Quote Originally Posted by bobbygreenbear
as far as the killing, the hebrew word "you shall not KILL" means to "murder", so there is no contradiction; it's not prohibiting all killing, but murder. as far as the penalities for sin in the tribe, i can't argue that it was right for god to enact those penalties; it was to keep the tribe holy and pure, but again this is a question of personal opinion of morality.
Well, I think most civilized people would say that killing people to keep your tribe pure is a morally disgusting act. The Germans tried that once. Didn't go over so well.

These are not people who did anything morally objectionable. They had premarital sex or male homosexual sex, they worked on the Sabbath or disobeyed their parents. Such people do not deserve the death penalty, no matter what tribe you come from. As far as I'm concerned, this is not a matter of debate. If I killed someone for doing any of these things, I would be punished, and rightly so, because that would be a case of senseless murder.
as far as the first question, i don't think the reading is supposed to indicate that that is a 1-2 sequence of events, like:

1.they come to the tomb
2.the stone gets rolled away

i'm trying to parse "descended" (katabas) but having some trouble

this is the sort of thing where the original languages are essential, but as far as i can see, the folks coming to the tomb, and the earthquake could have very well been simultaneous
I don't really see how the two can really be reconciled. It's just mythology. When stories are told and retold about mythological figures, details change. Whether it's Osiris or Mithra or Hercules or Jesus, no two accounts of a worshipped figure are exactly the same story, and that's exactly what we should expect from any ancient mythological scriptures, be they Hindu or Jewish or Zoroastrian or whatever.

These aren't real stories of shit that actually happened. People don't really walk on water, rise from the dead, and cure people by exorcising demons out of them. Why should the Bible be considered literally true but not the Bhagavad Gita or the works of Homer? There is no objective reason to prefer one over the others.