Grrrrr. Forgot to reset the cookies again – now that there are three of us posting from one computer, things are getting confusing.
For the record, the above post by matt_mcl should be by Hamish.
The site I cited above suggested that the distinction of the Holiness Code into ceremonial, civil, and moral is arbitrary, and not based in anything in the Bible. There’s also the suggestion that the verses in question are refering to homosexuality strictly in the sense of “temple prostitution,” common among the Greeks, suggested by the Hebrew word “Qadesh.”
As I asked above, have you heard this argument before? How do you feel about it?
But why do you feel marriage is between a man and a woman? It’s my understanding that the Christianity, through most of its history, was uncomfortable with marriage in general – people “didn’t marry in heaven,” and “it was better to marry than to burn.” So marriage was, from the get-go, a sort of compromise – and if it was a compromise with lust from the beginning, why should it only be a compromise with heterosexual desire?
Sometimes I hear the argument that marriage is only between a man and a woman because marriage is for procreation and the raising of children. But that doesn’t make sesne because no one would argue with infertile heterosexual couples marrying.
The historian John Boswell makes a good argument that both the medieval Church and the Orthodox Church were performing what could be called “gay marriage” until the 13th century.
And this is where we come to the crux of this thread. Disease and poverty are such obvious ills. Religion and sexual orientation are not.
In my own faith, the tradition I follow in Wicca, we never seek converts, though converts (so long as they’re serious) are welcome. Largely, this is because we learn that no one path is right for everyone. There are some people who belong in the various Christian traditions, they ought to be there, just so long as they don’t feel forced to be there. Being a polytheist, I have absolutely no problem with the concept of many paths to the divine.
My grandmother, who is Baha’i, feels the same way – her faith teaches that all manifestations of the divine are equally-valid extensions of the same sacred force. I also know Christians(probably in defiance of Scripture) who either do not believe in hell, or believe that whether or not you reach heaven depends entirely on “good works” – faith in God isn’t necessary.
Granted, it took me a long time to reach happiness, and I’ve counselled more than a few people who were very unhappy after they came out – but I lay blame with any generalized unhappiness among openly gay people on other people’s reactions, other people’s mistreatment of us, and on the myths and attitudes we absorb about us. And very often, that mistreatment has its source in the less-tolerant branches of Christianity.
To one of my questions, you answered you would forbid your child to be friends with someone who was gay. This happened to me in high school – for six months, my closest friend had to sneak out of his house to see me. What his mother didn’t know was that her son was also gay – he was so scared of her reaction, that he ran away from home and moved to another city rather than come out to her.
That mother’s decision created plenty of unhappiness for both of us – and she came to this decision because of her religious convictions. That’s why the “I’d-like-gays-to-be-straight-because-they’d-be-happier” argument falls flat for me – because the people making it are usually the ones who are making it hard for us to be happy. It’s creating a problem in order to solve it.
I think promoting tolerance is a far better way to ensure happiness. Trying to get people to “become” straight, or ostracizing them, is just going to leave people with emotional scars.
In Luke 6 Jesus is not condemning bankers, he is saying that it is more virtuous to give money than to lend it. Bankers are providing a service. It is their right to charge a fee for this service. Just as those who grow food charge a fee for this service. Jesus tells us to be charitable and generous. This does not preclude people from earning a living from the services they provide.
The analogy between homosexuality and usury is a poor one. There are several passages in the new testament which make clear that homosexuality is a sin, while there is nothing about usury.
Oh, it wasn’t my desire to exclude anyone, and your position on these things helps.
From my understanding of the New Testement – admittedly an outsider’s perspective – your views make the most sense to me. I started this thread to try and make at least some sense of those views I’ve heard so-often repeated from the other camp.
