God - vengeance
From PhiloWiki
- God sold off the Israelites to the Philistines, Mesopotamians, Canaanites, and Babylonians [Jud 10:19]
- God killed a quarter million people because David conducted a census [Sam II 24:13]
- God killed 42 children for making fun of a bald man [K II 2:23]
Is God vengeful?
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Christian views
- Resources are needed. Feel free to find and add resources.
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Secular views
God appears vengeful and full of wrath. This detracts from the image of a loving and just God.
- "Strobel quoted Thomas Paine from The Age of Reason, "Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and tortuous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness, with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we call it the work of a demon, then the word of God." Geisler responds, "too bad [Paine] didn't have a Bible [...] Paine is just factually wrong. The Bible doesn't have any cruel and tortuous executions that God commanded." I find myself wondering if Geisler has a Bible."
- "[God killed]... forty-two children who called Elisha 'baldy'."
- "Apparently having second thoughts about a Supreme Being unrestrained by moral principles, in the year of his death C. S. Lewis wrote: "The real danger is of coming to believe such dreadful things about Him. The conclusion I dread is not 'so there's no God after all,' but 'So this is what God is really like. Deceive yourself no longer.'" Only four months before his death, Lewis wrote in a letter to an American philosopher that there were dangers in judging God by moral standards. However, he maintained that "believing in a God whom we cannot but regard as evil, and then, in mere terrified flattery calling Him 'good' and worshipping Him, is still greater danger." Lewis was responding specifically to the question of Joshua's slaughter of the Canaanites by divine decree and Peter's striking Ananias and Sapphira dead. Knowing that the evangelical doctrine of the Bible's infallibility required him to approve of "the atrocities (and treacheries) of Joshua," Lewis made this surprising concession: "The ultimate question is whether the doctrine of the goodness of God or that of the inerrancy of Scriptures is to prevail when they conflict. I think the doctrine of the goodness of God is the more certain of the two indeed, only that doctrine renders this worship of Him obligatory or even permissible."
