(Part 3) Top products from r/OpenChristian

I've enclosed a few links that I have saved in my bookmarks. It isn't a huge about but it will give you a good start. If you are really interested I highly recommend checking out The Bible Now by Elliot Friedman, it does a much better job at explaining biblical interpretations much better than I ever will.
Some of these sites are obviously bias but, again, its a great place to start. I would love to give you more links but I have to dig though my USB for my notes and its all the way down in college (3 hours away). Here's what I can give you right now.

• The Daily Banter did a pretty good article on it and it can be found Here
  
• This site is probably my favorite. It does a really great job at looking at translation issues that arise with biblical versus. Obviously, none of these articles are subject only to versus about homosexuality but can be applied to basically everything in the bible. here's the link to that
  *I also really enjoyed reading this link. Mostly because of the external sources they have at the bottom of the page that I'm pretty sure helped me dig deeper into others areas to better understand the subject. Not to mention, its very great at showcasing all the belief systems that Christians have about homosexuality and why they have them. That link is here
  EDIT: I hope I did the formatting correctly. I'm a new user to reddit via laptop.

Experimental moral psychology and moral neuroscience tell a very different story.

It turns out that morality is much more intuitive and emotional than pretty much everyone wants to admit. Being a moral philosopher or religious person seems to do very little to actually change our moral actions, but does a lot to change our self-report of how we view ourselves morally. However, things like feeling good, smelling fresh bread(positive impact) or fart smell(negative impact), being in a clean or dirty room, or being reminded of our mortality all do in fact vastly impact our moral judgement and actions.

As to your view of the primacy of Christianity, my view on that is highly influenced by the dual process theory defended by Joshua Greene that posits that we all have both more emotive and more calculating moral hardware.

It is true that the ancient Greeks chose the primacy of the calculating side while the Christians largely promoted the emotive side, but historically the ancient Greeks were in the minority. All the major religions that have succeeded also have a large focus on compassion, and many say that is what religion is for. Religion is that which enabled us to connect ourselves into groups larger than the familial, and the religions that have survived are the ones that allow us to do that most effectively.

In my view supernatural religion in the large is relatively neutral, but such beliefs have the problem of, especially in times of threat and fear, turning into fundamentalist tribal certainty systems that promote in-group out-group dichotomies where all sides are equally sure that, as the Nazi's wrote on their belt buckles, "GOTT MIT UNS", that God is with and for us.

I freely admit to being influenced by Christianity, but that in the large it is not as morally superior as you claim and in history has much less impact then you suggest. I do however find compelling certain ways of interpreting Christianity that concentrate on freeing us from the fear of loss of meaning and death(whole series here), that of their nature directly contradict fundamentalist, high certainty theologies. That it turns out that this view is much more historical than the evangelical view of the 1730s and later that now dominates our discourse in America, which I think is clearly so poisonous to our culture.

Edit: If you're interested in learning more about moral psychology and moral neuroscience, this book review of the best book on the topic will get you started, and the author of the review interviewed many of the psychologists on his podcast.

I recommended this over on /r/Chrsitianity the other day, but I think it's more universally appropriate for this crowd. If you're interested in something non-traditional, I would whole-heartedly recommend Lamb: the Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal. It's a fiction that imagines Jesus left Israel during the years we don't have many stories about to go find the wise men that found him when he was young, and try to figure out what the heck it means to be the son of God. It shows him interacting with other religious traditions, and learning about God through them. It's a fun read, and enjoys imagining various Bible stories in ways that match the original text, but not what we assume about them.

It is fiction, and doesn't make any claims to truth, but it's thought-provoking. I highly recommend it to any Christian who can stand to not take the religion too seriously.

> What I'm thinking of is more a case of having a base translation that you think is pretty good for right now, and then updating it one verse at a time with something more like a text replacement.

Yep. This is usually how translators work. The NIV went though and replaced instances of the word "thong" with "sandal" when "thong" took on its modern "underwear" meaning.

But this doesn't always work out as perfectly as you would hope. Say you want to replace "bread" with "tortilla" in a culture where corn tortillas are the staple food. What do you do with the Exodus story? God told them to make unleavened...tortillas? But tortillas are already unleavened. Ok, so that's an exception. We have to leave "bread" there, maybe with a note explaining what bread and leavening meant to the Israelites. But then we have to check all the instances of "bread" to see if they mean "staple food" "specific type of bread" "metaphorical image" or whatever else. And there are books (and software - check out Logos) with this sort of information that translators use (lexicons, concordances, grammatical analyses), but there is still disagreement over what sense a word has in a particular passage. So there will still be a human decision somewhere down the line as to what "bread" in a specific passage means. And that I think is where we can't rely on the sort of program which does replacements of concepts. There are too many concepts to make this feasible. See Hoffman's book And God Said for another view of some of this.

