I credit this idea to Robert Price's scholarly yet tongue-in-cheek podcast, "The Human Bible." Here is my backdrop. I will set my argument in bold text below if you want to skip this part.
While I love Price's scholarly approach to Scripture that's not fettered by things needing to uphold particular doctrines, I do disagree with what he does with the subsequent disillusionment that comes from actually studying Scripture. Like most atheists/agnostics from fundamentalist backgrounds, he throws the baby out with the bathwater in favor of a much more grounded skeptic's worldview fueled by reason and empiricism (if you are on this road, then continue onward, good sir/ma'am! You are noble in my eyes).
I think this is unfortunate, because I do believe that humanity is, on the whole, living aberrantly, and in need of some sort of salvation. And I do see the Bible (among other things, granted) as a worthy guidebook. But the current mainstream Christian approach and the dogmas of the church are at best perpetual training wheels and at worst completely worthless shackles to spiritual infancy.
One of the fundamental problems I see is the doctrine of inerrancy. Various demonitations and branches apply this in different ways. It's as extreme as "I do nothing without confirmation from Scripture" which is nearly autoscribed via its authors by God God's self (I intentionally avoid gender pronouns for God as they would be misleading if there were actually a God) to "I take inerrancy as far as the doctrines go then I start chucking the parts that don't resonate with the Spirit in me." I applaud the latter extreme and should let you know that if you hover around this pole, I am not directing this at you. But for those of you soldiers out there, this Bud's for you.
Allowing the Spirit in you to confirm or deny the teachings of the Scripture admittedly erodes the very foundation of what the spiritually infantile need for their soul's current state: the need for external parameters because the heart is not trustworthy. We are totally depraved, morally bankrupt spiritual thieves without the rulebook. So homosexuality? Defer to the book, because it's icky and doesn't mesh with blue boys and pink girls worldviews. Slavery? Defer to the book, but it's never mandated, so God was showing a silly people how to work within their silly erroneous ways (at best). Murdering every man, woman, child, and beast of a neighboring tribe? Getting harder, but, defer to the book because at least God doesn't tell us to do that anymore (except when Evangelical pastors use these passages to create an ethically tenuous just-war theory to support the post-9-11 invasion of Iraq, Geneva Conventions be damned because they are man's law!).
I think the more of these you are willing to swallow, the more you are confused by why churches are being abandoned as Western culture takes a hard right turn away from it's nominal Chrisitan beliefs (praise God!).
But here we go. Here is something so appalling, so reprehensible, that I hope and pray it snaps you out of your fanatic loyalty to a rule book and into a new spiritual journey of viewing salvation as a daily struggle (Philippians 2:12) of conformity to heart attitudes and actions that yield qualitative fruit of Spirit.
My argument:
In Exodus 22:29-30 God commands the Israelites to give all firstborn males - including humans - as a sacrfice to God. This is very reminiscent of early practices at that time as a fertility rite to ensure a fruitful womb.
Exodus 13:11-16 seems to realize that this is pretty harsh and allows the Israelites to substitute sheep for donkeys (a man's still gotta farm, after all) and children (because to do otherwise is pretty insane).
Most scholars date Chapter 22 prior to Chapter 13. I'll let you dive into that on your own, but it doesn't really diminish my point much: YHWH demands child sacrifices.
Later OT authors seem to realize that this is, in fact, bad and called it accordingly. So as opposed to ignore it, they offer a rather terrifying retcon that has vile implications. Ezekiel 20:21-26 makes the claim that God intentionally gave the Israelites "statutes that were not good and ordinances by which they could not live." Why did YHWH intentionally mislead the people, commanding them to offer infant sacrifices? Why, "in order that [YHWH] might horrify them".
I'm horrified.
To those who see the supernatural being that created Adam and the God on the throne on the sea of glass in Revelation as one contiguous entity, how do you account for the fact that at one time this God demanded child sacrifices as an attempt to intentionally mislead God's people for the sake of horrifying them into submission?
Bonus question: how do you know you're not getting another round of bad commands? I'm pretty horrified at the Evangelical church's treatment of the queer community, and the fact that they were willing to either support or overlook Trump's treatment of every type of person Jesus told them to take care of and vote in the biggest joke our country has ever seen and will probably never recover from. So if this what your God is commanding, I'd say the fruit of this church zeitgeist is pretty horrifying and thus the commands must be, too, if they truly lead you there.
To view the various vignettes of God throughout the Scipture as one contiguous whole worthy of worship and following is morally bankrupt and spiritually dishonest, even contradicting the more nobler images.
A soldier's belief in inerrancy is untenable.