Richard Dawkins: "The God of the Old Testament..."

Great Debates
61

[QUOTE=Blake]
What about the God of one section being the omnipotent Lord, and the God of another section being unable to defeat iron chariots?

What about the God who is so powerful that no man can not look at his face without dying in one chapter, and the God of another section having tea and biscuits with with a man?

What about the God who never changes his mind in one section, and then in the next section changes his mind again, and again and again?

To me these aren’t trivial distnctions, they are major discrepancies between the characters every bit as dramatic as Hamlet the decisive warmaker. It seems to me that if we can excuse (or more often try to explain away) these sorts of discrepancies then we might as well say that any two characters in fiction are the same provided they are the same species.

[/QUOTE]

Good examples.

In which part is the OT God omnipotent?

62

[QUOTE=mr. jp]
In which part is the OT God omnipotent?
[/QUOTE]

All of it. The idea is so common that you probably don’t even realise that you are reading it much of the time. For example Genesis 17:1

“'I am God Almighty; walk before me, and be blameless.”

Almighty is a perfect synonym for omnipotent.

Similarly Job 42

"Then Job replied to the LORD :"I know that you can do all things; no plan of yours can be thwarted. "
And so on. The fact that the Jewish God was omnipotent (usually) is so uncontroversial that I’m genuinely surprised at you asking the question.

This is why those passages that indicate a lack of omnipotence are so jarring.

63

[QUOTE=Blake]
What about the God of one section being the omnipotent Lord, and the God of another section being unable to defeat iron chariots?
[/QUOTE]
"Q : Who’s more powerful, God or Godzilla ?

A : Godzilla. He can handle iron chariots."

64

[QUOTE=Polycarp]
It’s possible we’re talking past each other, but I am saying Dawkins is setting up a strawman by buying into the evangelical/fundamentalist “unitary scripture” bit, and everybody is having a great deal of fun with it.
[/quote]

Ad we’re saying that you are inventing a strawman of Dawkins by claiming that this is what he’s doing, complete with patronizing links and complaints that have remarkably little to do with what anyone’s said.

65

[QUOTE=Polycarp]
<SNIP>

My point is that (1) the perception of what God was and what He wanted evolved over several hundred years, during which a variety of authors, editors, redactors, commentators, etc., lived; (2) each of these people had a different understanding of Him and what He wants; and (3) both rabbinic tradition and the mainstream Christian Church has been alive to this truth for virtually its entire existence. The idea of a divinely dictated or quasi-verbatim inspired “Word of God” as a single monolithic entity which is a precise indicator of what the God who supposedly inspired or dictated it word for word, every jot and tittle, is a 20th Century construct. My grandfather was already a Presbyterian Deacon when The Fundamentals of the Christian Faith first saw print.

<SNIP>
[/QUOTE]

Polycarp

Not intending any snark at all here but I’m not following this. If the God of the Bible evolves/changes simply due to increased human understanding, it would seem that God isn’t required at all.
Likewise, if the Bible is edited, redacted, etc. then where does your moral guidance originate and how do you know that it has anything at all to do with God? Who is to say that in the next century or maybe next week, an entirely new understanding of what God demands will become popular? It could be a more gentle God or possibly one that would make the OT God look like a Brownie Scout.

Regards

Testy

66

[QUOTE=Polycarp]
That second story has nothing to do with Lot, but appears to be a somewhat confused retelling of the account of the Levite’s concubine in Judges, chapter 19. (Not that I’d justify either story as particularly moral.) This dates to several hundred years after Lot in Sodom – how many, depends on what dating system you subscribe to for the “captivity in Egypt” (if in fact you believe that was factual) and the timing of the Exodus and rule by the Judges.

No big huhu relative to the rest of the thread, but a factual correction worth noting.
[/QUOTE]
I believe that the point of noting the high degree of similarities between the stories is in part to underscore the point you’ve been trying to make. The bible is an edited mismash of stories. Here is the same story told twice, with two different outcomes. The moral take away is essentially the same - it’s better to offer up your daughter and other women for rape (and in the case of the story of the Levite, explicitly for domination) than it is to allow a strange man to take it in the keister.

I’d also ask you to clarify just what was so “confused” about it. I’m not sure you know what you are talking about on this one. Here is the story of the Levite’s concubine, from the website All True Bible Stories for Children! You can see that they reworded it to make it accessible for children :eek: , and if you check out the website, you can see that they offer up a moral explanation for the kids as to why a father should offer up a child for such abuse. (I think the website might in fact be an ironic depiction of the impropriety of the use of the bible as a source of one’s morality, although I’m not sure. It’s hard sometimes to tell an earnest Christian from an ironic commentator.)

