@maxdancona,
I sometimes wonder what's up with you.
You can have it both ways. Christians are human beings. Human beings have flaws. Mine is a tendency toward coarse speech and ranting.
Christianity is not a religion of love. Or of hate. This is a stupid oversimplification. But you like to do oversimplification, because you like putting people into a strawman.
Jesus is not some hippie dude that told everyone to love each other and blah blah blah old testament had wrong things so the entire Bible is wrong. Also we need to remove statues of Civil War generals because slavery is evil and racist, and people should have their pasts used against them. Okay then, some time when you're a kid and did something bad, we will never move past that. Either who we are now is all that matter and we smash evidence to the contrary, tearing down old monuments to pretend it never happened, or we look at other people and see only their flaws. If you want to play this all or nothing game, I'll be more than happy to play it on you! I'll dredge up some past event in your life, and insist you haven't moved beyond it.
No, that misses the point! We have Civil War monuments to remind us that slavery existed, and remind us not to lapse back into it! And people learn and grow and develop! That's why we have the Old Testament! To remind people that the way God's chosen people were, they wouldn't be chosen by anyone. Yet they were still treating slaves better than their neighbors. And you would begrudge them for having slaves at all. Fair enough, we'll hold you to your past wrongs. All of them.
God is often painted as either all-good or nonexistent. Because stupid people can't grasp a God who behaves like a human. Humans grow and get better as time goes on. Let's look at God. God throughout the Old Testament is like a mirror of the Jews themselves. The scene in the Ten Commandments csn best be described as a temper tantrum. As the book transitions into the New Testament, God becomes kinder and gentler. This isn't because these are different Gods. It's because the Jews evolved as a people, and stopped being warlike. They settled in their homelands. God is his people, and God's behavior changes as they change.
No, the Bible is not a book of love. It's not a book of hate either. It's a book of forgiveness. David was forgiven despite sleeping with his general's girl and plotting his death. Abraham lied about his wife being his sister. Cain killed his brother (the curse given to him actually protects him). Jacob stole Esau's inheritance. Joseph tried to get revenge on his brothers who in turn sold him into slavery. Moses killed a man for mistreating a slave, if I remember correctly.
It's about how we have shameful pasts, all of us, and this idea that we are loving or hateful with nothing in between is stupid. Human beings are a mixed bag! But what is the worse sin? Suppose you get blackmailed. They find that no you're not perfect, there was that time when you did something as a kid, and we have pictures. Suppose you murder them to hide that you were evil in the past. Problem solved right? Of course, you didn't just murder someone or anything! Or maybe... we can accept that we aren't perfect, tell the blackmailer to go **** himself and stop paying.
I don't care that maybe even today some Christians have sex slaves. Some Muslims, atheists, etc also have them. The entire point is this stuff.
Christians have to deal with that they had slaves. They also freed slaves. That's the point. That's what's getting erased when you take down Civil War monuments. They're not monuments to slavery, they're monuments that slavery ENDED. That there was a war over slavery, and slavery lost out. That's what can't happen again. And when we get rid of things like Uncle Ben and Aunt Jemima because we're offended by the past, we also erase the fact that Uncle Ben and Aunt Jemima have the pictures of successful black entrepreneurs. We erase the good to deny the bad.
