Tyler Wrote:I believe that yes the bible was written by man, but man was inspired by God prior to writing it.
Prove that.
Before you say something, I want for you to understand that before the Roman Reformation of a single Authoritative Christian Church took place, there was no 'bible'. There were over 600 writings, documents, letters, observations by many authors which the early Pre-Romanized Christians held Sacred and as the true word of God.
The Reformation of a 'church' lead to the creation of the bible, where 73 'books' were accepted as cannon by the Early Church. The modern Protestant bible chucked a few 'useless' books paring it down to 66 books. 7 books are apparently wrong, or worthless to a decent chunk of the Christians, or did the Early Roman Church just make a minor mistake and mistook 7 books as the word of God?
The format of the bible, with things like punctuation, spaces between words is a rather new invention. The Hebrew Old Testament doesn't have things like punctuation, spaces, heck even vowels are no where to be found. Forget Chapter and Verse - those were added in 1551.
Most of the English translations of modern bibles are directly translated from the Latin Vulgate, which has been purposefully edited, mistranslated and even had additions added from the earliest existent Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic texts upon which the Latin Vulgate is loosely based upon.
The Old Testament is interpreted far differently in many cases by Christians than the Jews. Which is odd considering Jesus Himself was a Jew, observed the dietary laws, followed the Mosaic law to the letter. however Modern Christians based on Paul/Saul and not on the word of Christ have totally thrown out such things as dietary law - so each time a modern Christian eats bacon they dig their hole to hell a little deeper.
You Sir, stand on a very slippery slope which is well greased with the blood of thousands, if not millions who have died by the 'Law' as applied by the patriarchs and 'True believers' who felt it reasonable enough to change the bible, to interpret it in a way to justify their murders of innocent people.
You are beating yourself up over being a homosexual. Because????
Do you beat yourself up for cutting your hair?
Leviticus 21:5
They shall not make baldness upon their head, neither shall they shave off the corner of their beard, nor make any cuttings in their flesh.
What about bacon? Do you eat that?
Deuteronomy 14:8
The pig is also unclean; although it has a divided hoof, it does not chew the cud. You are not to eat their meat or touch their carcasses.
Do you wear T-shirts?
Deuteronomy 22:11
Thou shalt not wear a garment of divers sorts,
as of woollen and linen together.
T-shirts are poly cotton blend... They are of divers sort...
BTW when it comes to The Law (Mosaic Law) do you follows Christ's words or do you just choose to do as Paul said?
http://doctrine.org/?page_id=1327
(Yeah another link for you to click on and this time click on it and read it Mister).
My point is not to throw you into confusion or to cause you to lose faith. My point is to point out that a lot of the law has magically been abolished.
Why is divorce suddenly ok when there are lots and I mean a lot of verses that directly say that divorce is not ok, especially woman who apparently are to be stoned should they divorce and remarry.
Which sin is worse? Those little white lies you tell often so as to not offend (A falsehood is a falsehood, and even saying 'I'm fine' in rely to the question 'how are you' when you are not 100% is a lie) Or sucking a man's dick?
Is any sin actually worse than any other? The answer to that is yes, as one is unforgivable (blasphemy against the Holy Ghost/Spirit:
Matthew 12:31-32, Mark 3:28-30, Luke 12:10)
Now I already linked you to several resources to go and get an alternative interpretation of those bible verses you are hung up on. So I'm not going to do that leg work for you.
This is not me trying to kill your faith here, this is me trying to enlighten you a little about The Word and how it actually operates.
Going back to what I said about listening to God - While the bible makes a nifty cliff note for 'what we should do with this thing called life' it is NOT life itself.
To be a Christian is real easy, so easy that hypocrites, haters, bigots and other really terrible people readily adopt that title and throw it around as if they are magically 'saved'.
Love one another (The new and really only 'commandment' Jesus gave us).
Have a faith in Christ, that He lived, died, rose again and saves us from our worst enemy, ourselves.
That's pretty much it.