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I wasn't trying to change anyone's mind about homosexuality. Think it's wrong all you want. Be concerned, be fearful, heck be angry about it if you want. I was trying to get you to consider how you are coming across when you talk about it. Especially people who claim they are being persecuted as per the Bible for trashing homosexuals. No, you are not being persecuted. You are insulting people. How would you like it if someone talked about your wife like that? If you stuck up for her would you be "persecuting" the person? Would you be indignant because you really just wanted to sin? No, you'd be sticking up for the woman you loved.
Not everyone agrees with you about what the Bible says about the matter. Not everyone is a Christian. Not even everyone is a believer.
Have your beliefs but show some respect. (not directed necessarily at you just saying you in place of anyone who misbehaves in this manner, maybe you don't)
Remember who the blessed are; remember the golden rule.
May I offer a "God bless you" for your words here.
It is so tiring and fruitless to argue this sort of thing with people who use a personal interpretation of millennia-old holy texts to support their bigotry.
To me, God IS Love. We can find God in each other. I feel I can learn something from every living being. I can find something redeeming or loveable about almost anybody.
Why focus on our differences or things we may not approve of in another's lifestyle, ideology, etc.? Why condemn people for those differences?
Love is a precious commodity. It should be fostered and cherished wherever it occurs between consenting adults, long as nobody is being harmed or coerced.
It is by coming together through understanding of "the other" that makes us more loving creatures...more human.
We are called to love and accept and forgive. It is not for us to judge and condemn.
By the same token, we who DO love and accept should also strive to understand and come to terms with those whose hearts and minds tell them that certain people should be precluded from having the same rights as the majority to love whom they wish or marry or not be discriminated against or treated as second class citizens.
However, those people should know that while they are free to hold and express whatever views they feel that there is no persecution towards them. They are free to have their beliefs.
But those of us who preach love WILL be intolerant of intolerance, for that is the most appropriate response to closed minds and closed hearts.
If it's a mental disorder, it affects no one. And no, there's no "treatment" for it and conversion therapy should be outlawed. A gay person can't become hetero anymore than you can "convert" yourself into being gay. Your sexual orientation is rooted in your brain, it's how you were born.
Many conservative Christians also struggle with being racist. A person cannot change the color of his skin.
I'm not going to argue with you, but I am going to use your post to contrast superficial thinking about homosexuality (yours, judging from your post) with the complexities actually involved in this subject. (I do find your statement "If it's a mental disorder, it affects no one" to be quite strange.)
The following is from a thoughtful and by no means gay-bashing article in the February 2012 edition of First Things, which is the journal of the Institute on Religion and Public Life. This is a faith-based organization but one that is open to all expressions of faith and is scarcely a fundamentalist or evangelical front. The article is entitled Same-Sex Science: The Social Sciences Cannot Settle the Moral Status of Homosexuality, https://www.firstthings.com/article/...me-sex-science, and is by Stanton L. Jones, a psychology professor at Wheaton College.
I'm not trying to change your views, but I encourage you to read this short portion of the article to see what serious, thoughtful thinking on this issue looks like. The whole article is worth reading. And with this, I believe I'm finished with the topic of homosexuality:
Has science established that sexual orientation cannot change? Dozens of scholarly papers appeared in journals from the 1940s to the early 1970s reporting that a substantial portion of those wanting to change homosexual orientation did change to some degree. But rarely since 1980 has a professional publication reported such results. Did science change direction and prove change impossible? Not quite.
Certainly, there has been less research of late studying the possibility of change. The removal in 1973 of homosexuality from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders both changed the political environment in the mental-health professions and undermined grant funding for research on this subject. Many academics no longer had any motivation to study this phenomenon and considerable political reasons not to do so. Further, prior published research is commonly dismissed as inadequate. The APA’s website stated for many years that claims that homosexual orientation can change “are poorly documented. For example, treatment outcome is not followed and reported over time as would be the standard to test the validity of any mental health intervention.”
