If the saying is true, that consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds, then my mind must be truly tiny. Inconsistency and self-contradiction drive me bonkers. It is an offense against rationality to simultaneously promote two ideas that are mutually contradictory.

What about consistency in matters of faith? Christians may quote Hebrews 13:8, "Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever." Well, that sounds like consistency. Morever, Christian conservatives tend to be suspicious of change (unless it involves a change back to what they imagine was a better time in the past), also suggesting that they prefer consistency.

And yet...

1. God supposedly approves of such traits as honesty, generosity, and courtesy, and disapproves of such acts as theft, murder, and perjury. God's standards, in short, seem consistent with conventional social norms. In fact, the religious view is that those social norms came about because God gave us laws that promote those views.

2. However, in some Biblical passages, especially from the Hebrew scriptures, God is portrayed as committing acts that would be classified as atrocities and war crimes if committed by a human being. In 1 Sam. 15:3, for example, God orders Saul to slaughter all of the Amalekites including their nfants and animals, and seethes when Saul spares one. In human affairs, that would be called genocide. But when questioned on this, the scriptural literalists reply, "We cannot apply human standards of good and evil to God."

Oh. So God has given us the law that forbids murder, and that is why we consider murder to be a bad thing. But when God commits murder on a population-wide scale, it is a manifestation of his holiness. Is anyone else bothered by this inconsistency, this direct self-contradiction?

Is God then a hypocrite, lke the parent who tells a child, "Do as I say, not as I do"? Well, let's consider some alternatives. Maybe God set up laws for humanity but follows other principles himself (after all, he's... well... God!). All right. But how can we say then that God is good if some of the things he does are horrible? We have no right to call something good if it looks evil to us. The Bible itself says "Woe to those who call evil good and good evil" (Isa 5:20).

Is God really evil, as the Matheists believe? They start with the same Bible-based notions as fundamentalist Christians and therefore end up believing the same blasphemy; but from there, they reach the logical conclusion that God is a vain, chronically dyspeptic tyrant, whereas the fundamentalists reach the piously hypocritical conclusion that God's infinite holiness either permits him or requires him to wipe out whatever displeases him.

Or is God simply not as portrayed in the Bible? Ah! Once you are no longer shackled to the notion that the Bible is the inerrant word of God, all seeming paradoxes and inconsistencies start disappearing.