Welcome to a problem-identifying node of the Pandeism index!!
The thing that has always bothered me most about this
story is the
ram. So Old Biblegod instructs faithful Abraham to
sacrifice his own son (and really it matters not from a
moral perspective whether it is his first or last or only son) -- sacrifice to who? Well, to Abraham's god, naturally, the god instructing the sacrifice wishes the sacrifice to be to itself. Never mind whether this all turns out to be a
test or a
joke or an elaborate
heist plot, Abraham chooses to
worship a deity whom Abraham
believes would
accept the
murder of a defenseless, innocent human being. And had Abraham refused the request? Had Abraham declared, "no, it is immoral to kill another person, even at the demand of one's deity"? "No, it is wrong for a man to kill his own unsuspecting son"? Naturaly, by my view a response such as
those would have been the one which passed the test.
But Abraham believes that his deity is indeed of the sort which would
accept such a sacrifice, of a human, of a man's own unconvicted, unsuspecting son, at all; and believes apparently not simply that it is in his own best interests to comply with his god's demand (since, after all, this deity when angry can cause horrific sorts of
grief), but that it is
morally correct to obey such a command. His lament is that he will be without his son, not that it is wrong in any moral dimension to plunge a
knife into his son's heart at the behest of a metaphysical voice, even one to whom Abraham accords ultimate moral accreditation.
But, so the story goes, Abraham's deity sees that Abraham is indeed prepared to murder his own son for the deity's
delight, and the deity
is satisfied with that-- and so
sends along the ram to be sacrificed in the boy's place. Whatever difference there are to be papered over in the accounts offered by
Judaism,
Christianity, and
Islam, this element abides in all of them. But why is that necessary? Abraham has proved his point, that he'd commit the most vile of murders on the tug of a string, there seems no reason to not simply proclaim, "Abraham, you've done well in being ready to go through with it, so don't kill anything, but instead have yourself a picnic, play some touch football with the lad. Whatever." But, no,
there still must be a killing. Abraham's deity
still requires a sacrifice, an infliction of
pain and
death on a haplass animal, as innocent and unsuspecting as the son had been. And it is a wasteful death at that
if the tradition of burning all the good parts to a cinder is to be observed. It might be claimed that it would have been Abraham's tradition to perform such a sacrifice, but that seems to be of little value given that it was surely Abraham's tradition to, by way of example,
not murder his own son as a sacrifice.
So though it may be a crime to trick a man into believing that he is to murder his beloved child, by my view the greater crime committed in this tale is the actual needless murder of the innocent ram.