Immanuel wrote: » I've looked up the Jewish online torah and they translate the Hebrew from the book of Vayikra (Leviticus) as : יג. וְאִישׁ אֲשֶׁר יִשְׁכַּב אֶת זָכָר מִשְׁכְּבֵי אִשָּׁה תּוֹעֵבָה עָשׂוּ שְׁנֵיהֶם מוֹת יוּמָתוּ דְּמֵיהֶם בָּם: And a man who lies with a male as one would with a woman both of them have committed an abomination; they shall surely be put to death; their blood is upon themselves.
tommy2bad wrote: » Now ask your self, what is it that God is so offended by that He describes this as an abomination? Not just a bit off mind but an abomination, someone engaging in hyperbole maybe? The fact that theirs a biblical injunction on something is no guide as to how sinful it is, it just expresses the level of disgust the writers felt. Dose anyone here see a contradiction between this prohibition on homosexual acts and the level of tolerance for genocide and rape and slavery shown in the same texts? Rationalize it all you want but to claim with a straight face that God is so bothered by what we do with our wobbly bits that He want us dead for it, is plain blasphemy. It fly's in the face of all that Jesus stood for and it makes God little more than a sex obsessed tyrant.
Immanuel wrote: » The books in the bible are more than a mere "opinion" of the author, it is the inspired word of God. Ultimately, all sin is an abomination to God. Personally, I'm not really bothered by homosexuality, as it does not afflict me in any way shape or form. Nor am I too bothered about similar sins that generally only afflict the consenting adult practising them and not others. Instead, I've my own different afflictions, urges, inclinations, and attractions to sin to resist. We all do. In my opinion, homosexuality is somewhat on the same level as fornication, adultery, gluttony, lust etc. There's worse sins in the world, but it's still sin. It's the pro homosexual critics of Christianity that seem to be currently obsessed by it, and constantly strawman and seek arguments about it, and the book of Leviticus, while selectively quoting out of context parts of the Old Testament and the Old Covenant, while wanting to entirely ignore the rest of scripture, and Christ, and the New Covenant. As Pope Francis said there is far more important things to talk about than the critic's old reliables.
tommy2bad wrote: » This is exactly my point. All sin is equally repellent to God, if we are to assume that homosexual acts are among these repellent sins we need to understand why, why is an expression of love between two consenting adults repellent to God? All the rest of the sins are about loving God and loving your fellow man (generic term for people not literally men) but this one has nothing to do with these conditions, one particular physical act that has no impact on anyone other than those that are involved, what is the context that singles this out from other human interactions and dose that context still apply. The argument needs to be more than 'because God said so' or all the 'sins' are nothing more than custom and mannerisms. Which is fine if that's the game but we as Christians claim that we have some tenuous connection with the truth, we support our prohibitions on adultery, theft, killing and other sins with arguments based on showing love for others. Except in this case, it's entirely based on 'God said so'. Yes I'm aware of natural law as an argument but it's weak at best and sounds retro fitted.
Nick Park wrote: » I'll leave the handling of the unsubstantiated name-calling to the mods. The passage I quoted is in the Bible. Leviticus 20:13 וְאִישׁ אֲשֶׁר יִשְׁכַּב אֶת־זָכָר מִשְׁכְּבֵי אִשָּׁה תֹּועֵבָה עָשׂוּ שְׁנֵיהֶם מֹות יוּמָתוּ דְּמֵיהֶם בָּֽם׃ Reading from right to left (as Hebrew does) we find the following transliterated Hebrew words with their English translation in brackets: 'iysh (a man) aser (who/if) yishkab (lies) et (with) zakar (mankind) mishkab (as lies) 'ishshah (with a woman) tow'ebah (an abomination) 'asu (have committed) shneihem (both) mot (surely) yumatu (put to death) d'meihem (their blood) bam (on them)
KJV1611 wrote: » Basically whatever your opinion is about the accuracy of the bible I believe there are fundamental doctrines and teachings in it which we must accept (as followers of Christ) no matter how unpalatable they appear to us to accept at first.
Penny 4 Thoughts wrote: » Ok. But you could simply be wrong, since again you are simply human. You see, I hope, the issue here in men proclaiming other men fallible or infallible and using God's authority, merely by proxy, to support their own assertions. Or to put it another way, I'm glad you said here "I believe". You should in future put that in front of any claims you make about what God does or doesn't want, since they will be merely what you (a flawed human, like the rest of us) think God wants.
