The violence in the Old Testament was a very troubling concept for me while I was still a conservative Christian, especially in regards to teaching these stories to my young children. I used to play Christian children’s Bible story CD’s in my car while I drove my grade schoolers to their Christian school (LCMS). One time the story was about Noah and the Great Flood. The CD narrator told how God sent a massive flood to drown all the “bad” people and only Noah and his family were saved. My little children asked, “Did God drown all the little kids too??”

“Yes” I had to respond uncomfortably. I could see the horror in their little eyes.

A couple of months later their Christian school had a singing program on a Sunday during the worship service of the sponsoring church. Hundreds of cute little kids got up and sang their hearts out about their love for Jesus. After their part of the service was over, all the little children were sent to sit with their parents. The pastor then gave his sermon. It was on the Slaughter of the Amalekites. The pastor explained that killing little children might seem horrible to us today, but we must trust God that it was the right thing to do in that time period. Something inside of me said, “That is just wrong. There is never a good reason for the targeted killing of little children”.

I experienced a profound crises of cognitive dissonance that day. How could a loving Jesus, who I believed as a Trinitarian was also the God of the OT, kill little children just like the cute little ones who had just been up on stage singing their love for him?

I could no longer hold a literalist interpretation of these passages. I had to adopt a more “enlightened” interpretation of these passages. In order to calm the cognitive dissonance swirling in my brain, I had to interpret these passages as fictional. “They were never meant to be understood literally. They were allegories. That’s it. Silly fundamentalists. How silly to believe that Jesus would really order the slaughter of little children! Whew! That solves that!”

But then I began to think: If the story of the slaughter of the Midianites and the Amalekites is fiction, what else in the Bible is fiction? I then started studying other alleged historical claims in the Bible such as the Exodus from Egypt. I found out that NO ONE other than evangelical and fundamentalist Protestant scholars and archaeologists believe that the Exodus as described in the Bible ever occurred! Even most Jewish scholars doubt the historicity of the enslavement of a large population of Hebrews in Egypt, the Exodus, the Forty Years in the Sinai, the Conquest of Canaan!

But then I had another incident of cognitive dissonance. The Gospels indicate that Jesus believed that these events were historical!!! Jesus can’t be wrong…can he???

Then I found out that most scholars, including most Roman Catholic scholars who very much believe in miracles, the supernatural, and the bodily resurrection of Jesus, don’t believe that the Gospels were written by eyewitnesses or the associates of eyewitnesses! How can I know for sure if Jesus really made these statements about Noah, Moses, and the Exodus? And what if…the detailed stories in the Gospels about Jesus are fiction, just like the fictional genocide stories in the OT? And the fictional story of the Exodus? And the fictional story of a Great Flood???

And within months I no longer believed. I was no longer a Christian.

And it all started over the fact that my little, innocent children were so horrified hearing stories that the loving Jesus (God) would drown and slaughter little children just because of the bad behavior of their parents.

Footnote: Shortly after hearing the Christian pastor mentioned above give his sermon justifying the slaughter of Amalekite children, I happened upon the blog of a former fundamentalist Baptist pastor turned atheist, Bruce Gerencser. So the crack in my faith began with my cognitive dissonance regarding the violence in the Old Testament, then Gerencser along with “DagoodS” provided information and insight which ultimately led to the complete loss of my faith.