Hello, and thanks for your post.
So the Christian message is Love, direct from the lips of Jesus..... yes?
How do you feel about same-sex marriages, or ordaining women?
Having read carefully through the bible more than one time, and then later even searching out all of the passages about these, there isn't any instruction about them, that is,
if you read fully past the passages some try to isolate -- full reading instead of partial. Partial reading would mistakenly for example mistake the instruction to slaves to remain slaves (in more than one epistle) as
permanent, because the person read partially, instead of fully. One crucial central chapter of Paul's to unlock what's happening in the instructions (which get reversed) about slaves, and also about women in the church, is
1 Cor chapter 8 (and for good measure, also Romans chapter 14), which for someone that really believes and listens, they can get that
this wasn't a principle that was temporary at all -- to sacrifice some of
your own freedom for the sake of the
"weak", that those who are "weak" not be destroyed. Since women had just had a revolution of a kind where they now had new freedom in Christ and were worshiping together with the men for the first time (not the old way in the Jewish temple), the message is don't try to continue to press for social change inside of the church, disrupting services, because you will destroy some of the weak men who cannot yet adjust to this new overwhelming change. This only makes sense though if you really believe in God for real -- so that all the chapters are not just....entertainment.
If you really get it that you yourself, here and now, are under the requirement that you yourself have to give up freedoms that are perfectly ok when someone "weak" around you will be destroyed by your perfectly ok exercise of that freedom -- that you have to sacrifice as needed. Personal sacrifice. If you get that, from faith -- that the words are true -- then you see how women at that time needed to sacrifice. You get it how slaves were to remain slaves at first (in the epistles) and then later were to seek their freedom, and why the radical epistle
Philemon was inevitable.
That's very straightforward really, and it means that today in some churches woman may still have to sacrifice their perfectly ok freedom to participate in services even though already in the first century, already, there was a prominent female deacon, and no doubt more than one over the centuries since. It's about where you are at, and who is "weak" around you, and in what way.
Ok, to avoid a post that is 2,000 words long, let me leave that at that, and for the other issue, of course, just the very basic observation that of course an inborn temperament isn't a sin, but sins are wrong actions and/or lusts in the heart. Again, temperament isn't sin. Sin is wrongful action. So, when we learn that intercourse sodomy (lev 18:22) is wrongful, that doesn't mean that temperaments are themselves sin. Of course, a person can have any number of intimate close relationships with people of both genders without sinning, obviously, and then we end up in a situation where people are demanding an end to wrongful prejudices, and it can get pretty political, etc. I'm not going to convince someone that is prideful or lacks faith, but perhaps some that do have faith can read with a more listening attitude in scripture, instead of only trying to merely use scripture like planks of wood to build their own building they prefer to build. I accept that only some will hear scriptures that put requirements on themselves, instead of on other people. We can only pray for others, we cannot force them to see anything.