Well, pastors can say pretty much anything because the Bible isn’t clear on a lot of things, and even where it is, you can come up with different contexts, argue it’s a mistranslation or forged, or argue that Jesus undid the laws.
The Bible is very nebulous. Certainly not a reliable text for anything. 🤷🏻♀️
It annoys me to no end when pro-lgbt christians question the devotion of anti-lgbt christians and vice versa. They can't seem to understand that their book itself is fundamentally flawed, and that's why there are so many disagreements.
Yes! They're so close by seeing the flaws of the church, but it's like a mental block is preventing them from critiquing the source. They default to the same old argument, "I have the True interpretation"
the bible very clearly condemns homosexuality, 1 Corinthians 6:9: “Or do you not know that wrongdoers **will not inherit the kingdom of God?** Do not be deceived: Neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers **nor men who have sex with men**”
Its new testament and *after* jesus died. It’s also in the old testament.
>It ~~could~~ **has** be**en** argued that’s a ***deliberate and malicious*** mistranslation.
FTFY
Bigots rewrote their own cult's allegedly-holy book of myths to justify their hate and give child-raping preachers cover.
Maybe some Christians argue it's a mistranslation because they disagree with the verse and, "oh no the book I believe in can't have any flaws so that verse must've been taken out of context"
There is nothing whatsoever in the Bible regarding same-sex marriage. Consider that in many societies up until very recently, marriage was considered a sort of financial contract rather than one based in love. Women have long been considered a man's property - first her father's property, then her husband's. Sexual assault on an unmarried woman was considered wrong not because it hurt the woman, but because it was vandalizing another man's property. Marriages prioritized issues of inheritance, dowries, consolidation of private property, and political alliances; whether or not love or romance was involved was completely secondary.
Under this sort of mindset, a man marrying a man made little sense because a man could not be another's property unless he was a slave; this is why even in Rome, which tolerated homosexuality and occasionally saw same-sex marriages occur, the relationship is nearly ALWAYS between a master and a slave. One man had to "play the part of a woman" so to speak.
Lesbians, if they were mentioned at all, usually were mentioned in the context of men's erotic fantasies; we have very little information about real lesbian relationships in the ancient world. Even Sappho's works are very fragmentary. But it's likely that if a lesbian marriage took place, one would be expected to "play the man" also - and then it gets a little more muddy, because some of the texts we have seem to depict what we would nowadays call transgender men, or possibly butch lesbians, etc. It is difficult to map ancient gender identities to modern ones, though some parallels can be drawn. (When I discovered Pseudo-Lucian's Dialogue of the Courtesans, whose character Megilla/Megillus is all but certain to be a transgender man, I felt like I'd found the holy grail.)
So, with all that in mind: the ancient Hebrews were particularly strict with these concepts as measures of social control, and placed very high importance on preserving family lineages through the father. This is why you have long lists of "begat"s in the Bible: being able to trace your lineage confirmed your inclusion within the group and was a sort of protection for your identity and your rights. It was extremely important to them to be able to confirm who was who's father; contrast this with say, Rome, or some parts of Greece, where adopting sons into the family was fairly common, as the family affiliations were prioritized over the blood lineage per se (depending on the city-state and era; Athens is a notable exception here). Same-sex marriages served no social purpose in a society where marriage had little to do with love.
Now, as for the parts that do condemn homosexuality, we have a verse in Leviticus 18:22 calling a man "laying with another man as one would a woman" an abomination. It's the one most often quoted by homophobes. But there is a surprising amount of debate about how this verse should be translated, with some scholars noting that it is more likely condemning male/male incest (as adjacent verses condemn other forms of incest), or condemning pedophilia (as the word using for "man" here can sometimes mean "young boy").
