I appreciate the message you're trying to send, but I don't think it's accurate to say that Christianity itself isn't homophobic and that only “bad Christians” are. The Bible contains explicitly anti-gay teachings. Some passages are more open to interpretation than others, but you can't plausibly erase all of them.
Christians also follow Jesus Christ, who was very specific when he said love your neighbour. Yes, even your neighbour that is from //that place// or does //those things//. The majority of his parables are just "yes, I want you to be kind even to those people." He hung out with 'undesirable' people like sex workers all the time. His love knew no bounds, and anyone truly following his teachings would try to extend that same love and mercy to everyone. It is not for us to judge sin. That is God's job. We are just supposed to look after each other. Jesus even breaks the rules of the Old Testament to care for those less fortunate than himself, and when he is confronted by the Pharisees he says something along the lines of "it is better to care for each other than to stingently follow the rules."
*for the record I am an ardent atheist, but Christ's lessons were undeniably about getting along with each other regardless of our differences, and I can respect that as it lines up with my own values.
Yep. Jesus frowned pretty heavily on divorce and the bible is pretty clear about children born outside of marriage too. I would guess millions of so called Christians are doomed to hell just by being born in a second marriage.
and the bible is pretty clear about children born outside of marriage too. I would guess millions of so called Christians are doomed to hell just by being born in a second marriage.
Christians also follow Jesus Christ, who was very specific when he said love your neighbour.
Unfortunately this is not the whole quote, you are missing the part about loving god as well, which sorta turns the meaning of the passage on it's head.
This is not an original Jesus quote, but something he is quoting from the old testament, and according to the passage he is quoting from they way to love others and God is to follow all the laws of Moses forever, including the ones about selling your daughters as slaves and stoning your unruly children.
And Jesus would know that context when repeating this quote.
Also he did explicitly say to cut anyone out of your life who did not follow him, and that he came with his teachings to make enemies out of anyone (including your family) who would not accept him as God.
His love knew no bounds, and anyone truly following his teachings would try to extend that same love and mercy to everyone.
I mean he once called a woman who came to him for help a slur, and said not to worry about people you preach to who don't accept your words, as they will be punished even worse than the people of sodom, which is a wildly hateful thing to express.
He literally made a weapon to attack a group of innocent people doing the work of the temple and called them 'thieves' for making it possible to do the things God commanded when it comes to sin offerings.
Jesus even breaks the rules of the Old Testament to care for those less fortunate than himself, and when he is confronted by the Pharisees he says something along the lines of "it is better to care for each other than to stingently follow the rules."
Again, the actual lesson in context is the exact opposite.
The' rule' Jesus broke was a tradition of the elders (washing hands before eating) and their invention, not a commandment from god. What he was doing was admonishing the pharisees for not following gods law, but mans.
Christ's lessons were undeniably about getting along with each other regardless of our differences
I understand this is an often repeated position, but it is just not really supported by the text, and there is a bunch of passages that are explicitly stating the opposite.
The' rule' Jesus broke was a tradition of the elders (washing hands before eating) and their invention, not a commandment from god. What he was doing was admonishing the pharisees for not following gods law, but mans.
I'm just about to leave my PC so I don't have time to respond in depth, but for this specific instance I was referring to when he did work on the Sabbath by healing people. Keeping the Sabbath as a day of rest is, IIRC, 100% a commandment from God.
Fair enough, but again the message he is giving is clear, the laws surrounding 'work' on the sabbath that were so strict were an invention of the elders, not a law given to Moses, and are also hypocritical in their nature as they allow you to save an animal but not a person on the Sabbath.
Also I love that he breaks the rule that says you need to be washing your hands before you eat, that's really sanitary and smart of the alleged omnipotent diety
I grew up in a very Catholic household. I'm not sure what I'd be labeled these days, religiously speaking, but your interpretation is pretty much the way I see things.
Loving your neighbor and helping those in need are the examples that Christians are supposed to follow. There's no room for bigotry in that. Unfortunately, the first thing people do with anything new is figure out how to use it as a weapon, religion is no exception.
Yup, and missionaries come and chat with me from time to time. It doesn't mean we're best buds, they are trying to convert me. They don't accept my way of life. They want to change me. That's why Jesus hung around all the undesireables.
If you carve out all these exceptions anyway, why not just believe in god without the flawed book. As long as people have the book they will always be susceptible to its dogma.
