I really enjoy reading the bible but i just can't get over the cruelty of it. [Spirituality & Religion]

Man, if you're a human being and think yourself incapable of proudly killing a small child under the right circumstances, you straight up don't yourself that well.

Ironically, centuries of aggressive brainwashing in the sorts of religions like Christianity which were permitted by the relative tranquility of the early Pax Romana to blithely feel out what the human condition is like when it takes the absence of constant life-and-death threats to "your people" for granted is pretty much [i]why[/i] (most of the well-adjusted, at least) modern people find child-murder fundamentally abhorrent and return error messages when trying to understanding why anyone would do it.

But yeah, [i]most[/i] of what Christians call "the Bible" was written in times when the suggestion of a forgiving, peaceful, and loving god would have been met by any sane person with the response, "Why would I possibly want to worship a god who won't bring me victory over my enemies?". A few texts in the Ketuvim start to show signs of glimpsing something "beyond" this perennially violent outlook, since Achaemenid times were kind of the start in the Near Eastern world of the necessary rerouting of notions of group-identity away from fervent loyalty to one's own sovereign national polity, owing to the fact that these were largely ceasing to exist outside of rebellious satraps and at least nominal Persian vassals (a general development with which the Assyrian and Babylonian imperialisms earlier in the 1st millennium BC — during the time when most of the so-called "Old Testament" was actually written — had certainly been pregnant, but which had gone unfulfilled because the prevailing "great powers" system could never be satisfactorily broken). This turn away from the ancient style of "spiritual nationalism" was really brought to bloom (and even encompassed the Greeks) with the superimposed gloss and ideal of Hellenistic culture over the Near East, with all the territories and traditions of the ancient nations and powers largely reduced to "objects of play" for Greco-Macedonian armies/navies; it was then brought to perfection somewhat before New Testament times with the general replacement of most interstate annihilation-wars with what was basically a lengthy "ancient Cold War" between Rome and the Arsacids, and all of the sudden you had a bunch of people who couldn't any longer find religious meaning in the cathartic revelry of needlessly destroying what your hated enemy was most trying to protect. People living in any age tend to rediscover this feeling during war, and the inability to reconcile that rediscovery with how "unthinkable" it all is according to the culture they grew up in plays its role in more than a few modern cases of PTSD.