No Stupid Questions

God is not about forgiveness and such in the New Testament. That’s a retcon by later Christians to make it more palatable.

He preached violence:

Matthew‬ ‭10:34‬: Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword.

He was just as happy to send people to hell:

Matthew‬ ‭13:41-42: The Son of man shall send forth his angels, and they shall gather out of his kingdom all things that offend, and them which do iniquity; And shall cast them into a furnace of fire: there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth.

Every single horrible decree in the Old Testament still applies in the new (despite modern Christians trying to redefine what ‘fulfil’ means):

Matthew‬ ‭5:17-18‬: Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil. For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled.

That’s last one includes all the slavery, rape, genocide, etc. Jesus could have spoken out against those things, but instead he said all those judgements were just and should be continued.

Matthew‬ ‭10:21‬: And the brother shall deliver up the brother to death, and the father the child: and the children shall rise up against their parents, and cause them to be put to death.

Pretty violent, and not very loving.

And let’s not forget the revelations, in which Jesus will doom billions of people to a horrific existence followed by eternal hellfire, not for doing wrong things, but merely for not being devoted to him. Even the devout and righteous of other religions, and even babies who haven’t had the chance to sin.

Remember, Jesus is the same god as in the Old Testament – if god is eternal and unchanging (which the Bible says he is), he is literally the same entity who committed atrocities before he decided to wear human skin and sacrifice himself to himself.

This is not a loving god.

Because Yahweh was originally a lesser Canaanite deity of war and destructive storms, while his counterpart, Baal, was all about gentle restorative rains. Part of that population moved around, and took him to be their primary deity when they broke off. He eventually merged with El.

Then that shit for further rehashed a few millennia later to soften his image.

If I had to guess, it's because they were written by different people at different times.

Because they're completely different gods. The old testament is only a part of christianity because in order to gain some legitimacy for their early church, they decided that their new god must be the same dude as the the god of the people that they were living among.

But in reality, they are very different books, written in very different times, by two very different religious cultures.

Because the God of the old testament is the demiurge...

Sorry, I couldn't help myself

The reason is because those texts are much older, and that was the style of religion practiced back then. Most God stories and stories about Gods in that period were like it. Most city states and tribal states had their own Gods that reflected them, and conflicts were gravely exaggerated. Also literally everything that happened in that state were an attribute or reflection of that particular God. With stories of how that attribute came to be, which reflected back in the people and in that way religion was a complex social interaction.

The people who wrote the stories we now know as the old Testament didnt write them as a part of a bible. These were stories of people who were taken out of their states and captured. Forced to live outside their land, but they took their God with them. Who became this omnipresent God that would lead people back to a promised land. Including all the complex social interaction people had with their mostly oral religious stories and traditions.

And it's the continued tradition that lead to the formation of religious scholarship and the idea that Gods could be of the earth and not just of a state. Which brought about new thoughts, new traditions, new religious complexity written down in the New Testament. Which lead to the desire to make religious books encapsulating all of religious thought.

And only much later came literalism, the mistake to take everything in the Bible literal. which sparked the formation of atheism as we know it today.

Because the people who wrote the old testament wanted to scare people into subservience

And those who wrote the new testament thought positive reinforcement was better

Actually if you read the book of revelations jesus sends the whole planet to hell except 7 cities that he told people to go to. he really lays into the sinners.

My take is that it's a reflection of the Israelite people. It's easy to be all fire and brimstone when you can back it up with military force. Suspiciously that all went away after they got conquered...