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dialectical response and a more serious one to Dawkins re picking and choosing from scripture

There is probably a way to say this without committing the tu quoque fallacy:
when he accuses Christians of picking and choosing which things to take literally in the OT (which seems unprincipled) one might ask if he is not doing the same with materialism, denying God but affirming equality, etc.

***

A better answer, of course, is to point out that the New Testament takes much of the Old Testament and transforms it, so that the latter can only be understood in light of the former.  The NT in a sense redeems the OT.  For example, the story of Abraham and Isaac becomes a foreshadowing of "God Himself" providing "the sacrifice."

More specifically Christian ethics centers on the notion of man as imago Dei.  We are in a kind of family with God.  There's no room for divinely mandated genocide etc. in such an understanding of the human person.  If the OT seems to have interpreted God as having mandated this, the NT has a different understanding.  The question of how one gets from the OT to the NT is one worth asking, but an objection to the imperfect understanding in the OT of the human condition doesn't automatically have any currency in a discussion with Christians.
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