History is filled with violence and the Bible is, at least in part, a history book. So why shouldn it contain violence?
It’s not the violence per se that bothers me; it is the biblical god’s role in the violent acts. The god of the Bible ordered Saul to kill “both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass” in 1 Samuel 15:3. And the Bible contains hundreds of other cruel acts of God, any one of which, if true, would be enough for me to reject the Bible and its vicious God. I do object, though, to the pointless violence in the Bible, even when God doesn’t seem to be directly involved. Judges 19, for example, is one of the most disgusting stories in all literature. If God was trying to communicate something in this chapter, I think I’d rather not know what it was.
