Actually, His true followers are those who obey Jesus. Unfortunately, most of us claiming to be Christians do not fall into that category and we give true Christians a bad name.
Jesus, however, IS the God of the Old Testament as well, so we cannot simply dismiss the Old Testament as inapplicable. The fact of the matter is that God often decides to weed his garden. This is not popular with weeds, but it is God's right as the gardener to do so.
True, in this phase of History, we have Jesus' command to love our enemies as part of a new Covenant with his people. But that does not mean that in prior times God did not command that many weeds be pulled up by the roots. This often includes His own disobedient people. We all start out as weeds.
I can understand why people who believe that all religions are the mere inventions of men would try to draw a moral equivalence between God's revealed Truth and all the counterfeits.
The difference is that God has the right to weed His garden and the rest of us don't.
There is more than one form of christianity. Gnostic christians, for example, do not believe the god from the Old Testament is the same as the New Testament. Personally, I ascribe to the Gnostic beliefs, so your comment would not hold true to me.
My comments were for Christianity defined as "what it says in the Bible."
Teaching anything that is not consistent with that is simply the inventions of men.
I agree that there are many such spin-offs where people choose not to believe what God's prophets and apostles wrote down for us.
Exactly.
I don't claim Old Testament is inapplicable. I believe that the words of Jesus from the New Testament have more weight than anything else in the Bible. If the Deuteronomy says we should burn the whole town if there is a non-believer in it, but Jesus says to love our enemies, Christians are supposed to obey latter.
That's a fair statement. Jesus did a lot to help us understand the Scriptures that already existed at the time. He showed us how to love our enemies, even to the point of dying for them. But He is God, and we should not take Him for granted. He doesn't hesitate to discipline His children and decimate his detractors.
Well said @stan.