Does God Have the Right to Kill?

My thoughts on a really tough and sensitive issue

Photo by Ahmed Adly on Unsplash

In his 2006 bestseller The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins declares:

“The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.”

That quote, from one of the world’s most famous evolutionary biologists and atheist thinkers, has become iconic. It’s one of the most colorful and brutal indictments of the biblical God put to paper this century.

It is, in fact, a view of the biblical God shared by many writers here on Medium. And periodically, since I often write on faith and religion, I get questions from these writers and Medium community members asking about all the violence and killing orchestrated by God in the Bible.

Let me begin by addressing this issue on a personal and emotional level.

To me, death is tragic. I hate to read or hear about people dying or being killed — in the news, in history books, and (yes) in the Bible.