cristiano said:
Yes, I like very much. Including this passages of the same apostle Paul, in the same book:
"Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen. Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural ones. In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed indecent acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their perversion." Romans 1.24-27
It's a lie to say this passage not refers to homossexuality. It does.
Then you'll like Romans 2:1 that I showed you earlier. St. Paul was baiting the Jewish Christian audience by appealing to their moral sensibilities. Romans 2:1, where he condemns Jewish Christians for judging and looking at Gentiles with utter disdain was what he was leading into.
"Therefore, you are without excuse, every one of you who passes judgment.
For by the standard by which you judge another you condemn yourself, since you, the judge, do the very same things." - Romans 2:1
As such, your utter disdain at homosexuals makes you no different than the Jewish Christians that St. Paul was trying to convert to his brand of Gentile Christianity.
Regardless, this passage is about homosexuality the way that that Judges 19 is about heterosexuality. God's destruction of Gibeah is after a mob gang raped and killed a female concubine. By your logic, this should be a sweeping condemnation of all heterosexual sex.
Have you ever actually analyzed Romans 1, though? It is a description of a Greco-Roman cult engaged in a temple orgy, which were bisexual. Romans 1:22-23 makes that clear. Like Judges 19 and 20, this is a condemnation of a specific practice, and given the fact that St. Paul spends lots of time in his epistles condemning idolatry, that would be precisely why he would have been disgusted at a temple orgy. But I think we can all agree that the Bible has a disdain for rape, orgies, and idolatry?
Yes, they are ill. In fact, we are all ill. Since Adam, in the History, the mankind was always ill. We are so greatly ill, that God had to die for us, because we were "dead in your transgressions and sins" (Ephesians 2.1). Haven't you read what I've explained about our imperfect nature before God? Simply put: God created Adam morally good (Genesis 1.31), but all men sin, and because of that, we need God (Rm. 3.23, 5.12). Any doubts?
I dislike labels. In fact, I hate labels. I even don't know if I fundamentalist or not, because I don't care of it. What label do you give to a man who seeks to live right before God, as stated and His Word, and simply that, with good sense and the orientation of the Holy Spirit? You called me Pharisee, and I simply wanted to discuss some biblical lessons, for God's sake...
I commit sins like everyone, and like everyone I need the Grace of God, because I regret from them. Like Paul explained in one of his epistles.
Like St. Paul, I call a spade a spade. When you state something like this, you're merely using it as justification for your prejudices. What you're really saying is,
"
I am a sinner, but homosexuals are all going to hell.""
You might state that you don't judge, but, frankly, your intentions are evident beyond your words.
But people like you, Melon, I don't respect. You are like one of those false prophets, who knows the Word of God, and through manipulation confunds the people, saying words from your heart and not from God, moving the people away from the real love and knowledge of what God wants for us. Prophets like Jeremiah met and fought people like you, who always existed. People like you, who always divided the Church. Call me whatever you want, I don't care.
Like I said. It's not about understanding the true Word of God. It's about maintaining tradition at all costs. The Pharisees had thought that they had it all right. You might be interested in knowing that the book of Revelation is a record of what the Pharisees believed would happen with Jesus' first coming. They were expecting a warrior Messiah who would vanquish their enemies and lift Israel into the most powerful kingdom that the world has ever seen. And because of their inflexibility, they missed the boat. The actual source texts to the Bible do not support your prejudices. Period.
The Bible's vague references to same-sex acts are in the context of temple orgies, which was a common pagan practice that stretched back thousands of years, and pederasty, the Greco-Roman practice where adult men would have sex with teenage boys until the latter reached the age of marriage, whereupon he would get married to a woman. If the destruction of Gibeah is not a condemnation of all heterosexual acts, then these stories of idolatry, orgies, and pedophilia are not a condemnation of all homosexual acts.
