hey Libertarian, this reminded me – are you familiar with the textual analysis that some people believe suggests that the Centurion’s servant in that passage might well have been his lover? (I find your citing it to refer to Esprix delightful, given that context.)
As I will continue to repeat whenever you bring that up, I’m not living in perpetual sin, in my opinion, since I’ve asked forgiveness for my past and have received it. And there’s a vast difference between real marriage and homosexulity. If I were to refuse my husband sex, that would no doubt end the marriage eventually (which God would hate) plus I’d be disobeying the verses which tell a husband and wife not to withhold themselves from one another except for short periods fo time for prayer and fasting.
Even if you don’t think homosexulity is a sin, fornication is. Any sexual activity outside the bond of marriage is sinful in God’s eyes according to what He says. And marriage is a union between a male and a female.
Now concerning the things whereof ye wrote unto me: It is good for a man not to touch a woman. Nevertheless, to avoid fornication, let every man have his own wife, and let every woman have her own husband. 1 Corinthians 7:2
Read on down and you’ll see the verses about husbands and wives rendering to each other due benovelence (giving their bodies to each other)
Hey His4ever, I have a question. Pretend I’m Christian (yes, I’m Wiccan, but let’s pretend I converted for a moment here). I’m female, and I happen to like other females as well as males in a non-platonic way. I don’t act on my desires at all, I’m completely celibate, and I’m otherwise a good, helpful member of society. Am I still going to hell for liking who I like?
I won’t flame you if you say yes (I respect your views as long as you don’t impose them on me), I’m just curious. Thanks.
His4Ever, to add to what Polycarp said, could you choose to be homosexual? If threatened with hellfire and damnation if you did not, could you choose to be homosexual? Homosexuals have been threatened with just that and more, yet they could not choose to be straight.
You’ve known cruelty and abuse. Would you choose to make that your lot? Would you choose to risk not being able to mention your husband at work or at church? Would you choose to risk disapproving looks or insults because you held his hand in public or kissed him on the cheek?
Dear girl, you are in a wonderful forum for learning about the reality of being homosexual from homosexuals themselves, not to mention all sorts of other forms of sexuality. Please, take advantage of it.
I’ve spent a certain amount of time wishing I could be conventional. You know, just another soccer mom, living in the suburbs with 2.4 children and (God help me!) an SUV. I’ve wished I could be just like everybody else, instead of this odd duck who runs around, gets into trouble, asks questions no one would dream of asking and generally thinks and talks too much. I’ve even, I think, prayed to God to make me into that more conventional creature. He’s not going to do it. To do so would be to change too much of who I am. I might, miraculously, gain the 2.4 kids and SUV, but I would lose myself, and I suspect SDMB might lose a poster. It’s my belief that God made me just as I am, obstinacy and unconventionality and all, just as he made Esprix, Gobear, and others. I’ve mentioned a real-life gay friend of mine. His kindness and decency is as integral to him as his homosexuality, if not more so. How do I know that if his homosexuality were taken away, some of the kindness, decency and courage I treasure in him wouldn’t also be?
Lilalilaren, I can’t begin to speak for Libertarian, but, because of my own beliefs about sexual morality, I don’t believe Jesus had a male lover any more than I believe he had a female lover. Who He was tempted by (other than the devil) is a whole new can of worms, though! 
CJ
CJ, I’m somewhat perplexed by your response; I was talking about the Centurion. . . .
Has the Lord God Almighty has appeared unto you with all of His cherubim and seraphim singing alleluias and said that you, Arthur, King of the Britons…oops, sorry, I’ll read that again…you, His4Ever, are to be His prophet unto all the nations of the earth and to scourge all those who are naughty in His sight? No? Then stop acting as if you were. “Any sexual activity outside the bond of marriage is sinful in God’s eyes according to what He says,” my Aunt Agatha! You do NOT know what God says; all you know is what the Bible says, and then only in translation because you, unlike me and several others, can’t read Greek and thus do not understand what the Bible actually says and the connotations of the terms it uses.
But let us stipulate that HFE is God’s prophet and and He is really quite cross with homosexuals. If your deity can look at the relationship I have with my partner and ignore the mutual love, trust, fidelity, and care we share and can see only our genders, then I submit that He is a very narrow-minded and bigoted Supreme Being indeed and ought to go back to playing “Ooh, look at Me, I’m a pillar of fire” to a pack of sheep-herding nomads.
