LGBTQ+ Rights and Religion

Also, there are three other sections that are used in regard to homosexuality.

First is the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. However, the homosexual sex in that is the threatened rape of two angels who were disguised as beautiful men by the men of Sodom and Gomorrah, which was a common method of humiliation in ancient times, and I'm sure we can all agree that rape is a terrible thing. In addition, Sodom and Gomorrah is referred to twenty subsequent times in the Bible, often with detailed explanations of the sins of Sodom and Gomorrah, and none of those twenty times refer to homosexuality as one of those sins.

Second is 1 Corinthians 6:9, which talks about various people who will not inherit the kingdom of God. Among these, he refers to πόρνοι, εἰδωλολάτραι, μοιχοὶ, μαλακοὶ, and ἀρσενοκοῖται. The last two are sometimes believed to refer to homosexuals (the previous ones talk about the sexually immoral, idolaters, and adulterers). However, that is not an accurate translation. The first of the two (μαλακοὶ) literally means "soft," and is used to refer to cowardly, lazy, or weak-willed people, which happen to be characteristics associated with women, so it's often translated as effeminate. The second of the two (ἀρσενοκοῖται) is a very obscure Greek word. In fact, this use is the first recorded usage of the word. It is often included in lists of sins. Specifically, it's often included in lists of sins of an economic nature. When that is combined with it's etymology (ἀρσεν meaning "male" and κοῖται meaning "bed," often with a sexual connotation), the word probably is referring to some sort of prostitution or exploitation for economic ends.

Third, and final, is 1 Timothy 1:10, which is another list of sinners, and includes πόρνοις, ἀρσενοκοίταις, ἀνδραποδισταῖς, ψεύσταις, and ἐπιόρκοις. Now, the second one (ἀρσενοκοίταις) you should recognize from 1 Corinthians 6:9 as the final thing on the list. As discussed, it is often incorrectly used to refer to homosexuals, but would more accurately refer to prostitutes.

None of those are actually about gay people or even have any relation to gay people.

And, to my knowledge, that is all the Bible verses that refer to gay people or sex or are used to refer to gay people or sex, so, in conclusion, the Bible doesn't say that homosexuality is a sin. It says that homosexuality was a cultural taboo in ancient Israel, and that it is a sin for heterosexual people to have gay sex.

I can see the validity in your logic. Though, as you might expect, I don't agree with it fully.

Why don't you agree with it? We've proven the passages don't mean what you think they do and never have. We all agree that the message of the Bible is one of love and not oppression. Why do you have such a hard time with the idea that God might not actually care about gay people making love to other gay people?

For the same reason you don't accept that the Bible is written precisely as it's meant to be. That it was written under divine instruction, and that if it was supposed to say "cultural taboo" or "for sake of hygiene" it would have?.

I would like to offer a personal thought of mine about faulty translations and such. If the Bible was really only written to give people a stick to club others with, why is it so unclear??

If people tampering with the Bible wanted to make it homophobic why not just say "Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed because it was overrun with faggots"?? Seriously, think about it. The translation clearly shows that it was the attempted rape, as deathpigeon mentions, that caused it's destructions. Seems to me it wouldn't take too much white-out to adjust it to remove the rape part and instead just make homosexuality the offending crime.

In fact why not throw in more than three mentions? Why not have a lesbian be the woman Jesus saved from being stoned?

The point I'm making Shima is that if the Bible were tampered with to oppress people, it's one of the shoddiest attempts at white, male, cisgendered world-domination I've seen in my life!

edited 25th Oct '12 3:10:05 PM by TheStarshipMaxima

But then why include the more questionable parts in the first place?

Because it was translated to say just that. That it was taboo for hygiene reasons. And then the languages shifted and abomination stopped meaning cultural taboo in English and people in the seventies decided that persecuting homosexuals in the translations was more important than keeping true to the original spirit of the text.

Human beings wanted an excuse to persecute gay people. And they corrupted a book of their faith to make it easier. After all, the language about homosexuals mostly only dates back about forty years.

edited 25th Oct '12 3:14:46 PM by shimaspawn

For the same reason you don't accept that the Bible is written precisely as it's meant to be. That it was written under divine instruction, and that if it was supposed to say "cultural taboo"

But that is exactly what it said! Human error just changed it.

The original purpose wasn't oppression though, or at least not intentionally.

edited 25th Oct '12 3:16:17 PM by LMage

And that my dear Kay is my point. I can readily believe that the Bible is a Book of instructions from God and that the uncertainties and questions stem from a flawed humanity trying to understand the ultimate expressions of justice from a flawless God.

I'm not trying to be a douche in saying, "Naw, the Bible can't have been tampered with." I'm saying, I've read books written in less-enlightened times than ours. The old James Bond books drip with casual racism, sexism, and douchery.

And if you go to the original texts of the Bible it says cultural taboo. The more recent editions that are the ones that have problems with homosexuals are the ones that are not true to God's word.