And this was more than evident through the first 1000 years of Christianity. It is known that early Christians looked at the Bible and focused mainly on idolatry, much in the same way that today's Christians look at the Bible and focus mainly on sex. Have you ever asked yourself where this focus shift came from? For that, we can blame the medieval Christian stoic movement, who finds its ideological father in St. Augustine. While he claims to have converted from Manicheanism to Christianity, the evidence is overwhelming that, much of the time, he used his influence to put Manichean theology into Christianity. Manicheans had two main obsessions:
1) Dualism--"good versus evil," a concept they took from the Persian religion, Zoroastrianism.
2) Purity, where they avoided the material, passionate, and emotional, along with all meat and sex, which they believed polluted the body, condemning them to an eternity of rebirth cycles.
Now just imagine what a disaster it is combining these two extreme philosophies. As a result, the post-Augustine Christian church developed a hatred of sex of all kinds. Sex for pleasure, even between married couples, was a mortal sin worthy of eternal hell. For a married couple to see each other naked would have been "lust," which was a mortal sin. This meant that a married couple was to only have pleasureless sex (probably through a hole in a sheet or something) only when they were ready to conceive a child.
This went further, as well. This philosophy is also the originator of the concept of "original sin." While today we believe that it is the sin of Adam and Eve, it was originally a belief that we were all tainted with sin, because we all came out of women. There was a particular disdain for women in these days, and, in fact, this was why female priests, who existed from the beginnings of the Christian church (so much for excuses claiming that they were forbidden because of the Bible) up to the 4th century A.D., were banned. It was their belief that the mere existence of women was from the result of Satan. Men were the lifebringers, while women merely held the incubating waters. Because men were the bearers of life, it was then believed that all fetuses were inherently male, and that female fetuses were a result of Satan's interference in the womb.
Proper behavior for men were to be strong and emotionless in every instance (hence today's adjective, "stoic," meaning "one who is seemingly indifferent to or unaffected by joy, grief, pleasure, or pain"). Feelings of happiness and sadness were equally condemned. Women were allowed to cry, merely because they were already "fallen," and, as such, "weakness" was expected.
Homosexuality, as such, was reserved for their deepest vitriol. It violated every tenet of Christian stoicism. It was pleasureful! It was lustful! It treated a man like a (*gasp*) woman! And because they believed that men were the lifebearers, they had a genuine fear that a man would get pregnant. This is where Christianity gets its anti-gay prejudices, not through the Bible. The Christian stoics did not even use the Bible to justify these prejudices. It was just obvious through their understanding of "natural law." Indeed, even today, the Catholic Church has quietly acknowledged that the Bible has nothing to do with their anti-gay sentiments, and a good many Catholic Bibles actually have contextual footnotes on the supposed anti-gay passages that echo exactly what I've stated in regards to idolatry, temple orgies, and pederasty! This homophobia, instead, has everything to do with medieval "natural law" tradition.
Christian stoicism, obviously, has changed over the centuries. Manicheanism became forgotten, so nobody would ever have known its influence on Christianity. "Original sin" was later redefined as being the equal sin we bear from being descendent of Adam and Eve, rather than being a result of childbirth through a woman's sinful vagina. 19th century Protestantism came up with the revolutionary concept that men and women should get married for love. Prior to that, it was about business and property alliances. Many kingdoms, after all, were created through such alliances.
"Homosexuality," as we know it today, was not even theorized until 1874 Germany. It was a revolutionary concept to believe that homosexuals were not merely heterosexuals who slip up once in a while. In the 132 years since then, it has been more than confirmed that homosexuals are a distinct part of nature. They are not merely heterosexuals that decide to fool around with the same sex here and there. It is not a mental illness, as determined by all credible psychologists and psychiatrists.
I'm not surprised that you have disdain for me, because what I tell you goes against everything you've believed to be true about Christianity and sexuality. However, the lesson of the post-Reformation world has been to ignore tradition, in favor of discovering the true "Word of God." It is blatantly clear what falls under "tradition" and what falls under the "Word of God" through textual analysis of the source texts and an understanding of Christian history and how the early Church understood the Bible.
Just because your beliefs are old does not mean that they are correct, and that "false prophet" label could easily be applied to you. If I were you, I'd start taking the lessons of Romans 2:1 to heart.
Melon