LGBTQ+ Rights and Religion

Yeppers.

That's why it was a crime of hospitality. You were supposed to give your guests the best even if you starved.

Personally I was always amused how everyone screams about how gay sex us bad and uses that story but fail to mention how Lot offered his family to the mob.

Then again, Lot's the first case of incest in the bible too. His daughters both got him drunk and slept with him in order to preserve the family line.

Edit: what a page topper Gabrael...

edited 10th Apr '13 9:31:14 PM by Gabrael

"Psssh. Even if you could catch a miracle on a picture any person would probably delete it to make space for more porn." - Aszur

Funny fact: got taught that story — as in, the St James' version — when I was 9. Yup. 9. In Bible Study. <nods sagely>

The... teacher glossed over bits. The dictionary did, too. But, I got enough to get the picture.

To this day, I don't know how Lot rubbed enough grace together to get saved. <_< Being there in the first place. Attempting to appease the mob by throwing your family at it, then losing your wife because she... was being the one reasonable one (I would look back, if only to check none of the mob were following rather than as an act of impiety, too ), and then not picking up on what the girls were planning and slapping the little idiots... err... Epic Fail for a few days, there, yes?

edited 10th Apr '13 10:20:49 PM by Euodiachloris

His brother was his ticket. Nepotism at its finest!

"Psssh. Even if you could catch a miracle on a picture any person would probably delete it to make space for more porn." - Aszur

To be fair, so did the Bible. Most of the details of what was actually going on there come from Jewish Mishnah. In the Christian OT it goes from "this is a thing" to "kaboom" in one page, and nobody remembers the even briefer account of the Siddim war that led into it.

edited 10th Apr '13 11:59:53 PM by Pykrete

Certainly when I learned it in Sunday school as a small child, it was handled hilariously badly: "But what did they do, Minister?" "Well, they were very wicked." "But what kind of wickedness?" "They were so wicked that I can't tell you." (*every child asks their parents what the Sodomites got up to).

edited 11th Apr '13 2:00:24 AM by Achaemenid

Schild und Schwert der Partei

Well, gangrape is hell of a subject for Sunday school.

Dopants: He meant what he said and he said what he meant, a Ninety is faithful 100%.

He could have described it simply as being nasty to guests, rather than in a way that guaranteed everyone in the class would become more, not less curious. It led to some interesting conversations with my parents.

Schild und Schwert der Partei

There is a reason some people say that you shouldn't let kids read the bible.

Or could use the same metaphor used in the Little Red Riding Hood: They ambush the guests and eat them.

"And as long as a sack of shit is not a good thing to be, chivalry will never die."

Being rude to your guests hardly deserves having your town incinerated. Then again, that seems a bit excessive even for gang rape. Then again again, someone gets killed in that story for the vile sin of looking.

Hmm...seeing how a lot of Christians treat homosexuals, maybe they thought the godless sodomites were asking the angels out on a date, which would be just as abominable to them as rape. (I've had Christians tell me that all same-sex intercourse is rape, no matter how consensual, so there's precedent for it.)

I there some sort of analogy to Godwin's Law that applies to calling all sexual acts of a particular category rape? Because there should be.

Just to nitpick but that should be "calling all consensual sexual acts of a particular category rape?". As I'm pretty sure there are certain categories that can only be rape, as they involve having sex with something unable to consent.

Fixed.

edited 11th Apr '13 6:35:00 AM by Silasw

“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ Cyran

I guess, but I figured it fell into the same type of loophole that allows you to call the Nazis Nazis.

'Consonantal'? I ui e a ee, a e i o o a i a .

edited 11th Apr '13 6:31:40 AM by Iaculus

What's precedent ever done for us?

"Live together in peace with each other. Don't be proud. Be willing to be friends with people who are not important to other people. Don't be conceited." - Romans 12:16

"Christ accepted you. So you should accept each other. This will bring glory to God". —Romans 15:7

"But Jesus said to them, "The kings of the world rule over their people. Men who have authority over other people make the people call them 'great helpers {of the people}.' But you must not be like that. The greatest person should become like the youngest person! Leaders should be like servants. Who is more important: the person sitting at the table or the person serving him? You think the person sitting at the table is more important. But I am like a servant among you." —Luke 22:24-27

And of course.....

"For God so loved the World (not a few select people in it) that he gave up his one and only Son. So that whoever would trust him would never perish. But would have everlasting life." - John 3:16

It was an honor

Finish the John 3:16, no one ever does because 17 flows into "and he that believith not shall be damned."

That is why acceptance of homosexuality is so problematic. When you tell people their eternal torment or eternal cookie is on the line, they justifiably freak.

