Number of times Jesus Christ mentioned homosexuality?

zero.

Number of times Jesus Christ mentioned abortion?
zero.

Number of times Jesus Christ referenced the poor and the need to aid and comfort them?
over 1,000 which were recorded, and no one knows how many others.

Number of times asshole conservative Republican politicians who claim to be Christians have demonized homosexuality and abortion, while at the same time voting to strip away protections for the poor?
too many to count.


Hypocrisy, thy name is Republican.

Big Fella."

Does that count?

Of Paradise;)

primarily because the man himself, if he existed, didn't leave behind any writings of his own. Those that we do have, that purport to be eyewitness accounts, were actually written down decades later by completely different people.

So anytime that anyone tries to use Jesus to promote a political viewpoint, it's problematic. I'd prefer we just stay away from that.

we aren't supposed to talk about such things.

:applause:

PS: I don't know where the 1000s of quotes about the poor comes from. I tried Googling "number of Jesus quotes" and couldn't get an answer. Can I possibly be the only person who ever asked this question? :wtf:

n/t.

sometimes, the answer is just so deliciously simple.

Aldous Huxley once reviewed a book written by Edmond Bordeaux Szekely (The Essene Gospel of Peace) and the advised the author to simplify it for the masses. In the book a scribe from the Essene compound that followed Jesus around writes first hand accounts of Jesus in the 'real' world. This book was available for the cost of printing the last time I checked. You might like to check it out! pax

...the gospels. Of course it's also in Leviticus. While it's true that stories and quotes of Jesus emphasize charity, as does the OT, RW Christians claim to be fulfilling that requirement by giving to their churches and religious charities.

was WAY more concerned with divorce

Romans 1:26-28 (New International Version)

"26Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural ones. 27In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed indecent acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their perversion."

I Corinthians 6 (NIV) also written by Paul:

"9Do you not know that the wicked will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: Neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers nor male prostitutes nor homosexual offenders 10 nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God."

I want to be clear--I am not quoting these prohibitions as an argument against homosexuality. Rather, I am merely responding to the suggestion that "real Christians" (however one wants to define that) have no theological basis for homophobia. They do. The problem is the religious faith in the Bible and not any supposedly faulty reading of it.

I had NT Greek as my foreign language in college. Two years of parsing, translating, and commentating, led by a PH.D. and a Methodist minister, in a class with everyone but me going on to Methodist seminary.

there is NOTHING, EVER in the Bible, OT or NT, about homosexuality. Male temple "prostitutes," etc., never homosexuality. There are many, many mistranslations, including the one you posted above.

...in its translations. It is not simply a rehash of KJV like so many are. It's a translation based on ancient documentation available in the 1970s. It contains hundreds footnotes giving alternate translations where it is ambiguous. I'm not dismissing your point of view or experience, but for now I'm going to accept the translation of the experts.

We're these actually written in Greek or was it Aramaic? I don't know.

but you do not even know the name of. Think about that for a moment.

Are you answering my question about which language it was written in? Is "the other" the previous poster?

Are you saying that I'm being unreasonable in relying on a professional, original (not a rehash of other translations) translation of I Cor. instead of taking an anonymous stanger's word for it that it is the wrong translation?

And also that you are attempting to correct a poster who has studied the Biblical Greek in question, when you are not even sure what language the texts were originally written in. You are also an anonymous stranger. You are framing your favored translation as something it most decidedly is not.
This is a discussion board. If you don't know the name of a freaking language, and another has studied it, at least listening to that poster is reasonable. If you are going to dismiss all that is discussed as potential lies, what is the objective of being in a discussion at all?

It's considered to be a paraphrase, in part, and therefore only used by certain denominations for their scholarly work. Most serious theologians don't use it at all--at least, that's what my Nazarene theology profs taught us, which is a denomination that uses the NIV in worship.

That's rather disappointing since my copy of the Christian Bible is in that translation. A Franciscan monk (Episcopal) recommended it to me in the '80s as an accurate, modern translation.

I did notice when I first got it that the list of church people consulted in making it did not include Roman Catholic. I assumed then that it was because the RC Church already had what it considered to be the authoritative translation.

There are many issues with that translation. Personally, I prefer the NKJV. From what I've read, it's a full re-translation.

...while thumbing through an English translation of the Vulgate. The priest told me there was no real agreement over whether or not they were properly part of the Bible.

They're kind of canonical, if that makes sense. :)

I studied both Hebrew and Greek in seminary and it's true. There is no translation of the text but rather transliteration where you try to find a modern analogue to an ancient word. Sometimes you can find a close match, other times you're just trying to get reasonably close.

