So, I have intentionally avoided this issue, but at request of the other Satyr (Mr. Satyrbuddy) I was linkied to a tumblr discussion, namely this. Here’s my response; it’s line-by-line, so strap the helmets on.
Ok so, the first thing is the implication that Jesus didn’t say anything about homosexuality. That is correct, Jesus said nothing directly regarding homosexuality; he was more concerned with calling the religious establishment a herd of hypocrites who instead of worshiping God worshiped The Law, which He also said could be summed up into “Love God with everything you are” and “Love your neighbor like you love yourself.” The other thing he was occupied with was explaining to people that he was fixing to get killed and rise again, but it’s rather obvious he spent more time on the how-to-love-right bit.
So moving on, the first user, whose text we make red, because aggresiveness:
I saw this picture and it really peeved me off. So many people are believing this lie that God isn’t against homosexuality, but He truly is. He HATES ALL SIN… homosexuality is a sin. Say whatever you will to try and prove that God is silent on the matter, but The Bible is God breathed, God inspired and therefore perfect.
Ok, I’m with you on a few things. The Bible is, for those who profess to be Christians, the inspired word of God. There is a ton of debate even among Christians exactly what that means; I for one, refuse to say that the Bible is “inerrant”, in that it has no errors. Maybe the originals are inerrant, but the manuscripts we have definitely are not inerrant. I prefer to think of it as “infallible”, meaning it’s not lying to you. But again, the inspired word of God bit only follows if you already believe in God.
Then there’s the “God is silent” comment. The original post said nothing about “God”, and said everything about “Jesus”. For Christians, same person. For everyone else, not the same person.
Now the big one — the “is homosexuality a sin?” question. Simple thing is we don’t know. Let’s look at the linkied references:
His word (the Bible) has examples in the New and Old Testament of it’s stance on being against homosexuality.
First book in the Bible (Genesis) God shows His heart towards the matter in Chapter 19, Sodom and Gomorrah. Basically, the town Sodom and Gomorrah was filled with people acting on their fleshly impulses… majority of it came from homosexual relations. VERSE 5 of Genesis 19 “They shouted to Lot, “Where are the men who came to spend the night with you? Bring them out to us so we can have sex with them!” ( Lot was related to Abraham and the two them mentioned in this verse is actually two angels).. the end of this story is God completely wiping out this city because of how gross the people were. Read it… proof number one that God is not in favor of this lifestyle.”
Okay. Here’s the deal. Sodom and Gomorrah were already going to be destroyed before this incident. Lot also wasn’t the best of people either, seeing as he offered his daughters to the rapists in place of the men. Also, reference Ezekiel 16:49, which says “Now this was the sin of your sister Sodom: She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy.” Hrm…who does that sound like? Also, in Romans 1, which we’ll talk about in more detail later, homosexuality is (though there is debate on it) listed among a bunch of things that are simply evidence of a life lived without God.
In the third book of the Bible, again.. God’s stance against homosexuality. Leviticus 18:22 ” Do not practice homosexuality, having sex with another man as with a woman. It is a detestable sin” This whole chapter in Leviticus is about Forbidden sexual practices. I know many say well that was the Old Testament and we are freed from the laws of the Old Testament… well the God of the Old Testament is the same one as in the New Testament. He never changes sides, He never changes period.
Oh Leviticus, how misunderstood you be. Homosexuality in Leviticus is a sin just like sleeping with a woman on her period, or sacrificing your children to Molek, or marrying your wife’s sister as well as your wife. This is in the context of “detestable things your neighbors do that you better not do or I’m gonna be mad”. Never mind that it’s all also in the same vein of things like shellfish, pork, shaving the side of one’s head, and strapping bible verses to yourself.
In the New Testament, Romans 1:18-32 talks about the penalty of homosexuality.
