The severity of Leviticus would break the back of modernist understandings if read seriously. Most of us internalized such a view of the world with our mother’s milk. Individual freedom, the license to choose ‘a’ over ‘b’ without reference to any constraining tradition or community restraint seems as obvious to us as simple math.
The pursuit of happiness needs no explanation, let alone justification.
‘It is’, to quote an observation made banal by sheer repetition, ‘what it is’.
This perhaps is why even inveterate Bible readers skim over such a book as Leviticus. No backs are broken then. No minds are changed. It is what it is.
The biblical and classical traditions assault ‘obvious’ truth of this kind with undeflected force, leaving as they do little or no room for the precious Unaffected Self. Post-modern groupies are actually on to something when they recognize the world-ordering potency of the community, even if they are left bereft of wisdom regarding which community deserves one’s loyalty over against the others.
Leviticus offers no apology for its verdict on the life of the daughter or son of Israel who does worship his way, or hers.
That man shall be cut off from among his people.
It is the bitter necessity of wartime discipline. Communities do not survive in the desert when once the individual and his whims—no matter how passionately pursued—has been enshrined, protected, even guaranteed respect.
In the language of chemistry, such an entity dissolves.
The biblical literature will not always insist upon this grade of severity. Yet it will seldom come close to the modernistic option at the other extreme of the continuum. Only seldom will it address the Individual rather than the Individual-in-Community.
Divine fire and the cutting off of the errant iconoclast are never too far away for imagining.
Thus does the back of modernist assumptions break, audibly perhaps, when one reads carefully and—one might even dare to say—aloud.
Canter Bridge 
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