“While they were partying, some men from the city, Belial’s sons, surrounded the house and pounded on the door. “Send out the man who’s visiting you so we can put our penises in him,” they yelled.
The old man went to them and said, “No, brothers, no. Please, don’t be so naughty. This guy is my guest, don’t be so silly. Look, here’s my daughter who’s never had a penis put in her and the guy’s concubine. I’ll bring them out for you to dominate. You can do with them what ever you think is a good idea. Just leave the man alone.”
The men weren’t really listening. They took the concubine and put their penises in her and beat her all night. The next morning, they let her go. […]
When it was full light, the Levite got up and opened the door of the house and started to leave. On his way out, he found his concubine lying just at the edge of the door. […]
Seeing that she was dead, the man put her on his donkey and took her home. At home, he got a knife and cut her into twelve pieces which he sent all over Israel.”

Nice bit of the Good Book there, and not very dissimilar from the story of Lot either.

67

Those who fault God for being inconsistent are wrong in my opinion. God is absolutely consistent. He must be obeyed in all things no matter how inconsistent they may seem.

68

This site is not serious. Well, maybe it’s serious, but it’s an atheist site.

69

[QUOTE=kelly5078]
This site is not serious. Well, maybe it’s serious, but it’s an atheist site.
[/QUOTE]
I’ll buy that, but as far as I know, they convey the story of the Levite’s concubine accurately. I can’t seem to find any other site that provides anything of the text itself. If you have anything that does, I’d appreciate you sharing it.

70

No, no, it’s a perfectly good rendering of the story. I’m just sayin’.

71

[QUOTE=Polycarp]
If I can make the point without snark, “the God of the Bible” is much like “the monolithic liberal media stance” – an entity that is far more often perceived than extant.

It’s possible we’re talking past each other, but I am saying Dawkins is setting up a strawman by buying into the evangelical/fundamentalist “unitary scripture” bit, and everybody is having a great deal of fun with it. And that in itself doesn’t bother me – but if you look at the history of discussion on Christianity on this board, you’ll find that there’s been a lot of presumptions that the clowns against whom Der Trihs rightfully fulminates are the sole people proper to speak for Christianity – in fact, I got it in your post, which is why the snark – and that those of us who represent the majority of Christians who don’t subscribe to their Bibliolatric doctrines, by failing to speak out against them, were somehow guilty of a sin of omission – letting the noisy fundies be taken as the sole spokesmen for Christianity. And yet when we do, we get nailed for having the temerity to suggest that the Jesus Used Car Salesmen are not the real deal, and that Christianity has a longstanding tradition of attempting to deal with rather than deny the world around us.

Oh, well. Too much to expect that a message board supposedly devoted to combatting ignorance might want to work with the facts rather than strawmen.
[/QUOTE]

Do you have no defense of God beyond accusing all those who impugn him of assuming all theists are literalists?

Dawkins, in the quote in the OP, specifically mentioned the God of the OT. That’s different from an actual God, if there is one. The God of the OT is clearly defined by what is in the OT, not by your extra-Biblical excuses. It hardly matters whether the stories are true or not, or even assumed true, they are still there, and some Bible writer, a long time ago, saw fit to include them, and some worshippers, perhaps a long time ago, saw fit to accept them. At the least it lets us look into the minds of the people who invented our current conception of God. For some reason, “Lords of the Swastika” comes to mind.

It is certainly reasonable to reject many of the stories for being ahistorical, but then you must reject the good with the bad. Can you reject Joshua without rejecting all of Exodus? But even if they are ahistorical, they certainly got put in to teach us something. Parson Weems’ myths about Washington had a purpose, after all, and they do tell us both about him and about the state of the American public who accepted them for so long.

Were the writers of the Bible inspired in any way, or were they purely captives of their time, working on including both folktales and propaganda? I’ve never succeeded in getting an explanation from you in the analytical realm about how you filter the made up parts from the inspired parts (aside from your personal moral sense,) but maybe you can explain it in the realm of synthesis, and tell us how the true, inspired threads got integrated with the false, evil threads.

Neither the literalist nor the atheist has any problem with this. The literalist says everything gets dictated, the atheist says everything got made up or taken from stories. But if you think there are inspired parts, I’m curious about how they got mixed in.

72

We have to remember that the Old Testament is a collection of oral histories arising from an assortment of ancient Semitic tribes. As the stories were told and retold down through the centuries, they evolved until they were codified by the Hebrews into what we now know as the Old Testament. Inconsistent? Of course! Have you ever heard tribal elders tell stories? They leave out some parts they can’t remember, add parts that make the stories better, and try to come up with a moral at the end of the tale.

