Fellow Liberals, Please Stop Claiming Jesus Accepts LGBT People

[Tom Sawyer]

And I dispute that those who choose to ignore Biblical condemnation of homosexuality, either because it refers to them personally or just because they think there's nothing wrong with it, are somehow less true believers than those who choose not to cherrypick it out of their belief system.

Then your belief is contradicted by the empirical evidence. There are numerous studies on the subject. They measure people's actual certainty of belief and value and importance they place on those beliefs and on acting upon them in their daily lives. Those are qualities of true believers, because when you believe it, you actually act on it and do so with confidence. Such measures are typically referred to as "religiosity". The fundies who take all of the Bible seriously consistently score higher in this religiosity. Cherry-pickers tend to be filled with doubt and uncertainty even about the most basic foundations of their religion, such as God's existence, and they report their religion as being less important to their daily life and decisions. IOW, they are less religious and less Christian in nearly every sense it which it actually means something to utter those words.

You can be against slavery and still call yourself a true Christian.

You can be against slavery and still call yourself a true unicorn. That doesn't make you one. Whether people utter the sounds "I am a true Christian" has no relevance. The question is what is the actual state of their beliefs, certainty in those beliefs, and importance they place in using those beliefs to determine their identity and choices in actual life. There is rather clear scientific evidence that these cherry-pickers, and especially politically liberal cherry-pickers are barely even theists at all and rarely can be accurately categorized as "Christian" due to their own admitted lack of importance they place on any ideas or actions that are at all particular to any form of monotheism let alone Christianity. Of course their are always exceptions, but as a reliable general rule people who say "The Bible doesn't condemn gays", rarely think about religion or God and the implications for their lives, and are much less confident in whatever cherry picked beliefs they do have.

While I agree with you that it would be great if they'd just dump the religion entirely, the LGBT Christians don't have that motivation. It's not what they're going for, so doing that would move them away from their desired goal instead of towards it. They like being Christians and they want their Christian faith to embrace them. They're not looking to abandon it over disagreement about one point.

IT is not just one point. It coheres with the general authoritarian ethics and intolerance that is the foundation of the monotheistic creator God concept. The people that want to ignore the specific issue of homosexuality and the Bible, almost always want to ignore most other aspects that show God to be an intolerant bigot with self-serving rules, which means 95% of the Bible. That is why such people report that they hardly ever read or think about the Bible, or even think about God and what God expects of them. IOW, they don't think Christian, they just utter the phrase "I am Christian" when asked.

Well, how many passages of the Bible do you need to ignore to make the claim that God is against slavery? How many passages do you need to ignore in order to say that one can be a Christian and believe in equal rights for women? Compare that to how many you need to ignore to say that God doesn't have a problem with homosexuality. I'm no Biblical scholar, but a quick google search shows the number to be around six and the first ones are themes which get brought up time and time again. Unless you're making the claim that none of the religious leaders of the anti-slavery movements were true believers in Christianity and that there are no fundamentalist women who feel that they are the equal of a man, I really don't get why it is that you feel that a topic about which the Bible is essentially uninterested in and only brings up a few times in passing, mainly while talking about other things, would need to be a sticking point of one's faith. You don't need to ignore 95% of the Bible to ignore what it says about homosexuality. You need to ignore parts of six passages out of over thirty thousand, so that's 0.0002% of the Bible. There aren't very many things which the Bible mentions that you need to ignore less in order to cherry pick it out of your belief system.

You can read hundreds of articles by Christians about how homosexuality is completely compatible with their faith and how acceptance of it is an expression of God's love - yada, yada, yada. All of those people are real Christians and true believers in their faith. One does not need to have a fundamentalist label in order to have a Real Christian label and, even if one did, homosexuality isn't a topic which the Bible particularly cares about so it's not one that Real Christians particularly need to care about either.

 

[funinspace]

And one has to consider how one treats passages from the OT, as Jesus definitely came in and re-wrote at least some of the rules, otherwise they would all just be another sect of Jews. The fundagelicals even ignore one of the 10 Commandments, in that they don’t keep the Sabbath. The NT is actually fairly weak regarding homosexuality. Romans 1:26-27 is probably the most abused verse on the subject, and it is more probable that it is about male prostitutes than homosexual relationships.

Wow…the dudes who have a higher degree of religiosity (aka fundagelicals) watch more porn. I wonder how that fits in the seriousness of their said faith…
http://www.christiantoday.com/artic...rn.than.other.less.religious.states/42045.htm

A new study has found that US states with a higher degree of religiosity are more likely to be searching for sex on the web.

The study was compiled by researchers at Brock University in Ontario, Canada, and based on two years of data from Google Trends across US states.

Researchers found that states identified as religiously conservative and politically conservative were indulging in more online pornography than other more liberal states.
<snip>

While 64 per cent of Christian men and 15 per cent of Christian women said they viewed pornography at least once a month, this figure was 65 per cent among non-Christian men and 30 per cent among non-Christian women.

Or how does that high religiosity fits with their fixation on the issue of abortion (unmentioned in the Bible, but for an OT verse that suggests a fetus is property)? Or how does high religiosity fits with fundagelicals strong support for warmongering? Why don’t these people with higher religiosity place gossip, boasting, and greed in the same category of sins as homosexuality; since the Bible does? With todays near epidemic levels of obesity, one would think the fundagelicals would be a little more worked up about gluttony and the need to treat one’s body as a temple unto their God. Who’s picking what cherries?

 

[funinspace]

A cherry here, a cherry there...

