Homosexuality in World Religions...

I must admit that I know very little about Islam, Buddhism and Hinduism, so I was wondering how each of them viewed homosexuality? Is it considered a 'sin' like it is in the Judeo-Christian view?

I know that in some Islamic countries that homosexuals regularly recieve the death penalty, was this sanctioned by Mohammed, or is it a case of religion being hijacked by extremists?

I know that The Dalai Lama has spoken out against homosexuality before, but I am not sure if he was speaking about homosexuality or promiscuity.

Any thoughts or answers to these questions would be greatly appreciated.

http://www.buddhanet.net/homosexu.htm

I also found this, here, which references some of the Dalai Lama's remarks:
http://www.religioustolerance.org/hom_budd.htm

You should keep in mind that the Dalai Lama speaks for Buddhists in about the same way the Pope speaks for Christians--in both cases, HH represents a particular (narrow) view.

A lot of people believe that homosexuality is condemned in the Bible. But this is merely a case of misunderstanding certain dynamics in the ancient culture and the unfortunate problem of interpretation biases by translators.

Allow me to elucidate:

1. The prohibition in Leviticus was written in a culture where people needed to procreate in large numbers. This was in order to guarantee that some of the children would live to child-bearing adulthood. *Any* sexual activity that did not directly result in making a woman pregnant was frowned upon. Hence, not only the restriction on homosexuality, but also on such things as a man being intimate with his wife during her menstrual cycle.
It should further be noted that the law was concerned with heterosexual people engaging in same-sex activity. "Homosexuality" as we understand it now was not perceived in the same way in the ancient cultures as we understand it today. It was thought that everyone had a "natural" heterosexual predisposition and that same-sex activity was one item in a list of perversions that did not lead to making babies.
As well, the entire Law was never supposed to be prescriptive for all eternity. Much of it was supposed to be malleable depending on the conditions the Israelites found themselves. Basically, one purpose of "Law" was to have the people living in distinct contrast to the cultures around them. They were regarded as a "holy" people; and since "holy" means "set apart," certain specifics of the "Law" were to make the people live in distinct contrast to their neighbors.

2. The story about Sodom and Gomorrah has nothing to do with same-sex "sin." It was about inhospitality. Other references in the Bible to this story make that absolutely clear.

3. Pauline references in the New Testament were likely focused upon two highly practiced customs. The first was an ancient Roman tradition wherein older men mentored young boys; and it was not only accepted but expected that part of the relationship would be sexual in nature. The second was related to prostitution. Simply put, some pagan cultures believed the orgasm was an actual connection with divinity; and a few of their rites involved temple prostitutes, both men and women.
Keep in mind that even in Paul's age, the high mortality rate for infants still compelled people to look down on same-sex activity as a "lifestyle." The two exceptions I just mentioned were supposed to be in addition to heterosexual procreation, not instead of it.

So, you see, what a lot of fundamentalists criticize today is based on misinterpretation of Scripture and ancient cultural norms. If they were to look carefully--without their biases--they would find that the Bible *does not* condemn homosexuals or homosexuality as we recognize them in the contemporary world.

As I've told people in my congregation, I sincerely doubt that God is concerned about the gender of two people who sincerely love each other.

and gomorrah as one which forbids homosexuality than it is to use it for the real intended purpose of the story which is one about how greed and lack of compassion do not go unpunished... (and i hate to use the word "unpunished" (because it speaks of a harsh God rather than a loving, or Just God) -- but i can't think of what other word i might use instead.

homosexual thing, wouldn't a 'just' God punish violations of his Law? For instance, should murderers, thieves, and rapists go unpunished by either a 'just' God, or a 'just' society? What about society? Should drunk drivers or speeders go 'unpunished' just because they haven't hurt anybody, yet?

Again, I ask this in respect to a general condition of 'justness', not specifically to homosexuality.

Murder, robbery, and rape are against another's will. There is nothing wrong with what two consenting adults decide to do. Period.

