Just a reminder, being a horrible person shoukdnt be tolerated simply because they claim their religion says so.... **YOU** choose one of any number of interpritations of your religion that caused you to be a horrible person. Thats not your religions fault, thats just you finding an excuse to be a shit human. No one needs to tolerate you being a shit human just because your a religious shit human.

That is all...

@freemo I find the multiple interpretations or treating religion as a buffet argument often quite insincere and intellectually dishonest.

You call yourself a believer of a religion. The religion has some scripture and some history.
Those say that believers should act certain way, say certain things, perform certain rituals to appease their deity. But you do absolutely none of that. At that point what makes you any different from an unbeliever who acts the same way you do?

Yes there are different interpretations, a lot of parts of religion are intentionally vague so that they can't be proven false. There are things lost in translation. But rarely are those direct negations.
Yes you can have a discussion on if various food rules etc make sense to uphold if they were made to prevent disease and we now know how to do it better, but that's not the case with social or political stuff, humans haven't changed.
If I write a book and call it Scripture 2.0 and just negate the original belief, I didn't make a new interpretation, I'm just wrong.

@matrix The problem is that it is VERY hard, next to impossible to assert what hte book is actually telling you to do, which is a very different abstraction layer than simply what the book is describing.

Take the Leviticus 19:19 as a prime example since it seems straightforward but when we poke it a bit more its not...

"“You shall keep my statutes. You shall not let your cattle breed with a different kind. You shall not sow your field with two kinds of seed, nor shall you wear a garment of cloth made of two kinds of material."

This seems perfectly straightforward, it is telling you what you cant do, it seems like we cant even debate the fact that is saying dont mix fabrics or seeds...

But its not that straightforward.. there are several competitings interpritations all of which have validity...

1) This is simply a long list of laws for a region at the time, a result of the long-windedness of the bible, not a proclemation from god. This is backed up by the suspicious lack of "god said" or any assertion these are rules set down by god .
2) the hebrew gamatria of the text reveals a hidden story (which historians are aware of by the way). The surface text isnt particularly important, the gematrial interitation, the underlying message,is.

3) It is literally telling you whatis and is not allowed (a generally jewish interpritation since this is old testamant).

4) a later set of books considered by only some people to be legit talk about jesus and in those stories they negate much of the rules set down in the old-testimant, so these rules are not enforced by god anymore but they used to be. (this is what most christians think)

The list goes on... There is no "right".. there are just endless interpritations, all valid within the frameowkrs of that particiular "canon" (both oral and written canon)

@freemo
1) This is objectively false interpretation as all translations of Leviticus 19 start with some version of "God said to Moses: "
2) Sure, but at that point you are doing several layer deep schizophrenic pattern seeking.
3) Yes that would be the most logical interpretation
4) Yeah the new testament redcons the old one but here you have a distinct 2 faiths, not two interpretations of the same faith.