It's like with the transliteration of the Hebrew word "alma" which fundamentalists like to claim means virgin but actually means young woman. ( http://www.outreachjudaism.org/alma.htm )

Arsenokoitai being the "tops" or active partners

This is of course all conjecture, since I learned this years ago when I was still a Christian and it gave me no comfort because it changed the minds of nobody in Christendom. Now, I couldn't care less about the "exact translations and meanings" because once I see men setting up house in the bellies of whales, virgins who have babies, our "Savior" bringing back the dead like Dr. Frankenstein, and snakes that can carry on debates about the tastiness of fruit vs. staying an idiot for eternity, I just decided to grow the fuck up and ignore the greek words for top and bottom.

or the old History channel, when it used to be unbiased. There is a book on this very subject...the unmistakable mistranslations in the Bible which have been promulgated down through the ages to bend to nefarious purposes. Don't remember the name of it, but would be easy to find for anyone interested. Just google Bible mistranslations or visa verse; Or try these

http://www.lionking.org/~kovu/bible/section01.html

Overview

How does the Bible address homosexuality - the word didn't even exist until 1869? The word first appeared in Germany to describe the theory that from birth some people are predisposed toward persons of the same sex. Since the biblical languages (Hebrew and Greek) had no words for heterosexual or homosexual, it is anachronistic and misleading when homosexual is used to translate a biblical text. It is wrong to proclaim the biblical view of homosexuality since there is none. This violates the integrity of the individual texts and the biblical witness as a whole. Each reference to what is today homosexuality must be read in the light of the particular literary, cultural, and historic contexts of any particular passage.

If Jesus ever said anything about homosexuality, it is not recorded in the Bible, even mistranslated. He did, however, speak extensively on God's unconditional love. More at above link

http://www.wrongplanet.net/postt83726.html

It is my understanding that the Roman upper class had young boys available for their pleasure....This is much more akin to what Catholic Priests have been doing to little boys and a far cry from modern committed gay relationships.

I'm not gay, but proudly belong to an "open and affirming" UCC church (that now has an openly gay pastor). This was part of our discussions prior to becoming O and A. Most modern gay people would agree with Paul on his disdain for those practices of the Roman rich.

... whether they thought to demonize it in the bible or not.

See "sinister"... Latin for "left".

Point: majorities like to demonize minorities and things they don't understand.

There is also an indication that Jesus may have had a homosexual lie down or two ...

Not only is there homosexuality in the world, there is also bisexuality --

but right wing control over normal human sexuality needs to condemn any sex which

doesn't lead to procreation. And that's in the interests of those who wish to exploit

labor.

*

*

better be living by the ones that apply to themselves. And not one of them does. Not one.

And we're not even sure the passage usually used (one of those "clobber" verses) is fairly attributed to Paul. Thin stuff on which to base persecution and discrimination.

Leviticus? When the hypocrites start following all the laws laid down in Leviticus, then we can start disputing exactly what was meant there, as well.

That's kind of my point. Reading the Bible as being against homosexuality is not the problem. The problem is assuming that an iron-age book of mythology has anything authoritative to say on morality at all. Anyway, there is no reliable information on what JC said since the gospels are mutually contradicting, contain factual errors and where written decades after the supposed facts. (Matt. and Luke contain different paternal geneologies for a man who supposedly had no human father. There was no empire-wide census and the one that existed in Italy did not require people to move to where their ancestors came from.)

Leviticus is actually pretty clear on the subject. Men who have homosexual sex are to be killed. And I'm the last one to suggest that Fundies are anything other than hypocrits.

Got a little problem there.

So if you ate clams, mussels, oysters, winkles, scallops, shrimp, prawn, lobster, crayfish, or crabs you're going to HELL! It's in the Bible. So why aren't right wing christians moaning and groaning about eating shellfish? Oh yeah, they like to eat it. Goddamned hypocrites!

One of them has a vision where God says eat anything you want. Some jaded souls might suggest that the writer only came up with that so non-Kosher diners could be recruited into Christianity to expand it beyond Judaism.

Leviticus doesn't send people to hell. That is a Christian concept that came later. It just says that transgressors must be killed.

If the writing of the Bible was directed by God, then why are there so many holes in it? Because everything in the Bible is so vague or contradictory there are no two Christians who can agree on everything in it. Even Biblical scholars who study the Bible all their lives still don't understand everything in it. Why would a 'god' make something so complex? Like I said in another post, "If simplicity is genius" then god is the exact opposite of 'genius'. How can someone who is 'all knowing' have a book written so poorly?

The NT alone has numerous contractions, many far more egregious than that. Next time you are bored in a hotel room, pull out the Bible and compare the genealogy for JC in Matt. and Luke. They are different. And they are paternal which seems pretty irrelevant for a guy whose dad is Jehovah.