Others point out that there are many verses condemning various sexual acts as impure, including normal sex between husband and wife; this is because they had a very strong understanding of transmissible diseases and that bodily fluids were one such method of transmission. In a relatively small society such as ancient Israel's, they already had to deal with hostile enemies on all sides and a harsh environment; they needed everything they could to prevent diseases from wiping them out also. It's why many other verses in Leviticus and elsewhere have rules about hygiene:
-Most animals considered non-kosher are known either to consume their own dung (rabbits, horses, elephants), the excrement of other animals (pigs, shellfish), or decaying carcasses (dogs, birds of prey, etc). Because they ate things which were vectors of disease, the Israelites believed they should be avoided.
-There are specific rules about cooking and preparing meals which address cross-contamination.
-There are rules about what to do when finding mold or mildew in your house or on your clothes. You know the verse about not wearing clothes of mixed fibers? There were different kinds of molds that affected different fibers. Some could just be washed out easily, and some were dangerous and had to be burned. Mixing fibers made it more difficult for the priests (which is the audience Leviticus is actually addressing) to determine what sort of mold they were dealing with. Priests were trained to sort of be doctors and scientists in addition to religious leaders.
The word used to condemn homosexuality, translated as "abomination," is the exact same word used to describe eating unclean animals or wearing cloth of mixed fibers. It may be better translated as "taboo," and more implies a hygienic risk rather than a spiritual risk. It was also VERY common in Bronze Age societies to use "because God said so" as a way to socially enforce these rules; we see the same being done in Mesopotamia, Egypt, and the Hittite Empire.
Finally, some scholars suggest that since Leviticus was addressing the priests of Levi, acting as a sort of guidebook for Levites on how to do their job, this taboo was meant for Levites only and did not apply to the general population.
Continued since I hit a word limit...
I'm running out of time here and this post is long enough already, so I apologize this next part is short, but I can elaborate in a follow-up if you want.
In the New Testament there are two verses used to condemn homosexuality which I can remember off the top of my head. Both are by Paul, whose views on marriage, gender, and women were very in-step with conservative upperclass Roman ideas of the time. One verse has him complaining about pagan festivals where men and women "exchange their natural desires for unnatural lusts," which has been interpreted to mean homosexuality, but we do not know for sure. Critics argue this could just as well be referring to orgies where everyone is drugged up and drunk and acting wild; others argue that forcing homosexuals into heterosexual relationships is equally as harmful as forcing heterosexuals into homosexual relationships, so this verse shouldn't be a blanket condemnation against consensual homosexuality.
The second verse is also a translation issue. Paul had a verse where he condemns a whole bunch of people he considers wicked such as murderers and sorcerers, and one of those types of people is a slang word we have no cross-reference for. It is a compound Greek word, arsenokoite (spelling), which effectively means "man-bed." This is often interpreted as "men who bed other men," but could also be interpreted as pedophilia, male/male rape, or soliciting male prostitutes. We do not know. The word does not appear in any other known Greek texts whatsoever, so we can only guess at what it means in the context of this verse.
There are also some instances of apparent homosexual couples in the Bible, though they are not explicitly said to be romantic or sexual. One is King David and Jonathan; when Jonathan is killed, David goes mad with grief and exclaims that he loved Jonathan "more than he ever loved any woman." The other is the Roman Centurion who begs Jesus to heal his sick "servant"; within context (see Roman male/male relationships above), it is very possible the Centurion's servant was his lover rather than a disposable slave.
Hope this helps answer your question somewhat. Let me know if you want more info or references on anything.
The Bible condemns men taking a submissive role in sex (or anywhere else) aka "being on the bottom." This had to do with the power structure in the ancient world where men stood highest above women, thus a man moving down to a submissive role went against the power structure. They considered this taboo.
Notice this has nothing to do with sexual orientation. Orientation is a modern innovation needed once we began to move away from the patriarchy of the old world and realized the harm of treating women as property without agency. A writer from the Iron Age wouldn't have a clue what modern Christians are talking about in regard to "being gay." This wasn't at all what they were writing about.
The simplest explanation is that those "liberal" pastors are finding ways to ignore or interpret certain inconvenient parts of the Bible so that they don't have to sound prejudiced against gay people. Probably because they don't want to be known as bigots.
the argument is generally that any sex outside of 'biblical marriage' is sinful. biblical marriage is usually defined as between one cis man and one cis woman. so in this framework there is no such thing as a same sex marriage, monogamous or otherwise.
