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

Great Debates
81

[QUOTE=Thudlow Boink]
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.
[/QUOTE]
You still haven’t explained who turned Lot’s wife into salt. But more specifically to this assertion, if I understand you correctly, it is only by cherry picking that one could look to the bible as evidence of a “psychopathic delinquent” god.

I don’t think there is much spin to interpreting God’s instructions to Joshua as anything other than genocidal. I also have a hard time understanding what good things would balance out genocide.

This probably goes to the argument that the Gods of the Old Testament are described in a variety of ways by multiple authors and editors, and that’s fine. Whether the question is about the God or the Gods of the OT remains irrelevant. The Bible is still held out as the Good Book, reflective of desirable moral and ethical qualities after which we should model ourselves.

I don’t think it improves the argument against the premise of the OP to amend the prescription to say: “It is good to act in petty, spiteful, vindictive, mysogynistic, homicidal, genocidal, inconsistent, good, kind, generous and forgiving ways.”

82

I don’t see how. If what you are claiming is “just about everything you could want,” then accusing me of cherry picking the bad parts is just an incredibly silly argument. Pol Pot did some nice things in his life too: that doesn’t make his genocide vanish. Nor does it make him a good source of moral guidance and wisdom, though I’m sure the man had some wise things to say at some time or another.

Your argument just doesn’t make any sense in the context of the Bible and especially the primacy of the Bible in major world religions. This isn’t a character I’m unfairly portraying in a bad light by only talking about the bad parts (though I challenge you to find a portion of the OT’s God’s actions that really are all that morally impressive): it’s the supposed alpha and omega, the fount of moral justification, etc. If you don’t want to take the stories about this God as being literally true and accurate, then my response to you is that you are, phew a sane and decent person. But then to go and repeat these stories, to hand Bibles to children and teach them out of it, to read these passages as if their existence in a particular collection gives them some deep and magical wisdom unlike any other text: sorry, but that still boggles the mind.

83

[QUOTE=Hentor the Barbarian]
You still haven’t explained who turned Lot’s wife into salt.
[/QUOTE]
Was I supposed to? :confused:

My response to that little detail is “She did what? She turned into what? What was that about? What am I missing here? There’s gotta be something I’m not getting”

I’ve seen explanations/speculations that try to make some sense out of this “pillar of salt” business, but nothing I’ve found so far really explains away the weirdness of it.

But at any rate, the Bible neither directly says nor clearly implies that God turned her into salt, so I’m not holding that one against God.

Now, that one definitely does bother me. I don’t know if I can do any more with that one than, “Well, people used to have a view of the world in which something like that could fit as a righteous thing to do, and a God who could sanction/command it could be a righteous God, but now we know better.” There might—might—be a justification for that particular action that somehow rests on “they deserved killing” or “they were better off dead” or “they posed too much of a threat to be allowed to live” as ascertained by God’s omniscient knowledge; but I don’t want to try going there.
Just to be clear, here’s one thing I do feel comfortable asserting:

The Bible is not a moral guide in the sense that every story and incident in it is intended to have a moral point and serve as a model for us to follow.

84

[QUOTE=Thudlow Boink]

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.

[/QUOTE]

We’re not talking about a flawed but interesting character in fiction here, we are talking about a deity who people believe defines morality and that people are supposed to worship. The Greek Gods, who didn’t seem to define morality, were certainly seen as flawed, but that is a very different type of godhood from the Western God. I don’t think Dawkin’s point was that God is portrayed as 100% negative - just that he is negative enough to refute claims of perfect goodness.

85

OK, based on several posts including Voyager’s one answering me, I now see the point. And yes, “the God of the Old Testament” is contradictory, arbitrary, and immoral by the very code he is said to have laid down.

My point, of course, is that the Bible, and the Old Testament in particular, is a library of works composed across centuries, with vastly differing concepts of God and related phenomena underlying them.

To draw a parallel, I could propose an OP “Resolved: the gods of the myths are inconsistent.” In support, I could illustrate how Apollo does things far different than Thor, both than the Dagda, and all three from Perkunas, Sreda, Krishna, or Murukan.

The clear argument against me would be “Which myths? Is any given set of myths internally inconsistent?” And in a way that’s exactly my point.

