So, OK, let me address one thing:
"taking God out of the classroom"
It is a public school, not a church. You do not teach about God there. You do not do church-type stuff there. You do not do Mosque-type stuff there. You do not do Shinto-type stuff there. You teach reading, writing, mathematics, problem-solving, and useful skills. No, the public education system does not fit those requirements I just listed. The public education system is terrible, regardless of how religion is or isn't incorporated into it. School is funded by everyone's taxes, and should therefore cater to no specific belief system. Which, to be clear, means that public schools should not teach Social Justice dogma, either.
Yes, there are Atheist jerks and the left has gone wild. If your reaction is "we need more prayer in schools", you're reacting just as ridiculously. Tirany is Tirany, whether it come from Left or Right, Bible Koran or Jezibel.
And, you know? #NotAllX. Selection bias is a thing. You notice the jerks because they loudly identify themselves.
But, about Leviticus...
... It's not where the antigay stuff is. I mean, yeah, there's laws about man-on-man sex being punishable by death. And rape being punishable by shotgun marriages and/or death. And lots and lots of things being punishable by death, stoning, whipping, and exile. And rules about not eating shellfish or pork.
But most Christians don't keep a third part of the laws in Leviticus. This is not hypocritical, if they are among the sects who believe that Leviticus was rendered obsolete in the New Testament, or that it requires a Levite priesthood to administer it.
No, it's Paul who declares homosexuality to be bad. And that women should keep silent in church, and that the man is the head of the household, and that he knows jack about Pharassaic writing on the law. (Bold claim, considering how well documented Pharassaic writings were while Paul was writing. But to be fair, his audience didn't have access to said writings, and it very much seems like he expected Jesus to return during his lifetime.)
If we take Paul as canon--and most Christians do--that also handles a lot of the purity laws. For some reason, people take Peter's dream in Acts literally, even though Peter himself explicitly does not. But that's OK; it leads to the decision not to impose all of the strict physical laws on gentiles, which is why the "Do you eat pork or shellfish?" gotcha only works on people who believe this does not release them from Levitic law.
(Paul doesn't have much to say about homosexuality, IIRC, other than that the churches should not be accepting of it. He's more detailed about gender roles. Why God would impose strict gender roles, I have no idea.)
Paul's letters being Scripture is kinda weird, isn't it? Presumably it's because he more or less single-handedly packaged Christianity in a way the gentiles could stomach, and leaving him out would take away the Hellenistic flavor that converted the Greeks. If you take out Paul, you still have to come to grips with the Genocide of the Amalekites and such, but no one said we were taking out Paul because he cared enough about hairstyles to put it in something that was canonized 300 years later. The Slaughter of the Amalekites is much worse than gender-coding clothing! It was a direct order from God to randomly kill an entire ethnicity! And while I like the "Agag had just set up his entire kingdom in a mass suicide/sacrifice to Moloch via slow-acting poison/plague, and so nuking them from orbit was the best response but God decided to use the opportunity to test Paul instead" idea, it doesn't have a scriptural basis. ("You're ancestor 10 generations ago thought my ancestor was a good target when they were in the desert, so I'm killing your children" is the closest the Bible has to a justification. And there's no sneaky way to kick 1Samuel out of canon. It is very clearly canonical based on all the references to it and Kings, and 1 and 2 Samuel were originally part of Kings.)
(Daigonite, that was the best explanation I've seen yet on this subject! Would that the topic hadn't turned into a political football game, nationally speaking.)
To the original subject!
College might be changing your friend. I'm not so easily sold on the "they were probably always like that and kept it hidden" thing that keeps coming up. Sure, it's possible. But, to bring it back to Paul, it's not as though he was secretly Christian while he was supporting their persecution, then escaped to Damascus where he could get a foot into the community and be himself.
People can change. Sometimes this is good, sometimes this is bad, most of the time it simply is. If you want to do something about it, that's up to you. Is it because of college? Probably. Colleges are Social Justice Cathedrals, and that's certainly a possible explanation. But it could just be seeing a different side of the world and the people in it. People's belief systems have been known to do a religious/political 180 after exposure to unfamiliar parts of reality. Not, I might add, solely in the leftward direction.
But these sorts of changes are usually pretty dramatic. People who become Christians in their 20s, for instance, are usually way more zealous and take it way more seriously than most people who were raised on it, as a general trend. Likewise, most of the jerk Atheists you've run into are probably people who were raised Christian and went Atheist in high school or college.
(... but if we're going to talk theology can we address WTF Paul made a big deal about hairstyles and dress code? That's weird. The sexist hierarchy stuff bugs me, but I can sorta see why he'd put it in there. But hair and pants?)
看過來!
"If you want utopia but reality gives you Lovecraft, you don't give up, you carve your utopia out of the corpses of dead gods."
MaxAngor wrote:
George... Don't do that.