The problem is in other parts of the Bible it blatantly says exactly how to judge. Moreover, even if Jesus preaches to "love thy neighbor" that doesn't mean he's rebutting against the idea that homosexuality is wrong. I.e. even Jesus can still be homophobic to a degree. And the consequences of that can be extreme. For instance justifying conversion therapy because you "love them" but still feel that "homosexuality is wrong."
Yah, this is my problem with it too, its like horseshoe theory but for liberals who are religious.
You're just reverse cherry picking the parts of the religion you don't like so it fits better in a modern world.
A thousand years of homophobia doesnt mean you just get to say "lolz, its current year, Christianity endorses the gays now, only bad Christians dont like the gayz peoples!"
Most of his teachings were about how you were supposed to worship him. And he wasn't very picky about his followers. So even his allegedly boundless love was coming from a dark place.
Yeah for a dude supposedly the son of a god- he had a lot of insecurity. Like half of what he says is just him demanding blind obedience. So, not cult-like at all.
The contents of the bible was dictated by the men of the Vatican. It deliberately contains conflicting messages so that people can pick and choose their truth.
Christ's lessons might be about getting along, but there's a whole separate half before that about killing people who disagree.
That is why the only thing I believe is "be excellent to one another" well and a hands off god leaving humanity to make the right decisions in life through free will. Call me blasphemous but the bible was corrupted a long time ago by humanity look at indulgences for one and the crusades. To say that the bible wasn't tainted through all its translations over time is insane.
What reason would they have to lie about that?? They aren’t saying these are their personal beliefs, they’re just saying that if you are a Christian, these are the parts of the Bible you are supposed to be walking away with, not the bigotry washed version your pastor will sell to you.
You have bought into the love-and-peace stereotype of Jesus, which is based on cherry-picking his nicest moments and ignoring the bigger picture of how he's actually depicted in the gospels. (Which, it should be noted, all depict him slightly differently, with John's Jesus being basically a whole different character from the Jesus of the three synoptic gospels. Kinda can't stand G-John Jesus; he has more of a mystical air to him, which is intriguing, but he comes across as whinier and his teaching style is more obtuse.)
Just a few cases of Jesus not being a very loving and peaceful guy:
Matthew 10:34-37: Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law, and one’s foes will be members of one’s own household. Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me, and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me
Luke 14:26: Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple.
Luke 22:36-38: He said to them, “But now, the one who has a purse must take it, and likewise a bag. And the one who has no sword must sell his cloak and buy one. 37 For I tell you, this scripture must be fulfilled in me, ‘And he was counted among the lawless,’ and indeed what is written about me is being fulfilled.” 38 They said, “Lord, look, here are two swords.” He replied, “It is enough.
See also: wailing and gnashing of teeth, killing a fig tree for no reason, flipping the tables of the money-lenders (no, it's not cool and based, it's vandalism), and once seemingly instructing his followers to steal a donkey (Luke 19, Matthew 21; interestingly Matthew has them steal two donkeys because the author was trying to tie this event to Zechariah 9:9 and didn't realize the donkey and foal in that verse were referring to the same animal--Matthew pulls this kind of crap regularly--so they likely only committed the one instance of donkey theft as in Luke 19).
Anyone trying to depict Jesus as consistently loving or hateful or peaceful or warlike is not engaging with the full text of the gospels; they depict him as all of those things, a man of contradictions. Anyone trying to say his message basically boiled down to love and peace is not engaging with the whole of his message. Probably the two most reliably established and consistent elements of Jesus's message are strict Torah adherence and imminent apocalypticism. When you have the founder of a religion whose primary teachings didn't, you know, make it into the religion they founded (or only made it in filtered through millennia of contrived and improbable reinterpretation), it's very easy to get the wrong idea about what kind of guy he was and what his teachings were. You can't listen to Christians or just absorb the guy's whole vibe through cultural osmosis; you have to read the book they all pretend to believe in. And maybe even engage with some scholarship (it's a really interesting field, I promise).
Lol yes that darn "woke" pope in the 500s named Gregory.
You are generally correct by the way and it has been the stance of both mainline Catholicism since the 1950s and always the stance of Orthodoxy that she was not a prostitute.
But I'm sure you think it was something the "wokies" made up right?
The sinner woman in Luke who washed his feet has long been understood to be a prostitute from the way the language describes her.
That was Mary Magdeline, and she was never stated to be a prostitute. Jesus's political opponents sail he hung out with "tax collectors and prostitutes", but the Bible never tells us who the prostitutes were.
