I knew it was getting along towards time for my semiannual “Shodan said something I agree with” post. Excellent analysis!!
I was fairly sure of my “disastrous lack of parenting skills” twelve years ago. I have a couple of young men who advise me that my holding that opinion was the result of inadequate bowel regularity. (They were a bit more blunt, informing me what I was full of. ;)) And I have a very strong feeling that agentfroot, if asked, might well inform you the same.
in re the OP: Shodan is correct in that most Christians interpret Jesus and Paul’s teachings with regard to the Law as suggesting that the ritual and dietary laws therein have been abrogated, but that the moral law remains in force. Paul: “We are free from the law, not to sin, but to love as Christ commands.”
There are several passages in Paul’s works that are usually taken as condemning homosexual practices, and one, in Romans, homosexual desires. An extensive exegesis of the language used and the scenarios in which they are applied can demonstrate a quite different understanding of the condemnations than that they refer to present committed male-male or female-female sexual relationships. But that is grist for a quite different (and done already several times) thread.
It is important to note that Christianity is not a monolithic bloc with regard to this topic – majorities in several major denominations and minorities in many others hold to a quite different understanding than the general condemnation publicized by many anti-gay activists claiming to speak for Christianity.
It may have the force of tradition, but it would not seem to be the view of most Christians in this generation. Rather the purpose of sex is a combination of procreation and holding the family unit together.
Few Christians today would raise eyebrows at a man marrying an apparently post-menopausal woman. Can you imagine someone raising this as an objection at a wedding? (There are other situations where it is known to be a non-repro marriage, such as when it is known that the man had been “snipped”, etc.)
Even the papal encyclicals referred to “mutual aid and comfort” together with the “allaying of concupiscence” as a secondary purpose for sex. “It is not good for man to be alone” as the Bible says.
Would you really find it “obviously true” that non-reproductive sex between a man and a woman is “perverted” and “disgusting”?
I recall someone reacting in loud disgust at a scene with an older couple going at it in “Moonstruck” even though it was very discreetly portrayed. BUT, you can bet your bottom dollar that it wasn’t the unlikelihood of progeny that he found revolting. Rather it was the very idea of having sex with a middle-aged woman that raised his hackles.
Not true. Studies have found that the dual incidence of homosexuality in identical twin males is significantly higher than in fraternal twin males.
Yet when one identical twin male is homosexual, in most cases the other identical twin is heterosexual. So there is not a perfect correlation.
Homosexuality may be a sex-linked genetic trait, like hemophilia, which is carried genetically by females, but expressed by males. Until recent times, hemophiliacs rarely lived long enough to reproduce, but their sisters passed the trait onto their children.
Excellent analysis!!