So it's a cold day and you go to a restaurant ready to get a bowl of hot, steamy soup. Your order comes, you grab your spoon and just as your are ready to take that first spoonful you see a dead mouse in the bowl!
How would you react?
I would leave the restaurant. Sort of like the reasons why I would leave the church when they served up dishes of fear instead of Love.
Would you eat the soup anyway? Shouldn't you be accepting and allow for imperfections?
A dead mouse is not the same thing as "imperfections" whatever those are. It's a health violation, not an "imperfection". Does your God send people to hell for not putting enough salt in his soup to his personal tastes when it poses no health risks?
This is what your analogy should be calling out, not some over the top comparison. It should say, God wants three leeks instead of two, and because you only put 2.5 leeks in there, you'll be strung up at dawn and your body burned for the whole village to see so they will fear him and give him his demands without deviation! Nice customer!
Isn't is too picky or intolerant to have strict standards of cleanliness and purity?
Darned right it's too picky when those standards are things that say God considers it a sin if women cut their hair, wear slacks instead of dresses, has a drink of alcohol, doesn't attend church each Sunday, has a belief or a thought or an idea that doesn't agree with their pastor's, and on and on the list of such legalist tripe spews on. Who exactly is it making up these standards anyway, and what you do find in the OT, or even in the NT, are not injunctions for the culture and time in which they were written, and not "eternal laws" that apply to today?
My experience with these "standards" is that they are pretty much all projections of the sensitivities of the yahoo preachers who cherry-picked them from the Bible to suit their particular cultural sensitivities, for right or for wrong. It's like saying only cherry pies are true pies, and then going on the attack for those who enjoy pecan pies instead, justifying their evil claiming God only accepts that cherry pies are "perfection" (whatever that word means).
Anyone can make mistakes, after all the cook is just human, right?
Actually, in your analogy, that wouldn't be a mistake. It would be an accident. Unless he deliberately put it in there, in which case it would be considered an attack on the customer to cause harm in which case that was a conscious decision which he would in fact bear responsibility for. Does your God send people to hell for accidents? That's not very loving or fair, is it?
There is a lot in the Bible which reveal that God as Creator has standards of purity which don't allow for corruption or anything less than clean, pure perfection.
There's a lot in the Bible which reveals the cultural mentality of the men who wrote it, standards which Christians today themselves do not follow. But rather than saying they don't appear in the Bible, they lie to others and themselves through either ignoring them, or saying Jesus got rid of those, but not the ones their group likes to harp on and on about. It's all just insincerity on parade.
Is God being too demanding?
It's religious people who are too demanding. God really doesn't give a hoot if you as a woman cuts their hair after reading Paul's comments that it is considered a sin. I'm pretty sure that if God has eyeballs, He'd probably just be rolling them at eyes our silly, primitive ideas of Him, assuming we think we know something about this because we read it in the Bible and interpreted it with our tiny little brains a particular way that somehow makes sense to us in our highly limited minds. I like where the Bible says God is Love. Is it love that leads to us getting our undies in a twist over such trivial things, or is that our tiny little egos projecting itself on the universe as God?
So often, it seems like God is accused of having requirements which are too high or that He should be a little lax or accept what He would classify as disgusting, gross substandard quality... yet, people don't so easily drop their standards.
All of these are a projection of our egos on God. The more anal someone is, the more they can tell themselves they are religious, when in fact they aren't at all in their hearts where it really matters. This is what Jesus taught at length. Straining at gnats, while swallowing camels.