Romans 1:18-32 actually talks about how God is letting people have sinning-fun-times so that they will descend into such depravity that they’ll have no choice but to turn back to God. Interesting logic, but follows from a God who actually cares quite a bit about human free will. Homosexuality here is mentioned in the sense of “natural” and “unnatural” relations, which is unclear at best. It’s also lumped in with “gossips, slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant, and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents; they have no understanding, no fidelity, no love, no mercy.” <sarcasm>And of course, we Christians, have never done any of those things.</sarcasm>
Also, the next thought after this passage is “You, therefore, have no excuse, you who pass judgment on someone else, for at whatever point you judge another, you are condemning yourself, because you who pass judgment do the same things.”
So, this passage is, curiously enough, actually about lawsuits. Again, homosexual activity is lumped in with thievery, greed, drunkenness, slander, and swindling. There’s also a fairly convincing argument out there that the homosexual acts mentioned are actually part of pagan worship practices, which of course colors it. Of course, since we’re quite a bit removed from the culture of 1st-Century Corinth we don’t know for sure. What we do know, what we can infer from the Corinthian letters, is that this church had serious issues with sex-related things — I mean the first letter starts off with a dude who married his stepmother; that should tell you something.
Again, takes a whole list of sins, lumps them together, reminds folk that “The Law” isn’t for the godly but the ungodly. Basic theology lesson, kids: The Law convicts of sin, the Gospel forgives it.
Sexual immorality and perversion could basically mean anything, including the general acceptance of fornication prevalent in our culture — personally I think that’s a bigger issue than homosexuality, but what do I know. Jude is also a weird little letter, as it uses a lot of strange, apocryphal books for examples. Remember, the example is not the point. If it were, my sermon for Sunday would imply that Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is the Word of God. It’s definitely not, but it is hilarious.
and many many more verses…
There’s not that many more.
Sorry if I seem angry, but people shouldn’t spread this false hope when God’s word says No to homosexuality. God hates sin and the sinner, but He is able to love us because of the blood of Jesus on the cross cleansed us and we able to become His children.
Ok, God’s word can be interpreted as saying “No” to homosexuality. It can also be interpreted as supporting slavery and supporting the oppression of women. I trust the Holy Spirit enough to guide us to the right way of interpreting the homosexuality thing just like it did with the other two. Also can we just give “love the sinner; hate the sin” a rest already? It makes us all sound like tools. Just love the person and let God sort the rest. He’s better at it than you. Especially if the person you are not doing a good job of loving isn’t a Christian, because then your rules don’t apply. There are rules for the “in-crowd” but we shouldn’t be expecting the “out-crowd” to follow them, now should we?
Alright, now onto the second user’s rebuttal of the first user; I’ll use orangey-brown because red was already taken:
I love crazy Christian people, they’re so cute with their crazy beliefs. They think spewing hateful things is okay because they belief the weirdest things. It’s actually kind of amusing, in a disgusting kind of way.
Yes, because insulting people’s beliefs, even when they’re being an asshat, is taking the moral high ground.
Okay man, you wanted to do this, tumblr user myhipsterheart, so let’s do this.
First of all the Bible is not God breathed, it was written by the hands of men to chronicle the word of God. Men are not God, men are not perfect, so the Bible is not perfect. For example, there are tons of different interpretations, translations and beliefs in varying bibles. The Mormon Bible, The East Orthodox Bible, and the Protestant Bible are all different, for example. Different. I have a copy of the King James version, but not the modern one. Mine was published in 1960, before the ‘official’ New King James version. Genesis 19 : 5 says, in mine, “And they called unto Lot, and said unto him, Where are the men which came in to thee this night? bring them out unto us, that we may know them.”
Tons of different interpretations, yes. As I mentioned earlier, Christians believe the Bible to be inspired; by the same token, non-Christians do not. Just the reality of the argument, and something Christians always seem to forget, mostly because for the past 1500 years or so they have been “in charge”. I’m rather glad that’s starting to change; it’ll be good for us.
Now I want to bring to your attention that in my Bible, there is five pages dedicated to words that may be misleading, because the people who published this, knew that shit can be mistranslated.
There is a common argument and debate over this passage in the Genesis whether or not it is condemning homosexuality, and most people have found that even if it is, it contradicts other text in the Bible! God wiped out the two cities because they were full of a lot more than homosexuality. Lot was afraid of his daughters being raped or corrupted, people stole, people killed other people, there was prostitution and they rejected God and his teachings.
