Translations don't change the meaning of a word.
Of course they do. Meanings change in every translation, because writing isn't simply a matter of stringing together words with precise, discreet meanings.
Any human writing neccessarily includes things like idiom and connotation - percieved meanings that are familiar to native speakers because of their shared experience with the language. You've never heard the phrase "lost in translation"? What did you think that meant?
Douglas Hofstadter famously explores this very real phenomenon in his book "Le Ton beau de Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language", the title of which is a reference to the French poet Clement Marot, the translation of whose poetry the book is largely about. The title translates roughly as "the beautiful tones of Marot", but this literal translation only encapsulates a small fraction of how the title would be percieved by a native speaker of French. You see, "le ton beau" isn't exactly grammatically accurate; in French it would be more proper to say "le beau ton." But rendered as "le ton beau", it sounds like "le tombeau de Marot" - "the tomb of Marot", and, indeed, the cover of the book has a picture of a tombstone. "Le tombeau" also means "a work of art done in homage to a deceased person", referencing the fact that Hofstadter intends the book in homage both to Marot but also to his wife, a translator of French poetry, who died before it was written.
That's just one example of what can be lost in translation; of how concepts that are easily encapsulated in the words of one langauge can only be grossly approximated in the words of another. I mean it took a pretty long paragraph for me to explain a reference in English that any native speaker of French would have percieved immediately. How can you assert that translation is simply a matter of word substitution?
Father doesn't mean mother and father isn't synoymous with parent.
Well, Paul uses the greek word "arsenkoites" in Corinthinans. It's a word of his own invention, as near as we can tell. Literally translated into English, we might choose to render it as "couch-men." Now, open your Bible to Corinthians and tell me where we find that word "couch-man."
Nowhere, right? Because there are shades of meaning to plain words. Scholars of greek see the root "koitai" used in other contexts, some completly normal - referring to couches or beds - and in other context, as synonyms for sex or prostitution. If I used the term "bedwoman" or "couch-girl", you might understand that I'm saying "prostitute" in a really oblique way. So too does Paul seem to be referring to men whose profession is sex with men, which was a common duty of temple acolytes for certain deities in Greece at the time. Temple prostitution was a very common practice, for both men and women, and it was one that Paul was adamant should not be a part of the early Church.
King James writers, however, chose to render that word as "homosexual", apparently percieving Paul to be condemning a practice that was essentially unknown in the ancient world.
In Hebrew, though? The thing is - the Hebrew word for "father" was often used in a gender-neutral sense*, much as some people use "man" in a gender-neutral sense to try to describe both male and female humans. So, "father"
could mean "parent" -
in Hebrew. Do you see how that could pose an issue in translation? That simply transliterating from "father" in Hebrew to "father" in English means sacrificing a potential alternate meaning of the word as it was used in Hebrew?
Its a matter of some impressionable young person investigating the scriptures and is going to be confused on what the Word says or means.
How does what you're talking about change the meaning? How is the core experience of Christianity altered if they aren't raised to believe that God has a big cosmic penis? And if he
doesn't have Godly male genitals, what's the justification for asserting maleness when maleness may not have been implied by the original text?
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