No worries, I’m sure I overstated my case. It just bugs me when people say that Jesus hung out with sinners as if they weren’t in any way transformed by that contact and that He endorsed what they were up to. aka He hung out with prostitutes because sinners are much more fun, rather than He hung out with them to show that everyone deserves a chance at redemption and they are not lost causes or beneath contempt. Sorry for any exaggeration and I plan to follow these debates rather than engage in them. I have only blind faith, and not enough critical knowledge.
Cite?
You’re comparing homosexuality to a disease?
There are no known evolutionary drawbacks to homosexuality and it’s ubiquity in mammals - absent any ill effects on populations - would suggest that it is neural at worst and that the notion of evolutionary benefit cannot be dismissed. Yes, I said “there must be something good about it.” I was being flip. Sue me.
My argument is that there is nothing in the New Testament to suggest that same-sex attractions have to be repressed. I also object strenuously to the suggestion that same-sex relationships can be dismissed as simple “lust.”
I don’t recall that the New Testament specifically addresses incest, either. The lack of a specific prohibition against homosexuality may merely mean that the authors and editors of the NT thought the prohibition against homosexuality was such a common sense proposition that it never occurred to them to address the issue.
It seems to me that the early Xians held sexuality in general in low esteem. The Apostle Paul stated up front that it would be better to remain single and celibate, that marriage was only for those weak souls who couldn’t control themselves. (Somewhere in Corinthians IIRC).
This is doubtful since there was no such attitude present in the Hellenistic world in which Pauline Christianity arose.
Paul also said that women should keep their mouths shut in church and that slaves should obey their masters. I don’t see anybody treating those pronouncements as being particularly inspired. I don’t know what Paul would have thought of monogomous, same-sex relationships because he never mentioned them. That would at least suggest he didn’t think it was important enough to draw attention to.
Actually, gigi I think you sell yourself short. Very short.
Jesus did in fact say that the greatest command was Love. But those words did not mean that those following him on the one hand needed to be perfect—to practice perfect love. In fact, the point of Jesus’s sacrifice was because we were/are sinners. He recognized that we needed redemption; we needed mercy, we needed direction…and we needed Love.
And so there are those who believe that we are doomed, and set ourselves up for failure by setting unreasonable standards—standards which by definition we as imperfect human cannot meet.
On the other hand…
The other end of the spectrum—and certainly the one popular here—is the notion that Love gives a free pass as to behavior. That because Jesus came to sinners it’s OK to revel in our sinfullness; that because he came to prostitutes we dare not speak poorly of prostitution; that our spirit of Love and inclusion is such that we dare not be judgemental; that he came to thieves and prostitutes and crooks so it is implicit that it is somehow OK to be a thief or prostitute or crook. And while someone may balk at that, the fact is that if we focus on Jesus’s Love myopically, and dwell on the simple fact that we are all sinners, we are absolved from the consequences of our own behavior.
Both views represent the opposite extremes of his ministry. Neither however represents what he really said in it’s full context, and misrepresents his ministry.
Here at SDMB, rarely do we speak about Jesus Christ, Bigot*. The Jesus that called religious leaders offspring of vipers. The same Jesus who blasted those who were greedy. The same Jesus who tore up the temple courtyard. The same Jesus who talked again and again about behavior—that his message would compel people to change. The same Jesus who said that upon his return that there would be those who were not only sincere, and who did great works, but who he would reject in the strongest terms. The Jesus who would say to those, “Get away from me you workers of lawlessness, I never knew you.”
That Jesus.
It seems to me that the world has a fair amount of people who [choose to] see half the story. Fred Phelps may or may not be (and I submit he is not) right about homosexuality. But he certainly doesn’t understand Jesus, or what his ministry was all about.
OTOH I would submit that the flavor of Christianity that only wants to “feel”, and ignores the clear directions that this Love we feel requires of us, that we manifest this Love in action, in our behavior, and a willingness to be humble and accept his commands is equally unbalanced.
So, I don’t think you overstated your case at all. I think you stated your case in a way that accurately reflects Jesus’s words and ministry. Your mistake was to post, in my view, in a board that is influenced heavily by secular humanism; a flavor of Christianity that seeks to be it’s own arbiter of what is right and wrong and considers things like “obedience” to be relics of an ancient code. A flavor that considers “behavior” anathema, that refuses to acknowledge much of what the bible really has to say because it is objectionable. A flavor of Christianity that speaks [sincerely] of love but rejects the [expectations of] behavior that should be clearly manifest by this love. (not the least of which is obedience and humility)
I think your words were spot on. They are not popular here. But, if you have the constitution, and you believe them, I would advise you to be steadfast with them.