It also helps to have your voice here, because for the first few years after I came out as gay, I wouldn’t associate with anyone who condiered her- or himself Christian. My childhood neighbourhood was made up primarily of fundamentalist Baptists, Pentecostals, and Jehovah’s Witnesses, and it’s from these people that I drew my first conclusions about Christianity. I’d simply assumed that all Christians were foaming-at-the-mouth homophobes. I hadn’t yet met liberal Christians. I suspect there’s probably a few posters reading this who have the same prejudices I had.
I also suspect there’s a few L/B/G/T – and maybe a few of my fellow Wiccan – posters out there who think I’m wasting my time with this. Our experiences with evangelical Christians tend to be very scary, and the usual portrayal of these people in either of my communities are either something like unthinking unzombies, or rabid animals. However, I’m uncomfortable, ethically, with either portrayal. I prefer to consider all people to be thinking human beings, capable of considering their motives and their actions. I felt it would be healthier to talk to them, rather than just shout past them.
Thank you.
**
Jujubes – that has to be it – I couldn’t get enough of those things when I was a kid 
Seriously, though, I once very concerned about the origins. It was once very important for me to figure “why am I gay?” because I sensed it was inborn, and hoped that if science proved it, people would be more open-minded about me.
I’m a little more cynical about this line of research these days. I’ve already heard some of the anti-gay types talking about how a “gay gene” would be like a “cancer gene.” Besides, the Nazis were also convinced homosexuality was genetic, and it doesn’t seem to have helped anyone there.
It’s more important for me now to make my arguments for tolerance from a point of view of ethics, not biology. Biology now sounds self-loathing to me – “Pity me! I can’t help it!”
I have heard the arguement about temple prostition being banned and not homosexuality but I found it unconvincing. If a distinction between prostitution was meant it could have been stated explicitly. There were homosexuals back then and if what they were doing was okay the passages would have been clear so as to avoid confusion. Those who seek to justify their behavior will go to any length to contort scripture to agree with them. The plain meaning is clear and anyone who reads them without preconceptions will know what is meant by the passages about homosexuality.
Marriage was created by God, it is not a compromise but a divine plan for the raising of children and the experience of love. Marriage has always been between a man and woman because that is the way it was created. Humans have always sought sexual pleasure outside of marriage and it has always been sinful. The thought that the medieval church performed gay marriages is a deliberate misreading and sexualization of what occured, it is not a serious arguement.
If two philosophies hold mutually contradictory tenets, one of them most be untrue. Jesus was either the son of God or he was not. If he was Christianity is correct and other religions are incorrect. If he was not than Christianity is incorrect and some other religion is correct. Wicca and Christianity can not both be true.
I would forbid my child to have homosexual friends just as I would forbid my child to have friends who are drug users, thieves, or any one who habitually engages in any sin. Perhaps if your high school friend did not know you he would have made other choices with his life.
Perhaps the unhappiness you notice in the gay people around you are a result of societal attitudes toward gays. But it has been my experience that happiness has more to do with the choices a person makes and the kind of person they are. There are many societies where being a Christian makes one subject to all kinds of harassment and discrimination, such a imprisonment and violence. Yet those who are Christians in these societies are very happy and at peace with who they are. If those unhappy gay people became reconciled to God they might feel the peace and joy that accompanies the Christian life.
And I also would encourage the gay community to do the same. Actually, in Esprix’s thread about “Love the Christian, hate Christianity” which I recently revived (much to Esprix’s chagrin ;), sorry about that ) due to following it from a crosslink or two and never seeing before, I mentioned the exact thing in a response to your take on the California ban of same-sex marriage. You mentioned the Church’s that were in favor of the ban, but not the ones who opposed it. The gay community would help both us moderate and liberal Christians and themselves if they to would voice the fact that there are Church groups that support them. We need support from the gay community just as much as they need support from us if things are going to change.