I don't care what any religion has to say about it, personally. The Bible is nothing but political literature written BY men, altered BY men throughout time. The book as we know today has been modified, translated, and torn apart so many times. Besides, you can't compare a society back then to what it is today. If it were up to them, we'd still have slaves, women would remain pregnant and at home, and men could do whatever they damn well pleased without consequences.

Because religion is set by the people who rubber stamp God's name on it, I don't want to have anything to do with it. And when I don't have anything to do with it, they cannot control my relationships. Nor should they.

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Anti-Bush and other outspoken political merchandise at www.cafepress.com/liberalissues

Consent wasn't in the question. Let me rephrase it. Assuming that there is a God who give commandments that he expects to be kept, would he be just if he punished some violations, but not others??

Again, I am assuming that your opinion, or mine, of what is just is not of great importance to God, who has his own ideas. This is a philosophical question. Work with my assumptions.

Thus, I tend to see that God is more concerned with the redemption of a person or people than with punishment of such. That is to say, if a person does wrong, the "punishment" or "consequences" are God's way of compelling a person to change heart, make amends, etc.

One "problem" in our eyes, however, is timing. For God, the right time may not be immediate, and the right mode may not be as we anticipated. For example, some (like Hitler, perhaps?) might not have the moment for full realization until after death. This may be due in part to the way a person has chosen to live and hardened his/her heart to listening to God's voice.

Another problem--from our perspective--is that neither justice nor grace is usually fair. So, we may be at odds with how God has willed to act/not act. We must simply trust that all things will come together someday, as they should.

By the way, despite the fact that this conversation is taking place in the midst of a discussion on homosexuality, I do not believe that it is a sin.

that God would want to redeem, rather than punish. But I disagree that justice is not fair. By definition, it must be.

I was actually referring to what we think or want to be fair. In such case, the just thing may contrast with our human, imperfect concepts of fairness.

but is 'fairness' simply a matter of opinion? Remember, for purposes of argument, we are assuming that God exists, and that he is setting the rules.

but even if there is no God, is fairness a matter of opinion? In which case, how are they reconciled. For instance, I may not consider it fair that there are people who have more than others, while you might feel that you worked for what you have and it is not fair to take it from you to help people you don't know, and don't care about. Who decides? Is it fair to use force to take your resources from you? Is it fair for you to allow fellow human beings to starve??

To a degree, I think that "fairness" is a matter of human opinion. Whereas justice is concerned with absolute rightness.

As a result, the two may not always be reconciled. This makes things difficult in terms of "deciding" what is right--and results in ideological differences between such folks as Democrats and Republicans.

But I think the key to finding answers or determining who makes decisions is in bringing people together on common ground. For instance, one person may say that it is "unfair" to take what he has worked hard to earn. But most sane people--even the one who wants to keep what he's worked for--would also agree that it is wrong for others to go hungry through no fault of their own. The process of solving the condition may be difficult to discern, yet if the problem remains as the main focus of deliberation, perhaps the just and fair thing can be found and accomplished (which, if truly just, would involve covering the immediate need while helping to establish long-term, sustainable, future solutions).

You know, I'm really exhausted right now, and may not have responded very effectively or coherently. I think I'll stop posting here for today.

Instead of saying that religion is set by people who "rubber stamp God's name on it," I'd say that religion is a very useful tool for discovering and sharing with each other the divine revelations placed in our hearts and spirits.

A sexual sin (which, as the priest in my parish of years past used to say, God forgives a dime a dozen) ... or, a sin of selfishness and greed, as was exhibited in sodom and gomorrah, or Judas, and is now being exhibted bythe many bushies and fascist followers of the bush goon?

...and how, or when, and for what and to what degree does a Just GOD punish? Wasn't Judas' sin one of selfishness and greed? What was Mary Magdalene's sin, or guilt? Was one of the thieves crucified with Christ a better thief than the other? Why did one go to heaven and the other one did not?

Have our churches ever really HEARD the message of Christ? Did they forget it? If so, when and for what reason did they choose to abandon the message of Christ?

