Can you be a homosexual AND a Christian?

[[toj.cc]phantom]

The strict laws were set up to show us our weakness. We cannot live by the old testament laws. They are there to show us the need for God's grace. If the laws are easy...no need for grace. We are imperfect sinners and the strict laws of the OT show us that. The new covenant through Christ is a gift of grace from God. His chosen way of showing mercy to us.

It really makes me wonder though how someone who claims to have been a Christian would not understand this part of God's plan and the need for forgiveness...

Your right though DV God could have chosen a different way if he had wanted to...he is God after all.

So since we need not live by old testament laws does that mean I can covet my neighbors wife, commit adultery with her against him and then kill them both? Maybe I'll just stick with those 10 laws that God laid down for us.

 

[Dark Virtue]

The strict laws were set up to show us our weakness. We cannot live by the old testament laws. They are there to show us the need for God's grace. If the laws are easy...no need for grace. We are imperfect sinners and the strict laws of the OT show us that. The new covenant through Christ is a gift of grace from God. His chosen way of showing mercy to us.

It really makes me wonder though how someone who claims to have been a Christian would not understand this part of God's plan and the need for forgiveness...

Your right though DV God could have chosen a different way if he had wanted to...he is God after all.

Forgiveness?

How many millions of people had to die to show mankind we are weak compared to an omnipotent being?

I know God COULD have set up different laws, my question is WHY DIDN'T HE?

 

[Eon]

Sorry - you and I both know that these bizzare and improbable laws have their roots in pre-Christian Judaism. You're taking the earliest tenets of Yahweh's faith - back when he was the God of a minor tribe out on the fringes of the known world, and trying to rationalise it into the omnipotent, omniscient, super god who dominates 3/4's of the world today. It won't fit.

I should point out here that the "bizzare and improbable laws" I refer to are the ones about not playing football on Sunday, eating Shellfish, shaving your beard, eating pork or wearing garments made of two different fibres. I'm NOT referring to the 10 commandments or anything similar!"

The reason why Christianity has thrived as a religion is that the Priests are willing to move on from many of the out of date dogmas that may have had a good reason once, but no longer make sense.

And we're kinda dancing here - there's no doubt in my mind that the Bible is dead clear on homosexuality being a bad thing. The question I have is that if you eat shellfish and you wear mixed fibre clothes and you have no beard AND you have no intention of modifying your lifestyle, then how are you different from a practising homosexual who also has no intention of modifying his sexual preference?

Some laws - such as Murder, Theft and Adultery - have a victim. How can you say the same thing about shellfish, beards and sexual proclivities (provided they aren't preying on the weak - such as pedophillia)?

 

[Didasko]

So since we need not live by old testament laws does that mean I can covet my neighbors wife, commit adultery with her against him and then kill them both? Maybe I'll just stick with those 10 laws that God laid down for us.

It's obvious you did not understand my post...

I am arguing for the OT laws that were not changed in the new covenant to stay in tact. Not sure how you got what you did from my post. I beleive that much of the OT law is still in force.

It's much more than 10 laws by the way The 10 commandments are a small part of what we try to live by.

 

[Didasko]

Forgiveness?

How many millions of people had to die to show mankind we are weak compared to an omnipotent being?

I know God COULD have set up different laws, my question is WHY DIDN'T HE?

Your question is one only God can answer...so no use asking it here

 

[Didasko]

Sorry - you and I both know that these bizzare and improbable laws have their roots in pre-Christian Judaism. You're taking the earliest tenets of Yahweh's faith - back when he was the God of a minor tribe out on the fringes of the known world, and trying to rationalise it into the omnipotent, omniscient, super god who dominates 3/4's of the world today. It won't fit.

It fits perfectly.

The reason why Christianity has thrived as a religion is that the Priests are willing to move on from many of the out of date dogmas that may have had a good reason once, but no longer make sense.

No that's not the reason Christianity thrives It thrives because it is true.