Such criticism took its most comprehensive form in the report of the 2009 APA task force studying SOCE (sexual-orientation change efforts). These scholars set extraordinary standards of methodological rigor for what they regarded as a reasonable scientific study of the possibility of sexual-orientation change, a move that resulted in the classification of only six studies out of dozens as meriting close examination. These studies were, in turn, dismissed for a variety of reasons, leaving the panel with no credible findings, by their standards, documenting the efficacy of SOCE. After dismissing SOCE for its lack of empirical validation. The panel then recommended gay-affirming therapy while explicitly acknowledging that it lacked the very type of empirical validation required of SOCE.
In the absence of evidence, it would be proper scientific procedure to acknowledge one’s ignorance. The members of the APA task force claim that their review has established that “enduring change to an individual’s sexual orientation is uncommon” and “that it is unlikely that individuals will be able to reduce same-sex attractions or increase other-sex sexual attractions through SOCE.” But even more-forceful claims have been made. The Public Affairs website of the APA for many years stated, “Can therapy change sexual orientation? No,” and insisted that homosexuality “is not changeable.” But has science proven this? Not at all; rather, skeptical reviewers have dismissed evidence of the possibility of change for some on the basis of such studies being methodologically inadequate by post hoc and artificially stringent standards.
Is sexual orientation immutable? With Mark Yarhouse of Regent University, I recently studied people seeking to change their sexual orientation. We assessed the sexual orientations and psychological distress levels of 98 individuals (72 men, 26 women) trying to change their sexual orientation through ministries organized under Exodus International, beginning early in the process and following them over six to seven years with five additional, independent assessments. Our original round of findings was published in a book titled Ex-Gays? The Latest Round, in the Journal of Sex and Marital Therapy.
Of the 61 subjects who completed the study, 23 percent reported success in the form of “conversion” to heterosexual orientation and functioning, while 30 percent reported they were able to live chastely and had disidentified themselves from homosexual orientation. On the other hand, 20 percent reported giving up and fully embracing homosexual identity, and the remaining 27 percent continued the process of attempted change with limited and unsatisfactory success. On average, statistically significant decreases in homosexual orientation were reported across the entire sample, while a smaller but still significant increase of heterosexual attraction was reported. The attempt to change orientation was not found to lead to increases in psychological distress on average; indeed, the study found several small significant improvements in psychological distress associated with the interventions. And lest we fall prey to the same mistakes we have been criticizing in others, we have said repeatedly that because our sample was not demonstrably representative of those seeking change among all religious homosexuals, these are likely optimistic outcome estimates.
I conclude that homosexual orientation is, contrary to the supposed consensus, sometimes mutable. “Homosexuality” is a multifaceted phenomenon; there are likely many homosexualities, with some perhaps more malleable than others. Not all interventions are the same; not all practitioners are equally skilled. Perhaps most important, those seeking change vary considerably in their intensity of motivation, in their resourcefulness, and in the context in which they try to change. Most of those seeking change and most of those who actually attain some level of change are highly religiously committed, and these individuals who believe in a God who intervenes in their lives are embedded in communities of care and are motivated by their core understanding of who they are as a person before God. It is a wonder that anyone without such resources successfully obtains sexual-orientation change.
I'm not going to argue with you, but I am going to use your post to contrast superficial thinking about homosexuality (yours, judging from your post) with the complexities actually involved in this subject. (I do find your statement "If it's a mental disorder, it affects no one" to be quite strange.)
The following is from a thoughtful and by no means gay-bashing article in the February 2012 edition of First Things, which is the journal of the Institute on Religion and Public Life. This is a faith-based organization but one that is open to all expressions of faith and is scarcely a fundamentalist or evangelical front. The article is entitled Same-Sex Science: The Social Sciences Cannot Settle the Moral Status of Homosexuality, https://www.firstthings.com/article/...me-sex-science, and is by Stanton L. Jones, a psychology professor at Wheaton College.