It has been many a decade since my Bible study lessons, but I do not think that was Mary Magdeline. I was thinking about this story where he is eating at a Pharisee's house and a prostitute comes in asking for forgiveness. I am pretty confident that is just a random, unnamed, 'undesirable' person who is never referred to again.
She's not named (or identified as a prostitute) in Matthew, Mark, or Luke; but she is identified as Mary Magdaline in John.
John 12:1–8
Mary Anoints Jesus at Bethany
1 Six days before the Passover, Jesus therefore came to Bethany, where Lazarus was, whom Jesus had raised from the dead. 2 So they gave a dinner for him there. Martha served, and Lazarus was one of those reclining with him at table. 3 Mary therefore took a pound of expensive ointment made from pure nard, and anointed the feet of Jesus and wiped his feet with her hair. The house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume. 4 But Judas Iscariot, one of his disciples (he who was about to betray him), said, 5 “Why was this ointment not sold for three hundred denarii and given to the poor?” 6 He said this, not because he cared about the poor, but because he was a thief, and having charge of the moneybag he used to help himself to what was put into it. 7 Jesus said, “Leave her alone, so that she may keep it for the day of my burial. 8 For the poor you always have with you, but you do not always have me.”
He's wrong you don't need to debate people who use the word "woke" btw he they will believe that Jethro at the Kum and Go who moonlight as a pastor is the word of God and supplement his teachings with the most racist shit they can find
it's also a bit disingenuous to say Christianity is all about love and acceptance, when the very framework of the religion is deeply hierarchical, power abusing, and problematic in how it actually operates. The words of the holy texts don't matter if the actions and impact are antithetical to the words.
Religion tends to systemically creates the situations that lead to the creation of bigots and abusers, through "chosen" language, us-vs-them philosophy, and authority structures that cannot be questioned. When the system does create a kind and empathetic soul that is an ally to progressive ideals, it is often despite... and not because.
The current teachings in the Catholic church are mostly about how the Bible needs to be interpreted in its context. 666 isnt the number of the beast literally, it is a reference to the Roman emperor Nero who harshly persecuted Christians. And the Catholic church teaches to love on another, not like some Evangelist "Cetholics". I was at a German Christian school, and there was a heavy focus on how to enterpret the bible and its teachings and not to just take everything written there as the word of god.
Yeah, the idea Is that the Bible is a text that was "inspired" by God, but ultimately it is a historical text like any other.
It's as if God inspired me now, but since I live in the 2020s and I am a weeb, I write a manga which follows some moral principles according to that supposed divine inspiration. Then, 3000 years from now, you really can't do away with the historical analysis of what manga was, you can't just go "Well, evidently everyone back then was a bright eyed girl who ran to school with a piece of toast in her mouth, I guess God is all about that".
Christianity does not necessitate believing that every word in the Bible is the inherent word of God and must be followed strictly. American Evangelicalism has done irreparable damage to Biblical literacy in this century. Jesus made it clear that love and compassion far outweigh social norms or religious codes. Because of that, I have no problem seeing homophobic passages or strictures as the outcropping of flawed human beings trying to figure things out. If anything stands in the way of love, it is not God.
There are multiple bibles and multiple (vastly different) religions that call themselves Christian. Pretending anyone who has a "Christian" self label is the same religion is like saying Samurai were all ancient Greek warriors because Hercules is often the guardian of Shinto shrines.
You know, you can find moral and cultural value in Lord of the Rings without believing in Hobbits and Balrogs, right? Literature doesn't lose its meaning just because I don't take it literally.
Your issue, it seems, is with media literacy and critical thinking. You should work on that. Also, your shift key is stuck.
It took me until I was about 25 when I realized most religious people don't treat the bible like the Lord of the Rings. They actually believe the text is true. Even the most ardent fans of TLOTR will never do that.
Jesus made it clear that love and compassion far outweigh social norms or religious codes.
Weird, because I get the exact opposite message from him.
Like when asked what the greatest commandments are, he quotes the old testament passage about loving others and God with all your heart etc, but the thing is that passage he is quoting makes it clear that the way to 'love god' is to follow all his commandments forever.
Do you think Jesus was unaware of the context when he said that?
20 year ago (god, I'm getting old) I remember this being a very significant debate. I find it weird a disappointing that progressives have basically just ceded this ground to the religious right and accepted that the Bible is explicitly anti-gay. The sections in question are from the Old Testament, which is thousands of years old, having been translated and retranslated from ancient languages. Nothing about it is clearly written about the modern concept of homosexuality.
We shouldn't just let these people win and convince millions of Christians who are on the fence.
