Oh, but of course. And I’m glad to hear it went well for you, and it does go well for many others all the time.
While the belief subsists, however, it is a homophobic belief.
Found some info on how to agitate…
Contact the Shelby County Department of Human Services in Tennessee at <number deleted --Giraffe> to report the abuse and neglect that is happening to Zach. They will be mandated to do an investigation.
Contact the Administrator for Shelby County Antionette Holman (<email deleted --Giraffe>) at the Department of Human Services and tell her why you think Zach’s case should be investigated.
Contact the media in Memphis, Tennessee and tell them how you feel.
They are already investigating.
It’s already been on the local news at least a few times a week for the past month. Don’t know if your methods will work any more than they already are.
I dunno. Maybe I’m a collaborator here. But I know people - in fact, I have good friends - whose religious beliefs are such that they think being gay is wrong. And yet we manage to be friends.
I’m not friends with anyone who would condemn me for it. I’m not friends with anyone who would try to get me “fixed” - I think most people I know are pretty clear on the fact that it’s not a behavior that easily changes. Nevertheless, it’s valid to read the Bible and see that in the text.
Of course, most people I know who think being gay is sinful recognize that, according to the Bible, all of humanity is sinful. Maybe it’s not your typical Fundamentalist Christian who can be fine with the fact that a good friend isn’t religious at all, but once you’ve gotten past that, being gay isn’t a big issue. I think people can respectfully disagree on things - even big ones - without it being necessary for one person to condemn the other.
The usual response is the “hate the sin, love the sinner” line, and I don’t see why nobody would be able to do so…
Why so? If it were true, then you’d havo to assume too that all chistians also hate, for instance, people who divorced their spouse and married again. Or all people who lie, or whatever else…
Fortytwois, we don’t allow the posting of contact information to facilitate campaigns for a given issue.
This is true. “Ignorance” clearly need to be appended to the list of causes of homophobia.
And yes, no matter how well-intentioned the reason, it is still homophobia. Unless the person also subscribes to the belief that heterosexual sex is just as sinful. If someone believes one kind of love is more sinful than the other, then that’s bigotry. That doesn’t mean the person holding that belief is necessarily evil, or discriminatory, or even unpleasant to be around. But if someone expresses to me their belief that homosexuality is sinful, I’m going to express my belief that what they’ve just said is bigoted.
shrug So it’s valid. Doesn’t make it not homophobic. The belief that there is something inherently wrong with being gay, or with having gay sex as opposed to heterosexual sex, is a homophobic belief.
If it doesn’t have any animus behind it, it’s weakly homophobic, but it’s still homophobic. I suppose it’s preferable to hate some kind of notion of homosexuality in general than to manifest one’s hatred directly at queer people, but both are homophobic and neither are laudable.
That’s what homophobia means: aversion to homosexuality. People ought not to be more averse to homosexuality, queer sex, and queer people in general, than they are to heterosexuality, heterosexual sex, and straight people in general.
If a person thinks that believing in that particular interpretation of the Bible is more important than not believing something that is homophobic, that’s entirely up to them. If it bothers them to know that they believe something that is homophobic, perhaps they should reexamine their beliefs.
Miller also said what I wanted to say. Thanks.
Which means that in your mind, believing that god condemn homosexuality is “ignorance”. I don’t see it that way. My take on the issue is that the scriptures do condemn it, and I find arguments to the contrary very unconvincing. Not better in any way than a large number of christian attempts to “explain away” the parts of said scriptures the find inconvenient or offensive.
I’m going to disagree. Heterosexual sex isn’t even remotely condemned in the scriptures, but at the contrary encouraged (as long as it is done by a married couple, that is).
Why so? The list of what is sinful and what is not is pretty much arbitrary, for a significant part. Christians states that their set of rules should be followed. They’re not supposed, in theory, to choose what is sinful and what is not. They actually do in various ways (either by picking their own set of rules, picking their specific church set of rules, and even picking the most generally accepted traditionnal christian set of rule, which is for a large part quite arbitrary too).