By preaching homosexuality to be a sin you are furthering the perversion.

edited 25th Oct '12 3:18:42 PM by shimaspawn

@Maxima: "Abomination" is just a translation for a Hebrew word for which there isn't a very good English translation for. It has also been translated as "detestable" or "disgusting," and it was used many times to refer to cultural taboos in the Bible. It was not translated as "abomination" because the translators were homophobic, it was translated like that because that was the closest the translators felt they could get to the original meaning of the word, but was not entirely accurate thanks to connotations to the word abomination.

The only parts which were translated faultily because the translators were homophobic, though the faultiness of the translation was probably not intentional, were 1 Corinthians 6:9 and 1 Timothy 1:10.

This wasn't people who were manipulating the Bible to say what they wanted it. This was people who were reading and translating the Bible with some biases which led them to believe it meant/said something other than what it probably meant.

edited 25th Oct '12 3:23:24 PM by deathpigeon

So Shima, L, I want you to consider what you're implying. In order to persecute homosexuals you put in three breif mentions out of a collection of sixty-six Books, when a simple thing like "God destroyed these two cities because they were infested with limp-wristed fairies run amok," would've done the trick.

Can you explain that?

Also I did some Googling on your assertion that abomination means something other than what it means. Much like these assertions that being gay is some genetic or intrinsic trait, it seems your "proof" that earlier versions of the Bible said "cultural taboo" are likewise not quite as set in stone as you seem to believe.

I've checked nearly every version of the Bible as it available now and not one says "cultural taboo". If you can get me a version of the Bible that actually says that, I'll be the first to say "oops".

But the fact that there's a sizeable group of people who seem to desperately want the Bible to say homosexuality is not a sin, and still nobody can actually produce a copy that says that...well.....

Edit:

Hm. Explain more please.

edited 25th Oct '12 3:28:11 PM by TheStarshipMaxima

Maxima, our point is that you are reading a purposely mistranslated version of the Bible to persecute Homosexuals(and others).

It was never a sin, and never will be. It's a wrong version and always will be. It did not ever mean sin, and the current version is quite literally an evil version of the original. It's not correct whatsoever.

Homosexuality, in the specific culture, at best, is considered "not acceptable", but not the same thing as a "sin', which is a crime. Being a little mean to others is not really always acceptable. But it's not an actual crime. That's pretty much what Homosexuality is treated as in the correctly translated version.

It's not any more favorable than eating shellfish. But it sure as hell not a crime. And yes, I mean that exact phrasing.

Well, purposely or not, it's still a mistranslation.

Homophobes mistranslated it to persecute homosexuals. Hence, purposefully.

Many others, non-homophobes, actually reprinted the incorrect text, not knowing it was wrong. Plain and simple. It's just a wrong version.

I have to run to work, but I am interested in learning more about the purposely or unintentionally mistranslations. If nothing else, even I'm aware there are society in which homosexuality and other guy-to-guy attractions were okay (didn't guys kiss on the lips in some of the feudal lands?) and it'd be interesting to see when gay-bashing started.

Catch you guys in a few.

I believe that the interpretation that the story of Sodom and Gomorrah was about homosexuality started in the Middle Ages in Europe. The earliest mistranslatuion of 1 Corinthians and 1 Timothy I could find was the Young's Literal Translation which was published in 1862, but the King James Bible does not mistranslate them, which was published in 1604. I have no clue when the misinterpretations of the passage in Romans and Leviticus to mean that homosexuality is a sin, rather than heterosexual people having gay sex being a sin and homosexuality being a cultural taboo to the Hebrews respectively.

edited 25th Oct '12 3:44:35 PM by deathpigeon

Starship, you could do mental gymnastics for America. There is no way to interpret that text that is not misogynist. No way at all. I don't know how you say that a text which says that men are the image of God while women are not is anything else.

(note: that passage also contradicts that other verse I've frequently heard, the one that says that all shall be one in Jesus and there will be no man or women, no gentile or jew, no servant or free. If man and woman are the same in Jesus Christ, how can we have all this bullshit about men being above women? One of them has to be wrong.)

The text is not a wonderful pure thing that we're corrupting by looking for misogyny, homophobia, hatred and violence. It's there. It's in the bible. You're just ducking around trying to explain how it doesn't count because you're not going to be nasty about it.

You keep blustering around about how 'Oh, but just because I think women are inferior to men doesn't mean I think we should treat them badly!' but you're missing the point.

Please answer my question: Am I or am I not made in the image and glory of God?

To be honest, I am not entirely convinced by that "mistranslation" business. Historically, if I am not mistaken, the early Christians — who in large part, spoke currently the Koine Greek in which Paul's epistles were written — have, for the most part, interpreted these verses as applying to all forms of homosexuality, as shown for example by the laws of the Christianized Roman Empire.

Now, we could certainly rule-lawyer our way around the Exact Words used by Paul; but personally, I am more inclined to think that Paul did believe that all forms of homosexuality were sinful, and taught as such. Now, the question is whether this implies that every faithful Christian should agree with Paul on this.

