If a person cherry picks their holy book are they still a member of that relgion?

I'm a theist. I believe in Jesus and the Bible and what not.

That said, I acknowledge that I am not a Christian because I do not follow the Bible that well.

Yet, it grinds my gear to see a great deal of Christians (especially left wing Christians) who cherry pick their religion.

Don't get me started on usury. Yes its necessary for modern economy, but it was forbidden for over a 1,000 years by Christianity because it was forbidden in the old and New Testament, but somehow after the 1500's it became ok to lend at interest like the Jews (to be fair, the Hebrew Bible says you can loan interest to people other than Jews and it doesn't count as bad).

And then we got this whole homosexuality thing.

Can you really be a Christian and support homosexuality? Its like a Muslim claiming to be Muslim even though they don't put apostates to death and beat their disobedient wives like their book says to do (moderate Muslims also trigger me).

How can you say you are a Christian/Muslim when you don't even bother to read or follow your holy book?

Maybe the medieval Catholic church was right and people were too stupid and lazy to read the book for themselves.

Yes, literallism is terrible, but so so is cherry picking.

I'm really tired of Christians who say its OK to be interfaith because the books says damn well the only way through paradise is heaven is through Christ and yet these moderate Christians are ok with being nice to Muslims who are also nice back when both holy books say the other is going to burn in hell.

So its like you are friends with these people but your religion specifically states they are going to hell so you are being a jerk by not trying to convert them.

What really got me was when I went to Mass in Lexington at some old church, and they were going to have an event where a Muslim would convince everyone that Islam is in fact compatible with Western reason and science.

>JUST

>Don't get me started on usury. Yes its necessary for modern economy, but it was forbidden for over a 1,000 years by Christianity because it was forbidden in the old and New Testament, but somehow after the 1500's it became ok to lend at interest like the Jews (to be fair, the Hebrew Bible says you can loan interest to people other than Jews and it doesn't count as bad).
Yeah it sucks, but its part of a secularized society. We'd have to de-secularize in order to make usury illegal.

>Can you really be a Christian and support homosexuality?
No, you can't. Jesus and Paul could not have been more clear on sexual immorality.

>Maybe the medieval Catholic church was right and people were too stupid and lazy to read the book for themselves.
Let's not appeal to Rome for clarity on the Scriptures.

>I'm really tired of Christians who say its OK to be interfaith because the books says damn well the only way through paradise is heaven is through Christ and yet these moderate Christians are ok with being nice to Muslims who are also nice back when both holy books say the other is going to burn in hell.
>So its like you are friends with these people but your religion specifically states they are going to hell so you are being a jerk by not trying to convert them.

Theological liberalism is a scourge that is slowly dying. The late 20th century and early 21st century will vindicate conservative, bible-believing Protestantism because liberalism has been uncovered as secularism and blatant unbelief. Now that political and social liberals don't need or want a religious covering for their ideals, the liberal churches will continue to bleed members and die. Hopefully conservatives bishops and cardinals can save the Roman Catholic Church from going liberal as well. Francis needs to go and the whole thing needs to go pre-Vatican II.

I mean really. Its like no one in the room wants to point out the both holy books of both religions are saying the people being nice to each other is a shit show because one of those parties is going to hell.

If you have the Holy Spirit living in you, you are a born again Christian.

If you do not have the Holy Spirit living in you, you are not a born again Christian.

What Christians do outside of confessing aloud that Jesus is Lord, and believing in their hearts God raised him from the dead, is a process of spiritual maturation.

Some saints stay babes drinking milk forever. So be it. Some saints take the toughest meat Paul can write about, and live it. So be it. Let every man be convinced in his own heart that what he believes is true.

You basically need to cherry pick in order for Christianity to be compatible with modern society.

Then which one is backwards?

Or itself

Between being a literalist or cherry picking?
Both.

No I meant
>modern society
>Christianity

Modern society or Christianity?
Little bit of both. I would prefer if we moved back towards more Christian values, but some of the stuff in there is too outdated like the "If you rape a woman just marry her and you're cool" rule

People who cherry pick of all religions do trigger me because I think meaning is created entirely by divinity so when someone betrays their interpretation it just disgusting to me.

But to answer your question if you blatantly disregard a rule of your book you aren't a member of your faith.

As to your friend question you need to let sleeping dogs lie.

What makes you so sure one group is reading their holy book well, and the other not so well, rather than you just having accepted that there's a way to read centuries old texts properly because someone else says so?

If you take someone with no experience with Christianity/Islam, isolate them with nothing but the holy book itself, are you absolutely certain their view of faith would be the exact same as a traditional church or mosque?

Obviously people wouldn't agree on everything, but some stuff like allowing homosexuality's immorality is blatantly wrong.

