Leviticus: A good reason why the Old Testament shouldn’t be related to Christianity.

I plan to cite sources and add this to my “book” post later on, but I thought this was important enough to post on its own.The Book of Leviticus is a perfect example of why we should be wary of religion gleaned from the Bible.

Leviticus teaches us that we men should not “lay with men as with women”. I think a very simple comeback to this passage is that it comes from such a disgusting book like Leviticus. Do you really think that this one passage holds true along with passages describing the slaughtering, disemboweling, and burning of animal sacrifices? Passages that instruct that for birds used for sacrifice, the head of the bird needs to be twisted off and its blood spilled on the altar? Passages that say these sacrifices will allow God to forgive us for our sins?

Once we acknowledge that modern Christianity still believes that these laws were given by their God, we can then look objectively at the New Covenant in comparison to the Old Testament’s Old Covenant. God is love, God is compassion, and God will forgive your sins if you repent. The Catholic church allows its flock to confess to a Priest to forgive these sins. Other denominations claim that you must do good deeds and “proclaim the good word” to be forgiven. Yet others belive that you just need to believe and all will be forgiven (but a few good deeds don’t necessarily hurt). How then can it be justified that those laws of animal sacrifice to allieviate sin only applied to the Jews? There’s no explanation from God as to why only the Jews were supposed to follow these sacrificial rituals. Even the Jews themselves stopped this barbaric practice after the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem by the Romans. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korban#The_end_of_sacrifices)

When we critically analyse the difference between these two covenants, it doesn’t appear that we’re talking about the same God. The God who passed down laws to the Israelites and the God that people claim Jesus is one with are structurally and morally different. Some may argue that God is beyond our understanding and thus put faith in his flip-flopping nature, thus proving that people have less faith in John Kerry, a living human being, than they do in a hidden almighty entity that might as well be part of a fairy tale. We often look down on Scientology and other religions, beliefs, odd sexual preferences (Furries? Oh my.), etc. But how are these things any less strange than an omnipresent being who created everything, puts humans at the center of all affairs on this planet, allows wars and massively destructive technology to be produced to destroy everything on this planet, yet loves us and put us here as a test? This belief is absurd and actually less acceptable than deviant sexual desires and lifestyles that are so often demonized simple because they’re different from the norm.

We should continue by examining the nature of God philisophically. We may not reach a hard truth, but it may put things into better perspective. Can a God be a dynamic, emotion-driven entity who changes over the course of at least 3000 years from a bloodthirst and violent God to an all-loving and compassionate being? A well-rooted reason that so many subscribe to a form of Christianity over tradition-based Judaism is due to having a much more attractive belief structure. It’s very difficult for Judaism to attract new new believers, instead generating most of its followers through the traditional passing on of information to their children, infecting these children with a religious meme from the earliest impressionable age possible. It can easily be understood that the passing on of cultural information to children had significant benefits before globalization came about. The information wasn’t necessarily just religious, but also information on how to survive in their environment and in their community. However, this practice is losing its initial purpose, and much of the information passed on these days do not translate effectively to our current social system.

In an era of increasing unfulfillment and unrest at our place in the world, religion helps people focus on something one might refer to as “otherworldly” or “God”. This distracts them from the real world problems and their consequeces, instead being content with blaming current social problems on immorality and demonic influence. There are so many problems with this. With “God” being the focus, their eyes are averted from physical truths. Their eyes are instead focused primarily on spiritual truths, somehow gained through reading a physical (and poorly translated) book, full of physical facts and details. They are thus unable study and accept the true reasoning for our social problems. Science should be pursued by most of the population as a primary source of truth, but encounters difficulties every day by right win, superstitious, Bible-thumping Christians who don’t even read the Bible that they thump. Even my mother, a very strong believer in Jesus, doesn’t recall any of Leviticus. I told her I was going to read all of it, and that she should read it again, too. She agreed. I want to talk to her about it later and hear her thoughts on what her Bible teaches. Hopefully this is the start of something good.