Here’s a silly anti-atheist trope that I see from time to time, but have never taken the trouble to document until now:

An argument (but, to be blunt, it frequently is not made as an argument but merely as an assertion) against the reality of God’s existence which is popular amongst village-atheists-with-intenet-connections is that the God-of-the-Bible is a moral monster.

Obviously this is a silly argument. “The God of the Bible is a moral monster” doesn’t directly entail “there is no God of any kind,” nor is there any half-plausible way I’ve ever seen to get from one point to another. Trouble is, the idea that atheist frequently claim this is nonsense. I’ve never seen it happen, and Ilion (the author of the quoted post) doesn’t provide a single example.

At worst, there may be some people who illegitimately try to change the subject from the existence of God to the (im)morality of the Bible. But sometimes, discussing the (im)morality of the Bible is what people want to talk about. And there are legitimate reasons for bringing it up in debates about the existence of God: if it’s being argued that God must exist because the Bible is the only possible source of legitimate moral authority, it makes sense to argue that the Bible isn’t a legitimate source of moral authority. Also, the monstrous things attributed to God in the Bible are useful for illustrating problems with more generic versions of the moral argument: for examples of where I’ve done this: I did this in my post on debating William Lane Craig, as well as in the Evaluating Christianity discussion of the moral argument.

As an aside: Ilion’s post is borderline case of the atheism is game, in this case, conflating atheism with materialism:

For, IF the world itself *just is* (i.e. the world was not intended-and-created, but rather exists in its own right) — and, after all, this belief/assertion is a primary and non-negotiable commitment of atheism — THEN there can exist only that which is grounded in, and reducible to, matter-energy moving in time-space.

Now, there’s a bit of an argument here, but it depends on assuming that the existence of anything that is not matter-energy would require intention. Where on earth does this assumption come from?