...snip...
Fundies grasp at whatever they can to buttress their bigotry.
I'm not going to argue with you, but I am going to use your post to contrast superficial thinking about homosexuality (yours, judging from your post) with the complexities actually involved in this subject. (I do find your statement "If it's a mental disorder, it affects no one" to be quite strange.)
The following is from a thoughtful and by no means gay-bashing article in the February 2012 edition of First Things, which is the journal of the Institute on Religion and Public Life. This is a faith-based organization but one that is open to all expressions of faith and is scarcely a fundamentalist or evangelical front. The article is entitled Same-Sex Science: The Social Sciences Cannot Settle the Moral Status of Homosexuality, https://www.firstthings.com/article/...me-sex-science, and is by Stanton L. Jones, a psychology professor at Wheaton College.
I'm not trying to change your views, but I encourage you to read this short portion of the article to see what serious, thoughtful thinking on this issue looks like. The whole article is worth reading. And with this, I believe I'm finished with the topic of homosexuality:
Has science established that sexual orientation cannot change? Dozens of scholarly papers appeared in journals from the 1940s to the early 1970s reporting that a substantial portion of those wanting to change homosexual orientation did change to some degree. But rarely since 1980 has a professional publication reported such results. Did science change direction and prove change impossible? Not quite.
Certainly, there has been less research of late studying the possibility of change. The removal in 1973 of homosexuality from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders both changed the political environment in the mental-health professions and undermined grant funding for research on this subject. Many academics no longer had any motivation to study this phenomenon and considerable political reasons not to do so. Further, prior published research is commonly dismissed as inadequate. The APA’s website stated for many years that claims that homosexual orientation can change “are poorly documented. For example, treatment outcome is not followed and reported over time as would be the standard to test the validity of any mental health intervention.”
Such criticism took its most comprehensive form in the report of the 2009 APA task force studying SOCE (sexual-orientation change efforts). These scholars set extraordinary standards of methodological rigor for what they regarded as a reasonable scientific study of the possibility of sexual-orientation change, a move that resulted in the classification of only six studies out of dozens as meriting close examination. These studies were, in turn, dismissed for a variety of reasons, leaving the panel with no credible findings, by their standards, documenting the efficacy of SOCE. After dismissing SOCE for its lack of empirical validation. The panel then recommended gay-affirming therapy while explicitly acknowledging that it lacked the very type of empirical validation required of SOCE.
In the absence of evidence, it would be proper scientific procedure to acknowledge one’s ignorance. The members of the APA task force claim that their review has established that “enduring change to an individual’s sexual orientation is uncommon” and “that it is unlikely that individuals will be able to reduce same-sex attractions or increase other-sex sexual attractions through SOCE.” But even more-forceful claims have been made. The Public Affairs website of the APA for many years stated, “Can therapy change sexual orientation? No,” and insisted that homosexuality “is not changeable.” But has science proven this? Not at all; rather, skeptical reviewers have dismissed evidence of the possibility of change for some on the basis of such studies being methodologically inadequate by post hoc and artificially stringent standards.
Is sexual orientation immutable? With Mark Yarhouse of Regent University, I recently studied people seeking to change their sexual orientation. We assessed the sexual orientations and psychological distress levels of 98 individuals (72 men, 26 women) trying to change their sexual orientation through ministries organized under Exodus International, beginning early in the process and following them over six to seven years with five additional, independent assessments. Our original round of findings was published in a book titled Ex-Gays? The Latest Round, in the Journal of Sex and Marital Therapy.