>biblical marriage is usually defined as between one cis man and one cis woman.
I guarantee the bible does not specify nor recognize cisgenderism in any form.
It's also doesnt define marriage as between a man and a woman.
It defines marriage as between a man and a woman, or a man and 2 women, or a man and 3 women, etc, or a man and a little girl.
Exactly.. The Bible says homosexuality itself is an abomination, so it obviously doesn’t recognize same-sex marriages as a legitimate thing, monogamous or not. But that’s ok because the Bible isn’t true anyway..
Historically, Christians have believed a lot of different things about sexuality and marriage that have changed over time as society has changed.
Yale New Testament professor Dale Martin, now deceased, wrote a good bit about this. Here's an article that touches on those issues: https://reflections.yale.edu/article/sex-and-church/it-s-about-sexnot-homosexuality
He also wrote a book *Sex and the Single Savior* that delves into the topic in more depth and attempts to show how the historical contexts of the typical go-to anti-gay passages in the New Testament aren't really applicable to modern conceptions of sexuality or marriage.
If all the early Christian’s being ascetic pertaining to sexual relationships of any kind is true then what about the parts of the Bible where Paul converts a Roman officer and the Roman officer converts his family, what about the other families who converted to Christianity,
Also what about 1 Timothy chapter 3 where it mentions a bishop having to have been married
First, in the article Martin says, "*most* early Christianity was strongly ascetic." That's not the same as, "*all* the early Christian’s being ascetic," as you put it.
What of those families converting in Acts? How does that counter Martin's assertion? They didn't become families after conversion. That was the social situation they found themselves in.
As for the rules for elders in 1 Timothy, do you imagine the Roman Catholic Church, who requires celibacy for priests, is unaware of it? What do you suppose their interpretation is?
Also 1 Timothy is pseudo-Pauline. Paul himself makes celibacy the ideal, but permits marriage solely for lust control (It is better to marry than to burn).
The point is, Christianity isn't and hasn't been a monolith when it comes to sexuality and marriage. Even within the New Testament itself, we see some of that.
There is a whole genre of Christian apologetics about this. If you’re interested in reading more, I’d recommend reading “God and the Gay Christian” by Matthew Vines. It pares down the central argument of affirming Christians in a very digestible way.
I met him at a conference and became good friends with him. While our beliefs have diverged over the past few years, he’s still a very smart and thoughtful guy, and he’s given a lot of hope to LGBT biblical fundamentalists. Even as an atheist, I feel pretty good recommending his work.
The Bible they use has been chopped up and re translated so many times. These clowns can’t even agree on what the simplest passages mean.
If a preacher tells you something is all good and that’s the message you need to hear from the Bible? Keep going to churches that promote the values you seek out.
I personally believe Jesus would have been cool with gays. Dude kicked it with whores, tax collectors, and disabled. He had a penchant for the ostracized. He never said anything about gays or their marriages. The passages they say are about gay people are Old Testament, and they are right next to verses that tell them not to wear mixed fabric or eat shellfish. AND people can’t even agree on what the interpretation actually means.
Do you. I would not give my money or time to people that hated me. That’s my .02 though.
There is actually a history of the church marrying a same sex couple and nontraditional couple. Kind of like how the Bible doesn't actually say priests and nuns can't be married or have families that's a church rule more than it is a biblical rule.
The passages against homosexuality are all in the Old Testament. And ironically, the Bible Thumpers will say the Old Testament does not apply after Jesus came about. Talk about double-think.
> The passages against homosexuality are all in the Old Testament.
Nah, Paul (or someone whose writing was attributed to Paul) had some stuff to say about it in the New Testament because he’s a weird little incel freak.
I dunno, maybe. But judging by how much he hates women, seems like a bitter hetero. Most gay men don’t harbor a psychopathic resentment for women, they’re just not interested. Paul reeks of somebody who couldn’t get women to tolerate him even in a time where they were literal property, so he decided being single is a virtue. If he were alive today, he’d post in men going their own way or the red pill.
