crf@mace.princeton.edu (Charles Ferenbaugh) (03/08/91)
In an article which has now expired on my system, the Moderator wrote that most Christians who argue for homosexuality do so on the assumption that homosexuality is a basic character trait which cannot be changed. I've thought about this, and I find it very hard to see how such an assumption can be held consistently with the Bible. I won't list all the relevant Scriptures (I'm sure it's been done before, many times) but several places in the OT God commands that homosexuality is not to be tolerated among the Jews. Leaving aside completely the question of whether those commands apply to us, we're still left asking: wait a minute, how could a just and loving God call for any homosexuals in Israel to be punished for a "basic character trait"? Since this is such a sensitive subject let me emphasize what I said in my previous posting: although God commands us to call sin sin, as much so for homosexuality as for murder, stealing, pride and the like, He loves us in such a radical way to free us from all sins. Likewise we as Christians are called to love the sinner(s) even as we hate the sin(s). In other words nothing I say is to be construed as advocating homophobia or persecution, but rather a call for us to love just as Jesus loved... Grace and peace, Charles Ferenbaugh
henning@acsu.buffalo.edu (Karl smack Henning) (03/09/91)
Charles Ferenbaugh writes: >In an article which has now expired on my system, the Moderator wrote that >most Christians who argue for homosexuality do so on the assumption that >homosexuality is a basic character trait which cannot be changed. >I've thought about this, and I find it very hard to see how such an >assumption can be held consistently with the Bible ... I will keep this brief, partly out of reluctance to recapitulate points I've raised in other posts, partly for reasons of focus; thus, I offer not an extensive argument, but rather the argument's precis. To argue that every sentence, jot & tittle in whatever translation of the bible is literally true and agrees on all points with every OTHER sentence, jot & tittle in the same translation of the bible, is IMHO either naivete or willful ignorance. And -- unlike the hundreds of xians who loudly denounced /The Last Temptation of Christ/ without ever seeing any of it -- I have constructed this opinion on the basis of somewhat extensive familiarity with the bible; this is not a "cheap shot". Notwithstanding my own opinions, I respect many xians who seek nonetheless to sort out what, in the morass of texts called the bible, may be considered "enduring truths". For me, the bible is nothing like a "word of god"; but I have even close friends who feel that it is, and I do not for this reason wish them off the planet :-) For this reason, I do not throw out or discredit my observations in the world around me, just because this or that Jew or xian two or three thousand years ago was reported to have said the contrary, and claimed the utterance for god's. For thousands of years, homosexuality was derided (and worse) as sexual perversion. At the end of the twentieth century, trying to clear away the mists of hate, fear, prejudice, and -- not least significant -- millenia of acculturation, we are finally willing to accept (some of us) that homosexuality mayn't be sexual perversion after all, but that a small but significant percentage of the population have [perhaps always] had personalities which exhibited homosexual tendencies. Verse-searches through the bible will not shed this light upon your mind, any more than they would encourage you to believe that multiple- personality-disorders are neural dysfunctions suffered by people in need of love, who didn't do anything to /deserve/ the dysfunction, rather than merely the human habitation of demons, experiencing god's "love" in the form of punishment. NOTE: I am NOT saying that homosexuality is socially/neurally dysfunctional; just that ancient ignorance and prejudice made pronouncements on a variety of topics for which these antique people had no information. If you, as a man or woman in the late twentieth-century, decide that you value the ignorance of antiquity (as crystallized for the ages in parts of the bible) OVER the knowledge and experience that surround you in the world that lives and breathes around you today -- You choose to embrace darkness. kph -- "The shrewder mobs of America, who dislike having two minds upon a subject, both determine and act upon it drunk; by which means a world of cold and tedious speculation is dispensed with." -- Washington Irving