I said a lot of people do it. It goes without saying. I didn't say on a daily basis.
I'm sorry. I thought that when you wrote "Most people do these things on a daily basis", you were referring to getting drunk and taking drugs, since those are things that you mentioned in that paragraph.
It shows that there is a disproportionate concentration on sins that concern sex. It's always been the case. I have been a member of many Christian forums for very many years and that has always held to be true. I'm constantly told that all sins are treated equally but that is patently not true. And it holds true in the sections of this forum where more worldly matters, if I can put it like that, are discussed. And I have access to all sections of the forum although I cannot post in those that deal specifically with religious matters. But I check for all new topics each day and read a lot more than the ones in which I can actively partake. And what I have said is true throughout the forum.
Okay. With the very large and hopefully obvious caveat that Christian Forums is not Christianity itself, if I had to guess why you are seeing that and I am not, I would wager that the America-centric nature of many internet discussion forums (perhaps more so those dealing with Christianity than other topics, given how the USA is often argued to be unique in its religiosity among first world nations) predisposes the discussions here on CF towards a very stereotypical Evangelical Protestant viewpoint concerning the 'hierarchy' of sins that you're noticing, with sexual stuff being viewed as especially bad due to the conservative nature of the culture of the American South, which is the historical stronghold of this type of Christianity in the country. To the extent that they have been influenced greatly by the wider Evangelical Protestant culture, you may find this among some Catholics, as well, though Catholics have been historically much stronger against what they view as theological error than what has historically been viewed within their religion as error in behavior (this
list of sexually active Roman Popes bearing witness; NB: the earliest evidence we have of celibacy being required of those in positions of clerical authority in the Roman Church comes from the canons of the Synod of Elvira, c. 305 AD, so of those listed at the link, this discipline would've conceivably only not applied to St. Peter himself).
For those of us who do not belong to western Christianity in particular, the laser-like focus on sexual sins that you have noted as being characteristic of internet forum Christianity is often much, much less prevalent. That's not to say that it's a free-for-all so long as you're not Catholic or Protestant (I would imagine that most Christians agree at least in theory on the impermissibility of sexual sins, even if in practice we often do not agree on all the particulars of what should or should not fall under that label), but the focus is demonstrably different. From memory, the only mention of virginity outside of mentions of the Virgin Mary herself that I can recall being present in the Coptic Orthodox liturgy, just for example, is one line of one short prayer in which we pray for "those who are in virginity" as but one group who are being prayed for, alongside the priests, the deacons, etc. This might make more sense when you consider that our fasting includes sexual abstinence for married couples (not at all times, though I'll admit I don't know the specifics here, since I am not married myself), and that Coptic people fast for over 210 days of the year. Other churches that are a bit less outwardly extreme in this regard would nevertheless have similarly pastoral approaches to sexual matters, i.e., dealing with the particulars of any person's sins (sexual or otherwise) in confession, rather than browbeating people more generally from the actual or imagined 'bully pulpit'. So our exhortations are generally less about "Hey, you over there, don't be gay" (although, yes, 'gayness' has never been accepted in traditional Christianity; it is found in the Desert Fathers, for instance, where it is treated as symptomatic of the spiritual unreadiness of the acolyte), and more reminders of the spiritual benefits and trials of fasting, how to overcome the passions more generally, etc. It's just like how we say (in the Coptic Orthodox Church) that you don't look at your neighbor's plate during the fast except to see that he has enough to eat. You don't look at your neighbor's personal life unless there's some way you can
strengthen him in his fight against the passions, as you too will inevitably need his support during times when you yourself are struggling. Simply saying "Eww, gayness" or whatever misses the mark by quite a lot, and at any rate is not the type of response many mature Christians (not just Orthodox ones, either) would find appropriate to begin with.
And this isn't a hollow argument from numbers. It's pointing out a fact about this forum (and others) that people say that they treat sex outside marriage and murder and lying and homosexuality all the same (as if being gay and murder can be compared in any way). But they don't.
Arguing that you do thing X, and
most people do thing X and don't see anything wrong with it sure seems like an argument from numbers to me.
Unrelated to that, I don't know that the idea of all sin being the same is ever properly fleshed out in conversations like this. Many people like to point to verses in the scriptures that talk about there being sin that leads unto death and sin that does not (following 1 John), but if we zoom out and take a bit more of a bird's eye view of things, we can certainly argue that in their nature if not in their effect, all sin involves a certain "missing the mark" (Gk.
hamartia, which is often translated as English bibles as "sin") which at least allows them to be conceptualized in the same way. Does that mean that telling a 'little white lie' is the same as murder, or that homosexuality is akin to theft, or that any other combination of two things is necessarily functionally equivalent? No, because we can recognize different levels of severity. The person who lies infrequently and always confesses it and works to eliminate this flaw insofar as they can is not the same as the habitual liar who thinks nothing of telling untruths about anything and everything without a hint of remorse. But the infrequent liar is not 'better' than the more frequent liar, since they're both, y'know, liars. By the same token, I am not better or more holy or whatever than my neighbor just because I may sin in a different way than they do. There are no bonus points offered for just not 'being gay', as though that's some sort of great accomplishment for a person who does not have that proclivity in the first place. We are both sinners, both in need of forgiveness and healing, both needing to make the internal changes necessary to truly confront our problems and overcome them.