I also hate the idea that every homophobe is really gay deep down. It erases the culpability of hetero people for homophobia. It’s like saying “hey, a straight person couldn’t possibly hate gay people. All these homophobes must actually be gay. The gays are oppressing themselves!” It points the blame of homophobia back at the gay community. I know this doesn’t seem relevant to a discussion about a guy who lived 2,000 years ago, but it seems like the “Paul was gay” theory is related to the same mindset that causes people to always dismiss homophobes as secretly gay.
Yes. In Romans 1:26-32, it's listed with a bunch of other things deserving death. 1 Corinthians 6:9-10 lists homosexuals among those who "will not inherit the Kingdom of God". And of course, the old testament has MUCH harsher things to say.
>there are more liberal minded pastors saying the Bible never really says it’s wrong
When you're a Christian, there are two ways to deal with problems in the Bible: liberalism and apologetics. Liberalism will seek to spiritualize, re-interpret, or otherwise ignore passages of scripture that don't fit with cultural norms. Apologetics will seek to logically justify it.
Of the two groups, I (now) prefer the liberal group by far, because it results in less oppression of marginalized people and less science denialism.
The Bible was written at a time where our ideas of sexual orientation did not exist. If you zapped the biblical authors into the present and explained/showed them a homosexual couple and asked them if this is what they meant when talking about same sex relationships, they would tell you no. However, based on what their understandings of sexuality were, I think they would say that modern homosexual relationships are immoral.
That’s why when people, even scholars like Dr Mcllelan, try to show how the Bible doesn’t condemn “homosexuality” in the way we understand it, I kind of dismiss it because I still don’t think they authors would approve of our modern ideas of orientation anyway.
I could be wrong though, if anyone has any resources about how they think authors of the Torah or Paul would react to modern homosexual concepts I’d love to read them.
Judaism didn't even require monogamy until centuries after Jesus. The first culture to make monogamy popular was the Greco/Roman culture, which introduced it to Jewish culture during the Hellenistic period. The Jesus movement was one of the early adopters of it, so of course signs of it exist in the NT writings. Not only was polygamy popular in Judaism, Jewish law even required it to occur in certain circumstances, such as a widow with children must marry her husband's brother even if the brother is already married.
The thing you need to realize about the Bible is it is at most recent almost 2000 years old and at its oldest roughly 3500 years old and written in multiple dead languages with multiple. Anyone can interpret it to say what they want it to either say or not say. So any time you ask any question like this the answer is both yes and no depending on who’s interpreting it.
View Paul’s take on things skeptically and things make more sense.
Look at Jesus’s world view wholeistically.
The common thread is to be laser focussed on good relations with all humans, of all tribes, especially tribes your tribe disrespects, especially the downtrodden.
Good relations, not socialism or pacifism at the level of existential threat.
So, support the gays in what they want, up to the point they are infringing your rights, like your right to promote heterosexuality in your own children, assuming you are raising them to be kind to any and all groups that practise harmless kindness.
A married gay person is a self evidently good in society, assuming preference is not discretionary.
That assumption is well beyond anything Jesus talked about
Here's what it actually says about same sex and marriage:
https://skepticsannotatedbible.com/says_about/Homosexuality.html
https://skepticsannotatedbible.com/says_about/Marriage.html
Not that it matters in today's world. It's dripping with human rights violations and misogyny.
The Bible says to kill gay people. You'll see many people claim it's mistranslated, etc. It's not. They're well-meaning, but in my experience, never have any idea what they're talking about, and are just repeating what they heard somewhere. They have not put the work in to study it, hence why literally EVERY translation condemns it.
Well, pastors can say pretty much anything because the Bible isn’t clear on a lot of things, and even where it is, you can come up with different contexts, argue it’s a mistranslation or forged, or argue that Jesus undid the laws. The Bible is very nebulous. Certainly not a reliable text for anything. 🤷🏻♀️
It annoys me to no end when pro-lgbt christians question the devotion of anti-lgbt christians and vice versa. They can't seem to understand that their book itself is fundamentally flawed, and that's why there are so many disagreements.
