Why did God ever single out a people to abide by all those cultural practices, sometimes on pain of death, a punishment to be carried out by the people themselves? Not only would getting stoned to death suck, but can you imagine being ordered by God to stone someone to death? It would have been more merciful of him to strike violators with lightning — then at least there’d be no ambiguity as to what exactly the law was, and no worried that you might be killing an innocent person.

Some have argued that by piling on the weird and wicked rules, God was trying to send the message of the futility of keeping the Law, and “paving the way” for Christ’s message of mercy and love. So basically, the laws were one big joke? Or does the creator of a billion galaxies genuinely have a preference for the smell of cooked meat over that of vegetables? And why exactly does it take theologians and interpreters to deliver that answer — couldn’t God have simply said it himself? Say, I don’t know, to the gathered Israelites newly freed from Egypt? Because, given the apparent reality of God’s wrath (ten plagues, anyone?) I’m not sure I see how they would figure out it was all a bunch of “metaphors”.

(That said, I don’t think there ever was an exodus, so most of the stuff about worshiping a golden calf, all those conquests, etc, are basically fictional. But that’s irrelevant to the point that they don’t even make internal sense.)

Some even go so far as to basically say “Well, of course the Bible doesn’t make sense — it was written by hundreds of people over thousands of years! It’s not fair to expect it to be a coherent work!” Yet the same people nonetheless call themselves Christians. Strange.

Daoloth: I wonder if the Islamist scholars, or rather Islamist “scholars”, include any of those campaigning to have time measured from Mecca instead of from Greenwich. After all, Mecca is the center of the world, doncha know.

Mr Deity has an interesting take on that.

http://www.youtube.com/user/misterdeity#p/u/44/s-25iBw2EX8

and too true!