Dawkins has completely lost sight of the real origins of religion; his book treats religion as some mysterious force that seems to have arisen unbidden and unwelcome out of the ground like swamp gas that was embraced by the ignorant masses. He’s as unreasonably fanatical as the craziest of the fundies.

There’s nothing wrong with a life run by pure logic and reason, although I would suggest that the lifelong search for pure logic and reason is little different from a lifelong search for spiritual enlightenment and fulfillment. Both end up contributing to the commonweal and leave behind productive and intellectual legacies.

73

[QUOTE=Sunrazor]
We have to remember that the Old Testament is a collection of oral histories arising from an assortment of ancient Semitic tribes. As the stories were told and retold down through the centuries, they evolved until they were codified by the Hebrews into what we now know as the Old Testament. Inconsistent? Of course! Have you ever heard tribal elders tell stories? They leave out some parts they can’t remember, add parts that make the stories better, and try to come up with a moral at the end of the tale.

Dawkins has completely lost sight of the real origins of religion; his book treats religion as some mysterious force that seems to have arisen unbidden and unwelcome out of the ground like swamp gas that was embraced by the ignorant masses. He’s as unreasonably fanatical as the craziest of the fundies.

There’s nothing wrong with a life run by pure logic and reason, although I would suggest that the lifelong search for pure logic and reason is little different from a lifelong search for spiritual enlightenment and fulfillment. Both end up contributing to the commonweal and leave behind productive and intellectual legacies.
[/QUOTE]
So two people want to try to trot out this strawman as the rebuttal. It just doesn’t even remotely follow that describing the depiction of God in the Old Testament as a “psychopathic delinquent” is undermined by arguments about literalism, inconsistencies or what have you.

74

[QUOTE=Sunrazor]
We have to remember that the Old Testament is a collection of oral histories arising from an assortment of ancient Semitic tribes. As the stories were told and retold down through the centuries, they evolved until they were codified by the Hebrews into what we now know as the Old Testament. Inconsistent? Of course! Have you ever heard tribal elders tell stories? They leave out some parts they can’t remember, add parts that make the stories better, and try to come up with a moral at the end of the tale.

Dawkins has completely lost sight of the real origins of religion; his book treats religion as some mysterious force that seems to have arisen unbidden and unwelcome out of the ground like swamp gas that was embraced by the ignorant masses. He’s as unreasonably fanatical as the craziest of the fundies.

[/quote]

You forget the inclusion of rules and stories clearly driven by the political and theological environment of Judea at the time the Bible was edited. It is not merely a collection of stories, but some creative fiction as well. Nonetheless, your account of the Bible’s creation leaves out God. So, I don’t think Dawkins would disagree that much with your account. If everyone considered it just such a collection, no more true or false than Gilgamesh, there would be no issue. Since many people consider it a lot more, Dawkins calling attention to the nasty bits is very reasonable. I suspect he gets lots of interesting mail from fundies.

I’d guess that Dawkins’ legacy will be greater than yours and mine put together. I’ve read a lot of Dawkins, but never noticed that he was on a lifelong search for pure logic. Spiritual enlightenment, whatever that means, can no doubt be accomplished just fine by people who have never seen the Bible.

75

[QUOTE=Blake]
What about the God of one section being the omnipotent Lord, and the God of another section being unable to defeat iron chariots?

What about the God who is so powerful that no man can not look at his face without dying in one chapter, and the God of another section having tea and biscuits with with a man?

What about the God who never changes his mind in one section, and then in the next section changes his mind again, and again and again?

To me these aren’t trivial distnctions, they are major discrepancies between the characters every bit as dramatic as Hamlet the decisive warmaker. It seems to me that if we can excuse (or more often try to explain away) these sorts of discrepancies then we might as well say that any two characters in fiction are the same provided they are the same species.
[/QUOTE]
Fair enough. I wasn’t aware there were inconsistencies on that level. If they’re there to the extent you’re saying, i’m perfectly prepared to change my mind and say they’re substantially different portrayals.

76

[QUOTE=Sunrazor]
There’s nothing wrong with a life run by pure logic and reason
[/QUOTE]
Spoken like a true Vulcan! :slight_smile:

77

[QUOTE=Sunrazor]
We have to remember that the Old Testament is a collection of oral histories arising from an assortment of ancient Semitic tribes. As the stories were told and retold down through the centuries, they evolved until they were codified by the Hebrews into what we now know as the Old Testament. Inconsistent? Of course! Have you ever heard tribal elders tell stories? They leave out some parts they can’t remember, add parts that make the stories better, and try to come up with a moral at the end of the tale.
[/quote]

So? Why do these particular people have any special claim to enlightenment or connection with God over and above anyone else that’s ever lived? Why do they get all the attention and careful reading and study?

