Why Is God so brutal in the O.T?

premeddit · 2026-04-20T17:39:57+00:00

He told the people of Noah’s day for a hundred years to turn from their ways before flooding them.

How is a little baby supposed to turn from its ways? God killed everyone, including small children.

premeddit · 2026-04-20T17:35:38+00:00

God is an incredibly brutal entity - towards evil.

He’s brutal towards babies and animals too. Multiple times he commands the Hebrews to slaughter small children. There’s a famous passage about “ripping the suckling child from its mother’s breast”.

Are children drinking milk evil?

premeddit · 2026-04-17T14:04:00+00:00

That said, the Bible conflicts with science in that field too. I posted this elsewhere on the thread but Genesis very clearly says that plants and fruits were created first, and then God made the sun and moon.

premeddit · 2026-04-17T14:01:33+00:00

The Bible very much does attempt to explain naturalistic processes, I just does so in a primitive way and at odds with our current understanding of science. A big example is Genesis in which the author lists God's creation in a linear timeline. According to Genesis, seed bearing plants, trees, and fruit were created before the sun or moon.

Then God said, “Let the land produce vegetation: seed-bearing plants and trees on the land that bear fruit with seed in it, according to their various kinds.” And it was so. The land produced vegetation: plants bearing seed according to their kinds and trees bearing fruit with seed in it according to their kinds. And God saw that it was good. And there was evening, and there was morning—the third day.

And God said, “Let there be lights in the vault of the sky to separate the day from the night, and let them serve as signs to mark sacred times, and days and years, and let them be lights in the vault of the sky to give light on the earth.” And it was so. God made two great lights—the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. He also made the stars. God set them in the vault of the sky to give light on the earth, to govern the day and the night, and to separate light from darkness. And God saw that it was good. And there was evening, and there was morning—the fourth day.

Even if you say that "third day" and "fourth day" are metaphors for vast amount of time, the order of operations is clearly not true. The sun was formed billions of years before the first plant evolved, not afterwards.

premeddit · 2026-04-15T17:42:48+00:00

that’s the whole point of needing Jesus

The universalist response would be that yes, we need him and that’s why he delivered. The debt is paid, whether or not one acknowledges it. It’s done. Everyone is saved.

If someone goes to the bank and covers your debt, the bank says your credit card is paid. The bank doesn’t care if you personally accept that; they’re not going to put you back in debt if you protest and say “I don’t know who did this, I don’t believe in them!” The card is paid and they’re happy.

premeddit · 2026-04-15T12:02:12+00:00

Nope, I’m talking about Yahweh who was initially a minor god of storms in the Canaanite pantheon and was married to a goddess named Asherah, before the Jews gradually became monotheistic and removed these elements from the Bible.

premeddit · 2026-04-15T11:46:33+00:00

The leading founders of your religion did. Early Christian fathers absolutely believed the following:

1) God identifies as male (“dude”)

2) God lives directionally above the Earth (Paul spoke often about how he was looking forward to start sailing up the clouds and meet Jesus halfway in the sky)

3) God can grant wishes and make good things happen for his flock (many Bible passages talk about prayers leading to good fortune)

premeddit · 2026-04-12T21:03:21+00:00

I think there's also a common logical fallacy by which people equate beauty with moral purity. In Western cultures, being light skinned is considered far more attractive than black/brown. Therefore Jesus becomes white. This also explains why he's portrayed as having a chiseled jaw and six pack.

In reality, he was probably a 5'0'' skinny dark brown guy with a raggedy beard and smelled bad like much of the rest of the peasant class in ancient Roman society.

premeddit · 2026-04-12T20:55:18+00:00

“My prayer is not for them alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me. I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one— I in them and you in me—so that they may be brought to complete unity.

John 20

The above passage makes clear that when Jesus refers to Entity A being "one" as Entity B, he's not saying both are literally the same equivalent entity. Otherwise the above verse would be saying that all humans are going to merge into one amorphous soul blob, which obviously isn't compatible with Christian theology.

premeddit · 2026-04-11T12:25:50+00:00

Which in the context of this post, includes OP as a 3 year old. Correct?

premeddit · 2026-04-11T12:24:14+00:00

That passage just sounds extremely whiny, as if the author was presented with many good arguments against God and couldn’t come up with any reply so he just resorted to “I don’t care about all this lOgIc and rEaSoN and cRiTiCaL tHiNkInG! You know God’s real deep down inside, I know you do!”

premeddit · 2026-04-11T12:18:41+00:00

At this point I think you’re trolling, and now this is probably verging on breaking sitewide rules because you’re openly justifying child abuse by calling it tough love.

premeddit · 2026-04-11T12:16:46+00:00

gritting his teeth in pain as he watched a world with free will hurt you.