Why does it say that pi=3? I forget where it is, but there is a part of the OT that reads like a building code. Among its pronouncements is the claim that a circumference = 3x the radius. That's not even close. At the time it was written, the Greeks already calculate pi to the equivalent of three decimal places.

I've read the Bible probably more than 99% of right wing 'christians'. With each reading it led to more and more skepticism until I finally came to the conclusion that no reasonable person could ever believe this is the work of an 'all knowing' god. That's interesting about pi and that the Greeks had it figured out three decimal places before the Bible was written. I guess 'god' didn't tell them about the real value of pi. I remember the value of pi from engineering classes as 3.1415926535897... I don't know why I remembered that many decimal places, but you'd think that the writers of the Bible could have been close to accurate.

Notice too how the Bible was written by men only. No women were allowed to participate. Hell, in the Ten Commandments women were equated with farm animals, manservants and possessions to be coveted. I thought it should have said 'thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's SPOUSE'.

I definitely appreciate those commandments against rape, child abuse and insider trading. :eyes: And isn't it cool how in Genesis it talks about how god made penguins, kangaroos and bacteria? :evilgrin:

The Bible is like Gilgamesh.... just an ancient text coddled together from oral traditions and then cut and pasted together to fit whatever agenda, for centuries. Every 3rd grader today knows much more about the world and the universe than all the writers of the Bible.

I give it as much authority in my life as I would Gilgamesh or Beowulf.... or a 3rd grader.

if those are the only choices

I missed that, I think.

many people confuse the two.

(my apologies to those who live in Cleveland. ;) )

Well, you do have Bible Belt officianatos... and others... defending BP...which is destroying the shell fish industry in the Gulf. It's a start!

used for sex. didnt have an issue healing him even though he was practicing a homosexual act. that is the closest the bible puts jesus to the gay word, as far as i know.

which memory was better to remember the specifics. sorry

I know it happened, of course.

I know you didn't mean to imply this, but I would caution against equating pederasty with adult homosexuality. If if as you suggest JC didn't have a problem with a Roman soldier raping a teenage slave, what does that say about JC?

That he lived in an age none of us would want to... or even understand.

shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled” (Mat 5:18 ) and the law included “If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood upon them.” (Lev 20:13)

I’m sure there are other translations of Lev 20:13 that one might cite but you did start the OP.

use that restriction?

with men, which apparently was common in canaan at the time.

there are many other "abomonations" in leviticus, such as eating shellfish and pork and so on, which christians recognize nearly universally as not applying to them. but the admonision against ritualistic homosexual acts by (usually) heterosexual priests, nearly alone among all the laws of leviticus, they believe applies not only to christians but to everyone, but should even apply to homosexuals!

homosexuality is only an unnatural act when it's done by heterosexuals (for prostitution or religious/ritual reasons). when homosexuals do it, it's completely natural, duh!

NOWHERE in either the OT or NT is "homosexuality" mentioned.

So I guess 'God' screwed up when he made animals too. I think god has celestial ADD because he sure messed up a lot of things, especially the Bible, which no two people on Earth can agree on everything contained within it. If 'genius is simplicity', then god is a blooming idiot. He should have waited to have the Bible written by good authors who could write with absolute clarity, instead of all of the riddles, fables and other confusing and contradictory things in the Bible. And he should have waited until at least the printing press was invented, or better still cameras and recording devices. Why would he pick a time in human history where everything was so backward and most people were ignorant? If he 'always was and always will be' and he was 'all knowing' you would think he would have waited just 1800 years.

god decided to create us exactly as if we evolved without him to test our faith.
god decided to put down a false fossil record to test our faith.

in fact, god decided to pretty much act in all respects as if we didn't exist, to test our faith.


and he'll roast you for eternity if you fail the test, because he loves you.

And what's so authoritative about nature? Smallpox is natural. Air conditioning is not. Which would you rather have?

Chapters 17 and 20 which contain the condemnation of male homosexuality expressly apply to everyone. 1-16 apply to the priests. Anyway, in what way were they otherwise "impure?"

Nor anywhere else in the Bible.

The others talk about men lying with men as they would a woman and impure sexual practices. The Bible doesn't say "sexual intercourse" either, but it is clear in context that is what it means when it says something like "he knew her." Being prudish by nature, the Biblical writers do not spell out sex acts.

I've never heard that before. I know it departs from some traditional wording in some notable places. Like in Psalm 28 it says something like "a dark place" rather than "shadow of death." It says "murder" instead of "kill" in the 10 commandments. But that doesn't make it an inaccurate translation.

Also, it's a dynamic equivalence translation - an odd choice for literalists.