Does God think in all white, or all black terms? Is He a God who goes by the LETTER OF THE LAW or is He a God who is more in tune with THE SPIRIT OF THE LAW?

If homosexuality is bad, why does it, according to Carl Jung, live inside every man and every woman, and why do some men and some women grow to love and need a same sex partner?

Does it have to do with one's growing up and the treatmemt of emotional support vs. lack thereof received from either parent?

Why are some people so threatened by the fact that two adults of the same sex can love each other and why are others not threatened at all by the fact?

I think the answer to all of that is somewhere inside the true message of Christ but I also think that the Puritannical/Moralistic forces inside the churches prefer to look at something other than the true message of Christ which calls each human being into growth while the Puritannical/Moralistic forces want to limit the growth of self-thinking human beings.

I know that the REIGN of GEORGE W. BUSH has drawn me further from everything and anything I held as a valued religious belief. God's love can never be canned and Bush and his goons and the religious right have the need to can God and His teachings... and yet God is free and freeing. I need to find and follow that God. Not Bush's moralistic God.

if I even could, which I doubt. Better theologians than me have tried. As for sin, well, God hasn't ranked them for me, unless the 10 commandments put them in order of importance. However, as I understand it, any sin is enough to separate us from the presence of God. And, for Christians, it is only through Christ's redeeming grace that we can again approach him. Other religions, heck, even other Christian interpretations approach the questions differently.

As for sexual sin (which, as the priest in my parish of years past used to say, God forgives a dime a dozen [/i, well, God can forgive murder, too, or any sin.

Until the 1930 Lambeth Conference (gathering of Anglican and Episcopalian Bishops) pretty much every Christian body prohibited contraception - yet pretty much every Evangelical now supports it's use (within marriage, of course).

The Church has always considered adultery to be worse than fornication, the Gospels put serial marriage on a par with adultery; how many now accept re-marriage?

Read mediaeval thinkers on usury, it was rejected utterly. How many fundies earn interest on their savings accounts.

Many in the primitive church rejected soldiers from their ranks; yet the Christian martial tradition is now firmly engrained.

My own view, is that many of these people just need a good lay. One night of passion, and they'll be far better.

also, i believe that for the catholic church the sex as a most sinful act came from St. Augustine's own life prior to his conversion to Catholicism--at which point, his guilt over his prior free-spirited sexual life innundated his teachings and somehow they managed to surpass Christ's own.;)

I'd add the word "sodomy" didn't emerge until the later middle ages, well over a thousand years after the time of Christ, and that before that time, the story of Sodom and Gommorah did not have a sexual connotation amongst Christians. By the time King James had the Bible translated into English, society's views had changed.

And the same Old Testament law codes which condemn "a man lying with another man as he would with a woman" (notice nothing about women wlying with other women) also claim that eating shellfish is an abomination, and that a woman who is raped but does not cry out is to be stoned to death. When most Christians in America are asked why they don't follow these rules, they quite easily say (if they even know enough about the Bible to answer) these rules were meant only for the Hebrews.

One more thing: Jesus told the story of the Samaritan to show that someone you despise may be more your neighbor than someone you venerate and honor. The Samaritans were a group of Hellenizing Jews, meaning they were Jews who had moved away from the Hebrew culture around Jerusalem and were following the Hellenistic culture. Greek culture not only did not frown on what we now call homosexuality (they had no word distinguishing hetero and homo sexuality, either emotionally or physically), they considered it a higher form of love, in some cases. In other words, the term "Samaritan" more than likely had homosexual overtones in Jesus's time, much as the city of San Francisco did a few years ago. Jesus may have specifically been criticisizing homophobia, in other words.

Neither Buddhism nor Hinduism (by the way, there is no such religion) contain the concept of "sin" the way Judaism, Islam, and Christianity do. That is partly because the two former religions have the concept of Dharma and Karma.

I read the Vedas and Upanishads and never came across anything proscribing homosexuality. Neither does the Buddhist Dharmapada. Both these philosophies state that desire is the root of the problem (including the desire for sex) so it really does not matter whether that desire is for hetero or homosexual sex.

