My grandfather was a deacon, and we lived with him so I had very Catholic upbringing. When my dad told me he took a class about the Bible’s historical text as a kid I thought, yep, normal thing you do.
But without realizing it he changed how I saw Christianity forever. He said before the things were translated and retranslated and changed over time because words change meaning over time, “a day” meant “a period of time”. Not 24 hours. A period of time.
So later when I went to a tiny Christian school, and people were fighting about evolution versus creationism all the time on the news, all I could think is why not both? God made the world in 7 days? Easy, not only does the bible also says time moves differently for him, but a day isn’t 24 hours in the first place so why can’t both be true?
Here’s another example, they used to say “silly Mary, Mother of God.” This wasn’t someone making fun of her, it’s because silly used to mean holy. No one says “silly Mary, Mother of God” anymore because in a modern context it sounds like wrong. It makes no sense.
There are things like this everywhere in the bible. Last example, the stories most used against gay people were about a country being upset with its citizens because they weren’t adding to the population and feared the future would hold no long who could enlist in the countries defense. This is where you get a lot of rules on sexuality. But That war is over, that reality is not a 2018 reality.
Almost all the harm that is done with Christianity, and really harm done by any faith, is caused by people who are unwilling to accept that meaning shifts over time. Unwilling to believe things like flooding the whole world could just as easily meant whole known world.
You are on your way to reconciling these hiccups. To deciding the path you think your god laid out for you. I’m now a pagan and it was absolutely easier to have someone tell me God will like you if you fall in line because he meant X about Y. But you don’t find God that way. I never felt God that way, and if you still have faith in something that caused you harm, something in that is still speaking a truth to you. That’s something holy to me. That’s how you can have the world of your faith while other hurtful worlds still exist.
