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Rocinante said:So, if you do a study absent the prejudice.......all of a sudden you realize that all the references are to rape, prostitution and promiscuity (or combinations thereof).
Ruthiefan said:Im an out and proud Lesbian christian
It is my belife that God knew i was going to be Gay before i was born,so it is no suprise to him that i am.
cabrown said:What is your opinion on this. If you were convinced that the Bible clearly forbid lesbianism, would you reject Christianity, reject those teachings specifically, or reject those teachings in our modern day.
I really do want to know: not being confrontational. Obviously you have a right to believe and act any way you want, and I love you as a sister in the Gospel. But if the situation were reversed in some way. How about this: I and my sister are love and develop a relationship. Can you accept my behavior as a fellow Christian , living in an incestual relationship. Forgive the analogy, I know it's not the same. But do you have a duty to stand up against practices you see as wrong, while still accepting me as a person? What do you think?
mpshiel said:But in the end, he doesn't need to denounce others, if God wants them to change, he will convict them as He did with him.
I think you should always be searching yourself to see if you are allied with God, but not always searching your neighbor to see if they are allied with how you, AT THIS TIME, see God (for as we know, that always changes).
When I have friends who live lifestyles I think are harmful to them: if they want counsel and ask for it, I give it otherwise I pray for thier protection and try to be there so they know that no matter what else happens they have a friend who is there for them and can accept them, right now, where they are.
Polycarp1 said:But there's one final point that absolutely needs to be made here. We are not called to go out and condemn sinners, but to show them Christ's love and lead them to Him, to have them enter into repentance and newness of life in Him. Jesus's commands are quite clear and explicit on this. There are any number of people who understand this to involve "speaking the truth in love" -- and if that is truly their intent, I agree with them -- in a way that points out the sins of a brother or sister, in overt love of them, to assist them in repenting of their sins. I see singularly little of this attitude expressed in the homosexual debates that plague this board. I don't care whether or not you agree with my church that homosexual sex within a gay marriage is excluded from the condemnation in scripture of gay sex for gratification of lust, or hold that gay sex and the lust for it are sinful in all times and places: what you are called to do is to love everyone, old or young, black or white, gay or straight, Christian, pagan, or atheist, penitent or stiff-necked, as your neighbor, as your brother or sister, for the salvation of whom Jesus Christ gave up His life, and received it back from God in order that they and we might have new life in Him.
And we're told that he will count what we do towards others as done toward Him, and that we will be judged by the measure with which we judge. As I hope for mercy, compassion, love, and forgiveness, so must I extend them to all.
I think it is the SAME issue. We must be consistent in how we read the text, otherwise we really are picking and choosing. It makes trouble to do it this way. You cannot support the tithe, for example, as a current law that must be followed. And I really wish we could seeing as how I am a part time pastor and all. It would make it easier to get donations.cabrown said:I have serious problems with your reading into those verses like that. I've read the context of those verses and there is nothing to refer them in that context. You're trying to fit the meaning to what you want. Now granted, there's nothing there that stops you from interpreting them that way. I do have a serious problem with Christian's who refuse to qualify their Bible interpretations, when clearly the interpretation is open to debate. I probably do it too: and that's a whole other issue.
PastorFreud said:I don't know what studies you have been reading regarding homosexuality and its causes. It is true that we don't have a clear cut causal relationship, but the correlation of homosexuality is high among identical twins who share the same genetic make up, lower but still high for fraternal twins who share the same prenatal environment, drops drastically for two children in the same the family born at separate times, and drops again for two randomly chosen people from different families. This suggests a biological influence that is strong.
Regarding environment, poor studies were done in the 60s that seemed to show a correlation between homosexuality and absent fathers, etc. The problem was that the population used for these studies were people in therapy. When the studies were done on the general population, the correlations disappeared.
