nicolaou, I understand your motivation and I share your zeal. And I feel your pain, LWT. That passage at Matthew 10:34-37 was used recently by my mother. "See, Jesus PREDICTED this would happen to us! It's in the bible! You're just fulfilling prophecy!"
THAT evoked a number of emotions, not the least of which was frustration. It leads me to be a bit more vocal and ask Christians, "WHY would a perfect, omniscient being, capable of engineering a complex universe, choose a non-universal language and imperfect men to convey the greatest message of all time? Would he not realize that (conservatively) two completely sincere worshipers could someday take the same text and arrive at two completely contradicting conclusions?"
The point to me isn't that man misinterprets or misuses the bible (boldly assuming there's only one correct way to understand it), because man abuses all sorts of things that are otherwise proper. But it's the fact that it's written in such a manner that it IS POSSIBLE to do so. Like Gladiator was saying, the bible covers all bases. With enough contradictions, it can be made to say whatever you want.
Unbiased reasoning led me to finally reject the bible as a holy book. Pain and anger lead me to speak up about it. Maybe someday I'll ease up a bit but the wounds are still fresh.
