Abraham

God told Abraham to kill his son and offer him up as a burnt offering. He was testing Abraham and Abraham failed miserably. He dutifully gathered up firewood and he and Isaac headed up the mountain. When Isaac asked where was the lamb, Abraham did not exactly lie, but he wasn’t telling the whole truth when he responded, “God will provide.” He laid Isaac on the unlit pyre, raised a knife to kill him and God intervened, and blessed Abraham for his obedience. [see Genesis Chapter 22]
What a failure! Abraham should have said, “No, Lord, I am not going to do this, are you going to make me burn in hell for all eternity? Evidently my moral code is more stringent than yours, because I will not kill my innocent son. What kind of god are you to ask me to do this thing?

Either way, God must have gotten the message because he later wrote in Deuteronomy 18:10,12 There shall not be found among you anyone who burns his son or his daughter as his offering,…for whoever does these things is an abomination to the Lord;

Instead of blessing Abraham, God should have blessed Isaac for not throwing his father on the pyre. I wonder what their trip down the mountain was like – do you think God thought about what his little test would do to the father-son relationship?

The moral of the story is that one doesn’t need religion to formulate a moral code.