Rebuttal to Cerebral Faith on Moral Objections from Atheists

This is my reply to an article by Phillip Mast, posted by Cerebral Faith, entitled:

An Atheist Moral Objection
Posted: 19 Dec 2018 09:27 AM PST

As what tends to happen, another objection has been making its way around the internet by skeptics and unbelievers. The meme (as seen below) is making two primary assertions in its attack on Christians and our Lord (If you couldn’t tell the picture is depicting Noah’s Ark purposely seemingly with just children drowning). The attack on Christianity is based on an emotional appeal and some moral assumptions that aren’t proven.

 While appeal to emotion is fallacious, there are naturalistic reasons why most mature educated adults automatically find infanticide and child-massacre to be offensive.  You have wrongly assumed that because there are emotions involved, the objection must be fallacious.  Under your logic, the jury who convicts a man of child rape and then sentences him to the maximum of life in prison, cannot divorce emotion from their verdict, therefore, all such verdicts are necessarily founded on the fallacy of emotionalism.  Well sorry, but real life requires one to have emotions and to react in conformity to them, even if not always.

You also overlook why it is an emotional issue.  While a human military general might decide that the collateral damage of bombing a school full of kids is required to achieve the larger goal of killing off the nuclear bomb toting terrorists hiding at that school, your god has no such excuse, as your god can cause even idolatrous unbelievers to do whatever he wants by simply waving his magic wand (Ezra 1:1, Daniel 4:33).  Since infants cannot make rational choices, the only way John the Baptist could have been filled with the Holy Spirit from before birth (Luke 1:15) is if God caused it to be so without that infant's consent or freewill.  In other words, your God apparently has the ability to get rid of the problem of human rebellion with fairy dust and is far less concerned about respecting human freedom than you think.  So if the Canaanites are being grossly immoral, it is reasonable to blame this on God's refusal to wave his magic wand.

Since you don't permit Mormons or other "cultists" to escape a theological jam by merely invoking God's "mysterious ways", fairness requires that your own option to invoke this excuse likewise be revoked.

But before going any further I’d suggest you take a look at the story of the flood and Noah’s Ark in Genesis 6:5 through 8:22 so as to get the context of both the meme and what I am sharing with you.

 Done. And I see signs in the text that your god was limited and imperfect. 

God "regretted" his own choice to make mankind (Genesis 6:6-7), and nothing in the text or context suggests it is speaking other than literally, so you have no objective justification to just scream "anthropomorphism" whenever bible inerrancy would require you to.

Then after the flood, God speaks as if he "noticed for the first time" that mankind's heart was evil continually, and on this basis, "decided" to avoid flooding the earth ever again (8:21), which, again, makes it sound as if God later contemplated that his flooding of the earth wasn't the brightest idea.

We also have to ask how the originally intended recipients of Genesis would have understood it.  Seems pretty obvious that for such a mostly illiterate pre-scientific people, the statement that god "smelled" the "soothing" aroma of Noah's burnt sacrifices and pledged to never flood the earth again (8:21) would have been taken literally...that is, the smoke of the sacrifice went up into the sky where God was literally located, and by smelling the aroma, God was placated...sort of like the dangerous starving dog that is placated by giving it a bunch of food.

So there are two problems: a) your God's wishing to massacre children despite him having other less barbaric ways of resolving such problems, and b) the textual indicators that this god was limited in knowledge and power.

For these reasons, I don't give a shit how many times William Lane Craig speculates about how maybe God knew that this was the most efficient way to promote the most righteousness in all possible worlds...anymore than I give a shit about any terrorist who utters the same excuse while flying the hijacked plane toward a building.

2018-12-17 15.26.14.jpg

As mentioned the meme is making an emotional appeal and moral assumptions that aren’t proven or consistent. So let’s break down what is most likely being advocated in the meme and then we will present a better way of looking at the situation given the belief of Christians.

“If you worship a god that drowns its children for being disobedient,”

This is obviously meant to be geared towards the flood event in Genesis and when combined with the imagine depicting children drowning is certainly making an emotional appeal.

If you came home to find that the babysitter had drowned your child, would you be emotional? Blame your god, whom you think gave us our moral sense.  Why did your god of "truth" give us our sense of emotion, if deciding things based on emotion is never a good idea?

