Re: why God might not allow homosexuality to exist
Submitted by F.O.D. on July 05 1999 at 06:12:00
In reply to Re: why God might allow homosexuality to exist Submitted by Ben on July 01 1999 at 19:58:59
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Hi Ben, it's great to be able to get into the details of the homosexual question with you! It's clear that you appreciate what the questions are. That's the main difficulty I have in discussing the matter with my straight conservative Christian friends in real life - they don't understand the questions and just take the simple reading of the Bible without realising the complexity of the issue or the impact on real people's lives. So discussion goes nowhere. And more of the guys here seem to accept the progressive interpretation (if that's the right term for it), so I'm glad to have you to discuss homosexuality from a conservative perspective. That way, if we will end up agreeing with the progressive interpretation, we can be extra sure it's right ;) That was interesting your thought that perhaps homosexual men have learned by now how to conduct loving and healthy relationships with other men, which at the times of the Biblical law they had not been able to do. The law would then make good sense in this context, as a means of strengthening and protecting relationships, and we would have every freedom to override that law today if the reasons for it being established in the first place were no longer valid. This would pass in the same way as Paul instructions for women to wear headcovering, which most churches today no longer keep. However the question of course is whether that is all there is to the laws against homosexuality. Are homosexual relationships truly richer and more fulfilling today? Were ancient homosexual relationships always abusive? The witness of the Greeks seems to indicate that some, if not all, of their gay relationships were as committed as you'd want any marriage to be. There's another aspect to the issue that I haven't brought up with you yet. That's the question of the meaning of gender. What does it mean to be male or to be female? You read in Gen 1 about God creating Man in his image, "male and female he created them?" So to recapture the "full image" of God, is it necessary that there be a male and a female together? Which would rule out homosexuality. But then again, it would also appear to rule out single males, which is stupid. But if gender has no purpose other than procreation, then it couldn't stand as an argument against homosexuality, if you do not accept procreation to be the primary function of Man. (As I heard once in a sermon somewhere, talking about God's instruction to "fill the earth" and relating it to overpopulation: "people, the earth is full!") Or to put the gender question in different terms, is a gay man missing out on something for choosing a male lover rather than a female? I think you're perfectly right about Matt 5:28. Lust is lust, whether directed towards a woman or a boy, and it's bad, whatever the fools at BC might say. (One of these days I'm going to blow up there, the next time I hear someone say "lust is good!") So it's something we need to learn to direct and handle properly, just as any typical hetero male needs to about women. God bless :) Fod |