They say: When God does good, it’s not because he’s conforming himself to some external morality; God’s actions are good because it is God doing them. Goodness is whatever God does and commands. This is the absolutist’s reply to Euthyphro’s dilemma. But maybe the absolutist is wrong.
By way of illustration, what if we simply describe “good” as “kindliness?”
“Whosoever speaketh against the Holy Ghost it shall not be forgiven him neither in this World nor in the world to come.” That text has caused an unspeakable amount of misery in the world, for all sorts of people have imagined that they have committed the sin against the Holy Ghost, and thought that it would not be forgiven them either in this world or in the world to come. I really do not think that a person with a proper degree of kindliness in his nature would have put fears and terrors of that sort into the world.
Russell, Bertrand. “Why I Am Not a Christian.”
We, if we have “a proper degree of kindliness”, must examine the deeds of God, and even sit in judgment over them when appropriate. This goes beyond the Problem of Evil and why God allows it—hurricanes, earthquakes, wars, famine, genocide. Evil has even been perpetrated by the Church over the millennia. (Think of the Crusades and the Inquisition and child sex abuse.) But even in the Bible, God’s own acts were quite heinous.
Abraham and Isaac
“All three monotheisms, just to take the most salient example, praise Abraham for being willing to hear voices and then to take his son Isaac for a long and rather mad and gloomy walk. And then the caprice by which his murderous hand is finally stayed is written down as divine mercy.”
Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great.
Hitchens and Dawkins and others have argued that God’s command to Abraham to sacrifice Isaac was reprehensible. But if it’s already so in the version we have today, the story gets even worse when you look into it. Some scholars in the field of higher criticism, believe that in the original version of the story in Genesis, Abraham did kill Isaac. There is archeological evidence that people had learned the story this way. After his sacrifice, Isaac is never mentioned again by the Elohist. So for that author, he’s off the scene entirely.
There is also indication, using the documentary hypothesis, that when the ram was sacrificed in Isaac’s place, it was not the angel’s idea, but Abraham’s himself, in disobedience to God. This would prove not that Abraham failed his test of faith, but that he was an actual moral human being who loved his son, and objected because he realized God was either a figment or something worse. When you read this side-by-side with his earlier objection to God’s plan to slaughter of the citizens of Sodom, it really does seem that Abraham is more righteous than God himself.
Polytheism and child sacrifice
The usual interpretation of the history of Israel and the worship of Yahweh was that they were always falling away (especially the Northern Kingdom, while Judah remained faithful—at least relatively). If you sit in a biblicist church where the Bible is preached systematically, from beginning to end, you will be taught about the continued backsliding of Israel into idolatry, and the coming of the prophets to bring them back to God, etc.
But it appears that the older textual sources present not a falling-away from monotheism into polytheism, but an evolution of monotheism out of the polytheistic middle eastern pantheon. El was the head. Yahweh was the god of war. Asherah was the “consort” of Yahweh. The menorah is a stylized representation of the “Asherah pole”, the trees under which she was worshiped in the High Places. And child sacrifice was part of the Yahweh worship until King Josiah established his reforms.
In his essay: “Gezer and Megiddo,” R. A. Steward MacAlister describes some archeological finds at the High Places in Gezer, “one of the early cities occupied by the Israelites, and it was assigned to the Levites.” There are two classes of jar-buried infants in the find.
The first class are sacrifices, to which we may safely assign those found in the high place at Gezer (especially those which display marks of fire on the bones) and those found in the corners of houses, when these are fully developed. There is another class of infant burial, however, of which some specimens were found at Gezer, and at least one…at Megiddo: I refer to still-born and premature births. I am informed that it is still the custom of the fellahin of Egypt to dispose of such by burying them under the floors of houses (quite possibly this is a survival of a traditional immolation of child victims). At Gezer both undeveloped and developed infants were found in house walls and corners, the latter generally with a more elaborate deposit of food-vessels, showing that both the original custom and its probable modification were practised.
(Gives a new perspective on the metaphor of Christ as the Chief Cornerstone, doesn’t it?)
It wasn’t that the people were rebelling against God, always seduced by the “fun” of the idolatry of the nations around them. This was the original Israelite religion. Monotheism came afterwards.
In Plain Sight
But there is more “evil” that we don’t even have to dig through layers of textual evidence to find, as it’s presented in the Bible we have today.
“The believers in the bible are loud in their denunciation of what they are pleased to call the immoral literature of the world; and yet few books have been published containing more moral filth than this inspired word of God.”
—Robert Ingersoll, Mistakes of Moses
The Genesis Flood in which God kills absolutely everybody except for a few lucky ones.
The story of Passover—the slaying of innocent children for the crime of not putting lamb’s blood on their doorposts.
After the Exodus, God commanded the genocide of the Canaanites. Even children.
“Happy is the one who seizes your infants and dashes them against the rocks”—Psalm 137
Forced abortion:
“‘May this water that brings a curse enter your body so that your abdomen swells or your womb miscarries.’ Then the woman is to say, ‘Amen. So be it.’… And when he has made her drink the water, then, if she has defiled herself and has broken faith with her husband, the water that brings the curse shall enter into her and cause bitter pain, and her womb shall swell, and her thigh shall fall away, and the woman shall become a curse among her people.”
Numbers 5:22 (NIV), 27 (ESV)
The slaughter of the innocents by Herod, simply for the sake of fulfilling prophecy by causing the women of Ramah to cry. Granted, it doesn’t say God caused it. But if it was foretold, then he allowed it, and this is used as proof of grand design and the legitimacy of Jesus as Messiah.
God’s actions are good because it is God doing them. I don’t think they’re good at all.
I stopped believing in the devil before I stopped believing in God.
I stopped believing in hell before I stopped believing in heaven.
Once the sins of the Old Testament Yahweh became obvious, I could have become a Marcionite, especially with his love of the doctrines of grace, but Marcion, whose movement was deeply influenced by these proofs of Dystheism, was condemned as heretics, and so we have the Church that we have today.
And so here I am. I think Jesus, if he existed, was a good and noble teacher. But I can’t accept a Trinity in which El or even Yahweh are admitted.