Of the 61 subjects who completed the study, 23 percent reported success in the form of “conversion” to heterosexual orientation and functioning, while 30 percent reported they were able to live chastely and had disidentified themselves from homosexual orientation. On the other hand, 20 percent reported giving up and fully embracing homosexual identity, and the remaining 27 percent continued the process of attempted change with limited and unsatisfactory success. On average, statistically significant decreases in homosexual orientation were reported across the entire sample, while a smaller but still significant increase of heterosexual attraction was reported. The attempt to change orientation was not found to lead to increases in psychological distress on average; indeed, the study found several small significant improvements in psychological distress associated with the interventions. And lest we fall prey to the same mistakes we have been criticizing in others, we have said repeatedly that because our sample was not demonstrably representative of those seeking change among all religious homosexuals, these are likely optimistic outcome estimates.
I conclude that homosexual orientation is, contrary to the supposed consensus, sometimes mutable. “Homosexuality” is a multifaceted phenomenon; there are likely many homosexualities, with some perhaps more malleable than others. Not all interventions are the same; not all practitioners are equally skilled. Perhaps most important, those seeking change vary considerably in their intensity of motivation, in their resourcefulness, and in the context in which they try to change. Most of those seeking change and most of those who actually attain some level of change are highly religiously committed, and these individuals who believe in a God who intervenes in their lives are embedded in communities of care and are motivated by their core understanding of who they are as a person before God. It is a wonder that anyone without such resources successfully obtains sexual-orientation change.
Blah, blah, blah. Whether or not sexual orientation is innate, it appears to be gestalt. Gestalt perceptions are unchangeable once "hardened." If you need proof, Try NOT to see the type on this page as words with meaning that evoke knowing and other emotional and intellectual responses. You cannot because it is gestalt. There was a time before you learned to read when you could have done it quite easily because it would have had no meaning to you. So why can you NOT undo the way you see the page or the way you react to the meanings in it???? When you want someone who sees the opposite sex as a love object (and a stimulus for carnal lust) to stop seeing them that way, remember your failure to unsee this page of type. It might help you to be more understanding, loving and non-judgmental, though I doubt it. Your beliefs about God have probably hardened as gestalt as well.
When an article starts out with a concept of "understanding of sexual brokenness" in refard to orientation I don't expect real objectivity. Agree that genetic is not the only factor but the perception that departure from the norm is objectionable remains a poor, if normal, response.
So do you think you could focus on that's what you understand the Bible to say and lay off comparing it to:
It's not quaint...it's disgusting to compare it with those two things. You're probably OK with comparing it to fornication.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Nerfball
I wasn't comparing or equating. I was simply listing behaviors that the Bible condemns. If I'd been comparing or equating bestiality and pedophilia to homosexuality in the portion you quote, I would've also been comparing or equating them to adultery and cohabitation! I will, however, be happy to leave bestiality and pedophilia out of further discussions.
Your posts are very well written, Nerfball. And, well written, educated posts are often regarded as being some kind of authority on a particular issue. I believe that you sincerely mean everything you write about and that you have no specific animosity toward homosexual people ...only toward homosexuality's acceptance by society ...right? You've made it pretty clear that any criticism you make toward the accepting by society of homosexuality is no more wrong than is society's accepting of divorce and remarriage. That's commendable since the majority of professed Christians that I come across don't even appear to know that no-fault divorce and remarriage is condemned in the Bible. And yet, they make it very clear that homosexuality is condemned in the Bible.
This brings me to a part of the topic that has become quite a big part of my life in recent years. You state that the Bible is very clear in its condemnation of homosexuality. I used to believe that also. Why? Because that's what I'd heard over and over and over again from preachers who claimed to speak the word of God from the pulpit. And then, because I was later confronted for the very first time in my life with someone who became a big part of my life and was gay, I began to actually study the scriptures regarding the issue of homosexuality.
Have YOU, Nerfball, ever actually studied those few Bible texts that have become known as 'the clobber texts'?