References:

http://www.davnet.org/kevin/articles/nivbible.html

http://www.douglasjacoby.com/view_article.php?ID=5691 (good suggestions at the bottom)

http://catholicbibles.blogspot.com/2009/05/nt-wright-niv-not-friends.html

...translators had had another principle, considerably higher than the stated one: to make sure that Paul should say what broadly Protestant and evangelical tradition said he said.

Quibbled over and explained by one who knows little about it, to one who knows nothing about it.

Here's the problem in a nutshell.

Language is used to express logical and content-ful propositions: Your electricity is going to be turned off. The sky is blue. If the earth were made of iron and had the same diameter, the moon would orbit much closer than it does. My wife loves bacon.

Language is also used for stylistic purposes, sometimes meaningful and sometimes not, sometimes to express fairly pure emotion: Poetry, verse, alliteration and rhymes. Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. Fuckin' shit!

The means used for both these purposes can be compositional, where you take words' meanings, grammar and syntax, and build the sentence. This is true for all the contentful propositions I listed. It is not true for things like, "If you keep spouting that crock of shit I'm going to spill the beans on you," with idiom chunks--groups of words with idiosyncratic meanings--and metaphor.

Moreover, we use real-world or cultural context. "Click the mouse on the radio-button to start the hyperdrive ship on its way" can't be translated into some languages because they lack exposure to the technology; if you cobbled together a translation, it would still be fairly meaningless. A lot of metaphor is based on that kind of context. Relying on implied referents also produces less than fully compositional utterances. Some words we form emotional bonds with, positive or negative, and the bonds often are idiosyncratic.

By and large, purely contentful utterances that are compositional and rely on real-world contexts equally accessible to speakers of two languages can be fully translated--not always. The problem is that some utterances are ambiguous, the words and grammar could mean two things. Puns, for example, can be compositional--but mean something different than sentences that aren't punning.

Stylistic uses are hard to translate. Sometimes you can manage them, but you have a choice. Take traditional English poetry: It uses a lot of rhyme, some alliteration, with regular cadences. Take Old English poetry: It's not so big on rhyme, has lots of alliteration and assonance, and often involves use of long and short vowels. If you translate Beowulf, do you keep the Old English poetic devices, lacking much appreciation; do you train students to have some sort of laminate of appreciation for these devices when they read Beowulf; or, do you translate Beowulf to contain the right amount of devices appreciated by the *modern* reader?

Context is also nasty. The real-world context in 30 AD is rather different. "Pay unto Caesar that which is Caesar's" is taken to mean "pay your taxes," but at the time it was also a religious comment because Caesar's right to tax was based on his divinity; moreover, the tax was instituted differently on non-citizens than citizens, and so deals with ideas of social justice. Do you translate the context to convey the *meaning* or do you translate the words--keeping in mind the issue with ambiguity, since we use context and obviously intended meaning to disambiguate words. Note that the context of NT and OT quotes depends crucially when you think they were written down and by whom. A Levantine Greek would have a different context from a Diaspora Jew; if Paul was classically trained in 30 AD and Luke was a physician, their contexts would be different if Paul was a pseudonym for a Xian in 130 AD and Luke was a pastiche of different writers.

If you think the Greek NT has to be interpreted as translations from the Aramaic--when it's possible that some sections would have been composed in Greek--then you have a different context. If you think that some constructions are loan-translations of Aramaic idioms common in Levantine koine, you go in a different direction.

The idea of "intended meaning" is itself a problem: It presupposes that we construct the meaning that would have been constructed by the intended audience. "Original intent," as it were. But I digress.

If we don't translate meanings, but words, how do we handle idioms? Context-sensitive phrases? When Dostoevsky refers to a "zheltyi dom" in Crime and Punishment, do we translate it "literally" as "yellow (zheltyi) house (dom)"? Do we footnote and say that brothels were mandated to be painted yellow at the time? Do we translate it as "brothel"?

The result is that translations apart from the purely functional and contentful between languages whose speakers share very similar if not identical contexts are all partial, at least for some people. (Let's ignore the complication that the "native speaker" whose understanding is to be mirrored in the translation is purely hypothetical because each linguistic community is a set of numerous subcommunities.) What you need to do is to pick the most salient, most important, part of what a text bears and render that in the target language. Of course, this leaves unanswered the question, "salient to whom?" and "important for what?" A poetic translation of the Psalms would inevitably differ from a translation that assumed that the Psalms were there for correction and doctrine.