Who’s ever claimed that being Jesus was okay with people being thieves and prostitutes? And what has that got to do with homosexuality?
And you may well be right. The point is that if you are, you then have no need of the “You don’t have to do that, you just have to love God” argument. That’s all.
Well, good for you. I did put a smiley in there to indicate that I knew I was over-simplifying the matter.
I’m unaware that homosexuality has any impact whatsoever on fertility rates. Presumably you mean reproductive rates? Well, here’s the problem: any time a heritable trait exists at a more or less constant rate over time, it is by definition not an evolutionary drawback, regardless of the reproductive rates of the individuals with the trait. It doesn’t matter if they themselves pass on their genes. All that matters is that those genes make it into the next generation somehow or other. We don’t have any very substantial data on the prevalence of homosexuality through the ages, but there’s no evidence I know of that so much as suggests that it’s becoming less common. Are you suggesting that? If homosexuality’s not becoming less common, then to the extent that it is heritable, it’s not an evolutionary drawback. That’s not up for debate. That’s a tautology given what ‘evolutionary drawback’ means.
I wonder if he thinks that non-reproductive indivuduals are a drawback simply because they don’t reproduce. This is flawed in a couple of ways. First, because it is by no means a given that homosexuals will not reproduce. It happens all the time. More significantly, evolutionary advantages can affect entire populations, not just individuals and as a matter of fact it is easy to point at examples of species where most individuals do not reproduce but work instead for the advantage of the community. Ants and bees, for instance.
Hm… I understand that you’ve decided to abstain from engaging in debate (which is what I usually do too), but I was wondering if you know where in the Bible Matthew says all that, cause I honestly just don’t remember that. A quick glance at the different gospel accounts of Matthew’s calling didn’t offer anything remotely close to that. I’m not trying to challenge you, I’m just honestly curious.
I don’t believe that the people who followed Jesus suddenly stopped sinning; all people sin, and that is a fact of life. What Jesus did was not say that these sins are okay or excusable, and I don’t believe that most liberal Christians would argue that he did. I also don’t think that anyone has ever suggested that Jesus “hung out with prostitutes because sinners are more fun.” What we say is that we are all sinners, and therefore equal in the eyes of God, and therefore no-one should ever be excluded from the church or from the community of God simply because they sin.
Even so, I don’t see how this involves homosexuality. “Love your God and love your neighbor” are the commandments to follow, and I can’t imagine how homosexuality breaks those commandments in any way. Loving God and loving our neighbor does not excuse sin, but there should be some logical reason why two men kissing would defy God or go against our neighbor, and I can’t see it. The logical reason is apparent in just about everything else we typically condemn as sinful, like murder, kidnapping, stealing, adultery, etc. Many may feel that Paul offers an explanation in Romans, but a close reading in context shows that Paul does not condemn homosexuality; rather he condemns idol worship and turning away from God and how this leads to homosexual practices. Since there are plenty of Christians who are gay, I can’t see this as being particularly applicable to the issues we’re talking about.
Anyway, I hate participating in these discussions myself, so I’m going back to my cave and lurk around again…
As a possible reference to lesbianism, this has always seemed pretty weak. At this time, there was no concept of sexuality and “gayness” and no reason to associate the sex acts of women on women with those of men on men. This passage could just as easily be describing sodomy: men sodomizing women, men sodomizing each other.
As with most rewritings of morality, the NT revisions seem particularly implausible in light of the fact that God in the OT not only establishes a “code” (which Christians denigrate in what can only be a retcon of the OT, not a continuity), but peppers it with phrases like “that is abomination” and “that disgusts God.” It seems pretty implausible that something which once made god puke would now be hunkydory just because Paul had a dream about how much he loved shellfish.
No, it is probably a commonly occurring mistake, like cancer is a mistake of cell reproduction. The fact that it is traditionally taboo in many cultures, and since the social expectation of marriage and reproduction is so strong, makes the effect of this mistake extremely difficult to isolate.
But if a homosexual orientation makes a person have same-gender sex by preference, and since same-gender sex can never produce offspring, then to the degree that homosexual orientation is genetically determined (the evidence for this is fairly ambiguous) then homosexuality is selecting against itself.