This is a fallacious argument as the appeal to emotion is in a general category of many fallacies that intend to use emotion in place of reason in order to attempt to win the argument. It is a type of manipulation used in place of valid logic. Now perhaps if the backdrop of drowning children weren’t used one could perhaps advise that it may be making an emotional appeal by use of ‘children’ in the sentence to portray a certain image in the mind. Christians can and do use the phrase of being ‘children of God’ which could be the reference and if it were the case would give the best assumption to the skeptic in this regards.

Well excuse me, but Christianity wouldn't exist if everybody automatically shit-canned every argument that could be said to appeal to one's emotions.  People naturally get emotional when you start talking about how they are going to endure some type of eternal depression or torment, so the Christian appeal to hell, according to your own reasoning, must also be a fallacious appeal to emotion.  You have to tell us that we are in trouble with god before we will perceive any need to be "saved" from that trouble, and as soon as you name the trouble, you are appealing to our emotions, no less than does the robber who threatens you at gunpoint and demands your wallet.  Giving in to the demand, so as to avert the potential disaster, involves an awful lot of emotion.

When it comes to the issue of the flood there was a particular situation beyond simple ‘disobedience’ as the skeptic has put it. Scripture gives insight of what was really the situation. Genesis 6:5 say,

“The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.”

 But you don't know that this is true, all you are doing is pretending that the biblical version of the story is the only one that matters.  By the way, Genesis 8:21 makes it seem as if God didn't know, until after the flood, that flooding the world wouldn't resolve the sin problem.  Read it the way the pre-scientific and mostly illiterate Israelites would have understood it, not the way a modern-day inerrantist jack ass would read it, in his crazed concern to make everything in the bible harmonize into a smug systematic theology.

And  this attack on god appears to be successful in the real world.  No, flooding the world did NOT resolve the sin problem, and the way god reacts after the flood in 8:21, it is clear that he didn't have some higher mysterious purpose, he simply flooded the world, then realized later that this solution wasn't the best one he could think of.

The wickedness of man was great and that every intent of their hearts was evil continually.

 Which is total bullshit and cannot be documented from extra-biblical sources.  The god of the OT was equally as evil as you think the Canaanites were.

And that is your god's fault since Ezra 1:1 and Daniel 4:33 indicate God can be as successful as he wants to be in motivating human beings to do his will.

This definitely was not a situation of simple disobedience.

 But you don't believe a 3 year old has reached the age of accountability...yet the flood story requires that we infer that many such children endured all the same horror of drowning that their allegedly sinful parents did.

I don't give a shit how confident William Lane Craig is in saying such kids went immediately to heaven...anymore than I give a shit about the terrorist who says something similar about the children in the daycare center he is about to bomb in the name of Allah.  There is no direct biblical evidence that those who die infancy go to heaven, and that particular bit if theology would justify never having kids and encouraging more abortions...since doing something that causes a child to inevitably go to heaven, is clearly more loving than letting them live past the age of accountability, when the threat of irreversible eternal hell becomes a real danger.  If you wouldn't let your kids play near the mouth of an active volcano, why would you let them grow past the age of accountability?  Isn't our ultimate spiritual fate of greater importance than the moral wrongness of murdering kids?

Yet that's the stupid-shit thinking that reasonably follows from the stupid apologists who mistake their speculations about the fate of murdered babies, for "god's word".  FUCK YOU.

God is patient and merciful but scripturally there are times in which the amount or kind of wickedness gets to such a level that God acts to pass judgment.

 You are doing nothing but quoting the bible at this point.  Do you still expect skeptics to suspect something wrong in their bible criticism?

We see this also when God passes judgment on Sodomo and Gomorrah in Genesis 18-19 and as well the Canaanite nations in the book of Joshua. Just as in these situations and during the time before the flood God patiently waited.

 Your God allegedly has infallible foreknowledge, so his patiently waiting for a repentance that he infallibly knew the idolaters would never make, is about as stupid as "patiently" waiting for a sack of concrete to produce a shark.  Now since Christianity has given the world a smorgasbord of idiots who quote the bible to  prove their mutually contradictory concepts of the extent of God's foreknowledge (Calvinism, Molinism, etc), my advice is that God's likeminded ones get their act together before they go on the internet pretending that their voice is more significant than the voice of their equally Christian opponent.  Or the atheist who cites the extreme extent of the theological disagreements among the Christians and their bible interpretations, will be very reasonable to toss the entire matter out the window and not give any of it a moment's reflection.

