Growing up in church, I have gone through several different Sunday school classes each of them teaching the students how to be a good person and how the Bible gave us an example of this. So, I was taught the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, but in a much more PG-rated way. It was based on the lesson of how people were not leading virtuous lives as God wanted and basically being inhumane, and that we could learn from their behavior that we should be kinder to others and act in a way that was helpful to all. They cut out the part of death and destruction to not scare us when we were kids, but as we got older and progressed through the higher classes more of the controversial topics were explained to us and the violence was discussed. Not until high school was these stories fully read through and explained and discussed in our weekly Sunday school classes.
One of the more thought-provoking questions that were posed in the class today that really hit me was that if you edit out all of the violence in some of the stories of the Bible, what is really left, and does it change the story as a whole? I think that to some point you are going to have to read through the hard stories that are more violent, especially the way that religion is taught and even how you proceed with your life. You take on the task of learning and deducing meaning from things that you take in and using it for your own experiences. By teaching the moral of the stories from the Bible to younger children is a place to start because as a child you really could care less about what a big old book has written in it and what directions it gives you for life. Then incorporating in the stories from the Bible later when we start to understand more. To the point of if editing the story, yes, I do think it could change the meaning if you have the full context because there are more factors to consider when analyzing and understanding the text for what it is. Sometimes when taking little snippets of stories there is only one way to understand the story, but when the whole thing is put together it is much more complex than you would have realized when just reading the small part. The small parts lead to a lack of analyzation and creativity for the reader, they are told one way and that is it.