My guess is that the NT is not completely literally true. In the ancient world the discipline of history as an objective study didn't exist. Plus, the gospels were based on oral traditions and weren't written until something like 70 years after the Christ.
Typically in seminary there are discussions centering around the differences in the narratives of the Gospels, which events are ignored, differences in language, etc.
it doesn't really say anything about the veracity of events and how each narrative got written (for example, there's a general idea that Matthew and Luke used Mark as a source but fleshed the narrative out based on their own sources and the things that mattered to them).
And that really does come out -- each gospel tends to view Jesus with a different purpose/theme in mind (Matthew is about "Christ the King" and proving he is the authority and heir of heaven, Luke tends to take a far more detailed and clinical approach, Mark focuses on the actions of Jesus and not much on the heady stuff, and John meanwhile creates image after image, tons of metaphors, about Jesus to help us understand who he was and what his purpose was.)
This makes it difficult for me to approach the Bible as a specific historical record. it definitely tells a story and presents truths... but in no single codified way. Christians still argue over theology, heatedly, nowadays -- what happened, what it means, what the "rules" are, who is a believe and who is not. it seems to me that one's interpretation depends a lot on one's individual priorities, which have no real bearing on what exactly is true. Hence, I can take a more legitimately conceptual approach to the Bible -- I try to distill the gist of things -- rather than getting hung up on the conflicting details or what rules might have been derived and inscribed from culture, pressing social needs, and/or general historical context.
As far as I can tell, there is no way of absolutely knowing what did and didn't happen.
That.
He came here to die for us. His sacrifice put an end to blood sacrifice, for Christians. His sacrifice was the one that satisfied the Father forever, and now we have a new covenant. A covenant that says we don't have to follow all the rules in Leviticus in order to be one with God, we don't have to sacrifice animals to be one with God, all we have to do is accept the sacrifice that Christ made. It's an end to rules and death. How do you get that it's a template for child abuse?
Step outside your framework and look at it differently, and maybe you'll get it -- even if the idea seems violently opposed to your reading of Scripture.
Look at the story of Abraham and Isaac too, for more clarification. As a believer of a particular tradition, you will tend to view it one way; now look at it from an outsider's POV.
Put in a nutshell: The guy "hears God telling him" to go sacrifice his son on a stone altar. Nowadays when someone claims that, we take away the kid and throw him in jail for abuse; and when we don't, a woman drowns all her kids in the bathtub and spends the rest of her life in an asylum.
The salvation story only makes any sense IF you accept all the premises (people are inherently sinful and doomed to hell without redemption; there is something about sin that God cannot just 'forgive' even though he's God; there is something about innocent blood that is redemptive but only Jesus was "innocent" despite clearly doing and saying some stuff that would seem sinful coming from another; etc.) What sort of God sets up salvation that involves the torture and punishment of his own child?
Have you ever read that e-mail forward about the kid who has a special quality to his blood to create an anecdote for a plague that if not stopped would destroy all human beings, and how the parent basically has to choose to let the docs murder his boy in order that all humanity be saved? That situation was different (there, the kid was young and didn't understand; Jesus seemingly could "choose to go along willingly")... but I found that story offensive primarily because the child WAS too young, and the parent has a bond that demands the child be loved and protected, and here the parent was abandoning the child. Some people carry those same feelings over into the Jesus story.
I think scriptural literalism, in any faith (and I would argue that it is a far, far greater aspect of Islam than any other faith today), is a sign of "bad faith" in the believer, secret doubts are masked by the letter of the law, and I also think, in fundamentalist interpretations, that it is a sign of emotional and psychological immaturity or neurotic trends.
I'd have to differentiate between extreme literalism and the more literalist tendencies showing today in evangelicalism (I have good friends in the latter), but I do disagree with some of them on their way of approaching scripture.
After years of being in the mindset myself and struggling with it, personally I think more literalist tendencies have an underlying fear of making a mistake and/or displeasing God. Life is also pretty ambiguous and sometimes terrifying, and belief in something concrete (whether it's picking a concrete rule out of scripture or else trying to translate a lot of abstracted spiritual concepts into tangible literal laws to follow in order to 'do good') allows a lot of that anxiety to dissipate.
Someone told me once it was a little like walking blind folded with the assurance that you will not fall from the path you are on, if you trust that you wont fall you'll not give it any more thought, if you dont trust then you may begin to scrutinise the blind fold itself, looking for flaws or holes or ways to peak out or around it.
What I tend to see is that closure-oriented people (e.g., J) better appreciate having a rules mindset, it frees them up to focus on other things and gives them a recipe to "make life work." Also, free-floater types (e.g., SPs) appreciate rules if they've felt unproductive in life or had their lack of discipline/rowdiness end up taking them far afield into unhappy places. A lot of religious converts to evangelicalism seem to fit into these two categories. Fundamentalism seems far more extreme to me. You'll see a lot more NTs operating outside those boxes simply because they have more trouble living with discrepancies in thought or not acknowledging inherent ambiguities in one's faith statement.
with this postmodern perspective it's pretty easy to not care so much about sweating the details because ultimately there's no such thing as a perfectly accurate story IRL anyways--but that doesn't mean they lack value.
This strongly resonates with me.
I think we are, as human beings, rotten at the core. We have to work to be peaceful, tolerant, and loving.
I'll be blunt: This is an example of extremism I avoid.
I was raised to believing in "Rotten to the core" humans and I finally have to say I don't see that as true.
We are imperfect and flawed creatures, that's what I have experienced over the course of my life.
I have seen spontaneous acts of kindness and a desire to be positive; I've also seen spontaneous acts of selfishness and some pretty horrendous violence. What does that say? It says we are both -- both profane and profound, and it is intermingled in our very being. We are both divine and animals all at once.
Trying to define people as either "naturally good" or "naturally evil" is actually the completely wrong question and leads to terrible assumptions being made.
I see "natural human dev" as moving from a self-oriented and short-term gratification level (because the organism's world originally is within itself) -- a toddler only sees its own world and other people are not inside the ego boundaries, except for maybe the mother but not as a separate entity but only to serve the infant. However, as a human being grows, there is a natural development towards extending one's boundaries and incorporating others inside, as separate entities but still treated with the respect with which a person hopefully treats oneself.
So this is why people are both victims and victimizers -- they are responsible for their actions even while being unable sometimes to choose something different (because they were raised in a way that limits their options, yet are still culpable).
The goal is to get people to move from toddler behavior (which is inappropriate and destructive when practiced by adults with adult power) to adult community-oriented behavior, which seems to provide the most potential in life.
Trying to ascribe someone an overall moral character, rather than just dealing with their specific violations of others, seems to be nothing more than a judgment issues in order to shame someone into changing. There is no real philosophical answer to "Is man good or evil?" We have drives and inclinations for both. It's just a control mechanism in the guise of philosophy.