We continue considering the various comments made by Oleg Dei who is the founder, president and publisher of the Science Club of Long Island. While the club claims to be about science, it is an anti-Christian support group and, apparently, Dei’s job description also includes, as he puts it, “I eat stupid dumb*** Christians for lunch!” (expletive removed).
His comments came about due to the essay Science Club of Long Island (which was originally posted at the blog Atheism is Dead which is one of the website True Freethinker’s predecessors).
Oleg provides another verse thusly in seeking to ascertain whence comes evil:
1 Samuel 16:14 But the Spirit of the LORD departed from Saul, and an evil spirit from the LORD troubled him.
In short, the Israelites chose Saul as king because he looked the part. Yet, Saul took it upon himself to act as king and priest, etc. YHVH affirmed that He had chosen David to be king thus a contentious relationship develops between the two. Saul attempting to take David’s life on occasion and David had occasion to take Saul’s but never even attempted it.
Eventually, due to his lack of obedience to YHVH’s expectations for a king of Israel. Thus, the Spirit of the LORD departed from Saul, and an evil, bad, disagreeable, malignant, unpleasant spirit from the LORD troubled him. Thereafter, “Saul’s servants said to him, ‘Surely, a distressing spirit from God is troubling you. Let our master now command your servants, who are before you, to seek out a man who is a skillful player on the harp. And it shall be that he will play it with his hand when the evil spirit from God is upon you, and you shall be well.’” Clearly, the reference is to a mood, a state of emotions, a state of mind, a state of soul that they thought could be treated via some easy listening music. The NKJV has a more contextual term for “evil” which is “distressing.”
Oleg provides another verse thusly:
1 Kings 9:9 .therefore hath the LORD brought upon them all this evil.
When a quotation begins with the word “therefore” you instantly know that something, the preface, is missing. Lesson learned: when you see a therefore find out what it is there for.
The text is very straight forward in that it proposes an if, then situation:
And it came to pass, when Solomon had finished building the house of the LORD and the king’s house…that the LORD appeared to Solomon…And the LORD said to him: “…if you walk before Me…to do according to all that I have commanded you, and if you keep My statutes and My judgments, then I will establish the throne of your kingdom over Israel forever…
Butif you or your sons at all turn from following Me, and do not keep My commandments and My statutes which I have set before you, but go and serve other gods and worship them, then I will cut off Israel from the land which I have given them; and this house which I have consecrated for My name I will cast out of My sight. Israel will be a proverb and a byword among all peoples.
And as for this house, which is exalted, everyone who passes by it will be astonished and will hiss, and say, ‘Why has the LORD done thus to this land and to this house?’ Then they will answer, ‘Because they forsook the LORD their God, who brought their fathers out of the land of Egypt, and have embraced other gods, and worshiped them and served them; therefore the LORD has brought all this evil on them.’”
Again, the NKJV has a more appropriate term, “calamity” for “evil.”
These are all of the examples that Oleg Dei provided. But do you recall what he stated was the purpose of quoting these fragments of statements, these partial verses? It was, “Where does evil come from?...Let us see what the source of evil really is, according to the Bible.” And this was stated in counter distinction to the claim that evil human free will choices to commit evil. Thus, none of his examples make a point for him since they all pertain to the utilization of some sort of evil, bad, disagreeable, malignant, unpleasant circumstance and none of them stated that in the beginning God created evil.
Moreover, Oleg Dei also wrote:
The Old Testament paints God as a blood thirsty killer in addition there are many passages that state that God created evil himself.
In fact, during the event of the creation week we read that YHVH stated, “it was good…it was good…it was good…it was good…it was good…it was good…it was very good.” And then, finally, “It is not good that man should be alone; I will make him a helper comparable to him…” Of course, that it is not “good” does not mean that it was “evil” but that it was not ideal—and Adam had to be there and to know this fact so that he would recognize His need for Eve.
When we run into evil is that “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil” was placed in the Garden of Eden. Of course, knowledge of evil and performance of evil are vastly different. The tree had to be there in order to provide a fair chance at making a free will choice. They made the choice and the rest is redemptive history.
Next Oleg Dei states,
So you like to worship an evil and blood thirsty God, who kills at the drop of a hat.
As a side note: the problem with reacting and writing emotionally is that he ends up qualifying his statement as pertaining to a God “who kills at the drop of a hat.” Thus, even if Oleg is successful at proving that God is “an evil and blood thirsty God” but we could show that God does not do evil or thirst after blood “at the drop of a hat,” his objections would fail.
In any regard, Oleg provides three points and concludes by outing himself as a theologian. This is a very, very typical move in fact: all atheists are theologians, as we will see.
Point 1:
1. God drowns the whole earth.
In Genesis 7:21–23, God drowns the entire population of the earth: men, women, children, and fetuses. Only a single family survives. In Matthew 24:37–42, the evil Jesus approves of this genocide and plans to repeat it when he returns.
This is what was previously meant, in this series, about how first atheists complain that YHVH does nothing about evil and then, when they find out what He has done, is doing and will ultimately do, they complain about that as well.
So, “God drowns the entire population of the earth: men, women, children, and” Oleg adds, “fetuses.” But why reference fetuses? After all, previously Oleg was quoted as expressing hopes that I had been aborted. Moreover, keep in mind that he cannot condemn evil without appealing to an absolute standard for good. Yet, doing so would conclude a moral law / code giver, a giver we call God.
Also, on his atheistic-Darwinian-evolutionary view the men, women, children, and fetuses who drowned were less fit, could not survive as the fittest and so the great floor played a beneficial role in our evolution (the same way that many celebrity New Atheists claim that rape played a beneficial role in our evolution and is not absolutely immoral—see Atheism, the Bible, Rape and EvilBible.com, part 6 of 6).
The Great Flood occurred because, “the LORD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually…the earth is filled with violence” (Genesis 6:5, 13).
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