I went to a Myan exhibition in the city a couple of years ago....the notable aspects of their worship seemed to be based on sex and death. Death was said to bring life...which is where the sex came into it. They offer sacrifice victims, participate in sexual orgies...and next year they are richly blessed with more little lives, many of whom will also be sacrificed to the same gods.
The God Jehovah in the OT was not violent. He did not desire human sacrifice. He detested the perverted sexual practices of mankind which is what got Sodom into trouble in the first place. One thing i notice when we compare the God Jehovah with the gods of the nations, there is a stark difference in the sexual moral expectations of Jehovah. Israelites were not permitted to come into the temple of Jehovah, or into battle, if they engaged in sexual intercourse the night before. But in the case of other religions, temple sex was required of those gods. They wanted sexual orgies to be carried out in the temple while Jehovah condemned such practices.
I disagree with you here Pegg and my apologies for calling you Robin. I've got several conversations going on here!
As for disagreeing, I don't agree that the God depicted in the OT is not violent. In Genesis alone you see Cain killing Abel, God will kill all man and all beasts (chapters 6 and 7), God has Abraham almost killing his son, God sent a plague to Eygpt and destroyed Sodom, Lot offers his two daughters to be raped, and more. Then in Exodus we find Moses killing an Eygptian, God threatening the Pharoah's first son, and the ten plagues. By no means am I trying to insult or demean your religion. And I am fully aware that the aforementioned are lessons in your faith but the fact remains that this faith is very much riddled with violence.
As for death and sex, and so on, those were the 'miracles' or the facts of every day life for those people. Things that they either relegated to their gods or to the wrath of their gods. How is the destruction of Sodom all that much different than their views of this? For you, it seems heinous to have orgies and I would agree, but for them, sex led to birth and birth was miraculous. Your view simply views this in the opposite.