On a side anecdote, Eve’s introduction to mangetout reminded me of a skit from the Neo-Futurists theater group’s show Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind that I saw five years ago. (For those of you unfamiliar with this show, they do 30 skits in 60 minutes.) One of the skits was called “The Introduction” or something such as that. It consisted of a female cast member asking the audience for a show of hands of how many of them did not know an openly gay person. About 5 or 10% of the people raised their hands. Then one of the cast members came out and said “Hello, my name is <insert cast member name here>.” End of skit. I thought it was a rather clever idea myself.
Well, I’ve spent over 300 posts on the Pizza Parlor banging my head against the wall on several of the topics you highlighted. So, yes, I’ve heard their counter-arguements. But, IMHO, their counter-arguements boil down to “lalalalalalala I can’t hear you”.
Ok, facetiousness out of the way, mostly they accuse us of deceitfully trying to find a way around “obvious” prohibitions to justify our sin. They typically fall back on a pat “I’m not convinced” statement and resort to “God created Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve”.
Here’s a variety of responses:
Avoidance of the question:
Stubborn denial of evidence:
nitpicking grammar that would do TheRyan proud:
appeal to authority:
BTW, here’s another good link http://www.glsengreensboro.org/jonathan_walker.htm
Then on preview, I notice that puddleglum has invoked nearly all of the examples I’ve given.
**puddleglum wrote:
Those who seek to justify their behavior will go to any length to contort scripture to agree with them. **
Oh, the irony! 
Yow, Puddle—so many issues to address, completely aside from my own ickiness!
• Humans have always sought sexual pleasure outside of marriage and it has always been sinful.
—Nope. It has always been CONSIDERED sinful by your particular religion. Big difference.
• I would forbid my child to have homosexual friends just as I would forbid my child to have friends who are drug users, thieves, or any one who habitually engages in any sin.
—That is so sad, and the best way to make enemies and liars of your own children. If one of your children turns out to be gay, what would you do?
• . . . But it has been my experience that happiness has more to do with the choices a person makes and the kind of person they are.
—I guess allll the evidence about sexual attraction not being a “cjoice” doesn’t cut much ice with you? Did you “choose” to be straight?
• If those unhappy gay people became reconciled to God they might feel the peace and joy that accompanies the Christian life.
—As this is GD and not the Pit, I will just whistle quiety to myself and stroll over to the “submit reply” button . . .
Well, yeah.
But, Mr. Marshwiggle, you and your ilk seem determined to put every obstacle you can in their way – in direct contravention of Christ’s own command.
So you would willingly put your child among the Goats at the Last Judgment? “Inasmuch as you have done it unto one of the least of these…” (which I would read as someone with any besetting sin, including, by your definition, a homosexual orientation)
I notice that others have seized on this bit, but…
And I fear that my original question still stands: how does being gay stop people being reconciled to God? Because I don’t see any answer beyond “well, that’s the way it is” in your post, puddleglum, and I am unable to reconcile that answer with the concept of God as Perfect Love.
I keep flashing back many years, to a conversation I had with a dear friend. We were both bemoaning our lack of romantic success; I described to him, in detail, my yearnings for the current unattainable object of my desires, and he did the same for his. The unattainable object, in my case, was female; in his case, was male.
I felt then, and feel now, that our situations were exactly comparable. I don’t suppose either of us, driven by our desires, was giving any particular thought to God at that time, so, I suppose we were both in a state of sin. But was my friend’s sin inherently worse than mine? Was his desire unforgivable in a way that mine was not? I can’t see that.
It’s a good thing Jesus wasn’t your child.
This is not necessarily true. My understanding is that the literal translation of “qadesh” is “holy one” or “someone set aside for a holy purpose.” It could be that it was seen as a form of idolatry – suggested by the word for abomination (“to’ebah”). Anyway, if translated literally, the passage in I Kings 14:24 would become “And there were also holy ones in the land: and they did according to all the idolatries of the nations which the Lord cast out before the children of Israel.”
The passage makes no sense literally – as if God is condemning “holy” people. You have to take the passage in context – the difference between your view and my view is how much context to apply.
