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And yet, for arguments sake, didn't Jesus in his good teaching, draw from the OT to show the good in it? And then doesn't this say something that challenges your assessment of it as a whole to be shameful?
Did Jesus stone anyone? I think not! A Christian is a follower of Jesus.
First of all, Christians are not under the Law so the OT quotes do not apply. Take out the ones that refer to what God will do and one is left with nothing that says to "hate" non-Christians. Nice try though.
It was a different time. The Lord had to be more stringent because it took almost nothing for the people go astray, and that usually spelled disaster for society. I think we're experiencing some disasters of biblical proportions today.
I would be one of those few who offered a reasonable understanding. But what I think you fail to understand is that the sites you are pulling those from are anti-religion sites that seek to attack the religion. People naturally are going to become defensive when you are using the very arsenal of those who are constantly on the attack of the religion because of the crazy fringe fundamentalists who read all this stuff literally.
I think it's not even so much the need to reinterpret them to make them spiritual, or something. I find the myth of Joshua's conquest of Canaan to be strictly a tale of national identity. There is really no mystical understanding of a story that has God ordering the slaughter of these peoples (which is especially interesting in light of archaeological evidence that the Jews in fact were Canaanites themselves). I see it in much the same light as we do the myths of any culture about their origins, painting their leaders on white horses, conquering the savages, etc. God is just a central figure in national identity, like a patriot missile, or something. I think tying to see spiritual metaphors in these is a bit of a reach.
An interesting thought I had to share is that if you look at the origins of Christianity, it was at first not a separate religion but was part of Judaism. It wasn't until later on that the philosophical differences led to them splitting apart into two separate religions. As that happened and the non-Jewish populations swelled the ranks of the early Christian body, they actually became anti-Semitic, rejecting and persecuting Jews. So their identification which a Jewish lineage became something different than what it was originally for them, where tying themselves to the OT was important to them.