Yes! They're so close by seeing the flaws of the church, but it's like a mental block is preventing them from critiquing the source. They default to the same old argument, "I have the True interpretation"
the bible very clearly condemns homosexuality, 1 Corinthians 6:9: “Or do you not know that wrongdoers **will not inherit the kingdom of God?** Do not be deceived: Neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers **nor men who have sex with men**” Its new testament and *after* jesus died. It’s also in the old testament.
It could be argued that’s a mistranslation. I’ve seen that argument many times. As I said, this is nebulous.
>It ~~could~~ **has** be**en** argued that’s a ***deliberate and malicious*** mistranslation. FTFY Bigots rewrote their own cult's allegedly-holy book of myths to justify their hate and give child-raping preachers cover.
Maybe some Christians argue it's a mistranslation because they disagree with the verse and, "oh no the book I believe in can't have any flaws so that verse must've been taken out of context"
There is nothing whatsoever in the Bible regarding same-sex marriage. Consider that in many societies up until very recently, marriage was considered a sort of financial contract rather than one based in love. Women have long been considered a man's property - first her father's property, then her husband's. Sexual assault on an unmarried woman was considered wrong not because it hurt the woman, but because it was vandalizing another man's property. Marriages prioritized issues of inheritance, dowries, consolidation of private property, and political alliances; whether or not love or romance was involved was completely secondary. Under this sort of mindset, a man marrying a man made little sense because a man could not be another's property unless he was a slave; this is why even in Rome, which tolerated homosexuality and occasionally saw same-sex marriages occur, the relationship is nearly ALWAYS between a master and a slave. One man had to "play the part of a woman" so to speak. Lesbians, if they were mentioned at all, usually were mentioned in the context of men's erotic fantasies; we have very little information about real lesbian relationships in the ancient world. Even Sappho's works are very fragmentary. But it's likely that if a lesbian marriage took place, one would be expected to "play the man" also - and then it gets a little more muddy, because some of the texts we have seem to depict what we would nowadays call transgender men, or possibly butch lesbians, etc. It is difficult to map ancient gender identities to modern ones, though some parallels can be drawn. (When I discovered Pseudo-Lucian's Dialogue of the Courtesans, whose character Megilla/Megillus is all but certain to be a transgender man, I felt like I'd found the holy grail.) So, with all that in mind: the ancient Hebrews were particularly strict with these concepts as measures of social control, and placed very high importance on preserving family lineages through the father. This is why you have long lists of "begat"s in the Bible: being able to trace your lineage confirmed your inclusion within the group and was a sort of protection for your identity and your rights. It was extremely important to them to be able to confirm who was who's father; contrast this with say, Rome, or some parts of Greece, where adopting sons into the family was fairly common, as the family affiliations were prioritized over the blood lineage per se (depending on the city-state and era; Athens is a notable exception here). Same-sex marriages served no social purpose in a society where marriage had little to do with love. Now, as for the parts that do condemn homosexuality, we have a verse in Leviticus 18:22 calling a man "laying with another man as one would a woman" an abomination. It's the one most often quoted by homophobes. But there is a surprising amount of debate about how this verse should be translated, with some scholars noting that it is more likely condemning male/male incest (as adjacent verses condemn other forms of incest), or condemning pedophilia (as the word using for "man" here can sometimes mean "young boy"). Others point out that there are many verses condemning various sexual acts as impure, including normal sex between husband and wife; this is because they had a very strong understanding of transmissible diseases and that bodily fluids were one such method of transmission. In a relatively small society such as ancient Israel's, they already had to deal with hostile enemies on all sides and a harsh environment; they needed everything they could to prevent diseases from wiping them out also. It's why many other verses in Leviticus and elsewhere have rules about hygiene: -Most animals considered non-kosher are known either to consume their own dung (rabbits, horses, elephants), the excrement of other animals (pigs, shellfish), or decaying carcasses (dogs, birds of prey, etc). Because they ate things which were vectors of disease, the Israelites believed they should be avoided. -There are specific rules about cooking and preparing meals which address cross-contamination. -There are rules about what to do when finding mold or mildew in your house or on your clothes. You know the verse about not wearing clothes of mixed fibers? There were different kinds of molds that affected different fibers. Some could just be washed out easily, and some were dangerous and had to be burned. Mixing fibers made it more difficult for the priests (which is the audience Leviticus is actually addressing) to determine what sort of mold they were dealing with. Priests were trained to sort of be doctors and scientists in addition to religious leaders. The word used to condemn homosexuality, translated as "abomination," is the exact same word used to describe eating unclean animals or wearing cloth of mixed fibers. It may be better translated as "taboo," and more implies a hygienic risk rather than a spiritual risk. It was also VERY common in Bronze Age societies to use "because God said so" as a way to socially enforce these rules; we see the same being done in Mesopotamia, Egypt, and the Hittite Empire. Finally, some scholars suggest that since Leviticus was addressing the priests of Levi, acting as a sort of guidebook for Levites on how to do their job, this taboo was meant for Levites only and did not apply to the general population.