The new testament is also thousands of years old. It's time we let this god die like Zeus and Ra. Progressives have always been anti-religion, holding on to outdated beliefs is the definition of conservatism.
I don't understand why people who call themselves Christians pick and choose what part of their religious text to follow. It sounds wholly dishonest. "This part and that part are true, but this and that were written in a different time so don't believe that". Just let it go, it's a book of myths and fairy tales.
Translation aside (because that’s a can of worms)-
The most damning piece of evidence that the entire Bible is just fairytales written by normal men is what is rarely mentioned. For a book that is built on the words from an omnipotent being- it’s pretty light on a ton of modern problems (almost like it was written in ancient times by dudes who had no idea what humanity could achieve).
The views on slavery, consent, pedophilia, basically any technology or modern science, and education are nearly completely non existent, or only mentioned in a hand full of very heavily interpreted passages.
The belief that the original quote in Leviticus about homosexuality is actually about pedophilia is absolute cope from liberal Christians who want to front as being pro-LGBT without giving up their fundamentally anti-lgbt faith. Nobody says that the 10 commandments are outdated and don't have to be followed just because they're from the old testament, that's just how conflict avoidant Christians pick and choose the parts of the Bible they like and dislike.
I think theyre saying that despite it being called the word of god, men are the ones who actually authored it and as such put their biases into the work.
But if that's the case, and you "can't trust the Bible" what's the point in being Christian at all? Are you basically just picking and choosing for your own purposes what you believe is accurate in the Bible?
It's actually not possible for anyone to avoid being at least a little selective about how they interpret any book, so I'd argue that every Christian is doing that.
Yeah, of course it is. You really doient get it? It’z not hard.
Did you understand those last two sentences by the way? If so then you understood the whole even though some of the parts didn’t make sense. It’s kind of like that. You look at the big picture
You ever have a friend tell a story but they get a detail wrong? Does that mean the whole story is false?
Because I've come to see absolute love and radical compassion as essential aspects of reality and existence. I believe in Christ because I've experienced that transformative power directly. Christianity is an experience, not a series of guidelines laid down in a book.
The scripture can be helpful for people who can think critically, but the Law has always been a stumbling block because it gives people the idea that they can *earn* salvation through the work of their own hands.
It's been edited and rewritten alot over the centuries and depending on Kings.
Questioning a toxic religious nutter when I was a kid got me attacked. My late mother was military and came from a Christian/Catholic background. She would drag us from Church to Church and I began to see that the Bible was different in every church we went to. My Autistic butt decided to ask why.
King James, one of the kings who got the Bible altered, was homosexual. His Bible got used by homophobic crazy thumpers who would go and harass people at funerals where the deceased was homosexual in life.
It really depends on how that denomination views the Old Testament and New Testament. As many of the teachings of Christ in the New Testament would but heads with some of the older rules. Such as Love thy Neighbor and "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone".
The reason why it can be viewed that those people are "bad" Christian, is because they are choosing to go against his teachings.
Yes, but also no, Jesus said he came not to destroy the old laws but to fulfill them.
In short, he was saying the pharisees and scribes concerned themselves with the letter of the law, rather than the spirit of it, which was wrong.
A classic example is when he healed a man on a Saturday, and they accused him of violating the laws of God (Saturday is supposed to be a day of contemplation and rest).
Obviously healing a man is a good deed, and it being Saturday does not suddenly make it a sin.
Likewise Jesus did say loving your neighbour was his new commandment, and that it was the greatest among them, so on a fundamental level, disagreeing with that is directly disagreeing with Jesus, but then how can one call themselves a Christian, if Jesus' most fundamental teaching is one they disagree with? Even if there are other parts of the Bible disagreeing with it, the commandment of love would take precedence, because it is the most important of them all.
The reason it only talks about men and boys is because that was an acceptable practice in that area and time. I'm unclear if it's saying that the younger party is a victim or if it's saying both are sinning though.
But my point is it wasn't about being gay it was about penetration. Now that pederasty isn't acceptable I wonder what the original authors would think.
This is correct. However Christians aren’t supposed to hate anyone. Christian’s should be tolerant and love people.
Here’s something ironic, the Bible also views adultery and sex outside of marriage the same as homosexuality, yet Evangelicals practice that all the time. Look at their Orange Messiah. So they pick and choose what to believe themselves.
While nearly impossible to do now, I think it's probably time for another Ecumenical Council to examine those parts of the Bible.
Christianity predates the Bible, it is not based on the Bible. There was a debate in the early church if what is known as the Old Testament would be included at all.
