When discussing the story of Noah and the flood, author Karen
Armstrong (A History of God, 1993), as a panelist on Moyers's
program, asserted that God is "not some nice, cozy daddy in the
sky," but rather a being who decidedly behaves frequently "in an
evil way." With his actions in connection with the flood, Armstrong
said, God originated the idea of justifiable genocide. Hitler and
Stalin, one might deduce, acted on the instruction of such stories
as that of the flood and of Sodom and Gomorrah when instituting the
holocaust and the camps of the Gulag. Had the panelists called on
Gnostic scriptures, they could have quoted many precedents for
Armstrong's criticism of the vengeful God of the Old
Testament.
http://www.gnosis.org/genesis.html