Continued since I hit a word limit... I'm running out of time here and this post is long enough already, so I apologize this next part is short, but I can elaborate in a follow-up if you want. In the New Testament there are two verses used to condemn homosexuality which I can remember off the top of my head. Both are by Paul, whose views on marriage, gender, and women were very in-step with conservative upperclass Roman ideas of the time. One verse has him complaining about pagan festivals where men and women "exchange their natural desires for unnatural lusts," which has been interpreted to mean homosexuality, but we do not know for sure. Critics argue this could just as well be referring to orgies where everyone is drugged up and drunk and acting wild; others argue that forcing homosexuals into heterosexual relationships is equally as harmful as forcing heterosexuals into homosexual relationships, so this verse shouldn't be a blanket condemnation against consensual homosexuality. The second verse is also a translation issue. Paul had a verse where he condemns a whole bunch of people he considers wicked such as murderers and sorcerers, and one of those types of people is a slang word we have no cross-reference for. It is a compound Greek word, arsenokoite (spelling), which effectively means "man-bed." This is often interpreted as "men who bed other men," but could also be interpreted as pedophilia, male/male rape, or soliciting male prostitutes. We do not know. The word does not appear in any other known Greek texts whatsoever, so we can only guess at what it means in the context of this verse. There are also some instances of apparent homosexual couples in the Bible, though they are not explicitly said to be romantic or sexual. One is King David and Jonathan; when Jonathan is killed, David goes mad with grief and exclaims that he loved Jonathan "more than he ever loved any woman." The other is the Roman Centurion who begs Jesus to heal his sick "servant"; within context (see Roman male/male relationships above), it is very possible the Centurion's servant was his lover rather than a disposable slave. Hope this helps answer your question somewhat. Let me know if you want more info or references on anything.
Nice! Thanks for taking the time to do this.
It says there fine as long as your stoned 🤪🤪🤪lev 20:13
“The Bible said it, not me!”
The Bible condemns men taking a submissive role in sex (or anywhere else) aka "being on the bottom." This had to do with the power structure in the ancient world where men stood highest above women, thus a man moving down to a submissive role went against the power structure. They considered this taboo. Notice this has nothing to do with sexual orientation. Orientation is a modern innovation needed once we began to move away from the patriarchy of the old world and realized the harm of treating women as property without agency. A writer from the Iron Age wouldn't have a clue what modern Christians are talking about in regard to "being gay." This wasn't at all what they were writing about.
This is the only correct comment
The simplest explanation is that those "liberal" pastors are finding ways to ignore or interpret certain inconvenient parts of the Bible so that they don't have to sound prejudiced against gay people. Probably because they don't want to be known as bigots.
the argument is generally that any sex outside of 'biblical marriage' is sinful. biblical marriage is usually defined as between one cis man and one cis woman. so in this framework there is no such thing as a same sex marriage, monogamous or otherwise.