In terms of conceptions of who and what god is, the God of Osama bin Laden is different from the God of the President of Turkey, both from that of the Lubavitcher Rabbi, and in turn they from the Gods believed in by Jerry Falwell, Page Patterson, John Shelby Spong, Rowan Williams, Benedict XVI, Mel Gibson, the First President of the LDS Apostles, the World President of the Baha’i Faith, etc. Yet they all claim to be pointing to the God who revealed himself to Abraham.

“The God of the Old Testament” is a single entity who can be placed in the dock and judged only to those who believe in the plenary verbal inspiration of Scripture, those who believe that He is unchanging and ensured that the Bible gave an accurate record of Him, and those who choose to take the whole thing as a single literary unit for purposes like those in the present thread.

Otherwise, you’re working with “the gods of the myths” and failing to distinguish Aesir from Olympian from Tuatha de Danaan.

86

I’m sorry to beat a dead horse, but it still feels like you are arguing about consistency, Polycarp. Maybe I’ve got it wrong, but I don’t think that is at all the issue.

Are you thinking that the point is to suggest anything about the existence of god by noting that the Bible’s depiction of him is inconsistent? That’s not the point.

The point is that, regardless of consistency, the God (or Gods) of the OT are, well, essentially evil. Evil in the sense that he or they are said to engage in completely inappropriate, cruel, criminal or petty behavior.

I don’t see how going on about consistency is at all relevant. Why do you keep bringing consistency up?

87

[QUOTE=Polycarp]
OK, based on several posts including Voyager’s one answering me, I now see the point. And yes, “the God of the Old Testament” is contradictory, arbitrary, and immoral by the very code he is said to have laid down.

[/QUOTE]

Maybe it is worth reviewing who we’re ragging on here.

An actual God? Dawkins certainly isn’t, since he (not most of the posters in this thread) doesn’t believe in one.

God as a fictional character? That’s just silly.

The authors of the stories? Though we don’t have the original texts, it is very possible that God has a consistent character inside a particular story. Some of these have God acting evilly, which I think we all agree on. It would be interesting to see if a particular story is to be considered 100% accurate, or if believers think that some of the story is inspired and some not.

The editors? I think we can all agree that the editors did a poor job maintaining consistency. It would be interesting to know if the concept just didn’t exist yet, or they needed to mix stories required by the priests with popular origin stories that the audience would have expected.

Believers? Now we’re getting somewhere. While believers reject the pieces they feel aren’t representative of the true nature of God, perhaps the non-literalists could get together and produce a version of the parts of the Bible they do accept. Jefferson did it, dumping the miraculous parts of the NT. If Polycarp is correct, and that most Christians admit that much of the Bible is non-inspired, such a version, while getting attacked by the literalists, should have wide acceptance. I suspect there would have to be levels of acceptance - this passage no one believes in, while that one is still controversial.

Such a revised Bible would meet Dawkins’ objections, wouldn’t it, and keep the rational Christians from having to defend God on an ad hoc basis.

What about it? After it is done, the committee could claim inspiration, and who can prove them wrong?

88

[QUOTE=Polycarp]

To draw a parallel, I could propose an OP “Resolved: the gods of the myths are inconsistent.” In support, I could illustrate how Apollo does things far different than Thor, both than the Dagda, and all three from Perkunas, Sreda, Krishna, or Murukan.

The clear argument against me would be “Which myths? Is any given set of myths internally inconsistent?” And in a way that’s exactly my point.

[/QUOTE]

Well no one, outside of certain fantasy writers, is proposing a universe where all the gods exist. So no one is proposing that Thor is compatible with Apollo, while the Bible is supposed to give one consistent story.

Whether a set of myths is internally consistent is another story. I’d suspect not, for the same reason the Bible isn’t - they don’t reflect a single reality against which the myths can be checked. I suspect the gods of the myths evolve also. Zeus may have started out a thunderer, but I recently read an early Roman play where he spent his time cuckolding an Athenian general, like a character in a comic opera. A good question for the classicists, but showing how the Bible is analogous to myths doesn’t really support the proposition that God is real, does it?

89

I really feel for Dawkins and Harris. If reading and pondering what God, on a dare, allowed Satan to do to Job and his family doesn’t turn ptoples’ stomachs, I don’t see how anything can.

90

[QUOTE=David Simmons]
If reading and pondering what God, on a dare, allowed Satan to do to Job and his family doesn’t turn ptoples’ stomachs, I don’t see how anything can.
[/QUOTE]
Oh, I don’t know… how about pondering on what God allows to happen to good people in real life?

