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You have a friend who is gay. You believe in your heart homosexuality is a sin and that perpetuated, non-repentant sin leads to death. This is all under the assumption that the reader also believes homosexuality is a sin. If you don't, then replace homosexuality with any other sin that irks you and see if that changes your mindset.
Do you:
1) Ignore the sin and let your friend continue on in it. Besides, it's their life, who are you to judge? By saying nothing, you neither approve nor disapprove.
2) Help your friend sin. Support their behavior and lead them further to destruction. That's what good friends do, after all! Support them at any cost, even to their own detriment.
3) Say something. You aren't God - you're not going to change their heart and brow beating them into submission never works. But, you can tell them about forgiveness through Christ and what he taught about living for God. The Holy Spirit will do the work for you after that. Don't judge, but love completely and help to the extent you can - let God do the rest.
4) Get angry and complain like a hypocrite. Go to a legislator and demand justice for something that is not yours or anyone but God's to judge.
Does that make a little more sense? And I apologize for the banter, that was distasteful on my part.
Another option would be to worry about your own sin, especially if it leads to "death."
Adjust your own oxygen mask before assisting other passengers.
Another option would be to worry about your own sin, especially if it leads to "death."
Adjust your own oxygen mask before assisting other passengers.
I agree with that, but I don't agree that telling someone the gospel and encouraging them through prayer and loving behavior is the same as ignoring the plank in your own eye. We're commanded to love God and love our neighbors as we love ourselves. If we don't respect and love our neighbors enough to tell them the truth, then how can we hope to do the same for ourselves? Lying to your neighbor is the same as lying to yourself. God will convict them in his own time, but we aren't aiding his kingdom by ignoring sin or by making it permissible in the name of love. People need to hear and see the good news in action before they can believe it. False piety (and religion) is what got the Pharisees and Sadducees in so much trouble with Jesus. When did it become better to embrace sin rather than mourn it? Christ died so that we could be free of that yoke, but people continue to choose enslavement over freedom.
I believe those are indeed some things that irk you, but I said "sins" that irk you. All sins should irk you, but if homosexuality isn't one, then I was suggesting that you identify some that come to mind. I've read enough of your posts to infer that homosexuality doesn't bother you.
On the other hand, does normalizing evil make it right? If I was to say I attended cult meetings where there were blood sacrifices as a child, and that I've since attended many blood sacrifices since then to the point where murdering innocent people can't possibly bother me as a mature, enlightened adult - does that make it right? I'm of course joking, but familiarity with sin doesn't make you a saint. In fact, it makes you a sinner - just like the rest of us. Don't know how you can be much more deceived than that.
Being gay is not a crime. You are equating LGBTQ with sin and crime.
Blood sacrifice? Murder? Your analogy is relying on something not true, yet you equate your example with homosexuality.
Homosexuality does not bother me. It is not evil. LGBTQ is not normalizing something evil either. Your analogy is not making sense.
You are taking an imaginary scenario, and trying to say it makes me a sinner. My sin is in your imagination, much like your blood sacrifice scenario.
Im curious, then, what are some examples of things you consider sin?
Kids not having enough to eat....Old people being lonely and having no one to talk to.... The mentally ill living on the streets...... People not having warm coats for winter....
How much time 'ya got? I have a very long list. Being gay is not on it. It wasn't on Jesus' list and it's not on mine.
It's an analogy of sin. Think about it a bit and I think you'll figure out what I'm getting at.
No, what it sounds like is that the daughter may have been born to "bible-believers" who won't accept her same sex attraction--so she tries to commit suicide. That scenario has been played out numerous times--and "bible-believers" have been guilty of every death they caused--even if they aren't there.
Ryan Robertson at age 19 killed himself because his fundamentalist parents wouldn't accept him being gay. They even prayed to God that they wouldn't have a gay son.
Now they don't. And NOW they have changed.
Quote:
The story of the Robertsons and their son Ryan became well-known after they posted a video on Facebook in January, titled “Just Because He Breathes: Learning to Truly Love Our Gay Son.” The Seattle couple had encouraged Ryan to try to become straight through prayer, but this strategy resulted in him abandoning his family and his faith.
