KnightWhoSaysNi

I have a question to those of you who used to be fundamentalist Christians. When you used to believe, how did you view the atrocities in the Old Testament? What was your perspective on it and how did you justify them in your minds?

When I think of the OT laws, like stoning young women if they were not virgins on their wedding day, or when God ordered Moses to slaughter a whole population (including infants and children) in war, my conscience reacts with revulsion. Fundamentalist Christians are just like most everyone else who has a conscience -- they feel empathy for people who are suffering and disdain for cruelty. But somehow, they just seem to be able to switch off their conscience like a light switch when it comes to OT atrocities and cruelties which actually become a form of "righteousness" to them. It just completely boggles my mind and I just find it disturbing.

When you were fundamentalist Christians, how were you able to psychologically 'tune out' your conscience to OT atrocities? When you 'de-converted' what was it that turned the light back on and how did it feel?

Pyrrho

Christians (and others) are very often able to not only read about atrocities without too much discomfort, but are willing to commit them themselves. To save myself some typing, here is a quote:

From A.J. Burger at:

http://ajburger.homestead.com/files/book.htm

It all comes down to the total set of beliefs that a person has.

And, the only way to be a Christian and reject the atrocities in the Old Testament is to be inconsistent.

Rational BAC

Well---

I think inconsistency is sublime. Inconsistency is the end-all and be-all of a Cherry Picker. Inconsistency is the bane of both atheists and Christian fundamentalists. ---------So, it is for sure it has something going for it.

Why does God have to be consistent? God can do anything he wants to.

And I, in following His lead, and being a cherry picker ---can be just as inconsistent.
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The Inquisition was very human. Humanity at its worst and not Christ-like in any way. It was HUMAN intolerance at its best (or worst).

I don't think Christianity should ever have been "organized" on such a grand scale. Human organization brought on such horrors as the Crusades and the Inquisition.

If never organized on such a grand scale, then Christianity would have been a much smaller religion--probably just a cult of Judaism. But would have been much more true to its roots.

Why was Christianity organized in such a grand manner in order to cause such historical horrors?

I don't know. But I believe that God just turned his back on the whole thing and let us figure out what Christianity was all about.

A good test.

Unfortunately, we flunked the test. --------------

------ Hey ------nobody is perfect. And certainly not us humans.

Rational BAC

Probably should not have gotten into this one.

Since I am the opposite of a Fundamentalist.

But then again, when you cannot seem to find a damned Fundy anywhere----------then you are plain out stuck with having to deal with a mainstream Cherry Picker Christian, aren't you?

Magus? Where are you?

Beetle

I think what many fundies fall back on (and what I fell back on in my evangelical/calvinist days) is the notion that god is the definition of god. Therefore, anything approved by god is automatically a good and just act, no matter how horrible it may appear to our human eyes. There's a great deal of submission to the text, saying "I don't get how killing the kids is right, but god said it was o.k. so I'm not going to worry about it too much." That was very common among my friends (none of whom would ever have sanctioned such activities in real life)

The loss of that attitude was one of the things that led me out of evangelicalism. When I started looking at the bible as just another book, it became clear that the moral code practiced in much of the bible is truly terrible.

Kassiana

Ex-fundy here. I can tell you two ways that they deal with it.

1. Having been a member of numerous Christian organizations, I can tell you first off that they don't mention those parts of the OT with baby murders being exalted, etc. very much. I don't remember once hearing anything but the Passover story from most conservative Christians...and then, they tend to emphasize the positive rather than dwelling on "And then the Lord came to the 1000th Egyptian home, the dwelling of Isra and Kasel, where their firstborn child, a baby boy, lay on his mother's stomach blissfully gurgling up at her, until the Lord cut his head off..."

2. After I started hanging out with you evil unsaved heretics and started hearing more and more of the OT atrocities, I basically went with the more liberal interpretation of "Well, God didn't want these terrible things to happen. These people just did them and then attributed their success to God. The stories are included to warn us against doing the same."

Of course, eventually I saw that as the b.s. it was and gave up on Christianity entirely, but it got me through for a few years.

lugotorix

I was raised as a Pentecostal. For most of my childhood I didn't really think about it. The pastor of my church soft-pedalled the more vicious parts of the OT; he focused more on the New Testament in his sermons.

When I got serious about becoming a minister (when I was around 13) I started reading the Bible, from start to finish. The really nasty bits did affect me, especially after being led to believe that my religion was all about love & light, etc. God commanding Joshua to kill every living thing in Jericho stood out as especially harsh, as did the whole book of Job. I kept reading, though, hoping it would start to make sense. In the end, it wasn't the atrocities that made me deconvert, though -- it was the genealogy of Jesus in the first chapter of Matthew.

Now that I'm not a Christian, they do stand out as particularly savage. The only things I ended up taking away from my exercise in Bible-reading were:
a) there's no way that the supreme being it describes is holy, and
b) I probably shouldn't piss off any Israelis.

lugotorix

mike_decock

God said not to fornicate or commit adultery. Anyone who does deserves to be stoned.

They were wicked people and the children would have grown up to be wicked as well. Sometimes you have to wipe out an entire population in order to preserve your own.

You're just a milksop. Sometimes you have to make the tough choices in life. Deal with it.

Simple: "The wages of sin is death". Look at AIDS: it kills all the right people. That's God's way of showing us to trust and obey His commandments.

My deconversion triggered the light to come back on. I can't really pinpoint why. I'm just ashamed that I really thought and felt that way about other humans who are just like me.

-Mike...

Aravnah Ornan

Kassiana has it exactly right: Christians don't mention those parts of the Bible. It's easy to believe in the Bible when all you know of it is the parts that are read in church on Sunday, and the lectionary leaves out details like the various punishments for being a rape victim.

As I took baby steps toward a greater knowledge of the Bible, I became vaguely aware that the OT contains various rules that wouldn't be much fun to live by today. I rationalized them by believing that while those rules weren't the best that G-d could give, they were the best that primitive people living back then could receive.

Still later, I made my first attempt to read the Bible from cover to cover, Genesis to Revelation. By the time I made it through Deuteronomy, my faith was in tatters. Nonetheless, I wasn't ready at the time to deconvert, so I figured that if reading the Bible all the way through would destroy my faith, I just wouldn't read the Bible all the way through.

In my second attempt, I decided to persevere, and I trusted in G-d to give me understanding. I did, and He didn't.

Once I deconverted, I felt as though I had just straightened out after having sat in a painfully contorted position for a long time. I no longer felt the need to force myself to believe that up is down and black is white, and I no longer felt guilty because it wasn't self-evident to me that up is down and black is white.