Homosexuality and Christianity

Southern baptists on the whole, are insane.

A lot of them are as close as you can get to fundamentalist christianity without going completely over the line.

Courtesy Link to the rescue. That Other Wiki has info on this topic. Affirmers are also notworthy.

edited 6th Jun '11 2:40:37 PM by secretist

Christianity is one of those heavily interpretational religions.

It's not a large stretch to be Christian and also support homosexual equality, methinks.

It's really not

Long and short of it? The passages that are generally used to condemn homosexuality are not clear when the Hebrew and Greek is considered. Some people take whatever translation they're reading as the "divine word", but often, other translations may have different interpretations of words that changed the meaning of verses entirely.

Context is important as well, not every verse was suppose to stand on its own.

Not every?

There are verse that are?

Was going to mention the commandments, but then remembered the whole "kill vs murder" debate as well some other issues...

The verses that go on forever regarding who beget who are clear enough, I suppose.

edited 6th Jun '11 3:54:41 PM by Justice4243

Holy fucking Odin!

That article about queer theology was awesome! It actually got the notion of Christian love to ''make sense''!

I actually jaw-dropped. It make a downright uncomfortable amount of sense.

I'll probably follow up on that reading. Like, really.

edited 6th Jun '11 6:21:25 PM by SavageHeathen

@Savage: Are you talking about the one that claims Xianity is a Queer Religion? Could you summarize what you got out of it?

More than the queer aspect of it, the actual notion of radical love as a tenet. Essentially, with its examples, puts the idea of actual unconditional love some perspective.

The whole reaching across barriers thing. From an outside perspective, the whole atonement-death-resurrection thing looks utterly pointless: Old Man Upstairs could simply declare sins forgiven and spare himself all the gruesome ordeal... And the obey me or be destroyed, for that matter.

The idea of assuming a loving God that actually loves you and that's not going to punish people for trying to express their feelings and find happiness and pleasure is quite refreshing, actually.

I don't know, the article simply painted an interpretation of Christianity with a God that actually cared.

edited 6th Jun '11 7:01:40 PM by SavageHeathen

I don't think that there is anything wrong with the idea that gay sex is immoral, it's just not very contemporary.

There are still a bunch of sexual paraphilias that are still listed as something wrong with the person, and they are illnesses that need to be cured, basically because most people are freaked out by them, and somehow "it causes distress or serious problems for the paraphiliac or persons associated with him or her." is part of their definition. And of course they cause problems, because they are considered freaky.

So, basically what sexual deviation is an illness, and what is a perfectly healthy activity, is decided by popular vote.

People believe that sex with your own gender is normal, so it is called normal. But You Screw One Goat, and you are a sick person, because eww.

I don't think that this basis is actually wrong either. There is nothing evil or dishonest about how past generations considered homosexuality an illness, after all, it did cause distress for the overwhelming majority of society. But there is nothing wrong with a hypothetical future where sex with animals, corpses, children, or trees is considered a wholesome activity, if it stops causing distress to society.

edited 7th Jun '11 1:58:27 AM by EternalSeptember

Past generations didn't exactly step back very far. Homosexuality was at the very least tacticlly approved or ignored for a great deal of time up until (about) the end of the 19th century.

I remember walking through the streets of Pompeii and seeing penises carved into the sidewalk pointing towards the nearest pleasure house.

All of Western Civilization stands upon the shoulders of men who had casual sex with other men. Architecture, language, art, everything. If it weren't for Emperor Constantine converting to Christianity, that religion would have stagnated as a creepy branch of Judaism. In fact it was he who called for the construction of St. Peter's Basilica, the eventual seat of the Vatican.

Not hatin' on the Church here, but I'm saying that culture has been accepting of gays for the longest time.

edited 7th Jun '11 2:38:45 AM by victorinox243

On the other hand, romans really, really hated lesbianism.

