Found God’s account

You are free to criticize democrats, but when you imply they are as bad as child rapists people are going to roll their eyes

It’s cherry picking because it’s choosing which pieces of the bible to give credence to and which to ignore based on preference. Paul was chosen as God’s chosen vessel; I don’t see why his instructions to the early church should be cast aside.

Jesus did say to love thy neighbor, yet it is easy to find examples of God condoning slavery and demanding genocides. Unless you intend to also deny those parts, it’s pretty clear he’s willing to contradict that commandment against whoever he considers sinful. For gay men, he prescribed the death penalty, although that was part of the covenant with Israel. I don’t think the new testament says how they should be punished, just that it’s a sin.

I believe you are right for the old testament commandments, but it does seem like cherry picking to say the early restrictions should only apply to the Israelites, and later verses that would expand the scope in letters from Paul shouldn’t be accepted.

When you say intentional, do you mean it’s interpreted that way as part of an agenda? Why would someone do this? Other versions of the verse make similar purity claims as well. From the surrounding verses, it sounds to me like Jesus is saying what you eat does not matter in the context of morals/sin rather than it being symbolic of people with different practices.

For the unclean foods bit, Jesus may have retconned that with Mark 7:19.

Gay sex is disparaged in various verses, some of which come from Old Testament divine commandments. It’s not just in letters.

It’s less clear about abortion but throughout the Bible fetuses are generally considered to have distinct personhood from their mothers. That tends to imply certain rights.

Christians tend to pick and choose which parts of their word of God are actually infallible and which parts don’t apply anymore. There’s no reason to think God changed His mind on gay sex, tattoos, or wearing garments of mixed materials, because there was no justification for banning them in the first place. If a Christian is a true believer, they should be satisfied with “God said it, so it must be true”.

That’s the problem with relying on an external authority for morality. When it tells you to do something you don’t like, you have to either change your behavior accordingly or realize that you actually don’t trust it as an authority. Christians being by and large massive hypocrites, they tend to do the latter without admitting to it. Because if they did admit it, they wouldn’t be Christians anymore.

It’s pretty rare to find someone who genuinely takes it all on faith, that stealing cookies from the cookie jar indeed warrants eternal punishment. For everyone else, if they were honest with themselves, they would admit that if you only follow the rules you agree with, they were never actually rules for you.

Yeah, I think it boils down to this.

“Do you believe in a god or gods?”

“Yes” - Theist

“No” - Atheist

“I don’t know.” - Agnostic

Of course, many people would admit they aren’t certain for yes/no, and so might qualify as an agnostic theist/atheist depending on how strict you are with confidence. Some agnostics will be more rigid and say the answer is inherently unknowable. Regardless, it still seems a lot simpler than having to explain a satirical religion you are pretending to believe in to someone.