Hope this helps.

http://www.religioustolerance.org/hom_isla.htm

The main place in the Qur'an where homosexuality is condemned is in the story of Sodom and Gommorah, where the Qur'an links male sex to the destruction of the city. Some Muslims have argued that this was the first time male homosexuality appeared. Remember, the Qur'an was "written" (i don't want to get into that debate) 600 years after Christ, in a different culture, and the stories of the Old Testament had been floating around for centuries longer in oral and written form.

The article mentions hadith, but doesn't explain what these are. Shortly after Muhammad died, people began collecting his sayings and either writing them down, or reciting them orally. Soon there were more of these sayings than could have possibly come from the Prophet, so the different Muslim schools of thought began trying to determine which were really the Prophet's and which were not. They used several methods: first, the saying had to have a clear chain of connection to someone who knew the Prophet. In other words, if someonce claimed "Jimmy told me that Eric heard this straight from Mohammad," it had to be proven that Jimmy knew Eric and that Eric knew the Prophet. Second, it had to be consistent with what the Prophet would say and what the Qur'an says. So in the end, a narrow set of hadith was accepted as being legitimately from the Prophet, and, as I understand it (though I could be wrong), various schools had different hadith they accepted as valid.

The words of Muhammad are venerated, and since Muhammad is the most perfect example of how a person should live, the hadith are considered infallible, when they are proven. As the article above shows, there are different degrees of acceptance amongst Muslims of the Hadith. Some believe they are fundamentally acccurate, some believe that many of them are bogus.

Sorry for the lecture. Get back to work now.

Zeus fell in love with the young Hephaseus, and kept him around for pleasure, which pissed Hera off, so I think she took Orpheus' girlfriend away to Hades for revenge...or something like that. Ray Harryhausen never made a monster movie about that story. :dunce:

You raise an interesting point, touchdown. The monotheistic religions - Jewish, Christian and Moslem - all have scriptures that appear to condemn homosexuality. On the surface I suppose it could be said that each of the monotheistic traditions were built upon similar world views by similar tribal societies in similar areas of the world with similar views of "God."

For instance, tribal societies have a compelling need to defend their territories, so it's natural that they would have a negative view of any type of sexual activity that does not produce offspring to help defend against neighboring tribes. Thus, homosexuality, abortion, contraception, oral and anal intercourse and even masturbation would be frowned upon.

Meanwhile, polytheistic religions tend to have a more accepting view of homosexuality. The Greeks celebrated same-sex love. Hindu writings contain references to gods and demi-gods who can change their sexes. Many Native American tribes honored "two-spirit" tribal members as valued members of society. Pre-Christian pagan religions in Europe were accepting of homosexuality (much to the chagrin of later Christian missionaries).

Buddhism, a non-theistic religion, has varied views on same-sex activity depending on the specific sect ... but in general the primary objection to homosexuality is that man has four stages of life, including parenthood. Thus, because they don't have always have the same options for parenthood as heterosexuals, gay Buddhists might not be able to fulfill all four stages of life. So in the Buddhist viewpoint, homosexuality has more to do with fulfillment and less to do with "sin."

I've seen a few books that dealt with the issue of homosexuality in world religions in a superficial way, but I wish there was a more in depth analysis of the issue and why monotheistic religions have a much more negative view of homosexuality.

who invented turkish baths. The Romans just copy-catted it, but male sexuality was one of the reasons for going to the baths. The pagan religions of Babylon and Assyria celebrated it as well. Witness the story of Gilgamesh and Enkidu. Once Zoroastorianism took over from Persia, the prudish morality set in, but arabs are still known for the closeness of men, even with Islam's condemnations. Much of the "rules" for Islam were adopted from the tenets of Zoroastor.

Once liberated from the Taliban, many Afghans started their man-boy relationships back up as if the Taliban never existed. I read an article about that a couple of years ago.

Taoism doesn't seem to have a condemnation of homosexuality, and whatever religion the Feudal Japanese practiced (it wasn't buddhism) sex between men was just seen as a part of life, and not cared about.