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I believe in the Bible from Genesis to Revelations as the inerrant and infallible Word of God! Trying to pick and choose which passages of scripture apply to today is about as idiotic as trying to pick which laws you're going to abide by and which laws you're not going to abide by!
Who, you have every right to your fundamentalist views. But do not trivialize 2,000 years of Christian history by claiming that any other approach to the Bible is "idiotic."
What do you think all the so-called "heresies" of the early Christian centuries were about? They were about different interpretations of the Bible.
What do you think the Reformation was about? Among other things, it was about different interpretations of the Bible. As you will recall, the position of the Catholic Church was that it alone had the right to interpret scripture, while the Protestant position, beginning with Luther, was that the individual had the right to interpret the Bible for himself. And needless to say, the Protestants all tended to come up with different interpretations, depending on which passages they stressed, etc.
In the 18th century, this culminated in the Higher Criticism, which subjected the Bible to rigorous historical and textual analysis. This in turn spurred the development of Liberal Protestantism, which, indeed, tended to pick and choose from the Bible those texts that appeared to it to harmonize best with a modern theological worldview.
Fundamentalism was a "back to basics" reaction to the Higher Criticism. Understandable. But let me point out that not even the Fundamentalists necessarily agree with one another about everything the Bible says, especially in view of its many apparent contradictions.
Even people who believe in the "inerrancy" of every word in the Bible inevitably place more emphasis on some words than on others,
And, frankly, it is not right to call other people's views "idiotic." As Jesus said (inerrantly, of course): ..Whosoever shall say, Thou Fool, shall be in danger of hell fire.
Matthew 5:22.
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