Casual sex and the breakdown of the family unit is taking it's toll on civilization as well. Children are seen as a burden, every developed country is having huge problems with fertility rate. Womens suffrage was a huge mistake

But 'allowing homosexuality' is more a position that comes from a whole bunch of outside conceptions of religion, dogma, social order, and so on that's not really evident in either holy book.

I meant allowing homosexuality with purely The Bible as reference.

Homosexuality is a perversion of nature. Most if not all Biblical rules about sexuality and gender relations come from an observance of nature, which can be deduced to having been ordained by God

I don't know. I'd think it's no less consistent to walk away from the Bible/Quran thinking you should just not be a same-sex rapist if you weren't also raised in societies with a long history of already hating same-sex relationships before they became Christian/Muslim. To me these justifications for reading these books this specific way sounds more like an appeal to tradition and already established interpretations.

>I'm a theist. I believe in Jesus and the Bible and what not.

The New Testament canon had plenty of time to be edited by interested parties. Scholarship has shown that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John wrote their gospels decades after Jesus' death; and not only that, but the authors of these works were not actually the apostles, but anonymous authors who falsely claimed to be these people.

So already, your narrative of unadulterated oral transmission is nothing but conjecture. What makes you think what the Bible says is what Jesus actually taught? The transmission from the supposed historical Jesus to modern Pauline Christianity wasn't in situ: there were myriads of sects with their own interpretations, many of which both fell out of favor or rose to prominence throughout the various centuries in the form of power plays and politics.

Christcucks are idiots.

The only logical position a Christian should take is that society is not for them. They are to participate in it as best they can, but they should not enmesh themselves in it.

Remember, we are only pilgrims in this world.

You don't "cherry pick." You pick that which is logical to you. This is reasonable and understandable. For your average chad or normie, the church catechism is enough.

>Yes, literallism is terrible

but the parts about god and jesus are literal and everything else isn't literal because it's inconvenient?

What are the more Christian values that you think modern society is missing? Keep in mind what you see on tv or read on the internet =/= modern society.

Also
>"If you rape a woman just marry her and you're cool"
Is less a christian value and more a "everyone pre-sexual revolution" value.

Which I find ironic that you don't want since I predict the vast majority of the values you want to move back to can essentially be boiled down to negating the values introduced by the sexual revolution.

You don't stop being a member of a religion because you're a bad example of that religion, if that was the case there would not be a single christian alive by jesus' standards.

If you take the communion you're a part of the church until you're formally excommunicated. If you don't like that, I guess you're not really a christian either.

>Not everyone who says to Me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only he who does the will of My Father in heaven. Many will say to Me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in Your name, and in Your name drive out demons and perform many miracles?’ Then I will tell them plainly, ‘I never knew you; depart from Me, you workers of lawlessness.’

>negating the values introduced by the sexual revolution
Weird turn of phrase considering that the sexual revolution didn't introduce any values it just destroyed the ones we had. It was a mistake no matter how you cut it.

>2017
>still following a religion with a rigidly established and applied canon

Also, say what you will about Crowley, but the Class A texts are short, interlocked, and more or less coherent between them.

Hell, I'm still not sure what makes Origen's OT worse than any other list, or what rules out the Coptic Gospels from normative canonicity, other than feels, which is itself cherry picking.

I do not permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man; she must be quiet.

Yea, that's pretty much what I expected.

He writes the same way in all his letters, speaking in them of these matters. His letters contain some things that are hard to understand, which ignorant and unstable people distort, as they do the other Scriptures, to their own destruction.

You sound like you disagree

You sound like you disagree with yourself when you say
>"If you rape a woman just marry her and you're cool" rule
The popular declination of which is pretty explicitly a value taken from the sexual revolution.

Technology is a perversion of nature too, now go join the amish

>the 'it's the current year meme'

please go

>reddit spacing

What about Islam? How do we make Islam calmer?

>Maybe the medieval Catholic church was right and people were too stupid and lazy to read the book for themselves
Producing a Bible before the printing press cost the modern equivalent of several thousand dollars, and it wasn't practical to make a majority of people literate at the time (Greeks and Romans had low literacy compared to modern times as well)

>Western reason and science

What did he mean by this?

>That said, I acknowledge that I am not a Christian because I do not follow the Bible that well.
Christianity is about believing Jesus is the son of God. Bible only plays into it if you want it to.

A better example would be Islam.

If I say a history textbook or biology text book is "inerrant" I'm saying the history/science contained is true.

If I say the Lord of the Rings is "inerrant" I can't mean that Hobbits are real, because the author didn't even believe that. So what I really would mean is that the moral ideas in the book or whatever are true.

Some parts of the Bible are like a textbook, others are like LOTR, and others are in between

>>still following a religion with a rigidly established and applied canon

Why is there a problem with that?

>I'm a theist.