Why "culture" is a bad excuse for God's immorality

In my discussions with Christians about my objections to the faith, one rebuttal comes up repeatedly. The culture necessitated the rule from God. This response comes most notably as a defense of Old Testament rules and regulations regarding slavery- though I've also seen it as a response to my objections to the treatment of women at the time. I want to take a moment to explain why I think this is rebuttal is invalid from three different perspectives.

Before I do that, I'm going to approach this as if someone is using the culture of the day as an excuse for the acceptance of slavery in the Old Testament- though my criticisms of this approach will apply to nearly anything in the Mosiac law that a modern person finds to be abhorrent.

That said, let's give some quick background on Mosiac law. So in Exodus, we see the story of the Israelites living in Egypt as slaves. Moses, with God's help, convinces the Pharaoh to let the Israelites leave with food and gold. The Israelites start making their way through the desert when God hardens the heart of the Pharaoh to get him to chase the Israelites down so he can, through Moses and the Red Sea, show his power by killing a large portion of Egyptians. This seems to work and the Israelites start coming to Moses to get God's opinion on things (Exodus 18:15-16). God then explains to Moses that the people are wicked and God is righteous so God can't bless the people until there is a way for the people to cover their sins. This results in God giving Moses a list of laws for the people to follow and rules on how they are to proceed when someone doesn't follow one of these laws (Exodus 19:3-6). From my understanding- the laws should make the people righteous, but because God knows they won't be able to follow them to the letter, he allows for animal sacrifice to cover many sins- though some require the penalty of death in order to be made right in the eyes of God.

Now if you disagree with my summary of the Mosiac law and the circumstances surrounding it, you will likely disagree with everything I say from here on. I think that this is a fair interpretation of what happens in Exodus- but I'm open to other interpretations if they are available. The summary is not meant to hit all of the events leading to Moses at Sinai, but rather to hit the most important parts regarding the relationships between God and Moses, Moses and the people, and God and the people. For now, I'll continue to use Biblical references to support my criticism, but I don't intend to go into further detail on the Mosiac law than I did in my summary. 

The first perspective I want to approach this from is the literalist perspective. The literalist, is anyone who believes the Bible is literally true- that it is inerrant. From this perspective we need to take the books of Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy as literal in their description of events, laws and customs. In Exodus we see Moses going to Mt. Sinai and returning with decrees from God. At this time, God was like the King of Israel. We see later in the Bible that when the Israelites demand a king, God finds it somewhat offensive because that was the role he was in for the people.

So back to Exodus, God commands Moses to go tell the people what he said. God makes it clear that obeying these laws is the only way for him to be close to the people of Israel (Exodus 19:4-6). In Deuteronomy Moses points out that the laws of God are substantially different from the neighboring countries, enough to make them stand out (Deuteronomy 4:5-8). This implies that God is not writing laws to match the culture. If this is the case, if we take the Bible literally, it is apparent that these laws are designed by God to be counter-cultural.

The point becomes that the purpose of the Mosiac law is for God to make the people holy (or set apart) so that they may approach him in worship. It is literally his will, his moral code for the people. This includes the contents of Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy and some of Exodus. Therefore, someone who believes the Bible is literally true, cannot make the claim that the laws in these books are there because it was their "culture" since the rules were outlined specifically to change their current culture and to set them apart from the cultures around them.

Why does this matter? Because this is precisely were all the objectionable Old Testament laws on slavery come from, and they are there not because slavery was a part of the culture, but because God wanted his people to be able to own people as property (Leviticus 25:44-46). Had God seen this type of slavery as immoral, surely he would have denounced it like he did with women who weren't virgins upon being married (which carried a punishment of death, Deuteronomy 22:13-21) or adultery (which also carried the death penalty with it, Deuteronomy 22:22). 

It seems to me, incomprehensible to reconcile the slavery commands in the mosaic law with a God who is only ascribing them to appease a cultural norm. If you are a Biblical literalist, you either have to accept the forms of slavery described in the Mosiac law as moral or you have to deem your God immoral for allowing it. Of course you could throw out Biblical literalism altogether- so let's see where that takes us.

A person who accepts that the Bible was written by fallible men and therefore may carry along with it some unnecessary baggage may claim that this was a law ascribed by Moses but not by God. Or may say that God was trying to appease the economic needs of the people (though we saw him supply them with both food and gold from the Egyptians in Exodus 12:31-42). It seems that anyway you try to reconcile it, ignoring Biblical inerrancy/literalism, You run into further issues. I'll first take on why any question of the validity of this scripture introduces a much bigger issue.

If you can accept that some of the scripture, namely the Mosiac law, is somehow flawed, one has to consider why an almighty god, worthy of our praise, would allow his book to become corrupted in this way? What benefit is brought to this being by allowing people to misconstrue his intentions? Would it not be better for him to correct the record so as to not allow for people like me to object to his moral supremacy? If a god did exist that was omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent, would it not be more rational to ensure a clear message to your people as opposed to a muddied one? It seems to me this would be the case and that any god who would allow his scripture to be muddied would be less good (less benevolent) then a god who didn't allow such a thing and therefore this god wouldn't actually be "omnibenevolent". 

If instead of the flawed scripture approach, you find my argument that God was intentionally making laws counter to the current culture unconvincing and instead you believe he was trying to maintain their culture in some way, we have a new problem. If this is said to be the case, then how can we determine what is good or bad now in our current culture without new revelation. What would God say about abortion in a culture that widely accepts it (at least up to 12 weeks)? What would he say about homosexuality or transgender individuals if he was to create a new covenant now. The answer is we don't know- but if his morality is malleable and reliant on the culture of the land, then each country, each society, each culture, would have their own rules from God that apply to their specific set of traditions. In this case, who is to say what in our culture would be "bad" or "good" in the eyes of God.

Such ambiguity is an issue and we cannot make reliable predictions about. We would need to hear from God directly. Without such revelation, we are simply applying God's moral code for a culture that no longer exists dictate what we believe about God's will today.

I want to be clear, as an atheist, I am not taking a position on which of these is the correct way to view the Bible, but rather trying to point out the flaws in each interpretation of it as it relates to the moral issues in the Mosiac covenant. Some may say that they have no problem with the slavery as described in the Old Testament for one reason or another- that topic I will definitely be addressing in a subsequent blog. Some have also said in the past that there is no morality without God, so if I don't believe in a god of any kind then I can't say anything is "immoral". I of course disagree with this premise but I will also address this is in a subsequent blog.

For now, the only issue I wanted to address here was the three reasons I don't believe that you can explain away the immorality of God, as described in the Mosiac Law, through an appeal to the culture. First was because the Bible specifically claims that the Mosiac Law was sent from God to make the people holy and set apart from the nations around them. Second because any god who would allow for corruption in his book or in the passing on of his laws would be a god who isn't omnibenevolent. Lastly because if God's laws/commands were dependent on culture, we would require special revelation to know what God wants today, which is something we don't have.