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Anybody can justify anything in their mind. Rationalization is a wonderful thing for sanity. Parts of the bible have been edited and changed many times anyways to fit the times, by human hands and not divine inspiration. Even the basics of the book itself was written at least 50 years after the fact (When Was The Bible Written?, earliest I can find to the bible authoring).
According to the Bible the only person that we know made it into heaven was the thief who was cruxified along with Jesus. The thief admitted his life of crime to Jesus as they were dying together. The thief wasn't pretending to be a virtuous man. It was his faith that saved him, not a life of virtue.
Paul wrote pretty exhaustively how Christians were saved (justified) by their faith in God not by their deeds. Thus Christians were saved even if the ignored the jewish dietary restrictions. Paul wrote that Christians were justified by their faith, not by their deeds. To be one of God's choosen people they no longer needed to be a Jew nor to practice Jewish dietary practices. They merely had to believe that Jesus is God and the He died for there sins. If salvation was by their deeds the thief wouldn't have made it into heaven. According to Christians what redeemed the thief and them, was the sacrafice of Jesus on the Cross and the faith of the thief that Jesus is God.
Jesus commanded his followers to love the sinner but to hate the sin. Hating the sin is pretty much a religious duty to oppose efforts for the state to sanction gay marriage.
Christians don't actually have to practice what they preach to go to heaven (they are saved by their faith, not by their works in Biblical parlance). But they do have to affirm their faith even if they don't always practice it. Love the sinner hate the sin as Jesus might say. Mary Magdeline was a prostitute and also considered a very holy woman in the Bible. But part of the reason she was considered a holy woman is that she stopped being a prostitute. Jesus didn't tell the woman accused of adultry to go forth and sin some more, Jesus was willing to show mercy on the woman the crowd wanted to stone once she showed repentence. Christians don't have to succeed at reforming their ways, but they do have to keep trying.
You might not actually care for Christianity or the messages that the religion proclaims about homosexuality. But the argument that you are making right now won't actually persuade the more fundamentalist Christian that his faith is wrong or that he is practicing his faith incorrectly. Your argument only appeals to people who aren't that well versed in the Bible. Your argument is much more likely to just convince him that there is devil and that the devil is constantly trying to lead him astray from the true path of righteousness.
The one thing the fundamentalists have a pretty good grasp on is their theology. As long as one is approaching the Bible literally, the fundamentalist's are going to win that argument because the document itself is very homophobic.
The thrust of the argument is that the rules for the people before Christ were in what is commonly called the Old Testament. Once the Messiah came, his word and sacrifice superseded all that came before if it was contradictory to his teachings, kind of like if an inventor had an instruction manual that was out of date and sent a repairman to set the record straight. The old ways might have worked (and been incredibly strict), but the newer advice was better. Uyger was either not aware of this concept or (more likely) was engaging in hyperbole. He also seems to have conveniently forgotten the idea of "shotgun marriages," where young adulterers were forced into marriage to keep them from living in sin. As for living out some of the items in the Bible that he mentions, I think that the polygamists in Texas recently found out how well that would be received. However, G*d might have been a Texan, since he had a fondness for burnt offerings that sounds suspiciously like barbecue or backyard grilling. Perhaps the way to salvation for gays is to get stoned and cook out?
i dont. but i follow the parts that my church finds important. i dont do, do it yourself christianity.
of course either way i probably wont be spared, i already got my asbestos suit in layaway.
I only support those parts of the Bible that aren’t in conflict with my personal experiences.
But I always reflect on those parts that are inconsistent with my experiences and always try to find out why they don't match them. So far Jesus' golden rule to love & treat others the way you want to be loved & treated yourself has worked for me.
What some people who take the Bible -especially the Old Testament- tend to forget (and this also goes for people who bring up the argument that there are inconsistencies in the Bible), is that Christ perfected the Old Testament. Christ was the fulfillment of the Old Testament. A simple reading of Isiah and Mathew will teach you that. Mathew was written for the Jews who were familiar with the Old Testament and designed to tell the Jews that the life of Christ was a fulfillment of Isiah's prophecies. And then when this is combined with John, we get to see that Christ is for everyone, because Christ's purpose was for us to find our way to God.