Another problem would be that replacing single words or even phrases would create a very clunky translation. The original translation might be in one style, but the people who filled out the form might use a different dialect or vocabulary. That MadLibs-style result would be at least as jarring as a footnote. The Bible is indeed a text composed by many human authors, but a single passage usually has one person making it cohesive. This is more of a trivial problem, not affecting the core meaning, but it will affect how the resulting product is read, which can very easily affect the meaning people take from it. See how the style of Donald Trump's speech completely changes when he has a British accent. The words are still the same, but the style completely changes how I feel about those words. And accent is something even beyond what we're talking about here.

> However this kind of thing usually doesn't happen on controversial verses

But...they are controversial exactly because there is disagreement about the core truth of the passage. I think this is where you are going to run into the most problems with this project. If there was a definitive core truth of a passage, we wouldn't still be arguing about it 50, 100, 1000 years later. Yes, we can decide to pick the more progressive interpretation. And yes, I think that people should have access to the progressive/liberal interpretation in the surface text, rather than in a footnote. But the Bible is not a collection of core truths. It's a text written in a context by specific people, and interpreted through millennia by people. The disagreements over the text are as much a part of the the interpretation of the text as the words themselves. That's why the Jews have Talmud. That's why we have subreddits. To struggle with the text. To discover nuances people 200 years ago couldn't have imagined, but are perfectly relevant to today.

I just finished 'Queering Christ: beyond JESUS ACTED UP' by Robert Goss. It attempts to construct a queer theology. It is mostly focused on gay men, mostly since that's where the author falls, but it does a decent job extending it to Trans/Non-Binary people. The book also has great resources for follow up reads on these topics.

Also check out Indecent Theology by Marcella Althaus-Reid; I haven't finished reading this one yet.

One I haven't even started yet is 'Omnigender' by Virginia Ramey Mollenkott. This is specifically a trans-religious approach.

Hope these help :)

*edit: added links.

It's a big question you're asking. Lots of people have dedicated their lives to studying it and unfortunately the answer won't ever be known unless God decides to break His silence or the mystery is revealed after we die. The simplified answer though is what you say, the split between Judaism and Christianity is the interpretation of Jesus. A central theme of the Old Testament is a prophesy of a redeeming king to lead the Jewish people. The debate is whether or not Jesus was the fulfillment of the prophesy or just another teacher. The Christian faith requires one coming to the conclusion that Jesus is the messiah the Old Testament prophets spoke of and accepting Him as such. Rob Bell is great but if you're looking for a more academic approach to the Christian faith and its interpretation of Jesus, I would recommend reading NT Wright. He has a book on Jesus that has been very fundamental to my understanding of Him and I think would serve a good way to understand what the Christian religion says claims about Him.

https://www.amazon.com/Simply-Jesus-Vision-What-Matters/dp/0062084399/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1504703893&sr=1-1&keywords=simply+jesus+n.t.+wright

Perhaps a good study bible, like the https://www.amazon.com/New-Oxford-Annotated-Bible-Apocrypha/dp/0195289609 ?

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It's filled with commentary from academics of different faiths. The aim is to be scholarly. Many notes describe literary structure, context, etc.

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So she'd be reading the primary source (well, translated), with hopefully about as unbiased as you could hope for commentary.

Here are some progressive, critical sources that cover African-American and feminist perspectives:

• The Africana Bible: Reading Israel's Scriptures from Africa and the African Diaspora, ed. Page (Hebrew Bible + Deuterocanonicals)
  
• True to Our Native Land, ed. Blount (NT)
  
• Women's Bible Commentary, ed. Newsom, et al. (Hebrew Bible + Deuterocanonicals + NT)
  
  For individual book commentaries, you might consider selections from these series:
  
  
• The Anchor Bible (Doubleday)
  
• Belief: A Theological Commentary on the Bible (Westminster John Knox Press)
  
• Hermeneia (Fortress Press)
  
• International Critical Commentary (T&T Clark)
  
• Interpretation (Westminster John Knox Press)
  
• Old/New Testament Library (Westminster John Knox Press)
  
  Note that commentaries in the Hermeneia and ICC series are fairly technical (e.g., Hebrew and Greek words are not transliterated), and some books in the Hermeneia and OTL/NTL series are English translations of older German works that are now beginning to show their age. For example, the Hermeneia volume for the Johannine Epistles is a classic (1973 ET of Bultmann's Die drei Johannesbriefe [2nd ed., 1967]), but it's older than me (and I'm no spring chicken)! In contrast, the Hermeneia volume for Mark is a comprehensive, recent treatment by Adela Yarbro Collins, published just 11 years ago.
  