He did not instantly pass judgment when the various peoples started committing wickedness and having evil intents.

 Which would be similar to you coming home to find the babysitter molesting your child, and your choice to patiently wait to see if they will repent when you start telling them "that's a no-no".   Is such a parent possessed of great patience, or great stupidity?

For instance God even patiently waited over 400 years while his people languished in Egyptian slavery until the canaanite’s iniquity was ‘complete’ (Genesis 15:16) or to such an extent that God could not hold off judgment any longer.

 Are you speaking to atheists or just Christians? An atheist is not going to be impressed by you simply quote-mining the bible.

Take this longsuffering and patience of God into account when he told Noah to build the Ark. The Ark was a massive piece of construction in Noah’s time. From the accounts of when we are introduced to Noah he is 500 years old and when the floodwaters arrived Noah is 600 years old. We don’t know for certain how long it took Noah to build the Ark but we do know God didn’t give Noah a small building project. It was noticeable and took time to build. Undoubtedly there was bound to be questions asked of Noah as to why he was building a huge ship when it had not rained previously. So we have two pieces of information to consider about God’s passing judgment: He was patient still and despite even this little added time people did not repent from their wickedness, violence, and evil intent. So what we have done here is show that God isn’t some being that just arbitrarily destroys people for no reason but is instead patient and in fact desires that wicked people repent as we see elsewhere like Ezekiel 18:23; 33:11.

preaching to the choir.

“you have no right to criticize my moral standards.”

Further there has been this assumption that God cannot take the life of anyone.

 Maybe some lesser informed skeptics see it that way, but not I.  If you think your god is the highest level of authority possible, then he doesn't have a "right" to take life because when we say somebody has a "right", we normally mean that right comes to them from an authority higher than themselves.

If there is a god and he is the bible-god, he would not be accountable to anybody for doing whatever he wanted, including his being inconsistent.  That's the more philosophically accurate way to characterize this.  

In fact the argument most associated with the flood incident, the Canaan judgment, or Sodom and Gomorrah is that the skeptic says that God murders these people. Why is that? Skeptics assume that God is not allowed or has no reason to take their life and so his doing so one way or another is murder.

 And given there's no compelling evidence for god and good evidence that the bible god is nothing but a hodgepodge of various conflicting psychologically abusive fairy tales, we get mad at your god in the same way we get mad at the Grinch who stole X-mas.

They then argue that since God is a murderer he can’t be moral and therefore should not be followed.

 That's because according to Ezra 1:1 and Daniel 4:33 and numerous other bible passages, god has an ability to get people to do what he wants without having to resort to bloodshed.

This is why the meme’s second part is written. They essentially are saying, “Since your God is a immoral murdering God, you have no right to criticize my moral” However this approach to these things is in error and we will show why.

Killing and Murder

To those who say God murders I pose the following thoughts: Is it immoral for a child to drown Or just to be drowned?

 Wait until you come home to find that somebody drowned your child in the bathtub, then you'll appreciate how stupid your questions are.

If we say it is immoral to be drowned, then it is the act of a moral agent that we are objecting to and this means that we are putting the issue of killing someone into the category of moral wrong rather than someone simply dying.

 No, your god directly caused the death of another person in circumstances that do not imply god's need for self-defense. They did not simply "die", they were KILLED.  At least, that's what your fairy tale alleges.

This is to say there is a categorical difference between a moral wrong and a tragedy.

 Correct, but your god claims responsibility for ALL murder and death, so you are incorrect, biblically, to pretend there's a distinction between a moral agent killing somebody, and a tragedy:

 39 'See now that I, I am He, And there is no god besides Me; It is I who put to death and give life. I have wounded and it is I who heal, And there is no one who can deliver from My hand. (Deut. 32:39 NAU)

Therefore if we are talking about a moral agent killing another we must ask if a moral agent can possess authority or moral justification for allowing, or acting out the killing of another.

 Not if one party to the dispute is saying the moral agent at issue is nothing but a fictional character. 

