It looks like Dawkins has not read enough and simply jumps to conclusions

And, by the way, J.J., you’re right to say that my “failure” to cite specific texts from the 8th-century prophets stems from a (perhaps mistaken) assumption that my readers are familiar enough with the prophets to know what I’m talking about. That’s probably an unfair and unwarranted assumption.

First, I think you (J.J.) have rightly understood one of my major points, namely, that Dawkins explicitly says (I’m “reading” the audio version, remember) he’s not attacking Yahweh, Baal, Zeus, Wotan, or any particular God, but rather the very idea of a god, and he explicitly says that the God Hypothesis should not stand or fall with its “most unlovely instantiation,” Yahweh. And yet there’s a lot of Yahweh-bashing in chapter 2. Why? The weak justification given in chapter 2 is that Dawkins’s readers will be most familiar with the Judeo-Christian portrayal of God, but why privilege familiarity over relevance?

Second, allow me to comment on the whole debate you’ve been having, chiefly with Robin, over the issue of Yahweh’s putative “obsession with the smell of charred flesh” (and forgive me if I’m quoting that imprecisely). My point in introducing the prophets was not to argue that no biblical tradition portrayed God as interested in sacrifices, but precisely to show that the biblical tradents were divided amongst themselves on this point. The eighth-century prophets (you’ve cited the most obvious and relevant passages over on the JREF forum) were sharply critical of the sacrificial cult of their day—and not because it was “not according to law,” but because they found ritual an offensive substitute for ethics. I am probably oversimplifying this a bit, but that’s the gist of it. That prophetic criticism of sacrificial ritual is not by any means a monolithic biblical outlook, but neither is the priestly promotion of the sacrificial ritual a monolithic biblical outlook.

Obviously, Dawkins did not invent the idea of Yahweh being obsessed with sacrifices out of thin air. But it’s quite instructive to note that all of the references to sacrifices as a “pleasing odor” occur in the Torah—once in Genesis 8, three references in Exodus, about a dozen and a half in Leviticus and the same quantity in Numbers—and in Ezekiel, but in Ezekiel the phrase refers to sacrifices offered to other gods, not to Yahweh. The criticism of the sacrificial cult is concentrated in prophetic texts. The promotion of the sacrificial cult is concentrated in priestly texts (and illustrated in narratives, to be fair). The whole point is that the biblical traditions aren’t monovocal on this matter. As I wrote before, if Isaiah, Amos, Micah, and (much later) Jeremiah are to be believed, Yahweh was a big critic of the Israelite and Judean sacrificial cults. For balance, of course, one could also say that if the priestly tradents are to be believed, Yahweh was a big booster of the sacrificial cults. Presenting only one side of this internal Israelite/Judean theological debate as if it were the biblical perspective under-represents the literary and historical facts (and by “historical” here, I don’t mean the reality of Yahweh, whatever that might or might not be, but the reality of Israelite/Judean thinking about Yahweh).

I could comment on other specifics of the ongoing discussion at JREF, but that would just be nitpicking.

http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?postid=2243539#post2243539

I see that G. M. Grena already mentioned that the word is “filicidal,” a person who kills his own son.

On January 2 I will be posting a preview of Dawkin’s book on my blog and I will link your posts to my post.

Claude Mariottini