"But what about the moderates?"

[xpastor]

I wonder if a relaxed view to biblical authority would have worked in your case?

Anyway, I wish you all a happy Winterfest..

I don't think so. As I explained, I started off with a relaxed view—no problems with evolution for instance.

The problem is that there are critiques which are offered by the opposing parties in Christianity (fundamentalists and liberals). IMO each critique is valid on its own terms, and the result is mutual destruction. For the moment I will just look at the issue of morality and I will state the positions in the opposite order to which I experienced them in my own life.

Historically, the liberal critique started off by doubting the historicity of many parts of the Bible and then moved on to problems of incompatibility with scientific knowledge. However, in our time he liberal critique of conservative Christianity is that parts of the Bible are too repugnant to our modern moral outlook to be acceptable (e.g. Bishop Spong). I think this last point is undeniable whether we look at the barbaric laws of the OT like stoning a young woman if she cannot produce a bloody sheet after her marriage night or the innumerable calls to genocide. Undoubtedly indiscriminate slaughter was common in warfare among primitive peoples, but it matters not a bit whether the genocides actually happened or not.* The point is that God himself is represented as commanding them. Not just killing all of the enemy fighting men but for instance killing "all the Amalekites, men and women, children and nursing infants" plus sheep, oxen, donkeys and camels. (1 Sam 15). Or killing all the men women and male children but keeping for yourselves all the virginal girls (as sex-slaves)—Num 31. Or bashing out the brains of a Babylonian baby—Ps. 119.

The conservative critique of the liberal position is very simple. You liberals say that you believe in Jesus as your savior. Where did you learn that? Was it not from the Bible? How then do you distinguish the true parts of the Bible from the false? If you are honest, you will admit that it's really just a feeling in your gut. If the Bible teaches morality, then surely it is all in force, for instance, God must attach more importance to pre-marital chastity than you liberals seem to do. Of course the fundies ignore much of the truly objectionable material in the OT and find ways (covenant theology) to weasel out of the harsher proscriptions, substituting disapprobation of pre-marital sex for stoning. Except of course for the dominionist sect, who want to make America a theocracy with the entire corpus of OT moral law in effect—stoning for apostasy or for Sabbath-breaking, etc. etc.

* On the issue of historicity I take the conclusions of Finkelstein and Silberman in The Bible Unearthed to be fairly authoritative. According to them archaeology shows that there never was a sojourn in Egypt and consequently no wandering in the desert and no conquest of the land of Israel. The early Israelites were pastoralists on the fringes of the land, and they drifted in when the earlier inhabitants abandoned their farms and towns. If there were any genocides, they were a good deal less extensive than the Bible records. The OT represents David as a mighty king with over a million fighting men. Not so, say F & A. He was a hill-top chieftain (like a medieval Scottish clan chief) centered on Jerusalem and having at best 10,000 subjects.