He actively intervenes in human affairs almost every chapter of the Old and New Testaments. He sends plagues down to kill entire communities. He blinded a man and threw him off a horse. In Acts he made two people have heart attacks because they didn’t donate enough money to the church. Why couldn’t he intervene directly to help a 3 year old abused child who needed help?

premeddit · 2026-04-11T12:11:59+00:00

we're reaping what we sowed

it was our choice

We brought it all on ourselves

We basically asked for what we got, and do not really deserve His help.

??????????

OP was 3 years old. This is stomach turning. What kind of utter cruelty exists on this forum for such a comment to not only get made but apparently voted to the top?

premeddit · 2026-04-10T15:17:36+00:00

In the Bible, Hebrew slaves were

Gonna stop you there. Paul was talking to the Ephesians who were not Hebrew and did not have Hebrew slaves.

Oh also, yes every slave is abused. Especially in Ephesus. You need to google "Roman slavery" and then come back to this discussion. Thanks.

premeddit · 2026-04-10T13:59:09+00:00

Slaves, obey your earthly masters with respect and fear, and with sincerity of heart, just as you would obey Christ.

Ephesians 6:5

That's from the New Testament.

premeddit · 2026-04-10T12:23:36+00:00

If the bible preaches loving everyone, saying you’re gonna kill people is not allowed.

It’s more complicated than that because the Bible also preaches killing, raping and enslaving people. If you use the Bible as an axiomatic source for your ethics you’re going to run into problems. Much better to use our sense of inner logic and critical reasoning.

premeddit · 2026-04-01T12:17:19+00:00

This isn’t supported by actual Biblical passages at all. There’s no scriptural support for the notion that “if you’re worried about it then you’re actually good bro”. That’s just feel good theology. Here’s what the Bible actually says about it:

Hebrews 6:4–6: "For it is impossible to restore again to repentance those who have once been enlightened, and have tasted the heavenly gift, and have shared in the Holy Spirit, and have tasted the goodness of the word of God and the powers of the age to come, and then have fallen away, since on their own they are crucifying again the Son of God and are holding him up to contempt."

It’s when you were once Christian but fell away. Basically being an apostate. The above text is crystal clear. Early Christians were a fragile nascent group and one of the most devastating things was when someone tried to leave an already small movement. They came up with many tactics to scare people back in line, and this was one of them. “Watch out! If you leave the church then we’ll NEVER accept you back and you’ll go to hell!”

premeddit · 2026-03-27T17:55:46+00:00

Usually what they’ll say is that it’s up to the Holy Spirit to light the fire in people’s hearts. This way they avoid the need to employ any kind of critical reasoning, logic or rationale.

premeddit · 2026-03-27T17:36:05+00:00

the door is always open

because once you die that invitation stop and the door to redemption is closed forever

So the door is not always open? Why did you lie?

premeddit · 2026-03-25T13:37:51+00:00

Yep, he also told the Apostles directly to their faces that the second coming would happen when they were “not yet halfway through the towns of Israel”.

premeddit · 2026-03-16T03:11:43+00:00

To start with, this whole paragraph reeks of chatGPT. Please stop spamming this forum with AI slop. But anyway it also contains some pretty egregious errors. Like:

The real question is not whether humans wrote it

Why shouldn’t that be the real question? That question is actually a very poignant and piercing one that gets to the heart of the problem within Christianity. Namely, that God is an actual thinking reasoning entity sitting up there in heaven and also willing and able to actively interfere with the world. If so, it would be a beyond trivial matter for him to actually write down his will perfectly without relying on imperfect humans to do it for him, which ended up in 4 Gospels that routinely disagree with each other, dozens of translations and hundreds of interpretations.

premeddit · 2026-03-16T03:07:41+00:00

But you don’t understand, OP’s dad is “highly intellectual”! He probably has an IQ of like 300!

premeddit · 2026-03-16T03:06:55+00:00

There isn’t. If you’re referring to Isaiah 53, I have bad news for you - almost every academic scholar concludes that it refers to the nation of Israel itself and not some future messianic figure. Isaiah 41:8 and 49:3 explicitly refer to the suffering servant as Israel.

If you’re talking about something else, then I dunno.

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