“That passage is from the Old Testament!”

As usual, I’ve been watching atheist YouTube videos lately because honestly no amount of “atheist indoctrination” is ever going to be able to hold a candle to the amount of Christian indoctrination I’ve been through in my life. A lot of the videos take issue with things that are in the Old Testament, and when I bring them up with Christians, they say that “That was under the old covenant.” This argument didn’t work for me even when I was a Christian and desperately wanted it to work, because I grew up Calvinist. We Calvinists made a distinction between “Dispensationalism” and our Calvinist alternative which was called “Covenant Theology.” I tried to find a video explaining the difference and honestly I couldn’t come up with much. But basically, we really super emphasized that the Old Testament was just as important as the New Testament in every regard. There were some rules like which animals were okay to eat which were specifically repealed in the New Testament (Acts 10:9-16) but all Old Testament commands were still binding unless otherwise specified in the New Testament. This made me about the only student in my entire Evangelical college who didn’t do homework on Sundays, which is really complicated because the actual Old Testament sabbath was Saturday, and also if I “disobeyed” and did work on our version of the “sabbath,” it’s not like I was going to be stoned to death so the punishments didn’t apply anymore but the rules did and anyway I tried to make it all make sense but it doesn’t. What matters here is that we claimed that the “Dispensationalists” believed that people were saved by works in the Old Testament but saved by grace in the New Testament. As usual, it’s very questionable whether our opponents actually believed what we said they believed, and I found out while looking things up for this post that “Dispensationalists” actually believe in a lot more than two dispensations, as explained here:

Anyway, our argument was that God saved people in the same way and generally interacted with people in the same way throughout history. So it’s hard for me now to be on the other side like, “Hey some of this Old Testament stuff is pretty harsh” and I’m told that it’s okay because that was the Old Testament, when I spent decades as a Christian and I never got to use that argument.

Furthermore, even if we assume that it really used to be different back when the Old Testament was written, how is that fair to the human beings who are described as living under the old rules? Which, if you’re curious what life was like for those Bible characters, this pretty much sums it up:

But even if we assume that the Old Testament no longer applies and the people who lived back then somehow get everything made up to them in the afterlife, there are still problems with the Christian claim that I’m making too much of Old Testament accounts. Imagine your son or daughter brings home a new significant other (since the church is constantly referred to as the “bride of Christ”) and let’s say their new significant other has a personal history of murder. But they haven’t done it in a long time and lately they’ve been really sweet. But when you mention the murder, they’re not sorry. Quite to the contrary, they feel that what they did was absolutely perfect and beyond any critique of any kind. But your kid says that since it was a really long time ago, it’s unreasonable to not just drop it. Wouldn’t most parents be concerned?

And finally, even if it was a long time ago and God seems mostly different ever since the latest covenant started, who the 🤬 is to say that there’s not just going to be another covenant and we’ll be back to stoning people again? If absolutely anything including genocide, rape, and slavery can be justified under the right cultural context, it’s very disturbing to imagine what God could decree at any time.

And can we also just point out that it’s not like the New Testament is great? (For a familiar example see 1 Peter 2:13-25. For an unfamiliar example, see the entire book of Philemon, to which I was subjected to a sermon series as an adolescent. It turns out that a slave named Onesimus escaped and ran away to the Apostle Paul. Paul told him that he had to go back to his master, Philemon, and wrote the book of Philemon for Onesimus to bring with him. I’m fuzzy on the details and I don’t have it in me to look it up right now, but for those who thought it was just random verses, there is an entire book in the New Testament endorsing slavery. But like, Paul really cared about Onesimus so it’s cool.

Back to the Old Testament, since I’ve recently discovered NonStampCollector, here are a couple more videos describing what I’m talking about in terms of horrifying things that were “a long time ago” and are totally not important now