The Biblical God is a Malevolent Bully, Part I
Nearly all Christian believers consider God to not just be a loving and caring guy like we try to be ourselves, but the utter paragon of moral perfection — perfectly benevolent and never failing to do anything wrong. God is said to be love and goodness itself, embodied.
The Bible even testifies to this, saying in 1 John 4:8 that “God is love”, and going on to say in Psalms 145:8-9 that “The LORD is gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and rich in love. The LORD is good to all; he has compassion on all he has made.”
However, we already know a few reasons why this cannot be true — God, if such a being were to exist, must be said to permit all of the needless suffering in the world, everything from the Holocaust to Hurricane Katrina, when it was in his power to stop it at any time. Additionally, God allows us to remain dwindling in religious confusion and nonbelief when a clear and consistent revelation would save billions of souls. Instead, God condemns them to a Hell that is definitively unjust punishment.
But we can additionally demonstrate that God cannot be benevolent not from external evidence, but from the Bible itself. Perhaps this is why it is occasionally said that the best way to convert someone to atheism is to have them read the Bible cover-to-cover. God’s actions in the Bible reveal him to be a malevolent and uncompassionate bully, and in no sense the benevolent all-loving perfect deity that many claim him to be.
God Mauls 42 Children With Bears for Teasing a Prophet
From there Elisha went up to Bethel. As he was walking along the road, some boys came out of the town and jeered at him. “Get out of here, baldy!” they said. “Get out of here, baldy!” 24 He turned around, looked at them and called down a curse on them in the name of the LORD. Then two bears came out of the woods and mauled forty-two of the boys. — 2 Kings 2:23-24
What just happened there? Little children come out of a city and mock a prophet by calling him a “bald head” and presumably telling the prophet to die. So what is the admirable, compassionate response? Ignore them? Turn the other cheek? No, the answer is mauling them with bears. Kill forty-two little children… with bears.
This story has become the textbook go-to example of Biblical cruelty, so some apologists (defenders of the Christian faith) have tried to soften it by suggesting that the children were not really “little”, and were only called “little” as an accident in translation. While the translation argument itself is dubious and debated immensely, even granting it does little to resolve the problem. All it points out is: (1) The Bible contains enough mistranslations to make our interpretation incorrect and confused and (2) Mauling grown men with bears is still okay and admirable according to some apologists.
Additionally, this verse is further softened with the idea that this passage somehow indicates that the prophets’ lives were in danger. But of course, this is kind of ridiculous – why can’t God just protect the prophet or silence the crowd of children rather than needing to kill them? Surely such an omnipotent God has many other options than bear mauling — just teleport the prophets out of harm’s way, or create some sort of forcefield, or make the prophets invulnerable, or… Nope, bears.
Another attempt to answer this question says “The penalty was clearly justified, for to ridicule Elisha was to ridicule the Lord Himself. The seriousness of the crime was indicated by the seriousness of the punishment. The appalling judgment was God’s warning to all who would scorn the prophets of the Lord.” Yes, God has such self-esteem issues that his reaction to being ridiculed is death by bears. This is far from clearly justified; it is horrendously disproportionate.
Gather Wood on the Wrong Day = Torture + Death
While the Israelites were in the wilderness, a man was found gathering wood on the Sabbath day. Those who found him gathering wood brought him to Moses and Aaron and the whole assembly, and they kept him in custody, because it was not clear what should be done to him. Then the LORD said to Moses, “The man must die. The whole assembly must stone him outside the camp.” So the assembly took him outside the camp and stoned him to death, as the LORD commanded Moses. — Numbers 15:32-36
Not only is the crime so obviously crazy, but the method of death is exceedingly immoral – death by stoning is a form of torture in which the person is killed by an entire community throwing stones at the person until they eventually die from severe trauma. Why would a loving God impose this kind of barbaric punishment for any crime, let alone a crime as trivial as picking up sticks on the wrong day? Why is there stoning for breaking the Sabbath anyway?
