Thanks for the kind words, and for sharing your own experiences. I'm really glad you've had much the same experience as me. I haven't met many really crazy religious types. Most religious people are intelligent and willing to talk about their religion . They're some of the best conversations I've had because they always show me something new about how people think. It's far better to talk to someone about their opinions than to attack or deride them. The New vs. Old Testament comparison is an interesting one. Jesus definitely had many better things to say than the Old Testament did, and I'm inclined to think that Jesus was a real (non-divine) person who had some very good ideas that were ahead of his time. I don't think he wipes the slate clean, though. He did say to keep the Ten Commandments, which include some very arbitrary and questionable things. I haven't got there yet, but I also gather that he's the one who introduced the idea of Hell, which is a very disturbing idea, especially when it's pounded into the heads of small children. That kind of thing can really screw people up.
You ought to check out the Jeffersonian Bible and the history behind it, if you've not already. You can't make this sort of stuff up.
I'm checking it out now! Deism is the one model of God that I think is defensible. It's very possible that someone designed the laws of the universe and set the thing in motion. It's not a self-contained solution - it still raises the question of who God is and what he was doing - but it's a start. The Deist "God" doesn't even have to be supernatural, which is one of the things I like about it. There's a possible, if far-fetched, idea that we're all running inside a simulation of the universe, which means that "God" is some kind of a computer programmer.