Not all Christians. See "William Wilberforce," for example.
Not all, but certainly most. The victory of abolitionism in Christianity is an instance of longstanding, traditional, well-established readings of Scripture being disregarded in pursuit of progress toward an ideal of perfect love.
If there are Wilberforces today on the issue of same-sex relations, they are not the ones arguing to maintain the status quo. Not that there's anything inherently wrong with maintaining statuses quo, but it's certainly not what Wilberforce did in his situation.
I don't think it's divorced from any culture but our own; I think it applies to every culture. I believe God sets absolutes in place that take precedence over the cultural assumptions we make.
But you seem to be acting like we don't even need to attempt to be aware of cultural assumptions we may be making. You're looking at a first-century text from an entirely different culture than ours and assuming we can instantly apply those words to the modern issue of sexual orientation, a concept that did not exist in the public consciousness until at least the mid-1800s.
We cannot read the Bible without bias and subjectivity. We can either attempt to understand the lens we're looking through, and how it differs from the lens the original audience had, or we can pretend we aren't looking through a lens.
But again, he has explicitly said that he did not come to do that. "Fulfill" clearly does not mean "abolish" because he used them both in the same sentence, portraying them as different things.
Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets. I have not come to abolish these things but to fulfill them. I tell you the truth, until heaven and earth pass away not the smallest letter or stroke of a letter will pass from the law until everything takes place. So anyone who breaks one of the least of these commands and teaches others to do so will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever obeys them and teaches others to do so will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. For I tell you, unless your righteousness goes beyond that of the experts in the law and the Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.
This is an interesting one. Not a single stroke of the law will pass away until everything takes place, and anyone who breaks the least command and teaches others to do so will be the least in the kingdom of heaven (though, interestingly, it sounds like they're still in the kingdom of heaven)... and then Paul goes and completely throws out circumcision, feasts, dietary laws, ceremonial laws, and says
For freedom Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not be subject again to the yoke of slavery. Listen! I, Paul, tell you that if you let yourselves be circumcised, Christ will be of no benefit to you at all! And I testify again to every man who lets himself be circumcised that he is obligated to obey the whole law. [...] For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision carries any weight – the only thing that matters is faith working through love.
It looks a lot like Paul is teaching people to break the least of the commandments. Circumcision was not a suggestion: "The Lord spoke to Moses: “Tell the Israelites, ‘When a woman produces offspring and bears a male child, [...o]n the eighth day the flesh of his foreskin
must be circumcised.'"" (Leviticus 12:1-3)
So if Jesus was literally saying that every one of the 613 laws is binding until the end of time, then Paul was a false prophet -- and then suddenly we don't have any New Testament prooftexts against homosexuality, just Leviticus.
The passage I keep coming back to in figuring this out is Romans 13. "Owe no one anything, except to love one another, for the one who loves his neighbor has fulfilled the law. For the commandments,
“Do not commit adultery, do not murder, do not steal, do not covet,” (and if there is any other commandment) are summed up in this,
“Love your neighbor as yourself.” Love does no wrong to a neighbor. Therefore love is the fulfillment of the law."
It's a stretch to say that love for God is always expressed best through love for neighbor, at least with how you're using "love." It rightfully includes loving one's neighbor - that said, "love" means doing a lot of different things, including looking at the bigger picture. The "what if I'm wrong" argument conveniently fails to take into account that sin that damages the soul. Consequences of sin are not always measurable on earthly terms.
But not so different that moral principles differ. "If you love me, keep my commands."
Sure, but this goes both ways; the other way around - dismissing people by dismissing Scripture - is dismissing people in a hugely damaging way. Love does not equal indulgence. Sometimes it means restraint.
This is not an argument that homosexuality is wrong; this is an argument that sin is wrong, with the sinfulness of homosexuality taken as a given.
The commandment is most certainly in play in the New Testament. Jesus does teach on the Sabbath, noting what the Pharisees were doing wrong with it (turning it into just a different kind of duty rather than as a time of rest).
