The same old, tired platitude of love the sinner hate the sin. You are implicitly trying to justify bigotry by acting as if you are understanding and tolerant. What you are actually doing is damning with faint praise. I am a Christian and I see nothing in the Bible (read in toto) that condemns LGBTQ people in the slightest. The only thing that is condemned is pederasty and involuntary sexual relationships between the powerful and those who cannot resist.
For too long, Christians have taken verses such as Genesis 5:2 and 1:27 and misinterpreted them to justify the idea that there are only two sexes (which is contrary to the understanding of modern medical science by the way. But then ancient Jews were ignorant in many ways. Remember, God didn’t write the Bible, fallible human men did.)The problem is that you are distorting the meaning of the original scripture.
In Genesis ancient Hebrew writers used a literary device called a merism in these two verses. A merism is a way of describing a range of possibilities, not a pair of binary alternatives. It is like saying something is neither black or white, but a shade of gray. The same is true about the description of the sexes. God says that he made mankind in his own image, male and female and (implied) everything in between. That is a merism. It includes gay and transgender people. A clue to the proper interpretation is included in the literal words of the KJV version so revered by fundamentalists: “Male and female, created he them; and blessed them, and called their name Adam…” Why use the plural pronoun? Have you ever thought about it? It’s because the authors were acknowledging the full range of possibilities exhibited by mankind, not just two individual sexes.
Don’t believe me? Look at the standards of the ancient cultures the time or at the Talmud, which was the book which explained the meaning and application of the Torah for ancient Jews. It was written by the same scholars who wrote the Jewish Bible. It describes eight genders, of which four are transgender people. They were equally accepted in society. It is only modern day bigots who have twisted the language around from its original meaning.
Likewise, with the tortured reinterpretation of the clobber verses condemning homosexuality. These were selective misinterpretations that had little to do with the original Greek language used by Paul which scholars still scratch their heads about. Indeed most of them did not even exist in English versions of the Bible until being revised in the the early and mid 20th century.
More fundamentally, Jesus says nothing, and I mean absolutely nothing, about LGBTQ relationships. If it were that important, he would’ve at least addressed it once. He did not. But he had a lot to say about religious legalism, self righteousness and bigotry. Your apologetic is not much better than the hateful absolutists. You need to go further and understand the true message of the gospels.
I am a Christian, a transgender woman, have degrees in philosophy and religion, and a ministry degree from the Episcopal Diocese of Southwest Florida. I am not speaking from a position of bias, but objectivity. It took me decades of research to fully understand what was going on when the original scriptures were written. I was once where you are.
It is past time for Christians to let all this go. Many Christians think that they are under attack. What they fail to understand is that what is under attack are their hateful beliefs, claim to exclusivity and smug self-righteousness. The higher ideals expressed in the gospels appeal universally, and have never been condemned. It is the reason for the durability of the Bible.
But modern day evangelicals are doing their best to destroy the faith. Before you start trying to make reasonable arguments implicitly justifying their beliefs, make sure that your premises are correct. You have a lot to learn.
