Is the God of the Bible compatible with morality?

Raymond D. Bradley, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Simon Fraser University, in an article titled A Moral Argument for Atheism (1999, see @ infidels.org) gives this definition of objective morality [some believe that it would be more appropriate to speak of "universal morality"]:

[By objective morality] [w]e mean a set of moral truths that would remain true no matter what any individual or social group thought or desired.

He goes on to give a few examples of moral principles that he considers to be paradigms of objective moral truths:

P1: It is morally wrong to deliberately and mercilessly slaughter men, women, and children who are innocent of any serious wrongdoing.

P2. It is morally wrong to provide one's troops with young women captives with the prospect of their being used as sex-slaves.

P3. It is morally wrong to make people cannibalize their friends and family.

P4. It is morally wrong to practise human sacrifice, by burning or otherwise.

P5. It is morally wrong to torture people endlessly for their beliefs.

For each of the 5 above principles, Bradley give examples, from the Bible, whereby the God of the Bible would have repeatedly infringed each and every one of them:

I1. In violation of P1, for instance, God himself drowned the whole human race except Noah and his family [Gen. 7:23]; he punished King David for carrying out a census that he himself had ordered and then complied with David's request that others be punished instead of him by sending a plague to kill 70,000 people [II Sam. 24:1-15]; and he commanded Joshua to kill old and young, little children, maidens, and women (the inhabitants of some 31 kingdoms) while pursuing his genocidal practices of ethnic cleansing in the lands that orthodox Jews still regard as part of Greater Israel [see Josh., chapter 10 in particular]. These are just three out of hundreds of examples of God's violations of P1.

I2. In violation of P2, after commanding soldiers to slaughter all the Midianite men, women, and young boys without mercy, God permitted the soldiers to use the 32,000 surviving virgins for themselves. [Num. 31:17-18].

I3. In violation of P3, God repeatedly says he has made, or will make, people cannibalize their own children, husbands, wives, parents, and friends because they haven't obeyed him. [Lev 26:29, Deut 28:53-57, Jer 19:9, Ezek 5:10]

I4. In violation of P4, God condoned Jephthah's act in sacrificing his only child as a burnt offering to God [Judg. 11:30-39].

I5. Finally, in violation of P5, God's own sacrificial "Lamb," Jesus, will watch as he tortures most members of the human race for ever and ever, mainly because they haven't believed in him. The book of Revelation tells us that "everyone whose name has not been written from the foundation of the world in the book of life of the Lamb who has been slain" [Rev. 13:8] will go to Hell where they "will be tormented with fire and brimstone in the presence of the holy angels and in the presence of the Lamb; and the smoke of their torment goes up forever and ever: and they have no rest day or night" [Rev. 14:10-11].

In regard to I4, some have adopted the strategy of denying that Judges 11:30-39 speaks at all of Jephthah "sacrificing his only child as a burnt offering to God", but it would "only" be relative to Jephthah dedicating his daughter to the service of the Tabernacle at Shiloh as "sacred prostitute". Apart from the rather dubious morality and compatibility with the dictates of the God of the Bible of this imaginative hypothesis, let's leave aside this specific discussion, and let's concentrate on the 4 other points.

In his article, Raymond D. Bradley goes on to say that biblical theists are confronted with a logical quandary which strikes at the very heart of their belief that the God of Scripture is holy.

According to Bradley they cannot, without contradiction, believe all four of the statements:

(1) Any act that God commits, causes, commands, or condones is morally permissible.
(2) The Bible reveals to us many of the acts that God commits, causes, commands, and condones.
(3) It is morally impermissible for anyone to commit, cause, command, or condone, acts that violate our moral principles. [that is the principles exemplified by P1-5]
(4) The Bible tells us that God does in fact commit, cause, command, or condone, acts that violate our moral principles.

The trouble—comments Bradley— is that these statements form an inconsistent tetrad such that from any three one can validly infer the falsity of the remaining one. Thus, one can coherently assert (1), (2), and (3) only at the cost of giving up (4); assert (2), (3), and (4) only at the cost of giving up (1); and so on.

For a detailed exam and argument, see section D: A logical quandary for theists: an inconsistent tetrad.

You can look at David Bradley's article in detail.

For my part here are some observations (1, 2, 3) and counter-observations (1a, 2a, 3a):

1. The notion that the god of the Old Testament was the monster-god, guilty of infanticide and genocide, whereas the god of the New Testament is the kinder, gentler god, is untenable. Yahweh slaughtered whole populations, but, according to standard Christian doctrine, whole populations are doomed not to death but to eternal suffering... for having the wrong beliefs or no belief. Apologists offer a smorgasbord of excuses and explanations (the penalty is not for wrong belief but for SIN... God is so holy that he cannot abide SIN... God has the right to do as he sees fit with those who remain in SIN...), but they all sound to me like fawning obsequiousness before a despot.
1a. Nobody can make positive statement on the amount of people that are destined for condemnation at the Final Judgement. And I believe that the most obvious reading of the "second death" at Rev 20:14 is pure and simple annihilation of those who had wilfully refused Life Everlasting in their earthly life, anyway.

2. The objection that we cannot hold God to human standards of good and evil is untenable. When we use words like "good" and "evil," they carry connotations that humans can understand on the basis of human parlance and experience. If it is true that we cannot hold God to human standards, then we cannot apply words like "good" to him unless we can recognise something in his actions that we recognise as good. In fact, we ought to recognise God's actions as of a character so good that we, as finite and fallible beings, could not hope to achieve the same level of goodness; but the point is that God's actions would be in the category of what we recognise as "good"--else we have no right to call them "good." Conversely, if God's actions are recognisable as "bad," we must not refrain from calling them "bad." (The Bible has something to say about calling evil good and good evil.) The Maltheists look at scriptural accounts and conclude with some logic, that God must be evil. This view is blasphemous, but it is at least honest, which is more than I can say for Christian fundamentalists who read the same accounts and piously declare that each act of infanticide and genocide attributed to God is another demonstration of God's goodness and greatness and worthiness of our worship.
2a. The only possible apology of the God of the Bible, in my view, is that not the whole Bible (OT in particular, but also NT) is truly inspired, but much of it reflects a political agenda of the authors, conveniently attributed to God, who is blameless by definition.

3. If we believe that God is good, then we must reject scriptural literalism, for such accounts, taken at face value, bespeak a god who is anything but good as we humans understand the term good, and that criterion of good is the only one we should resort to, if we are not hypocrites.
3a. More, not the whole Bible is inspired, or rather it sometimes reflects human motives, rather than divine.