The Dietary Laws

Valjean said:

It seems clear to me that Christians have been cherry-picking Biblical laws and admonitions pretty much forever; observing the ones they like, ignoring or rationalizing ones they don't, and insisting on strict observance of whichever injunctions are politically expedient.

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Yes that has happened, very unfortunately in my opinion, although I do believe most don't even realize it at this point, and of course love God and are very well meaning. We as believers are responsible to search the scriptures for ourselves though, rather than simply depending on men to teach us everything, but I think there are many generations worth of deception and misunderstanding at play here.
In any case, I just hope to do the best I know how and continue growing and learning

Valjean said:

Why don't we just scrap the whole OT and organize a church around only the New testament?

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The early Church actually considered doing just that, but the problem then would have been that so many NT references are found in the OT, thus readers of the Bible would not make heads nor tails of many narratives without the OT.

Valjean said:

Trying to mesh the OT laws and world view with the New has led to nothing but political cherry-picking, factionalism, squabbling and war.

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Ah, but Christians would argue without it anyway.