Would you prefer a Bible that pretends God never lets good people suffer? that doesn’t address the question of suffering at all?

91

[QUOTE=Thudlow Boink]
Oh, I don’t know… how about pondering on what God allows to happen to good people in real life?

Would you prefer a Bible that pretends God never lets good people suffer? that doesn’t address the question of suffering at all?
[/QUOTE]
That’s a tricky line though. Obviously suffering occurs, so the bible has to suggest why a god would allow that to happen. However, it seems unnecessarily cruel for an omnipotent creator to not only allow suffering but to expressly cause suffering simply to toy with humans in an either whimsical or experimental manner.

A god who says, “Hey, hey, dude, watch what I can make this chump do just to prove he really, really likes me!” seems particularly unworthy of respect and not in any position to be held up as a model of decent behavior. Most, or many, humans show superior compassion, which doesn’t fit well in any model of superior creator that I would value.

92

[QUOTE=Voyager]
…
An actual God? Dawkins certainly isn’t, since he (not most of the posters in this thread) doesn’t believe in one.
…
[/QUOTE]

My bolding. Did you mean to say “nor”?

93

[QUOTE=Hentor the Barbarian]
That’s a tricky line though. Obviously suffering occurs, so the bible has to suggest why a god would allow that to happen. However, it seems unnecessarily cruel for an omnipotent creator to not only allow suffering but to expressly cause suffering simply to toy with humans in an either whimsical or experimental manner.

A god who says, “Hey, hey, dude, watch what I can make this chump do just to prove he really, really likes me!” seems particularly unworthy of respect and not in any position to be held up as a model of decent behavior. Most, or many, humans show superior compassion, which doesn’t fit well in any model of superior creator that I would value.
[/QUOTE]
Right on. For casual “bad things happening to good people” in actual fact it is always possible to fall back on the old “we can’t judge the actions of an infinite mind.” However, in the Book of Job, God’s purpose is made pretty clear and it isn’t pretty.

94

[QUOTE=Revenant Threshold]
Polycarp, I could be wrong, but I think the idea of this thread is to debate how God is described in the OT. Now, you’ve presented a case which suggests we shouldn’t take it literally, that there are contradictions which suggest this view is correct, and so on. That’s fine. I’m sure most people on the board would be right there with you in saying we shouldn’t take the OT literally.
[/QUOTE]

Actually, what the contradictions show most clearly is that there is no monolithic OT. It’s a bunch of texts, written by different people over a considerable span of time. There are apparent contradictions in it and differing depictions of God’s views because of these different authors. It was assembled into one book by a committee much later on.

We shouldn’t take the OT literally as one book because it’s more like an anthology of short stories about God.

edit: I see Polycarp was even more explicit than I was, in post 85 …I shoulda read all the way through, sorry.

Sailboat

95

Goddamn! You guys just love you some of that inconsistency argument, with a side order of the literalism bit.

Now, if only someone would show up to advance a premise for which that argument is the first bit relevant.

96

[QUOTE=Thudlow Boink]
Oh, I don’t know… how about pondering on what God allows to happen to good people in real life?

Would you prefer a Bible that pretends God never lets good people suffer? that doesn’t address the question of suffering at all?
[/QUOTE]

I’ve never thought that the book of Job really DOES address that question. It’s answer is basically a diversion into yet another “tell me instead of show me” peon to how wonderful God is.

There really ISN’T much sensible justification for suffering. Entire societies have lived and died in far far more suffering than our current society. Are we lacking in suffering? Is it moral to cause more? Is there any conceivable purpose to creating a world in which massive amounts of suffering are caused by natural disasters that wipe out entire cities worth of people, preventing anyone from living to even learn pat lessons about how awesome and cool God is?

Only if you simply deny the realness of reality… which is in fact the length many even progressive believers are willing to go to.

97

I must be the only one here, but I kind of like the Old Testament God. Sure, hes got a temper, and will smite you if he doesn’t like what you’re doing (hint: He really doesn’t like idolotry or picking on Jews), but he’s also the type of God you can make deals with, even argue with, and he’s got your back.

98

I was going to make a post but then Voyager went ahead and wrote #87.

