[A bit of a random ramble]
Beyond the Holy Word
The bible supports the idea that heathens are evil, or foolish, and passages differ, the trouble with Christianity, as well as Judaism and Islam, is verse selection, the act of quote mining their own religious texts, and in many cases the group or sect they belong to sets a view that condemns or condones a group of people by a very bias selection process. So selecting passages can be used to support nearly any position, especially with some cunning interpretation, this is the sad case of what religion is, in its fundamentalist and moderate forms, an expression of bias that claims divine warrant.
Philosophising the bible means you pretty much place the new perspective, as a modern ideology, above that of the bible, every church is interpretation above pure biblical acceptance, because the contradictions mean that you cannot come to a view without an interpretation of the bible. Even if you try die-hard literalism, the various contradictions mean you cannot accept all things as equal, the first motion is to say one set of ideas are divine and secondly others were man-created, or only laws and traditions of the time, the line between what we should accept now and what we need not, is not set out in scripture, so even literalists admit this problem.
The trouble is that sects find excuses to picks a select various rules out of their books, some by bible study, some by modern tradition, others by claiming that Christ tells them what is right or wrong, this last one being more about conscience than anything divine, and based on a cultural background as the ethical foundation for what god may wish to you. Many read popular Christian books, as a result of modern apologists many think that a Christian belief is rational, depending on who's work they read, and the sect in question. Some are more honest and say that god is not testable, non-falsifiable, such reasoning isn't about confirming that their religion is true, as much as suggesting there's room for some kind of god, and Christianity fits the mould they have just created enough to suggest that their belief is possibility true. The modern Christianity we face is a reformed religion, even in cases of biblical literalism, this reformation hasn't fully taken place in regard to Islam, of which similar methods of interpretation are used, and, much like fundamentalist Christians, they claim not to be interpreting the holy works, even though there is no other way to take them perfectly literally, since texts that consist of great contradictions and imperfections.
