Is it possible for Christians to be moral when their god is immoral?

Question

God is pro genocide: Exodus 34: 11-14
Pro slavery: Exod. 21:20-21
God promotes misogyny: Exodus 20 & 21

Just to name a few.

Answer 1

Empirically yes, many of them actually are moral, and likable too; generally these either deny or rationalize these and the many other atrocities.

Answer 2

The OT god is the result of an overworked imagination of a very bored shepard and Pharaoh wannabe--Moses. Most people take it for granted that what they know of the bible is true. Well, it's not true. In fact, only the bible records stories about Moses' exploits. What is written in the OT about god comes directly from the perverted mind of Moses. Don't forget this is the guy that went to the mountain for ten commandments and by the time he and his mind-controlling freaks got things written down, they had over 600 laws to be obeyed! Even their own prophets said the scribes, those who wrote the scriptures, LIED! Moses was the most insecure and control freak of the ancient world. People put alot of words in god's mouth he did notsay or would not have said were he alive.

Blessed be the name of Yo!

Answer 3

Christians can't help what they become. Here is the best explanation of the process that I have read -

The way to understand our origins is to remember that living organisms are in a state of constant change - It's not that evolution *can* occur, but that it *must* occur, simply because there is no mechanism in living organisms to ensure perfect, flawless reproduction for ever.

Suppose you could study a population of chimpanzees in the jungle, on a timescale of millions of years. Clearly, each individual only lives a few decades, so the population is constantly being succeeded by individuals which are different from their parents, because reproduction is imperfect - and remember, this is *inevitable*. It can't *not* happen. All the time this population is inter-breeding, the genes are getting mixed together, and only genes which work well with all other chimpanzee genes will tend to get passed down to successive generations (because individuals with genes that don't work well together will tend not to survive and reproduce).

However, suppose that circumstances arise which cause a group to become genetically isolated from other chimpanzees. This could be as a result of an accident of geography (e.g. an impassable river) or breeding preference or simply great distance. There will develop two distinct groups of chimpanzees which can never again exchange genes, because they have become different enough that mating will not produce viable offspring. This is what biologists define as speciation - i.e. the population has forever split into two distinct groups. Biologists have observed many instances of speciation, so there is no doubt that it occurs.

Assuming that both groups continue to survive, it is again *inevitable* that they will diverge genetically - There is no possible way that both groups, isolated and independent from each other, can change in exactly the same ways, and the longer they continue to breed, the more different they will become. Over millions of years, given that the rate of genetic change via mutation tends to remain fairly constant, the two groups will become as distinct as today's chimpanzees and humans are from each other, and from their most recent common ancestor.

All this is based on what we *know* is true - it's not supposition or guesswork, and remember it's not just possible, it absolutely *has* to happen, because there is no mechanism in biology to make reproduction a 100% perfect, flawless process.

NB: The reason we're classed as apes is that there is no valid way to group all the other apes together that doesn't also apply to humans. In other words, whatever criteria you use to define what is an ape, in order to include chimpanzees, gorillas, orangs and gibbons, humans will also fit those criteria. Indeed, chimpanzees are more closely related to humans than to gorillas, and gorillas are more closely related to humans and chimpanzees than they are to orangs, so any classification that separated humans out from those other apes would not make any sense.

Answer 4

To the Christian, God isn't the moral absolute; he's the righteous absolute. He defines appropriate and incorrect, e.g., the ten Commandments, the culmination of the Spirit. men choose on morality: what's immoral in one social placing is ethical in yet another, e.g, abortion and corporal punishment. in the little female and warm water occasion, a million) the little female remains gaining expertise of the might desire to obey her father and mom. 2) the little female does no longer yet have a carry close of the outcomes. 3) Neither the little female nor the father and mom have the skill to opposite the outcomes. in the story of the autumn, a million) Adam and Eve the two have the skill to obey, 2) Adam and Eve the two be attentive to the end result, and 3) God is able to furnish a scientific care, i.e., salvation.