The most surprising thing to me in my studies was that any mention throughout the entire Bible of same-sex sex practices is found in only a half-dozen places ...at most! I used to think that the condemnation of homosexuality was found on just about every other page of the Bible judging by the wrath concerning the subject that I heard from Christians! I was further surprised in my studies to find that "God" only broaches what might be construed as condemnation of homosexuality in only TWO places in the entire Bible! Those places are Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13. That's it from "God", per se! The odd references to the topic of same-sex sex found in the New Testament comes chiefly from Paul, NOT God.
SO, the only mention of 'man lying with man' and its condemnation, allegedly from 'the Creator', that has led to Christianity's across the board condemnation of homosexuality, comes from just two places in the entire Bible! How many of you are surprised by this? I know that I was.
SO, Nerfball, what do you make of this? What are the Leviticus (18:22 and 20:13) texts referring to? Are they referring to homosexual goings on within the Levi tribe or are they referring to the pagan worship practices to idols? Please, you tell me.
I'm not going to argue with you, but I am going to use your post to contrast superficial thinking about homosexuality (yours, judging from your post) with the complexities actually involved in this subject. (I do find your statement "If it's a mental disorder, it affects no one" to be quite strange.)
The following is from a thoughtful and by no means gay-bashing article in the February 2012 edition of First Things, which is the journal of the Institute on Religion and Public Life. This is a faith-based organization but one that is open to all expressions of faith and is scarcely a fundamentalist or evangelical front. The article is entitled Same-Sex Science: The Social Sciences Cannot Settle the Moral Status of Homosexuality, https://www.firstthings.com/article/...me-sex-science, and is by Stanton L. Jones, a psychology professor at Wheaton College.
I'm not trying to change your views, but I encourage you to read this short portion of the article to see what serious, thoughtful thinking on this issue looks like. The whole article is worth reading. And with this, I believe I'm finished with the topic of homosexuality:
Has science established that sexual orientation cannot change? Dozens of scholarly papers appeared in journals from the 1940s to the early 1970s reporting that a substantial portion of those wanting to change homosexual orientation did change to some degree. But rarely since 1980 has a professional publication reported such results. Did science change direction and prove change impossible? Not quite.
Certainly, there has been less research of late studying the possibility of change. The removal in 1973 of homosexuality from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders both changed the political environment in the mental-health professions and undermined grant funding for research on this subject. Many academics no longer had any motivation to study this phenomenon and considerable political reasons not to do so. Further, prior published research is commonly dismissed as inadequate. The APA’s website stated for many years that claims that homosexual orientation can change “are poorly documented. For example, treatment outcome is not followed and reported over time as would be the standard to test the validity of any mental health intervention.”
Such criticism took its most comprehensive form in the report of the 2009 APA task force studying SOCE (sexual-orientation change efforts). These scholars set extraordinary standards of methodological rigor for what they regarded as a reasonable scientific study of the possibility of sexual-orientation change, a move that resulted in the classification of only six studies out of dozens as meriting close examination. These studies were, in turn, dismissed for a variety of reasons, leaving the panel with no credible findings, by their standards, documenting the efficacy of SOCE. After dismissing SOCE for its lack of empirical validation. The panel then recommended gay-affirming therapy while explicitly acknowledging that it lacked the very type of empirical validation required of SOCE.
In the absence of evidence, it would be proper scientific procedure to acknowledge one’s ignorance. The members of the APA task force claim that their review has established that “enduring change to an individual’s sexual orientation is uncommon” and “that it is unlikely that individuals will be able to reduce same-sex attractions or increase other-sex sexual attractions through SOCE.” But even more-forceful claims have been made. The Public Affairs website of the APA for many years stated, “Can therapy change sexual orientation? No,” and insisted that homosexuality “is not changeable.” But has science proven this? Not at all; rather, skeptical reviewers have dismissed evidence of the possibility of change for some on the basis of such studies being methodologically inadequate by post hoc and artificially stringent standards.
