Jews also regard the Torah as the word of God, as the absolute truth. But here’s the thing; there are some parts of the Torah which make no sense, and even the most pious Jews have somehow come to terms with that, and have found ways to avoide those passages.

For example, in the book of Deuteronomy, there is a passage that says that if you marry a woman, and she turns out not to be a virgin, you’re to kill her on her father’s doorstep. To the best of my knowledge, Jews don’t do this, nor do I recall that they ever did. It is in the Torah, but Jews have found a way to avoid having to carry this commandment out. Why? Because killing your wife on her father’s doorstep, even if she is not a virgin, would violate commandments which are far more important than this one, and would violate notions of common sense.

I am not a scholar of Islam, el Shinqiti, and you seem to be one, but I can bet you that there are passages in the Quran which good and pious Muslims have found a way to bypass, because they make little sense, or would do more harm than good.

I think that the Prophet Muhammad once said that if God wanted us all to be the same, He would have created us that way. But He made us different, and therefore wants us to learn to deal with one another, even if we don’t agree with someone else’s beliefs.

I believe that above all, God wants us to make sense of our lives. He did not put us on this good earth to kill one another. He put us here to live; not to kill, and not to die before our time. We can hold on tightly to our beliefs, but at a certain point, we have to come to believe in what makes sense. Some of us can choose to believe that homosexuality is wrong, but what we do about it has to be considered carefully, lest we end up doing something that undermines the legitimacy of our beliefs altogether.