It depends where you read. There is fire and brimstone in the new testament. Revelation is a book that doesn't hold back and we see a wrothful God of judgment. But then there stories of Josiph and his brothers, or the book of Daniel, shows that there is forgivness in the old testament as well.
this post was submitted on 28 Sep 2025
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God a bitch
In the gnostic belief it is just two different gods.
He's very much not.
I mean, using Jesus to recontextualize the Old Testament God definitely misses the mark. Jesus was here on a mission of mercy to cross the boundary between the sinful ape and the rising angel, and to bring as many people along with him as he could.
But once you're grafted into the tree of Judaism through Christianity, you still have to abide by the rules of Judaism (with the exception that foods are no longer verboten or whatever).
Jesus was an incredibly stern man who was very rigid and inflexible on his views because he had the eternal viewpoint.
He refused to perform an exorcism for a Samaritan woman's daughter who was half Jewish because she wasn't full Jewish even though she was perfectly faithful until she made such a hue and cry that she publically shamed him into it.
He would snap at his own friends if they said the wrong thing or failed to understand something because he didn't effectively communicate it to them so that they would understand at the same level he did.
And I don't hold any of these actions against him, he was on what should be the most important mission in all of human history, right?
But the modern Christianity teachings of Christ where he's like buddy Jesus and he's just a happy-go-lucky, I love everyone peace, love, and harmony dude is absolutely not the way he's actually represented in the Bible by his closest followers.
It was not out of the realm of normalcy for him to do things like beating the fuck out of a temple full of salespeople.
But once again, the sheer stress of his every moment, the fact that if he told a lie, if he felt lust, envy, greed, selfishness, anything that even approximated a sin, it would destroy all of humanity, and himself in the process, must have been so stressful, that in a way, I believe it was a mercy that he died so young.
If Jesus had had to stick it out into his 80s, I don't know.
Maybe he would have fallen along the way.
God became terrified of us after the tower of babel, so he told his minions to write the new testament in a more positive way, so we wouldn't seek to invade his realm and take control over creation in revenge for the atrocities he did to us.
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.
The simple answer is that the gospel wasn't working as well as it had been, so they had to change it up to continue attracting people. Cults are basically popularity contests, and you can't win if you're scaring everyone away.
It made sense to scare people into being reasonable. That was the Old Testament.
Once they acted less stupidly, it became safer to let people be as they are. That was the New Testament.
If you think the old testament rules are reasonable ones, I hope you are never in charge of any person, place, organisation or animal.