Not a month goes by when this don't happen:
Somebody says to me, or messages me: “But there are violent verses in the bible” + some quote from the Torah.
I have come to the conclusion that most people are incapable of thinking their way out of a wet paper bag.
Here are some of the things you will find in the bible;
No eating clams, bacon or duck, but ok to eat salmon, beef and chicken.
Execute sabbath breakers, homosexuals, perjurers and women who falsely represent themselves as virgins.
Do not wear clothes made of linen and wool, but you must grow your sideburns, and absolutely no skinheads - unless it’s a captive woman you want to marry - then it’s mandatory.
You touched a corpse? No problem, sprinkle the ashes of a bull over running water and apply.
According to the text, these and many many other instructions, were given to a man called Moses, by God.
Now just stop and think for a minute. You already know that Christians do not keep to any of that, not a single Christian you have ever met. Christians eat bacon, do not advocate capital punishment for sabbath breakers, side burns are optional. In the unlikely event that I touch a corpse, like you, I would wash my hands with soap.
I get that most secular people will probably not understand why that is the case, but everyone surely does know that it is the case - so why the foolishness?
Christians are not Jews.
If you want to underline parts of the Mosaic penal code and push it in someone’s face, find a synagogue and try there, because you are knocking on the wrong door.
If you care, here is the why in under 5 minutes;
Not the reformation. There was a historical event about 500 years ago called “the reformation”, involving a man called Martin Luther. Sometimes people think - ahh, reformation, that guy reformed Christianity. That is not the case. The reformation was of the church as an institution, not the religion itself, indeed if anything, the event moved the institution closer to the texts.
The reason that Christians do not adhere to the Mosaic law, is because Jesus told them not to. Yes, really. It was like this from the very beginning. People talk about “Judeo-Christian values”, but this is a (mostly American) confusion, Christianity is not Judaism.
If you doubt this, simply read Matthew 5:20-48. Jesus repeatedly quotes parts of the Torah, “You have heard it said X”, followed by, “but I say to you Y”. Four times he radically changes it, twice he flat out turns it on its head.
If you read the rules for determining if an animal is clean or unclean in the Torah, you will find it is really quite lengthy. One time Jesus was talking to a religious leader, he said “food does not go into the heart, it goes into the stomach and out”, the writer who records this (Mark in 7:19) adds the following; “thereby he declared all food clean”. Pages and pages of regulation, thrown over by one sentence.
You might think that strange, wasn’t it God who gave those regulations? That’s true. But Christians believe that Jesus is The God. And The God changed things. Logically you will then ask, why Moses? Well, that would take too long to explain properly, but when you build a house, you use scaffolding, once the house is built, the scaffolding is discarded.
