This turned out way longer than I expected so if you make it all the way through please accept my congratulations, or something :)

The various cultures which have translated the Bible throughout time, perhaps through neglect or through willful intention, have included their cultural bias into their translation which has caused a lot of confusion. I actually believe firmly in the power of the Bible; it's completely changed my life for the better (don't run and hide -- Christian salvation tract NOT incoming) :) Just going to talk about my personal experience which, like yours, differs markedly from the experiences of most mainline Christians I know.

I never had any problem with the idea of contradictions in the Bible from early on, because every bible interpreter, from the most latent skeptic to the most zealous believer, seems to have their own way of resolving or not resolving the conflicts within its 66 books. If you're given ultimate power to interpret the words as you choose, you can find as many contradictions, or solve as many contradictions as you want, it seems to me.

Which leads me to another misleading thing we Christians do that screws people up. Saying the Bible has 66 books is incredibly misleading. It comes across like the "Bible" existed first, as an immaterial and immutable essence (essence of Bible, or something), with 66 empty spots, and then the 66 books came, one by one, to fill in the "blanks." It's taught as though the faithful were just waiting throughout time and checking off boxes "OK We got the Pentateuch, five down, 61 to go." Or a child is just trying to force different shapes through holes until the right one fits. So there's 66 holes ok and only 66 possible books that will fit through, so we just need to wait for the right ones, and complete the puzzle. But it's obviously not that simple, even though it's taught that way.

The truth is the Bible was put together by men who none of us know, and who had NO idea that 1,750 years later, entire nations, families, and cultures would be struggling so hard to make all 66 books work into one neat, tidy little package, and be chomping at the bit to follow every letter of every law of their own invented system of interpretation.

Not that the Bible was invented by these people but rather that every man's interpretation of the Bible is invented by himself. So at the very least there are several layers of abstraction to get through before you can find what these 66 books are saying to YOU, then you can determine if it's God's word or not.

Personally I think it is God's word, because of my own subjective experience of its life renewing power. But I'm well aware that some people have read the same book and attempted to follow it and have come up empty-handed. I recognize and accept that many people's experience with the Bible varies greatly from mine, and I don't make mine out to be "the norm" at all. I think everyone's experience with the Bible is different.

I think the great majority (95% or more) of what people hate or find distasteful about Christianity, is a series of traditions that have grown up into dogma that characterizes a sub-culture of fundamentalist or pseudo-fundamentalist Christians. It's a culture that doesn't actually follow the Bible, but follows a version of what they think to be true about the Bible in its 66 books. Other Christian traditions and offspring of them (Christian cults, Mormonism, all the dozens and dozens of protestant denominations, Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, et al.) all zealously take what they want to believe about the Bible and forcefully reject what they don't want to believe. If you look at the few things that all Christians agree on, the list is pretty short. Here's my attempt at that list.

1) Man is sinful (i.e. evil, sick, misguided, lost, incomplete, tarnished, etc.) whatever you want to call it. Man has problems that are demonstrably severe. Man has failed repeatedly and also demonstrably to solve those problems for himself. 2) Jesus became a man and died a transient death to reverse the effects of man's sin and restore all of humankind to it's proper function. 3) This restoration is taking place now, and has been in the past, and will continue throughout the future, as individuals and communities grow more and more in love for God and their fellow man.

Here lies the essence of Christianity as I see it, in my best attempt at objectivity. I don't know why, historically, the human organizers of the world have taken it upon themselves to complicate Christianity by turning it into a system of doctrines, laws, and obediences, so complex that it puts even the most convoluted legal documents to shame.

The reason I know all these traditions are false is because the Bible wasn't written by one person, and the only way to create a system that "works" is to ignore huge other chunks of the Bible in preference for a few books, chapters, or verses that receive all the favors and benefits of the doubt. The amount of self-deception that most Christians go through to achieve this feat is truly amazing.

So I try reading the song of Solomon again with this mentality, throwing aside what others have told me about it, and committing myself to see everything through my own raw human eyes. Well when I read the Song of Solomon through my own eyes instead of the eyes of my preacher or past teachers, I see very vivid and NSFW scenes unfolding on every page. If the author of 50 Shades of Gray was asked where she got her inspiration for her books, and replied that she drew inspiration from the Song of Solomon, it wouldn't be that much of a stretch.

So I like to imagine an illustrated picture Bible with real Song of Solomon pictures in it. Oh noez that would be pr0n. Yeah because we wouldn't want our cleverly disguised facade of righteousness to come crumbling down, that would take away our self-assumed moral precedent to judge other people's lives as inferior to our own.

It's so easy to go through the Bible and miss the raw earthiness of it because the group of traditionalists who have claimed it for themselves and impose their views of it on everyone else, as if they have the right to claim sole proprietorship over this book. Personally I think the Song of Solomon would make a nice companion book to the Kama Sutra, or something. It would go well in a compilation of erotic poetry, story-telling, and theory from world religions. Someone should do that.

But when it comes to the Old Testament and God's smiting judgments, these, like the Song of Solomon, are also highly misunderstood in my opinion.

We look at God raining fire on Sodom and Gomorrah and say that's repulsive, what a hateful God.

But what if he wasn't raining fire on homosexuals, but raining fire on rotters who offered their house-guests up to be molested and raped by a mob consisting of the rest of the town? Yes, that's right, it seems that Sodom and Gomorrah most likely had a longstanding conspiracy that involved inviting and hosting strangers, wayfarers, and guests into their houses, dwellings, and city as a gesture of hospitality and good-will. These visitors, having been deceived, and being completely ignorant of the fact that their apparently beneficent host is in collusion with the rest of the town, stage a sexual assault of such a grand scale, and of such unimaginable depravity that it descends far, far below anything even remotely resembling the slightest shred or dull glimmer of humanity.

Such was the depraved nature of these acts and the infamy of these towns, that sodomy became a byword in the surrounding areas, a cheap piece of slang, inspired not by two people of the same sex having consensual relations, No! That would be kosher. Etymologically, sodomy would have been inspired by the following act: Various groups of down-on-their-luck, innocent, and helpless travelers over periods of weeks, months, and years, being lied to, being told they were safe from harm and would have a place to stay for the night under the guise of hospitality, and then being woken up, brought outside, and forcefully subjected to an excess of unspeakably insane brutality, mindlessly violent, decidedly massively inhuman, super-trauma inducing, hellishly surreal, and blatant sub-animal aggression from a flash-mob of numberless, unnamed, unknown, and unreal attackers, without any warning to the victim, repeatedly, resulting in a very quick death, either by blunt trauma, blood loss, or pure psychological shock and horror. This was probably what was meant by sodomy.

This gives, I think, a whole new meaning to what it means to be "sodomized." Now it seems these people probably knew what they were doing was wrong and my gut says they not only knew it but had been warned about it, and loved it and didn't care. It certainly gives me a different outlook on the reasoning behind entire city being destroyed. Maybe it does for you, too. Maybe not. Either way, it makes a lot more moral sense than saying he destroyed them for being just a bunch of really vigorous homosexuals, which is frankly absurd by any standard. It seems the men of Sodom preferred men, which may have been where the homosexual connotation came from, as an accessory to their reputation, not as the primary meaning of it. Their wives could help set the trap for these poor wayfarers by gaining their trust.