Immorality in the Bible: The Flood

An atheist friend has challenged me with the suggestion—not unfamiliar—that the Bible promotes immorality.

Let’s grasp that nettle by the prickly bits. Here’s a web essay that tries to cite such passages comprehensively, at religious tolerance.com.

http://www.religioustolerance.org/imm_bibl.htm

Let’s see what they’ve got.

First cited: the familiar story of Noah.

The Flood: 16th century.

Genesis 6:5-9:

"And GOD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And it repented the LORD that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart. And the LORD said, I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth; both man, and beast, and the creeping thing, and the fowls of the air; for it repenteth me that I have made them. But Noah found grace in the eyes of the LORD. These are the generations of Noah: Noah was a just man and perfect in his generations, and Noah walked with God."

The Flood: 17th century.

This is described by the site as “genocide.”

The truth is that we are all going to die. Death is part of the natural order. It follows that, while our instincts make us fear and seek to avoid death for as long as possible, death itself is not evil. It serves some necessary function. It is killing that is evil, not dying.

If death is not evil, why is killing evil? Because it assumes a right that belongs properly to God. In the end, God kills all of us. Just as individuals may not wage war or shoot people, but the state can, so God, as governor of the universe, can morally do things that humans cannot.

Now consider: is he objectively doing harm to these people? We do not know what comes after death, but a believing Christian assumes that, for the good man, heaven follows. For the good, dying is not a punishment, but a reward. For the less good, either purgatory or hell—as justice requires. In either case, necessarily, no injustice.

The same logic applies to most reports of killings in the Old Testament. If they are done by God directly, there is no immorality. If they are done by someone else under God’s direct command, again, no immortality. God has that right.

And if they are neither done by God, or at God’s command, how do we know whether the Bible approves of them? Much of the Bible is straight history.

Of course, it is entirely likely that the Noah story is not: that its flood is a metaphor for the fact that we all die in the flood of time.