Oh, no, loving someone won’t damn anyone. But Jesus was never erally all that supportive of sex, regardless of whom it was with. You are free to platonically love anyone you want, though.
Like I implied, love != sex.
There are quite a number of homosexually-inclined priests. I’m afraid there will never be an exact number. Personally, I admire people who can take up the mantle of priest. It can be a hard burden, but y’know, you’re never really alone. There are always peope to talk to and help and places to go.
Actually I don’t recall Jesus saying all that much about sex. Seems like Paul and St. Augustine did most of the talking there.
And, as I said, the priesthood or celibacy is a special calling not gifted or meant for everyone, heterosexual or homosexual. I am one of those who has not been called to such a life. Attempting to force me through guilt trips is a very low tactic indeed, yet that seems to be what the Church is doing.
Basically, homosexuals are pretty much the exact same as heterosexuals, except with different sexual preferences. They basically just want to be treated equally. If someone has an illness, but was basically the same as everyone else, wouldn’t you treat them the same? I’m not suggesting that homosexuality is an illness, it’s just that no matter what differences people have from each other, they still want to be treated with the same amount of respect as everyone else. Nothing should change the way we treat other people.
Discriminating against homosexuals is just like being racist. Homosexuals can’t help being the way they are, just like you can’t help what race you are. Sexuality is not something you can change. You can try, but I have found in all cases that you cannot successfully go against your own nature. Being who you feel you must be is a part of life, and you can’t change who you are.
In partial support of Unu Mondo’s comment (and I do disagree with much of it – both the priesthood and celibacy are charisms that being gay does not automatically give one! – let me point out Fr. Mychal Judge, priest, Franciscan friar, recovering alcoholic, IMHO a man in whom the light of Christ shines out, and whose “cause” for sainthood is being advanced. He identified as “gay” in the same sense that our gay members do – his natural attractions were predominantly to other men – and lived a celibate life that he was vowed to. But he was a strong supporter of many gay groups around NYC, along with a number of other things he espoused.
You’re confusing the issue. I was asking for people who have voluntarily become celibate to conform with the Catholic church’s recommendations regarding homosexuality not because it was a job requirement.
As others have pointed out, you really ought to have a calling for the priesthood before joing rather than doing it because it’s a way of enforcing celibacy.
Isn’t fornication part of the homosexual lifestyle? Fornication is a sin, and you’ll find it thur throughout the Bible (which you don’t believe in, so why do I bother?).
THE TOPIC: I don’t want or expect anything from homosexuals. You can take that up with God when you meet him.
Depends on how you define fornication. If its sex outside of marriage, then yes of course. We aren’t allowed that holy sacrament.
If you mean sex outside of a commited relationship, then no. A decent number of young men do sleep around, in all honesty, but thats more a factor of being male than being gay. Lesbians have a higher rate of commited relationships than both gay men and heterosexual couples.
Oh and I believe in Jesus and God. I believe Jesus’ message of love is sacred, and thus so are much of the Gospels. The Old Testament is, as others have mentioned, an old covenant. It is useful as a tool of learning, but not sacred. The Epistles, again, have wholly human origins, and thus can not to my mind be considered sacrosanct. Many of these humans were wise people in their time, and much of that wisdom can be carried over to the present, but they were still fallible humans.
Priam,
“Depends on how you define fornication. If its sex outside of marriage, then yes of course. We aren’t allowed that holy sacrament. If you mean sex outside of a commited relationship, then no.”
So, legally, you are engaged in fornication, which you imply, since you are homosexual (well, I think you are homosexual).
How did we get from “marriage” to “a commited relationship”? They are not the same, are they? No. They are not the same.
There are no laws enforced about fornication anymore, so I dunno whether I qualify under the legal definition. As well, the failure of this country to recognize my right to marry is hardly my fault. Plus, some churches do provide commitment ceremonies that are, in a religious sense, just as binding as a marriage. They simply can’t call it that because the state has a hand in the latter.
I believe that a marriage is in the heart, between two people who hold great love for eachother. A ceremony is simply the announcement and recognition of that bond. Thus, a commited relationship of years is a marriage to my mind. Whether the government says yea or nay means nothing.
Does having a sexual identity imply that one is having sexual relations? Not all heterosexuals have sex, not all homosexuals have sex, not all bisexuals have sex, so on and so forth.
As for marriage, is there not the possibility that a civil marriage could be redefined to include marriages of two women to each other, or two men to each other?
Thought Police, how do you define “marriage”? And why do you define it the way you do?
I’ve used “committed (or ‘covenanted’) lifelong relationship” a number of times as a euphemism for “a state in which what the parties to it mean by it is the commitment of marriage but which the state or a given church refuses to regard as ‘marriage’ as they define it.” The two women at my church who pledged to each other vows effectively identical to those my wife and I pledged, who received the marriage blessing from the priest performing the service, and who have lived in grace ever since, including adopting and raising two little girls, one with major special needs, are married in my eyes and, I believe, in God’s. What the state laws of North Carolina and persons feeling themselves privileged to define who can marry in their opinion are irrelevant to the actual state of what their relationship is.
For those of you interested in the classic Plessy v. Ferguson analogy, former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean makes a case in an interview in the current Advocate that Vermont civil unions are separate but, by law and by definition, truly equal, and that going for the term “marriage” to cover them was impolitic in the sense that “politics is the art of the possible.”
Polycarp,
I would define marriage as the Bible does. The verse has already been referred to about a man and a woman, etc. (I believe Tracer refers to it above). That’s the Bible. Ignore it if you please. You do have free will.
(Footnote: The fact that your “priest” [whatever that term means] gave 2 homosexuals some kind of “marriage blessing” is irrelevant to the laws of God Almighty.)