Sure, the Sabbath is the holy day, and it’s probably important. But is it really so important that someone gathering wood necessitates death by stoning? Clearly something changed, because nowadays working on the Sabbath is no crime at all — today, we do it all the time! But even if it were such a problem back in the day, why does such a petty crime necessitate torture and death?
God Orders All Men to Be Killed, All Women to be Raped
“Have you allowed all the women to live?” he asked them. “They were the ones who followed Balaam’s advice and enticed the Israelites to be unfaithful to the LORD in the Peor incident, so that a plague struck the LORD’s people. Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man, but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man. — Numbers 31:15-18
In Numbers 31, Moses’s army defeats the Midianites under God’s direction. During this war, Moses then orders the army to kill all the adult males. When Moses learns that the army had taken women and children captive, Moses tells the army to “kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him.” He then tells the army that “all the women children, that have not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves”. What does this mean?
Remember that thing about the Ten Commandments, and how people are supposed to not murder each other? Yeah, well here is an example of God ordering people to not follow his other order, and kill people despite saying not to kill people.
What God allowed his own prophet to do without any retribution in a war he directed was for absolutely everyone who was not a female virgin, including children, to be killed. The virgins would then be kept alive and forced into sexual slavery. Sounds like fun for the whole family, right? I guess “Do not rape” isn’t in the Commandments…
This practice of taking women for sex is perfectly acceptable by Deuteronomy 21:11-13, which states that “if you notice among the captives a beautiful woman and are attracted to her, you may take her as your wife. Bring her into your home and have her shave her head, trim her nails and put aside the clothes she was wearing when captured. After she has lived in your house and mourned her father and mother for a full month, then you may go to her and be her husband and she shall be your wife.”
Of course it’s completely fair that the captive gets to mourn her father and mother for a month, but she doesn’t get any choice but to become the wife of someone. She is “taken”. Why would God allow such a depraved and immoral practice to continue? Why would God allow one of his prophets to order an army to do such an immoral thing as take women into forced marriages?
And why would God even allow this kind of war to happen at all, when he has the ability to just zap enemies out of existence, or settle all disputes through diplomacy?
God Orders More Raping, Plus Killing and Torturing of Babies!
Whoever is captured will be thrust through; all who are caught will fall by the sword. Their infants will be dashed to pieces before their eyes; their houses will be looted and their wives violated. See, I will stir up against them the Medes, who do not care for silver and have no delight in gold. Their bows will strike down the young men; they will have no mercy on infants, nor will they look with compassion on children. — Isaiah 13:15-18
The people of Samaria must bear their guilt, because they have rebelled against their God. They will fall by the sword; their little ones will be dashed to the ground, their pregnant women ripped open. — Hosea 13:16
God must really have something against those the Isrealites go to war against! Lets have a quick gore recap:
- Lots of people will be killed by swords.
- Babies will be chopped in pieces in front of their parents.
- People will have their posessions stolen.
- People will be raped.
- No mercy will be given toward babies.
- Babies will be ripped out of pregnant women.
This is downright terrifyingly gruesome, yet it is something that God specifically predicts and commands. Is this really what a loving, merciful, just, and good God do or allow in his name? What did the wives do to deserve getting their houses looted and babies killed, let alone be raped –- one of the most traumatic experiences someone can undergo? What did the babies do to deserve being shown no compassion? Why is everyone guilty for the transgressions of a few?
God Commands Genocide
However, in the cities of the nations the LORD your God is giving you as an inheritance, do not leave alive anything that breathes. Completely destroy them — the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites — as the LORD your God has commanded you. — Deuteronomy 20:16-17
Being omnipotent, God could have done many things to clear the land given to the Israelites — for starters, he could have simply teleported all the ethnic groups to another area, or simply create land for the Israelites out of nothing. And even if for some reason they had to die, God could have caused them to die painlessly, or could have never created them in the first place. But no, that’s not God’s style. Instead, he has the Israelites go and kill them all by war.