  I also agree with earlier comments regarding NOAB, now in its fifth edition, which is just slightly changed from the fourth edition. Note that a major revision in terms of page formatting, paper stock, etc., occurred between the third (2001) and fourth (2010) editions (cf. comments on Amazon for details). You can find used copies of these prior editions for reasonable prices both online and at places such as Half-Price Books.
  
  Two other Bibles to consider, in addition to the HarperCollins Study Bible:
  
  
• The Access Bible, ed. O'Day and Petersen (ecumenical study Bible geared for mainline audiences)
  
• The Peoples' Bible, ed. DeYoung, et al. (study Bible incorporating multicultural, liberationist, and post-colonial interpretive methods)
  
  Best wishes concerning your continued studies!

We are very clearly allowed to eat animals; no one (well, not many people) would contest that. But I think the Bible clearly shows that animals are God's, not ours - and being allowed to eat them is not the same thing as being allowed to torture them, and that's the crux of the issue for a modern day person contemplating the modern meat industry. Animals were treated much differently, and far better, in Bible times than they are in our factory farms, feedlots, and slaughter houses. Volumes have been written on the subject; I strongly recommend Dominion by Matthew Scully if you want to read a good, measured argument for how we should treat animals.

So there are multiple ways you can look at any problem. In relation to beliefs, there are also multiple ways you can arrive at a reason for believing something.

It seems like one of your biggest issues currently is believing God exists, which to me translates to having difficulty finding a reason to believe in God. Additionally, it seems as if you've been looking at the whole issue of God's existence, atheism, etc. from a perspective of truth value.

However, what I'm suggesting is try to look at them from a perspective of cost/benefit in the actions they generate.

Example belief to run a cost benefit analysis on: I should go to church every week

• Cons: I lose about an hour a week
  
  
• Pros: I find that I behave more morally throughout the week if I do go. Actually, there are studies (specifically dishonesty in this case actually) demonstrating an increased moral conduct upon being reminded to be more moral
  
  
• Conclusion: I will go to church weekly to increase my moral behavior.

The book mentioned in the article is free as an eBook on Amazon. It’s a real solid read, especially for the price of free.

Whoah, there is way too much in here for me

But, broadly speaking, it seems like you're up against the challenge of fitting a mechanical, game-rulebook way of looking at Scripture to reality. What you probably don't realize is that that's not only the best way to look at Scripture, it's not even the most respectful way to look at Scripture - it frankly trivializes this amazing set of books.

Can I ask you to try an amazing book? Things Hidden by Richard Rohr. It blows apart the mental model of Scripture you've got right now and shows you one so, so much better.

Also, do you have a better church than the one that taught you the broken way of thinking you've got right now?

Greta Vosper is a pastor in the United Church of Canada. She's a self-identified atheist, and has very left-wing ideas.

The United Chaplain at my school pointed me towards her. The chaplain said that she doesn't agree with everything Vosper says, but it offers interesting ideas.

http://www.amazon.com/With-Without-God-Important-Believe/dp/0062294857/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1398234192&sr=8-1&keywords=greta+vosper

Hmm, most of the stuff I know on this is pretty academic and dense (and pricey), like Brittany Wilson's Unmanly Men: Refigurations of Gender in Luke-Acts or Amy Kalmanofsky's Gender-Play in the Hebrew Bible: The Ways the Bible Challenges Its Gender Norms.

But have you watched Peterson Toscano's short film, "Transfigurations," in which he portrays several Bible characters in gender-nokconforming ways? It's just a couple bucks on Amazon video or you can buy the DVD for $20 plus shipping.

“The Story of Reality: How The World Began, How It Ends, And Everything Important In Between” - Gregory Koukl.

The Story of Reality: How the World Began, How It Ends, and Everything Important that Happens in Between https://www.amazon.com/dp/0310525047/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_tai_niHPAbGE270Y0

https://www.amazon.com/Changes-That-Heal-Henry-Cloud/dp/0310606314

When I was first asking these questions, this book helped a lot.

Torah Queeries and the book

The Queer Bible Commentary

I will list more. Gotta go catch a train.

I recommend Rob Bell's Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived. He reexamines the descriptions of hell in the bible (in context, in the original languages) and presents a fresh (and much more compassionate) view of hell.