Let’s put this in a form of a syllogism:
1. Killing is not murder or even a crime when justified or when the taker of a life has the authority to do so.

 Fictional characters have no real-world authority.

2. Authority or justification can be possessed by a moral agent

 Correct.  But since you don't agree with the authority the Nazis had to murder Jews, then a moral agent's possession of "authority" doesn't end the dispute, as the higher authority might itself be corrupt.  In the case of your god, your higher authority is indeed corrupt. Read Deut. 28:15-63, then tell me this god doesn't fit the profile of a sadistic lunatic.

3. Not all killing is murder

Correct, but irrelevant.  If war separates a mother from her child, and she later comes home to find the child dead in the rubble, the sense of moral outrage that causes her to grieve is going to manifest itself regardless of whether or not the political authorities that participated in the war reach agreement about who was in the right.  That is, human beings naturally oppose the death of a loved one where that death was not clearly justified, so you and your god can hardly blame a person for not seeing a meaningful distinction between killing and murder, as they lay sobbing over the dead body of a family member.

4. Therefore, you can kill someone and not be morally wrong.

 In this current social structure, yes, but morality is not absolute.  Very small children will imitate anything, including law-breaking behaviors by their immediate family.  Your idea that god put his laws into our hearts is total bullshit, and has zero empirical evidence to back it up, while there is plenty of empirical evidence that mammals grow up to imitate the behavior they learned from their parents or others, along with a dose of genetic predisposition.

The point here is this: A moral agent can possess the authority to take the life of another.

 Your analogy fails because human authority to kill comes from an authority higher than the human who did the killing.  So when you say your god has "authority" to kill, you are using the same terminology that in other contexts implies there exists an authority higher than the moral agent doing the killing.  Since you think your god is the highest possible authority, you need to stop characterizing the situation by using imperfect human analogies. 

So does God possess this authority? Is he justified in his taking of human life?

 Those questions are irrelevant under your own presupposition that there is no higher authority than god himself.  To be consistent, you'd have to say that god just does what he does, and he is never accountable to anybody else for anything he does, ever.

Let’s looks at some specifics for both man and God as Christians view the situation that supports God possessing the justification and authority, to take any human life resulting in that God did nothing morally wrong.

 Thanks for specifying you aren't doing apologetics here. You've said exactly NOTHING that would do any harm to the atheist bible critic's beliefs.  You simply quote the bible and regurgitate a Christian form of "might makes right".

About Man
A seeming assumption in the meme is that the people involved are somehow innocent. Scripture clearly demonstrates this is not the case. In the specific instances often cited, like in the flood or Canaan judgment, scripture mentions that the people were wicked, violent, or evil.

But as we'll find out, they were not nearly as wicked, violent or evil as you think they were.  Your apologetics sources are guilty of misinterpreting the bible and of having no extra-biblical support for saying the pagans around ancient Israel were unspeakably atrocious.

The Canaanites are somehow painted as if they are these peaceful loving people groups dwelling in Canaan that God just somehow chose to destroy.

 Our problem is less with the adult pagans and more with the young children pagans.  What did a 3 year old Amalakite do to "deserve" being beaten to death (commenting in Psalm 137:9, "The barbarous practice referred to in v 9 was a feature of ancient Near Eastern warfare."Allen, L. C. (2002). Vol. 21: Word Biblical Commentary : Psalms 101-150 (Revised). Word Biblical Commentary (Page 309). Dallas: Word, Incorporated.)

But is this the case? No. Apologetics Press sufficiently explains why God moved to pass judgment on the nations of Canaan,

“The Canaanite nations were punished because of their extreme wickedness. God did not cast out the Canaanites for being a particular race or ethnic group. God did not send the Israelites into the land of Canaan to destroy a number of righteous nations. On the contrary, the Canaanite nations were horribly depraved. They practiced “abominable customs” (Leviticus 18:30) and did “detestable things” (Deuteronomy 18:9, NASB). They practiced idolatry, witchcraft, soothsaying, and sorcery. They attempted to cast spells upon people and call up the dead (Deuteronomy 18:10-11).

