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the WHOLE Bible is the infallable word of God.....
you cant pick it apart just to make one sin ok......
Just like you can't just pick it apart and take it out of context to support your's or anyone else's prejudices about a group of people who are different to you.
Just like you can't just pick it apart and take it out of context to support your's or anyone else's prejudices about a group of people who are different to you.
From what we read in the gospels, it would appear that Jesus had a bigger hang up with divorce than any other perversion (see the adulterous woman).
When christians target the gays based on homosexuality, their own house is not in order hence they lose the right to judge anyone else - notwithstanding, we are not to judge anyone.
Then again the NT clearly states that if you fail in one law, you fail in all. That was not to place the burden of living under the law but to show the ridiculousness of trying - it was a system with 100% guaranteed failure rate. Pretty evident in that the high priest had to do offerings for his personal sins too.
Just like Paul mentioned that the eating of meat offered to idols was sinful to some, to others it was not hence his statement of "happy is he who does not condemn himself in that which he approves" (paraphrased). When it comes to homosexuality, the graded sin list comes out and homosexuality is on the top or near the top of the list.
Obviously the stonings of gays in the past did no eradicate the "problem" as there are still gay folk today, even in Muslim countries. They will still be around in 100 years time and they are all born into heterosexual couples (mostly).
So either this is a natural phenominan or God sure has made some big "mistakes" allowing the corruption of His genetic code to go skew, we have discussed this at length too - the intersex folk.
At the end of the day it all comes down to personal conviction. I certainly would not want to go through life feeling guilty about my heterosexuality.
Jaymax, Can you go into this more?
Tried to rep you but couldn't.
Quote:
How many people who condemn homosexuality just read their post-1948 English translations of the Bible and see the English word "homosexuals" used, so don't bother to research any further?
How many people actually understand the meaning of Hebrew words like qadesh or to'ebah or Koine Greek words like arsenokoitai and malakoi, and the context in which they were used?
The soul has no sexual aprts. That is only for the material world. When we die and leave this earth, you will no longer have those parts. You will either have masculine or feminine aspects but no bodily parts to go with them. The only thing God cares about in a relationship, married or not, male or female, is Love.
I can..."Obsession". I have long wondered about the hang ups, or obsession, if you will, that many Christians seem to have about all things sexual. Are they that sexually repressed?
Obsession definitely ( an unhealthy one at that) and I'm with you with the pondering about this odd fascination with other people's sexual orientation...
Very odd indeed.
Sexually repressed or maybe some have their own struggles with certain feelings perhaps if one was being very uncharitable... Or is just plain bigotry they struggle with ?!
One could almost call it a "fetish" if one was being a bit suspicious....
It is odd isn't it how what consensual adults do in the bedroom becomes a hotter issue than child labour or the eradication of poverty, war or crime...
If one finds certain behaviour distasteful why not let their God be the judge ? Let's face it he can smite Homosexuals with their might for their sinful ways so why not leave it to the creator ? I have been told he is omnipotent, omniscient and ubiquitous so he seems perfectly suited to punishing those who err against him without any outside help.
Let his wrath come down upon all the sinners . That would I suspect put a stop to most sinful behaviour rather quickly ( whether straight or Gay)
I also do not understand what the problem is with Homosexuality for some posters when nobody is forcing them to be that way inclined ?
The words " none of your beeswax" comes to mind...
For a religion who preaches love Christianity has some rather odd problems with Human beings falling in Love and making love.
The soul has no sexual aprts. That is only for the material world. When we die and leave this earth, you will no longer have those parts. You will either have masculine or feminine aspects but no bodily parts to go with them. The only thing God cares about in a relationship, married or not, male or female, is Love.
No sexual parts?...You state these things as facts...How on earth do you know this is real or true? How about our other parts? Do you think we will still have eyes, ears etc?
Jaymax, Can you go into this more?
Tried to rep you but couldn't.
It would take me quite awhile to go into it, and this thread might get closed down as so many others do, so I'll just give you some links you can read. These are just some of the more recent sources I've found since I've been researching this topic over the last few years. There are also many many books written on this subject.
By the way, I meant to write "post 1946 Bibles", not 1948. The English word "homosexuals" was first used in 1946 in the Revised Standard Version (RSV)
Here's a link to a well researched site on the verses/words that are misused to condemn homosexuality. A COMPREHENSIVE STUDY OF
Here's a great link for gay Christians mostly written by psychotherapist and Christian theologian Dr Ralph Blair. He also goes into detail about the verses used to condemn homosexuality with references and links to what other Biblical scholars and theologians have to say.
Evangelicals Concerned Inc. (http://www.ecinc.org/index.htm - broken link)
Here's a website which shows the timeline of the various translations of the Greek words aresenokoitai and malakoi from 56AD to 1998. These are the words that have become fashionable to translate as homosexual and effeminate or even homosexual perverts - which is not what most scholars believe those words to mean, given the context in which they were written. CHRISTIANGAYS.COM: Translations of Malakoi and Arsenokoitai Through History (I Cor 6:9)
Religious Tolerance has a good overview of how conservative and liberal Christians view homosexuality and what the Bible does and doesn't say about homosexuality. THE BIBLE AND HOMOSEXUALITY
Another fairly comprehensive look at the Bible and homosexuality.
What the Bible Says - And Doesn't Say - About Homosexuality (http://www.soulforce.org/article/homosexuality-bible-gay-christian - broken link)
There's many more, but those websites are fairly comprehensive on the topic.
What I find sad, is that so many self-professed Christians who use the "Love the sinner, hate the sin" line with homosexuals, don't usually bother to do any research on the topic, but just rest easy "knowing" that the Bible condemns homosexuality because it's what they've been told or what they want to believe. Or because of the homophobic idiot who first mistranslated the word arsenokoitai to mean "homosexual" in an English translation in 1948. I wish I could find his name. Although I did find a critique of the Revised Standard Version written in 1953:
Quote:
"When one approaches the New Testament (RSV version) serious flaws are found. These can be traced to two things: (1) the tendency to paraphrase and (2) a superficial insight into the exegesis of the Greek New Testament. The net result, in spite of certain advantages of the new version, is to curtail seriously the usefulness of it../..The most glaring flaw of the new version is the woeful lack of exegetical insight into the New Testament on the part of its translators. This, no doubt, is a reflection of the current trend in the majority of the seminaries to de-emphasize the exegesis of the text of the Bible in its original languages. S. Lewis Johnson, Th.D."
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Last edited by Ceist; 03-24-2009 at 09:01 AM..
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