I've definitely heard other ppl say that God is love and that he doesn't get angry. I've actually been hearing this all my life.
Good.
There are lots of things we hear others say in life that we don't get until some other point later in life. It's amazing how many things the wisdom of my father was trying to tell me about such things when I was younger, that only much later do I understand the basis for it. Life experience has a lot to do with that. But when were younger, we think how we see things, is the reality of things.
Anyway, I appreciate your explanation and I do agree with the fact that when the scriptures were written, the the mindset, perception, ways of speaking, culture and more, strongly influenced the way the scriptures were written.
How humans have perceived God, what they imagine about God and project onto God from their own psyches has and does continue to evolve historically into today and beyond into tomorrow. Our understandings of God evolves along with us.
You can see that in our own lives. When we were a child, how we held the image of God in our minds, what God was to us, is not the same thing God is seen and understood in later in life. All of it is about God, but God to us becomes much "larger" the more developed we become. And this holds true into adulthood for many, though not all. Many settle on a certain image and that's where they stay. Others may keep going.
However, if God was never angry, then why did he Flood and destroy the world (mankind and whatever other beasts) once already (Noah's ark) and why did he destroy Sodom and Gomorrah and why did he send some of his earlier prophets and messengers to fight or destroy.... do the actions not match the language being used? Do you believe these things actually happened?
As I said, in our historical childhood, we as humans would project onto God our own interior landscapes, such as a fears, our guilt, our shame, our angers, and so forth. Because we feel shame and guilt, we assume that "mom and dad" are going to be mad and punish us, from the mind of a child imagining the future response to getting caught.
So for example, let's say you were someone living some 2500 years ago and your knowledge of the world and why things happen was very limited, like a child's understanding of life is very small at that stage of life for them. Some major catastrophic event happens that you can't control of understand. The mind of a child, and this is well-known in psychology, will think it's because of something they did wrong. Mom and dad getting divorced is their fault, somehow.
Now imagine you are living your life in your community, and some invading foreign power comes and sweeps away your friends and family, and hauls them off into another land away from your home. They then destroy your church you went to your whole life, and your house, and then they raze your city to the ground and you are left sitting in the ashes mourning the loss. In your grief and fear and anger you cry out, "Oh Lord, why have you punished us? What sin have we done to bring this upon ourselves?" You then bargain with God, "If we turn from our sins, you will restore us?" This then gives you some hope, and you reach out to others who remain in the ashes with you and you proclaim to them that God has made a promise to you, "If my people which are called by name shall turn from their wicked ways, I will restore unto them their land". Etc. This is of course the underlying conditions behind the book of Lamentations, in the Bible.
So real historical events are interepretted as acts of God, projecting the author's own imaginations upon God as all-powerful and fearful. There are other reasons for some of the stories as well, such as stories to convey greater truths than the actual contents of the story. These can be understood as
parables. They many never have happened, such as the parable of the Good Samaritan, yet they contain a certain truth that is greater than the "facts" of the story. The "facts" miss the point of the story actually. This is the nature of mythology. The truth is greater than the facts. It doesn't matter if Noah's flood is not a real historical event (and it is not). That's not the point of the story.
People who get stuck on literalism end up not hearing the important parts. I have a really good essay I found years ago that I refer to all the time to help others understand the nature of symbolism and mythology in religion as a vehicle for truth. Literalism kills that in too many ways. I'll let you read the brief essay for yourself, but I'll share one quote from it here.
The early ethnologist R. R. Marett is noted for his dictum that “religion is not so much thought out as danced out.” But even when thought out, religion is focused in the verbal equivalent of the dance: myth, symbol and metaphor. To insist on assigning to it a literal, one-dimensional meaning is to shrink and stifle and distort the significance. In the words of E. H. W. Meyer- stein, “Myth is my tongue, which means not that I cheat, but stagger in a light too great to bear.” Religious expression trembles with a sense of inexpressible mystery, a mystery which nevertheless addresses us in the totality of our being.
The literal imagination is univocal. Words mean one thing, and one thing only. They don’t bristle with meanings and possibilities; they are bald, clean-shaven. Literal clarity and simplicity, to be sure, offer a kind of security in a world (or Bible) where otherwise issues seem incorrigibly complex, ambiguous and muddy. But it is a false security, a temporary bastion, maintained by dogmatism and misguided loyalty. Literalism pays a high price for the hope of having firm and unbreakable handles attached to reality. The result is to move in the opposite direction from religious symbolism, emptying symbols of their amplitude of meaning and power, reducing the cosmic dance to a calibrated discussion.
From here:
Biblical Literalism: Constricting the Cosmic Dance – Religion Online
Let me know what you think. I'm more than happy to help shed some more light of my way of understanding these things.