But the Amalekites were the al-Qaeda organization of the time. You don’t like the warfare of the Israelites and the Amalekites. When He doesn’t, I’m not so quick to say he’s wrong. That’s sad, and I don’t like it, but the Bible depicts a God who shows great mercy at times. God was saying these terrorists are so bad that you have to do what you normally do not do: kill civilians alongside combatants. So you can’t say I’m dodging the tough questions, I’ll take up your toughest accusation. I could take up a lot of time discussing each thread, but I’ll just look at one. It’s a garment, but you want to keep tugging on it, searching for a loose thread that you can pick at and pull on.
We see examples of self-sacrificial love. But we see glimmers of the promised redemption. Until Christ comes again, creation still groans. Yes, many non-Christians have done wonderful and charitable things. Of a love so terrific that God willingly sacrificed His own Son to make redemption possible for these people.
Of the blind, the lame, and the lost being plucked to safety by a Redeemer. It’s a story of love and rescue, promise and deliverance. They are often unlovable but He always loves them. They keep messing up, committing spiritual adultery, but God never abandons them.
He shows them their inability to keep the law. He teaches them about evil and the need for sacrifice. They keep messing up, but He doesn’t abandon them. They sometimes fight wars, but they survive. The rest of the Bible is the story of how this works out.įirst, God forms a people and protects them against enemies. Even as He pronounced the consequences of sin, He also made a promise: that one day a special human being would outwit and defeat Satan, and that the earth would one day be restored. He was not content to let the world decay and rot. The story is about what God did after evil came into the world. Evil exists in our hearts and decay mars the creation. Adam and Eve fell for Satan’s lies and the world changed. A renegade angel, Satan, tempted the humans to rebel. The very good apparently wasn’t good enough for human beings who sought what they thought was perfection. God created the world and it was very good-but it wasn’t perfect. Let me give you and folks here a quick summary. Sure, the Bible has some rules that show us how the world works, but the Bible isn’t mainly about rules and what we should do. Maybe you learned that the Bible is a book of rules about what we should and should not do. ResponseĬhristopher, I can tell you one bad thing some Christians have done: Somewhere along the way, they gave you a misapprehension of what the Bible is all about. Mine is not, since I haven’t published it elsewhere, but some of what I presented may be helpful to others, so here are the rest of my comments: a 10-minute response to the Hitchens opening statement, and a 10-minute closing comment. Hitchens, who died in 2011, was summarizing the argument he made in his best-selling God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (Twelve Books, 2007), so his argument is readily available.
I appreciate the comments from those who read my opening statement in a 2007 debate with Christopher Hitchens at The University of Texas at Austin: We posted it as part of our Saturday Series on Aug.