The following is a guest post by OpenDiary blogger Atheist Under Ur Bed. This is part of an ongoing series that will be posted each Monday. You can read the introduction to this series by clicking here.

Good morning, class! And welcome to another session of Monday School. Whether you’re a long-time student or a new transfer, I hope you’ll find that this course lives up to its billing as “The Rational Corrective To All That Nonsense You Learned Yesterday!” Let’s all open our minds to atheism and begin, shall we?

The Old Testament’s account of how the ancient Hebrews went from slavery in Egypt to freedom in the Promised Land with the help of Moses is one of its most famous and important. Yet many, many problems render it difficult to accept as true.

Consider:

1) The Bible is our only source for the stories associated with Moses.

They are inherently suspect as one-sided accounts written long after the fact by people with a vested interest in them. “[T]here is no record outside the Bible of Israelites in Egypt, of their enslavement, and of their escape. In particular, none of the events in Exodus are to be found anywhere in the Egyptian records uncovered by modern archaeologists.” - Asimov’s Guide to the Bible: A Historical Look at the Old and New Testaments, p. 125-126.

2) The Bible’s story of Moses is less than unique.

“The few details which the Bible gives about the personal life of Moses represent him as the typical hero of national legend, who comes into the world and departs from it in an aura of mystery. He is exposed in infancy beside a river and rescued by a princess, and at the close of his career he disappears on a hilltop. His ‘call’ is authenticated by three miraculous signs, and he is equipped with a wonder-working rod which divides a sea or lake, makes the bitter waters sweet, and produces a stream from a rock. These traits are abundantly paralleled elsewhere in folk literature.” -Myth, Legend, and Custom in the Old Testament, Theodor H. Gaster, p. 224.

3) The Bible dates the stories of Moses to a time when they almost certainly could not have occurred.

“One theory takes literally the statement in 1 Kings 6:1 that the Exodus from Egypt occurred 480 years prior to the time Solomon began building the Temple in Jerusalem. This occurred in the fourth year of his reign, about 960 BCE; therefore, the Exodus would date about 1440 BCE. This conclusion, however, is at variance with most of the biblical and archaeological evidence.” - The Encyclopedia Britannica, “Moses”

4) A Sloppy God

As in the Bible’s stories about Creation, Adam and Eve, the Flood, and the Tower of Babel, God is once again depicted as using very sloppy means to solve problems He could have fixed in much better ways – or simply prevented from arising in the first place. In this case, His main problem is getting the enslaved Hebrews out of Egypt. How did God ever allow this problem to arise in the first place? How could He ever have allowed His “Chosen People” to fall so low? It seems that if they deserved to be enslaved, they never should have been “chosen” by an all-knowing, all-powerful God to begin with. If they didn’t deserve to be enslaved, it seems that an all-good God wouldn’t have allowed it to occur.

5) A Tardy God

Having allowed His “Chosen People” to become enslaved, why did God allow them to live in slavery for over 400 years before coming to their rescue? If the Bible is to be believed, whole generations of Hebrews were born into slavery, lived lives as slaves, and died as slaves through no fault of their own. Such evil is impossible to reconcile with the existence of an all-good God. Calling the victims of this slavery God’s “Chosen People” sharpens the absurdity of this the way salt sharpens the pain of a wound. How much better to have been a “God forsaken” Egyptian during those 400 years!

6) An Unneeded God?

By the time God did decide to come to the aid of the Hebrews, the Bible says that the Egyptian Pharaoh thought those Hebrews to be more numerous and mightier than his own people (Exodus 1:9). If that was in fact the case, why did they need God’s help at all to leave Egypt?

7) A God Who Himself Needs Help?

Once God has decided to help the Hebrews, He chooses Moses as His agent. Why did He choose anyone? Why didn’t He just magically whisk the Hebrews out of Egypt through a simple act of will? Why does a supposedly omnipotent being keep having to choose people like Adam and Noah and Moses to help Him achieve His purposes?

8) Moses: God’s Immoral Choice

Having decided to choose anyone as His agent, how could an all-good God have chosen Moses – a murderer? (See Exodus 2:12.) God had earlier told Noah “Whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed” (Genesis 9:6). Yet He not only fails to apply this rule of His to Moses after Moses slays an Egyptian, He actually rewards Moses with a leadership position.

9) Moses: God’s Unqualified Choice

How could God choose Moses for that leadership position when Moses was a poor public speaker? (See Exodus 4:10.) Why does He tell Moses to trust in Him – the maker of all mouths – to make things right, then “solve” the problem by telling Moses to get Aaron to serve as his spokesman? Once again, an allegedly perfect God uses a less efficient means when it was in His power to use a perfect one; that is to say, He could have given Moses himself spellbinding eloquence. As it is, Aaron’s presence seems more like a fortunate happenstance which was attributed to God by later writers interested in furthering their theology than a genuine case of divine intervention which wouldn’t have needed such a sloppy middleman to achieve God’s goals.

10) God’s Strange Respect For Immoral Human Authority

Having chosen Moses as His agent, why does God order Moses to get Pharaoh’s permission for the Hebrews to leave? Why didn’t He just tell Moses to revolt and lead the Hebrews away? As with Paul’s later exhortations for slaves to obey their masters and all citizens to obey their leaders, the Bible here displays a bizarre respect for authority even when that authority is clearly immoral.

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That’s all for this week’s class. Next time: A detailed analysis of the race between God and the Hebrews to be the first to strain our gullibility past the breaking point.

Extra Credit Homework Assignment: Write a short report on which act of Moses most offends your moral sense and why.

Go to Part 2