Christian Dietary Essentials

To be honest, I'd never really thought much of doctrinal differences in Christian denominations before, assuming they were all small details that in the end wouldn't matter. Many are  just that, but when I was forced to draw the line between essential and nonessential I didn't really know where to start. After all, I had never talked through doctrine with someone who disagreed with me; that just seems like a weird discussion. Thinking it through a little more through the Bible Class debates we've had, I did at least have some concept of my options in choosing the essentials of Christianity. There is only one truly honest and mostly non-biased account to consider in analyzing our faith: the Bible. First assuming the Bible is honest and authoritative (and that's assuming a lot for some people, yikes,) I already had one essential down. With the Bible's self-declaring authority lost, I believe the whole faith loses its credibility, so I hold first and foremost that Scripture is true, and (though there are many interpretations of passages within) it provides clear and relevant guidance in most cases that count as essential doctrine. (ie. The Trinity, Jesus' Ressurection, An Afterlife) In sorting this all out, I really like the method stated in the paper we looked through in class, proposing that recurring and clearly stated passages are essential truths, while interpretations of vague and singly stated passages are the nitty-gritty nonessentials. That might have an exception here and there (just saying; somebody's always  going to make a case against a universal statement,) but I think it's just a comforting bit of logic to help sort out the mess that is our faith. It does raise some crazy questions, however (essentially foreign to me until now:) "Is Hell really eternal?" "Is it okay to believe that Hell is not eternal?" and most infamously recently, "Exactly how and to what extent is homosexuality a sin?" All of these questions are cringeworthy to me, and to be frank I'd rather not debate them at all, but it's nonetheless mind-opening to get the chance to. As for how I'd deal with something I'd never heard before or disagree with, I'd probably use that method. Is the Bible clearly for or against this issue? If not, then it's really likely nonessential. To verify that, what passage is this view based on? Does that shed any light on the issue? etc. I really think this is the simplest (and in many cases the simplest method is the best) and most applicable method of interpreting unfamiliar ideas, because, as I would say any true Christian necessarily believes, the Bible is the authoritative word of God, and thus it stands as a foundation on which to build faith in Christ.