This elimination of groups of people is the very definition of genocide – similar to what Hitler tried with the Jews in Nazi Germany. If God commanded Hitler to kill the Jews, would that make such a genocide okay? Why does God require the complete elimination of entire ethnic groups, and why does he need his followers to do it for him? No crime can possibly require mass murder of an entire group and genocide is definitely not moral even if the Bible commands it. Such passages in the Bible are what lead atheist Richard Dawkins to refer to God as “a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser.”
Take note of these two defenses that are very commonly made in response to this problem of Genocide, because they get to the heart of the issue about God’s goodness, and we will address them thoroughly in a future post:
The first is to retreat to “God’s ways are not our ways” / “You have no right to question God” / “Whatever God does is just and admirable, no matter what” arguments. We’ll save these to be thoroughly analyzed later, because they apply to all of these biblical atrocities as well as all other problems of evil.
The second is to retreat to the idea that all of those who are killed will end up getting what they deserve — either placed in Hell by God if they were guilty (coupled with evidence that they were indeed guilty: these people were accused of infanticide, bestiality, and incest) or Heaven if they were innocent and wrongly killed. Additionally, add the idea that since everyone is sinful by corrupted human nature, everyone is probably at least a little bit guilty!
This leads to a completely different perspective on the event, as we see by William Craig’s handling of the question:
So whom does God wrong in commanding the destruction of the Canaanites? Not the Canaanite adults, for they were corrupt and deserving of judgment. Not the children, for they inherit eternal life. So who is wronged? Ironically, I think the most difficult part of this whole debate is the apparent wrong done to the Israeli [sic] soldiers themselves. Can you imagine what it would be like to have to break into some house and kill a terrified woman and her children? The brutalising effect on these Israeli [sic] soldiers is disturbing.
Next Up…
For now, we’ll note that this first defense seems to completely abandon any claim that we can actually prove God is good based on the evidence, and instead have a lot of prima facie evidence that God is evil, and the second defense seems to indicate that murdering anyone is okay because God will always sort it out in the afterlife and we have nothing to fear, as well as saying nothing about the numerous other options God had.
Just based on what we have so far — God ordered the torture and death of someone for collecting wood on the Sabbath, God ordered the death of children in really violent ways, and also specifically ordered women to be raped. This is the kind of character that is worse than any dictator, not the kind of character that is the embodiment of love!
In the next post of this series, we’ll look at even more egregious cases where God obviously is doing something completely unjustified, uncaring, and not worth honoring or worshipping. Yes, it gets even more egregious than infanticide and rape! Then, we’ll look far more in depth at the defenses that are being offered to defend God from claims that he is a malevolent bully.
Directly continued in: The Biblical God is a Malevolent Bully, Part II
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I now blog at EverydayUtilitarian.com. I hope you'll join me at my new blog! This page has been left as an archive.
On 26 Nov 2011 in All, Atheism, Christianity, Problem of Evil. 18 Comments.
1 Dec 2011, 5:28 am
But the atheists don’t have an objective moral pattern…
Therefore, they can’t accuse God of being malevolent, evil or the like.
How do you know God didn’t have a superior purpose behind these events?
mimimi
1 Dec 2011, 5:32 am
Damn, I put didn’t put the metatags correctly, the above message should have the tags <WLCraig> and </WLCraig>.
2 Dec 2011, 2:24 pm
@Rodrigo Amaral:
It’s a fair criticism even if you’re just doing it in a devil’s advocate style, but it definitely doesn’t get the specifically Christian God in the Bible (henceforth referred to as “God”) off the hook.
~
Can Atheists Have Objective Morality?
This is false. Though I don’t bring up the topic in this series on the Bible (though perhaps I should, later), I do think that atheists can have an objective morality, which I’ve started working on in the essay “The Meaning of Morality”.