In addition, what kind of God gets het up over the genders of people who love each other and yet has no interest in clothing the naked, feeding the hungry, or comforting the afflicted? Jesus never mentions homosexuality even once in the Gospels, yet He is quoted numerous times enjoining His followers to love their neighbors, to show compassion and kindness, and to show their faith through their love and acts. You, H4e, have ignored those commands during your entire tenure here. I submit that you, in fact, are preaching the Gospel of H4E, not the Gospel of Christ.
No, I would’t think so. You used the term “platonic”. Isn’t that liking another girl as a sister, not a lover? I’m not going to say who is and isn’t going to hell, all I can say is what Scripture says and people make their own choices and bear whatever consequences there are to those choices. I can’t for instance say 100% that you or anyone else is going to hell because I don’t have any ideas what decisions you may make during the rest of your life. You may not always remain a Wiccan. You may one day see your need of a Savior and accept Christ, then any pronouncements I may have made upon you years earlier would be untrue.
You are certainly entitled to your opinion, gobear. I don’t feel like arguing with you. You and I don’t have the same understanding, beliefs, or thoughts about the Bible, it’s quite obvious.
Ok, I gotcha. Thanks for answering my question, His4ever. Just had to clear that up.
As for you, CJ, an unconventional person would have extreme difficulty fitting in to a conventional lifestyle. I doubt you’d be happy living in a big house in a certain town with an acre of lawn landscaped to perfection, a husband, 2.4 kids, a minivan or SUV, a dog, and a perfectly normal life. You’re one of the least normal people I know (take that as a compliment - I find normal people dull), and that life just doesn’t fit you. I’m not saying you should never get married or have kids or drive an enormous vehicle (Napoleon complex, anyone?). I just think that you were born to live an adventurous, interesting life. Could you see ME as a soccer mom? I know I’m not going to live that life either, and frankly I don’t want to. So there. God obviously has other plans for us.
Anybody that would be happy with 2.4 kids needs serious psychiatric help. 
Ok, I’ve investigated the “What does the Bible say about homosexuality” issue a lot when I came out about 9 years ago. From what I read, the arguments that said the Bible was talking about something else was sketchy in some spots and inaccurate in others. IMHO, I’d have to agree with H4E in that the Bible does condemn homosexuality.
KJV
Book of Romans
1:26
For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections: for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature:
1:27
And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompence of their error which was meet.
Leviticus
20:13
If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them.
To me, both of those passages DO condemn homosexuality. To deny that, or find a selfish exemption isn’t following the Bible and the word of the lord. Christianity is seemingly usually treated as a buffet with its member picking and choosing what they find applicable and important and subscribing to those while using excuses to get around the items they find contrary to their life (or lifestyle).
But hey, I’m a gay atheist, I don’t need to make my peace with a religion that says what I’m doing is wrong.
He also calls menstruating women unholy, yet still provided them with eggs and estrogen. And he called Pharaoh sinful for not liberating the Israelites, yet it was God himself who hardened his heart. And sacrificing one’s child is sinful, yet he ordered this of Abraham and let his own son be tortured due to some point he wanted to make about symbolism and mercy. And he ordered the slaughter of women and unborn children yet is said to have strong opinions against abortion, etc. etc. ad nauseum.
Neither would holding a gun to somebody’s head make them attracted to or not attracted to that person.
While, based not just on my experience and my studies, I firmly believe homosexuality is an unchosen and usually unalterable orientation, so what if it is a choice? Being Christian is a choice- nobody “holds a gun to anyone’s head saying you must” be Baptist/Pentecostal/African Methodist Episcopal/Ralph Macchio/etc., do they (not in this country, anyway), and yet the “lifestyle” of a Fundamentalist, distasteful as I may happen to find it, is protected by the spirit and the letter of the Constitution. Why can’t gays be afforded the same rights?
Fixed quote tags. – MEB
It depends on how they’re cooked.
And when will you get it through your head that one’s sexual orientation is about who one is ATTRACTED to. Not who one has SEX WITH. Otherwise, virgins would have no sexual orientation!
There’s a huge difference between being attracted to someone and having sex with someone.
:smack:
I second that, Guin, and in addition I keep trying to point out that a relationship involves much more than sex. It is about love–even if I were celibate, my love and my deepest feelings of intimacy would be for men.
gobear, can I just say that that is very touching, and I envy you. Wish I had somebody.