As a consequence, you can’t say that someone is bigotted on the basis that he’s following his religion’s set of rule. Whether or not he cares about homosexuals, whether or not he’s homosexual himself, if his set of rules states “this is sinful”, then he doesn’t have a say in the matter. He must just accept what he thinks the will of god is. He’s not supposed to make his own judgement call on the issue (how could he judge god?). If his best guess about the meaning of the scriptures is that homosexuality is sinful (and as I mentionned above, I’d agree with him), then he’s going, quite logically, to state that homosexuality is sinful. His personnal feelings about homosexuals are irrelevant.
Now, you’ve every right to interpret away the condemnations of homoexuality, since christians spend their time picking and choosing anyway, but you can’t state that it’s blatantly obvious that homosexuality is not condemned by the scriptures, and that as a consequence people disagreeing with your peculiar interpretation must necessarily be bigotted people who are going out of their way to pick some nonsentical interpretation because they’re homophobes.
Now, a simpler way to handle the issue is to completely ignore the scriptures and assume that the whole “sin” thing is just as much BS. You then don’t have to bother anymore about finding some alternate meaning for some obscure greek word. But if you try to conciliate the christian beliefs and you sexual mores, you’re going to run into troubles and to run into people, who, though not being homophobes, won’t accept your peculiar convenient and PC interpretation.
I certainly can. Look, I just did.
If someone is concerned with bigotry, she should abstain from following a bigoted rule.
See, the entire problem here is that you seem to believe that abhorring queers would be unacceptable in any other circumstance, but it magically becomes okay if the person asserts that God put them up to it. I don’t buy it.
We have a choice as to what we believe. Millions of Christians do not believe that homosexuality is sinful; the largest Protestant denomination in this country teaches this as doctrine, for example.
A religious person has every right to believe I’m sinful for being queer, but they don’t get a pass on their belief’s being homophobic just because God told them so.
People judge God every day. I judged God when I was 16 and decided that the God that had been taught me in Sunday school was wanting. So I changed religions.
A person whose religion has taught them that being queer is evil ought to drop that belief, just as a person whose parents or whose school has taught them this ought to.
I still have an issue with this. Essentially based on my conception of homophobia as implying a personnal dilike, prejudice or abhorence.
Let’s assume a non-prejudiced christian making is honest to god best guess at the meaing of the scriptures, and finding out that they do condemn homosexuality. Is he in any way a worst person if he says “homosexuality is a sin” than the same christian doing the same thing, and ending up convinced that for instance “woshipping idols is a sin”, “stealing candies is a sin”, “having a one-night stand is a sin”? Why would he deserve more contempt than in the former case?
I guess, upon further thinking, that it boils down to the following question : can you state that saying “homosexuality is a sin” is morally reprehensible, without rejecting as qually repehensible the whole concept of sin, and as a result, essentially, christianism. For instance, is there any diference between stating that my heterosexual one night stand was a sin and stating that your homosexual one night stand was a sin? Is it logically possible to accept one statement and condemn the other? If yes, why?
I find them sufficiently convincing, personally. But really, isn’t that exactly the point? Christians “explain away” all sorts of things that they find inconvienent or offensive. So, I don’t think I’m unjustified in holding people responsible for not “explaining away” the Biblical prohibition to homosexuality.
Eh? I’m not stating what the Bible teaches, I’m stating what a person has to believe in order for him to think homosexuality is sinful and not be considered a homophobe.
Of course he does. God gave him free will, did He not? God gave him a mind, and a conscience. I have no problems at all holding someone responsible for not using the tools God gave him to make the proper moral decision.
The key phrase in that sentence is “what he thinks.” People in the past have interpreted the Bible to support all forms of horrible things. Do they get a pass because they honestly believed they were doing God’s will, or do we hold them responsible for the fruits of the actions they have freely chosen to pursue?