What you often get is a "scholar" arguing at cross-purposes with himself. Instead of saying, "What kind of translation best gets across the original meaning and web of associations that a native speaker at the time would have had?"--which leads to interesting discussions of word meanings, contexts, and what the implications of different theories of translations are you get dogmatic arguments. "The words don't actually say 'homosexuality'," and to avoid having the text be translated that way they instead on a word-by-word translation, searching for other possible contexts and therefore meanings and settle on the context that provides the acceptable meaning. Yet later, when the text in a word-for-word would clearly mean something they don't like, they insist that it's an idiom, some cultural allusion, that we need precisely dynamic equivalence or some such kind of translation to provide the required meaning. (Okay, "dynamic equivalence" is a dicey term, with a range of meanings over time: Nida used it even for things like, "The Lord is my anchor, I shall not drift" in lieu of "The Lord's my shepherd, I'll not want." After all, a seaman is unlikely to know much about shepherding. Then again, the average 30-something fast-food worker in the inner city is unlikely to know much about shepherding.)

For instance, rendering to Caesar that which is Caesar's is a troubling comment. It says to accept oppression. There's no boycott, no rebellion. It says that paying your tax is fine, even for religious reasons: yes, it's oppression, but Caesar's no god so it doesn't matter. Just don't make a fuss over it. You hear "righteousness" discussed in the NT, but no discussion of what righteousness would have meant at the time; you hear about men lying with men, and are dutifully told some cultural details that might lead to a pre-specified conclusion that the reason is because it's involved in some temple worship. But paying taxes to Caesar, an apparent form of worship, is fine? One would think Paul would have said, in parallel with his "eating meat from the shambles" logic, that gay sex is fine unless it would offend a weaker brother.

Translation theory is a vexed issue because it tries to be a theory to cover a wide variety of uses and varieties of language. Each theory builds on a specific goal of language, a specific type of language, and works badly with other kinds of language.

What's humorous is when you get somebody claiming that a word coined in the 19th century or thereabouts wasn't used in the 1st century, so therefore the practice couldn't have been discussed as such. In the case of homosexuality, judgments varied over the centuries and by culture. Since it's a controversial topic, with every argument containing a lot of unstated assumptions and overlooking crucial facts or details, it can't be discussed. It's can only be polemicized.

that was interesting and instructive.

I knew a poet once who was fascinated by translations. He found himself inadvertantly an amateur linguist, because he always felt like he needed to read things in "the original". What you've written here would've involved a trip to the Pub for pints and "discussion"...

:)

if you're going to say that jesus meant that we should follow everything in leviticus (which i seriously doubt but you COULD interpret it that way by pulling the one quote you found out of context) then i hope you are not mixing meat and dairy, eating shrimp or pork, or wearing cotton and linen because those are included in the same list of laws from which you pulled out the leviticus quote against gay men getting it on...and probably in those days taken about as seriously (which is to say, yah, yah, as a good jew we shouldn't be eating shrimp, mixing up fabrics, or taking a younger dude to bed, because then we blend right in w. the usual greeks out to have a good time and never looking to the next world...in other words, only a religious kook of the day worries abt that stuff over-much would be my guess)

at the end of the day leviticus is not the word of christ and to claim, that since he said for political reasons, oh yeah, we should of course respect the old testament law blah blah blah, and you find buried deep in the old testament one line against gay guys...so it means jesus thought gay guys should be executed...pul-lease...that's just ridiculous on the face of it

at least you didn't pull out the onan nonsense (aga. masturbation) and try to pretend that it's somehow prohibiting ABORTION, so you're a step ahead of the usual kooks around here...no one has ever found anything in the bible aga. abortion, jesus said it or somebody else said it...not that i've ever seen...everything they come up turns out to be on a completely different topic

those who spend their time arguing over how many angels can dance on the point of a needle.

:rofl: :hi:

The Law of Moses was still valid and would be forever. That includes the dietary restrictions. If JC were real, he was not a Christian, but a Jew. It was the book of Acts that supposedly removes dietary restrictions. Ergo, Lev. and the rest of the five books are the word of Jesus by reference.

I'm unaware of any prohibition on abortion, though the Onan thing is agruably a lesson against contraception or masturbation. That story does seem pretty fact-specific, though.

Love your neighbor and love God? I think he said 'for that IS the law AND the prophets' but we are not here to play talmudic games, now are we?

and sometimes to others who hold strong opinions about what those books say. What did the apostles find funny? That is, what were the modalities of humor at that point in history? Would you be able to identify such modalities in the texts? Has it ever even crossed your mind that some of the 'quotes' of Jesus might be not dry and sincere, but rather wilting in their wit and skewering o hypocrites?
When he said "If your eye makes you sin, why don't you poke it out" one might note that none of his followers did so. I would suggest that has to do with exaggeration, the big humor hit of the time. His followers got the joke in the story. Seems obvious.

