THE GOD OF LOVE?

The Judeo-Christian God isn't very nice. He commits genocide on not only entire peoples, but also their children, their farm animals, and even their pets, just so some people He likes better can have the neighborhood.* And the people He didn’t like so much weren’t even warned – weren’t given a chance to leave on their own. My own moral imperative tells me this is wrong. If He knows everything, He should know of a neighborhood which is empty.

If He knows everything, He must have known we were bound to occasionally break His commandments. So why weren’t the commandments immediately followed by news of heaven and hell? Just as in the Garden of Eden, the punishment seems to have been decreed long after the commission of the crime. Any parent can tell you this doesn’t work as well as telling the miscreant ahead of time. So is He not very smart or not very nice?

Just read this passage (a small sample) from Hosea: Samaria shall become desolate; for she hath rebelled against her God: they shall fall by the sword: their infants shall be dashed in pieces, and their women with child shall be ripped up. (Hosea 13:16) Anyone advocating such behavior today would be considered completely insane (just ask Charles Manson). There’s more; “Keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, and that will by no means clear the guilty; visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, and upon the children's children, unto the third and to the fourth generation.” (Ex 34:7) No just system can punish four generations of a man’s children for what he has done – it would be ridiculous if it weren’t street-bat insane.

WHY THE LONG SILENCE?
Humans are easily-manipulated creatures. We can make each other see things that aren’t there (photographs or holograms, for example), hear things that aren’t there (music without the presence of musicians), smell things that aren’t there (perfume). If God wants us to believe in Him, why won’t he just settle the question by appearing to us all as a vision, a voice, or even a smell? Some people experience these things, but their evidence is unprovable and comes to us only through the testimony of people we don’t know. Why should He insist that we believe without proof, unless proof is impossible, even for Him?

Nomads living in about 1440 BCE claimed to have seen God. He traveled with them as a pillar of smoke by day and as a pillar of fire by night (Exodus 13-14). Perhaps the reason “faith” wasn’t mentioned in the ten commandments is because it wasn’t seen as being an issue – these people had SEEN their God, HEARD His voice. The last time God spoke to man was in the Book of Job. There are many opinions about exactly when Job lived, but it was a really long time ago – probably about 3,500 years ago. All eyewitnesses have been dead for centuries. He hasn’t ‘spoken’ to more than an “elite” special few since, and (completely unlike the Israelites) we only have their word for that.

* Yet in the story of the Good Samaratan, the lesson is that even in a group of people considered “bad,” there are good individuals. This has an echo in the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, but in that case the “good” people were warned to flee.