What is God's justification for killing infants?

[AgnosticBoy]

One issue that pushed me over to the agnostic side is the details about infants dying in the Bible. The OT details several instances of infants dying as part of a punishment. Genesis 7:23 provides a clear example in reference to Noah's flood:

23 And every living substance was destroyed which was upon the face of the ground, both man, and cattle, and the creeping things, and the fowl of the heaven; and they were destroyed from the earth: and Noah only remained alive, and they that were with him in the ark.

For debate:
1. Is there a common Christian response to this? Were all babies during the time, evil?
2. If there's not a common response, then what is the justification, if any?

 

[Multicolored Lemur]

These 11 verses turn Christians into Atheists. How do you explain them?

Certain verses in the Bible do more to cause people to become atheists than help people love and follow God. These are atheist maker verses.

redeeminggod.com

This guy acknowledges, yeah, definitely a problem. And he puts forward a couple of potential solutions.

 

[AgnosticBoy]

These 11 verses turn Christians into Atheists. How do you explain them?

Certain verses in the Bible do more to cause people to become atheists than help people love and follow God. These are atheist maker verses.

redeeminggod.com

This guy acknowledges, yeah, definitely a problem. And he puts forward a couple of potential solutions.

Out of the 3 solutions he offered, he accepted only this one:

3. Realize that the purpose of the text IS condemnation​

When we approach Scripture this way, we can agree with the Atheists about the moral repugnance of these violent texts, but then turn around and say that the reason God inspired these texts to be written in Scripture is not to justify such behavior and actions, but to challenge us to not do such things ourselves.

This would not be convincing to me because the author side-steps the issue. He only brings up passages that involve people being immoral in the Bible, but the concern here is when God does it. The issue here is the death of babies, and several places in the Bible it says that God did it or ordered for others to do it.

 

[Multicolored Lemur]

Out of the 3 solutions he offered, he accepted only this one:

This would not be convincing to me because the author side-steps the issue. He only brings up passages that involve people being immoral in the Bible, but the concern here is when God does it. The issue here is the death of babies, and several places in the Bible it says that God did it or ordered for others to do it.

I think it’s because the books of the Bible are written by human beings.

Now, what we still have going in our favor is that most religions have hit upon the Golden Rule. I’ve been surprised how long and seemingly complete this list is.

And we probably have other things as well.