In this post, I will completely set aside the question of whether or not Yahweh exists. This post will only focus on whether or not Yahweh is a moral being, as he is described in the Bible and whether or not we are equipped to recognize his goodness.
In conversations with Christians, I'm often offered our inherent sense of right and wrong or our "moral compass" as evidence that their god exists. We are alleged to all have a sense of right and wrong programmed into our being that tells us which actions are morally good and which are bad, and this sense also makes us feel guilty. People will characterize this sense it different ways (I suspect it depends on what parts of the Bible that may have recently read, or which theologian they recently heard/read) but it all boils down to the idea that we have some way of "sensing" right from wrong.
However....
...when people point out passages in the Bible that would be interpreted as wrong/evil in another context (our moral senses are flashing red) the theists tend to dismiss these seemingly immoral acts by saying it's not for us to judge Yahweh, his ways are higher than ours, etc. These explanations are inherently problematic.
If our moral sense is in any way inadequate, how can we distinguish between these three scenarios?
1. a good deity whose actions seem immoral, but whose grasp of morality is so superior to our own that we really have no basis on which to judge his actions
2. an evil deity whose actions are genuinely immoral, but who insists that he is supremely good beyond our comprehension in order to use us as his pawns
3. a fictional deity whose manufacture was the device of men who wanted to control a population with fear and whose moral sense was merely less evolved than our own
If our moral compass is broken, it doesn't seem like we have any way to know for sure what's good and what is not good. And if it is only broken when it comes to judging the actions of supernatural beings, it doesn't seem like we really have any way of discerning which supernatural being(s) is actually good. What if Lucifer was really the good supernatural being and Yahweh was the evil one. The mere suggestion of that is repulsive to most people, but I have yet to hear any Christian explain a means of discerning who is good and who is evil, if the acts of one of the supernatural beings seem evil to us but he claims to be good. If such a being exists, he could be lying to us. He claims he cannot lie, but there is no way to know that this is not a lie.
In conversations with Christians, I'm often offered our inherent sense of right and wrong or our "moral compass" as evidence that their god exists. We are alleged to all have a sense of right and wrong programmed into our being that tells us which actions are morally good and which are bad, and this sense also makes us feel guilty. People will characterize this sense it different ways (I suspect it depends on what parts of the Bible that may have recently read, or which theologian they recently heard/read) but it all boils down to the idea that we have some way of "sensing" right from wrong.However....
...when people point out passages in the Bible that would be interpreted as wrong/evil in another context (our moral senses are flashing red) the theists tend to dismiss these seemingly immoral acts by saying it's not for us to judge Yahweh, his ways are higher than ours, etc. These explanations are inherently problematic.
If our moral sense is in any way inadequate, how can we distinguish between these three scenarios?
1. a good deity whose actions seem immoral, but whose grasp of morality is so superior to our own that we really have no basis on which to judge his actions
2. an evil deity whose actions are genuinely immoral, but who insists that he is supremely good beyond our comprehension in order to use us as his pawns
3. a fictional deity whose manufacture was the device of men who wanted to control a population with fear and whose moral sense was merely less evolved than our own
If our moral compass is broken, it doesn't seem like we have any way to know for sure what's good and what is not good. And if it is only broken when it comes to judging the actions of supernatural beings, it doesn't seem like we really have any way of discerning which supernatural being(s) is actually good. What if Lucifer was really the good supernatural being and Yahweh was the evil one. The mere suggestion of that is repulsive to most people, but I have yet to hear any Christian explain a means of discerning who is good and who is evil, if the acts of one of the supernatural beings seem evil to us but he claims to be good. If such a being exists, he could be lying to us. He claims he cannot lie, but there is no way to know that this is not a lie.
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