Kidding! Well . . . mostly. I had meant to explain this, because I think there's a fundamental disconnect missing, and as someone raised in a background very similar to yours, I, perhaps arrogantly, think I might be able to clear it up.

But first - don't worry about that part, it doesn't matter all that much.

Second - thank you.

Last: his sermons focused on two things more than anything: the all-importance, over and above everything, of love. And the way one must meditate and pray without ceasing on the Bible, especially Jesus' parables, in order to allow them to touch your spirit - because they must be taken as literature, poetry, and that requires thought. (He was a professor of Russian literature for many years, and it never quite left him.)

So, on the disconnect! I think the issue many people have with your position (I'm going to leave out the tone issues now, they're irrelevant to a discussion of rhetoric) can be broken down into the three categories of response. This is more or less applicable to every issue discussed (maybe except Israel).

The first, I think you are probably very accustomed to. It goes something like this:

Amen, brother! Love the sinner, hate the sin. It's sad, but if they'd only come back to God we'd welcome them. I pray for their souls every day.

You're on the same page, you may disagree about particulars, but more or less you agree.

The second, goes more like this:

Well, your position may have some internal logic if you are [insert sect here], but your Holy Book/Sacred Scriptures mean nothing to me, I don't believe in your Messiah/Deity, and so I wish you'd stop talking about the Bible/Apostles and use a form of reason that's applicable to both of us for your arguments.

This person disagrees entirely with something you believe to be not only true, but the foundation of reality, given to us by the Creator of aforesaid reality Himself. That's obviously very, very difficult to wrap your head around. You're more or less trying to argue about the nature of something neither of you has seen - one has touched, and the other heard. You cannot have rational discourse unless you both have the same frame of reference. You mentioned, at one point, that all of Western civilization* American culture has been heavily influenced by Christian thought. You are absolutely correct about this! Very, very correct. And I'm glad you know this, since many atheists often argue traditionally conservative Christian positions with no good reason whatsoever, save their cultural bias, which they are maddeningly blind to - but I digress. The point is, just because American culture is steeped in conservative Protestant values, does NOT mean that everyone agrees with conservative Christianity. They're still missing the agreement with you, that everything in the Bible is true. This, you have to understand, is a position not held by the majority of Christians, let alone the majority of Americans or Europeans.

So you literally cannot make an argument they'll agree with without converting them to your specific worldview, which is unlikely. You really need to either go a different route, arguing by some other principle, or let the matter drop. I recall you tried this with the "gay gene" studies, but I think you'd read them, or had them read to you, with a predisposition to see the article as a negative, and there was no textual support for that, so it failed. But that was the closest I saw you come to a frame of reference both people can understand. Similar efforts usually go "but humans are made for reproduction, and gay couples can't reproduce," which implies that love = reproduction, i.e. sterile, elderly, etc. people cannot love - but you understand, it relies on something other than quotes from Scripture. I really hope this is making sense.

The third position is, essentially, this:

Yes, I'm familiar with that passage/book/chapter/verse, but I disagree with your interpretation of it.

This is the one that seemed to confuse you the most. I understand why. Your entire life, if I guess correctly, you have been taught that the Bible says this specific thing, and the passages' contexts support it, and to you it is so obvious that you don't understand how someone can read the Bible, and not see the same thing in it that you see, and that your pastor sees, and that your family sees, and that your professors and classmates see. What you have to understand is that everyone you're talking to does not see it that way. Everyone experiences things they read differently, and that's no less true of the Bible than any other written word. These stories are thousands of years old, from a world that bears almost no resemblance to the one in which we live. That's their context. Then they were collected into one volume or another by different people. Argued over. After Christ, and then after the Apostles, people argued over who to include, which of their letters mattered enough, etc.

If you believe those arguing over who to include were divinely inspired in their final choice, that's okay. But don't be naive about your decision to do so - always bear in mind, and you can tell by reading Paul - that even the disciples, even the Apostles, disagreed with one another constantly from time to time. Anyway, the Council of Nicea was put together to make all the sects stop their interminable disagreeing over the nature of scripture. Then other councils after that decided what mattered enough to keep and what didn't. More and more, until King James, which for some reason is the version Baptists stuck with. But everyone who's read that book since it was written has had a different interpretation, and many, many of them are absolutely certain that theirs is the correct one.

To either of the people with the second or third responses, you saying "But this is correct because the Bible, read correctly, says it!" about gay marriage, abortion, etc., sounds exactly the same as someone saying "But this is correct because the Bible, read correctly, says it!" about interracial marriage, or whatever else. To you, there's a world of difference. But in order to communicate with others who disagree, you have to think very carefully about their perspective, and stop thinking in your own worldview. Otherwise, no one in the world outside of your college and church are going to ever make any sense to you.

Ugh. Obviously this got away from me. But it was bothering me, because you're obviously quite intelligent, and you seemed interminably frustrated - as did your opponents - by an inability to communicate. It's differences in worldview. That's pretty much all it is. You and an atheist from Scandinavia or an Anglican**-turned-CLDS from England aren't even going to be able to disagree properly unless you start taking into account the vastly different interpretations of the Bible, or the world including the Bible.



*You said Western Civ - I disagree, as the entirety of the European sphere of influence cannot be so generally categorized. But since American culture is so influential, and what you're coming from as are many, if not most, of the 'Board, I think the substitution works.
**I'm assuming Anglican, I may be wrong