The religious authorities of the day certainly did add unnecessary baggage to a lot of the law, but the fact remains that the law said that doing any work whatsoever on the Sabbath, including picking up sticks, was punishable by death. Jesus did work on the Sabbath, and led his disciples to do the same, in picking wheat to eat. Going strictly by the letter of the law, I don't see how the Pharisees' accusation was incorrect -- when the Israelites were getting manna in the desert, they weren't allowed to pick up manna on the Sabbath (which would have been as much or less work than picking grain) -- if they wanted to eat on the Sabbath, they had to plan ahead on Friday.
With the implication that the false teaching has become ubiquitous in its being held to, or allowed to propagate by those living there.
Every single man, woman, child, and animal in the town? Really?
First off, you make this argument as if the "epistle to the Nevadans" were suddenly found two thousand years later, and as if there didn't exist between 21st century and 41st century a massive history of the development of language and convention. Translations change over time and but the meanings don't change with the language we use. You present a sudden contrast between two cultures in your example but the way cultures develop in reality is gradually.
There's a massive history, to be sure, but it's not an unbroken chain. For example, conservative evangelical Christianity generally didn't have a problem with abortion
until the early-to-mid-1980s.
Even so, taking cultural context into account, you would still have to prove that 2012 Paul was not condemning the act of reading books in and of itself (can I assume e-readers or other such future technology have taken over as the main method of conveying textual information?). Maybe he really was telling people not to do any of those things in and of themselves. Which is why you'd go to the other epistles written by 2012 Paul and - lo and behold - they mention and condemn the same activities, though they're not all in the same groupings as in 1 Nevada.
There's one other passage that again mentions "bookies", as part of a list; and then there's another passage that talks about people "abandoning God, following their books filled with sinful things." The first one doesn't clear things up at all, because we still don't know what the word means. In the second one, are books inherently evil? Are books by necessity filled with sinful things, or is 2012!Paul only speaking against the books that do have sinful things in them?
I'm reminded of a change made from the 1984 NIV to the 2011 NIV: 1 Thessalonians 2:14b-15a
1984: ‟You suffered from your own countrymen the same things those churches suffered from the
Jews, who killed the Lord Jesus and the prophets and also drove us out.”
2011: ‟You suffered from your own people the same things those churches suffered from the
Jews who killed the Lord Jesus and the prophets and also drove us out.”
There is an enormous difference between "The Jews who killed Jesus" and "The Jews, who killed Jesus". Paul was not saying all Jews killed Jesus, he was making a reference to the ones who did. Similarly, 2012!Paul could be saying all books are evil, or he could be talking about a subset of evil books, and Romans 1 could either be saying all homoerotic acts are inherently idolatrous and/or promiscuous, or could instead be decrying a specific subset of idolatrous/promiscuous homoerotic acts, with the morality of homoerotic acts in general not being addressed. Can we say for sure which one he was going for?
But I don't see the discussion developing much beyond this point because we think very differently on the nature of the law under the new covenant, and on how the Bible works, for that matter. The fact is, you can make the Bible say whatever you want it to, which is what I'd wager both sides of the argument think the other is doing. Speaking of rape, maybe rape was condemned then because in a culture where women were viewed as property, rape was synonymous with theft? But now that we're in a different situation as a culture, maybe the condemnation of things like rape no longer apply? After all, rape isn't mentioned that much in the Bible, and when it is, the cultural context needs to be brought into account to determine what behavior is actually being condemned.
Actually, yeah, usually when rape is mentioned in the Bible, it's treated more as theft/destruction of property, due to the highly patriarchal culture it was written in. And we should not blindly apply the applicable laws about it to modern-day society -- for example, the law in Deuteronomy 22:28-29 that a man who rapes an unmarried woman must marry her. At that time, once word got out that she was no longer a virgin, no man would be willing to
buy marry her, and she would therefore have no way to provide for herself once her father died. Therefore, if a man was going to take her virginity and her marriagability, he was responsible for providing for her for the rest of her life. You break it, you buy it. In modern western society, when a lack of virginity does not have the same life-destroying stigma it did for women even just a couple centuries ago, and when women are perfectly capable of getting jobs and earning a living on their own anyway, applying that law would be barbaric, infringing on the woman's freedom (where before, in a super-patriarchy, it was the only way she could have had a modicum of freedom).
But just because rape isn't wrong for the reasons it was wrong in Moses' time doesn't mean it's not wrong. I seem to remember something about loving your neighbor as yourself. Having sex with someone without their consent is a pretty massive violation of that law.