament, this brings the good news of God's grace and extends the offer to His people to all nations. Jesus showed us who God is - a loving and nurturing God. He knows we cannot keep His commandments without His help, so He came as a man, kept the commandment so that we all can be seen as righteous in Him. Jesus is our intercessory with the Godhead just as Abraham was for Sodom and Moses was for the Israelites at Sinai. Remember passages such as (paraphrasing) 'he who puts his hand on the plough and looks back is not fit to inherit the kingdom of heaven' and 'if you love me, you'll keep my commandments'. Jesus provides ample warnings that judgement will be harsh, just as it always has been.

Jesus also said that without the Holy Spirit, the mysteries of God remain hidden. When you believe in Jesus and that He was raised from the dead, the scales are lifted from your eyes and your ears will hear. The writer of "Beyond Good and Evil" as well as Peterson is reading in the blind. They may be smart, but remember, God takes delight in confounding the wise with the foolishness of the cross.

Is God a Moral Monster? by Dr. Paul Copan has an entire chapter on misogyny, so I recommend looking at that book. But I’ll provide a list of notes that I took a while back.


Misogynistic? Women in Israel

• God created male and female in his image, and his ideal was male-female equality.
  
• In Israel’s laws, God works within a patriarchal society to point Israel to a better path, and provides many protections and controls against abuses directed at females in substandard conditions.
  
• Even though there are examples of oppressed women, there are many examples of oppressed men too, and “is” doesn’t lead to “ought.”
  
• The husband was the legal point person for the Israelite family, but this doesn’t mean that women considered this an oppressive arrangement.
  
• Wives in many OT marriages were equal and equally influential in their marriages and beyond.
  
• God emphasized the protection of widows, divorced women, and other vulnerable of society such as orphans and non-Israelite strangers or aliens.
  
• The OT is full of powerful matriarchs who were highly valued, exerted a great deal of influence, and stepped forward with the best of men.
  
• The moral and ceremonial laws of Israel presumed that men and women were equal and they shared equal moral responsibility.
  
• The levitical laws that address incest and adultery apply to men and women without distinction.
  
• Impurity at childbirth, for both male and female, was ritual impurity, not moral impurity, and duration of this impurity was unbiased.
  
• When sonless Zelophehad died, his daughters appealed to inheriting his property, and their appeal was granted.
  
• Israelite women weren’t saleable items like houses, oxen, or donkeys.
  
• The Mosaic law commands a son to revere the mother and father alike—with the mother listed first, but other ANE cultures often had the mother under the control of the son.
  
• The OT doesn’t automatically place “female” and “priesthood” in opposite categories.
  
• Both Adam and Eve carried out priestly duties of worship and service to God.
  
• God desired that all Israelites approach him as a “kingdom of priests,” but they refused to go up to the mountain, so Moses went in their place.
  
• Women were not permitted in the tabernacle/temple in order to preserve Israel’s religious identity, since other religions of the ANE commonly included fertility cult rituals, goddess worship, and priestesses, during which sexual immorality took place with temple prostitutes.
  
• In OT Israel, women like Miriam, Deborah, and Huldah fulfilled the first two roles as teachers, judges, and prophetesses.
  
  Bride-Price? Polygamy, Concubinage, and Other Such Questions
  
  
• The OT makes clear the ideal built into creation; Genesis 2:24 has the singular “wife” as well as “father and mother.”
  
• While polygamous marriages, including concubines, occurred in the OT without God’s stamp of approval, such marriages still brought with them a husband’s commitment to protect and provide for his wife.
  
• If a child came through a woman hired for sexual pleasure, shame and no inheritance resulted.
  
• Deuteronomy 17:17 strictly warned Israel’s future king(s) to not multiply wives for himself or else his heart will turn away.
  
• Leviticus 18:18 prohibits polygamy, even if this law wasn’t always abided.
  
• The biblical writers hoped for better behavior.
  
• Some scholars have suggested that polygamy may have been tolerated for the practical reason that its prohibition would have been difficult to enforce.
  