And therefore there needs to be some kind of evidence for this speculation about how homosexuals are involved in baby-sitting and so forth. But you probably already knew that.
Well, maybe in your opinion.
Regards,
Shodan
For a sec, I thought this thread was about Jared Diamond’s latest book.
Not necessarily. See below
No, that’s incorrect. Alleles can provide benefit to individuals in some combinations even if they reduce the reproductive success of other individuals who have different combinations of the alleles. A simple example that we all know about is the sickle cell allele that provides reseistance to malaria when an individual has only a single copy.
But it can be much more complex even than that. There could well be multiple genes involved in sexual oriantation, and those genes could have other functions as well. Certain combinations of those alleles could provide increased reproductive success to some individuals even if they result in some offspring being attracted to the same sex, thus providing a mechanism for those “gay genes” to remain in the gene pool. Keep in mind, too, that although there is almost certainly a genetic component to “gayness”, it’s unlikely to be solely controlled by an individual’s genes-- the twin studies done to date indicate only about a 50% heritability.
You’re making the incorrect assumption that there is a one-to-one mapping between genes and traits, but we know that genes often control more than one trait, and that certain traits are controlled by more than one gene.
I’ve debunked the Romans passage as a condemnation of homosexuality multiple times on this board. It;s a passage where Paul is describing the consequences of idolotry. Paul claims that people became hedonistic and turned away from their “phusin” relations with their spouses and burned with “para phusin” lust for each other. The words phusin and para phusinfor are usually misleadingly translated as “natural” and “unnatural,” but the actual Greek usage pf phusin only denotes manifest characteristics, not some sort of innate moral “purpose.” That is, it refers to characteristics which are observable in an individual. It has no teleological or moral implications. Paul says, for instance, that it is phusin for men to have short hair. In Romans 11:24, Paul even use para phusin to refer a (metaphorical) act of God.
Romans 1 is an oft thumped Biblical “proof passage” that God hate homos but really, the pasage does not say that the people are bad because they were having gay sex, it says they were having gay sex because they worshoped idols. It’s idolotry that’s being condemned, not the Gay.
I agree with most of the rest of your post, but I think you’re overreaching here. “Phusin” can refer to usinversal moral law, so to speak. For example, for Musonius Rufus, marriage is kata phusin. Pedarasty is para phusin For Philo, also, pedarasty is para phusin.
In fact, for the Stoic, what’s phusin almost always has moral implications.
As a counter point, and for the benefit of any interested lurkers, I would submit that Diogenes did anything but “debunk” it. Far from it.
In fact, this board—at least in the last 4 years—has never had a comprehensive discussion of what the bible has to say about homosexuality. Never.
This is not an indictment of the SDMB, or the denizens here. On the contrary. The problem associated with such a discussion is that there are a handful of texts that speak directly, or apparently so, to the issue of homosexuality.
From there, there are valid ancillary discussions like The law of Moses (and it’s appliciability), The New Covenent, The Law of the Christ, Paul and his relative merit as a spokesman for Christ and others.
And so almost every conversation contains elements of all these issues. The result is that the conversations lose focus and become splintered. It is also a quality of a message board that “everyone is talking at once.”
In my view, Diogenes was at his very best in a discussion we had about hell , in that he stripped away a thousand years of tradtion and correctly—once again in my view—revealed the popular version of a burning hell more as a product of Dante than the bible.
In my view, he is guilty of the exact same crime as it relates to the bible’s view of homosexuality. But rather than blind credulity to dusty tradition, he bows at the altar at 20th century liberal theologians. (and often seems blind to the effect of humanism on modern Christianity)
Paul wrote in clear unambiguous language. The account in question is in clear language. Further, Paul did in fact write about idolotry—but this account is not about idolotry. This hop skip and a jump logic that magically transforms his clear words from a condemnation of homosexual behavior to one of idolotry isn’t supported by the immediate account (anywhere) without imputing both words and meaning that the author didn’t share with us. Further, it isn’t supported contextually by Paul’s other writings. It isn’t supportd by the bible writers and historians in the few hundred years after Paul, nor scholars in the 1900 years that followed.
This is a modern creation by theologians and others who have a clear agenda. It’s intellectual gymnastics. This is not about faith, or how one practices one’s faith.
It’s what the bible has to say in this account. What you do with that information, or how it plays out in a person’s life is up to them. And this account is clear in it’s condemnation of homosexual behavior.
As always, don’t get you knowledge from an internet message board. (including from me)
Read it for yourself.