this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2023
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I grew up in a church that was consciously literalist and held the Bible as inerrant. I'm no longer religious, but looking back with the blinders of those doctrines on, I have to wonder if I might still be a believer if those ideas hadn't been drilled into me.
I'm all on board with the Jesus of the Gospels; he seems like a pretty cool dude who didn't have any time for people in power exploiting the downtrodden. But the Old Testament, on the other hand, is a mess, and it includes passages casting God as a bloodthirsty murderer making the Pharoah resist Moses just so that he could send more plagues against Egypt, prophets speaking for God in the language of the abusive boyfriend who tells his partner that it's her fault that he's hurting her (basically every one of the prophets, but take Ezekiel 16 as a representative example), God guiding Joshua through an ethnic cleansing of Canaan, and God commanding the genocide of the Amalekites and then punishing King Saul for being insufficiently thorough about it.
Let's not even mention that weird bit of erotic literature that's tucked into the middle for some reason (and don't try to sell me on the idea that "Your breasts are like two fawns, twins of a gazelle" is a metaphor for anything other than really nice boobs)...
Then, on the other side of the coin, you have the letters of Paul where, when you look at it without bias, it's plainly clear that he's a religious conservative trying to pull the radical early church back into line with his own personal mores. Small wonder that hundreds of years later, when the church was The Church and falling into conservative patterns of orthodoxy, they picked the epistles they did to canonize as The Complete and Unerring Word of God...
What a well-written, intelligent, and respectful rebuttal. Thank you.
I really wish the message of Jesus, exactly as you described it, was better understood by all of the anti-Christians. It's a seriously good message, yet so many people want to hate on it without giving it a chance.
As for the Old Testament, I'm continually blown away by how much of it foreshadows Jesus, His ministry, and His apostles. The number of times this happens is far too great for me to count, though I'm sure some biblical scholars have attempted to do so. Having grown up in the church, and clearly having read the good book, you may well be more familiar than I am with all of the foreshadowing, as I'm a convert who was raised atheist and didn't find God until my 30s. I still have a lot of catching up to do, and I'm sure I always will. But suffice it to say, there's foreshadowing through and through.
Before Christ, we made God's work more difficult. Humanity wasn't wholly ready to follow Him. Abraham and his descendants were, at least they were enough to form a series of binding covenants. But until we were ready to receive Christ, God did what needed to be done to lead His first non-begotten son to the point when Christ could successfully arrive. And that, I believe, explains why the OT played out the way it did.
As for twin roe deer, I have no doubt God appreciates the form of a woman. Otherwise He'd not have made her look as He did, and He'd not have predicated our entire civilization upon marital intimacy.
As for the scripture that we now consider canonical, do you really think God had no hand in the Church's selection? I find it implausible that He'd take the effort to inspire various works of scripture, but then leave their canonicalization unguided.