Yup, I mentioned this, though again, the presenting issue was “not taking care of the poor.” By the by, that’s a recurring theme that God wants the “haves” to help out the “have-nots”.
Now let me give you some history on the Bible here, and the gospels, and these guys Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. They were only a handful of a couple hundred or so people that claimed to have chronicled the word of God and the life and times of Jesus Christ. There were tons of gospels, and even today they are digging new people up that have pages written about Jesus buried with them. No, not from Bibles, these corpses were found long before the Bible was put together. Okay well, not necessarily true, but at that time the Bible was this ridiculous mix of a bunch of different contradicting stories, and considering these were some early days of Christianity, churches of Christ were kind of all over the place in their teachings.
So this guy, Emperor Constantine revised the Bible after becoming a Christian himself. He knew it was all pretty ridiculous and figured how could people ever work together in this Religion and for the good of the Empire when nothing in the Bible was working together itself? So he got a bunch of Heads of Churches together, tossed the bible on the table, and said hey, let’s see what works if we mix and match. And I’m going to throw in there the fact that he made that Bible something that would appeal to Pagans AND Christian beliefs, even though they are very different religions. So, step 1 into how the Bible is NOT perfect. Step 2 is that the New King James was published in the 1970’s, with obvious further changes. That’s over three hundred years of time to change.
Oookkkaaayyyy. The New Testament, as we now call it, was written before (at the absolute latest) AD 150, and likely done before the end of the 1st Century. Somewhere around AD 135 a dude named Marcion of Sinope, who had some weird beliefs about how everything Jewish was bad, came up with a “canon” of Scripture, the fancy word for “list of books that are good and right to have around” which included 10 of Paul’s letters and the Gospel of Luke. In response to Marcion, other church leaders had to scramble to come up with their own “canons” to counter this guy who they all thought was wrong.
A guy named Eusebius, in his book Ecclesiastical History (written around AD 325), wrote that another fellow from around 200, named Origen, used a set of books similar to the New Testament. Eusebius also set forth a canon not unlike the New Testament in this book, but he was more concerned with tracing the history of what books are accepted and what were disputed than creating an accepted list.
I have no idea where this conspiracy theory with Constantine changing the Bible came from. The dude was technically not even a Christian, he was part of an offshoot sect called the Arians (not to be confused with Aryans; two totally different things). The Council of Nicea was meant to establish doctrine, not canon. Constantine commissioned about 50 Bibles from Eusebius, but that 50 isn’t going to make a dent in what was actually floating around at the time, especially as when Constantine converted Christianity (and Arianism) became the cool thing to be.
The actual canon of the New Testament as we know it wouldn’t appear until 367, in Athanasius’ “Easter Letter”. But even then, it took another 200 or so years for it to become more or less “official”, which technically didn’t happen until the Reformation. Bet you didn’t know that. Also, keep in mind many of the “changes” are because we keep finding older manuscripts, which are assumed to be better because they’re closer to the original. There are many things in the King James Bible that we no longer think are right because we have more, better manuscripts.
Alright, moving on.
Leviticus 18 : 22, oh we meet again.
Okay, remember the Pagan thing? And you know how like, Christians don’t really like Pagans all that much and consider them ‘devil worshippers’ or what nonsense?
Okay, so interpretation one of this verse, which is a popular acceptance by a wide number of Theologists is that the lines pertaining to homosexuality are actually referring to Pagan worship, and it goes more so against the second commandment than homosexuality being a sin. This includes 20 : 13.
Interpretation two, is also commonly accepted, because guess what and, you might not believe this but people have actually misread the old hebrew?! oh no way…whoa….whoa….people misread it whoa that’s never happened before has it? The line can be changed to “And with a man, thou shalt not lie in the beds of women”, pretty much stating if you’re going to bump uglies with another man, don’t do it in a girl’s bed cause that’s pretty grody.
Yea, I basically covered this, but the interpretations mentioned are pretty much a case of “let’s make it fit what I already believe” not “let’s find out what it’s really saying.”
