The God of the Christian Bible is Evil
Evidence from Scripture and Nature

1. The Old Testament God is Evil
   1. God Creates Evil Regardless of Human Free Will
   2. Some Genocides Committed Directly by God
   3. Satan and God are Interchangeable
   4. Fear God
2. The New Testament Tells us that the Old Testament God is Evil
3. The New Testament God is Also Evil
   1. No Free Will
   2. God Destroys Families
4. The Problem of Evil

1. The Old Testament God is Evil

1.1. God Creates Evil Regardless of Human Free Will

Isaiah 45:7 affirms that God creates darkness and disaster. It is not a creation of mankind, nor of fallen beings or Satan. The Hebrew word here that is translated as "disaster" could also mean "wickedness", "hurt", "affliction" or "adversity". God creates these things directly. Any argument that asserts that evil is a result of Human free will must first get over the fact that the Christian Bible states that God creates evil and disaster itself. Not only does this God create darkness and disaster, but it actively "does" them too. It doesn't merely create them as possibilities for other people, it actively chooses to do them itself.

The Book of Lamentations confirms that free will cannot stop evil, when evil comes from God, nor can man stop goodness, when goodness comes from God:

Who is he that can speak, and it happens, when the Lord command it not?₃₇
Out of the mouth of the Most High proceedeth not both evil and good?₃₈

Lamentations 3:37-38

1.2. Some Genocides Committed Directly by God

Some of these are of the young, the innocent, and some are even the results of accidents. They are my five favorite smitings of the Old Testament (click the link for full descriptions of each one):

1. 2 Kings 2:23-24 : 42 children are killed for calling a prophet "baldy", by two she-bears.
2. 1 Samuel 6:19 : 50 070 (or 70) people are killed for looking in (or "at") the Ark of the Covenant.
3. 1 Kings 20:30 : God makes a wall fall on and kill 27 000 of an army retreating from some Israelites.
4. Numbers 16:16-49 : Death to all those who complain (14 950 of them altogether).
5. 2 Samuel 6:6-11 : God kills someone for accidentally touching the Ark of the Covenant.

In addition to these are some more serious issues:

The Adam and Eve story shows god as an immoral bad parent, not as a loving God2002

1. The immoral doctrine of original sin, where children are punished for the sins of their parents is hardly the scheme of a moral god. Adam and Eve were punished with death, pain, suffering and caused the evil of all mankind... yet they themselves 'sinned' before they knew the difference between Good and Evil. God must be immoral, if it punishes innocent people for sins they do not understand and could not resist.

2. The Flood could not be the creation of a patient, loving, caring, forgiving or good god.

1.3. Satan and God are Interchangeable

As various authors copied copies of the Hebrew Scriptures, changes accumulated in the stories. Sometimes, the same story appears twice. There are even two accounts of the Creation that contradict each other in the details. One such doubled story shows us clearly that the Old Testament God is evil, and Satan itself is not a separate being, but is actually part of God, a face of God. There is one occasion when David took a census of his men in order to count how many could fight in the armies of Israel. 1 Chronicles 21:2 and 2 Samuel 24:2 both contain a copy of the exact same text:

What had happened is that God had a rule: That David was not allowed to 'number' Israel. But, for some reason, David went ahead and did so. As a result, God punished them all for breaking his rule. But, it is very telling when we examine the preceding verse: Who inspired David to count Israel's fighting men?

In one copy of the story, we are told Satan told David to do so. In the other, it was God. How can this be? It is because in the Old Testament, Satan and God are the same being. Satan in the Old Testament is merely the face that God puts on when it is testing its people. "The anger of the Lord" is Satan. It was common in old religions (Hinduism, Roman religions, etc) for gods to have multiple faces, each associated with different emotions. In the Christian Bible, Satan is God. It is not just the Old Testament that contains such revealing truths, the New Testament tells the same story:

1.4. Fear God

The Old Testament describes God as angry, fearsome, destructive and vengeful. In continual deviance from what a good god would do, and feel, the God of the Old Testament sometimes repents of its own actions and thoughts. How can a god that knows everything, and is never wrong, repent? How can a good god even have evil thoughts, let alone do evil actions?

It seems one thing that Old Testament gets right is its assertions that we should fear god. See Lev. 25:17; Deut. 6:2, 6:13, 10:12, 10:20, 31:12-13; Joshua 4:24; 1 Sam. 12:14; 2 Kings 17:39; Job 28:28; Psalms 19:9, 25:14, 33:8, 33:18, 34:9, 96:4, 103:11, 103:17, 111:10, 112:1, 115:13, 128:1, 147:11; Proverbs 1:7, 22:4, 24:21; Ecc. 5:7, 12:13; Jer. 5:22. We should definitely fear such a god as this!

In Old Testament times, people were exposed to many different Gods. Frequently, people would simply have to be scared into worshipping one god over another. By representing it as powerful, destructive, jealous and harsh, the Jews who wrote the Old Testament were affirming that they believed their God should be worshipped, and other Gods should be abandoned.

