I see a number of problems here;

First, Custador is not wrong about some of these horrors being commanded by your god, like killing babies and genocide. You can apply this to whatever context you like and apply your best exegesis, but you’re still left with the notion that killing people is bad by Christian standards (call it murder, call it killing, but it is generally thought not to be a good thing), yet your god has repeatedly commanded it, even on babies and women. The contradiction is glaring, and requires a lot of explanations and waving of arms where there should be easy answers. For example, the 10 commandments (which aren’t really 10, or revised 10, or however you wish to count) should make the moral basics simple, yet the simplicity of it is contradicted by the god who commanded them. Custador is not wrong in this, and it requires a more serious answer than pointing out that slavery and child rape somehow isn’t as clear cut yet omitting all the stuff that are approved horribles.

Second, two people can have what we all deem as good – even biblical – moral codes and follow them, yet the two can be very different. The bible is full of rules and laws, and within them is the supposed moral guidelines from your god. Should we stone people who work on Saturdays / Sundays? It should be a fairly simple thing, yet no Christian could ever tell me why this rule can be overlooked while others can’t. The context of each “rule” seems to, in lack of a better term, evolve with the religious culture that follows them. If Paul saw what women were doing in churches these days, he’d have a stroke, yet most Christian denominations do not have a problem with women being treated as real people, even with a religious gout and passion, preaching or, you know, not wear a head scarf. Things like that. From the bible you can read several moral codes that contradict each other on various levels of subtleties, so where do we draw the line? What is acceptable drift from your gods will and what is an abomination? These drifts are a point of discussion about the absoluteness of your god’s so-called creation, such that if he created everything including morals and the nature of humankind, then why can we develop different yet good moral codes? (I am assuming already that you’re going to say that there’s only one good moral code, and everybody who doesn’t subscribe to it, whatever it might be, are doing something wrong and under influence of evil. The devil influencing us to create good moral codes that aren’t good in some specific way?)

“What may seem capricious or cruel to us serves a divine purpose we either aren’t privy to, or we refuse to entertain because of the darkness within us. The second option is more likely.”

So instead of recognizing evil and call it for what it is, you accept that there’s a thing such as necessary evil, and it is acceptable for this evil to continue because your god hasn’t told you the details of it. Hmm. Only a calvinist with denial of the normative free-will could endorse such a crappy argument. Your god cannot be very powerful or smart if evil is necessary for anything; at least main-stream free-will toutin’ people can blame indeterminism for evil being necessarily ignored by a god that supposedly love them. Some powerful god that is; can’t even seem to be able to communicate clearly some of what is regarded as the most important thing EVAH for people.

“If you trust that God is as he reveals himself in the Bible, then this leap of faith is easy to make.”

Yes, it’s easy to see your god as a pretty damn evil entity that somehow requires the murder of babies to exist – to even command it! – instead of giving them or us options.

Well, I agree with the above comments, but I also see what you are saying. That God defines what’s good, so we can’t use our own definitions to judge him. Héhé, that’s clever. Perfect way to make scripture work when it just seems broken, as your video said the other day. You do realize that we can make any story work with clever adjustments like that. All I can say then is that I disagree with His definition, I reject some of what God thinks is good (and Jesus seems to have himself, on some points, like murdering women for committing adultery -> and you can say that He is God, so He can decide when to observe His own laws and when not to, but that wasn’t a nice example to be giving if He didn’t want it followed. And anyway, since God recommended such murders in the Old Testament, He definitely seems to have undergone therapy, as some comedians like to say).

“All that said, can atheists be moral without God? I’ll explain why I don’t think so tomorrow,”

I guess you’re going to say that when we do follow God’s laws, we are influenced by his spirit unconsciously, and/or that we can’t be “perfectly good” without God, as you’ve said before. I guess we’d have to do the other good things, like spend our lives adoring Him to please Him, putting aside 52 days per year (for that is good, and truly good -> I mean in God’s sense), and disapprove of homosexuality, make our potentially homosexual children feel they are evil (making sure to tell them they will go to Hell, without insisting, as you recommended in a recent post). Then, following such perfectly good recommendations from our Perfect Creator, we would be able to be perfectly good, whether we realized it or not.

Hehe: “God defines what’s good, so we can’t use our own definitions to judge him”

To follow up on this a bit, the Christian claim is that we are part of that creation and we are created in his gods image (another phrase that no one seems to know what means). But isn’t the claim of the fall that we now posses knowledge of good and evil? This shouldn’t be hard; the fall gives us the ability to see your gods evil deeds for what they are. No wonder he’s pissed off at us, and no wonder there’s so much denominational quarrels given we known good from evil, and then we read the bible.