THE OLD TESTAMENT CLAIMS TO BE THE DIRECT WORD OF GOD

The Old Testament's core is the law of God, effectively the first five books. It says very little about love and justice and virtually all the laws are hate-filled. The sacrifices of animals are treated in a pornographic way full of gore. Jesus was in that vein too for there were promises of Gehenna which is worse than anybody being stoned to death. Jesus spoke of the law about stoning a lad to death who insults his parents as being from God.  This rule mostly applied to boys.  It is significant that Jesus never said a word to protect underage from stoning or participating in a stoning.   Most of his teaching was judgemental and threatening. He said terrible things about the Jewish leaders and by implication their Jewish supporters the ordinary people in Matthew 23. The accusations were clearly an attempt to incite people to attack them violently.

Jesus said the two big commands were total love of God and love of neighbour as yourself as in service.  This is not picking out two big commandments.  They are too general.  They are in fact summaries of the ten commandments which have two sections, the God section first and the neighbour section next.  The God bit evilly talks about there being only one valid God and to keep away from sun worship and idol worship as they are not Gods.  God's name in oathtaking is upheld as sacred and the sabbath is upheld as the day to dedicate to God. 

Jesus shows he had no real empathy with the pagan cultures and religions that were wiped out over these commands.  Evangelisation led to pressure on people to drop their traditions as their own leaders converted or were replaced by Israelite leaders.  Genocide was used as well.  And those who wanted their old faith back were threatened with the death penalty laid out by the law of God.  God is said to have wanted the town that reverts to old religion razed to the ground.  We must not forget the children that died.  The racism.  The colonialism.  The people Jesus preached the commandments to were prepared to do these things in their day.  Maybe things were still happening despite the Roman occupation that kept the religious cranks at bay.
 
The legal systems of today say that the civil law protects public morality and may let people do what they want in private. Nobody thinks there is a contrast between law and morality in principle.

Some Christians today go into politics and defend the death penalty for homosexuals. They understand their religion correctly at that point. Uganda is an example of that!

Ask yourself:

Why do Christians never express disgust at the murders of innocent people endorsed in the Bible under God's law?  Real disgust means getting your name off the parish register and not giving the Church your babies.

Why do they deny that those who gathered sticks on the Sabbath, who committed adultery, women who were thought to have married while pretending to be virgins, who kidnapped, who adored harmless pagan gods, sons who were layabouts, who had homosexual sex were innocent people? They were - their "crimes" were none of the laws business and killing them was not going to help anybody.

Why do they never express disgust at how those murders were carried out? - gay men were stoned to death by the people. First stoning is too cruel and involving the people and not an executioner is just rabid evil. It is too much.

Why do Christians lie that God was compelled to take such extreme measures for the people were so bad? If they were that stubbornly evil then to empower them by giving them the right to legally murder people cruelly was extremely unwise!  This is clearly blaming the victim.

An excuse for the severity appears in Leviticus 19:29. It commands that you must not make a whore of your daughter in case the whole land falls to whoredom and become full of wickedness. So it argues that tolerating sin or endorsing it leads to a slippery slope that ruins the entire nation. In real life though, it always ends up being a minority who do such things. The whore in the Bible is not always linked to the selling of sex but to women being too permissive and having sex outside marriage. The argument that the command was about stopping Israel having temple prostitutes is speculation. The commandment merely says that sex outside marriage is a sin period and commands us to believe that any tolerance of illicit sex will soon ruin the nation.

Why do Christians say that the Bible God was head of state for the Hebrews as if that somehow excuses the laws or necessarily implies we don't have to worry about them now? God did not function as head of state. He gave a law and men were to administer it. They were the heads. God nowhere claimed to be political king of the nation. And even if it he did, it does not mean he thought it was okay for non-Hebrew nations to just discard or ignore his law. If God is the ideal government then each nation should keep his laws as much as possible.

Why do Christians lie that God was head when the Bible says no such thing, when God only gave occasional revelations and did not look after the day to day business, when Israel was not a state when it was wandering through the jurisdictions of real states and when Israel was a religion and not really a state in any form?

Why do they try to make out that the law is no longer used as if that makes the past murders minor and irrelevant?

Why can't they give you a text from the Bible that explicitly revokes those laws? They will say God commanded love but he did that among the bad commandments too. Love your neighbour comes from the most vicious book of the Old Testament.

Why don't they admit that the alleged change of the law is only an assumption?

Why don't they admit that if the rule falls into disuse that is no comfort? - it needs repudiation and an apologetic abrogation.

Why do they say that God as master of life and death has the right to tell people to kill?

Why do they not admit that devotion to the Bible and the Jesus who endorsed it is implicit and indirect homophobia of the sickest kind?

Why do they even use the violent texts in tracts and theological documents to argue that homosexuality is a sin?

Why do clergy devote their lives and energy and money to a God who is revealed in the Bible, a Bible of dubious morality?

Why do they not admit that though moral relativism - the notion that good and evil depend on what we think is right and wrong meaning that if a country believes in infanticide that makes it right - is a terrible evil and turns people into moral do-nothings that they are worse than most relativists? Most relativists do not agree with the stonings. A faith that says God can make murder right is a relativist faith.

Why do they not do the normal thing - regard scriptures that endorse violence as man-made and fit for the incinerator?

You need very strong grounds, as in evidence or proof, to endorse a scripture as being from God for you cannot risk condoning the reprehensible that should not be condoned. Nobody cares about such proof.

Atheists do not feel obligated to condone whatever evil some atheists do. Only religion obligates people to approve of divine evil and risk insulting God if there is one by saying he commanded terrible things.

Do not argue that the Bible, the infallible word of God, proves that he does not require the death penalty for he commanded us to love our neighbour as ourselves. This objection ignores the fact that God gave the command in the middle of a book, Leviticus, that commanded a liberal and wide use of the death penalty for religious and civil reasons. The commandment gets a brief mention and God in Leviticus treats it as he wanted us to miss it. When Jesus made it the second great commandment he was quoting Leviticus and implying approval for Leviticus as the word of God. Jesus was asked what the greatest commandment of God was and he picked out two from the Torah implying that the other commandments too - including the bloodletting ones - were the commandments of God. The love endorsed is not about feelings but about giving people the dignity they give themselves through their actions. It is love to destroy a homosexual for he is only receiving what his dignity demands. We must accept God's right to establish such a penalty but has he abolished or suspended it so that we don't have to inflict it today?  The fact that you have a command and it is clear for God should know how to make clear laws, and there is no command referring to its abolition answers the question.