"The Bible" vs Christians vs Homosexuality

Under this video: [Which, to my ears and eyes, has a very "a.i." feel to it] 

Various culture-warring, Christian-religious fundamentalists condemned and dismissed her as a heretic for her acceptance of homosexuals.

 In other words, "We don't have to listen to your hippie liberal calls for compassion, because being TOO loving is something only Satan wants us to do. And your views about THE GAYS are proof of that! Thus, we rebuke thee in the name of our LORD, who plans to torture the gays (and also you!) forever for being yucky!"

Here is a directly related video (of a globally renowned cognitive scientist) explaining why scientifically illiterate (and impulsively emotional) people keep mistaking their own personal sense of disgust as a reliable moral compass:

Yes, I realize that the vast majority of moral-authoritarian gay-bashers also reject evolution. 

However, there's an easy solution for that here.

I invite those people to re-watch this video, and to mentally replace every reference to "evolution" with the phrase "intelligent design". 

[Seriously. Who am I kidding? They won't even watch it once. Fundamentalists are too afraid to risk exposing their brains to dangerous reality.
Besides, they think they have all the answers already.]

The point of the video remains the same, if we assume "design". 

But in that case, a "God" designed us to mistake our subjective disgust-reflex as something "God wrote onto our heart". 

And HE did that by mashing together those functions into one crudely unreliable region of the brain.  

-And thus GOD is "authoring confusion" about when to trust our disgust-reflex as a "moral truth"
  vs
When to understand it as a subjective reflex shaped by motivated self-interest and cultural norms. 

Now, I have no idea who the woman in the video is.
I'm guessing she's a currently trending Hollywood starlet. 

One of those comments (under that video clip) was carefully subtle. 

"Did she ever figure out what the Bible says about homosexuality?

- @intheend8315

 
Underneath that comment, every religious fundamentalist who showed up to be hateful4Jesus was ... less than subtle in their agreement. 

---

@tjblackartist

12 hours ago

 @ApPersonaNonGrata yes they do. The only one that doesn’t is one German TRANSLATION in 1534.

We can only assume that the one that did the translation was in fact, a homosexual.

[Note: For emphasis, I (the writer of this blog) added the bold and underline seen in that sentence] [That Christian continued by saying:]

ALL of the original copies of the actual manuscripts use the word homosexual as well as men lying with man.

Do your research and translate the Hebrew and Greek manuscripts yourself!"

-- In reply, I offer this: First, it's interesting how Christians don't feel suspicious at all about the King James version of the Bible, even though he was gay. Regardless, I have done my own research. That research heavily relied upon the consensus of qualified scholars. - As should yours. Even though, clearly, yours did not.

Today, more and more Christians are developing the skills, heart, and courage to do ethically responsible research. In fact, the Christian apologist and professor Randal Rauser has just released an academic book on this topic. [link] With the help of qualified scholars, people are discovering that most Christian churches have been either grossly mistaken or lying about all such matters. Here are the facts: Only a few Bible translations use the word "homosexual". The 1946 Revised Standard Version (RSV) was the first to do so in English. Many modern versions, including updated RSV editions, have since removed it, as it was a mistranslation of Greek terms that are more accurately translated as concerning exploitative or abusive behaviors. Also important to note: * It would not have been possible for any source text to use that word since it's an English word. * We do not have any of the original manuscripts. But we still know they weren't written in English. *Neither the word "malakoi" nor the word "arsenokoitai" means "being gay".
*There are no bible passages that say anything about sexual attraction or sexual identity. In that part of the world, during the "Biblical" centuries (roughly 4th century BCE through 2nd Century CE), no people had a word (not in any language) which meant the same thing that today's English word "homosexual" means. Neither that culture nor the surrounding cultures thought about sex and attraction in those ways. They didn't speak of sexual identity or sexual orientation as such. Instead, they spoke of sexually specific behaviors.

A few passages speak of such acts. But they didn't exactly mean what modern readers are taught (by churches) to assume they meant. That culture was unaware of how normal such behaviors are in nature.

Thus, they concluded by their limited observation that certain acts must be against the way the gods decreed (made known) the gods' own nature and plan via design.

In other words, Iron Age cultists "reasoned" that certain kinds of sexual acts must then be a violation of the divinely designed natural order, merely because they didn't know that same-sex pair-bonding and same-sex sex acts were normal in nature. In reality, nature does not have such uniformity.

Nor does nature have ubiquity of male dominance.

