Don't worry, I wasn't offended. I'm often shocked and saddened by how utterly stupid some Christians are, and it's often enough to make me tempted to give up. God I can cope with, but a lot of his followers are nutjobs.
Thankfully, here in the UK, more extreme Christian fundamentalism is rare, and a lot of churches are fairly moderate.
I fully understand your issues, as I've had to work out a hell of lot of this stuff myself - and a certain Raven Moon has seen a lot of my agonised travails over this.
I think a lot of this hinges on how far you go in taking the Bible literally. Most hardcore evangelicals/conservatives/fundies adopt an "all or nothing" approach to the Bible - or at least claim that they do - despite the fact that it was written thousands of years ago in a violent and largely anarchic culture. The view that it's either all true, or all false, is very widespread, and I held this for a long time, until I realised that this is crazy, and the Bible is full of stuff that, true or not, just isn't relevant to 21st century life. For starters, modern concepts of love, romance, marriage and relationships simply didn't exist when it was written, and trying to apply bits of the Bible literally to this is extremely problematic.
I have a lot of serious problems with most of the Old Testament and some lesser problems with the New, and I'm not sure I'll ever deal with these. But thankfully I recently moved house, giving me an excuse to dump the fundie-nutjob church I was in and move to a much more sensible and rather more liberal one. It did me a lot of good.
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Don't worry, I wasn't offended. I'm often shocked and saddened by how utterly stupid some Christians are, and it's often enough to make me tempted to give up. God I can cope with, but a lot of his followers are nutjobs.
Thankfully, here in the UK, more extreme Christian fundamentalism is rare, and a lot of churches are fairly moderate.
I fully understand your issues, as I've had to work out a hell of lot of this stuff myself - and a certain Raven Moon has seen a lot of my agonised travails over this.
I think a lot of this hinges on how far you go in taking the Bible literally. Most hardcore evangelicals/conservatives/fundies adopt an "all or nothing" approach to the Bible - or at least claim that they do - despite the fact that it was written thousands of years ago in a violent and largely anarchic culture. The view that it's either all true, or all false, is very widespread, and I held this for a long time, until I realised that this is crazy, and the Bible is full of stuff that, true or not, just isn't relevant to 21st century life. For starters, modern concepts of love, romance, marriage and relationships simply didn't exist when it was written, and trying to apply bits of the Bible literally to this is extremely problematic.
I have a lot of serious problems with most of the Old Testament and some lesser problems with the New, and I'm not sure I'll ever deal with these. But thankfully I recently moved house, giving me an excuse to dump the fundie-nutjob church I was in and move to a much more sensible and rather more liberal one. It did me a lot of good.