Has God mellowed?

While I was growing up, God was portrayed as nasty, capricious, judgmental, and difficult, much like my father.
My siblings, what few remain, will dispute this, that my father was a wonderful person, and I am just rebellious.
It’s true in their case. My father mellowed as he got older, but I‘m the oldest, and my remaining siblings are all 13-to-17 years younger than me. So the parents they had were much easier to live with than the parents I had.
The God I grew up with seemed happy to consign you to the flames.
Now He’s become loving and kindly, almost a Santa Claus.
I kind of walked away from religion. I still have the values thereof, but my father lost me when he clobbered me once.
That mellowed my mother quite a bit; she could see I was lost when my father hit me.
Religion at that time was judgmental, or so it seemed.
If I dared question I was portrayed as rebellious, and it wasn’t just my father.
Some rather insane rules were foisted upon me. For example, television was Of-the-Devil. When Kennedy was assassinated I wasn’t allowed to watch his funeral-parade. It was almost as if he deserved assassination.
But it seems all that has changed, that now anything goes.
My sister, slightly younger than me, who died in December of 2011, was married four times, and also drank.
But now none of that seems to matter any more.
What matters is she claimed being (and demonstrated to be) a believer, beholden to Godliness.
Well, good for her. She changed friends returning to the church, thereby making her life less depressing.
What astounds me is how tolerant God has become of previous sins — and current sins.
That’s not the world I grew up in.
God back then was not tolerant of infidelity or drinking.
Now it seems anything goes. For example, Jesus gets high on crack-cocaine. (We now have “Jesus-Rock,” when rock-’n’-roll for me was Of-the-Devil. Jerry Lee Lewis was the Devil personified.)
The God who could consign you to the flames — for example the coal-fired boilers at my elementary-school if you dissed the janitor — is now loving and tolerant.
So now I’m confused.
Plus my pointing out stuff like this is portrayed as rebelliousness.
This is especially true of my blowhard brother-from-Boston, the macho Harley-dude, who reminds me very much of my father.
Judgmental.
Our family was hardly functional. I was always portrayed as rebellious and Of-the-Devil because I couldn’t venerate my father. And God at that time seemed to concur.
“Flames for you, baby!”