Allowing male homosexuality wasn't so much a piece of enlightenment, but more like a part of there culture's MANLINESS ideal, that the MAN has a right to penetrate anything that has a hole in it.

And it's not like Constantine personally started to ban homosexuality based on the scriptures, (or, for that matter, ban the brothels themselves, or any of the million other things common through history that were forbidden by the scriiptures.) The change came centuries later, from a change in the society itself, not from an individual emperor's decree.

In fact, so few people could read, or get a copy of the Scriptures, that the whole change was based more on the "eww factor", rather than rabid fundie armies quoting Leviticus 20:13.

The same thing happened in many other societies, for example Japan is one of the least religious countries of the first world, and it still has at least as much mainstream homophobia appearing here and there, than the west, simply on the preconception that "it is unnatural".

edited 7th Jun '11 4:24:23 AM by EternalSeptember

Not strictly, it was still considered "unmanly" to be the "Bottom" (god I hate that term, is there another one?) As evidenced in Suetonius where he says that one of the criticisms of Julius Ceaser was him being in a relationship with the king of an eastern state.

But the "unnatural" arguement is more easily dispelled by pointing to examples of homosexuality in nature. Its much harder to dispute divinity than it is to dispute fact.

Uke?

^ Weeaboo or gay, the choice is yours!

edited 7th Jun '11 5:25:05 AM by BobbyG

The nature argument has been used for a long time, yet people still invoke it, simply because when they use that term, they don't really mean "something that wouldn't happen in nature", but as "something that's just not right". Think of how an ugly cloth's coloring may be sometimes described as unnatural, even if those colors in fact appear somewhere in the nature, or how a car design is described as "more natural" than uglier shapes, even though neither of them happen in the nature.

And "divinity" can be argued just as easily, people successfully argued divine laws regarding circumcision, sex outside of marriage, eating "unclean" meat, or celebrating sabbath.

They simply chose to accept the ones about homosexuality for a longer time, and now as it's starting to fade out, they still universally continue to accept other ones.

The "natural" argument, at least in its more sophisticated forms, tends to not to assume that wilderness is good, but rather natural law. That is to say, it's a teleological argument which asserts that the purpose of sex is procreation, and any repurposing is in defiance of God's will.

@Savage: It's funny, because that's the understanding of Xianity I've assumed for most of my life. I dont even know who taught it to me. So it's... weird to see Xians who dont share it. Now that I'm better informed, I know that this attitude is more prevalent in Pantheism than current forms of Xianity, which is sad.

I read in a book somewhere, I forget where, the love you feel for other people is actually God's love passing through you. But now I'm derailing.

If you think homosexuality is unnatural...

Two words: gay penguins.

That always seems more than a little creepy. "Any good emotion you feel is from God alone, its not your's, He gave it to you". If he gets to claim love then does he also get love sickness or obbsession? It seems only fair to me.

Modern Christianity is better about homosexuality because (for the most part) its been pretty much forced to accept it, whilst religion and culture tend to go hand in hand for a while it seems as if things are starting to go more towards "science and culture" than "religion and culture".

^^ As far as the argument from natural law is concerned, penguins are every bit as capable of "doing it wrong" as human beings.

^ Christianity generally assumes some form of creationism (not always Young Earth Creationism), so there's very little in the Christian universe that doesn't come from God.

And thus we come to the problem of evil. Again.

Evil being the absence of Godliness. Which, if you take the teleological argument, essentially makes homosexuality, as a misuse of sex, evil.

That's the argument. I don't agree, but there you go. It's not as simple as "this is natural, it happens in nature."

Surely if something happens in nature that makes it "natural"? Our sins do not affect animals afterall, unless they were in the garden to start with and were then thrown out for having sex with an animal of the same gender.

Urgh, it just seems like an odd arguement. I mean why exactly does this omniscient thing create everything bar evil, and then lays the blame for that on something he created (free will) in the first place. He's omniscient for pities sake, you'd think he would have seen that coming and simply moved the tree out of Eden.