• From Lamech’s wives to those of Abraham, Esau, Jacob, David, and Solomon, wherever we see God’s ideal of monogamy ignored, we witness strife, competition, and disharmony.
  
• The OT presents polygamy as not only undesirable but also a violation of God’s standards, and the OT narratives subtly critique this marital arrangement.
  
• God himself models covenant love for his people; this ideal union of marital faithfulness between husband and wife is one without competition.
  
• Many practices are prohibited, but case laws are given in the event such unfortunate circumstances arise.
  
• When a father sells his daughter, he’s doing so out of economic desperation in the form of contracted employment.
  
• If the man (widowed or divorced) rejects the servant woman as a wife, she is to be given her freedom.
  
• If his son wants to remarry her, she’s to be taken in as a family member and treated as a daughter.
  
• If the man marries another woman, the servant woman is to receive food, clothing, and lodging.
  
• The bride-price was a marriage gift that reflected the honorable state of marriage as it was a deposit from the groom’s father to the bride’s father to compensate him for the work his daughter would otherwise have contributed to the family.
  
• The marriage gift also served as a security for the wife in case of divorce or her husband’s death.
  
• The bride’s father would often give an even larger gift of property when the couple married.
  
• In the cases of non-marital sex and forcible rape, the man is always guilty and the woman is always protected.
  
• In adultery, both are culpable and receive the consequence.
  
• In non-marital sex, both are culpable, but the man receives the consequence; in forcible rape, the man is guilty and receives the consequence, while the woman’s innocence is assumed.
  
• In non-marital sex, the man is commanded to take the woman to be his wife and pay a dowry, but the woman and her father have to agree to this arrangement; if without consent, the man is commanded to pay an even higher monetary price.
  
• A foreign female POW was protected and cared for, given a month for mourning, and possibly taken as a wife; and if the man didn’t want to marry her, then she had to be set free without being sold or mistreated.
  
• “You shall cut off her hand” is symbolic for publicly shaving the woman’s pubic hair as a form of humiliation for grabbing the testicles of an opponent during which he fought her husband; this is much milder in contrast to Middle Assyrian laws which had the woman’s finger cut off or eyes gouged out.
  
  Again, hope this helps. Take care, and hope you feel better with your chronic condition.
  

> For the OT bit, I think I understand what you're saying, but it's hard for me to accept that genocide was once holy for the Israelites but now deeply immoral for everyone else, if that makes sense. I guess it makes me wonder if it might become required again, and how we would know it was?

There was a specific reason (several actually) for the genocides that God ordered: for one, Israel's conquest served as God's judgment on the Canaanites (just like the Flood was judgment on the pre-Flood world or how the Assyrians was judgment on Israel). There was also a matter of God wanting the Canaanites out of the land so that Israel could better maintain its unique identity as God's people.

Now that we are in the New Covenant, instead of God using physical things, He is using a greater amount of spiritual and internal reality in his people. So instead of a physical nation of people being God's judgment against wickedness, He is more likely to use internal judgments (like what we see in Romans where God just gives up people their own sin as a form of judgment), as well as the Second Coming of Christ and the threat of hell as the ultimate judgment against wickedness. God gave us everything in the Old Testament, even the things we don't understand, as historic pictures and symbols of our lives in Christ now.

Simply put, the stuff we see in the Old Testament has seen their fulfillment in Christ in some way or another. Because God is no longer working through the unique cultural and tribal identity of Israel, He no longer needs to especially keep that national identity from being absorbed into the surrounding cultures. So the Canaan conquests are a picture of sanctification: the Christian may not be obeying God in killing Canaanites to purge the Promise Land, but he does obey God and kill the sin still present in his life.

There's no cause to "fear" that God will order any genocides from us, simply because He's moved from the point in redemptive history where those were needed for his purposes. I wouldn't call it "holy" but more pragmatic - God was using the tools from the culture he had at hand. If it had occurred in modern times, God may have used something more economically crippling for example. I'm not sure.

One good resource for examining the stuff in the Old Testament is Is God a Moral Monster by Paul Copan.

