Why do many Fundies go after homosexuals, but not after people who shave?

Great Debates
1

If a man lies with a man as one lies with a woman, both of them have done what is detestable. They must be put to death.
-Leviticus 20:13

Most Christians I know who believe homosexuality is an abomination point to this verse as their basis. The question of whether or not homosexuality is immoral is not the question I propose.
In other places, close in proximity to the preceeding, the Bible says the following…
Do not cut the hair at the sides of your head or off the edges of your beard.
-Leviticus 19:27

Do not wear clothes of wool and linen woven together.
-Deuteronomy 22:11

A woman must not wear men’s clothing, nor a man wear women’s clothing, for the Lord your God detests anyone who does this.
-Deuteronomy 22:4

If a man has recently married, he must not be sent to war or have any other duty laid on him. For one year he is to be free to stay at home and bring happiness to the wife he has married.
-Deuteronomy 24:5

If you go into your neighbor’s vineyard you may eat your fill of grapes, as many as you wish, but you shall not put any into a container.
-Deuteronomy 23:25

Make tassels on the four corners of the cloak you wear.
-Deuteronomy 22:12

If two men are fighting and the wife of one of them comes to rescue her husband from his assailent, and she reaches out and seizes him by his private parts, you shall cut off her hand.
-Deuteronomy 25:11,12

And wherever you live, you must not eat the blood of any bird or animal.
-Leviticus 7:26
My question is this. Why are Fundies (i.e. people like Jerry Fallwell) going after homosexuality like the plague. Is it not a bit hypocritical not to also go after those who shave, or those who don’t have tassels on their shirts, or those who don’t cook meat all the way through and accidentally drink some blood?

What makes homosexuality singled out as it is?

2

Most Christians consider the writings of Paul to be more binding than OT law. They, therefore, justify the sinfulness of homosexuality due to Paul’s condemnation rather than the one in Leviticus.

3

I realized relavent cites might be helpful :smiley:

Paul on homosexuals:

Romans 1:26-27
1 Corinthians 6:9

I also noticed that John the Divine is another NT author who gets in on the act:

Revelation 22:15

Although it is not clear whether or not John is speaking about homosexuals, I fairly sure that many anti-homosexual Christians think he is.

4

Which brings up another question: why do fundies ridicule Catholics for “worshiping” the Pope, and believing in papal infallibility, when they basically consider Paul to be God incarnate?

5

Cuz they don’t?

6

They believe that Paul speaks for God, and that disobeying Paul is the same as disobeying God. Seems to me my statement is accurate.

7

I find that the majority of Christians I have encountered in my stint here on Earth employ the A La Carte method of Biblical morality. They agree with those moral standards which they have no interest in violating (e.g. homosexuality), ignore the ones they - as the rest of us - tend to violate somewhat often (e.g. lying) - and hide the ones they violate but hope no one finds out about (e.g. sleeping around on their spouse). Apparently, God gives them the ability to pick and choose which portions of his law they decide to follow based upon personal choice - something to do with being the Chosen People or somesuch nonsense perhaps?

My favorite one is where you bring up the laws of Leviticus - and they claim it is part of the Old Covenant and therefore not binding. However, these same people want the 10 Commandments in the schools - even though they too are Old Covenant (from Exodus) and they want the wrongs ones posted (the 2nd version in Exodus doesn’t match the 1st version so who knows which ones are right?).

Rabid Christians are an interesting lot.

8

Ryan’s got a point. If they belive the Bible is all written by God, how can the part Paul took dictation on be more binding than other parts?

And the New Covenent theory nowithstanding, how( unless you think he’s God) can Paul’s ruling on homosexuality, circumcision, keeping kosher etc. have any weight over Jesus’ claim he was not removing “one jot nor tittle” of the law (sorry, I can’t remember the chapter and verse. But can you tell I use King James?)

