"But what about the moderates?"

[Vicki Q]

OK, DeistPaladin hasn't replied, so I''l break for Xmas with a last post. But who to reply to?

Very well. You'll understand, then, when I don't give your posts any consideration.

Communication is a two-way street.

Oh, OK then. Sorry and all that.

...
And there are the mistaken scientific assumptions: Joshua commands the sun to stand still although it is the earth that moves. Far more chilling, it became obvious that the God of the Old Testament was a genocidal maniac. In dozens of passages God exhorts the Israelites to slay all of their enemies, men and women, children and infants.
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A word about historiciyy. It is the view of modern critical scholars that few, if any, of the genocides narrated in the Bible actually happened. Rather they were patriotic lies concocted by the authors of the OT writing centuries after the supposed events. Of course that doesn't let Yahweh off the hook. He is represented as ordering genocides.
...

Bizarrely, I'm going to argue that the OT massacres maybe did happen to a limited extent. Total war has come and gone throughout history. In e.g. C19 and the beginning of the U.S. Civil war we had professional armies, but with e.g. WW2 Japan and the end of the U.S. Civil war attacking civilians was the thing. If you were a small tribe trying to take over land, you couldn't afford to leave too many of the defeated enemies alive because eventually they would attempt round 2. It made gruesome but logical sense to do ethnic cleansing.

In that respect, the OT reflects the reality of ancient warfare, in which too much 'morality' lead to national extinction. There is certainly a different feel between the God who ordered a massacre and the God who went to the cross as a suffering servant. However this perhaps reflects the development of the story, and the group of Jews who began Christianity had a clear picture of the continuity between the two, as the occasional 'history of Judaism' bits of the NT show.

I have heard it said that we learn more from the challenging bits of the Bible than the easy.

Thanks for sharing your story. I can see how the contradictions with science might create problems. I'm not sure they need to. For instance:

If sin entered the world with "humanity", for which Adam and Eve are symbolic representations, how did even the early stages of humanity evolve. Remember we have to go back to single cell organisms here. Evolution doesn't work without death and death didn't enter the world until sin but sin requires choice and choice requires a brain capable of understanding and making choice and that doesn't exist with single cell organisms which operate according to stimulus-response.

This was very perceptive, and gave me more thought than I've had for a while. Once again, we should not equate factuality with truth.

Paul obviously was unaware of modern science. One would like to take him to one side, update him, and ask him to express the teaching he was trying to get over within an evolutionary framework. I hesitate long to guess the outcome, but at a pure guess...

We exist in a flawed creation. Man is part of that creation, and death is part of our makeup. However Jesus was able to do what we flawed humans could not, and has inaugurated a new creation.

Or something snappier. But the 'contradiction' isn't a problem as such. I wonder if a relaxed view to biblical authority would have worked in your case?

Anyway, I wish you all a happy Winterfest..