How is it stretching and twisting to summarise what you said about interpretations of the Bible as excluding the majority of Christians in the world? They accept evolution and an old earth. They see parts of the Bible as allegory or metaphor -- words that are not synonymous with lies, but different ways of seeing and understanding. And they may even reject some of the Bible, having been written by men of a past culture, as irrelevant to life today. Presumably you do this as well, unless you are striving to live according to every rule in Leviticus? Why must the creation story in Genesis be literal? Jesus spoke in parables; does it follow that they must have literally happened as well, or could there be a deeper truth that was meant to be learned from them?
Linda, dear linda, since time immemorial Christians have been arguing about interpretation. It's why there are different denominations. But there are some basic truths that all Christians share, even if they don't go to church. The main of those is a belief in God and his ominpresence and power. Second to that is that Jesus is the son of God, that God sent him, he died for our sins, and rose from the dead.
What Christian argue about more than anything else, is literal translation, meaning the word forms as taken and interpreted from the original Hebrew Aramaic or Greek. Hebrew sometimes offers a few different variations of interpretation on a word, a slight change in the form of an hebrew letter for instance, can change the enire meaning of the word. There is also some contention about certain interpretations of the Catholic church in the first millenia.
But irregardless of all that, God lives and Jesus continues to save, and in the end minor differences of opinion really don't matter.
If you want to start tossing the ideas of liberal late 20th century Christians onboard, I'll stop you right here. They are a class of Christian all by themselves whose disagreemnts with the majority, large majority mind you, of Christian churches, has pretty much left them separated from that majority who do intepret the bible mainly in common. I am not going to begin a discussion about that with you because you still do not know the basics of Christian beliefs, even though you think you do. But Linda, it's obvious that you do not. Your view of christianity appears to be strongly colored by your emotions and personal desires of what Christianity should be, not really what it is.
After you have spent about 2-3 years attending church, any church except a liberal broken off branch, and have spent likewise the same amount of time in Sunday school, learning, not trying to teach everyone... learning... then I would be happy to discuss these things with you.