Mentioning Romans is just ridiculous because the Gentiles are literally doing what they’re doing because they think they’re better than God and can do whatever they want, and that is really pissing Him off. God is described as a wrathful, jealous being who demands devotion from humanity, and seeing the Gentiles trade his word of ‘Truth’ to worship creation is really getting his goat. The homosexuality here is purposeful. They are doing it to make God mad, because they are going against nature. Now, this is interpreted so that the Gentiles are straight men, and their natural desire is to be with women, but they’re sleeping with one another to SPITE God. It’s not saying homosexuality is unnatural, because the natural desire of homosexuals is to be with the same sex. They are doing the unnatural by sleeping with a sex they don’t prefer and God is mad because he knows they’re doing it just because they think they’re better than him, and can resist their natural urges.
Basically covered this too, but they’re not doing it to “make God mad” or anything like they. They’re not actually acknowledging God at all, so God isn’t acknowledging them either. Seems a fair trade. God wants people to worship Him, but it’s not because he’s needy and insecure, it’s because life with God is better than life without God. That’s what Romans (on the whole) is trying to say.
In I Cor 6 : 9, the jewish words here that I assume you’re referring to for ‘Effeminate’ and ‘Abusers of themselves with mankind’ are mistranslated again because back when Jesus Christ was walking around, the word that was translated into Effeminate didn’t indicate homosexuality, like, ever. I mean we’re talking back when Gay meant happy and was rarely used to indicate homosexuals. The same goes for ‘malakoi’. When it mattered, when the Bible was chronicled, it didn’t mean Gay. Now the next phrase that’s used actually has five meanings that are preferred over homosexual which include rape, anal with one’s WIFE, sex with angels, and masturbation. There’s not mention of guys x guys in here.
Covered this too. The most well-known forms of homosexual expression in Bible times was for religious purposes and pederasty. Being “gay” wasn’t a thing. Did people have same-sex attraction? Of course they did, but the idea we have of what “gay” is has no place in Scriptural interpretation, because that idea plain didn’t exist 2000 years ago.
I’m not going into other versus because I think I’ve proven myself plenty in how ridiculous you are.
And the original message of this post was that Jesus never said anything against homosexuality. And he hasn’t. In fact, there’s a verse involving a roman who asks Jesus to heal his gay lover, and Jesus does it. Shit, Jesus could’ve said no just based on the fact this guy didn’t believe in God, but he healed his lover all the same, because Jesus was A GOOD GUY who believed in LOVE and RESPECT FOR OTHERS IN ALL OF HUMANITY. He did not condemn homosexuality.
Really, you’re going to pull out of nowhere that the Centurion’s servant was his lover? Is it possible? Sure, in the same way that I have a dog because I didn’t say I don’t have a dog. I might have a dog, but just because I might doesn’t mean I do. (For the record, I don’t have a dog.)
Now I’m not saying you have to stop believing what you want, go for it, but you have no right to tell people how to read their own Bible, you have no right to tell people what God believes or what God thinks because you are NOT God, you are NOT Jesus Christ and all you have is a book written by the hands of MEN that has been adapted and badly mistranslated over the years that it has been written to try and hold your argument. So you can not judge a person’s lifestyle or their religion.
Goodbye friends I am gone.
This is true: I’m not God; the first user isn’t God; the second user isn’t God; we just do the best we can with what we’ve got: a book written over 2000 years ago that may or may not be God’s inspired Word, depending on if you pay attention to God or not. Christians need to spend more time listening to what the Bible definitely says, things like “love your neighbor”, “love God”, “help the poor”, and not things that are quite a bit less clear given our cultural differences.
tl;dr – Christians, love better; Non-Christians, we’re not all jerks. Gays and the Bible is just complicated, and I, for one, don’t know for sure what to do about it, so I prefer to err on the side of love. Is homosexuality a sin? I’m personally not sure. If it is, it’s one among many. If it’s not, there’s plenty of other sins to worry about. The important thing is that in Christ there’s life — present and future — and freedom. When Christianity becomes about rules and regulations, we’re doing it wrong.
I hope I don’t catch too much hell for this.