Did God command Abraham to perform a human sacrifice?

One of the most well known Bible stories, often told in Sunday Schools, is that of Abraham and Isaac. Abraham is told by God that to prove his faith, he must take his son up to the top of a mountain, and kill him as a sacrifice. Abraham obeys, and just before delivering the killing blow, God stops him and tells him that he has passed the test, and his son can live.
This story rubs some people the wrong way, understandably so. However, what this short-hand version leaves out is the stuff that makes the terrifying command make a lot more sense. It's not unusual that someone who is only familiar with this version will ask "What would you do if God told you to kill someone you love?" expecting to put you in a catch 22 situation where you either have to admit you'd be willing to murder, or you'd be willing to disobey God. What is missing is a lot of important context. (Context, as usual).

Is Old Testament God an angry spiteful tyrant?

Christianity teaches that God is the embodiment of love. This comes through by various explicit scriptures...

God is love -- 1 John 4:8

...and also through the life of Jesus, who was God in human flesh. Jesus' actions are clearly those of loving, caring, humble, person and those are generally what we look to when thinking of a Christian role model.

But very often we find people making out that Old Testament God is a very different character to New Testament God and Jesus, even though they are the same.
In one particularly hilarious example from the show 'Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt', a character at one point says, "Oh, thank angry Old Testament God, the one who's always threatening to kill children to prove a point!". While later, another character, Titus, while praying says, "Forgive me friendly New Testament God after you settled down and had a family."

Was it fair for God to flood the world in the days of Noah?

So when sceptics want an example of times that God was cruel and unfair and went way overboard with dishing out punishments, what better example is there than the time he drowned every living thing on the planet with the exception of one family and a selection of animals?
Doubly offensive to them is that Christians often use this one as a favourite children's story.

So the basic set up that everyone knows is that Noah and his family were the only people following God, and the rest of the world had got nasty and were doing their own thing. So God wanted to start over and just keep the good stuff.
This is actually a great foreshadowing to the end times, and is even referred to by New Testament writers as a comparison. Just like how in the Flood, water washed away the wickedness and made things good and new again, in the end times the same thing will be accomplished with holy fire (2 Peter 3:6-7). '1 Peter 3:29-30' tells us that baptism is a symbol which corresponds to Noah's Flood, which again is making the point that it is all about becoming reconciled with God, and being made new.

But the point sceptics try to make is that this mass drowning was an extremely harsh judgement.
Let's look at the connection Noah's Flood has to the end times. In the final judgement, those who do not choose God will be destroyed. So, Noah's Flood, being a precursor to that, shows us these people as examples of that. They turned away from God and were destroyed so that the good and faithful could live in a better world without them.
As detailed in my article on God's plan, God's goal is to create a perfect world. There is no room in a perfect world for sinners.

Does God cast people into Hellfire?

Sceptics like to point to Medieval paintings of torture and hellfire and demons with pitchforks and tell us that God throws sinners into this imaginary place.
Of course none of this is Biblical.

Have a look at A-rough-guide-to-God's-plan for a Scripture based detailed look at some of this.
For a more brief version stay put here.

Firstly. The idea of flaming pools of lava and torture racks and so on is an artistic invention that came about centuries after the Bible was finished. It is not what the Bible describes.
I myself am an annihilationist, which means I believe that those who don't go to Heaven, will be wiped from existence altogether. There are a lot of reasons why I hold this view, but as a quick pointer 'Matthew 10:28' just about covers it: "And do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell."

Reasons to Believe in God In Simple English

Often the debate about God's existence feels like it belongs to the philosophers with their doctorates and essays full of complicated words. But God is for everybody, and so his existence should be clear to everybody - just like the book of Romans suggests.

For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse. -- Romans 1:20 (NIV)

But the book of Romans also tells us about truth being suppressed. It seems to me that a lot of God's truth has been suppressed. So it might not be the case that each individual suppresses the truth for themselves, but they might be victims of other people suppressing it for them.

I believe it is hugely important for this information to be public knowledge, and not just kept by the intellectual elites who's careers revolve around it. There is far too much misinformation in the world, especially with the internet and the ease that anybody can share their opinions. There are people who believe that the Earth is flat, there are people who believe that we never landed on the moon, there are people who believe dinosaurs never existed, there are people who think the Holocaust never happened. These are extreme cases, but just like these people, there are many people in the world who have been duped by other ideas in exactly the same way. People believe that all cowboys wore stetsons, people believe that knights needed to be put on horses by crane, people believe that Captain Kirk said "Beam me up Scotty". Misinformation spreads easily, and for many reasons. When this happens, the truth becomes suppressed. So it is very important that we take care to check what we believe and make sure it lines up with truth.

So what follows are a few reasons, based entirely in truth, that tell us without doubt that God is real. I aim to keep this as simple as possible, so I will not go into much depth on each, and I encourage you to read more on any subject that takes your interest. I'll also comment that these are not even all of the reasons that are available to us. This is just a small selection of some of the best.

The Islamic Dilemma - Or Why Islam is Definitely a False Religion

I think this is the knock down, ultimate argument that utterly destroys any credibility that Islam might have. It’s called the ‘Islamic Dilemma’, made famous by David Wood.

I will only be using the Qur'an for this, although Wood has been known to support it with hadiths as well. The reason I will be leaving aside the hadiths, is that using the Qur'an is a stronger case. The Qur'an is essentially the Muslim equivalent to our Bible. It’s the Holy Scripture from God himself. The hadiths are commentaries on it and biographies of Muhammad. Some Muslims treat them as authoritative like the Scripture, but not all do, and even those who do might try to wriggle out of the conclusion by suggesting that the particular hadith you are referring to isn’t trustworthy. So it’s best to stick to the Qur'an, because a Muslim can never say that you can’t trust Allah’s own book.

The Islamic Dilemma itself is very straight forward, but it takes a little bit of ground work to get to it, so let’s start with that.

Muslims are commanded in the Qur'an to say:

Why Can There Be No Moral Values If God Does Not Exist?

I very often find myself defending the Moral Argument for God's existence. I don't know why either, because it's far from my favourite.  My reason being that I find Premise 1 to be very easy to explain, while Premise 2 is very difficult, if not impossible, to support using empirical data. More on that later.

P1: If God does not exist, Objective Moral Values do not exist.
P2: Objective Moral Values do exist.
C: Therefore God exists.

Anyway, the strange thing I find when discussing this argument, is that many atheists think that P2 is actually obviously true and needs little defence, while P1 has no support whatsoever. So having been given P2 as a freebie, I generally find myself in a situation where all I need do is explain why P1 is so very clear, and that should be the end of it, and the atheist should embrace theism (or give up P2).

What actually happens, is that I will explain why P1 is obviously the case, but will be given various responses that are supposed to undermine what I have said. Each one of them misses the mark. It seems to me that a lot of these responses that try to show that atheism can account for objective morality, are actually examples of when people think that 'any response is a sufficient response'. What I mean by that is, that you might explain something with absolute clarity, and leave no gaps or details unchecked, but the person you are speaking to gives an objection and no matter the content of the objection, they feel as though simply being able to say something in reply means that they have destroyed the argument. Often the objection will be something that was already covered in the original explanation.

In this article, I will be explaining my take on the Moral Argument for God's Existence, and particularly why I find Premise 1 to be so conclusive.