Penny 4 Thoughts wrote: » "As lies" is not a direct translation of "mishkab". It is a fudge to make the sentence make sense. The actual sentence isa man who lies down with man a lyings a woman an abomination have committed Mishkab is a noun, that means, in direct translation, "a lyings" (ie a place where someone lies). It can, and is often, translated to simply mean bed. Of the 45 times it is used in the Bible 25 of the times the context means simply "bed".http://www.biblestudytools.com/lexicons/hebrew/nas/mishkab.html As such a perfectly valid translation of the above passage is "A man who lies with any other man in the bed of a woman has committed an abomination" Is that the correct translation (ie what the authors meant?) Who knows. But it is impossible to say it is not a valid translation. No matter how many appeals to authority you present it won't change the facts of the matter.
Nick Park wrote: » Do you see the inconsistency of linking to www.biblestudytools.com as a source of authority when you dismiss them as dishonest when it comes to their translation of a text, and accuse me of making to an appeal to an authority when I refer to their translation (and that of virtually every other biblical scholar that has ever translated Leviticus 20:13)? You can't expect anyone to take you seriously if you dismiss biblical scholars as dishonest and irrelevant when they overwhelmingly disagree with you, but then link to them when you think that what they say suits you.
Nick Park wrote: » However, you have a much bigger problem here. Translation of any text involves looking at a sentence, translating the various words, and then constructing them in a way that makes sense. In other words, a translation should not only be correct, it should also be plausible.
Nick Park wrote: » Now, your suggested translation of Leviticus 20:13 is as daft and surreal as the hypothetical coffee/black paint illustration. It would mean the law given to the Jews said that it was perfectly OK for homosexuals to rodger each other on the floor or in a man's bed - but if they happened to do it on a woman's bed then they were committing a sin so grievous that it merited the death penalty. That is so absurd that no-one in their right mind would ever entertain it.
Nick Park wrote: » For you, with no knowledge of Hebrew, to seriously advance it as a valid alternative translation is tomfoolery of the highest order.
KJV1611 wrote: » If Jesus said they are GOD's word then...
Penny 4 Thoughts wrote: » I don't expect anyone to take me seriously,
No one has to believe a single thing I have said, they can go out and find the definition themselves. If they don't like that web site they can use another. They will find this discussion taking place all over the internet. They can find any number of Hebrew translation tools that will say the same thing I have said.
At this point I'm wondering why you are so insistant that the Bible must say homosexual acts in general are sinful, even when you can find no clear passage that says that. You kept saying you would be super happy if the Bible doesn't say that. Well, I pointed out the Bible doesn't say that. You don't seem super happy.
But when Christians proclaim moral teaching from these sentences you need to be damn sure you have it correct and there is no ambiguity.
It would also probably be a good idea to study Christian history in regards the reformation, specifically the trouble people got into when they proclaimed that only the elites were in a position to know the "correct" way to study and interpret the Bible and gave to the great unwashed masses their proclamations of what the Bible said and meant. That didn't end well.
Nick Park; I practice something called exegesis. It is where I read the Bible, lay aside my own biases and presuppositions as much as possible, apply the necessary tools to interpret it (including listening to those who have linguistic skills and background knowledge I might not possess) and then try to discern how the original authors intended the Scriptures to be understood by their readers.
Nick Park wrote: » The 'elite' in your interpretation are those who think it might be helpful to actually speak, read and write in a language in order to understand it. As opposed to the 'unwashed' who assert that someone who doesn't understand a language knows how to interpret it best.
Penny 4 Thoughts wrote: » As I said, if you could contradict what I'm saying (which obviously doesn't come from me, but people who have studied this and, as it is important to you, speak Hebrew) you would have already.
The facts are that the passage is not clear, the translation you claim exists in the Bible isn't in the Bible, and this passage must be massaged in order to get it to be commandment against general homosexual acts, and a commandment against homosexual sex in women's beds makes about as much sense as anything else in Leviticus with regards to the cleanness of women.
Instead of dealing with these facts you simply attack my apparent lack of qualifications to report this, as if I woke up this morning and decided to invent something in the Bible, rather than simply repeating what people have always known about this passage.
tommy2bad wrote: » This is what interests me, I do the same, read and try to understand what the authors were trying to say and how this applys to me. I usually have no trouble with most of the teachings, some even offer further enlightenment as I get older. Some need to be read in the light of the past and a culture that is as alien to me as Klingon would be. But in spite of that I can see a thread of trying to do what is best in the circumstances they struggled in. Theirs an awfully story of killing every male down to infants and cattle but taking the women and letting them grieve before taking them as wives and concubines. In today's world we would not hesitate to call this genocide and rape. But read as an effort to save as many as possible in a time when their was no way to gain a peace and any widows would be left to certain death by starvation once the men were killed and if they were not killed then the whole thing would continue ad infinutim, it's a different tail. One of struggling to make the best of a bad situation and reclaim some humanity from a disastrous war. The lesson is not that it's ok to murder everyone as long as you rape the women so they can have a place to stay, it's that we must try to gain some good no matter how little from every situation. The prohibition on homsexual acts has no such justification, no reason to exist at all other than some one felt repelled by it, in the context of the time it might be justified by the need to have as many reproducing men as possible but like genocide that is not a necessity now. Outside of the context of proscribing things pagans do, all of which we now discard apart from this one, it has no contribution to gaining a good from a bad. It's incongruous with the main message of the gospels and belongs in the past with genocide, stoning and not wearing mixed fabrics.