2. The New Testament Tells us that the Old Testament God is Evil

2nd Century Marcionite Christians believed that the Old Testament God was Evil2006

The author of the Gospel of Luke wrote that Jesus said that 'a tree is known by its fruit' (Luke 6:43-44): "Good trees do not produce rotten fruit, and rotten trees do not produce good fruit". The Old Testament God, who says that he "creates evil" (Amos. 3:6, Isaiah 45:7), cannot therefore be a 'good tree', but must be a rotten one. An ancient form of Christianity was preached by Marcion, who realized that the God of the Old Testament must be Evil. As Marcion believed that the Good News of the New Testament was the plan of salvation from a good God, he believed that through Jesus the evil god the Old Testament had been defeated.

3. The New Testament God is Also Evil

3.1. No Free Will

Jesus and the Disciples accepted the Old Testament as God's word. They could only do this if they themselves believed that God was not benevolent. They also preached the goodness of God, despite his apparent evil. This is because they, like the writers of the Old Testament, do not care if god is 'good' or 'evil', they merely wish to do its will, in order to get rewards in heaven.

The Book of Revelations is the climax and final book of the New Testament, where it is said that God will once again revert to his Old Testament ways... the suffering and pain described in the apocalypse is something that a good god could never let happen. To even believe that God do this is to believe in a monstrous demon of a God.

The New Testament preaches at great length that we have no free will, and that God's punishment is arbitrary

“Not only does the existence of God logically, philosophically and theologically deny the possibility of free will, but the Bible also says that there is no free will! Examining the writings of St Paul, the Biblical books of Ephesians, Romans, 2 Timothy, 2 Thessalonians and Revelations, we see that God's plan overrides our free will; those that do good do the specific good that God predestined them to do, and all others are ruled by Satan because God sends "powerful delusions" to them. The Christian Bible frequently states that God creates our future and decides our fates, no matter what our own will is. It constantly denies that we have free will.”

"Biblical Christianity Denies Free Will" by Vexen Crabtree (2005)

The doctrine of predestination is like the doctrine of original sin. They affirm that God is not just, not moral, and is actively evil and arbitrary. Not only do god's plans override free will, but, God also punishes those who it has predetermined to be punished. There is no grand moral plan to god's will. It makes no sense to say that this is the behaviour of a good god. The New Testament makes more sense if its schemes are the plan of an evil god, rather than a good one.

3.2. God Destroys Families

Jesus said:

"Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword. For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law. And a man's foes shall be they of his own household."

Matthew 10:34-37

"Suppose ye that I am come to give peace on earth? I tell you, Nay; but rather division: For from henceforth there shall be five in one house divided, three against two, and two against three. The father shall be divided against the son, and the son against the father; the mother against the daughter, and the daughter against the mother; the mother in law against her daughter in law, and the daughter in law against her mother in law."

Luke 12:51-53

These compare well with Exodus 15:3, "The LORD is a man of war: the LORD is his name".

4. The Problem of Evil

List pages on the Problem of Evil on this site by Vexen

“If God is all-powerful and all-good, it would have created a universe with no suffering and no evil. But, evil and suffering exist. Therefore God does not exist, is not all-powerful or is not benevolent. Attempts to justify the existence of evil are called theodicies. There have been no fully working theodicies created to date, even popular ones such as the free will theodicy were rejected thousands of years ago for reasons that still stand today. It seems that if there is a god, it is not the all-good moral being that classical religions would have us believe.”

"Introduction to the problem of evil" by Vexen Crabtree (2000)

Arguments that God Must be Evil, by Vexen Crabtree 2003

“The existence of such large quantities of suffering, despair, pain, of natural disasters such as earthquakes, of the death of the unborn and the immense suffering of lovers & kind-hearted people means that god is evil and intentionally creates life in order to create suffering. That all life exists in a food chain means that life is completely tied to death, and such a barbaric biological cycle could only have been made by an evil god. Also, that such a god appears not to exist, or actively hides itself, is a source of confusion, conflict, war and stress and is again more likely the antics of an evil god. Given the state of the natural world, it is impossible that a good god exists. [...]

If God did exist and was evil [...] it would create maximum confusion by preaching multiple conflicting religions. It would create heaven and make it hard to get to in order to tease and torture people into making their own lives hell. As all of those things happen, if there is a God, it is doing the things an evil God would do!

Once I recognized and accepted this state of affairs and adequately called myself a Satanist, I could concentrate my life on happiness, love, stability and peace. Because I know and understand that death always wins, that life is temporary, I waste no time on short-term whims that reduce my quality of life, or of those around me, and I waste no time with spiritual pipe dreams. Recognizing Satan as the personified meta-figure of reality is self-affirming, life-affirming, positive, honest and clarifying.”

"Evidence that if there is a God, it is an Evil One" by Vexen Crabtree (2003)