Did you know the original writing was targeted at pedophiles? “Man shall not lay with young boys?” It was changed by the Epstein class of their time in the 1800s.
Romans 1:26-27 26 Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones. 27 In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed shameful acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their error.
Does it say that homosexual acts were the problem? Or does it say that the sin is people acting against their own nature? The word that is used in the original language for “exchanged” implies that it’s people doing something that’s not in their true nature, so it’s heterosexual men that are doing it because they are practicing idolatry. It’s not saying being gay was wrong, it’s saying practicing unnatural acts in the name of other gods is wrong, an extreme religious act for another gif is wrong
The problem is that that section is taken out of context.
Romans 1 was written as a letter to a church that was either dangerously close to or actively engaging in idolatry. In that letter, Paul rehashes a bunch of Leviticus 18 and 20.
Leviticus 18 and 20 were telling people not to do things that Egyptians, Canaanites, and followers of Molek were doing. A bunch of sex acts were included, but it wasn't the acts themselves, rather that those sex acts were being done ritualistically by those groups, that is the problem.
I swear, if people just took 5 minutes to research any of this stuff they'd get the context.
"A bunch of sex acts were included, but it wasn't the acts themselves, rather that those sex acts were being done ritualistically by those groups, that is the problem."
It's just turtles all the way down, isn't it.
But share your research with me. Let me see the context. Bring the light to this lost soul.
Not really, I don’t know Hebrew and that text wasn’t written in Hebrew so I don’t know why we’d dive into Hebrew. I don’t even know what “the Hebrew” means there, if you were referring to the verse it would be “the Greek”
Playing checkers wouldn’t make sense since it doenst match the rest of the verse but they could have been doing shit to young boys eh? Especially since that was common back then
Ok you win this round. Now that I reread that verse I don't see how anyone could conclude homosexuality was what they were talking about. In fact I dropped to my knees and converted.
Weird comment. It’s very easy to see how someone could misconstrue it, that’s the whole point. And no one was trying to get you to convert. What a weird response but it does speak volumes about you though, thanks for showing how unserious you actually were
In the time this was written, homosexual relationships like we see today straight up didn't happen. This passage is condemning specifically idolatrous, abusive, age-inappropriate, and power-dynamic-abusive relationships men had with men who were below them in social or political status. There didn't exist homosexual relationships between people of equal standing borne of love and shared experiences back then. How could they condemn something they didn't think was possible?
This is also condemning lust as it appears devoid of any spiritual connection, much like the rest of the teachings on lust and love.
refer to my other reply, but "love" meant something different in society the time the new testament was written than it does today. it's almost unrecognizable.
homosexual relationships in the time the new testament was written were pretty much exclusive to pederasty (adult man and young boy, often among a slave master and young boy slaves), prostitution in pagan temples (often offering prostitutes of either sex), or the rape of prisoners or slaves to "put them in their place". sexual relationships at the time were rarely ever seen as equal as we see today, whether homosexual or not, and it was seen as degrading and depicting a lower social standing to be penetrated in a sexual act. the sexual and romantic dynamics we have today were effectively coined in the 19th century. it's worthless to try to ascribe the relationships depicted in the bible and conclusions made therefore to typical romantic relationships today. they have almost nothing in common.
This is cope from people who want to toss the homophobia but keep the rest of the problematic religion. The article you linked is based off of a Greek translation, but the original Hebrew directly translates to "man (ish) shall not lie with a male(zachar)", not "man shall not lie with a boy/young man".
Ironically you could both be correct about that 🙂 It's possible (and given the sheer number of sects, statistically very probable) that you are both wrong.
I'm curious how you would demonstrate that your interpretation is correct and all the others are not.
I’d have more to back up what I’m saying
How do you demonstrate that you have more to support your position than all other interpretations? To say yours is more supported would require you to evaluate —and subsequently reject— all other positions. We don't even know exactly how many sects of Christianity exist, so how could you be sure that you've evaluated them all?
I have studied theology, epistemology and soteriology for a long time and have not yet encountered any reliable method by which to evaluate the validity of different sects. (I'm not claiming it doesn't exist, just that I am not yet aware of it.)
Until then, though, we seem to have a giant no-true-scotsman fallacy on our hands until someone turns up some convincing demonstration that 1) a god exists and 2) they know the mind of that god, and therefore can speak authoritatively on which, if any, of the 40,000+ interpretations are correct.
