I was reading an article written on the internet yesterday by someone who was having a go at the stuff in the Old Testament of the Bible that they didn’t like and that gave them reason to therefore discredit the whole of Christianity and the Christian story of the divine. It went through the violence and seemingly inhumane laws – stuff that I struggle with too. Where I at least see crude forms of justice that I wrestle with, they saw nothing but reason to condemn.

It struck me though – how sanctimonious are we!? We criticise violence in the Bible and other things we consider to be abhorrent and yet we live in a generation that spends more on the development of killing machines than the world has ever seen before. We fund weapons of mass destruction quicker and to the tune of way more than we’re willing to give to assist those who are starving and lack access to clean water. Talking about access to food and clean water, let’s not talk about the tons of food thrown away every day in the western world alongside the rise in obesity (one of our biggest health issues) while millions around the world struggle to pull the most basic meals together to meet the nutritional requirements of them and their families.

We critique old school justice in the Bible as reason to reject it yet in New Zealand alone we kill unborn children at a rate of over 10,000 a year and it’s entirely legal, ferociously protected and argued for by a large sector of society. On that issue I’m a pragmatist who wants to find ways that both sides can come together to bring that rate down rather than just arguing about it, but I still think its a horrible thing.

We condemn the soft approach to slavery present in the Bible yet purchase cheap product that props up a large and brutal slavery industry and we keep turning a blind eye to it because to do otherwise would be inconvenient. Yet somehow we think we’re better because we don’t have slaves in our own homes that we’re responsible for and have to treat well.

The porn industry is the fuel of the internet. We condemn parts of the Bible as inhumane yet spend billions a year on watching other people have sex where many in those videos have been exploited. Alongside that, large numbers of middle aged western men travel to developing countries so they can have sexual encounters with child prostitutes.

People condemn the violent story of Joshua invading the ‘promised land’ yet in my lifetime the wars in Iraq and Aghanistan have stood out. As much as I struggle with Joshua’s invasion, I can make a moral argument for it, yet when I scratch the surface of Iraq and Afghanistan what I find isn’t the PR moral case of toppling unjust regimes but a wholesale grab for oil to make sure that we can keep driving those cars and creating petroleum based products that pollute our planet and destroy our health. Let’s not get into the weapons used in such wars and other modern conflicts that I’m sure would make Joshua turn in his grave and cringe at how effective we are at taking lives wholesale. Heck, we can even fly unmanned air-crafts that can kill large numbers while the operator sits in an air-conditioned office with a latte in another part of the world.

I could keep going on and on and on, but I think you get the point… the sad thing is that I’m complicit in a lot of it. It’s the culture of the world I live in so who am I to condemn an ancient community as if I’ve got a cultural leg to stand on that makes me so much better?