Yeah, it had to come down to blood and agony, because forgiveness has a price, unlike the forgiveness the believer is supposed to extend. That is sommmmmme story.
..alternative peaceful Buddha-like gods, or other "loving god of the hippies" would be incapable of understanding the concept of justice for the victims of atrocious evils...
..
Since Biblegod orders wars of extermination and authorizes brutal behavior toward slaves, this is nonsense.
The Bible God only ever reacts to those consistently daring to war against Him (and his people) when God always gives several warnings beforehand.
Slaves, as I've mentioned on other threads going over old ground, were treated much better than the slaves taken from Africa to the Western nations. Slaves in the bible were mostly bond-servants which their servitude lasted for seven years before being freed as required by the commandments for the Hebrews.
No one in the Bible, from start to finish, denies that their deity does this or finds anything grotesque about it.
That's sort of the interesting thing I found about the bible, which imo refutes the types of rhetorical arguments I often hear, for example,"the bible writers were doctoring the scriptures to make God look ultimately good etc. & etc.".
Yet beyond this particular logic of what should be most obvious a flawed plan... "meant to win over converts etc." has rather oddly been portrayed to be...um.."a good idea?" The suggested textual "contradictions" at the same time is also portraying a Loving God? "No need for erasures or alterations but instead...
leave in all those details of atrocious wars among nations, the suffering, illness, disease,death and Gods harsh punishment". "Yeah, that'll do it, people will stampede the churches now".
To me, it sounds more like the reporting of 'how it was', as harsh as it sounds, no pretty picture, lacking the idea that "it would be a better idea to add imaginative embellishments to give a more delightful false illustration being much easier to accept and emotionally digest".
In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, mankind at last began to see with clear vision what slaveholding and genocide really meant.
Two different degrees of slavery, two different eras. One had it worse (African slaves) than the other (slaves of the the old testament).