Good luck to you and yours.
stpauler, as a Christian who (in Marcus Borg’s words) “takes the Bible seriously but not literally,” may I address those points you make.
If you read the full passage in Romans 1, you find that these are people who are rejecting God in order to get “kicks” from the world, and that as they arrive at ennui, he inflicts desire for the same sex on them in place of their previous desire for het. sex as a punishment – a sort of “shock treatment,” IMHO, to get them to “see the light” and turn back to him. Anybody who takes that as reference to Kinsey 5 or 6 gays as opposed to what used to be called “gay chic” where it was the “in thing” to “try out homosexuality” is not reading it in context. As for the Leviticus quote, this is smack dab in the middle of a list of sexual activities supposedly practiced by the Canaanites and/or Egyptians which the Children of Israel were warned not to copy – a cultural prohibition to protect them against acculturation by the people among whom they lived and from whose empire they had escaped after a several-lifetimes-long sojourn there. And further, Paul is repeatedly explicit that the Law (Torah, including Leviticus) is not applicable to Christians.
Those of us who subscribe to the idea that God commands love and not judgmentalism (a) don’t think we have any right to tell you what “thou shalt not” do, and (b) in attempting to interpret what God’s will is, look at His purposes for sex as revealed in Scripture and nature, and find that it is for the biological purpose of progeny and the social purpose of establishing family, of a biological drive underlying and supporting a committed romantic love. While gay people cannot reproduce having normal gay sex (ignoring the sidetrack of a gay man ejaculating into a turkey baster to assist his Lesbian friends to conceive a child), they certainly can and do fall in love, commit to each other in lifelong unions, and form families.
I want to stress again for His4Ever’s sake: people talking about “being gay” are not discussing their sex lives so much as they’re talking about whom they fall in love with, whom they find desirable, whom they want to spend the rest of their lives with.
And the overwhelming evidence of the people who are gay and ought to know is that it is not something they chose to be but something they discovered about themselves, usually along about puberty but sometimes before or after, and which they understand themselves to be powerless to change.
If you want to posit the possibility of God working a miracle and turning gobear, stpauler, or Esprix straight, I won’t argue. But that’s not what ex-gay ministries deal in – they try to convince the believing gay person, already struggling under a burden of guilt, that his sexual desires are ipso facto sinful, usually using those same four quotes from the Bible that we’ve been over and over and over, and that he by his own willpower must “change” and become straight. Believe it or not, that brainwashing does sometimes take effect and people convince themselves that they “are now straight” – until temptation comes their way.
Me, I cannot see a God who loves people so much that He died in agony for their sakes being so petty as to demand something impossible of them and condemning them for not doing it. YMMV.
Was that a whoosh or a 757 going overhead.
Taking a literal reading of Mark 10:12, though, you commit adultery by remarrying.
You were not free to remarry another man, according to the words attributed to Jesus. Does Paul trump Jesus? Is not Paul refering to unmarried, and by unmarried he means never married?
If Grace covers your continued adultery, then why does it not cover homosexual relations? Your reasoning that you’ve asked for forgiveness for adultery and are therefore blameless is specious. You say that we homos must be celibate or we continue to sin. By the same literal reading, you commit adultery every time you make love to your third husband.
I want to make clear here that I don’t give a rat’s ass about your divorces. They have no bearing on whether my opinions of you, or anyone else. However, if you insist on a literal reading for others, then you must accept one for yourself, as Jesus says in Matthew 7:2
You choose a strict, literal measure for everyone else, therefore you will be judged by that measure, also. As for me, I choose to measure by Love.
But Homebrew, she doesn’t believe in Jesus, she believes in the Bible!
I found excellent arguments against these in John Boswell’s “Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality.”
The first has a huge argument against it which basically boils down to:
As to Leviticus, first of all the word commonly translated as “abomination” is toevoh which means something ritually unclean. Like eating pork or engaging in intercourse during menstruation.
Further more, most of those laws were thrown by the Council of Jerusalem (49 AD) which said that pagan converts to would not be bound by any of the requirements of the Mosaic law with four exceptions:
Fornication refered to heterosexual rather than homosexual abuses. In fact, almost no early christian writers mentioned Leviticus in arguments against homosexuality. In fact, the opposite is true, with people using the relationships of David and Jonathan and Ruth and Naomi as examples of beautiful relationships.