By now you've probably had enough from me to last you a while, but I've still got a few paragraphs of your letter to address; mercifully, some of it repeats what's gone before, so we may be able to move through that more quickly.
"Why," you ask, "would a God who is constant and never changing make a world that science can figure out, but make a religion of divine mysteries that we just have to have faith to believe, but no proof?"
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First, you have both overestimated the degree to which science is understood and underestimated the amount of "proof" of religion; but second, there is a good reason for religion to be a bit uncertain. I'll attack the second point first.
Many apologists have addressed the notion of the certainty of God and the obligations that entails. Calvin pointed out that if you realize that God exists, it follows without argument that He owns you body and soul, and you have no real alternative but to give Him what is already his. I think it was Sir Francis Bacon (don't quote me on that cite) who argued that as a gamble, you should bet on the truth of the gospel--because if you bet that there is a god and are wrong, you've lost a small amount of your own life; but if you bet that there isn't a god and are wrong, you've lost eternity. But what if you knew? What if it were an incontrovertible fact that God existed, that the only way of salvation was through Christ, and that all who were not saved would face eternal punishment? If it were completely undeniable, it would lose all sense of a voluntary decision. It's the difference between opening a retirement account and having social security taken from your paychecks. In our enlightened age, we are (rightly) highly critical of our history, of armies which entered pagan lands under the slogan, "Convert or die" (a strategy used by Islamic troops first, but that does not excuse its use by Christians); but would it be any less coercive for God to make the truth so obvious that there was no real choice?
Look at it as a family thing. My children love me, as I love them. It happens that I also feed them, and try to help them with their problems and otherwise look after them. But they don't love me because I require it, and I've never threatened not to feed them if they don't love me. Were I to say that they couldn't have dinner until they told me that they loved me, would that be evidence that they did love me? More than that, wouldn't such coercion be more likely to cause them to resent me, but to pretend that they loved me for the sake of appearances? No, in order for God to receive a genuine response from us, a response of love and trust, He has to arrange life such that there is some seemingly reasonable alternative, and that means that it has to be possible to reject him without the certainty of total loss.
But that's not to say there is no evidence for God. Every child understands that the universe is created by God; they don't fully understand it, and many of them will grow to decide that that was childish. There are several excellent arguments for the existence of God, expounded over the centuries; these actually have names by which they are known. The ontological argument suggests that because we have existence as persons, there must be some ultimate person. The cosmological argument argues that the presence of creation requires the existence of a creator. The teleological argument observes that the order and structure of the universe, like that of a timepiece, demands a designer who put it in place. The moral argument holds that good can only have meaning if it is based on something beyond the natural realm, and that reason can only be valid if it is built on something other than the chance developments of a random universe. One other argument, translated as "God or a bad man", essentially says that the Jesus we read of in history cannot have been a great moral teacher; his claim of divinity and the subtle ways in which it permeated every aspect of his life forces us to choose between a deluded lunatic, a scheming liar, or God incarnate--and the first two choices just don't fit the facts.
At the same time, science is entirely a matter of faith itself. David Hume argued that one could not "know" the so-called laws of science. All one could know is that something had happened before, and had happened several times. The leap from recognizing that this follows that to asserting that this causes that is entirely a leap of faith; the belief that a repeated sequence of "do this and that happens" demonstrates that it will be that way in the future is taken on faith. The philosophy of science is built on the basic assumption that the world follows specific discoverable rules; that assumption cannot be proved, so all that we know is based on faith that we can know anything of this sort at all.
Beyond that, what we consider "laws" in science are not more than statements which describe what we have observed to date. A prime example of this is Newton's laws. For well over a century, what Newton propounded was believed as laws of the universe. But in the twentieth century, there were a few things which were not explained by Newton. Einstein's relativity observed that Newton was actually wrong about almost everything--it's just that the error in most of it was so small as to be insignificant in all of the reality that had been observed previously. So now we have Einstein's laws, but already we seem to be pressing into areas (especially in the quantum level) in which these laws are inadequate. Eventually there will be a new law, which will also be wrong, but less wrong. We may never come to a full understanding of science; but whatever we do understand is still taken on faith.
"The basic principles of the bible - love one another, don't drink to excess, do unto others, and such are wonderful, and I believe that they came from God, but the stuff about kill children who are rebellious....(It's in there. Why can you pick and choose what you are going to do out of the bible? Who are these religious leaders who can say that the old testament is figurative and we don't have to follow every word exactly, but some of it we do have to follow, ok then who chooses what biblical texts are literal and what ones are figurative?) Why did God allow the editors to put that stuff in the bible about Levitical law (don't eat pork...etc.) if we weren't supposed to follow it? If God had put it in there he would have wanted us to follow it. Did the constant God, creator, Father of us all really invent a religion of errors and discrepancies?"
You've reached one of my pet peeves--people who believe that they can pick which of God's laws apply and which do not. This makes less and less sense the deeper you go. I am reminded that many people argue that God didn't allow the Jews to eat pork or lobster because of health concerns in that age. Similarly it has been noted that from a medical perspective (and on average), the extensive instructions on when men and women could sleep together would assure the highest pregnancy rate in an age in which large families were the best route to prosperity. But the orthodox Jews today will reply that it's very interesting to note what the effects of God's commands are, but it is extremely egotistic to assume that we therefore know why he gave those commands.
And you are absolutely right--there is no basis in scripture for the distinction between the "moral" law and the "ritual" law. That is no more than religious leaders imposing their opinion on the text. Even the distinction between the ten commandments and the rest of the law is dubious. Interestingly, Catholics, Jews, and Protestants all agree that there is a special "ten commandments"; but we each number them differently, combining and dividing the text in our own ways. I've already discussed the fact that the gospel moves us from law to grace; but the relationship of Christians to the Old Testament is really a rather complex one, deserving an extended examination itself.