But those men didn't realize this. As such, they reasoned that the natural order is for males to always socially and sexually dominate and never be submissive. Meanwhile, that way of thinking appealed to their emotional intuitions. They FELT that 'surely' the gods(plural) want them to hoard social, economic, and religious power in ways that grossly disadvantage "the weak" (ie: girls, women, and "soft" men).

Notice. That's the same way Islamic men reason. It also helps to understand that the writers of the Torah were NOT monotheists. They were henotheists. Basically, this means people believed that many different gods existed. But they only concerned themselves with their favorite god. And no, they did not originally mean "false gods". That idea developed later. But even then, they believed true gods (plural) still existed. The Torah-writers used other and older religious cultures' ideas to create Torah-stories. Throughout the Hebrew and Christian texts, ... None of those stories (as written) are actually history. It's mostly just borrowed and altered concepts, characters, and stories they heard about from other cultures. IF the Christian texts are really trying to pass their works off as real history, then (in that case) they really are plagiarizing to help develop and justify a nonsensical religion. However, scholars generally agree that the Hebrew bible wasn't meant to be taken as literal history. That's why historians and Bible scholars don't accuse them of stealing (plagiarizing) those things. Everyone in that era's Jewish religious culture understood that the stories were adaptations. Their stories were copied from other religions, altered, and used as a way to convey moral tales and to help shape their evolving cultural narrative.

It wasn't supposed to be understood as literal historical events. -Thus, no deception was intended. For the entire span of the Jewish-religious "biblical" era, the Torah-writers believed in many gods. Starting in the Second Temple period, they were in an exclusive mental "relationship" with their favorite god. - A "God" which they had previously created ... from scavaged parts (bits of lore) from prior gods. The primary reason for later Yahweh-ists switching to monotheism was the same reason any religious culture ever switches to monotheism. As Bible scholar Kara Cooney (author of "The Good Kings") explained, ... It's the same reason the Egyptian king Akhenaten decided to create monotheism as a religious concept ... thousands of years before the Yahweh-religion(s) switched to monotheism. Consolidation of all social, religious, and governmental power ... into one voice. -So that men in power would not have to compete with disagreeing moral opinions. ONE GOD speaks through one MAN (or one religious body of men). That way, nobody in a kingdom can say "but my different god disagrees". The religious leaders of the Yahweh-ist religion ... had not yet realized they could gain more power by switching to monotheism. Still adhering to polytheism, they reasoned that the gods (plural) intended for all human social situations to always have each proper man "on top" (literally and metaphorically). This included: * all sanctioned man/woman pair-bonds, * all churches, * all forms of government, and * all sexual activities involving a man. Explaining my use of the term "pair-bonds": This is what modern Bibles mistakenly refer to as "marriage." It was really just contractually-obligated sex-slavery. And most of that was sex trafficking of female children. Translating that as "marriage" is an act of whitewashing both Jewish and early Christian religious history. In most cases, it was a man purchasing a barely pubescent girl from her father.

The girl had no choice in the matter.

The girl was then owned for life.

She could also be gifted to a man's son if the man wasn't happy with his purchase.

And yet, no women were allowed to buy boys because ownership is **dominance**. Only men were allowed to dominate.

Men were never allowed to be in specific submissive social or sexual situations.

And thus, men were not allowed to be the "catcher" in sexual situations. They would also be upset with the "pitcher", for taking part in an act where the catcher was risking that the gods might literally "curse" the land as a consequence of violating the alleged "natural order". They didn't want anyone risking magical reasons for failed crops and other natural disasters. They were, after all, obsessively, compulsively superstitious.

That's why they had religious laws against men doing such sexual acts. In those fables (which most Christians have been trained to mistake as actual history), no "God" ever came down to personally comment on his natural laws.

Those were always deduced by religion-minded men ... via their very limited observations of nature (as viewed through a hyper-religious perceptual lens). They made those "moral" deductions * per their own subjective interests, and * per their own subjective morality-themed intuitions. Those deductions always "just coincidentally" aligned with their own selfish interests.

They merged their subjective intuitions with ongoing attempts to structure social, political, and economic power to their own advantage.

Mere mortal men would put their own thoughts into words, and then add "thus sayeth our god". Although, ... They were technically correct.

It really was those people's "god" speaking. How do I know this? Because the true identity of their "God" was (in all cases) ... whichever men they were allowing to speak (OVER them) as their god.

Even today, when Pastor Smith or Deacon Jones interprets biblical texts, they become both the immediate voice AND the source of the voice their congregants call "God".