Howdy!

The bible is not a book, it's a tome. It is made up of several books by several authors written over a huge length of time. Possibly thousands of years.

Your manual doesn't have any issues because it's a manual. The bible is not. It's not a text book either. The bible has two big parts, the old testament and the most recent testament. Both are organized into sections having nothing to do with timeline. This is hard for most people to grasp. Genesis is the first boom of the bible, but is younger than Job, even though the creation story is in Genesis. There are sections of history, poetry, prophesy, philosophy, law, general corespondences, even a section describing foreplay in extreme detail.

Time is another factor. Some of the bible may be 6,000 years old. Ever read Shakespeare? Did the English there frustrate you at times? What about Chaucer? Beowulf? My favorite line is thou saucy knave. Taken literally in modern context that means a funny guy covered in marinara. Or, wait, does it? Bible is often the same. Now let's think about beowulf, you have added a translation to the mix. Uh oh, things just got more complicated, didn't they. Now let's remember that the bible was written in a variety of languages over hundreds of years. Hebrew, Greek, Aramaic, the list goes on. Now, let's translate those to Latin for the pope. In the vernacular you say? Good, let's not bother going back to the original text, let's just re-translate the Latin. Not all modern translations, but many do this. Words have multiple meanings in other languages just like in English, the multi-meanings do not keep when you switch language. So, which meaning do you keep? The inherent problems there are obvious.

The bible has some parts where it urges you to study the bible. That is often taken to mean memorize as much as you can, so that you can throw it in people's faces later. They can tell you what every tree in the forrest is like, but can't tell you anything about the forrest.

Other cultural problems. Ancient cultures, even modern day middle eastern cultures, tend to defy our understanding as westerners. Make it an ancient middle eastern culture and we are totally lost. I have met a number of people who want to take the bible word for word, with no room for metaphor because they can't wrap their head around the idea that when the authors wrote those books they didn't write them like a modern text book, or that saying literally exactly what you mean is a rather modern and western concept. Had arguments about it actually. Don't forget, we as westerners have had Christianity through a Roman filter. If we make a picture of God, he looks like Zeus. Angels get wings (this is not actually a biblical concept). See my point? Ben Franklin was shunned for the lightning rod, as it would thwart God's will (Zeus).

But even my example is skewed because it was really Rome in control at the time, and Rome had Jupiter in place of Zeus. And just like that, with one little error, I completely mislead you. My point in doing so is to show you how easily we can screw things up. I just lied to you, knowingly, and I bet you fell for it. Just a little maybe, but even if you didn't, someone else did.

Now let's look at the size of the thing. That's no moon. If you read three chapters a day, you can get through the bible in a year. That's long. It becomes hard to keep track of it all, especially when you skip large portions of it. I would hazard to say, very few modern Christians have actually read the bible in its entirety. Furthermore, the new testament is all about love and kindness and faith and hope. Warm fuzzys all. So, where does the WBC get so much hate? If there is a force involved, it's not the God I worship. It's hard to be hateful and angry in the name of a religion that is focussed on love.

So, where does the WBC get all their rhetoric? Well, the old testament has a series of laws written, homosexuality pretty clearly violates some of them. So does eating shellfish. Or wearing clothes of mixed fabric. But you don't see the WBC chanting "pure cotton won't burn in hell," or "lobster crab and shrimp is served in hell." You also don't see them quoting much (if any) new testament scripture. They have feelings and ideas and have found scripture to back it up. That is a fine way to get a different interpretation than others.

Let's also keep in mind that Christians are humans. We aren't perfect. We, in fact, suck. We get more wrong than we get right. We go through life based on culture, gut feelings, instinct, societal cues, and all of that affects how we deal with religion.

So, how can we Christians come up with hundreds of ways of interpreting the same documents? Hope that helps.

How can a perfect God create a book that is vague? God did not write the bible. Let me say that again,God did not write the bible. People wrote the bible. With divine help? Fine. Did God intervene and shape it to what it is today? Sure, why not. But the human filter is still present. A perfect painting behind wavy and bubbled glass isn't going to look perfect anymore. A perfect poem read by a stutterer isn't going to be perfect. A perfect symphony played on untuned instruments isn't going to be perfect. Man is a great imperfect filter. Here's another example, you are the best programmer in the world. You write the perfect self aware program. You write that program to be able to re-write parts of itself, as it is self aware and deserves to evolve. The first rewrite it makes hampers its ability to communicate with you. It's second blots out large portions of its memory of what it is supposed to be. It's third, it writes your existence out off as an impossibility. The only thing that exists is itself and the other computers on the network with it. It's fourth rewrite gives it the ability to reprogram other computers. It rewrites them the same way it was rewritten. Now you have a network of computers that talk to one another, but won't acknowledge you. You go to reprogram your computer back to where it is supposed to be, it's will be damned. Remember that first rewrite? You can't program it at this point. Nor the others. You, the perfect programmer have allowed your otherwise perfect creation to go straight to hell, by virtue of giving it its greatest gift. Man is the same way.

Holy crap this got long, sorry if it's a bit disjointed, I took several breaks while typing to play with my kids. I will end now with this idea, the phrase fundamentalist Christian has always struck me as a misnomer. The fundamentals of Christianity are lined out as faith, hope, and love, with the greatest of these as love. "Fundamentalist Christians" tend to show the least of this IMO. But I have a different interpretation of the bible based on the above.

TL;DR; nothing that hasn't been said before and better by someone else.