And we're kinda dancing here - there's no doubt in my mind that the Bible is dead clear on homosexuality being a bad thing. The question I have is that if you eat shellfish and you wear mixed fibre clothes and you have no beard AND you have no intention of modifying your lifestyle, then how are you different from a practising homosexual who also has no intention of modifying his sexual preference?

We have a new covenant that does away with some of the OT laws but not all of them.

Some laws - such as Murder, Theft and Adultery - have a victim. How can you say the same thing about shellfish, beards and sexual proclivities (provided they aren't preying on the weak - such as pedophillia)?

Homosexuality has victoms as well. It's a degenerate lifestyle that draws many vulnerable young people into it's snare. It is one of the lifestyles that spreads disease at an alarming rate (right up there with drugs and dirty needles). And before you say, 'what about the other lifestyles'...yes I agree heterosexuals who are promiscuous cause the same problems for society (and that is just as sinful).

 

[Gandhi]

My thing is wouldn't it be easier for god to come down show himself to the owrld and say these are my rules and everyone should follow them. Wouldn't more people believe in him then. Bt would that go back to that quote in Constintine where he asks Gabriel y he can't get in to heaven if he believes because he sees the angels and deamons and gabriel responds, "U know thats different than believing". I know just a movie but it fits, if there is a god y wouldn't he show himself.
U can only worship me, but u never get to see me.

And another question, if the act of having sex with a person of your own gender a sin, would a gay man be allowed to be a catholic priest. Priests don't lust for anyone do they, so couldn't a person be not attracted to the opposite sex and still be not sinning if they don't act on it. ANd anyone read an article about a book about the church and gays, I forgot the name but it was about how many gay men in the early days became a priest because they wern't attracted to girls. It was a way for them to escape their families pushing marriage proposals on them.
And on a side funnier note have u noticed that now that most gay men are out of the closet there is a shortage of new men in north america joining the priesthood. Alot of the newer priests we have now in north america are coming from asia and africe. Just something I thought off while talking to father at my parents church.

 

[Dark Virtue]

Your question is one only God can answer...so no use asking it here

And that, my friend, is my main problem with Christianity.

When you don't know an answer you stick your head in the sand and say, Hey, who are we to question God?

Use that thing between your ears, you can your reasoning powers to make an educated extrapolation about the nature of God can't you? So why DON'T you?

Do you never ask yourself questions like this? These questions are integral to your belief, they may not have a concrete answer, but they need to be addressed.

 

[Mr.Bill]

But Didasko. If someone was born with an innate tendency towards a sinful lifestyle like homosexuality, does that not implicate God as the one who bestowed this tendency? To break his own rules? Surely God would not do something as cruel as this. There must be some other explanation.

How do you explain it?

I'm going to repost this...since--hoo boy--have we gotten off topic or what!

 

[Genesis1315]

I think we have heredity vs. environment on this one. Let's get back on track though with thinkgs, Thanks Mr. Bill for bringing this up.

Gen

 

[Dark Virtue]

Could you explain that to me in PM please? Heredity vs environment?

 

[Didasko]

Quote:
Originally Posted by Mr.Bill
But Didasko. If someone was born with an innate tendency towards a sinful lifestyle like homosexuality, does that not implicate God as the one who bestowed this tendency? To break his own rules? Surely God would not do something as cruel as this. There must be some other explanation.

How do you explain it?



I'm going to repost this...since--hoo boy--have we gotten off topic or what!

This brings up the question about whether gays are born with a genetic propensity toward homosexuality or if they aquire it as a result of their environment (that should answer your question to Genesis DV).

If I remember right this was discussed in a thread a few months ago and you were a part of it Mr. Bill. It was my contention then and is now that gays are not born that way. Now please back on topic here

If you want to reawaken the other thread post to it and bump it back to the top. I'm sure you'll get someone to discuss it with you...but I am done with that topic.

 

[Mr.Bill]

Didasko, I do not see how you can overlook the undeniable evidence that homosexuality is, at least, in part due to natural processes. Why do you insist on remaining in the dark? Seems to me it's not even that large of a concession--I, too, believe that homosexuality is a lifestyle choice--it's just that some individuals are born with a greater tendency to make that choice. What makes that so difficult to accept?