One thing that has to be understood about the Law of Moses is that it was given to the Jews. Form critics have observed that the structure of the law, beginning with the pronouncement of the ten commandments, is what is known as a "Suzerainty treaty formula". This was actually a rather common document in the ancient world. A small nation fearful of being conquered by a larger nation would request help from another larger nation; the other nation would come in and fight off the threatened invasion. Then the ruler of the other nation would begin to announce his treaty terms. It always began with an extended recitation of all the wonderful things that this ruler had done for the small country, and then it went on to express his "expectations", usually in terms of tribute to be paid to him out of "gratitude". (It is in some ways not unlike what it was to be an iron curtain country in modern times.) The ten commandments similarly begins, "I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the House of Bondage"--a rather abbreviated but complete statement of the wonderful things He had done for Israel. The rest of what Moses gives to Israel is their debt for that rescue.
Once you grasp this, you realize something that the first century church came to understand, but that was lost almost immediately thereafter: The Law of Moses never applied to gentiles. If you aren't Jewish, it is an interesting and informative document showing much about the person and nature of God, revealing many things about what is pleasing and displeasing in His eyes. But it was never law for anyone other than the Hebrews.
I say that the first century church grasped this. Evidence for this appears in Acts 15. There was a very important meeting in Jerusalem. Peter, Paul, James (the brother of Christ), and all the major figures of the day were there. The question before them was whether gentiles who wished to become Christians needed to become circumcised and keep the law of Moses. The fact that this question was being asked is extremely significant: it means that Jews who had become Christians were continuing to keep the law, continuing to circumcise their children and make their ritual sacrifices as the law required. After all, they would hardly have held a meeting at which they might say, "The gospel has freed us from all of the obligations of the Jewish religion, but we think that you gentiles should have to keep all of those obligations if you want to be Christians." They concluded that gentile Christians had no obligations to the law, although it would help with the unity of the church if they would observe a few points which Jews of the day found particularly offensive.
This dichotomy appears elsewhere. It explains why Paul circumcised Timothy, who had one Jewish parent, but not Titus, the gentile. It also sheds a great deal of light on the material in Acts 21. There we find that James suggests to Paul that he undergo a ritual vow to prove that he has not been preaching that Jews should forsake the Law of Moses--and Paul agrees to do it. This baffles people who think that Paul was in fact preaching just that--it is not characteristic of Paul to abandon his principles for appearances. The only explanation is that the apostle who preached all over the known world that gentiles did not have to keep the law to be Christians still kept that law himself, because he was a Jew. Jewish Christians still regarded themselves as Jewish in every sense; they embraced their gentile brethren, and they accepted the differences as part of the plan of God, but they remained Jewish.
No one can say how they expected this to turn out. Most of them expected the end of the world to come before the end of the century (much as many today think the year 2000--only the last year of the 20th century, still a year away from the new millennium--may be the end of the world just because it happens to look significant on our man-made calendars). They would not have thought there was any future to consider. But into the second century Jewish and gentile Christians were interacting as such, and Jewish Christians were also living as Jews. The Jewish Christians fought against the Romans in Israel with their Jewish brethren. Then there was a disaster at a place called Masada.
At Masada, Jews of all types were making a final stand against the Romans. They were being led by one Bar Kochba--"Son of the Shining", if I remember right. Some leader of the pharisaic faction (only the Pharisees and the Christians had survived the destruction of Jerusalem around 70 A.D. as intact factions; the other factions all had too much stake in the city and its politics to matter once it was gone), whether from honest conviction or desire to fuel the fires of the troops, declared that Bar Kochba was the messiah. The Christians pulled out, unwilling to support any claim to a different messiah than the one they served; and the Jews were slaughtered, and for many generations did not forgive the Christians for this. Yet it was moot--Palestine as a Jewish homeland ceased to be for centuries; Christian Jews were assimilated into the population of the empire, and Pharisaic Jews existed in enclaves around the empire. The ties were broken.
Thus it appears that God has created two religions. He has kept the first one intact so that those of us saved through the second one can learn from those who followed the first. That isn't to say that the content of that covenant is not valuable or not applicable in some way to our situation; it is only to say that we are not under that law, only able to understand our God better through it.
And what of killing rebellious children? Well, there are a lot of things to consider. First, the law was originally given to a nomadic people, a people who would not have permanent homes for over a generation, and even after that would not have strong buildings, police, prisons, or any of the trappings of law enforcement in our world. A person who was a chronic law breaker had to be eliminated; there was no place to keep him alive. Death was the penalty for many crimes under that law, because the influence of the criminal could not be contained in any other way. Second, the law was multifunctional. It provided standards and rituals for the faith, but also structure for the society, health regulations for the control of disease, moral direction, and quite a bit which was focused primarily on preventing Israel from following other gods. There was no way to handle juvenile delinquency if it was incorrigible; the death penalty was at least a sound deterrent, and certainly a final solution, if not a very appealing one. Third, if you examine the law, you'll see that the people--the only people--who get to make the charge that a child is beyond help and should be put to death are that child's parents. The decision is made by the elders of the people, but the question is not considered unless the parents have decided that there is no way they can save their own child. Given that consideration, we would expect the law would only be applied in extreme circumstances. And fourth, there is no indication that the law was ever used. It might have been, but if so it was not recorded.
I think this chunk is long enough; I'll pick up here next time.
--Mark
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