DrTonstad,
You invoke grim, gruesome, ghastly and grisly images of children being burned alive in the Holocaust. The six million victims of Hitler, included countless babies, toddlers, children, and teenagers, of whom, Anne Frank, of Amsterdam is the most poignant, perturbing and eloquent example.
Death by drowning is also gruesome, but God had zero compassion nor compunction about drowning huge numbers of children in Noah’s flood. What is more sadistic is the drowning of millions of innocemt animals ( those saved in the Ark were a minuscule fraction of the total animal population on the planet at the time ).
God’s vehement, vociferous instructions to Israel, to ethnically cleanse surrounding tribes, demanded the slaughter of babes, infants, toddlers, and teenagers along with all the livestock owned by these neighboring peoples.
The Israelites themselves practiced a death cult, sacrificing countless innocent animals in ritualistic barbarity.
Were these ethnic cleansings, exterminations, and mass exécutions meant to inure, toughen and callous the good Angels to all future genocides ??
Why were the Angels not clamoring to God to end the carnage of the Holocaust ?? Was one more genocide merely banal, bland, blah to them after so many God ordained genocides in the OT ??
The Armenian, Bosnian, Rwandan, Pol Pot genocides elicited zero concern from the “unfallen beings on other planets “. It was all “ old hat “ to them ! One more atrocity to ignore !
An omniscient God, who foresaw all these horrors, apparently lacked the compassion to fast forward the Second Coming so that these atrocities could have been avoided!
He sadistically awaits to inflict a “ time of trouble such as never was “ before the final Apocalypse! As if the Holocaust was not the essence of evil, the archetypal atrocity, the ultimate affront to humanity — we have to expect worse?
So much sadism and cruelty has been catalogued in the OT that future “ smoke of their torment “ and “ endless burning “ merely emphasize a sadistic God, lacking in compassion for humankind,