And what are you going to do next?  Quote pre-WW2 Nazi propaganda to "prove" that the Jews are a lower form of life?  All you are doing is quoting the after-the-fact rationalizations of later redactors responsible for the final canonical form of the biblical information we now possess, redactors clearly biased in favor of the biblical account.  While bias doesn't necessarily show error, the bias of the biblical writers is sufficiently extreme that only a fool would pretend that the biblical accounts are strictly confined to the actual facts.  This is even more the case for any apologist who thinks Copan and Flannagan's "hyperbole" explanation for the "kill 'em all" stuff in the Pentateuch is serious.  If the ancient writers were just exaggerating in such descriptions, we also have to wonder what else the biblical authors exaggerated.

Their “cultic practice was barbarous and thoroughly licentious” (Unger, 1954, p. 175). Their “deities…had no moral character whatever,” which “must have brought out the worst traits in their devotees and entailed many of the most demoralizing practices of the time,” including sensuous nudity, orgiastic nature-worship, snake worship, and even child sacrifice (Unger, p. 175; cf. Albright, 1940, p. 214).

First, Zeus was also known as a sexual lusting god, so do you suppose that everybody who worshiped Zeus was just a carbon copy of him morally?

Second, I see nothing particularly "depraved" about sensuous nudity, or orgiastic nature-worship, there are people who do this today, but it does not cause them to be vicious criminals. 

Third, the Israelites were commanded to engage in snake-worship by God through Moses as follows:

  7 So the people came to Moses and said, "We have sinned, because we have spoken against the LORD and you; intercede with the LORD, that He may remove the serpents from us." And Moses interceded for the people.
 8 Then the LORD said to Moses, "Make a fiery serpent, and set it on a standard; and it shall come about, that everyone who is bitten, when he looks at it, he will live."
 9 And Moses made a bronze serpent and set it on the standard; and it came about, that if a serpent bit any man, when he looked to the bronze serpent, he lived.   (Num. 21:7-9 NAU)

 If believing in the Son of Man means "worshiping" him, as it obviously does, then Jesus understood this OT incident to involve snake-worship, not merely a literal "looking" to the snake:

14 "As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up;
 15 so that whoever believes will in Him have eternal life. (Jn. 3:14-15 NAU)

Your god is rather stupid; the creator of the cosmos, who is so apparently infinitely wise regarding how to handle sin, couldn't think of anything better to turn away his wrath upon Israelite sin, than to command the sinners to worship a snake?   Christian inerrantist scholar R.D. Cole seems to think the "looking" to the snake constituted a form of belief...in a social context that was rife with serpent worship:  

The verb translated “look” (rā˒â) often carries with it the idea to see with belief or understanding, and it is to be so interpreted in this context...The use of the copper or bronze serpent form in the worship context of the Sinai region has been attested through the excavated remains of a temple at Timna, located on the west side of the Arabah about fifteen miles north of Elat and Aqaba on the gulf.

Cole, R. D. (2001, c2000). Vol. 3B: Numbers (electronic ed.). Logos Library System;
The New American Commentary (Page 349). Nashville: Broadman & Holman Publishers

 Yes, snake-worship was popular in the ANE



 Source is Unger, here.

 Other Christian scholars admit it is difficult to know where in this story the etiology ends and history begins, if at all:

We include here the story of the serpents (21:4–9). The text appears to have as its background a priestly etiology justifying the cult of Nehushtan. The ideological interests at the root of such stories and their adaptations make it very difficult for a historian to extract ancient history from them.

Budd, P. J. (2002). Vol. 5: Word Biblical Commentary : Numbers.
Word Biblical Commentary (Page xxvii). Dallas: Word, Incorporated

 The story has in fact a cultic orientation, and may be based on a cultic etiology of Nehushtan. In the Yahwist’s hands the story is directed specifically against the cult, which was apparently attacked by Hezekiah (2 Kgs 18:4). This cult may have celebrated Yahweh’s protective power, but it was probably also a healing cult with strong Canaanite associations, and deriving ultimately from Canaanite sources.

(Id p. 235)

Furthermore, the Israelites in Numbers were prone to idolatry and making god mad anyway (Numbers 21:5, see also ch. 25), so your god is even "extra" stupid if he 'expected' these idolaters to "look to" a snake sign and yet successfully resist the temptation to view it as a god.  You may as well deliver 20 large pizzas to the hungry drunks at a poverty stricken frat party and then "expect" them to successfully resist the urge to eat.

