Via Why Evolution Is True, I found this piece by Dennis Prager about Noah's Flood. Like William Lane Craig, he is trying to defend a mass murder in the Bible and in the process making himself look like he does not know good from evil.
Hilariously, Prager's example of law is that "murder is wrong. So wrong that one of the moral rules revealed after the flood is that murderers must be put to death". So, killing everyone on earth would be really, really wrong - surely? And when we read the Biblical account of Moses, we find that humans already know that murder is wrong and punishable by death; Moses kills a man and fears that he will be put to death by the Pharaoh for it.
But these errors are not the real problem. The real problem is that Prager is trying to defend mass murder as moral, and that makes distortions inevitable. New Atheists are criticised for saying that moderate religion enables extremists, but here is a classic case to justify the claim. Prager is saying that a group of people (a culture or a race) can become so evil that even an omnibenevolent, omnipotent deity can find no better solution than to kill them all. What will such arguments become in the hands of extremists? It is a justification to kill, either other groups who have become "sufficiently evil", or dissenters in our midst who will lead us along the path to extermination at the hands of others.
Prager even explicitly rejects the idea that it's a fairy story, and claims that it conveys enduring wisdom. A story like that might be instructive if the God character was merely a plot point, and the focus was on Noah. But when it is supposed to have really happened, and God is supposed to be the focus of the story and someone for us to worship - then there is no escaping the implications of having a mass murderer in charge.
I would not want to live near Prager, or anyone that thought he was right. Like Craig, he provides a justification for those who feel someone else is an affront to God, that they may have God's blessing to kill. And there are no shortage of people who think that way.
If your moral compass won't point you away from wholesale genocide, what good is it?
First I cannot help but find fault with his reasoning. Apparently exterminating every man, woman and child on earth (bar eight) is the act of someone who "values goodness" and "hates evil". Because the inhabitants of the earth at the time were treating each other "cruelly". That sets a pretty high bar for bad behaviour; what were they doing that couldn't be stopped except by killing them all? After all, it must have been something that they were all doing, otherwise there would have been some victims who could have been saved instead of killed. And whatever it was, it was immediately transmitted to every child at birth - because an omnipotent God could have saved all the innocent babies, but clearly chose not to. How did Noah escape it, one wonders.
And why did things get this bad? Because God left them to their own consciences instead of giving them Laws. Surely, then, the correct first step would be to provide these laws instead of just killing everyone. Instead, God waited until long after the flood before providing laws - if I have the chronology right, about 800 years.
But these errors are not the real problem. The real problem is that Prager is trying to defend mass murder as moral, and that makes distortions inevitable. New Atheists are criticised for saying that moderate religion enables extremists, but here is a classic case to justify the claim. Prager is saying that a group of people (a culture or a race) can become so evil that even an omnibenevolent, omnipotent deity can find no better solution than to kill them all. What will such arguments become in the hands of extremists? It is a justification to kill, either other groups who have become "sufficiently evil", or dissenters in our midst who will lead us along the path to extermination at the hands of others.
Prager even explicitly rejects the idea that it's a fairy story, and claims that it conveys enduring wisdom. A story like that might be instructive if the God character was merely a plot point, and the focus was on Noah. But when it is supposed to have really happened, and God is supposed to be the focus of the story and someone for us to worship - then there is no escaping the implications of having a mass murderer in charge.
I would not want to live near Prager, or anyone that thought he was right. Like Craig, he provides a justification for those who feel someone else is an affront to God, that they may have God's blessing to kill. And there are no shortage of people who think that way.
If your moral compass won't point you away from wholesale genocide, what good is it?
