A question for the faithful

[Angrboda]

For 27 years, I was just as real a Christian as the person next to me in the pew. I tried to do everything the Bible said to do - except for the obvious stuff - I didn't kill children that rebelled or those who didn't keep the Sabbath day holy.

This part has always struck me as mysterious. How do we know that killing those children and those Sabbath breakers (and shunning menstruating women) etc, etc, are not the "serious parts" ? If God is indeed mysterious, who are any of you, including Christians who believe in a New Covenant, to tell what are the serious bits and what aren't. Even if you believe that the law no longer applies, the evidence for that position is not 100%. If you really cared about your salvation, you'd take every jot and tittle very seriously, just in case you were wrong about it. Some Jewish traditions preach this, that none of the 613 laws are unimportant and therefore we must scrupulously follow all 613 of them. (A key example where this plays out is the prohibitions on eating certain animals. We can theorize that the reason God commanded this was to disassociate the Jews from the Gentiles, and to prevent unnecessary cases of trichinosis or other food borne disease. But we don't really know the specific reasons that God made it a holy commandment; the text never spells out to do this, "unless you've heated the meat to 140 degrees for at least one minute". God's reason for these mitzvot could be totally unrelated to our hypothesized concerns.) Yet people, Christians especially, think that they are a) unfit to vouchsafe God on the one hand, and yet, b) vouchsafe his every commandment every time they turn around. I think in fact, this indicates either that none of them truly cares about their salvation, or that they're willing to replace the godhead with their own head whenever it suits them. Unless I'm missing something here, probably 99.99% of Christians are the so-called "cafeteria Christians," as they all substitute their wisdom in place of the written law on the flimsiest of pretenses.