Warbler said:
yeah, I've never been too comfortable with some of the Old Testament stuff. I've often wondered if those kinds of things were truly ordered by God, or did the people back then just think it was, or did they make it up to use an excuse to justify the slaughter they wanted to do?
I'd say it was a mixture of the latter two. If any entity approximating the Christian God exists, then He had no part in the genocides commited in the OT - that, or He "grew up" sometime between the OT and NT, mellowing out and losing a lot of his wrathfulness. Inerrancy goes out the window in either case (not that that's a bad thing IMO).