Part of it is ‘effeminate men don’t make good warriors, we only want tough, manly, macho men’.
Part of it is that under-population was an issue through most of human history, and it was regarded as a civic duty in many cultures to marry and have children.
Also, with male homosexuality, many cultures draw a clear and firm distinction
a) between active and passive roles, and
b) between sex with a boy up to mid-teens or so, and sex with a grown man.
The active role is regarded as more acceptable, and sex with boy is regarded as more acceptable.
If it’s “that simple”, then why are there ANY religious laws or strictures? Why is there a Bible at all in which G-d says to do some things and not do others? If all that G-d wants is for people to be happy being themselves, that’s what they’ll do even if he never revealed anything to human beings.
Except that effeminate is not equivalent to homosexual, and that Alexander the Great might disagree about who is a good warrior.
Aristotle, in my single reading at least, seemed to say that it was proper for a man to transition from boys to women upon reaching marriageable age, not just for reproduction but for child raising. But if our culture still followed this I suspect homosexuality would have been seen more like adultery for men, and not something to get castrated over.
The Greeks weren’t the only ones who thought this - look at David and Jonathan, which was perfectly okay in the eyes of those who wrote the story.
Oh yes, they were just good friends.
My ass.
RTFirefly, I liked your post and I’m glad you shared it, but at least one thing you said gave me pause. I thought about saying something, and then I held back; but since cmkeller brought it up…
I’m not saying you’re wrong about this, but something about it makes me uneasy. Maybe because it sounds too much like the Prosperity Gospel (with “God wants you to have fulfilling romantic and sexual relationships” the same kind of claim as “God wants you to be prosperous and successful”). Maybe because I struggle to reconcile a statement like this with the years and years in my own life when I desperately longed for a romantic/sexual relationship (“if God wants me to have one, why the hell don’t i?”). Maybe because it seems like it’d be easy to use a similar statement to justify just about any behavior or lifestyle one wanted to indulge in ("I should do this thing that I want to do, because God wants me to be happy and fulfilled ").
If you’re worried they might start up the witch BBQ then perhaps we could try Leviticus 19:11 instead: “Do not steal. Do not lie. Do not deceive one another.”
I’d be super duper surprised if it was found that there is some innate, genetic, hard-wired disgust for homosexuality (we seem to be just talking about male homosexuality and men here, by the way) and this disgust – where is exists – isn’t the result of very early and intense acculturation of boys to fear and loathe “effeminacy”.
In other words, one of the things the Bible is, is a book describing cultural norms from between 5000 to 2000 years ago, which have heavily shaped today’s cultural norms in the west.
I cannot remember so cannot cite the author of the premise that Biblical Inerrancy as a modern movement is a traceably direct result of the gradual ascendancy of science as the means to determine “truth”. That is, it became a battle of truths, a war between books so to speak. Some Christian movements (Fundamentalism and its children), were driven to try to use the Bible as if it was just like “science”. In the process of trying to eliminate ambiguity and nuance from the world, they manage to misunderstand both science and religion.
Actually, a lot of it, and I mean A LOT, appears to come from associating “gay sex” with “anal sex”. I’m not qualified to conduct actual studies on the subject, but I’ve got experience turning people from disgust of gay men into acceptance by pointing out that apparently (mind you, my only sources are discussions in these boards and the links which appeared thereof, and personal conversations with friends who happen to be gay) a lot of gay men find anal sex about as attractive as your average Spanish grandmother, which means “not at all”. The next question is “so what do they do?” “in the words of an old woman I used to know, ‘anything a man and a woman can do with her panties in place’” “Oh. Ooh. OOOOOH. You mean, hands and mouth! Oh! Oh. OK.”
It also appears to be part of the reasons there’s much less of an “issue” with lesbians. Now, my targets have all been female so they don’t need much to figure out stuff two women can do together without involving props, but in any case, the popular image of lesbians is not associated with anal sex, unlike that of gay men.
There are two kinds of selfish: one kind where you do what’s best for you even though it may hurt others, or there was an obvious opportunity to help others.
The other is just generally looking after yourself in ways that either don’t obviously affect any other person.
There’s nothing wrong with the latter. Indeed, for us to survive as a population we need to be doing the latter the majority of our time.