So, if Christ is the fulfillment of the Old Testament, we need not dwell too much on the Old Testament, we should focus on what Christ said. And in that case, there are no conflicts, no inconsistencies - the main messages are clear: (1) Love your neighbors as you love yourself, (2) No one gets to the Father except through the Son.
**I used to be Christian, Catholic, Jesuit-tradition, but even now, as an atheist, it annoys me that belivers and non-believers alike choose to focus on minutiae or inconsistencies (to somehow defend their stance) that are not really meaningful and could easily be explained if only we focus on the main message that Christ is the Son of God and is the the Final Word.
"If a man has a stubborn and rebellious son who does not obey his father and mother and will not listen to them when they discipline him, his father and mother shall take hold of him and bring him to the elders at the gate of his town. They shall say to the elders, "This son of ours is stubborn and rebellious. He will not obey us. He is a profligate and a drunkard." Then all the men of his town shall stone him to death." Deuteronomy 21:18-21
My problem is the book is not the word of god, it's the word of man. It's not that it's a terrible book, I think there's many good morals and values in it...but it was written by people after the event. Then edited, added and subtracted from, for more then 1,500 (or 1,800 by some people) by many people who think they know what god desires...they may have, they may be furthering their own agenda, they may have added parts they thought was wrong to get a stronger argument, they may have been hearing voices.
Following it to the letter is not the word of god, it is not a dictators view of "Do this or I smite your butt", it's stories to help people live a good life.
For a lot of people, constructing your own religion or at least your own morality isn't actually effective. Part of the problem is that with most decisions you lack perfect information. Is aborting your kid wrong? If he would have came up with a cure for cancer aborting the kid was probably a bad decision, if he was the next Hitler abortion was probably a good idea. In most decisions in life you have incomplete information at the time you make them. When you are making decisions with incomplete information, telling yourself you are going to make the decision by reason alone really doesn't advance the decision process.
Too much freedom of choice can be a bad thing for a lot of people. If you are an alcoholic, giving yourself the choice to drink or to not drink tonight probably isn't a wise decision. If you have a problem with gambling , again the same problem. A lot of people do better in an enviroment with some constraints.
If past experience has shown that you don't do a good personly of coming up with good boundaries for yourself, you might find the boundaries advocated by an organised religion to be better than the one's you were trying to operate when you were making up your own boundaries. This is part of the reason people are drawn to really fundamentalists sects. They advocate very strong and clear notions of what is right and what is wrong. That has a lot of appeal for a lot of people.
If you look at sexuality morality, for a lot of people the secular morality that if it feels good do it wasn't working. Some people have sex with lots of partners because they have difficulty forming healthy intimate relationships. The more people they have sex with the less good they feel about themselves. For them the rigid constraints of avoiding pre-marital sex and of trying to save sex for marriage force them to address other problems in their life that they previously avoided by sleeping with lots of partners. For a lot of people adopting a religious framework actually improves the outcomes of their decisions.
Religion makes a virtue of being responsible to your family, taking care of your kids and not cheating on your wife. In the Jerry Springer world we inhibit, religion is one of the few institutions that do that. So if you are looking for that type of life, you might seek out religious organizations and you might seek to meet other people who proclaim and share those beliefs.
The problem with the religions that take a cafeteria approach to theology, is the more you say that Bible can be wrong about homosexuality, the more you are also saying that Bible could be wrong about other claims as well including the claim about the existence of God himself.
If you look at the theologies that are less confident about the inerrancy of the Bible, like say the Unitarians, those religions stop being about fulfilling what you think is God's plan for you life and turn more into meetings of the Green Party. They tend to be less about what God want for your life and more about what you want for life or what you think government should do to make your life better. But if your plan for your life is purely (or mostly) your plan, why do you need to attend a church to encourage you to do what ever already feels comfortable for you? So the committment level in those churches often isn't that high.
If you want to be a member of religion where people are really committed to their faith, often you do better by joining a more fundamentalist approach.
In my experience these types of motivations explained why a lot of people were drawn to very fundamentalist groups.
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I only support those parts of the Bible that aren’t in conflict with my personal experiences.
So far Jesus' golden rule to love & treat others the way you want to be loved & treated yourself has worked for me.