This is just an increasingly lazy non-response to what he and others argue. He presents very specific criticisms of religion and faith, criticisms that are simply dodged or ignored in a very frustrating way.

The point about the God of the OT (and the NT) too being a monster is not based on the idea that we must read the Bible literally. Its based on the idea that the Bible is held out as the core text for understanding God, morality, and so on, despite it being a very poor example of all of those things no matter how you read or interpret it. As I’ve said before, virtually any human being alive today could write down better, clearer, more honest, consistent and direct principles for morality, faith, and even Christianity than what is found in the Bible and not need to dance around interpreting this or analyzing that. The argument that by somehow studying the perception of God that a bunch of genocidal murderers had we can come to better learn God than studying virtually anything else simply strikes me as absurd. That’s my opinion, but I think it’s a real elephant in the room in these sorts of discussions.

There is nothing necessary about the Bible or the descriptions of God contained within, not even to Christianity. Early Christians did perfectly fine without it. Most Gentile Christians were completely ignorant of Jewish scripture.

Utter straw man. Logic and reason are not polar opposites of spiritual enlightenment (in the sense of looking for and finding fulfilling meaning in ones life). Logic and reason are helpful tools, in fact, for that search.

78

[QUOTE=Revenant Threshold]
Fair enough. I wasn’t aware there were inconsistencies on that level. If they’re there to the extent you’re saying, i’m perfectly prepared to change my mind and say they’re substantially different portrayals.
[/QUOTE]

Oh yeah, the Bible is full of those sorts of massive and jarring inconsistencies of character.

Interesting definition of omnipotence.

Note that the actual word used here is the tetragramaton: Yahweh. This was Jehovah himself, not some other god or representative, having tea and biscuits with Abraham.

So God does not repent/change his mind… except in the numerous instances where he does repent. I could also give numerous examples of God changing his mind that don’t actually use the word “repent” but these are the most jarring examples.

So God is omnipresent and sees al things. Except that he is unaware of whether or not the stories he has heard about Sodom are true.

I could keep going with examples of God never being the author of evil, yet creating evil, never deceiving, yet deceiving and so forth. The plain fact is that the God of the OT has no consistent characteristics at all. Beyond being a male being and a misogynist who is especially fond of the Israelites there are absolutely no other consistent characteristics at all.

[QUOTE=Hentor the Barbarian]
I’ll buy that, but as far as I know, they convey the story of the Levite’s concubine accurately. I can’t seem to find any other site that provides anything of the text itself. If you have anything that does, I’d appreciate you sharing it.
[/QUOTE]

Bible gateway will give you the text of any passage you want in umpteen different English translations. The unbound Bible will also give various translations such as the original Hebrew and Greek.

79

[QUOTE=kelly5078]
No, no, it’s a perfectly good rendering of the story. I’m just sayin’.
[/QUOTE]

Just sayin’ what, exactly?

80

[QUOTE=Apos]
The point about the God of the OT (and the NT) too being a monster is not based on the idea that we must read the Bible literally. Its based on the idea that the Bible is held out as the core text for understanding God, morality, and so on, despite it being a very poor example of all of those things no matter how you read or interpret it. As I’ve said before, virtually any human being alive today could write down better, clearer, more honest, consistent and direct principles for morality, faith, and even Christianity than what is found in the Bible and not need to dance around interpreting this or analyzing that. The argument that by somehow studying the perception of God that a bunch of genocidal murderers had we can come to better learn God than studying virtually anything else simply strikes me as absurd.
[/QUOTE]
I think this is a good summary of what is at issue. And I think the starting point for this thread was that the OP was asking for evidence that what I’ve bolded above is actually the case.

I, personally, disagree with the bolded statement.

I do think that you could make a pretty strong case for God being as awful as he is described in the OP, if you were allowed to pick and choose and spin and interpret things however you thought would fit your case. But I also think you could make a case for a good God who was just about everything you could want in a Supreme Being, by the same method.

What if someone could read the entire Old Testament (or the entire Bible) from cover to cover, in a faithful translation (if not the original language), without bringing to it any preconceived notions, but with plenty of background knowledge about the world in which it was set: what kind of impression would they form of God from their reading?

I don’t know. But I honestly don’t think it would be anywhere near as one-sidedly negative as Dawkins suggests in the OP’s quote.