So if the prosperity gospel were saying “Give $5 to charity, and God will give you $100 back, eventually” it would be horseshit, but I wouldn’t consider it immoral.
The immorality comes in no help being given to others, and instead the exploitation of the poor by conmen.
“God would want me to be in a loving relationship” doesn’t suffer from these problems.
I didn’t say it was hard-wired, but yes I would disagree if we’re saying it’s entirely cultural. There is an “ick” factor associated with sex, and just as we’re attracted to people of type A, we’re repulsed – sexually at least – by people of type B, whether that be the “wrong” gender, people who are ugly or diseased, too old or too young, siblings etc.
Cultures can (de-)emphasize this factor a lot, but yeah I think it’s always there, it makes absolute sense that it should be.
But some things that our Bible condemns were the cultural norms of the surrounding culture when some of it was written. And Paul’s hatred of sex was not the norm of any culture.
And what person A thinks is icky person B loves and vice versa.
Some of the “Church Fathers” really did have a hatred of sex, but it’s not fair to describe Paul that way. 1 Corinthians 7 is probably the best source for Paul’s views on sex and marriage, which could perhaps be summarized as “Celibacy is best for those who can handle it, but not everybody can” (and he seems to have been influenced by the belief that The End was near). And he approved of regular sex between married people, if only for the negative reason that it kept them from being tempted by less legitimate sexual activity.
Servants/slaves depending on translation in English, not necessarily distinct at the time anyway, are characters in various parables attributed to Jesus, but without any side commentary about slavery. Slavery was a universal institution of society, and Jesus did not come as an earthly revolutionary. Nor was Paul per mainstream Christian belief inspired by God to fill in an earthly revolutionary agenda in Jesus’ place.
In Catholic and other mainstream sects’ theology God’s instructions to the Israelites, ie Mosaic Law, Leviticus and Deuteronomy in the Christian Bible, have never applied in whole to Christians. Nor is there a need for a line by line ‘rescission’ for them not to apply. Many Mosaic Laws not mentioned in the NT were never adopted by Christian societies, the early Church never said they should be. Some were specifically discarded in post-Gospel NT, Jewish laws which became a point of contention between Jewish and gentile followers of Jesus. And Jesus in the Gospels rejected some, like divorce, on the principal ‘it was allowed because of the hardness of your (ancestors) hearts’. Catholic teaching is that Jesus’ perfection of the Law through the dual principals of love of God and love of neighbor (in Matthew 22) transcends the specifics of Mosaic Law and leaves those two moral precepts.
Back on topic, homosexuality: traditional ‘natural law’ teaching and Paul’s* condemnation are the central issue for Catholics and some other mainstream traditions to embrace homosexuality, not Leviticus. The counter argument is that Paul’s statements were in the specific context of corrupt and exploitative sex practices in Greece at the time, pointing to the need to consider Paul and Jesus’ condemnation of licentiousness of all kinds* and not single out homosexuality when they didn’t, and having an evolved view of natural law.
*in Matthew 15:19 Jesus condemns ‘porneiai’, in Greek in the oldest known written versions, which could be read to include homosexuality, though all major translations I know of in English or otherwise translate it as ~ ‘(sexual) immorality’, leaving it relative to the reader’s frame of reference what it encompasses, as arguably the original word also did.
Sex in marriage is only to avoid something worse, sex outside of marriage or masturbation. Mo appreciation of the role sex has in bringing a couple together.
I’ve heard this quoted with the “with passion” part, and I assumed burn meant burn in hell. I wonder if this is a valid translation. If it is, now I know where the “get married to stop having sex” canard comes from, since it appears he thinks that marriage extinguishes passion.
The redeeming message of Jesus is we all fall short of the ‘law’, but that doesn’t matter as we are free from the consequences of the law as written as the debt is paid in full. Now the only thing that matters, is the only thing that every mattered, to love one another (and God in that also). So yes love your neighbor and also love your mate, but above all love your God which made it all.
According to the rah-rah’s (really religious) I’ve talked to, gay marriage is not about LOVE. Two people of the same sex cannot have the same relationship as two people of the opposite sex. No, all same sex relationships are based on LUST.
so what do they do?