I am not a kooky Christian...truly. I am a soccer mom who listens to Godsmack and shops at Victorias Secret....desires lustful sex and in the midst of my 2nd divorce who doesnt give near enough back to my community.
OK, I'm just going to say it again--belief in the inerrancy of a collection of myths from long-vanished culture is kooky, any way you spin it.
Congratulations, though. 18 years of "we want you to love each other, but make sure certain portions of your anatomies don't come into contact with each other, because that's not real, spiritual love" has left me so emotionally warped I'm pretty much incapable of any kind of interpersonal intimacy, sexual or otherwise. Which, to me, just suggests that if God does exist, he's an asshole with a sick sense of humor, to bring this back to my original point.
If you take the time to look at the links I provided, you will see that this is a church full of people JUST LIKE YOU. They require MORE than just being told.
The teachers (and there are many, I could teach if I wanted and earned it and so could you)are also looking for the same things you are looking for (you AND I).
They open up the context of the given PASSAGE/WORD and then support it with other passages in the Bible...even using differnet Bibles (KING JAMES/NIV) comparing the wording...........AND THEN (and this is the part that excites me) they go into language and historical reference of how that would fit in based on the TIME IT TRANSPIRED. Not our modern interpretion, not our societial standards and understanding of living and the world NOW.....but based on then and how it was in context THEN.
It changes GREATLY so many things........it is amazing.
Except they're not just like me. Not in the slightest. No matter how much you go over and over the same document to figure out exactly what you've been told, you still basically need to be told. Trust me. I walk in there and say "Um, and why exactly have we decided that this book is the only one worth studying?" and they'll (very politely, no doubt) ostracise me just as quickly as the people did in the church I grew up in.
*picture this: pens, notebooks, Bibles, coffee, donuts and jeans.
Congratulations. You can read and write.
Yeesh. I'd rather go to Mass. "Hey, we're hip. See, we wear blue jeans and drink coffee! Oh, yeah, I like rock and roll, too! Have you heard the new Switchfoot album? They're not as good as Creed, but it's really the message that counts, right? So, yeah, I've arbitrarily decided that everything I need to know was written down thousands of years ago in a language no one speaks any more. But I'm not one of those kooks. I wear jeans and drink coffee, remember?"
(Creed really, really sucks. Reeeealllly.)
Throw in some beer and weed and maybe I'll show up. But probably not.
I am not kooky, I am just someone like you pondering greater things. I just happen to have faith in one.
Yeah, it's the faith part, not the pondering, where the kook factor really comes in.
I***Revelations has always stood out to me, I tend to go toward the dark......however, the depth of it tends to blow my mind
So, being an educated, rational Christian who knows all about the historical context of the document, naturally you know that most serious legitimate scholarship supports the view that Revelation is actually a political screed criticizing the Roman empire through carefully coded allusions to Jewish history, right? (666, for example, is the numerical value of "Nero" written in ancient Hebrew) That anything it actually predicted would have happened between 1000-1500 years ago, if at all?