Ah, another pious, righteous fundagelical soul taking his holy book oh so literally….lol

There is an audio segment embedded in this link where Tony Perkins (Family Research Council president) is on Jan Mickelson's radio show agreeing with the host that if SCJs support gay marriage, they should be impeached.
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/conte...on-insists-he-never-called-scotus-impeachment

After Mickelson went on a rant about how Congress should attempt to strip the court of its jurisdiction on marriage and “impeach [their] sorry keisters,” Perkins responded: “I don’t disagree with you, I think you are absolutely right.”

Then on Face the Nation Perkin’s splits hairs on par with Bill’s “I did not have sexual relations with that woman”.
http://www.frc.org/updatearticle/20150430/site-soros-lies

As usual, the site intentionally took the statement out of context and twisted the meaning to further its agenda. And while conservatives like me are used to these tactics, nothing prepared me for hearing those same distortions repeated back to me by CBS's Bob Schieffer. "Did you really say that justices who come down on the side of gays on this should be impeached?" he asked. "No, I didn't," I replied. "Because there are reports to that effect," Bob explained. What he didn't explain on air was that the "reports" were from the Soros-funded RightWingWatch.

Yeah Tony, you didn’t say it with your mouth, you just whole heartedly agreed with the radio host who just said it. Tony has good company with the fornicators and murderers…
Revelation 22:15 (NRSV): Outside are the dogs and sorcerers and fornicators and murderers and idolaters, and everyone who loves and practices falsehood.

 

[Herrick]

And one has to consider how one treats passages from the OT, as Jesus definitely came in and re-wrote at least some of the rules, otherwise they would all just be another sect of Jews. The fundagelicals even ignore one of the 10 Commandments, in that they don’t keep the Sabbath. The NT is actually fairly weak regarding homosexuality. Romans 1:26-27 is probably the most abused verse on the subject, and it is more probable that it is about male prostitutes than homosexual relationships.

"For this reason God gave them over to degrading passions; for their women exchanged the natural function for that which is unnatural,
...and in the same way also the men abandoned the natural function of the woman and burned in their desire toward one another, men with men committing indecent acts and receiving in their own persons the due penalty of their error."

How can one tell that verse is about male prostitutes and not homosexuality in general?

I'm no expert in theology but I never got the impression that Jesus thinks being gay is a good thing. Maybe he wouldn't want to have them killed but he probably thought it was "unnatural". I think a lot of this "Jesus is down with gay people" idea comes from his saving the prostitute from being stoned and the talk about loving one's enemies etc. Just because one doesn't think someone should be killed for a particular "offense" doesn't mean that they are supportive of the "offense".

 

[funinspace]

And one has to consider how one treats passages from the OT, as Jesus definitely came in and re-wrote at least some of the rules, otherwise they would all just be another sect of Jews. The fundagelicals even ignore one of the 10 Commandments, in that they don’t keep the Sabbath. The NT is actually fairly weak regarding homosexuality. Romans 1:26-27 is probably the most abused verse on the subject, and it is more probable that it is about male prostitutes than homosexual relationships.

"For this reason God gave them over to degrading passions; for their women exchanged the natural function for that which is unnatural,
...and in the same way also the men abandoned the natural function of the woman and burned in their desire toward one another, men with men committing indecent acts and receiving in their own persons the due penalty of their error."

How can one tell that verse is about male prostitutes and not homosexuality in general?

I'm no expert in theology but I never got the impression that Jesus thinks being gay is a good thing. Maybe he wouldn't want to have them killed but he probably thought it was "unnatural". I think a lot of this "Jesus is down with gay people" idea comes from his saving the prostitute from being stoned and the talk about loving one's enemies etc. Just because one doesn't think someone should be killed for a particular "offense" doesn't mean that they are supportive of the "offense".

Sorry, I was thinking of the wrong verse when I said this was in reference to male prostitutes, as that would be 1 Cor 6:9 (NRSV): "Do you not know that wrongdoers will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived! Fornicators, idolaters, adulterers, male prostitutes, sodomites,"

This is in the notes from the New Oxford Annotated Study Bible for Romans 1:26-27. Degrading passions, while Torah forbids a male “lying with a male as with a woman” (Lev 18.22), Paul’s Jewish contemporaries criticized a range of sexual behaviors common in the pagan world. Although widely read today as a reference to homosexuality, the language of unnatural intercourse was more often used in Paul’s day to denote not the orientation of sexual desire, but its immoderate indulgence, which was believed to weaken the body (the due penalty).

I wouldn't argue that Jesus (aka the writers of the Gospels about the character) and Paul were promoting homosexuality or even necessarily neutral. However, what they don't have appeared to be waw rabidly considering this kind of behavior as one of God's top half dozen sins. Additionally, the first few hundred years of translating the Bible out of Latin had lots of problems until the last century or so. Even the NIV was somewhat more trapped by pre-existing dogma.

 

[Herrick]

I wouldn't argue that Jesus (aka the writers of the Gospels about the character) and Paul were promoting homosexuality or even necessarily neutral. However, what they don't have appeared to be waw rabidly considering this kind of behavior as one of God's top half dozen sins. Additionally, the first few hundred years of translating the Bible out of Latin had lots of problems until the last century or so. Even the NIV was somewhat more trapped by pre-existing dogma.

Agreed. Some Christians in our time make homosexuality out to be the downfall of "the family". This is an argument I've never understood. I've had a gay sibling-in-law living with us pretty consistently for the past 11 years or so and they have had zero negative impact on my family *shrug*. Gay people are just people for fuck's sake. If Christians want to go after something that fucks up families, then where is the campaign against divorce?