My thesis will end up being something like talk about “morality” is completely misguided and instead should be replaced with talk about “rationality”, and it is rational to be compassionate. This will be enumerated in future essays.
Additionally, even if this fails, grounding morality in God is hardly better — for this just makes morality arbitrary, and thus means that it just as pointless to say “God is good” as to say “God is God”. I think this is flawed for many reasons, also to be enumerated in a future essay.
For now, read through “The Great Problem of Evil”, though, because this comment does mirror a lot of what I discussed over there. If you still don’t like my responses in headings “Can We Identify Suffering Without God?”, “Is Any Suffering Needless?”, “Can God Do What He Wants?”, “Does God Work in Mysterious Ways?”, and “Do Atheists Have a Basis to Judge God?”, feel free to leave a comment there and we’ll discuss further.
You can also read through “The Patriotic Humanist” — though mostly unrelated, subheadings “The Meaning of Good, Patriotism, and Apple Pie” and “You Can Be Good Without God” are relevant, and God does fit the definition of “bad person” enumerated there.
~
Can Atheists Call God Malevolent?
Interestingly, I don’t think this logically follows — even though I think atheists have an “objective moral pattern”, I do not think such a moral theory is even necessary to call someone malevolent or evil.
Instead, malevolent can be whatever intentionally and deliberately causes another person to be harmed. Notice that this definition is descriptive, not normative — at no point did I ever say that we shouldn’t be malevolent (even though I do think we shouldn’t be malevolent). It’s just enough to point out that God actually is malevolent, as in he does actually intentionally and deliberately cause people to be harmed.
Additionally, God is a bully, as in God uses his position of power to abuse others and cause them harm. The fact that he can just deflect his action with “my ways are not your ways” is just a further abuse of power.
Basically, if you don’t think it is a problem for entities to rape women and cut babies into pieces, or if you’re fine with genocide, or if you’re cool with ruining a person’s life and killing innocent people for “no reason”, then I don’t think you’re the kind of person who can be persuaded by moral theories anyway.
And all that failing, we can also just call God a hypocrite for doing what he commands people not to do, and also for being inconsistent by commanding people to do things which he commands them not to do — it is one of the commandments not to murder people, but then God orders murder.
~
Could It All Be a Conspiracy?
How do you know that Jack the Ripper didn’t have a superior purpose behind his events? How do you know that Hitler didn’t have a superior purpose behind the Holocaust?
What this response assumes is that God, despite being omnipotent and thus capable of doing anything that is logically possible, he is still so helpless that he is forced to do things that look dramatically bad but… look… it’s not his fault, because… well… you see.. he had this “superior purpose” that no one can actually identify and that God certainly won’t tell us about… and there is this massive conspiracy to make him look bad in the Bible when he was really just doing the benevolent thing… and yes um… sure he could have created us to recognize that instantly, but he didn’t see because erm… well… he likes us more when we struggle intellectually to justify him.
My point is that we don’t actually have absolute knowledge of anything, but we can be rather confident that God didn’t have a superior purpose behind these events. Acting as if God has a superior purpose when we clearly can’t identify it would actually mean that we could never find anyone guilty at all. And it’s not like God is incapable of defending himself, he just chooses not to for no apparent reason.
All of this strongly points to the actions of God in the Bible being unjustified, which is enough to prove his nonexistence, as I’ll later point out.
2 Dec 2011, 4:46 pm
Awesome response!
What I wrote early is just a piece of crap that I ear frequently (and disagree, of course). I don’t think William L. Craig has ever refuted the problem of evil.
And, regarding morality, I think like you.
4 Dec 2011, 9:30 pm
Also, I almost forgot: for more on some potentially sensible atheist moral theory, make sure to read the essays in the subheading “The Foundations of My Moral Theory” in my collection of “Essays That Inspire Me”. Things have changed a bit in my views since May, but the pieces enlisted there are still fully worthwhile starting points.
