[quote=“Qin_Shi_Huangdi, post:100, topic:580163”]
Why?
Yes to both. There’s really no discussion to be had about it.
[quote=“Qin_Shi_Huangdi, post:100, topic:580163”]
Have you no internal morality? If there were nothing specifically condemning homosexuality(according to your interpretation) in the Bible, how would you feel about the subject?
Turns out that a good many Americans tonight have serious issues. 
Whoa… I. Am. Empowered!
Okay, nature, bring it on – here I stand, not condemning homos! Cue the lightning! Thunder! Rivers of blood! Rain of frogs! Bwaaaaah, ha, ha!
Cite?
[quote=“Qin_Shi_Huangdi, post:100, topic:580163”]
If this is true, then let God sort it out. Or is he busy doing something else, or travelling, or on the toilet?
Or conversely, if God condemned something that otherwise appeared to you (Qin Shi Huangdi) as good and lovely, would you turn against it on that basis alone?
Well, I don’t have a whole lot negative to say about Teen Challenge (the program he founded), but yeah, if a religious leader who’s lived that long & is spouting weird lies dies, I think it’s reasonable enough to say that God called him home to shut him up.
Pat Robertson hasn’t been called home, on the other hand, because he’s not one of God’s. 
You do realize Paul’s very next words after that description are, “And you have no excuse, because you’re just as guilty!”, right? (Not of being gay, of sinning generally.)
In all seriousness, you know what Romans 1:18-32 is about? It’s not Joe and Jim Gayguys and their metrosexual apartment. Qin, go read a good appreciation of the Satyricon of Petronius Arbiter. (I do not suggest reading the story itself, which includes a big chunk of erastes/eromenos sexual relationship, for the same reasons as that other book recommendation. You’ll find the characters are petty, spiteful, vicious, backbiting, idolatrous, lustful, promiscuous… In short, it sounds just like Paul wrote the Cliff’s Notes for it in that first chapter of Romans – exce[t that he wrote 20-30 years before Petronius. And they were both describing the same thing – the dissolute Roman elite of the time. That’s what Paul’s condemning.
Now:
David Wilkerson is a false prophet. I have a book of his around here from the 1970s that says in rather explicit and detailed language what God is going to do in judgment when and where – and He did not. And it’s not a case of “unless they repent” … explicit woes are predicted if they continue to do what they did indeed continue doing. (I know that will really shock all the atheists 
but I emphatically wanted to make that point for the benefit of believers. There may or may not be such a thing as real predictive prophecy (I suspect mostly not, other than in the Heinlein extrapolative sense), but David Wilkerson is absolutely not an example of it.
By the standards that hold Romans 1:26-27 up to judge gay people, I can find New Testament verses, some explicitly from Jesus’s own mouth, that condemn about 95% of the Republican leadership to a far worse fate, and not a small part of the Democrats as well.
Finally, even given a concessive presumption of the Scriptural sinfulness of gay sex (which is quite far from the case – those verses are translated with an agenda in place), take a good look at what Jesus Christ, whom you and I took as Lord and Savior, commands we do about the situation. Because it is most emphatically NOT what most vocal American Christians do. Recommended reading: Matthew 7:1-2 and 12, 18:21-35, 22:34-40, and 25:3-46, and Luke 15: 1-2 and 11-32 (note the setting in those first two verses; it’s important to understanding the context of the story), Luke 10:25-37, Romans 14., Galatians 5.
And deservedly so. Many people create their god in their own image; there’s a great quote about knowing you’ve done this when it happens that he hates exactly the same things you do.
Scripture is replete with God claiming Himself to love us, patiently calling us to a good loving relationship with Him and to becoming our best possible selves, combined with the horrible fate that awaits those who don’t respond. Skeptics have commented, not unjustly, that this seems to show a schizoid nature in Him. In point of fact, however, I think those passages derive from two souirces: people with an overblown case of Schadenfreude at How God’s Gonna Judge My Enemies ™, and instances of something else best explained by example. In the early 1970s I knew a brilliant, vibrant young man who got very heavily into the drug culture of the time, including acid, 'ludes, etc. When last I saw him, he was a burnt-out shell of his former self, incapable of most of what he previously had done with ease. Or suppose a town puts up a sign: “Sharp Curve Ahead / Speed Limit 30.” Someone decides to take the curve at 80, slides into a tree and is killed. Those are not punishments for breaking the law; they’re consequences of it.
It may be argued, well, why can’t He make things such that those bad results don’t happen? And my answer is, I don’t know, but I suspect strongly that it’s the same reason He cannot make a four-sided triangle. In a world subject to physical law, events necessarily have consequences, sometimes dire ones. And a world with no sharp edges and no hard rough surfaces is not a good environment for children – while toddler-proofing is a good move, a kid needs to grow up learning to deal with a world that can hurt him. I think the parallel is apt: God doesn’t send us to Hell as though it were the verdict of a criminal court; we choose to go there as the consequence of our actions, even though He warns against it. And He permits this because whatever He created us to become involves free will and He values that outcome enough to put us in a world where we can be hurt so that we can learn how not to get hurt and how to tend each other’s hurts.
Except that those private citizens en masse become either a mob ostracizing others, or a mjaority of voters who do use the government.
[quote=“Qin_Shi_Huangdi, post:100, topic:580163”]
So why does God create homosexuals?
Also, why ought we listen to what God says? Is it because he can kill us? If this is your criteria, then why ought I not listen to Uncle Tony and pay him a service fee for not crippling me every Tuesday?
Aren’t both ‘moral doctrines’ equivalent?
I love this!
Many (but not all) Christians worship a sadistic [del]God[/del] monster who creates people so that he can torture them for eternity. That’s the only logical conclusion you can draw frrom the doctrine of doubel predestination.
Incidentally, CS Lews wrote something (in Miracles, I think, but it might have been The Problem With Pain) in which he relates an argument (not claimed to be original to him) that God’s moral reasoning must be comprehensible to humans for God to have any morality authority. Otherwise it’s just the threat of punishment, “and we might as well worship an omnipotent fiend.”
So, some guy 99% of us never heard of has died, and you expect us to have a strong reaction?
My reaction is. let his family and the people who knew him grieve, while the rest of us think about baseball, the weather or who’ll get booted off “The Apprentice” next.
Thank you, I thought of him immediately but couldn’t recall his name.
I don’t celebrate the death of anyone (no, not even Osama bin Lauden-- That registers for me as “interesting news”, but not as cause for joy). I’ll admit that I don’t particularly mourn for Wilkerson, either, but that’s just a matter of relevance: There are billions of other people in the world I also won’t mourn when they die. I’m not saying that it’s a good thing that I won’t mourn them, but it’s just not humanly possible to have an emotional reaction to a stranger one’s never met.
I should certainly hope you don’t mourn the death of each person who dies. You’d be crazy in in week.
[quote=“Czarcasm, post:104, topic:580163”]
I am not certain, because it would be a person in mental makeup quite different from myself.
Yes because celebrating the death of an evil man is evil. :rolleyes:
Romans 1:18-32
Assuming it was being “spinned” but actually so, yes.
I agree.
And if this is true (I don’t know much about Mr. Wilkerson) he must be condemned for that for in Mosaic Law, homosexual acts and false prophecy were meted out the same punishment.
Yes, many politicians do have problems with regards to this subject and I am criticial of them also.
What about people who’ve gave up a particular pleasure of theirs for belief it is a sin? Ie alcoholics who “quit”, or licentious people who stop their practices?
I agree with this.
And such laws are unconstitutional as argued even by many Republics (such as Ron Paul)
Once again, Qin, WHY does God condemn homosexuality?