I'm a Christian, and one who is decently educated in the history and traditions of the Christian Faith. I'm not an exclusivistic person; if you honestly cannot be Christian, or are perfectly happy in another faith, then I, at least, will not condemn you, also as I hope you would not condemn me for my own.
First, the issue of the Bible must be addressed. The Bible DOES contain flaws, contradictions, biases, historical inaccuracies, etc. And a good example of that is in the six-hundred and something Mosaic laws of the Torah (the first five books of the Hebrew Bible/OT). As a Christian, I see those laws (and the Bible as a whole) not as a perfect and inerrant reflection of God's will but a product of the historical memory and spiritual testimony of its writers and its writers' communities.
Second, there's Christian history, including the Christianity of today. As some of you have pointed out, there have been, and still are, many self-described Christians that are hateful, bigoted, self-righteousness blow-hards, and then there are Christians who stick more to the ideals of love, and they've done wonderful things. It's not all black and white and leaning only to one or the other. This division is even found in the Bible, as most Bible scholars will state. There are verses in the Bible that reflect both the hate-based and the love-based strains of Christian thought. Christianity is NOT a religion of hatred, in and of itself, and it often fails to meet the standards of a religion of love. To generalize will benefit no one. Christianity is not black or white, but somewhere in the vast spectrum of gray that lies in between.
What it comes down to is personal choice and practice. In terms of personal choice: People who are typically loving will focus more on the love-based verses, and people who are typically hateful will focus on the more hate-based choices. In terms of practice: Look at the individual acts of each person, rather than blanketing a whole religion under the lunacies of its most extreme and widely discredited wing.
I'm Christian because it fits me, and it feels like home, and I for one aspire more to the ideals of Jesus, which are overwhelmingly ones of the afore-mentioned qualities of love, compassion, forgiveness, etc. If you are not a Christian, or you are viruntly anti-Christian, as is trendy of late, then there is little I can do except state with rock-solid conviction that people like Fred Phelps do no represent me or the Christianity I know and love, and try to show by my actions that that's no lie. Things are not as simple as we often make them out to be.
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