It’s not surprising the ancient Israelites would condemn temple prostitution – firstly, it was a fundamentally pagan institution, and secondly, it was sex in the temple – very unclean.
It may well be that no one thought to mention monogamous homosexual relationships because the situation wasn’t likely to come up. I once met a gay guy whose family had emigrated from rural Malaysia, and his most difficult task coming out to his parents was to explain the concept of homosexuality to them. They’d never heard of anything like it. For them, life had been a struggle for survival – no leisure time to stop and think about who you are – marriages were arranged, life was pretty desperate, and people thought more about food than about sex. Perhaps the ancient Israelites were the same.
As to the first point, the early Church’s ambivalence towards marriage is well-documented. Complete celibacy was considered the ideal life, marriage filled the halfway-point between that and promiscuity. I Cornithians 7 was taken to support this view. This is why the Church demanded celibacy of its priests, and why marriage was not even a sacrament until 1215.
Interestingly, the Old Testament not only allows for marriage, but for polygamy and divorce. So while the institution exists there, it’s very different from modern marriage.
The second point – medieval gay marriage – is much more controversial. Until recently, Boswell was alone in his views, but his theories are steadily growing in respectibility. I recently read Sam-sex Unions in Premodern Europe, and though very I was very skeptical, he managed to convince me. Boswell’s very careful about not making statements he can’t back up, with more than one source.
His book is a very scolarly treatise the “adelphopoiesis” ceremony, literally a “brother-making.” The ceremony does not appear to be a form of adoption or a commemoration of friendship, it mimics contemporary heterosexual marriage ceremonies, and it was eventually discontinued, in Western Europe at least, as “immoral.” The ceremony was refused to monks, along with heterosexual marriage. Since “brother-making” was one way the Greeks described homosexual unions, and since “fraternal adoption” was used by the Romans to legitimize male couples, Boswell theorizes that the ceremony was a Christian continuation of the Pagan tradition, which only vanished as the Church started become more conservative. Boswell cites the life of King Basil I of the Byzantine Empire, who twice married other men through the “adelphopoiesis” ceremony, men with whom his contemporary and modern biographers admit he was sexually involved.
Boswell admits that the evidence is scanty – we know so little about the erotic life of medieval people – but his research steadily and systematically eliminates all the other possibilities. It is a very “serious” theory. Boswell is a professor of history at Yale – not proof of anything in and of itself, but we’re not talking wild Internet-speculaltion here. He spent about a decade researching sources, including going from monastery to monastery around the Mediterranean, examining manuscripts, looking at artwork, reading saints-legends and histories.
But at this point, I’m practically hijacking my own thread 
I can’t agree with you on this one. I tend to believe that the Christian God exists, but that his claims to exclusivity, omnipotence, and to having creating the universe are wildly exagerrated.
For us, it’s not so much of an either/or thing.
But another thread might be more appropriate for a debate on thealogy versus theology.
No, he had discovered himself already on his own, before we met.
I realize a lot of evangelical Christians think of homosexuality as a disease that spreads.
It’s a strange attitude. I didn’t meet any gays/lesbians/bisexuals – or at least none that had come out to themselves – until months after I’d come out myself. And I didn’t come out to myself until after five years (age 11 to 16) of trying to turn myself straight. Before age 11, I’d been developing schoolboy crushs on guys, but it was only then that I realized that other boys weren’t. The closest thing I had to a gay influence on my life were reruns of Three’s Company :rolleyes:
Four years of sex education never mentioned homosexuality, and the only information I could find said it was always just a phase. When I came out, it seemed I was the only one in the world. After I lost most of my friends by coming out, I looked for “my kind”, if you will. Bastian, the friend I mentioned, was the first I met.
The idea that a child with straight parents, straight siblings, straight aunts and uncles, hearing about straight sex and seeing straight sex on TV, reading about straight relationships, going to straight weddings – the idea of that child, becoming gay the moment they meet a gay man or a lesbian – well, let’s just say it’s very flattering to think people believe we and our lives are so attractive.
