Agnostic atheist here who was raised Episcopalian and was an altar boy for years in his youth.
Something people tend to miss about Christianity is that the whole point of Jesus was to sacrifice himself to absolve humans of the sins and laws described in the Old Testament.
So the adherence of many “fundamentalist” Christians too the laws set down in the Old Testament seems ridiculous to me. In my mind, they ignore the most fundamental teachings of Christ, and if you do that, why claim to be Christian at all?
(Sorry, in a weird place right now, otherwise I’d just be avoiding this topic entirely.)
You’re right, but the New Testament is very conflicting on that too. Books like James tell Christians that they very much need to behave “morally” and that faith alone is “dead” without good works. As Duracell said, these documents were written by different people in different times and places, which means that it makes perfect sense that they contradict each other and it also means that the theology has to be extra complicated in order to reconcile the contradictions.