Ah, so you believe that His4Ever is living in adultery these days? (I don’t.) Because Jesus was not talking about what constitutes a valid marriage, but about divorce and the tendency of some Jewish men to put away their old wives and take younger, prettier wives that stirred up their libidos.
My “priest” is, FYI, a minister of the Gospel in the Episcopal Church, ordained to the order of the priesthood by a bishop in the Apostolic Succession. I consider “‘priest’ [whatever that term means]” to be an insult to my beliefs. And I agree with this:
Because she could only have done that if it was in accord with God’s Laws, and we find the key point in Matthew 22:34-40 and the parallel passages in Mark and Luke. That is where you find the “laws of God Almighty” summarized by Him Who is God the Son incarnate, and the command on how you are supposed to treat others. For me to indulge in legalistic pilpul on whether what MrVisible and his life partner feel and intend towards each other corresponds to what God commanded Adam and Eve prior to the Fall is failure on my part to keep God’s second most important commandment.
1.Who is “His4ever”?
2.Matt. 22:34-40 does not invalidate the other commandments of Jesus the Christ. You know that.
3.John 14:15. “If you love Me, you will obey what I command.”
The laws of Yahweh on sodomy are VERY clear in the Bible. If you love the Lord your God, you will obey Him. It really is that simple.
Again, we all sin. We must not, however, remain in (“practice”) sin. Your homosexual acts are gross rebellion against God, according to His word (regardless of what your “priest” tells you).
Come Judgment Day, you won’t be able to say, “But the priest said it was okay, and I got her blessing!” You and I are accountable to God; your so-called “priest” will not be able to help you on that day.
I wish you would repent of your abomination, but it appears you will twist the Scriptures to meet your choosen lifestyle. Free will is great; a wonderful gift from God. However, many choose the wrong path. I am truly sorry for you.
Not everyone who stands staunchly in favor of homosexual rights is gay, and some of our finest advocates are straight people. Poly, from what I know of him, is happily married, and to a person of the opposite gender.
Personally, I’m an agnostic homosexual. I don’t have much use for religions; my relationship with God is my own business. I think God can be perceived in the world a lot better than he can be seen through the pages of a book.
Come the day of my judgement, if that’s how it works, I will stand before my creator, and tell them that I loved a man, I loved him well, we made each others’ lives joyful and happy and complete. We healed each other, we helped each other to become better people, we worked through our problems together, we worked to make sure our families and friends were happy, we worked together to make our community a better place. Most of all, we loved each other.
And if he condemns me because we had the wrong genders, and sends me to hell for loving someone, I’ll know that god was never worthy of respect, let alone worship.
Meanwhile, you’re going to have to go up before God, and explain why you call people abominations for loving each other.
YAWN More Fundamentalist drivel. Can’t you guys come up with something more original than the usual line about “God’ll getcha for that nasty homosexual stuff if you don’t change your evil ways!”
Thoughtpolice your act is nothing more than faint imitation of Fred Phelps.
His4Ever is a woman who posted here regularly, who is reducing her presence to a minimum for stress management reasons. She takes the effectively-literalist stance on homosexuality as sin, but for quite good reasons is now in a healthy and blessed third marriage, having divorced her first two husbands. A number of us who believe in a God not of inexorable Law but of grace and mercy have used the conflict between this and what Jesus says in the cited passage as an example of how the Bible must be read in context and with an eye to His mercy rather than the letter of the Law, and have suggested to her that her stance ought to be one of extending the same mercy to gay men and women, a point with which she disagrees, for reasons I don’t feel competent to present from her POV adequately.
Right. What it does is provide a touchstone, as exemplified by His own actions, for how one is to behave under them. And most emphatically, that means that whatever I may think about another’s actions, I am not to stand in judgment over him or her and thunder “The Bible says…” and call him or her an abomination before God. Or He will judge me as I have the temerity to judge others.
Right. And what is it that He commands? “This is my commandment: love one another, even as I have loved you.” (John 15:12)
I couldn’t agree more. God condemns fornication – the gratification of lust in sexual intercourse for personal pleasure and sometimes for domination of another. And he condemns sodomy – the gratification of lust by “alternative sex acts” for personal pleasure and smetimes for domination of another.
And just as the first does not apply to the lovemaking of a married couple, neither does the second.
First off, I am in a quite happy heterosexual marriage, and feel no more than the normal temptation to sin against the commitment I’ve given my wife, a temptation I find easy to combat. Second, I am the judge of only one man’s sinfulness, and he looks me in the mirror each morning. It’s my task as a Christian to call people to follow Him, not to judge them of their sins, to help them to live a healthy and blessed life in Him as He has created and called them. And I am firmly convinced that He has called me to speak of His love to both Christians and gay people, to help overcome the barriers that have grown up between them thanks to comments like yours and the judgmentalism over Christians expressed in contraposition to such attitudes by many gay people.
You know what? I am quite willing to take the chance that doing what I feel my Lord calling me to do will be seen in His eyes as an attempt to follow Him, even if I should (as I probably have) made some mistakes along the way. And you will make absolutely no
more disparaging remarks about the clergy of my church in Great Debates. You’re privileged to believe what you want about the clergy of my church – but I have asked you to stop slamming them, and I’m now telling you to do so. I will consider the next comment of that sort to be an intentional personal insult.
Nice job judging me. I am not interested in “twisting the Scriptures” but in reading them in accordance with the will of a God who inspired the Gospels and Who created a world in which some people are born gay. The abomination that needs to be repented of here is the Neopharisaism that decides what someone else’s sins are (erroneously, in this particular case) and condemns them. You, sir, like myself and the other participants in this thread, are a sinner, saved only through the grace of God. It behooves us to treat our fellow men as our brothers and sisters, deserving of our love and not our self-righteousness.