6 Feb 2012, 10:04 am
Remember the Word says in Matthew chapter 5, “Judge not that ye be not judged, for with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged, and with what measure ye mete it shall be measured to you again.” That is just the old English way of saying that you will be judged the same way you judge others.
1 Mar 2012, 7:32 pm
I have a request. Can you provide me with a list of things a malevolent bully would *NOT* do? Feel free to make it as long as you like.
1 Mar 2012, 7:35 pm
It’s not like Peter’s making an absolute claim like you. For God to be malevolent, he doesn’t need to be omnimalevolent. Sociopaths can be incredibly charming and on occasion will do something apparently nice for their own sake later. IOW, God can still do some nice things and be a jerk. Those aren’t mutually exclusive.
1 Mar 2012, 7:49 pm
Man, you really are fired up today! What absolute claim do you allege I’ve made? Perhaps you labor under the mistaken assumption that at least part of my definition of “omnibenevolent” means “won’t cause or allow pain to anyone, anywhere, for any reason?”
Look, I get your point, don’t you get mine? We need a clear line of demarcation to be able to properly identify when one is a “malevolent bully.” Are you familiar with the TV show Dexter at all? Is Dexter a malevolent bully? He sure does some gruesome things to people.
1 Mar 2012, 8:59 pm
Hey, just trying to get to the bottom of this issue! I’m feeling a little more comfortable around these parts, so I’m feeling more confident in expressing my opinions without restraint.
Well, I know for a fact that you allege God is omnibenevolent. That’s an absolute claim, correct? All-good is an absolute. I agree with you that the definition shouldn’t be one that is “never ever allows or causes pain.” If person A is going to stab person B to death for no reason, I wouldn’t be opposed to God materializing right then and there and breaking both of person A’s arms. I am still leery about God causing pain, though. It does not sit right with me. I am especially concerned when God seemingly allows instances of suffering which he could prevent at seemingly little to no cost.
I’m guessing you have some sort of argument from justice up your sleeve. Whether or not an instance of suffering was needless or necessary would be very relevant to this argument, no? I am indeed familiar with the TV show Dexter, but I’ve never seen an episode. I do get the principle: a vigilante goes about killing serial killers that elude the justice system. Right?
Well, I don’t see God killing serial killers. I don’t see God stopping rape or even bothering to prohibit it in the Bible. This falls under the free will defense though, which I find valid. What really gets to me is God allowing children to die in Africa and people to die in natural disasters such as tsunamis and hurricanes. Those instances of suffering don’t have much to do with justice or free will.
1 Mar 2012, 9:05 pm
What might also be very relevant is whether or not one must allow or commit harm to preserve justice. Batman is a good example, and speaking of which, he’d totally kick Dexter’s ass.
1 Mar 2012, 11:06 pm
TE, you didn’t answer my question! Is Dexter a malevolent bully? Why or why not? I won’t be able to understand where you’re coming from if I can’t get a clear idea of what constitutes a malevolent bully on your view.
12 Mar 2012, 3:35 am
Calling something a “malevolent bully” entails two things about that entity: it is malevolent (it acts out of a desire to cause a net harm to others) and it is a bully (it gains compliance through intimidation via displays of power).
So a malevolent bully would not do anything that is inconsistent with these two descriptors, which means that it cannot go its entire existence and fail to do one or more things that (1) are motivated by a desire to cause a net harm to others and (2) use strength and power to harm or intimidate.
Other than that, a malevolent bully can do anything. And I agree with Thinking Emotions, I’m not claiming God to be “omnimalevolent”, because God seems to do good things to. The universe is indifferent, not evil.
~
I can’t answer for Thinking Emotions, but I’d say that Dexter is not a malevolent bully. The first question is whether Dexter is malevolent, and I’d agree that he is: his desire to kill murderers doesn’t seem motivated by an attempt to get them to stop murdering and thus save people from their recidivism and provide an alleged net benefit, but rather it seems motivated by a revenge that aims at a net harm in general, even if it only targets a specific group of people.