Answer 5

They will tell you they don't understand their scripture, when even every Christian scholars has a different interpretation trying to justify the unjustifiable. You only touched on the beginning of the atrocities of the OT God. It is quite funny that people are trying to make a contemporary perspective of the Biblical God when in reality Jehovah was just a creation that represents the worst of a very barbaric, primitive culture.

Answer 6

Humans have developed a conceptual brain. The brain perceives reality and sensetions and perceptions are classified into concepts of two kinds: good for living and bad for living. The accumulation of all the sensations, perceptions, concepts, feelings, ideas, and so on forms our consciousness. Ethics is the branch of philosophy which studies the nature of the good. To know the nature of the good is essential for constructing a moral code to live by.
Animals have no need for morality. They simply follow their instincts. They cannot imagine, they have no cenceptual brains, so they cannot intentionally do anything against their nature. Humans can. And that's why they develop and need a code of morality. They need to know what is real and unreal, what is true and false, what is just and unjust.

Religious people do not rely (so they say) on logical reasoning for their moral code. They memorize what others tell them to believe is a moral code, whether these others are preachers, prophets, or revelations. Faith is the method by which religious people claim to know what is true and what is false, what is just and unjust. Whatever God might say, that should be the last word spoken.

But since God doesn't tell us clearly what it is that we ought to do to be moral, we are left to have to INTERPRET his words. And that brings us back to level one -- our logical thinking. In the end, whether we are religious or atheists we mainly rely on our logical thinking to tell us what is moral and what is immoral.

Logic is the method of reasoning that does not allow contraddictions with reality. To know if we are right or wrong about anything, all we have to do is test it against reality. If we say we can fly from the top of a skyscraper by flapping our arms, those who dare believe this idiocy can always test it and see what happens. It only takes one example for many other people to get the knowledge that reality doesn't kid, it doesn't care about us. If we are irrational, reality let us have the consequences -- there are no safety nets, no exceptions.

Only reality is certainty and that's why logic works and faith doesn't. Most people of faith make claims that cannot be tested against reality, because they are part of their imagination only. If I say that I speak to God, my claim has no relevance to reality. It does not alter reality. It has no consequence. Basically all I am really saying is that with my mind I can pretend to speak to God and this does not violate any law of reality. But if I am a judge and can enforce the law and declare that I do not need evidence or proof in a trial because God told me in a dream who is guilty of murder and who is innocent, I should be put in an asylum.

What the Bible describes on sevaral occasions is God speaking to His people and telling them what battle to fight, who to kill, merely because the "infidels" disobeyed his commandments. That is the same as a judge hearing voices that tell him who should be freed and who should be punished in a court of law.

Answer 7

Some can be - I would consider my parents to be moral people and they passed those onto me. My parents, my father especially, said that the bible should be looked at critically just like any other book because a human being had to write it and therefore it is biased to the author. My husband, who was born and raised in England also holds the same view. My family tends to be liberal and open-minded even with their religion.

Answer 8

God is not to blame for these issues. It is the fallen human nature of man that brought these things to bear.

Exodus 34:14 reminds us to not worship false gods and idols. If these people had followed the true God they would have been fine.

Exodus 21:20-21 simply addresses an institution already established by men.

Please explain what you meant by "Exodus 20 & 21".

Answer 9

Regardless of what they think they do they do not live according to the morality asked for by God... They are Americans or Europeans or Asians, etc., and New Yorkers or Berliners or Parisians or Moscovites, or Sidnees, etc., and they live according to the moral standards of their differing a~~.

Morality is not a behavior of religion but rather a behavior of society. Remember always that the Cannibal is behaving with moral correctness whenever he chooses to dine on his neighbors behind.

http://i209.photobucket.com/albums/bb62/Randall_Fleck/Chimp_Two_GIF.gif

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Answer 10

Yes, it IS possible, but only by ignoring such verses or "weaseling" on them, pretending they aren't there or somehow don't mean what they mean, etc... Good Christians tend to select out the more benevolent verses in the Bible to focus on, whereas Bad Christians ("Fundamentalists") prefer the gloom and doom verses where Gays and Heathens are condemned... and of course, they LOVE the "Hell" verses!