As I see it, this is not necessarily the case. I hold Paul to have been a great Apostle and one of the best minds of his generation, and I hold his letters to have been divinely inspired; but as I see it, that does not necessarily imply that everything that these letters contain is necessarily correct. There are clear differences of perspective between different parts of the Bible, and — as Loni Jay points out — even among different Pauline letters for that matter.

edited 26th Oct '12 12:59:53 AM by Carciofus

If Paul felt that all forms of homosexuality were sinful, he didn't say so in the Bible. He was specifically speaking of an exchange in his letter in Romans, not only in the section talking about homosexuality, but in the surrounding sections as well, so it's pretty clear he was talking about people whose nature was heterosexual having gay sex, exchanging heterosexual sex for gay sex, and it doesn't work without an exchange.

As for the section in 1 Corinthians and 1 Timothy not being a mistranslation... Well, μαλακοὶ is used elsewhere, out of the Bible, to mean something completely unrelated to homosexuality, and ἀρσενοκοῖται is commonly listed with sins of an economical nature, which homosexuality is not, at least not inherently, and probably about gay male prostitutes, and was definitely of the sort. Also, if it really wasn't a mistranslation in those two sections, why can't I find a Bible translation earlier than the 1860s that supports the translation dealing with homosexuality. I mean, the King James Version doesn't mention homosexuality. Nor does the Webster's Bible, which was translated in 1833.

If the most accurate translation were "homosexuals," why was the sin commonly listed with economic sins? Why was there no translation of the Bible earlier than the Young's Literal Translation to support that translation? Why wouldn't Paul just say something like "men that lie with men as with a woman," or some other thing that has been used previously in the Bible, such as how he referred to gay sex in Romans or how Leviticus referred to gay sex, or some other thing that was used to talk about people having gay sex that was used in other tests, rather than inventing a new term, one that hadn't had a recorded use before it was used in 1 Corinthians?

I read this as saying that men are made to be subservient to God, while women are made to be subservient to men.

Yeah, while Paul's exposure to same-sex relations was Greek/Roman power dynamic stuff that we can pretty reasonably throw into the Bad Box, his neuroses on sex on the whole were enough that I get the feeling he would've thought our modern understanding of homosexuality to be wrong too had he heard of it. I mean, this is the guy who grudgingly accepted marriage as an acceptable path to procreative sex because he thought everyone should be celibate.

That said, while he was critical to our early formation and had some pretty respectable ideas for the time, we've kind of been treating his words like a gospel that they aren't.

edited 26th Oct '12 1:28:33 AM by Pykrete

Paul was horrified by all things sexual in nature. I don't think the poor guy actually had much of a libido... and might have been naturally asexual. He... just didn't get it, and was squicked out by all aspects of it.

That... or he might have actually suffered abuse early in life, which tainted everything later. <shrugs> Unknown.

Also, keep in mind that at that point in time (as had been the case for centuries in the region) the prevailing attitude was that All Women Are Lustful and the cause of lust. It's one reason why Roman Matrons were supposed to show restraint a lot of the time (for a given definition of "restraint"): it was a sign of their strength over the the daughters of the lower classes and other kinds of barbarian.

Where the Early Church started out remarkably accepting of women teaching and taking an active part within it, between them, Peter and Paul changed the tone remarkably to more "acceptable" norms for the time... possibly in a bid to retain converts, particularly the blokes who would have suffered a huge degree of culture shock. <shrugs> Not only that, but a fair few of the lasses would have felt... quite out of depth: it was a major change, that you'd have to leave at the door when you went back outside and faced the "real world". Not everybody is comfortable with change, even if it might benefit them.

edited 26th Oct '12 7:35:33 AM by Euodiachloris

I cannot accommodate you in this request Loni. You want to back me into a corner and pick either the square or the triangle. I personally believe the truth is a circle, and I cannot say otherwise for the sake of appeasement. You should know me enough by now to know that's not an option.

That is a recurring problem, I think, not just in these threads, not just in gay/women's/minority rights, but in society in general. Sometimes the truth doesn't fit your neat checkboxes. I understand as mere mortals sometimes we have to pick something and move forward, but that doesn't mean we accept it as the absolute truth.

To use mathematical logic, if p implies q and q implies s, it stands to reason p implies s. If man is the glory of God, and a woman is the glory of man, well, I think you see where I'm going with this.

Additionally, Shima is a moderator, I'm a troper. She's no better than me, nor I than her, however in this specific context of these threads, she has authority to reign in my behavior if she deems fit. I must submit to her judgment. I don't consider this a statement on our worth relative to one another.

So Loni, you can disagree with the path my logic follows. You can be offended by my logic; that is your prerogative.

But my logic is not an attempt to believe something, "but not be too nasty about it." My logic is an attempt to find the truth and do the right thing at all times. When the truth is nice, I go with it. When it's ugly I go with it. I think homosexuality is a sin; I don't hedge that truth to not seem nasty. I think Christians who use that as excuse to bully and harass and kill people, are an abomination. I don't say otherwise to show solidarity with people of my faith.

My point is, I cannot "just pick one" and I cannot answer your question any better than I have already. The answer you have is the answer I believe to be true. The only option for changing it, would be to learn it isn't true.

So you think that women are the glory of God, but only through men?

Yes.