------------------
“What we had wished for, prayed for, hoped for — that we would not have a gay son — came true. But not at all in the way we had envisioned,” Linda Robertson says in the video for Not All Like That, a new Internet video campaign that gives LGBT-affirming Christians a platform to speak out.
She closes by telling LGBT Christians, “If you're wondering whether there is a place for you in the kingdom of God, we want you to know that the kingdom of God won't be complete without you.”
They are no longer fundamentalists. They are NALT Christians--Not All Like That Christians, their own organization affirming the right, privilege and honor of every gay person to worship God freely and absent from condemnation from Pharisees.
Don't hold yourself responsible for this death---God will do that for you.
Im curious, then, what are some examples of things you consider sin?
I am passionate about civil rights. You might even call me militant. It is a generational thing. I come from a family of passionate militant activists.
When your brothers and sisters are denied their civil rights.
When women are expected to submit.
When an adult raises their hand to a child for any reason.
When women are denied reproductive healthcare..
When God is confined to a book.
When men do not put the bible in context.
...................... and so forth.
These things grieve me. Sins? I know right from wrong. I will leave the meaningless labels to others.
Kids not having enough to eat....Old people being lonely and having no one to talk to.... The mentally ill living on the streets...... People not having warm coats for winter....
How much time 'ya got? I have a very long list. Being gay is not on it. It wasn't on Jesus' list and it's not on mine.
For Dopefish, DRob4JC, bryan85, jeffbase40, and other fundamentalists. Please review the sin that your hearts delight in--the subjugation of gays in the name of God:
Quote:
How f a g g o t s became the term for a gay man is unknown. It may have been a derogatory term for an old women that got applied to gay men, but another derivation suggests that we throw the ******* on the fire. From Constantine, the first Christian Emperor of Rome, and for the next 1,500 years, Christians burned the gay. We think of the Inquisition as burning heretics, but according to records of the trials, more gay people were killed than religious heretics. Joan of Arc, for example was burned alive by the church for the sin of wearing pants, in defiance of the Bible. Who were all those witches but spiritually feisty women in a patriarchal world? The central question in Christendom was not whether it was just to burn gay people or not, but whether it was better to kill them first or to burn them alive.
---the citizens of Venice decided to protect their city and their wealth by killing the gay people, burning them alive between those magnificent pillars. Over the years the screams of gay people burning in Saint Mark’s Square became too much for the bureaucrats working in the surrounding palaces, so in a humanitarian gesture towards those working nearby, the city decided to behead the accused gay person before the burnings. For hundreds of years Venetians pursued and killed gay people to ensure the city’s prosperity and God’s blessings.
Hard as it is to believe, there are modern American Christians who continue to preach the killing of gay people. There are American evangelicals who are unable to kill gays in America, and so are backing “death for gays” legislation across Africa. This legislation got dangerously close to passing in Uganda in 2010, and Christian American money promoting these bills continues to flow. Even here in the States Christians attend rallies with signs advocating death for the gay. Gay people are blamed for 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, and pretty much every earthquake or wildfire in California. The medieval views of the Venetians are alive and well to this day.
Of course that is not the norm. Most Christians in America do not believe we should kill gay people. They believe tormenting us is enough. In the name of God, morals, families, righteousness, country, national security, civilization, and the human race, many Americans believe hurting the gay is a Christian duty.Gay people are bad and must be punished for their wrongness, and the pain inflicted must be horrible enough to serve as a message to others who might choose this deviant path. So we end up with what my friend Jathan Gurr calls the “If we just hurt them enough they won’t be gay” attitudes that dominate our political and religious discourse.
No matter how one cuts the mustard, fundamentalists were murderers from the beginning. Their killing weapons are different in this nation now, limited by law to name-calling and condemning gays to hell. The feeble efforts of the converted OP notwithstanding, even a gay who is "fighting" an inner battle with how God made him or her is still a victim of Venice today.
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