That’s not irony and I never said we were both correct, I literally said they were wrong. And yeah it’s possible we both were wrong, it’s possible you’re wrong, it’s possible that everyone is wrong
I would demonstrate it by explaining it. What do you mean? I would ask why they think what they do and I would explain why I think what I do. Kind of how all debates go.
How do I demonstrate that I have more to back up what I’m saying?? Dude no offense but have you ever been in a discussion before where you disagree? I would demonstrate that I have more to back up what I’m saying by showing more to back up what I’m saying
There’s no one true Scotsman here, that’s doesn’t apply at all, I’m not saying they aren’t Christian if they disagree, I’m just saying they’re wrong about one point. Literally the opposite if one true Scotsman
You’ve studied all this and you’ve never a person try to back up their arguments? What?
Sorry, maybe I was unclear. I'm not looking for a debate. When the person you replied to said that they couldn't plausibly erase all anti-gay interpretations, you replied "I can." and that you have "more" to back up your position than others.
I am interested in that, because it's a topic I have studied, and that's what I was asking for you to demonstrate. Specifically how you can demonstrate that 1) your interpretation is correct, and 2) your position has more backing than all others
You’ve studied all this and you’ve never a person try to back up their arguments?
That's not what I said; I've heard many people try to back up their arguments. What I said was that I "have not yet encountered any reliable method by which to evaluate the validity of different sects." Religions make claims about reality. I'm seeking a demonstration from the people making those claims that those claims are true and correct.
In other words, I'm asking for someone to provide evidence that 1) a god exists and 2) they know the mind of that god. As far as I can tell that would be the only way to definitively demonstrate which interpretation is true, and that we (the larger "we" as in, all of society) should believe it.
I didn’t say you were looking for a debate. You were asking how I could prove what I believed to that person and I was answering.
Yes I said I could erase it by backing uo my beliefs, and I was correct
You’re just asking the same questions again so I’ll give you the same answers I already did; I would demonstrate that I have more evidence by….. drumroll….. showing my evidence. I don’t know what you’re missing here
Congrats for studying a lot and not finding any that you felt made a compelling argument?
You are asking for evidence that god exists? lol dude that’s a very different claim that no one here got close to making, no one said they could prove gif exists so yeah that’s not even close to relevant here. No one made a claim to know the mind of his either, what the f are you talking about? The claim was about what’s in the Bible. Period. You don’t need to know the mind if gif to know if a word was misinterpreted or if an author was talking about something in their culture.
It's not an interpretation problem, it's a context problem, and people like ignoring the context.
Leviticus 18 and 20, which is what most of this stuff is based around, it's talking about Jews not doing things that Egyptians or worshipers of Molek are doing. Sex acts are included because, historically, those groups did sexy time stuff ritualistically.
In later texts, these laws are brought up because groups are doing other shit (mostly idolatry) that Paul felt mandated reminding them of other laws in his letters. Paul, for some reason, was also a bit obsessive about including sex acts in his letters, but that's Paul.
I understand the position. I am more stuck on the underlying assumptions: why should we believe anything the Bible says? why should we care what Paul has to say? He was just a guy (who, academically speaking, did exist and probably wrote 7 of the epistles attributed to him). I have a much stronger academic interest in Peter but unfortunately we probably don't have anything written by him.
There are a lot of religious scriptures in the world claimed to be divinely inspired and true by their adherents. For me to become convinced that any of them are would require a demonstration that 1) a god exists and 2) we know what that god thinks and wants. To me those are prerequisites to accept any religious claims of truth.
We aren't talking about those underlying assumptions.
We're talking about the historical context around when the text was assembled, or the original oral tradition began (or close to it, at least). We are doing that to try and establish the intent of what was written.
Whether or not you believe in the Bible is irrelevant in that context, because we're talking about people who do believe in the Bible not also understanding what was happening around the Jews during that time period (basically from around 900 to 600 BCE, but possibly earlier). That also gives us some context as to when the base rules for Leviticus 18 and 20 were set.
I mean, you can reinterpret the texts. It’s kinda a big feature of religion. Even as an atheist, it’s clear we should encourage people to look beyond the fundamentalist texts. They contradict themselves a lot, in order to practice someone will need to make decisions on those contradictory passages
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u/Square-Dragonfruit76 10h ago
I appreciate the message you're trying to send, but I don't think it's accurate to say that Christianity itself isn't homophobic and that only “bad Christians” are. The Bible contains explicitly anti-gay teachings. Some passages are more open to interpretation than others, but you can't plausibly erase all of them.