But is Dexter a bully? Here I’d say no. He doesn’t seem to have any aims at gaining compliance or intimidation in general, but just rather wants to kill people in wrathful ways.
12 Mar 2012, 12:12 pm
That’s pretty much what I was going to say: that Dexter is definitely malevolent, but cannot really be classified as a bully. If we look at this as simply as possible, we’re dealing with a serial killer that kills killers. Dexter has no emotions and can easily be classified as a sociopath. While his killings of guilty people may prevent killings of innocent people, that does not mean Dexter has these intentions; there isn’t a trace of nobility in what he does. Had it not been for “The Code,” Dexter would have became like any other serial killer. Heck, even as it stands, I’m not sure how he’s all that much different from a guy like Patrick Bateman.
Besides, just because one is a malevolent bully does not mean they are never anything else. At one point, Joe Montana was a football player, but he was capable of doing more things than throwing a ball around.
13 Mar 2012, 3:55 am
Personally I just hope CL isn’t implying that the Biblical God is some kind of über-dexter.
My analysis of Dexter is something like:
He is a malevolent bully to his victims, but it would be hypocritical of his victims to complain.
He is not a malevolent bully from the viewpoint of society, which he probably does net good (because he lives in a magic world where he can give an IV jugular injection perfectly everytime with a non compliant subject and without looking, also etorphine doesn’t work that way for people), unless maybe he undermines the Police force and the Government monopoly on capital punishment (we don’t have capital punishment in the UK, I don’t personally agree with it…but lets not get into that). Likewise from societies viewpoint he is not a bully.
22 Sep 2012, 11:02 pm
You contradict yourself. You write,
…okay, but then you write,
Let’s take hypothetical Joe as an example. Let’s say that on two occasions, Joe acts out of a desire to cause harm to others, and gains compliance through intimidation by doing so. But, say every other act in Joe’s life is benevolent. By your definition, we can still call Joe a “malevolent bully” but I see no reason to accept that as true.
So, I guess I’ll have to wait for you to clarify.
25 Sep 2012, 4:08 pm
Two things here.
1. I agree that this would not make him a malevolent bully.
2. It still means he’s fallible. God is not fallible; he’s perfect. He never makes mistakes. In the case of Joe, I’d say he was having a bad day and made a bad decision. In the case of God… what are Peter and I to say?
To say that God has even once acted malevolently is to erase his perfect and omnibenevolent nature. I don’t think you’ve conceded that, but that’s the reality here. It doesn’t matter how insignificant or infrequent God’s malevolence would be. We shouldn’t have to cut some slack for a perfect being.
Follow up question: what if hypothetical Jason acts malevolently more often than benevolently? Would that make him a malevolent bully?
26 Sep 2012, 3:06 pm
TE,
Cool, I’m glad you seem to agree that Peter seems to have again overstated his case with emotionally charged rhetoric.
Well sure, but to say that God has acted malevolently requires knowledge of motive, and Peter lacks that knowledge.
Going in another direction, don’t you see the gross inconsistencies between what Peter says here and what he recently posted on my blog, that “Killing someone can indeed be morally good?” Surely Peter won’t retreat to a “quantity” defense, i.e., killing one person can be morally good but killing 42 can’t. Just as surely, Peter is committed to the fact that an omniscient God could not err regarding whether any given mortal(s) “should” be killed. Lastly, how could Peter possibly know that the 42 killed “shouldn’t” have been killed according to “the utilitarian course of action?” He can’t, not even in principle.
Therefore, as he admits further down the thread in the instance I just linked to, at least a subset of Peter’s moral judgments are founded on INTUITION, things he decries elsewhere as unreliable. Why should any self-respecting rationalist accept those intuitions on morality, whether the agent in question is God or man?
Please, people, don’t let the intuitions of fallible humans dissuade you from repentance!