As Moses wrote, the inhabitants of Canaan would “burn even their sons and daughters in the fire to their gods” (Deuteronomy 12:30).

First, Frank Turek makes the same claim and I trounced him on it, showing there is no compelling historical evidence saying the kids were alive when placed in the fire.  See here.  So the one part of the story that helps make "god's" harsh judgment seem more "deserved", is actually missing from the evidence.  At that point, the objective person will have severe difficulty distinguishing between those who kill children and then cremate the corpses (Canaanites), and those who massacre children and just leave their carcasses for the animals (Israelites).

Third, there is biblical evidence that "pass through the fire" did not involve the death of the child: Hezekiah had a son named Manasseh, who later became king (2nd Kings 20:21).   In 2nd Kings 21, Manasseh made his "son" (singular) "pass through the fire" (v. 6), then a few verses later Manasseh's "son" (singular) becomes king (v. 18), yet nothing in the context expresses or implies that this specific Manasseh had any more than one son:

1 Manasseh was twelve years old when he became king, and he reigned fifty-five years in Jerusalem; and his mother's name was Hephzibah.
 2 He did evil in the sight of the LORD, according to the abominations of the nations whom the LORD dispossessed before the sons of Israel.
 3 For he rebuilt the high places which Hezekiah his father had destroyed; and he erected altars for Baal and made an Asherah, as Ahab king of Israel had done, and worshiped all the host of heaven and served them.
 4 He built altars in the house of the LORD, of which the LORD had said, "In Jerusalem I will put My name."
 5 For he built altars for all the host of heaven in the two courts of the house of the LORD.
 6 He made his son pass through the fire, practiced witchcraft and used divination, and dealt with mediums and spiritists. He did much evil in the sight of the LORD provoking Him to anger.
 7 Then he set the carved image of Asherah that he had made, in the house of which the LORD said to David and to his son Solomon, "In this house and in Jerusalem, which I have chosen from all the tribes of Israel, I will put My name forever.
 8 "And I will not make the feet of Israel wander anymore from the land which I gave their fathers, if only they will observe to do according to all that I have commanded them, and according to all the law that My servant Moses commanded them."
 9 But they did not listen, and Manasseh seduced them to do evil more than the nations whom the LORD destroyed before the sons of Israel.
 10 Now the LORD spoke through His servants the prophets, saying,
 11 "Because Manasseh king of Judah has done these abominations, having done wickedly more than all the Amorites did who were before him, and has also made Judah sin with his idols;
 12 therefore thus says the LORD, the God of Israel, 'Behold, I am bringing such calamity on Jerusalem and Judah, that whoever hears of it, both his ears will tingle.
 13 'I will stretch over Jerusalem the line of Samaria and the plummet of the house of Ahab, and I will wipe Jerusalem as one wipes a dish, wiping it and turning it upside down.
 14 'I will abandon the remnant of My inheritance and deliver them into the hand of their enemies, and they will become as plunder and spoil to all their enemies;
 15 because they have done evil in My sight, and have been provoking Me to anger since the day their fathers came from Egypt, even to this day.'"
 16 Moreover, Manasseh shed very much innocent blood until he had filled Jerusalem from one end to another; besides his sin with which he made Judah sin, in doing evil in the sight of the LORD.
 17 Now the rest of the acts of Manasseh and all that he did and his sin which he committed, are they not written in the Book of the Chronicles of the Kings of Judah?
 18 And Manasseh slept with his fathers and was buried in the garden of his own house, in the garden of Uzza, and Amon his son became king in his place. (2 Ki. 21:1-18 NAU)

 Additionally, that Israel didn't seriously believe their own unique theological system was superior to that of the pagans, may be inferred from the fact that the OT also says Israel burned their sons and daughters in the fire:

