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They don't have to be uniformly wicked. It's enough for them to all be some level of wicked, which the Bible asserts they are, for reasons that I think, based on my own introspection and observation, they probably are. We all have it coming.
What I (probably obviously) meant with 'uniformly' is that humans are very varied and it's entirely implausible that a nation wouldn't have over 1 in 20 people who, by your standards, it'd be obviously an unforgivable and titanic evil to murder for their 'wickedness'. The sick child, the quiet boy who took the abuse and did nothing to anyone else, the street beggar, the elder who did his best to guide his society towards a better place within its constraints. The man who does his job and doesn't bother anyone.
Again, consider the example of China nuking one of their provinces because it was 'wicked'. Does this strike you as reasonable, by your moral standards?
This just ... highlights ... the absurdity. Okay, God, right now, glasses America. Is this good? Probably not, right? But we all have it coming, so...
You're just giving a billion times as much deference to things in the Bible as you would anything else.
Humans are quite varied in the forms of evils they choose. They do not vary much in whether or not they choose evil. They do. They don't even vary that much in the amount of evil they choose: they generally choose quite a bit. Nor is evil divided into "minor" and "serious" grades. It's divided into the kind whose harmful effects are obvious and the kind whose harmful effects are subtle, but both kinds lead to misery and death, just as both kinds are endlessly justified by the individual engaging in them.
It seems to me that you are looking at people, and assuming the average person is "good" and only the obvious outliers are "bad", somewhat similar to how we handle terrestrial justice, where we mostly leave each other alone against there's an immediate, obvious, grievous offense. Therefore, you're saying that the murderers and the thieves and the rapists are legitimately bad, but most people are okay, and even if we assume most people aren't okay, at least five percent have to be okay. But that's not an understanding I share. The quiet boy who takes the abuse and does nothing in return can still hate the abusers in his heart, and probably does, if my own experience is anything to go by. Likewise for the street beggars and the elders and the men who do their jobs and "don't bother anyone". There are a lot of ways to embrace evil that don't show up in crime statistics.
Further, there have been societies within the last hundred years that were massively more complicit in evil than our own, where either direct participation or at the least complicity in really obvious, immediately harmful evil was more or less society-wide. Revolutionary Russia, Cambodia, and China come immediately to mind. Maybe you are right, and the society we are in has one in twenty who aren't evil. Maybe that's why we survive. Or maybe doom is around the corner, and we'll wake up tomorrow to a few megatons of instant sunshine.
I have no expectation that anything China does is done for reasons of virtue or justice, because the Chinese government, like our own, seems quite wicked. On the other hand, we firebombed Japanese and German cities, incinerating hundreds of thousands of men, women and children, because they were citizens of empires that spread slaughter and atrocity across the globe. I don't think the fact that this was done to them was unjust. Do you?
It's not hard to think of reasons why we'd richly deserve it. A couple centuries of slavery, sixty million abortions, endless lawlessness, routine acceptance of evil and injustice... The list of potential reasons is long. We are not a righteous nation. I am certainly not a righteous person, nor are most of those I know, even those who, like myself, put some effort into actively trying to be more righteous than we've been in the past. I believe the peaceful, happy life I enjoy is an example of divine mercy, not something that I deserve for my goodness. This has served to calm me considerably through the culture war, a reminder that as furious as I grow with those on the other side, I am in no way better than they are, and so have no right to hate them. What they do is fundamentally no different from what I have done, and will doubtless do again.
A billion times seems like an exaggeration. I give it a fair bit more deference than I give to other things, because it provides the best axioms I've found. Or to put it a bit closer to the local parlance, it pays considerably more rent than any other worldviews I've been able to test.
You reverse-reasoned your way to the evil of mankind from god’s commandments. Since he condemned everyone unless they obey his arbitrary commands, they must deserve it. So a kid who makes a bald joke deserves death, and mankind deserves hell. They don’t, and god’s orders are evil.
If god was actually merciful he would just forgive everyone instead of pretending to. Or like, let them out on parole after ten million years at least. Man’s Justice is infinitely more merciful.
There’s that binary thinking again. When we call someone ‘good’ or ‘honest’, we do not mean they are flawless and have never told a lie. We mean, compared to others. “All of mankind is evil and dishonest” is meaningless. You mean like laughing children are evil, that kind of evil? It’s a linguistic trick: because mankind is quote-unquote “evil”, god is quote-unquote “good”.
The only way you can deny that god is evil is by effectively erasing the distinction between good and evil. So you have to argue that not only can god not be compared to human standards, humans cannot be compared to each other.
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