See, here’s the funny thing: I don’t give a shit. Belief is a choice. People choose to believe in Jesus. People choose to believe that the Bible is the word of God. People choose to believe one interpretation of the Bible over another. They are absolutely and entirely responsible for these choices. They can try to pawn that responsibility off on God, or their upbringing, or on George W. Bush, but I’m not buying it. They chose to adopt a belief system that denigrates me as a person. I don’t consider that acceptable. I’m only interested in “why” insofar as it determines how vehemently to respond. FriarTed is a poster who in most respects I like and admire. But his views on homosexuality are pretty much exactly the views you are defending here, and as much as he is a nice, intelligent, and generally non-judgemental person, he’s still a bigot. I’m not going to attack him, or curse him out, or refuse to talk to him because of it, but neither am I going to prentend that his views on homosexuality are anything other than irrational, inexcusable prejudice.
I don’t believe I’ve ever stated any such thing. I simply don’t care what the Bible says. I said people are homophobic out of ignorance not because they don’t know the Bible, but because they don’t know homosexuals. If they did, they should be able to recognize that homosexual relationships are no more sinful, or harmful, or immoral than a heterosexual relationship. If they can’t recognize that, or they do recognize that but consider homosexuality a sin anyway, then we go back to Diogenes’s list and find another explanation.
Well, that’s how I handle it myself, but I’m not interested in evangelizing for atheism, so I usually try to find arguments that convince Christians on their own terms. For that, Diogenes oft re-posted expalantions on the errors in Hebrew-to-Greek-to-Latin-to-English translations should be more than sufficient, for anyone who is truly more interested in the good of their fellow man than reliance on ritual and empty tradition. If they don’t, then I’m more than prepared to offer an object lesson in their own belief system: “Judge not, that you be not judged. For with the judgment that you pronounce you will be judged, and the measure you give will be the measure you get.”
We’re not arguing about which is more contemptible, we’re arguing about whether or not holding the belief “homosexuality is a sin” is homophobic or not. It is, by definition, and I believe homophobia is wrong and that homophobic beliefs ought not to be held.
Certainly. Many Christians who believe in the concept of sin believe that homosexuality is not a sin. In that case, they do not hold a homophobic viewpoint about sin.
In this case, you are talking about something different: a specific act. Not all beliefs condemning acts performed by homosexuals is homophobic. It is not homophobic for a Jew to believe that a homosexual Jew should not eat pork, because presumably she also believes that a heterosexual Jew also should not eat pork.
If a person believed that all one-night stands were wrong, but agreed that some types of sex were not sinful, and that they were not sinful regardless of the gender/s of those involved, that person would not hold a homophobic viewpoint in this regard. I would believe those views were foolish for other reasons (I don’t think one-night stands are wrong in any way), but I could not call such views homophobic.
It would be homophobic to believe that people may only have heterosexual sex in certain circumstances, but that they may not have homosexual sex under any circumstances.
OK, I must agree with this statement that more or less sum up your whole post.
I think it’s important, in talking with people positioned as I was, to both be firm that such attitudes do qualify as homophobia and to acknowledge the continuum of homophobia, i.e., to be clear that the label does not equate them with Fred Phelps. It is a step in the right direction to recognize one’s bigotry for what it is, because then you are better able to renounce it. But if it seems to require seeing oneself as the same as a hateful, spittle-flecked wackjob, it is much harder to make that step. In fact, since you know you aren’t a hateful, spittle-flecked wackjob, it’s pretty impossible. I’m glad when I see the distinctions being carefully voiced, as they are here.
Also, I know it’s been said before around here, but I’m not sure believing is a choice. I know I felt pretty compelled to change my point of view when I was confronted. I certainly don’t think I could choose to go back to believing what I used to believe about homosexuality any more than I could choose to believe in Santa Claus again. My brain don’t work that way.
Well folks, the investigation was called off. To quote the article:
Would you guys please wipe the foam from your mouths so can we agree that the claims we’ve heard here about child abuse are unfounded? It sucks that the kid had to go to this dumb camp, but apparently, they are not abusing him or any other “campers”.