I feel this is the fundamental substance of the topic of this thread, so I think it should be addressed. But if Didasko is unwilling, could someone else please answer my question?

 

[Didasko]

And that, my friend, is my main problem with Christianity.

When you don't know an answer you stick your head in the sand and say, Hey, who are we to question God?

Use that thing between your ears, you can your reasoning powers to make an educated extrapolation about the nature of God can't you? So why DON'T you?

Do you never ask yourself questions like this? These questions are integral to your belief, they may not have a concrete answer, but they need to be addressed.

lol...use that thing between your ears? DV I often wonder why atheists don't 'use that thing between their ears'. It's a matter of perspective I guess.

Nothing wrong with asking questions DV. I gave you the only answer to your question. Any other answer is speculation and you would probably have responded to the speculation with a comment like...use that thing between your ears...

My main problem with atheism is the lack of being able to see the whole picture. You narrow in on science to the exclusion of common sense at times. Now we can argue...what is common sense...but I really don't think that will get us anywhere. Your common sense and mine are obviously very different...your next question...How do we know which one is right?

We'll find that out at death I guess...

I have asked myself most of the questions that you have asked DV. I have come up with satisfactory answers for myself. But since you have no faith in God and are looking for scientific proof...my answers will not satisfy you.

The proof is in the pudin...look at the world around you.

I know I know...your too intellectual for that

 

[Didasko]

Didasko, I do not see how you can overlook the undeniable evidence that homosexuality is, at least, in part due to natural processes.

There is no undeniable evidence! There are a few studies in the area but it is definitely not undeniable.

It seams no matter how hard we try, we always end up off topic...lol. This is off topic and my discussions with DV have gone off topic.

 

[Dark Virtue]

lol...use that thing between your ears? DV I often wonder why atheists don't 'use that thing between their ears'. It's a matter of perspective I guess.

Care to explain that? Basing your beliefs off of Faith is contrary to reason. If you are a Christian based on LOGICAL PROOFS, I'd sure like to hear your scientific reasoning behind them. Faith is a suspension of reason, the two are not reconcileable.

Nothing wrong with asking questions DV. I gave you the only answer to your question. Any other answer is speculation and you would probably have responded to the speculation with a comment like...use that thing between your ears...

What's wrong with speculation? 1 Thes 5:21 was the catalyst to my turning away from Faith, "Prove all things; hold fast that which is good."

My main problem with atheism is the lack of being able to see the whole picture. You narrow in on science to the exclusion of common sense at times. Now we can argue...what is common sense...but I really don't think that will get us anywhere. Your common sense and mine are obviously very different...your next question...How do we know which one is right?

Common sense is easily defined, it is sound and prudent (but often unsophisticated) judgment. How does science exclude common sense? Common sense would lead one to only believe in things that can be explained, no? But you somehow use common sense to believe in things that can't be proven. How is that sound and prudent? Do you define common sense differently?

We'll find that out at death I guess...

Now on that we agree

I have asked myself most of the questions that you have asked DV. I have come up with satisfactory answers for myself. But since you have no faith in God and are looking for scientific proof...my answers will not satisfy you.

How and why do two people come up with wildly different conclusions if they are based on logic and reason? I can explain scientific principles to you, teach them to you if you don't understand them. You can't do the same with feelings, because they are unjustifiable and unreasonable. If you and I have asked the same questions, but have come up with different answers, shouldn't you be able to explain to me your rationale behind your outlook?

The proof is in the pudin...look at the world around you.

I know I know...your too intellectual for that

That always makes me cringe

If there is "proof", then show it to me.

If you can't, then it's not proof, certainly not incontrovertible proof.

 

[Gandhi]

Nothing wrong with asking questions DV. I gave you the only answer to your question. Any other answer is speculation and you would probably have responded to the speculation with a comment like...use that thing between your ears...