Is sexual orientation immutable? With Mark Yarhouse of Regent University, I recently studied people seeking to change their sexual orientation. We assessed the sexual orientations and psychological distress levels of 98 individuals (72 men, 26 women) trying to change their sexual orientation through ministries organized under Exodus International, beginning early in the process and following them over six to seven years with five additional, independent assessments. Our original round of findings was published in a book titled Ex-Gays? The Latest Round, in the Journal of Sex and Marital Therapy.
Of the 61 subjects who completed the study, 23 percent reported success in the form of “conversion” to heterosexual orientation and functioning, while 30 percent reported they were able to live chastely and had disidentified themselves from homosexual orientation. On the other hand, 20 percent reported giving up and fully embracing homosexual identity, and the remaining 27 percent continued the process of attempted change with limited and unsatisfactory success. On average, statistically significant decreases in homosexual orientation were reported across the entire sample, while a smaller but still significant increase of heterosexual attraction was reported. The attempt to change orientation was not found to lead to increases in psychological distress on average; indeed, the study found several small significant improvements in psychological distress associated with the interventions. And lest we fall prey to the same mistakes we have been criticizing in others, we have said repeatedly that because our sample was not demonstrably representative of those seeking change among all religious homosexuals, these are likely optimistic outcome estimates.
I conclude that homosexual orientation is, contrary to the supposed consensus, sometimes mutable. “Homosexuality” is a multifaceted phenomenon; there are likely many homosexualities, with some perhaps more malleable than others. Not all interventions are the same; not all practitioners are equally skilled. Perhaps most important, those seeking change vary considerably in their intensity of motivation, in their resourcefulness, and in the context in which they try to change. Most of those seeking change and most of those who actually attain some level of change are highly religiously committed, and these individuals who believe in a God who intervenes in their lives are embedded in communities of care and are motivated by their core understanding of who they are as a person before God. It is a wonder that anyone without such resources successfully obtains sexual-orientation change.
From the same article: "The best ecclesiastical, professional, legal, and social policy will be founded not on falsehoods or grotesque and indefensible simplifications but on a clearheaded grasp of reality in all its complexities, as well as on a humble recognition of all that we do not know."
Since we're concentrating on homosexuality here you will notice that a gay man is still a male and a gay woman is still a female. Moreover, once god had created adam and eve he had no involvement in the procreation process from then on. God has zilch to do with procreation.
Quote:
Originally Posted by n..Xuipa
is this biggoted ? Or just beguiling ? ? Because this is not what we are told to believe on the bathroom issues. Neither is this statement politically correct at this point in time and in this moment of this day( but we all know it could change tomorrow just to "win" ) .but you still used biblical truth to try and win an argument today . How beguiling of you !
We are told we have to let gay believe whatever they want to believe about their bathroom issues and we are tod we must let them do whatever they wish to do about their bathroom issues . That is what we will be taken to court for "hate crimes " if we say what you stated. Correct?
I just wish some folks would make up their very confused minds. But if we tell them what they must be, then is when the bathroom poop hits the fan..
I'm not the confused one, n..Xuipa. You are. I specifically stated that this thread is concentrating on homosexuality, i.e. the LGBQ of the acronym and not the T. So, I don't know what you're ranting about above ^^^.
Are you having fun, though? ...that's the main thing . . .
is this biggoted ? Or just beguiling ? ?
Because this is not what we are told to believe on the bathroom issues. Neither is this statement politically correct at this point in time and in this moment of this day( but we all know it could change tomorrow just to "win" ) .but you still used biblical truth to try and win an argument today . How beguiling of you !
We are told we have to let gay believe whatever they want to believe about their bathroom issues and we are tod we must let them do whatever they wish to do about their bathroom issues .
That is what we will be taken to court for
"hate crimes " if we say what you stated. Correct?
I just wish some folks would make up their very confused minds.
But if we tell them what they must be, then is when the bathroom poop hits the fan..
Speaking of confused...
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