Such as with the Church of Christ, they refuse to have music, have a strong hierarchy, and rely on biblical gender roles for the basic fear of, well if the bible didn't say so let's not do it just to be on the safe side.

As long as people believe homosexuality is a damnable sin, and most Protestants still hold sin is equal in severity, we can always expect a backlash on LGBT civil issues.

"Psssh. Even if you could catch a miracle on a picture any person would probably delete it to make space for more porn." - Aszur

While I agree with all of that, the reason I don't particularly mention that is because it's not my business. What God chooses to do to punish people is not my issue to handle; I'm far more concerned with shouldering the penalties for my own crimes.

And it follows from that that I do not believe holding to Protestant Christianity means a backlash against LGBTQ civil rights. Civil rights are not the business or purview of the Church. People have the right to follow the Scripture, or not, as they see fit.

It's my duty to pass along the message as I understand it, and then demonstrate it as best I can through the expression of my own generosity and acceptance toward all.

What is between a person and their Creator...is between them and their Creator.

It was an honor

It's not really construed in that story as much a punishment for looking as a consequence of gazing into the face of the Divinity (especially of the enraged divinity).

It is a common theme in the Old Testament that raw divinity is insanely dangerous to human beings if not approached by caution — for example, one guy gets struck dead for touching the Ark of the Covenant, even though he does so just to prevent it from falling.

From a purely mythical point of view, you can think of this as akin to similar themes from other cultures — for example, to the sight of Zeus being enough to reduce his lover Semele to ash.

From a more "theological" point of view, perhaps, you could think of this as a symbol of the separation between fallen humankind and the Divinity being such that excessively direct contact between the two is utterly lethal to the former.

edited 11th Apr '13 1:53:06 PM by Carciofus

But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.

It...went quite a bit beyond "being rude to guests". Jewish texts describe randomly assaulting foreigners and then extorting them for "bloodletting service", hazing foreigners with Procrustean beds (the ones where you stretch or chop off limbs until they fit), and rewarding a young girl's act of charity to a beggar with scaphism.

Suffice to say "lack of hospitality" is a tactful poetic understatement. The way it's described, it was the sort of thing that would cause very understandable knee-jerking for a long-ass time.

edited 11th Apr '13 2:01:10 PM by Pykrete

-Googles those terms-

Yeah, I'm going to have to say that they deserved to get scoured off the face of the earth.

Eating a Vanilluxe will give you frostbite.

The similarities between the god of the Bible and the Old Ones are amusing...until I remember that people worship him.

Knowing that just makes the fact that Christians still compare us to these...people so much worse. We're supposed to reach out and be understanding to people who see us this way? Someone else can do it. I refuse.

edited 11th Apr '13 2:23:33 PM by Morgikit

What, that out of all the scary non-Euclidean otherspace beings, we might have one who doesn't feed on pain and insanity? Then again, I've always enjoyed Lovecraft Lite. Suffice to say, Gnostics have a field day with the subject.

As to the more relevant second...yeah. That's the picture we're up against. The "God hates fags" type may not have knowledge of the more detailed Jewish accounts of the matter, but they will often think of Sodom and Gomorrah as consummately (if nebulously) depraved. And the way the OT account of it has been trimmed, buttsex is just about the only detail that was left in, so they'll see it as a symptom of that.

edited 11th Apr '13 2:36:56 PM by Pykrete

It is not a coincidence. As I said, it is a common theme in many mythologies. Of course, Lovecraft was an atheist; but it does not mean that he did not draw inspiration from older ideas.

Actually, compared to the monotheistic God, the Lovecraftian Old Ones are pretty tame and comprehensible: after all, God is supposed to be the transcendent Absolute, the "infinitely other" — to use Simone Weil's brilliant definition.

But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.

And yet (to get back on topic), apparently he still cares deeply about the difference between rubbing a penis on a vagina and rubbing a penis on another penis. Supposedly that somehow makes more sense than us caring about the difference between fhtagning a mglw'nafh at a ph'nglui and fhtagning a mglw'nafh at another mglw'nafh.

I dunno, maybe you and Starship have drastically different views on these matters.

Join my forum game!

I've been reading a lot of Lovecraft lately and, ah...I feel that this does an injustice to what Lovecraft's mythos represents, which is humanity as an aberrant blip in a vast and incomprehensible void in which human concepts such as moral absolutes are as meaningless as white noise. Which is infinitely more horrifying than humanity as God's special children, I would argue.

But this is rather off-topic!

edited 11th Apr '13 3:40:07 PM by pagad

With cannon shot and gun blast smash the alien. With laser beam and searing plasma scatter the alien to the stars.