There's no hard proof that any religion is right, thats y its called faith. U have faith that what u believe is right is, but u can't be 100% sure. I don't think any of us can.
DV's questions always make sense, he asks them because there is no one clear answer. And I think thats what he is trying to point at. That no one is absolutly 100% sure that they are right. If that was the case everyone would have the exact same beliefs as everyone else. Well I think thats what he's trying to do.

This brings up the question about whether gays are born with a genetic propensity toward homosexuality or if they aquire it as a result of their environment

If it was just from their enviorment, what enviorment breeds gay people?
From what I can see we have gays from every nationality, class, and family backround.

 

[Mr.Bill]

There is no undeniable evidence! There are a few studies in the area but it is definitely not undeniable.

It seams no matter how hard we try, we always end up off topic...lol. This is off topic and my discussions with DV have gone off topic.

No, methinks this is very much on topic. But anyways, I happened upon a old post of mine to Kidan...evidently I saved it to my hard drive. Most of it is from a psychology essay of mine, so if it sounds essayish, that is why.

Cultures vary in their in their attitudes toward homosexuality, but whether a culture condemns or accepts homosexuality, heterosexuality prevails and homosexuality survives. This is what first triggered me to delve deeper into the subject…and I found that homosexuality likely to be (at least in part) caused by natural processes.

Most psychologists today view sexual orientation as neither willfully chosen nor willfully changed. Sexual orientation is in some ways like handedness: Most people are one way, some (mostly men) are the other. A very few are truly ambidextrous. Nor is sexual orientation linked with some psychological disorder or sexual crime. “Child molester” is not a sexual orientation. Some child molesters are homosexuals, but most are heterosexual males (Gonsiorek, 1982). It was partly for these reasons that the American Psychiatric Association in 1973 dropped homosexuality from its list of “mental illnesses.”

Consider the findings of lengthy Kinsey Institute interviews with nearly 1000 homosexuals and 500 heterosexuals (Bell and others, 1981) The investigators assessed nearly every imaginable psychological cause of homosexuality—parental relationships, childhood sexual experiences, peer relationships, dating experiences. Their findings: Apart from homosexuals’ somewhat greater nonconformity, the reported backgrounds of homosexuals and heterosexuals were very similar. Homosexuals were no more likely to have been smothered by maternal love, neglected by their father, or sexually abused. In more recent studies, as I’ve said before, scientists have found that sons of homosexual men were NOT more likely to become gay if they lived with their gay dad, and that 9 in 10 children of lesbian mothers developed into heterosexuals (Bailey and others, 1995; Golombok and Tasker, 1996). If even being reared by a homosexual parent has no appreciable influence on sexual orientation, then having a gay or lesbian teacher also seems unlikely to have an appreciable influence.

Gay men and lesbians often recall childhood play preferences like those of the other sex (Baily and Zucker, 1995). Gay men have fingerprint patterns that are very similar to those of heterosexual women (Hall and Kimura, 1994). Curiously though, the same is not as true for lesbians. Lesbians do have a more male-typical anatomy though..for example..the cochlea and hearing system of lesbians develop in a way that is “intermediate to those of heterosexual females and heterosexual males” (McFadden and Pasanen, 1998, 1999) But these things are mere trifles in light of other physiological differences. Researcher Simon Levay discovered that certain sections of the hypothalamus is different in homosexual and heterosexual people. He was a gay scientist though, which raised suspicions to the reliability of his controversial findings. But know that he did his experiments blindly for that very purpose, as in he did not know which donors were gay and which were not. As he says in his book, The Sexual Brain, “Gay men simply don’t have the brain cells to be attracted to women.” Laura Allen and Roger Gorski offered a similar conclusion to Levay’s after discovering that a section of the fibers connecting right and left hemispheres is one-third larger in homosexual men than in heterosexual men. “The emerging neuroanatomical picture,” notes Brian Gladue (1994), “is that, in some brain areas, homosexual men are more likely to have female-typical neuroanatomy than are heterosexual men.”

