Outchurched

Who Would God Kill? Apparently, plenty of people…

How many people did God kill in the Bible?

It’s impossible to say for sure, but plently. How many did God drown in the flood or burn to death in Sodom and Gomorrah? How many first-born Egyptians did he kill? There’s just no way to count them all.
…
So far I come up with a total of 2,138,346 (not inlcuding, at least in some cases, women and children).

The Dwindling in Unbelief blog has a pretty comprehensive listing, including references, etc. This type of analysis is always interesting. Of particular note is that God kills more people than Satan (ratio: God’s Kills: Satan’s Kills - 212,834 to 1) and that the Bible’s version of God is far bloodier than the God of the Book of Mormon or the God of Islam (arguably though, you’d have to add the frag count of the Biblical God to the totals for The Book of Mormon, etc., so the Mormon God would be far bloodier, though He kills far less in the LDS-exclusive Scriptures).

I think this provides some interesting insight. God, the Creator, is also God, the Killer. If humanity is created in the image of God, and we’re to act as God acts, then presumably it’s acceptable to create things and destroy them at will, regardless of whether or not those things have life or sentience. “My creation isn’t pleasing me, so I’m just going to destroy it.” Scripture makes God sound like an out-of-control toddler.

Bloodshed, violence, death, disease, pestilence, sin, misery and suffering… all are God’s creations. King David was an outstanding warrior and military leader… it sounds like killing and the shedding and blood is how King David was “a man after God’s own heart.”

My point is not to advocate the violence that the Bible condones or seemingly encourages, rather the contrary. I think that pointing out how violent God is, according to “His Word” would cause one to stop and ponder how God can be simultaneously be Love and Death.

This comment from the the post on “Who has killed more…” makes some good points:

Notice how the Christian responses are all some variant of “It’s OK for God to kill because [insert their preferred justification here]”

Translation: God is above the law. Since any moral code worthy of the name ought to rule out murder and torture at the very least, and the Biblical deity is portrayed doing both on a massive scale, and the latter for eternity, it is clear that God cannot be considered morally “good” in any sense.

The very best that could be said for him is that he is an amoral entity, like a hurricane or the Borg–simply Power unconstrained by ethics or even unaware of it. However, his repeated claims of “righteousness” seems to rule that out.

Since eternal torture would be unacceptable to a being possesssed of even minimal levels of empathy, we are left with no choice but to consider him… >pinky finger to corner of mouth< ...Eeeevil.

This entry was posted by Rev. Dan on Tuesday, August 29th, 2006 at 5:01 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.