heterosexuality
Out of context: Reply #19
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- gramme0
00000, don't confuse translations with versions. There are many translations that basically say the same thing.
There are really only three versions of the Bible, and even those are not so much "versions", they just include differentiating material with many overlaps. There is the Jewish Torah, which is exactly the same as the Christian Old Testament. The Torah obviously does not include the New Testament, because Jews do not think Jesus was the Messiah spoken of in the Old Testament prophecies.
Then there is the Catholic Bible, which has the Old Testament, Apocrypha and New Testament. The Apocrypha was added after the Council of Nicaea in 323 AD. At Nicaea, hundreds of church elders gathered to determine which biblical records were the most accurate based on whether they had remained unaltered, and whether they agreed with each other based on what had generally been revealed about God's nature through the various Biblical books.
Finally, there is the Evangelical Bible used by Presbyterians, Lutherans, Baptists, Anglicans, Methodists, Churches of God, and many other denominations. The Ev. Bible does not include the Apocrypha, because the veracity of those books is highly debatable.
The original, unaltered Hebrew and Greek manuscripts are still available for study in a number of museums. Pastors and priests in training learn archaic forms of both languages, so as to make sure that they are getting to the root and understanding Scripture as it was originally written.
Translations such as the English Standard Version are word-for-word translations, labored over for years, sometimes decades, by highly trained Hebrew and Greek linguists.
And whether God created Steve or not is best answered not actually by reading the Biblical account of creation, but by studying male and female genetics and observed natural tendencies. Most people are misinformed by popular culture about these things. I would say that even most heterosexual men I know are deeply confused about what it means to be a man. This is not propaganda, but rather a belief that there are certain roles God intended for men and women; and when we fulfill those roles, we will be at peace – not just happy, which is temporary – but that we will know true joy and peace. That what I desire for everyone I come across.