I suppose before I get into rambling any more, one of the things about being a Christian is trusting God even when things look odd, strange or counter-intuitive. It's easiest (or at least most natural) to apply this to when our lives don't work out how we envision, or when we have to deal with how evil interacts with us. But for the Christian, our faith (our confidence and trust in God) is probably most important when God doesn't seem to act like he "ought" too. But God has given us a huge record of His dealings with people, his faithfulness, love and mercy, as well as telling us about his justice, his holiness and his right and proper anger against wickedness - all the while He reflects that these are aspects of his goodness and love. We shouldn't feel "betrayed" when God acts in a way that feels like a gut-punch to our sensibilities. It's proper to ask questions and learn, but we've got to be careful not to judge the Judge of the Earth with our limited perspective.

Have you done any online research into these verses? It might be worthwhile to seek out a theologian's view before making any snap judgements. Often we do not see the cultural context, nor do we understand the language. An excellent example of this is the laws on "slavery", which some use to claim the Bible endorses slavery as it was in the antebellum south. This is false, because what is called slavery in the OT is entirely different than what happened in more modern times. This is an excellent explanation if you are interested: http://christianthinktank.com/qnoslave.html

A book I am reading through now that may be useful to you:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004EPYPY4/ref=oh_aui_d_detailpage_o00_?ie=UTF8&psc=1

As for Lev. 26, it came true later on when the Israelites began to worship Canaanite gods, which involved child sacrifice. God then withdrew his protection and Israel was under siege from the Babylonians. The Israelites ate their own children rather than ask God for forgiveness and turn from their false gods.

I am also posting this as an apologetic resource for you to use.


Why Christianity?

https://youtu.be/nWY-6xBA0Pk

Why suffering?

https://youtu.be/v6Gl4ao8IzA?t=9m6s

Evolution? Genesis?

Part 1

https://youtu.be/qMU1soRrtJk?t=26

Part 2

https://youtu.be/HZrxogY9Pnc?t=26

Part 3:

https://youtu.be/G7HQzhi8UPM?t=26

Part 4:

https://youtu.be/_3R0bh9LtSc?t=26

Part 5:

https://youtu.be/KJ3IgGYf29k?t=26

Part 6:

https://youtu.be/KCxWhKe1AMg?t=26

Part 7:

https://youtu.be/AyQY5Z3GeG4?t=26

Part 8:

https://youtu.be/eOwA9L0IY3I?t=26

Did Jesus exist?

https://youtu.be/A6uWSoxG_Fs

Jesus claimed to be God?

https://youtu.be/gT2TN6kA5kY

Trinity?

https://youtu.be/LoTSqXY5uhc

The good news?

https://youtu.be/HSNayo631a0

Homosexuality?

• A sin to exist?

https://youtu.be/COIThVReiIo

• A call to love?

https://youtu.be/nPYRXop7aPA?t=9s

Hell?

https://youtu.be/dz2EaQMBS3Y

All You Want to Know About Hell: Three Christian Views of God's Final Solution to the Problem of Sin

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00EQE3FJE/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_.o7HCb3HS6NG3

Never heard of Jesus?

Part 1

https://youtu.be/RvyzODL4B9U

Part 2

https://youtu.be/ufROkQF8rvg

Where did God come from?

https://youtu.be/RVzeojdXbpQ?t=9s

You might also enjoy these reads below,

Why Are There Differences in the Gospels?: What We Can Learn from Ancient Biography

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01MQFWQHD/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_QfzpCbWNBDNS2

The Resurrection of Jesus: A New Historiographical Approach

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B005LUJDNE/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_QizpCbDR7WP0G

Evidence That Demands a Verdict: Life-Changing Truth for a Skeptical World

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01MYP99J3/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_UoApCbAY8N4YN

Jesus Among Secular Gods: The Countercultural Claims of Christ

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01F1UD66I/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_u6wsCbDS1XXHR

Is God a Moral Monster?: Making Sense of the Old Testament God

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B004EPYPY4/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_3WypCbW728FHK

> And yet the Bible describes God condoning and even commanding immoral behavior.

