We seem to find a number of areas for disagreement here. I think Freyr has done a fair-to-middling job of categorizing them.
However, I do have to make a distinction on the Divine Weasel category: Just because God prohibits something that you feel moved to do (including giving place to actualizing one’s sexual orientation) does not make Him the Divine Weasel. There are a number of things I would very much enjoy doing that I refrain from because I consider them as sinful for me. I have no right to judge what is sinful for another; in fact, doing so is sinful for me. What would make Him the Divine Weasel is if He were, as some fundamentalists (not all!) allege, inclined to give contradictory data on important matters and save or condemn one based on whether one makes the “right choice” according to a schema which they consider He gave them. For example, in a world with internal evidence suggesting an age of about 4.6 billion years and sequences of fossils that vary as one examines superimposed strata, one is expected to understand that the world was created in 144 hours just over an exact sixty centuries ago because a literal reading of Genesis, coupled with other Biblical dating data also read literally, would say so. To avoid pointing the blame in just one direction, that one becomes “righteous” and therefore acceptable in His sight by keeping a select list of 631 instructions, much of which are applicable to a patriarchal tribal structure far closer than they are to modern urban civilization, would be another such bit of headgamery.
Along those same lines, Zev commented, with regard to the Why of the Law:
Well, Zev, though I am reasonably certain you would disagree, it is the understanding of us Christians that we did indeed get that answer.
And that it consisted in the application of two commandments, singled out and given grundlag force so that all the other 629 are to be understood as applicable only insofar as they give force to the two primary ones. The first is, of course, the mandative half of the Shema: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and soul, and mind, and strength” and the second, as Jesus said, “is like unto it”: “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” To which he gave the expansionist definition of “neighbor” that includes every other human being, who is to be treated with the same love, compassion, respect, etc., that one would like for oneself.
It would be on these terms that a Christian would debate any questions about the applicability of the Scriptural cites. Jersey Diamond, for example, would differ strongly with me on the conclusions that we reach, but would start from the same presumptions.
Now, on the first point, any command in Torah that cannot be shown to support these two primary pillars of behavior becomes null and void. In particular, the cultic regulations that were set in place to keep the Jews kosher in the strict sense, separated out from the mass of Amorites, Canaanites, Horites, Hivites, and Miscellaneous-other-ites near whom they lived, are lifted. (I’d point out that Zev or Chaim or any other practicing Orthodox Jew could legitimately, to use a classic example around here, eat a cheeseburger if they so chose, since the provisions against mixing meat and milk are not commandments but “fences” to ensure against inadvertently violating the commandment. If Zev could be certain that the meat and cheese were produced under kosher conditions and neither was from a kid nor the mother of one, he could in good conscience make himself a CB.
Too, the prohibition is against “laying with a man as with a woman” and hence could be construed as not necessarily prohibiting homosexual relations, but rather bisexuality – lie with one or the other, but don’t lie with one as with the other! (Though somehow I don’t think that exercise in Rabbinic reasoning is going to go over terribly well with any of the major schools of Jewish thought!)
So far, nobody has gotten into the New Testament injunctions against homosexuality, but more than one scholar has noted that they generally fall into lists of sinful acts characterized by giving vent to “worldly desires” such as promiscuous fornication, adultery, gluttony, drunkenness, and so on. In short, they may reasonably be understood as prohibitions of lustful acts, not of a particular action per se. Just as heterosexual intercourse is not only not sinful but blessed within the marriage bond, but sinful when used only for the gratification of one’s lust, the idea that there could be a loving committed union of two persons with same-sex affections (as for example Hastur and his husband) becomes not contemplated in the N.T. prohibition.
Two sidebars here: Romans 1 seems to imply that the people of whom it speaks are cursed with homosexual desires, replacing heterosexual ones, along with some antisocial attitudes, as a punishment for turning to secular things and rejecting God. And it is immediately followed by Paul’s note that some of the Roman Church members were formerly caught in this condition. I’ve noted before that since Paul’s description completely contradicts the stated experience of gay and Lesbian people, and sounds strangely like the “queer chic” fashionable trend that was “in” in the early '80s, and was common in later First Century Rome and other metropolises as well, it would be my guess that he’s speaking of this and not the sexual orientation in this passage.
Finally, Jude is exclusivist in its listing of who is excluded from the “elect” and specifies homosexuals who repeat the sins of Sodom. Now there are a lot of things to be said about the Sodom story, but specifically it speaks of homosexual rape of the “stranger within your gates”. And I doubt that anyone involved in this thread is particularly interested in defending any form of forcible rape, be it of man, woman, or beast. Too, the writer of Jude has a serious problem in distinguishing what is scriptural or not; at least some of his allusions are to apocryphal works like the Book of Enoch and the Assumption of Moses.
Now, all this is being said presupposing that people are accepting the Bible as a guide to behavior in the first place. And that was one major question raised.
Comment regarding that: If one presumes the existence of a single powerful and knowing God (even bypassing whether he’s omni-), and if one equates that presumed God with the traditional one of Jewish and Christian belief, and if one accepts the Bible as the record of His revealing Himself to humankind, then there may be legitimate grounds for debating what the Bible considers sin, and in particular whether homosexuality is such.
However, the New Testament of that same Bible gives the two injunctions I mentioned above as primary behavioral commands for humanity, backs them with “Judge not lest you be judged” and “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” and further attempts to picture this God as one Who loves all mankind and desires that they turn to Him and be “saved” from the Hell that they construct for themselves with their autoabusive behavior. It would therefore be my contention that only to the extent that a concerned gay person asks for one’s advice should a non-gay Christian have any comment on homosexuality as a behavior, and that he condition what he has to say on the two commands about loving and the one about not judging.
We can get into the evil inherent in legislating Biblical moral standards later, if someone chooses.
My final comment would be that there seems to be some disagreement among posters about what the function of sex in human nature is, and that that needs to be addressed.