He was talking about the non-Jewish woman who asked for some favor from JC. His response was something like saying that what he had was for Jews and not for "dogs." That seems pretty harsh. The woman then says that even dogs get table scraps. Then JC turns and lectures the apostles about how she has more faith than them. Anyway, the priest suggested he was talking tongue-in-cheek when he called her a dog.

I note that you did not answer my questions. Of course it 'could be' but I am saying that it is, and that there are answers to the questions I asked you. I am also saying that anyone who claims to understand a text, as literature or as divine, who does not know what the people in the text thought was funny does not understand it at all. Further, I am saying that this lack of curiosity about the text makes the devotion to it highly suspect.
It is really an important point. Not just about humor. About many aspects of such old texts, really. But if you can not spot a joke, Don Rickles is the meanest man who ever lived. And some wise cracker is the messiah. Go figure.

Given the context, I don't see much humor in the Bible, especially in the cruel parts.

"The Bible contains six admonishments to homosexuals and 362 admonishments to heterosexuals. That doesn't mean that God doesn't love heterosexuals. It's just that they need more supervision." (Lynn Lavner)

and my recollection is that Paul had much he didn't like.
Plus I have read many interpretations of the Leviticus passage that this is in reference to how one man relates to another and little to do with sex.

He even thought heterosexual marriage interfered with one's relationship with God.

He had "issues."

An alien concept to the GOP.

I really find it confusing when I run into Fundy literalist business owners. Just what about JC's teachings (or Paul's for that matter) promotes the accumulation of material wealth?

they insist that god wants them to be wealthy.

Jesus said relieve yourself of worldly goods and come follow me.

So it would appear that God and Jesus are not even on the same page and they're supposed to be one in the same. Whuddupwi'dat?

... that Leviticus was purely the set of rules set up to keep the people from behaving as the Canaanites, who had some parties in their temples, if you know what I mean. That means the actual "rule" isn't about homosexuality at all, but same-sex partying in the temple. Not gay, so much, but hedonistic (their belief, certainly not mine). Jesus did say he was here to enforce the rules of Moses, which would include this.

However, given that the Bible was put together by humans, edited by humans, and bits rewritten by humans, all they were doing was installing their own prejudices into law. Who knows what was actually spoken by Jesus at the time, and what he meant. My version of Jesus loves everyone, regardless, gays, straights, and GOP included (although I'm personally sure he'd have smashed their "temples", given the chance).

If you haven't seen this, though, you're missing out on some incredible art and criticism: http://www.thebricktestament.com/

Sorry.:shrug:

It is because of those 6 admonitions against homosexuality in the Babble that I renounced my Christian beliefs. And yes, I have heard the argument you made numerous times. It never convinced the haters, so it never helped me. Those 6 passages are still there, and there's nothing you, or anybody else can do to neutralize them, except declare them bullshit. Once you declare those 6 admonitions against homosexuality bullshit, then you are free.

But that begs the question. If those 6 are bullshit, how much else of this book is also bullshit?

Nobody ever makes attempts to find the "real" Zeus or the "real" Odin or the "real" Huitzilopitchli. Nobody strips away all the miraculous bullshit and says, "there must have been a real boat called the "Argo" on which a real man named "Hercules" rode with real men named "Jason, Orpheus, Castor, and Pollux."

The answer to your question at the end is, of course, all of it. They Bible is not a legitimate source of modern morality or worldview.

points with those in power. Everyone of them are going to hell, so why would they actually do anything good for society?

Jesus and The American Flag - would make a good book title.

Great book title!

Yes, there's Detroit, but I was talking about hell in a literal sense.

Who wrote the bible? It sure wasn't Jesus.

Seems like I read that in a scroll somewhere...;-)

Eros shot an errant arrow at the wrong god. :shrug:

society, by taking an enlightened view on things sexual. He doesn't speak about sexual issues much at all, except for noting that many people are hypocrites when they point fingers at others. He also violated the social norms by speaking openly in public with women that had "bad" reputations.

It's important to understand that those things known as "the harsh teachings" of Jesus were aimed at the hypocrites in powerful places, not at common folk.

That is exactly what the story is. That is the story. Told four times over, that is the story. It is all of the gospels, and it is also the acts of the apostles.
You offer no specifics. While making a strong claim indeed.

What about all that stuff about "put your eye out if it offends you" and "make yourself a eunuch for the sake of Heaven?" Even if you think those admonitions are metaphorical (a position which I'm not entirely convinced of) they seem pretty fucking far from "enlightened."

Note that none of the followers of the man put out their eyes, nor made themselves eunuchs. This should be a hint as to how they understood what he was saying.
Exaggeration was the big mode of humor in that time. You will note that to this day, you can hear men talk about how seeing a woman wearing such and such makes them sin. Some cultures cover their women you may note.
So. If you say to me, "Seeing them makes me sin" and I replied " Well if you believe that, you'd poke your eye out, because it is better to be blind than go to hell, right? Let me get you a knitting needle." What do you think I would mean by that? Does it seem to you that I think you should poke your eye out? Or that I think you are full of crap? Just a thought.