It should not be surprising that there are physiological differences…as the science of psychology’s maxim says, “everything psychological is simultaneously biological.” And of course, this evidence does much to imply that there is a genetic influence in sexual orientation. (Notice I keep using words like ‘influence’ and ‘plays a role’…it’s not all genetic; environmental factors do play a role, but almost no scientists believe that it’s entirely environmental or entirely natural) One research team studied twin brothers of homosexual men. Among their identical twin brothers, 52% were homosexual, as were 22% of fraternal twin brothers (Bailey and Pillard, 1991, 1995). In a follow up study of homosexual women, 48% of their identical twins were homosexual, as were 16% of their fraternal twins (Bailey and others, 1993). Clearly, with more than half of the twins differing in sexual orientation, we know that genes are not the whole story. But since approximately 3.33% of the world population is homosexual, it is also very clear that there is some sort of biological, or genetic influence. Moreover, as you probably know, scientists can with a single transplanted gene cause male fruit flies to display homosexual behavior (Zhang and Odenwald, 1995). A single gene, yes..but that was for fruit flies..an organism of paralyzing simplicity on the genetic level when compared to that of humans. So it is completely reasonable for a ‘gay gene’ to be so far undiscovered…because there very likely to be more than one. Research is indicating that there is a level of heritability though, so something more complicated than a single gene can manage is going on.

Another theory for the causation of sexual orientation deals with abnormal prenatal hormone conditions. With humans, the critical period for the brain’s neural-hormonal control system may exist between the second and fifth months after conception (Ellis and Ames, 1987; Gladue, 1990; Meyer-Bahlburg, 1995). Exposure to the hormone levels typically experienced by female fetuses during this time appears to predispose the person (whether male or female) to be attracted to males later in life. Some tests reveal that homosexual men have spatial abilities typical of heterosexual women—a pattern consistent with the hypothesis that homosexuals were exposed to atypical prenatal hormones (Gladue, 1994l McCormick and Witelson, 1991; Sanders and Wright, 1997).

Regardless of the process, the consistency of the genetic, prenatal, and brain findings has swung the pendulum toward a physiological explanation. Nature more than nurture, most psychiatrists now believe, predisposes sexual orientation (Vreeland and others, 1995). If biological influences prove critical (perhaps especially so in certain environmental contexts), such would explain why sexual orientation is so difficult to change. Yes, I said difficult, not impossible. It is possible to change one’s sexual orientation, but such an ordeal is dauntingly difficult and traumatic.


Clearly Didasko, there is SOMETHING going on here that is more than a complete arbitrary choice.

 

[Eon]

And not just that - there is certainly plenty of homosexuality in the natural world. It seems that certain pressures in population growth - lack of resources - not sure what else, may cause large numbers of otherwise heterosexual animals to develop homosexual behaviour. As usual, we have probably studied this behaviour in ducks, rabbits and marmosets more closely than we have in human beings. I despair sometimes.

I don't know, I'm kind of biaised because my brother turned out to be Gay and came out of the closet recently. I'd been able to see no further than the label "Gay" before - and being raised in a military environment is not conducive to an equanimous treatment of homosexuals. Being a member of the gaming community isn't either - one of the worst labels you can slap on something is that it is "totally gay".

Having someone that you know really well be Gay just opens your eyes to the fact that it doesn't define everything that there is about them. It's one facet. Seeing as how EVERYONE has a facet of their personality that it is distasteful at best and sometimes downright odious I decided that it's a little unfair to judge people solely on the basis of their sexual proclivities.

And I don't see how that is any different in Christianity. Is there a part of the bible that specifically states which OT laws are overthrown and which aren't? Is there a hard and fast formula? I thought the whole new deal with Jesus was that salvation comes from him DESPITE sins. I know Catholics believe that's why you need to get a Priest to tell God your sins for you (it seems JC only speaks Latin or something), but I've always thought that all Christian faiths were on the same page about this - if you accept Jesus as your personal saviour and the sole route to the mercy of God and if you repent of all your sins, then you're saved.

 

[Didasko]

repent of all your sins.

Is the key phrase where we disagree on the path to salvation. With repentance comes change. Do you believe differently about the meaning of repentance?