He recounts this exchange:
I was dismayed at one bit of conversation with Dr Rod Butterworth, head of the place. He was trying to explain how the bloody god of the Old Testament really wasn’t such a bad fellow after all.
“You don’t understand: all those people he had to kill, were horrible people. They deserved to be killed!”
…
I pointed out that his god, according to his myth, exterminated the entire population of the planet, except for 8 people. Was he really arguing that all of those people, even the babies, were all so wretchedly evil that they deserved death?
He replied that yes, they did, because they refused to worship god, and god as their creator had every right to do with them as he will.This had me thinking back to my confirmation.
My instructor was the pastor of the church and young earth creationist who taught us that the Grand Canyon was created by the flood and not through millenniums of geological processes. I was taught that God had to destroy the world by the flood because all those people on the earth at that time were wicked and had to be destroyed -- except for Noah and his family of course. I was also taught that Jesus came a few short millennium later to redeem the world through his sacrifice on the cross.
And then the thought occurred to me back then, why didn’t God just send Jesus instead destroying the world in the flood? If people needed a savior, wouldn’t this be the most appropriate time? Weren't these the most “wicked” people ever if anyone needed redeeming and saving it would have been them. No one would have been killed -- including babies and children. I mean, Jesus' sacrifice was suppose to be so significant that it could not have redeemed these antediluvian people? Christians believe that Jesus came to redeem humanity, you mean to tell me that Jesus only conditionally redeems? Apparently so, since Christians believe in the flood myth.
So I was taught that I should approve of God’s genocide and not question it.
Of course, it’s never taught to us that God committed genocide. It’s always taught that the creator of the universe, who engineered people, had no choice than to drown everyone in the world. His hands were tied and he had no other options. Except, he later came up with the Jesus option anyway.
Yet, this thought never seems to occur to believers of Genesis that God could have done something else other than genocide. They approve of God’s genocide and hold it up as righteous and inevitable, even though they believe that Jesus eventually came to redeem humanity’s sins at a later date anyway. And the God they worship is supposed to be all-knowing and has a plan for everything. So why not Jesus then, instead of a global genocidal flood? I can only conclude that God wanted genocide and to murder children and babies.
Since I had this thought many years ago in my confirmation class as child and with the other things that did not make sense to me in that class, I reasoned that Christianity is false and I did not want to be a Christian.
