I am and always have been a firm believer in the separation of church and state.

I agree that God should be taken out of all secular/governmental oaths, offices, money, the pledge, etc. This separation is hard for some people. Generally because their stance on moral issues comes from their religion.

Many people are against homosexuality, same sex marriage, abortions, birth control and sex education due to their religion.

I want to point out that the Bible should not be taken literally. The Bible should simply be a moral guide for life. When I say, for life, it should be only a guide for living your own life. It should not be a means to impose your beliefs on others.

The Bible was written by man

Not only was the Bible written by man, it was written years after the original events happened. It’s much like Homer with the Iliad and the Odyssey. Homer is credited as the author of those two epic poems but he did not write them down. He was a great orator that told the stories. After years of those stories being spread they were finally written down.

Have you ever played telephone as a kid?

In a line you share a phrase from person to person. You then see how that single phrase changes in the exchange. These stories were bound to have changed from their original nature over those years.

I always feel when I write about Christianity that I should say, I am a Christian, I do have faith that Christ died for my sins. I believe he lived, I do believe the stories in the Bible were based on real events. However, I just don’t take them as completely true because of the flaw in not only man writing them, but that time frame between the event and when they were written.

When taking the Biblical stories and applying them to today we also have to remember the vast difference in cultures at the time.

Many cultures, tribes of people, living at the times of the stories in the Bible had a very small worldview. For instance, there is archaeological evidence of a great flood. But the evidence of this great flood happened just around the Black Sea. It was by no means a world-covering flood, but I’m sure to the cultures around the flood at the time it did cover what they knew of the world. It seemed like a flood that covered everything.

No matter the argument I make there will be many that still use the Bible to their defense, often times twisting the meaning, ignoring any cultural influence, etc to make a point.

My thought, as a Christian, is we need to stop worrying about the sins of others (if you truly consider them sins) and just worry about ourselves.

Worry about the other teachings of Jesus Christ including to love all, accept all. Political influences, utilizing your religion as a means to pass laws against others that are not harming anyone is amoral in my eyes as well.

Sarah

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