If you aren't, I should point out that people, at that time, did castrate themselves for religious reasons, most famously Origen, an early church father. Tertullian, another church father, suggested that Jesus and Paul castrated themselves for religious reasons. People who lived much closer to the supposed time of Jesus, and are considered some of history's great experts on the subject, seem to have thought that Jesus was being quite literal.

At first glance I find it extremely unusual to suggest that Jesus was being sarcastic when he said those things. I have never in my life heard the suggestion that Jesus tried to teach by making snide remarks, though I suppose that is an interesting way of reconciling some of the contradictions he exhibits with himself. You may actually have a point, though. Reading Matthew 18 again, every word out of Jesus's mouth is extreme and absurd. The only way we could rate him a good moral teacher is if everything he said in the chapter was in jest. Only if we take him to mean the opposite of everything he says can we as modern readers approve of his moral teachings. That's something for further consideration.

Cut and dried.

And I say that as an exiled Christian myself.

The poor ARE the message. And the poor were made poor by the rich exactly the same way back then.

If true, why is it so derivative?

I don't base my morality on a very old book written by very silly, very superstitious, pre-Industrial, pre-Enlightenment religious fanatics. I think anybody who does is doing something wrong. I know for secular reasons that homosexuality and abortion are not matters that the state has a compelling interest in. And I know for secular reasons that the poor and the weak are those that our society should be built to benefit. Even if the Bible condemned the poor as evil and lazy, I would feel the same way. The Bible is not a valid source of morality or ideology.

Serious, your point is so obviously true that I wince everytime someone makes a point about morality which is clearly based on religious dogma rather than actual morality. Holy =/= good.

Incest is mentioned zero times by Jesus Christ.

So I guess we should all look upon our mothers, sisters, brothers, and children as RWLFs--relatives we'd like to fuck. Jesus didn't mention it, so porking sis, bonking junior, humping pa must be okay.

Beastiality also isn't mentioned.

So I guess it can be a three-way, you, Ma, and Fido.

Yes, it's offensive. But the prohibitions would have to be seen as a cultural hang-up, wouldn't it, not a religious one. Of course, that they're prohibited in Leviticus, well, all the more reason to assume it's okay, I guess.

As for the "protections for the poor," the basis for that is as weak as my previous 6 paragraphs. It's in parallel to the NYT letter to the editor by Macham saying that the 2nd amendment, since it refers to the "right of the people," must be a collective and not an individual right. So, then, is the right to petition and several other rights held dearly to be individual. Making it more salient is that some rights refer to "the accused"--a singular substantivized past participle--and "persons." Complicating the Constitution is having some rights not have proper subjects: The person or group with the right is elided. However, it can also be read as showing that they're interchangeable terms--individuals have rights, groups are composed of individuals.

My point is that reading the obligations in the NT as collective or individual poses the same problem that Macham flubbed. Sometimes obligations are worded in ambiguous ways: if a group is told to show mercy and love to a group, that is 4-way ambiguous: the group could give help to the 2nd group, individuals could give help to the second group, the group could give help to individuals in the 2nd group, or individuals in the first group could help individuals in the second group. (It depends how you perform the quantification.) However, since elsewhere the responsibility is clearly from one one person to another--with nice singulars--then the problem vanishes. While groups can act, they're groups of individuals; individuals' actions are their own, and when they act as a group are also the group's. If I'm in a group and donate nothing, I am not virtuous when everybody else acts charitably. I could go on, but the purpose of this is to show that it's a defensible position to argue that such choices are individual, and how an individual discharges that obligation is really his/her own choice.


Or I could just argue that you implicitly violate the separation of church and state: We must pass certain legislation and implement certain policies in the US because it's Jesus' will. How fundie. Perhaps it's a stand you take. Perhaps not. Dunno. Not going to do a search, I don't like gotchas.

Many such policies can be motivated on other grounds. Moreover, accusing somebody of hypocrisy because they fail to live up to the standards you attribute to them fails the fairness test.

John 6:56

If you take the position that he didn't mean "eateth" literally, didn't mean "blood" literally, and said "dwelleth" in a more fairly literal sense, you have a reasonably homoerotic line.

The whole passage in "The Message" translation gets even more explicit (especially if you quote-mine it):

Wonderful book, that Bible. You can make it say anything you want.

Then he said to the, "The Sabbath was made for humankind, and not humankind for the sabbath; so the Son of Man is lord eve of the sabbath."


