Christians - Justify This!

A question for all the Christians (or Jews) out there who think their god is so wonderful. How do you reconcile a god of love with the following?

In Exodus we have God hardening Pharaoh’s heart. Now, this was so that the Pharaoh wouldn’t allow Moses to leave with the Israelites. Apologetics seems to say that god knew that the Pharaoh would harden his heart, so why did god have to do anything to cause it? God can do anything, why not simply change the Pharaoh’s mind – hardening his heart is just as much a removal of his free will as changing his mind would be. This entire scenario makes no sense, other than to allow the biblical writers to portray their god as all powerful, but it also opens up the following argument:-

The Bible says the final plague visited on Egypt by god was the death of the first born; the first born son of every person would die as god passed through the land.

Where is the cut off point though, is it just children, or adults too? What if you have a mother and father who’s first born son is himself married with a male child? Did god kill both the son and his son, leaving the grandparents mourning the loss of their son and their grandson and a wife mourning the loss of her husband and her son? Did the parents of the child have to be alive at the time, or would the grandfather have died if he were a first born? I’ve yet to see this explained by anybody.

To make the situation worse, god even kills the first born of the slaves, who would have had no say in the actions of the Pharaoh – not that the Egyptians would have either, given it was hardly a democracy. God’s not even content with confining his bloodlust to man, he deems that the first born of all the cattle deserve to die. Presumably cows were big supporters of the slavery of Israelites, you can tell from their mooing!

What is the reason of this malicious act; for god to demonstrate his power so that the Pharaoh would allow the Israelites to leave. Yet ask yourself this – what had any of these people done to deserve such an appalling act be committed against them? They had no way of influencing the Pharaoh, doubtless many didn’t even own any slaves. This entire murder spree was against a populace who were powerless and innocent.

So what can you honestly say of a god capable of such inhuman barbarity and arbitrary slaughter of innocent people (and animals) other than they must, by any moral definition, be condemned as evil. To excuse such actions must surely require such an abdication of all morality as to render the person a sociopath.

Of course any theists reading this will be thinking “What you atheists don’t understand is this …”