I think people who hold this view ought to ask themselves why they think our lives are so attractive, why they think that people would flock to our community at the slightest opportunity.
Sometimes people do come out after meeting one of us – not surprising at all. A lot of people had never considered it a possibility – had considered themselves “diseased” until they met one of us, and realized the “disease” is just another trait, like eye or hair colour. And like eye or hair colour, we can cover these things, but we can’t change them at the core.
I agree with you on one thing – happiness has a lot to do with the choices people make. It’s one of the reasons why people come out – when you think about it, there’s nothing material to be gained from a choice like that – we risk family, friends, job, and home to be honest. Why do we do it? To be honest, to be happy – to not have to cut ourselves away from the people we love – the inner reward outweighs the material losses.
But I don’t think anyone can say goodbye forever to someone they love – because that person refuses to accept them – and not feel sad. That’s only human.
You mention reconciling to God – which is an idea that, among Christians, seems to take different forms. I’m guessing there’s a reason congregations who are accepting of gays and lesbians refer to themselves as “reconciling.”
Biblical and religious scholars have been debating these things for centuries, but thank you for clearing all that up - who knew you were the one with The Truth[sup]TM[/sup] all along? (Sorry, mate, but there is no - and never will be, IMHO, - “plain meaning” to just about anything in the Bible.)
As was already asked, what about those couples that cannot or choose not to bear children? And what about the fact that love between two men or two women is every bit as deep, meaningful and profound as love between a man and a woman?
It’s these kinds of responses that grate on people’s nerves - “Really, now, certainly we know what’s better for you…” :rolleyes:
According to Christianity, that is.
Have you read the work in question? Dismissing it without verifying its accuracies is fairly high-handed of you.
This Unitarian Universalist most wholeheartedly disagrees.
He made him gay? 
Absolutely, and I’m the happiest homo you’ll ever meet.
Bwahahahahahahahahaha!
{ahem}
Thanks, but no thanks. :rolleyes:
Esprix
This UU will also stand up with Esprix and say that Christianity and Wiccanism are not incompatible.
Heck, I’ve even convinced my mother of that.
(Big Zen Hugs to Spree, Poly et al)
**I tend to believe that the Christian God exists, but that his claims to exclusivity, omnipotence, and to having creating the universe are wildly exagerrated.
**
So you do not believe in some of the fundamental tenets of Christianity. I do. One of us must be wrong. Either God created the world or he did not, Either there is one God or there is not, Either he is omnipotent or he is not.
I was not intimating that you made your friend gay but that if he had received help instead of encouragement than maybe he would have made different choices in his life.
I would want my offspring to surrond themselves with friends who are good influences and will encourage them to live a pure life. It is not that I think that they could catch anything.
I understand why people come out and why people sin in general. If sin were not tempting no one would do it.
If God decides to let gay people into Heaven, are you comming?
Tris
It is exactly this kind of “Christian” that Hamish is speaking of. By this quote (emphases mine), we need help, chose wrong, are bad and impure.
What I wouldn’t give to be a fly on the wall when you meet your god - I’ll bet he’ll have an earful for you!
Esprix
This is actually one reason why I’m convinced being gay is not a sin. My moral code growing up was largely based on the stereotypical Judeo-Christian one.
Let me tell you, just about every one of those things that would be labeled sin according to that ethic has crossed my mind as tempting in some way.
However, being gay has never tempted me in the least. I have no desire to experiment sexually with another guy. I don’t find men sexually attractive in the least. (No offense meant to you other males out there.)
(Though, I do admit I do find some guys better looking than others, but that’s from an appreciation of the beauty in the human form, not from anything sexual.)
I’m happy with sticking to women (well, actually my wife) as the recipient of any of my romantic and sexual actions.
So, puddlegum, if sin is by definition tempting, do you find yourself tempted to have sex with other men?