When I was at Seminary my friends were studying for their ordination exams (I never intended to go into the local parish so I didn't bother). One of the sample questions was:


You are the pastor of a church and a young couple has lost their child during child birth. They are devistated. They want to have their child Baptized so he can go to heaven. What do you do?



Virtually all of us would have answered to try and counsel the couple on the meaning of Baptism and so on. We all would have gotten this question wrong and would have all flunked the exam on the basis of the one question.


The correct answer was to provide a symbolic Baptism for this family in the middle of their grief and not worry about being theologically correct. Pastoral love trumps theological theory.


The Sabbath is a symbol for the Law. The Law, in this case all of the instruction on Homosexuality, is superceded by a higher understanding of the reconciliation that "Son of Man" was bringing. It is in the perfect sacrifice of the Christ that Christian Truth is understood, not in the fallable applications of theory, even if they are written by Paul.

If two people want to commit their lives to God in a sanctified ceremony then the compelling interests of Pastoral love have to outweigh the imperfect understanding of the "Law", this is what is meant that "the Sabbath was made for humankind, and not humankind for the Sabbath, so the Son of Man is lord even of the sabbath". Whatever prohibitions there were on homosexuality at the time they did not have a greater standing than the prohibitions of taking action on the Sabbath.

I would call it a money worship 'cult' which is what the GOP has morphed into

Jonathan was Saul's son, and was going to be king, but when he met David, he really did some pretty romantic things towards David, and upon Jonathan's death in battle, King David said that his love of Jonathan exceeded the love he had of women.








It was love at first sight between David and Jonathan. In 1 Sam 16:18,21, as a young lad, David attended regularly at King Saul's court to play harp for the king. David must have known Jonathan even then. Some years later, in 1 Sam 18:1, now both yound men of age, when David single handedly defeated the Philistines and after the victory appeared before King Saul. The relationship between David and Jonathan was rekindled again. Jonathan fell in love with David at first sight. (1 Sam 18:1). Many Gays would have, for David was very handsome, and slim. (1 Sam 17:42,43).

That's just the first paragraph. Read about it all here ---

http://www.psa91.com/david.htm

because he believes that "God doesn't want us to be gay". That's what he told me the final time we had a serious talk, then, after a few calls of a couple minutes, the man I had fallen deeply in love with was gone out of my life, swallowed up by the self-hatred taught to him by the church. Never mind that there are millions of Gay Christians in these churches who love Christ as Savior, and are being told over and over that they are not compatible with their faith. I pray that, like me, they reject not the faith, but the church that teaches such self-hatred, and that they find a place of worship (even if it's in someone's home who is open minded, or in their own home) where they are accepted.

So, as I said, I forgive them. They're blindness is devastatingly sad, but we must persevere and not lose sight of who we are. Whether Christian or Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, or a non-believer - we have rights as humans to be who we are. I pray for us all. And thanks to those straight-but-not-narrow friends out there who support Gay Rights despite being Heterosexual.

Its nothing new. The societal norms of ethical morale undoubtedly evolve over time. Civil liberties, equality, and good will toward mankind have shown significant improvement over the past 2000 years. YET, sure enough, the ones filled with hate find some loosely translated bible quote to blockade love and make god look like the asshole, not them. For example, Fact. before 1967, it was illegal for interracial couples to marry in 16 states. In 1959, when the Virginia judge handed down the decision prohibiting interracial marriage, he quoted from scripture that it was God’s will. How many religious Conservatives now are married to someone of a different race? Seriously, they just make this shit up! If the majority of society keep viewing religion as a positive lifestyle, The bad people will continue to hide behind it.

any thoughts?

:hi:

-C

the "right" to bare arms
the "rights" of corporations

He does seem to mention taxes and the separation of church and state though...

Thanks for the thread, Bravo.

If Jesus ever returned, the republicans would only kill Him quicker.

throughout the ages are united in their suffering due to our sins and through the grace of God they manifested an archetype in the life and death of a man named Jesus a little over 2000 years ago.

Not only are the 100s of thousands of innocents we have killed in Iraq and Afghanistan what is known to some as "the Second Coming" (an a-Biblical story, btw) they are the Lord Jesus Christ with us now as he always has been, dying, as he always has and as one often hears, "for (because-of) our sins."

It was the next to last thing he said, "Father, why hast thou forsaken me?"

It appears to this here fallen Catholic that all of this absolute certainty about being "Saved", this quid pro quo for "virtue" is not only blasphemy, it's not Faith.

and he was all knowing.....

and was truly the son of God.....

and strived to help mankind by promoting peace, love, and understanding.

Don't you think that after all the bloodshed his existence has caused, this "omnipotent" deity might have served humanity better if he just kept his mouth shut.