Or a "person". Theists typically imagine that God is a person.
In other words, the killer has to be the sort of being to which it makes sense to ascribe moral predicates in general, and responsibility and blame in particular. Again, theists typically imagine precisely that, insisting that 'God is good!' and even the source, essence and paradigm of goodness itself.
In the OP, Maher was quoted as saying ''
God is a mass murderer: He killed off almost the entire human race with a flood, including innocent children.'', and there was no alluding to
imagination, his own or anyone else's. He took it upon himself to apply the same standard to The Almighty God, as he would the worst type of human. Why would he do that when clearly they are not the same.
My view is that if we aren't willing to call a particular behavior (such as genocide) 'good' if a human being does it, it's even less justifiable to call it 'good' when God supposedly does it.
''Supposedly'' being the operative word. As I pointed out earlier, there is one reason alone why anyone dies, and that is most likely from the the same source Maher (and maybe yourself) draws this conclusion from. That sole reason is due to sin, not murder.
The biblical quote below explains why murder cannot be attributed to God. For one, we all belong to God, and from the process of the creation of Adam, we can understand that the life-force that inhabits the physical body is part and parcel of God, making the idea of God murdering His parts and parcels absurd.
Here is just one quote among many, which exposes that idea for what it is. It is from
Ezekiel 18. You may want to read the entire chapter to get a contextual perspective.
4 Behold, all souls are mine; as the soul of the father, so also the soul of the son is mine: the soul that sinneth, it shall die.
God needs to be better than we are, not worse. He needs to satisfy a higher standard.
God IS The Standard, or else He isn't God. Either your starting position is to accept that, through experience, intelligence, or grasping the concept through scripture, or we don't accept it. I think its good to be sure as we only have a fleeting moment of life (in this body) to make the right choice.
Being God isn't a get-out-of-morality-free card. (Just as being 'Fuhrer' and a self-imagined Nietzschian superman wasn't for Hitler.)
As I said before, God IS the standard, and the same source that Maher probably got his ideas from attest to this, so what is the justification for your statement?
jan.