 13 Yet the LORD warned Israel and Judah through all His prophets and every seer, saying, "Turn from your evil ways and keep My commandments, My statutes according to all the law which I commanded your fathers, and which I sent to you through My servants the prophets."  14 However, they did not listen, but stiffened their neck like their fathers, who did not believe in the LORD their God. 
15 They rejected His statutes and His covenant which He made with their fathers and His warnings with which He warned them. And they followed vanity and became vain, and went after the nations which surrounded them, concerning which the LORD had commanded them not to do like them. 
16 They forsook all the commandments of the LORD their God and made for themselves molten images, even two calves, and made an Asherah and worshiped all the host of heaven and served Baal. 
17 Then they made their sons and their daughters pass through the fire, and practiced divination and enchantments, and sold themselves to do evil in the sight of the LORD, provoking Him. 
18 So the LORD was very angry with Israel and removed them from His sight; none was left except the tribe of Judah. 
19 Also Judah did not keep the commandments of the LORD their God, but walked in the customs which Israel had introduced. 
20 The LORD rejected all the descendants of Israel and afflicted them and gave them into the hand of plunderers, until He had cast them out of His sight. (2 Ki. 17:13-20 NAU)

Mast continues:

The Canaanite nations were anything but “innocent.”

 Once again, the more acute problem is the massacre of the Canaanite kids, not the adults.

In truth, “[t]hese Canaanite cults were utterly immoral, decadent, and corrupt, dangerously contaminating and thoroughly justifying the divine command to destroy their devotees” (Unger, 1988). They were so nefarious that God said they defiled the land and the land could stomach them no longer—“the land vomited out its inhabitants” (Leviticus 18:25).

Once again, the problem is more with the slaughter of Canaanite children, less so the adults.

When it comes to the flood incident we are given some further information about the current condition of mankind aside from Genesis 6:5.

 And that "further information" comes from an anonymous source, god knows how many redactors it went through in the 1400 years before the 1st century, yet you pretend that the final canonical form is sufficiently unbiased as to be considered reliable.  And it's folklore at that.  The degree to which the account is even talking about reality is debated between Christians, between young earth and old earth creationists, and between conservatives and liberals. 

Genesis 6:11-12 also states that, “Now the earth was corrupt in God's sight, and the earth was filled with violence. And God saw the earth, and behold, it was corrupt, for all flesh had corrupted their way on the earth.” This ‘corruption’ is sin and not only were all people then in sin but even today we are all in a state of sin. Romans 3:23 states“for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,” to be honest I think most anyone would at least not argue with the fact mankind is far from perfect. This imperfection cast us as falling short of God’s glory or perfection. This is sin and it stains us, leaving  us in a fallen condition that merits nothing other than death and separation from this perfect God (Romans 6:23).

preaching to the choir.

About God

God is described as the maximally great being.

 Not if Genesis 6:6-7 has anything to say about it.  Go head, google "anthropomorphism" to death: let me know when you find any textual or contextual justification for saying v. 6-7 were intended any less literally than the details in the verses prior to and following 6-7.

God by definition possesses properties that make him maximally great.

 Why not just say "the open-theist Christians are wrong", and tell yourself classical theism is too obviously biblical to need any argument?

To be perfect, rather than imperfect, is certainly a great making property and so God is therefore perfect in every way, which includes being the good itself.

If God was perfect before creating the universe, he'd have been perfectly "content", and would thus not have had any desire to cause his reality to be more complicated than it already was.  God's choice to create makes it reasonable to assume he was starting to get bored or lonely, or both, which would mean his attribute of perfect contentment became lost...a sign of imperfection.

1 Timothy 6:16 further describes God as “who alone has immortality, who dwells in unapproachable light”. This would be one of many ways the scriptures talk about God uniqueness and holiness. Sadly, our understanding of God’s holiness even for the church in our current culture is severely lacking and even more so with skeptics who want to question God’s character. This lack of understanding is then combined with a misunderstanding of man’s condition before such a perfect being.

preaching to the choir.

God as the maximally great being who is author, sustainer, and creator of life is the sole authority in these matters. Mankind is dead in sin and unable to approach a Holy God. Since God is the good God WONT murder. God didn’t murder when he wiped out life on earth in the flood because he possesses the authority to take it, and he has the justification for doing so. God is under no obligation to sustain the life of anyone who merits death due to sin.

Ditto.

Thus we can wrap up all this in 3 simple points:
1. There is a difference between murder and justified killing and that lies in authority.
2. God has ultimate authority over all life and death.
3. Therefore, God has the authority to kill anyone at any time.