By manipulating the prenatal environment, we can make gay fruit flies and bisexual mice. That doesn't prove much, I will grant that. But then we can't exactly do an ethical experiment using humans for this.
cabrown said:For the first time in my life, I am personally aquainted with a number of openly gay and lesbian individuals, many of which are religious. I find almost all of them as sincere and heartfelt in their spiritual zeal as any other Christian, but it seems to me the Bible is explicity clear that homosexuality in any form is a sin. Can christianity embrace and accept gays and lesbians? I am not sure what my opinion is myself?
cabrown said:I don't want to turn this discussion into a tedious study exchange, but the most recent review article of the studies done on homosexual origin and development (Mustanski et al. A critical review of recent biological research on human sexual orientation. [Review] Annual Review of Sex Research. 13:89-140, 2002.) agrees that there is no clear evidence in either direction that homosexuality is genetic. Some of the researchers find evidence that genes influence sexual orientation, but because no molecular connections have been shown, this is just as possible to be environmental effects. The one thing that has been consistently shown is that having older brothers increase the odds of homosexuality in men, which points strongly toward environmental effects also. And in the twin studies that you cited, the fact that siblings vs. fraternal twins have different rates of homosexuality suggests an environmental connection, not a genetic. If it was genetic, fraternal twins and siblings would have similar rates. Using twins in this kind of study is problematic in many regards: unless they are seperated there is no way to evaluate genetic vs. environment against each other. Anyway, sorry to bore.
The studies I have seen point to some kind of effect in the prenatal environment and hormone exposure. The bro. phenomenon is related. Fraternal twins share the same prenatal environment, whereas siblings do not. But as women have subsequent pregnancies, there is more testosterone in the prenatal environment at certain times. This is suggesting a biological basis (still technically called environment) for the development of sexual orientation.
Now you could pressure your child and manipulate it so that it turned out gay, but it is more likely the child would have a gender identity disorder. If there is an environmental factor that causes homosexuality, we don't have a clue what it is. Faulty research in the 60s suggested absent fathers, etc. But that research was done on volunteers who already presented to therapy for some reason. When the research was generalized to the gen. pop, these "factors" disappeared. In fact, going back and looking at the straight men in therapy, it became clear that the list of factors such as absent fathers was more likely a factor for a need for therapy more than anything.
Again, I don't know what studies you are referencing. In the ones I mentioned, hormones were added to the prenatal environment at certain periods and it produced homosexual behavior in fruit flies and bisexual behavior in mice (or it might have been rats, can't remember.)One last point, the studies on animals you mention are almost interely irrelevent, since the procedure in effect masculinates females and feminizes males. And we already know that naturally males are attracted to females, and vice versa. There was an interesting study done on sheep doing the same thing last year. Interesting, but not very useful.
There is also some data on the hearing systems of lesbian women. They have brains structures more like those of straight men than straight women. Gay men have spatial recognition structures more like those of females than that of straight men. And there is something to do with fingerprints that I read, but didn't quite understand. This is all pointing to biological factors, but the results are not clear.
Now just because something is biological doesn't mean it is necessarily good. Dyslexia has biological causes, but we consider this a tragedy. It does help us understand that homosexuality is NOT a choice.
The way you have decided that homosexuality is wrong, while rejecting other prohibitions less than 10 verses away seems like random selection to me. You may have some reasons for your selections, but I don't think they hold water.OK, I'm quitting. By the way, thanks for your response. Oh, one other thing about the scriptures: clearly many of the laws of Moses in the OT were done away with at the coming of Christ, and it's fair to say that OT references maybe don't apply in the new gospel. But many of the references are from the NT, which we accept fully. So there is something wrong with saying we don't live some laws while we live others. We live a very specific part of the Bible in our lives, not just some random smattering of them, and I think homosexuality is still an active no-no, while the other laws you mentioned are no longer active.
Okay, honestly, done.
I reject ALL Mosaic law. All of it. I accept the law of Christ. The tests for what is right and what is wrong are based on loving God with heart, soul, mind, and strength, and loving neighbor as self. Now your example of incest does not meet the law of love. My ham sandwich does. Wearing polyester does not violate the law of love. Wearing a suit that you know was manufactured in a sweat shop would. If one of Moses laws fits in the paradigm that Christ gave us, I keep it. If not, I throw it out. Homosexuals living in committed relationships does not harm anyone. Homosexual rape does. Heterosexual rape does. Beastiality forces oneself upon an animal that cannot give consent.
We might have a few areas where we would have to lay a case in order to apply the law of love, but these are typically areas the Mosaic law doesn't address anyway. For example, decisions about cloning aren't covered in Leviticus. Applying Jesus' rule to cloning will require some definitions be agreed upon, but we will come closer to an ethical choice than we could using Moses.
I have an issue with this because people would generally see this as -- and I would agree -- an immoral act. Alotta people, however, give sketchy reasoning for this. If you think about it, when you go to a kennel and adopt an animal, you are doing so without the animal's consent.PastorFreud said:Beastiality forces oneself upon an animal that cannot give consent.
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