By whose standard?

> That's not justice. You condemn someone for their actions, not their circumstance of birth.

We are born with a sinful corrupt nature. We are condemned for our sinful actions. Sin requires a penalty. That penalty is death.

> You claim God didn't condone slavery but you are completely incorrect. (That is, if you believe the Bible is directly inspired by God and isn't flawed in any way.) There are more verses in the Bible condoning slavery than there are condemning homosexuality.

The point I was trying to make was that God did not approve of or command that slavery be practiced. That was the work of fallen man. However, God laid the groundwork for reversing the practice of slavery through regulation and changing the hearts of man. However, slavery still continues due to rebellious man, not God.

Perhaps this link could help explain my position better.

> There are more verses in the Bible condoning slavery than there are condemning homosexuality.

Thats debatable.... There are verses that do condemn slavery. There’s not one that affirms the practice of homosexual lifestyles.

> So you don't believe atheists are going to hell?

Yes. But they are not specifically going to Hell for not believing in Christ. Even the demons believe in and acknowledge Christ. Rather they are going to Hell as a penalty for sin in breaking Gods law. Their not believing in and following Christ is simply their choice in foolishly rejecting the only means of redemption for the penalty of their sins.

This may sound like semantics, but the confusion lies in your original statement: "A loving God would never commit someone to an eternity of torture just for not believing in Him”. And indeed, the statement is only half-wrong. So I will give you credit there.
Originally, we were condemned to Hell for disobeying and rejecting God. We were inherently separated from God due to our sinful nature. Because God is a holy and just God, He cannot accept or be in the presence of sin. And due to our sinful natures, it is in our nature to reject and rebel against God. This is what condemns us from the start.

But Christ went to the cross as payment for our sins. He came, lived a sinless and perfect life - for the purpose of making the ultimate sacrifice for our sins. Our sins were imputed on the perfectly innocent and sinless Christ, so that His righteousness could be imputed upon us.

He does not commit us to eternal damnation for not believing in Christ per se, but rather for rejecting Him and instead leading a life of unrepentant sin.

> There are so many it would be impossible to list here. But there is a website that lists a lot of them that, if you don't mind, I'll use to save myself some time. I realize it's extremely biased however the scriptures quoted are accurate.

"Extremely biased" is an understatement. Just a cursory glance at it betrays the authors lack of experience in understanding and contextualizing the Scriptures. He/she tends to take verses out of historical and scriptural context in order to create for him/herself a false sense of abundant low-hanging fruit in which to work with, oftentimes going to utterly ridiculous heights to do so. This to me betrays an agenda based on hatred and pride, rather than seeking to find genuine truth.

But I will also agree that there are some events told in the Bible that can be difficult to rationalize or accept. To say otherwise would be foolish. One good book amongst many (not the best, not the worst) would be Is God a Moral Monster?: Making Sense of the Old Testament God. It is inexpensive and worth a look.

> I appreciate that you acknowledged it. I'm not taking any offense. However, these are topics I've thought long and hard about and researched endlessly already.

For instance?

>I've yet to come across any explanation that makes sense and allows for God to be a morally good being, except not taking the Bible literally.

Morally good, based on what (or whose) standard?

> I've spent thousands upon thousands of hours doing that already. I'm not ignorant of Christianity, in fact, I used to be a Christian. I'm also not an anti-theist and have expressed my desire to believe in God again.

I can appreciate that. In fact, I can readily state that I was probably in your same boat, in what feels like not so long ago. However, ‘head knowledge’ will only take you so far. But one must also search their heart for signs of self-centered pride and ego. If there is one thing I have learned is, the Bible is very offensive to man in the sense that it teaches doctrines and wisdom that very much go against mans nature and desires. And to me, overcoming that was the toughest hurdle. But in doing so, it opened up new perspectives for me to explore.

I can’t answer 'There are so many it would be impossible to list here’ kinds of objections. But if you wish to discuss specific points civilly, either here or through PM, I would be more than glad to entertain that. Otherwise, good luck in your pursuits!