Penny 4 Thoughts wrote: » The problem again is that Jesus did say anything to you. You know what others have claimed he said. So again when you say "Jesus said.." you actually mean (or should mean) "I believe the New Testament authors when they claimed Jesus said..." The latter loses some authority to proclaim the correct teaching as a certainty. But it is a more honest assertion. It is up to everyone else to think do they agree with your justification of your belief. Christians should know by now the trouble encountered when certain people or groups proclaim certainty as to what God or Jesus wants or meant.
Nick Park wrote: » Hi Tommy, If I understand you right you are saying that we should simply junk parts of the Bible that don't suit us. That is certainly more honest than trying to twist the Bible to say what we want it to say, in contravention of its plain and obvious sense.
Nick Park wrote: » And, of course, in a free country you are free to believe whatever you want about the Bible - and I think we would both thank God that we live in such freedom.
Nick Park wrote: » However, I do think such an approach falls short of one of the historic cornerstones of Christianity - that the Bible is inspired by God in some way, and that it has an objective authority over our lives.
Nick Park wrote: » In other words, Christians should not change the Bible to suit ourselves, but we should rather change ourselves to suit the Bible (properly interpreted, of course). We believe that our faith can transform us for the better by renewing the image of God in us - not that we transform God into our image.
Nick Park wrote: » Once you start deciding which parts of the Bible we can junk, then what is to prevent anyone junking what doesn't suit them? For example, a racial supremacist could choose to junk all verses that don't fit with with their views (in case that sounds far fetched, a guy called Marcion did just that in the Second Century AD).
Nick Park wrote: » Once you abandon the notion of Scripture as some kind of objective authority then it's difficult to see what remains other than a subjective morass of ideas based on our own limited, and sinful, natures.
KJV1611 wrote: » There really is nothing further I can add to this. I believe every word of it. When we start to doubt the word we are on a slippery slope which can lead to proclaiming our own authority and judgements.
tommy2bad wrote: » I don't doubt you at all, in fact we have done similar, changing understanding based on progressive revelation is exactly that, we junk bits and claim to have a better understanding of it now than then. Ending slavery, the definition of marriage and several other things all are the result of junking bits in the light of other bits we didn't notice before.
Penny 4 Thoughts wrote: » Slavery really is the classic example of this process. I think it is Jimmy Char or Ricky Jevas who has a great skit on this, how Christians not only are not embarrassed by the fact that so much slavery was considered at the time to be supported by the Bible, but that modern Christians now proclaim that God never wanted slavery and that it was Christian teaching that helped end slavery when nothing else would. He jokes in 100 years gay marriage is not only going to be totally accepted in society, but Christians will proclaim it was them who made this happen. :P
tommy2bad wrote: » All the old 'have it but your wrong' response!
It's the in some way bit that causes the problems, I see it as inspired by God the way a painting is inspired by it's subject rather than ghost written as they claim the Koran was
Again properly interpreted; though you have yet to answer my point about their being no benefit to this particular prohibition other than it's forbidden so it's forbidden so it is.
I don't doubt you at all, in fact we have done similar, changing understanding based on progressive revelation is exactly that, we junk bits and claim to have a better understanding of it now than then. Ending slavery, the definition of marriage and several other things all are the result of junking bits in the light of other bits we didn't notice before.
tommy2bad wrote: » Quick response; It's fine as an end to discussion not as a way to further discussion. Well aware that I'm a hand wavie, heretical, pagan, universalist and totally orthodox Agreed but I see it as scripture revealed through the lense of Christ. Rose tinted as that may be. See what I mean about the church tilting towards reactionary. Once we start defining ourselves in opposition to the world we are tending towards one or other heresy, Gnosticism? We are not part of the world but not out of it either. tbh this is a different issue and is a tangent here but I can't see how an entire religion doing an about face theological can be attributed to the influence of the state and not the religion it's self. Just admit it, we changed our minds.
riveratom wrote: » If sex is a gift, then why should only those who are not gay get to partake? Is there a reason?