[hijack]

Since we’re talking about Paul and Biblical infaliblity, there are several points in Paul’s letters where he says
basically “I have no word from God, but it seems to me…”.
(One example: I Cor. 7:12)

You could say it “seem to him” as a holy man and he may be right, but how can you say everything that ended up in the NT is written by God when the text is saying it wasn’t?

[/hijack]

9

Quite simply, all Christians are selective literalsts, without exception. For some, the only words one can be sure are literal are the two Aramaic phrases Jesus is quoted as saying, along with a couple of short passages from the History of the Israelite Monarchy in Samuel and Kings.

For the typical “fundamentalist,” the idea is that everything that is not clearly a literary technique is to be taken in its literal sense. So if Matthew says that Jesus heals a leper, then that actually happened, but if he then says, “And Jesus told this parable,” you’re to hear this as “Fiction Alert! Fiction Alert! Jesus is making up a story with a point here!”

Same thing with Apocalyptic writing. Most of Daniel and Revelation are to be read as using figures of speech to veil eschatological events in metaphorical language. So your fundamentalist is quite capable of interpreting the “beast with seven heads and ten horns” as the revived Roman Empire, or this President of Romania who gets elected U.N. Secretary General, or whatever.

The standard most conservative Christians hold to is, in broad terms, that the “dietary and cultic” law of the O.T. was superseded by Jesus’s life and work but the “moral” law from the Torah remains in effect, in essence if not to be taken literally. (E.g., you need not put your daughter caught fornicating to death, but you should consider her as havin sinned.) Drawing this distinction sometimes gets interesting.

10

I know a lot of the stuff from Deuteronomy is what goes into the kosher lifestyle, like the “mustn’t eat the blood of any bird or animal.” They drain the blood of the meat, which of course takes out most of the fats and good stuff (and is why kosher meat tastes like shit).

I remember my mother tried to convince my grandmother (who’s Orthodox) that kosher goes to the extreme sometimes with Deuteronomy 22:11 (wool and linen don’t mix). She didn’t believe that the Bible said that.

11

Soup,

I have been pondering that very same question for quite some time. It seems that anything that involves sexuality is perceived as more sinful than the other things most Christians believe to be wrong, even if the other things are more hurtful to others. In our society it is more acceptable to be a lying, stealing, swearing, judgemental, wife/husband/child abusing, traffic law breaker than it is to be homosexual.

I don’t remember which reference is used, but the Bible verse always refered to on anti-homosexual banners does mention that it is a sin, but in the same paragraph it condemns other things as being equally sinful, including judging other people. This attitude is prevailent in our society for other sexual practices, for example having an affair is worse than treating your spouse like crap and prostitution is a crime. I think it has just developed over time that anything sexual is shameful. I don’t see the Bible as condemning sexual sins more than other sins.

12

I started this thread last year, questioning how Christians decided which commandments from the OT were no longer applicable and which ones did still apply.

The consensus of opinion (IIRC) was that there was no hard and fast rule on which commandments still applied.

Zev Steinhardt

13

As my wife says, “Until those fundamentalists stop using the toilet and start going into the back yard with a shovel and a handful of salt I’m not taking them seriously.”

14

This is a far cry from believing that Paul was “God incarnate.” Most fundamentalists believe that the entire Bible is inspired, so something written by Paul would fall under that category. But this does not make Paul a god of any sort, any more than it makes Solomon, Isaiah, Jeremiah, or John gods.

If you don’t believe me, perhaps you should ask a fundamentalist Christian (if you live in the U.S. they shouldn’t be too tough to find!) whether s/he thinks that Paul is “basically … God incarnate.”

15

My answer to the OP is probably more cynical than most, but it seems to best describe the actions of the fundies:

  1. Most of them shave, because they prefer a neat beard, or none at all.
  2. Very, very few of them are gay.

Another reason, of course, is that homosexuality has a certain “ick” level around it for many people, and it’s much easier to get people pissed off about something that doesn’t particularly appeal to them.

