this post was submitted on 04 Mar 2024
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There is no reason to believe that Noah's family were the only innocents in the Flood story. I do not know how one can pin the supposed hedonism of the world on all those young children who would have drowned.
There is also no way to excuse killing the children of thousands of people because of the actions of one man. Blaming that one man for "forcing" supposedly omnipotent being to act in that way is also unjustifiable.
And there is no way to shift blame for genocide by simply saying, "the underlings took it too far." This excuse rings especially hollow when Jehovah asks for a cut of the spoils afterward (Numbers 31:25-31).
In the Sodom and Gomorrah story and the Jericho story, innocent people were saved. How would the great flood be any different? It's illustrative of the extent of the hedonism.
You can't even keep your own stories straight. The Great Flood myth in the Bible is very explicit that all life on earth will be destroyed, except that aboard Noah's Ark. Genesis 7:23 (NIV):
"Every living thing on the face of the earth was wiped out; people and animals and the creatures that move along the ground and the birds were wiped from the earth. Only Noah was left, and those with him in the ark."
It wasn't a global flood. It was hyperbole. 2 Peter 2:5 says it just covered the world of the ungodly. "World" is generally used locally in the Bible as well as "the earth" meaning a large area of visible land.
We can see that in Genesis 8:9
"But the dove found no place to set her foot, and she returned to him to the ark, for the waters were still on the face of the whole earth. So he put out his hand and took her and brought her into the ark with him."
When verse 5 said:
"And the waters continued to abate until the tenth month; in the tenth month, on the first day of the month, the tops of the mountains were seen."
I do not care how local you think the myth of Noah's Flood was supposed to be, as that fact is immaterial to the point you continue to miss. That flood still would have killed innocent people, and the story frames this as a morally just action. No amount of quibbling over linguistics will change that.
The amount of excuses needed to ignore the plain implications of a passage is really telling. One could take the Old Testament as it appears: a series of books written and edited (and redacted, and co-opted, and edited again) as the religious and cultural canon in the Iron Age for an otherwise obscure Levantine tribe, with morals from a different time and place unsuited to our modern sensibilities. There are many such books and traditions from all over the world that contain tales just as horrifying as any in the Old Testament, so it would not be without company.
But the apologist wants us to believe that their ancient stories are actually true, and so they have to invent all these insane reasons why clearly immoral actions by their book's main character are totally justified. This is the sort of position that can only come about when someone decides what they believe first and then looks for rationale afterwards.
It didn't kill innocent people, though.
You have yet to satisfactorily establish that. The most you've mustered is claiming that Jehovah would have known his victims were guilty and so was was justified in killing them. This excuse only works if one starts from a position of, "Jehovah is good", and then finds justification for his actions afterwards. In every other instance we would judge people by their actions, yet you want to make a special exception for your god where we reverse the calculus and judge his actions by his person instead.
I reject this backwards logic, and still conclude that the god of the Old Testament is a vindictive, bloodthirsty character, much more in line with his Iron Age contemporaries than with any modern conception of a god. This is one of the fundamental flaws of Christianity: that its god cannot be separated from its narrow, barbaric past, and thus cannot be easily squared with what is expected of a universal deity.