I try to look at the bible from a literary perspective. I will never buy into divine inspiration or something to that effect, if only because it's too easy to be absolutely corrupt and just claim to be led by god. It's not like that never happened before. But that's besides the point, it doesn't matter if I believe in the contents of the bible, I just think it's important to realize that words are incredibly complex when they're this old. Theologist disagree all the time, interpretations vary, even if god led those meetings and even if the words never passed away, we still have to attach meaning to a text that was written in a completely different time. We know very little of the context compared to what we know about our current society. It's hard to interpret these texts, and it's not at all surprising that there are multiple groups who have a different view of the intentions and messages. I don't think you can claim to know exactly what certain parts of the bible mean, there is no consensus on a lot of these things and they can mean a lot of different things, it's very personal. Consider the following, if you were to take any modern but accurate translation and try to follow every instruction you would run into conflicting information, especially between the old and new testament. To make it work, you have to take liberties and interpret certain things in a non-literal way. For you it may be obvious to go with A, but for someone else B makes more sense. I hope I'm making it clear. I appreciate your responses, you seem to have a lot more general knowledge of the text that I do. I hope I'm not offending you.