To be clear, too, I fully understand the referrential difficulty we all have with some one verse or two written by Paul that is constantly quoted by Christians but REALLY has no clear meaning----at least not from the immediate context of only the letter in which it is a part.
I don't think that Paul was actually claiming that all humanity "knows God's Will" in the same way that many Christians unfortunately today insist that he does. His cultural and epistemic environment couldn't possibly have provided the same perspective and justification that many Christians today attempt to assert that it is; they insist that what Paul was saying is essentially an unsaid "magically inclined" fiat. No, I don't think Paul was referring to a "magical fiat" of spiritual recognition. To think he meant this is to be negligent in our reading and handling of the biblical text. This isn't to handle the text in a scholarly way.
OK, we can discard the "magic" and universality and stick to Paul's community. Certainly such would apply now to those who have heard the gospels and the teachings of Paul, that is you and I, so certainly *we* are "without excuse" by Paul's reconning. Paul then proceeds to both characterize how those of us who either reject or do not find convincing the things Paul preaches will substitute for worship of god other worship and then "descend" into certain sexual activities. I know of many who've known the gospel and abandoned it without engaging in alternative worship.
That's not what Paul was saying. Paul was Jewish and one who lived in the 1st century. We need to stop assuming he saw the world and thought in the same way that a modern day Christian Fundamentalist/Apologist would tend to think. And it wasn't just "look at the trees." To mis-apply our interpretation methods in this way, too, can also bring a misconstrual going the other way. He thought in moral and natural categories typical of his Jewish and 1st century perspective, such as he mentioned in his Sermon on Mars Hill-----not the American perspective where either Modern Science or Fundie Christian definitions rule on either side of human conceptions about perceived reality ..................
I don't have a fundamentalist bible with fundamentalist footnotes. I don't read the writings of fundamentalists on biblical interpretation, nor have I ever. (I should thank them for presenting interpretations I disagreed with of various texts. It broke the seal that eventually allowed me to find the interpretations I'd accepted as wrong.)
The problem here is that I don't see anyone really applying a full investigation about how [various] 1st century Jewish people thought about the world. No, many people today want to claim that reading the Bible is "simple," which then allows them to ignore the many historical and cultural contexts which play into what are more or less still enigmatic statements in the bible (from Paul, even). This in turn then plays into various political machinations that folks have now, especially in the U.S.
If you want to turn the writings of Paul into an artifact of the 1st century Roman Jewish world and leave them there, I am fine with that. I would prefer they sit dusty on the shelf except for historical understandings. That's not the world we live in, now is it? To the extent I care about this passage (a full page including footnotes), it is only because people use it against others (including myself).
Whether you like it or not (and you make it abundantly clear that you do not like it), they use that half-chapter to make several claims against people like me:
1. That we know God exists and just deny it (they are wrong, what would be the point of denying the existence of a god you knew to be real);
2. That we worship other things in place of God (for some this is true, but I have not interest in worship of any kind); and
3. That this leads to succumbing to "unnatural desires" for which there is a "just punishment". (I've never seen any evidence that a homosexual orientation is tied to rejection of god, or any of these other things.)
(For the record: No, I really don't "know God exists". No, I don't worship anything, nor do I find that a worthy activity for free beings. And finally, no, I've never been gay, nor did I become so inclined when I "rejected God". This interpretation of Paul is self-defeating unless one must stubbornly cling to it's "truth".)
If it wasn't for the third of these items and the tie to the Levitical law, no one would be bringing up that chapter in threads like this.
This is unacceptable. Ignorance and anti-intellectualism are unacceptable.
And here we go. Quick you are to stomp on disinterest in theology as "anti-intellectualism". For shame.
Polemical gerrymandering of terms for the sake of political gains (on either side) is also unacceptable, and I think this goes whether we're reading the Bible or we're listening in on a reading of a pro-LGBTQ+ story for children in a public school.
Why not aim some of this on your fellow Christians who misuse Paul's "Romans 1" writings because they don't understand it properly? Educate them that that isn't what Paul is saying. Let *them* know that homosexuality doesn't come from a rejection of God as they misinterpret and cite psychological and sociological research to show them otherwise. I'll be glad to have your back if you want (though I'm not sure I'd be an asset as an ally).
