Please stop talking bollocks. The assertion "the God of the Bible is evil and should mend its ways" is no more admitting its existence than the assertion " Voldemort is evil and should mend his ways" is admitting the existence of Lord Voldemort. You can discuss a literary character without having to concede it exists.
"Discuss" is the operative word here. I don't concede that repeating
ad nauseam the mantram "The god of the bible is an evil psycho" constitutes discussion*. I will concede your final comment - up to a point. But since I was specifically referring to the way LR writes about these matters, this might merit a little psychological investigation (any takers?). You only have to note what she wrote about a rather fine text from Isaiah above, commenting something like "The god of the bible shouldn't be preaching, since it is wholly evil". I challenge anyone to make sense of the mental gymnastics involved here: the non-existent god of the bible, who has sometimes been written about performing decidedly evil deeds by
different people over hundreds of years, is now written about by a different prophet (one of the 3 or more Isaiahs), and is now (still non-existent) exorting its followers to behave in morally unimpeachable ways. In effect, this is accusing a non-existent entity of
hypocrisy . What the fuck is that all about?
And this is why your analogy with Voldemort doesn't really work: a writer such as J.K. Rowling may create a single character who is evil and hypocritical, and a good writer will always create characters full of moral ambiguities. But these characteristics are presented as the writer's
own personal view of their own personal creation. In that sense, you can discuss the merits or defects of a non-existent character.
However, God as referred to by the various prophets is not like this at all, whether IT exists or doesn't exist. In fact, it doesn't require an in-depth examination of the way the prophets each refer to God to realise that many of them were deliberately
reacting to and
correcting the views of other prophets, so different these images of God can be seen to be. In a significant instance, it may well be that a lot of them were not aware of the Adam and Eve story at all, since they never refer to it. If they were aware of it, they obviously didn't consider it of any significance. (Richard Elliot Friedman in "Who Wrote the Bible" gives a very persuasive argument of how some prophets deliberately reacted to accounts of God's requirements and actions written by other prophets)
*If you want some
real discussion from an atheist talking about the Old Testament, you can't do better than Nietzsche's
Beyond Good and Evil, where he speaks admiringly of some of the OT prophets. He has far more insight in this regard than Christopher Hitchens.
