Quote - Throughout the Old Testament, God is often self-described as jealous, vengeful, and judging by some descriptions, pretty over-the-top when it comes to revene for injustices. But then, when you run the Universe and your subjects are semi-civilized humans who do far worse to each other on a near-daily basis... let's just call it Getting One's Undivided Attention.

Not until a far more advanced (relatively) stage of civilization do we see the radical concepts as put forth by one Yeshua of Galilee: Love, Forgiveness, Tolerance, Kindness...

/P

Oh come now...  you actually call this a REASON why God is how He is? Because of who WE were He acted like this? And we reached a FAR more civilized tone so he behaved better? This is the first time I've heard anything like this and it sounds like you're reaching and trying to reconcile the differences. We did not advance THAT much. We did not change THAT much. The two Gods in the Bible are RADICALLY different from each other and the reason you propose is insufficient.

Answer me this. If He is all-knowing and all-seeing, how come he did not know EVERYTHING that was going to happen LONG before it ever happened? And KNOWING all of these things...   HOW could He get angry?

**Let me put it another way...    a mother is preparing to bake bread. She gets all of the ingredients together - except the yeast. She puts the bread in the oven and when the timer goes off and she pulls it out of the oven she finds it has not risen. AND THEN SHE GETS MAD. Now of course she KNEW it would not rise because she intentionally left out the yeast - and YET...   she still got mad. DOES THIS MAKE SENSE? Apparently God did the same thing when He created us. Of course we all have "free will," but then He IS God and knows what will happen nonetheless. Interesting, huh?
**

The devoutly religious really do not ask the hard questions and the vast majority of the time resort to "We don't understand Gods' Plan."  Uhh...  yeah. We're supposed to understand everything else and BELIEVE in Him with nothing but a collection of misrepresented letters as proof.

As has already been pointed out here, it is obvious that most religious consistenly misinterpret the stories in the Bible and sway them to mean what they want them to mean. This is why we have so many sects of Christianity since none of them agrees with each other. It's just very sad when they try to change laws based on their religious beliefs BASING them on false interpretations.