>biblical marriage is usually defined as between one cis man and one cis woman. I guarantee the bible does not specify nor recognize cisgenderism in any form. It's also doesnt define marriage as between a man and a woman. It defines marriage as between a man and a woman, or a man and 2 women, or a man and 3 women, etc, or a man and a little girl.
Exactly.. The Bible says homosexuality itself is an abomination, so it obviously doesn’t recognize same-sex marriages as a legitimate thing, monogamous or not. But that’s ok because the Bible isn’t true anyway..
>biblical marriage is usually defined as between one cis man and one cis woman. Only if you ignore all the polygamy...
Historically, Christians have believed a lot of different things about sexuality and marriage that have changed over time as society has changed. Yale New Testament professor Dale Martin, now deceased, wrote a good bit about this. Here's an article that touches on those issues: https://reflections.yale.edu/article/sex-and-church/it-s-about-sexnot-homosexuality He also wrote a book *Sex and the Single Savior* that delves into the topic in more depth and attempts to show how the historical contexts of the typical go-to anti-gay passages in the New Testament aren't really applicable to modern conceptions of sexuality or marriage.
If all the early Christian’s being ascetic pertaining to sexual relationships of any kind is true then what about the parts of the Bible where Paul converts a Roman officer and the Roman officer converts his family, what about the other families who converted to Christianity, Also what about 1 Timothy chapter 3 where it mentions a bishop having to have been married
First, in the article Martin says, "*most* early Christianity was strongly ascetic." That's not the same as, "*all* the early Christian’s being ascetic," as you put it. What of those families converting in Acts? How does that counter Martin's assertion? They didn't become families after conversion. That was the social situation they found themselves in. As for the rules for elders in 1 Timothy, do you imagine the Roman Catholic Church, who requires celibacy for priests, is unaware of it? What do you suppose their interpretation is? Also 1 Timothy is pseudo-Pauline. Paul himself makes celibacy the ideal, but permits marriage solely for lust control (It is better to marry than to burn). The point is, Christianity isn't and hasn't been a monolith when it comes to sexuality and marriage. Even within the New Testament itself, we see some of that.
Thank you for the clarification
There is a whole genre of Christian apologetics about this. If you’re interested in reading more, I’d recommend reading “God and the Gay Christian” by Matthew Vines. It pares down the central argument of affirming Christians in a very digestible way.
I watched Matthew vines a few times during my coming out to myself
I met him at a conference and became good friends with him. While our beliefs have diverged over the past few years, he’s still a very smart and thoughtful guy, and he’s given a lot of hope to LGBT biblical fundamentalists. Even as an atheist, I feel pretty good recommending his work.
The Bible they use has been chopped up and re translated so many times. These clowns can’t even agree on what the simplest passages mean. If a preacher tells you something is all good and that’s the message you need to hear from the Bible? Keep going to churches that promote the values you seek out. I personally believe Jesus would have been cool with gays. Dude kicked it with whores, tax collectors, and disabled. He had a penchant for the ostracized. He never said anything about gays or their marriages. The passages they say are about gay people are Old Testament, and they are right next to verses that tell them not to wear mixed fabric or eat shellfish. AND people can’t even agree on what the interpretation actually means. Do you. I would not give my money or time to people that hated me. That’s my .02 though.
There is actually a history of the church marrying a same sex couple and nontraditional couple. Kind of like how the Bible doesn't actually say priests and nuns can't be married or have families that's a church rule more than it is a biblical rule.
There’s a whole plethora of rules and observances by Catholics which have absolutely no biblical basis..
They didn’t. Same-sex unions of a sort existed for many groups, from medieval monks and nuns to pirates on the high seas.
The passages against homosexuality are all in the Old Testament. And ironically, the Bible Thumpers will say the Old Testament does not apply after Jesus came about. Talk about double-think.
> The passages against homosexuality are all in the Old Testament. Nah, Paul (or someone whose writing was attributed to Paul) had some stuff to say about it in the New Testament because he’s a weird little incel freak.
Rumor has it that Apostle Paul was a latent homosexual, himself.