If Hitler had become a world-dictator, he'd also have had authority to kill as he saw fit, but that wouldn't stop the victims from protesting.  And since you don't have any good evidence for a creator anyway, we have to decide for ourselves how far we will toy with you and these thought-experiments before we finally invoke the fully justified "fairy tale" wildcard and send you home empty handed.

To all this one might question why we must care about God's alleged authority. One may answer that you don’t necessarily have to care! God created human beings with limited libertarian freedom that allowed us to sin.

Despite the fact that in 1st Corinthians 15 and Revelation, it is apparent that after we get to heaven we will authentically love and worship god without having the ability to sin...implying that God could have simply created Adam and Eve with the same constitution of will, and presto: they wouldn't have needed the freedom to sin, in order to authentically love god.  Once again, your god is nothing but a fictional character in a theological fantasy whose original creators didn't think through its ramifications very thoroughly.  They made their god in their own inconsistent image.

Adam and Eve had a choice, as do we, as to our actions. Do we obey God and his commands that seek our good?

 If you were an army man serving the Medes in 700 b.c., would you have obeyed god's "stirring" you up to commit rape (Isaiah 13:16-17)?  If you find out you are among the armies of 'gog' and 'magog' in Ezekiel 38-39, would you acknowledge that your desire to war against Israel was because their god was drawing you against Israel with the same level of power that one puts a ring through the nose of an animal and draws it along along?  Or will you argue that Ezekiel's Calvinistic view of divine sovereignty indicates he shouldn't have been allowed into the canon? Or maybe this is yet another among the growing list of exaggerations and hyperbole that bible authors engage in?  Perhaps the biblical statements that god loves sinners are also exaggerations?  Were the NT authors inspired by the same god of hyperbole that Copan and Flannagan say inspired the Pentateuch?

Or do we exercise that freedom? Just remember that the freedom to sin is the definition of rebellion and of which we are all guilty of and as stated that rebellion has a cost.

One has to wonder whether you have any non-emotional argument for even suggesting that those who die in infancy go straight to heaven.  That's a nice thought, but the bible nowhere supports it, and even seems to condemn it when it says children of unbelievers are "unclean" (1st Cor. 7:14).  Worse, your flood-god caused lots of small children to suffer the horror of drowning, so you cannot say it is obvious that God would spare children the kind of fate that adults usually receive.  No he doesn't.  Keep pushing the need to believe in Jesus as the only way to get saved, and you wind up saying those who are stained with original sin and die in infancy, go to hell, and having nothing but emotion-based arguments to counter with.  Blame this on the stupid biblical authors who didn't uphold modern American ethics when they wrote.

Good News

Often overlooked in these objections by skeptics and unbelievers is what God has done for them. God doesn’t merely stand by waiting for the perfect time to pass judgment on us all, though we certainly deserve it.

 Tell that to the parents who come home to find their children murdered.  If God wasn't "merely standing by", what else was he doing?  Trying and failing to hold back the bullets?  Oh, I forgot, God was the one who was causing those men to kill those kids, Deuteronomy 32:39.  My bad.

Scripture instead demonstrates a God who is patient and merciful. As Ephesians 2:1-10 states,
“And you were dead in the trespasses and sins 2 in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience— 3 among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body[a] and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind.[b] 4 But[c] God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, 5 even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved— 6 and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, 7 so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. 8 For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, 9 not a result of works, so that no one may boast. 10 For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.”

preaching to the choir.

God is a God of not only Justice and wrath against sin but of Love and mercy. We all deserve God’s just wrath

 And since you seriously believe the teenager who steals bubble gum from a store deserves an eternity of roasting in hell or some other form of irreversible shame and depression, I can understand why you make unsupported blanket statements that defy all common sense.  Fundie religion does that to the mind.

but he offers freely his love and mercy.

Sometimes love is not properly expressed except by force to protect the rebellious one from the consequences of their own obstinacy, such as wrenching a child from the middle of the street so they don't get run over.  Apparently your god is like the drunk father who sees the danger coming, but then says "hey, I told you to get out of the street, so if you don't obey me, you have nobody else to blame but yourself if you get ran over."  If that's what god's "love" is like, I'm more than reasonable to say "fuck you".


The rest of your worthless choir-preaching was snipped as useless and repetitive.