Have you read any of the other great scriptures or did you just take your pastor's word that they are "false teachings"? Could you, in fact, read them with the openness with which you profess to read the Bible? I seriously doubt it. In my experience, fundamentalism teaches one not to consider other beliefs under penalty of sin...a convenient provision when it comes to keeping the flock from straying!
If you were a believer, not a skeptic, there would be no question which message was truly valid...
Well, you are essentially saying that if I believed it then I would believe it. Obviously true!!!
I do wholeheartedly support your right to believe as you do and I do not question your sincerity. I do have a problem when thoughtful people here are branded as evil interlopers and liberals just because they don't agree as you do about these deeply personal matters.
Personally, my own conception of God leans toward that imagined by Jefferson when he said, "Question with boldness even the existence of a god; because if there be one he must approve of the homage of reason more than that of blindfolded fear." -Thomas Jefferson, letter to Peter Carr, August 10, 1787.
Apparently you took my comment about accountants to mean that I am wealthy. Not so (regrettably), however that is not to say I do not find it challenging to fill out my tax return!
It seems my little joke about your being an engineer or accountant has been taken very literally by you, and is leading off in a direction of no usefulness whatsoever.
Again, you have rolled out terms such as "fundamentalism", "branded", etc. and employed the passive tense evasively, as if politely to reveal your suspicions about my posts and beliefs, which are anything but what you suspect -- and again, imagining that while you are so grand as to have read other scriptures with an open mind, I could not have done so. Possibly you believe I could not have done so and also have made an informed decision to choose Christ (an end product of the process you attributed to Jefferson), because apparently you have not done so after your erudite readings.
But it is true -- I have read many other scriptures with an open mind as a seeker, I am an Ivy graduate-degreed reader of same, and yet I eventually chose Christ -- most assuredly not due to the exhortations of any pastor, but due to the words of Christ and the impact of realizing their scope and majesty.
In fact, most of the pastors I have ever encountered were intellectual disappointments; and many were spiritual disappointments as well. You have only to look at the churches to see that this is so. But that has nothing to do with the messages taught by Christ and reinforced by the Holy Spirit. Part of leaving behind the "thinking as a child" is to understand the human limitations of the church, and taking up the cross of individual responsibility.
I wish you well, but this discussion is now over.