99

[QUOTE=Captain Amazing]
I must be the only one here, but I kind of like the Old Testament God. Sure, hes got a temper, and will smite you if he doesn’t like what you’re doing (hint: He really doesn’t like idolotry or picking on Jews), but he’s also the type of God you can make deals with, even argue with, and he’s got your back.
[/QUOTE]
As long as you’re a bald-headed old coot or an incestuous father. If you’re a woman, a non-Israelite, or an Egyptian (especially the latter), you’re fucked. To his credit, though, he is at least out in the open some of the time; he shows up and has tea, tells Moses exactly what to do and how to do it (even though his instructions clearly make no sense), and causes manna to fall from the sky. Sure, sometimes he hid inside a burning bush or otherwise communicated by proxy, but at least he manifested himself in ways that didn’t require logical articulation equivilent of licking the back of your head.

Regarding the consistancy argument, whether the Books of the Old Testament are intended to be literal recording of events or interpretations of much edited and transcribed stories which may or may not have taken place, they are presented as being part of a document which forms the fundamental underpinnings of the Christian religion. They are used as a guide for moral decision making, and much is made of “what God means by ____”, and yet, many of the stories both conflict with the essential beliefs about the Christian God (being just, merciful, omnipotent, et cetera) and provide no clear moral lesson, other than that making fun of someone’s baldness is likely to get you savaged by bears. Sure, you can “interpret” them to be wholly allegorical and whathaveyou, but if you have to intrepret them to mean someone completely antithetical to the story, or ignore them for the sake of some kind of consistancy then it begs the question of what they’re doing in this supposedly sacred book to begin with. It requires–demands–a level of cognitive dissonance unmatched in any other area of study. If the Old Testament are merely fictional stories tenuously related by a common, if highly changable auxiliary character then they should be presented this way. But they’re not; most Christians rationalize away the inconsistancies with this all being part of “God’s Plan” and invoking “God’s Mysteries”, et cetera, which is a tiresome rationale for anyone trying to make sense of the whole business or extract a useful more precip without the “guidance” of some claimed authority who doesn’t have anything more to go on than the same book but has a talent and verve for spinning out fantastic apologia.

As far as Dawkins is concerned, he’s not addressing any real gods in his diatrabe (as he doesn’t believe in them) but rather the means why which people learn and affirm their faith. As explained to me by many a Christian, first you have to believe, and then you accept the Bible–in contradition to the way you form rational opinions on any other topic. “Faith” in organized is the result of an authoritarian and generally dogmatic instruction on the topic, typically applied by primary authority figures and at young age when one’s reasoning faculties and ability to render competing hypotheses are undeveloped and unsupported. Insofar is other areas of reasoning and study conflict with the tenents of the beliefs, religion is anti-intellectual and oppressive; and it is noteworth to observe that while progression in scientific knowledge has continuously forced a retrenchment of religious strictures and claims, no advancement in religious knowledge has ever caused a re-evalutation of scientific thought. Religion is inherently conservative adn reactionary, trying to retrofit a god or gods into the existing gaps of knowledge, and devotedly clinging to those footholds as long as possible. Science accepts and embraces change, refinement, and revolution (even if specific members of its ranks are sometimes reluctant to part with a favored theory gone bust), and an inherent part of the process is constantly challenging “accepted” ideas in the face of new facts.

Stranger

100

[QUOTE=Stranger On A Train]
As long as you’re a bald-headed old coot or an incestuous father. If you’re a woman, a non-Israelite, or an Egyptian (especially the latter), you’re fucked.
[/QUOTE]

Well, if you’re an Egyptian, you’re fucked because you’re both an idolator (all those cat gods and bull gods) and you picked on the Jews (the whole slavery thing). If you’re a non-Israelite, and don’t do either of the above, you’re generally ignored in the bible (except for the ones who are nice to Jews, who get praised). And I don’t know that women were treated much worse in the bible than they were in other societies at the time. I mean, they certainly weren’t seen as equal to men, but there are some women in the bible who have an elevated status…there’s Deborah, there’s Esther, there’s Ruth (not an Israelite, originally), there’s Rahab (also not an Israelite), etc.

I know the bald-headed reference is to Elisha, but who’s the incestuous father? I can only think of two…Lot (whose daughters got him drunk and raped him), and Judah (his daughter disguised herself as a prostitute and seduced him). So, in neither case, was it really their fault. (Well, and I guess Adam, technically, since Eve was made from his rib.)

And, thinking about it, Tamar was actually Judah’s daughter in law, so it wasn’t actually incest.