The story of Abraham and Isaac, in the Old Testament, is one of the best known in the Bible. Abraham and his wife can’t have a child until old age, then miraculously they have a son, and then God tells Abraham to sacrifice his long-awaited child, which he accepts without question. At the last possible moment, God tells Abraham to stop, as it was all just a test, and to sacrifice an animal instead.
Incredibly enough, Abraham’s actions are considered “good” by most Christians, even though we probably value human life quite higher than we did thousands — or even hundreds — of years ago. However, due to precisely the latter fact, many people explain that part of the bible as “not literal”, “just an allegory”, or “simply a moral lesson”.
Vjack of Atheist Revolution addresses that contradiction: even if that is just “an allegory”, it’s an allegory to what? Certainly, in modern moral terms, there’s nothing to learn from a father ready to kill his infant child. Besides, many Christians don’t believe it to be “just an allegory”: many fundamentalists, especially in America, believe in the Bible (with all its absurdities, atrocities and contradictions) literally.
As for choosing which parts of the Bible to take literally and which ones not to, I have addressed it in the past, such as here. In short: if you accept that the Bible is the inspired word of God, then, for a human to decide which parts come from God and which don’t, or to decide which are literal and which aren’t, is an act of supreme arrogance, it’s believing you “know better than God”.
But what about the morality of this tale, itself?
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