16

Ok, well, to try help us get past the “all Fundamentalists are evil hypocrites who inconsistently apply dogmatism” line of thinking, I think it would be helpful to return to the “old covenant/new covenant” idea.

Basically, if you think about it, this question amounts to why don’t Christians follow the restrictive laws set down in Leviticus and Deuteronomy, including the kosher dietary restrictions, but they do follow what Paul and the other NT writings say. The short answer is that Jesus’ religious symbolism abolished the need for those restrictions. The long answer can be found in Gillian Feely-Harnik’s “The Lord’s Table: The Meaning of Food in Early Judaism and Christianity”, which while it does not discuss homosexuality and shaving explicitly, contains a reasoning that is roughly analogous to the answer you seek. Basically she says that restrictions in Leviticus and Deuteronomy existed as a symbolic division between Jews (God’s chosen people) and all of the other riff-raff. But when Jesus came along, he used the “language of food” to reverse these restrictions and create a religion that defined itself by including all peoples instead of by distinguishing itself from all peoples (which is what Judaism did). So basically, Jesus came along and reversed the practices in Leviticus and Deuteronomy in order to make Christianity at once distinct from old-style Judaism and also more appealing to both Jews and non-Jews (i.e. the Romans) at the time. As a result, today Christians don’t follow OT restrictions on diet and such. As for why they DO follow the gospels, well, as you might imagine, it’s stuff about divinely inspired and whatnot. Such is the issue of faith.

But my main point is that fundamentalists are not really being hypocritical (at least on this issue) in adhering to Paul but not to OT restrictions, since Jesus sorta did away with the whole Leviticus thing anyway.

17

Nicely put. And welcome. Good luck in getting people past the “all Fundamentalists are evil hypocrites who inconsistently apply dogmatism” line of thinking :wink:

18

I really don’t think that the fundamentalists’ position is all that far from believing that Paul actualized God’s will
(or at least, a great portion of it).

Why is it that it seems that whenever people disagree with me, they misquote my position? I didn’t say that fundamentalists believe that Paul is basically God. I said that fundamentalists basically believe that Paul is God. Word order is important. Fundamentalists hold a position which is very close to believing that Paul is God. Therefore, they basically believe Paul is God.

19

To The Ryan:

Once again, I suggest you actually ask a fundamentalist Christian what s/he believes. Good luck finding 1 in a 1000 who thinks that Paul was in any way, shape, or form divine, godlike, etc. They believe that Paul was a normal individual, just like you or me. God inspired a handful of his letters which ended up in the New Testament to protect them from error. That is all; nothing more. There are lots of Christian websites if you don’t want the hassle of talking to a Christian in person. Go to one where you can ask questions on the Bible and see what they say about Paul.

20

  1. After JC died for our sins- the entirety of the OT became a 'footnote" to Christians- ie NONE of the Laws contained therein applied to them/us. Jc is the “new Covenant”. (note that my Church, however, accepts that the “Old Covenant” is still valid for those it was written for, if that is what they want- or they can accpet the “New”)

  2. Paul- whom many Christian Churches believe was directly inspired by G-d when he wrote his letters & etc- did condemn Homosexuality. He also condemned: drunkeness, fornication, the envious, DEBATERS, whisperers, backbiters, the proud, the decietful, the despiteful, inventors of evil things, the implacable, the unmerciful, those “without natural affection”, adulterors, and those disobedient to parents. Paul also was not too happy about ANYONE, even married couples, having sex. If I was a Fundie- I would worry less about others who might be Gay- and more about myself and those sins of: “whisperers, backbiters, implacable, unmerciful” etc.

Of course MY Church does not concern itself with these- altho we accept that Paul was certainly inspired by JC to work FOR Him, instead of against Him- in no way does it follow that all of Pauls words are inspired, and the "Word’. JC’s preaching in many ways directly contradict Pauls- His only “sin” is being intolerant (and intolerant is certainly what Paul was). His commandments are to “accept Him” and “do unto others…”.