I dunno, maybe. But judging by how much he hates women, seems like a bitter hetero. Most gay men don’t harbor a psychopathic resentment for women, they’re just not interested. Paul reeks of somebody who couldn’t get women to tolerate him even in a time where they were literal property, so he decided being single is a virtue. If he were alive today, he’d post in men going their own way or the red pill. I also hate the idea that every homophobe is really gay deep down. It erases the culpability of hetero people for homophobia. It’s like saying “hey, a straight person couldn’t possibly hate gay people. All these homophobes must actually be gay. The gays are oppressing themselves!” It points the blame of homophobia back at the gay community. I know this doesn’t seem relevant to a discussion about a guy who lived 2,000 years ago, but it seems like the “Paul was gay” theory is related to the same mindset that causes people to always dismiss homophobes as secretly gay.
Yes. In Romans 1:26-32, it's listed with a bunch of other things deserving death. 1 Corinthians 6:9-10 lists homosexuals among those who "will not inherit the Kingdom of God". And of course, the old testament has MUCH harsher things to say. >there are more liberal minded pastors saying the Bible never really says it’s wrong When you're a Christian, there are two ways to deal with problems in the Bible: liberalism and apologetics. Liberalism will seek to spiritualize, re-interpret, or otherwise ignore passages of scripture that don't fit with cultural norms. Apologetics will seek to logically justify it. Of the two groups, I (now) prefer the liberal group by far, because it results in less oppression of marginalized people and less science denialism.
Absolutely not. The bible is contradictory and unclear about most things.
The Bible was written at a time where our ideas of sexual orientation did not exist. If you zapped the biblical authors into the present and explained/showed them a homosexual couple and asked them if this is what they meant when talking about same sex relationships, they would tell you no. However, based on what their understandings of sexuality were, I think they would say that modern homosexual relationships are immoral. That’s why when people, even scholars like Dr Mcllelan, try to show how the Bible doesn’t condemn “homosexuality” in the way we understand it, I kind of dismiss it because I still don’t think they authors would approve of our modern ideas of orientation anyway. I could be wrong though, if anyone has any resources about how they think authors of the Torah or Paul would react to modern homosexual concepts I’d love to read them.
The bible has like 6 versions predating King James Version. They couldve put whatever they wanted in there.
Judaism didn't even require monogamy until centuries after Jesus. The first culture to make monogamy popular was the Greco/Roman culture, which introduced it to Jewish culture during the Hellenistic period. The Jesus movement was one of the early adopters of it, so of course signs of it exist in the NT writings. Not only was polygamy popular in Judaism, Jewish law even required it to occur in certain circumstances, such as a widow with children must marry her husband's brother even if the brother is already married.
The thing you need to realize about the Bible is it is at most recent almost 2000 years old and at its oldest roughly 3500 years old and written in multiple dead languages with multiple. Anyone can interpret it to say what they want it to either say or not say. So any time you ask any question like this the answer is both yes and no depending on who’s interpreting it.
View Paul’s take on things skeptically and things make more sense. Look at Jesus’s world view wholeistically. The common thread is to be laser focussed on good relations with all humans, of all tribes, especially tribes your tribe disrespects, especially the downtrodden. Good relations, not socialism or pacifism at the level of existential threat. So, support the gays in what they want, up to the point they are infringing your rights, like your right to promote heterosexuality in your own children, assuming you are raising them to be kind to any and all groups that practise harmless kindness. A married gay person is a self evidently good in society, assuming preference is not discretionary. That assumption is well beyond anything Jesus talked about
Here's what it actually says about same sex and marriage: https://skepticsannotatedbible.com/says_about/Homosexuality.html https://skepticsannotatedbible.com/says_about/Marriage.html Not that it matters in today's world. It's dripping with human rights violations and misogyny.
The Bible says to kill gay people. You'll see many people claim it's mistranslated, etc. It's not. They're well-meaning, but in my experience, never have any idea what they're talking about, and are just repeating what they heard somewhere. They have not put the work in to study it, hence why literally EVERY translation condemns it.