The Gay Megathread (see mod note on post #2212)

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.

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.

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.

That is not a literal translation of the passage.

The problem with Biblical translations for lay people (as opposed to those who study the Bible in detail and recognize that some parts of it simply do not make sense as sentences and paragraphs*) is that more often than not the translator is attempting to form a sentence that still makes clear sense in English, so that the reader of the Bible can discern some meaning from the sentence. As discussed above the direct translation does not make sense as a English sentence.


If a translator wishes to produce a sentence that does make sense they have to change the wording.


*I consider myself a lay person who refers to other far more qualified people in this regard

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.

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 is

a 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.

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.

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.

If a sentence can be translated in 2 or more plausible ways then a translator will make a note to that effect (as is done in thousands of cases in a modern Bible translation such as an NIV). But they obviously don't list every silly or implausible way in which someone might choose to translate a sentence. The goal of translation is to convey the intention of the original authors, not to engage in an exercise in surrealism.

This holds true for the interpretation of any communication. For example, imagine that you were translating a statement by me into another language. My statement was, "I don't put milk in my coffee. I drink my coffee black."
The obvious way to translate this verse would be to say that I like to drink black coffee. But, what if you had an ulterior motive and desperately wanted to avoid that conclusion at all cost? You could argue, "But this could also mean that Nick likes to cover himself with black paint when he drinks his coffee. You can't prove that he didn't mean that! Therefore you cannot claim that it is crystal clear that Nick drinks black coffee." And yes, technically your translation might be possible in a surreal parallel universe - but in the real world any sensible person will laugh your suggestion to scorn, and rightly so.

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.

You know as well as I do that if 100,000 people approached this verse, not to try to force it to fit a preconceived agenda, but with a genuine desire to translate it in a way that would reflect the author's intention, that not a single one of them would come up with the woman's bed interpretation.

And both you and I know that the only way anyone would ever opt for the woman's bed interpretation is if they approach this verse saying, "I really desperately don't want this verse to be a condemnation of homosexual acts. Is there any way I can jig the words around to produce a different interpretation - no matter how far-fetched it might be?"

That is why not one single translation, out of thousands, of the Bible into any modern language so much as adds a footnote suggesting the possibility of such a translation. That is why, in the Ancient world, translations from the Hebrew into Aramaic (the Targums), into Greek (the Septuagint), into Syriac (the Pe****ta) and into Latin (the Vulgate) didn't think such an interpretation worthy of consideration. Nor has it ever been seriously advanced as an interpretation by the millions of Jews who have read this verse in their mother tongue over the centuries.

For you, with no knowledge of Hebrew, to seriously advance it as a valid alternative translation is tomfoolery of the highest order. Can you not see that, rather than promoting any serious discussion on the subject of the Bible and homosexuality, that all you are doing here is exposing yourself to ridicule?

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.

I don't expect anyone to take me seriously, because it is not my opinion, but rather the facts of the matter that cause serious problems for your assertion that the Bible is crystal clear.

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.

The fact remains that that word doesn't mean what you claim it means and that translation is not found direct word for word in the Bible. You can keep dancing around that issue all you like, but I think by now you know that if you could disprove what I was saying you would have done so.

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.

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.

And there lies the problem. That sentence does not make sense. It doesn't make sense in Hebrew. But it is what it is. You are of course correct, if this was a normal book no one would mind that much if the translator fudges the sentence to make it make sense.

But when Christians proclaim moral teaching from these sentences you need to be damn sure you have it correct and there is no ambiguity.

Which of course there is. There is tons of ambiguity. You have it in spades. Saying 100,000 people would interpret it this way is rather beside the point in a Christian forum isn't it. 100,000 fallen souls who don't know what God wants? Yeah lets ask them...

So what is the correct response? To say we do not know what was meant by this passage, but we think it means this and reason why you think it means what you think it means. Not to pretend that it can and only means one thing and then proclaim a moral teaching of what God wants homosexual couples to do, from that assumption.

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.

Why is that any more absurd than any of the other laws in Leviticus to do with the uncleanness of women?

There is a law that says if you merely touch a woman having her period you are "unclean" until the evening, if you have sex with her you are unclean for 7 days. Anything she sits upon or touches is unclean and if you touch her bed you are unclean. It is pretty clear that the Israelites didn't really understand what was happening with women, periods, sex etc.

I'm not saying that the do not have gay sex in a woman's bed is the correct interpretation (again wider context would suggest that this is a law against gay prostitution). But even if this was simply a law saying gay men don't have sex in a woman's bed, that would not be any more absurd than any of the other laws around the uncleanness of women and their bed linen.

If if God was saying to his priests guys when having sex with each other don't have sex in a woman's bed, they are gross, I wouldn't be at all surprised. Certainly would not be absurd given the other passages about the cleanness of women and their linen.

What is truly absurd is the idea that God would want gay men and women to not enter into loving relationships and marriage with each other, when the concept of love and companionship is found throughout the Bible.

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.

If you could point out where I was wrong with this you would have done so already. You can't, so we have more attacks on my lack of qualifications to comment.

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.

Penny 4 Thoughts wrote: »

I don't expect anyone to take me seriously,

Good.

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.

But what they won't find is anyone who actually understands Hebrew drawing the conclusions that you do.

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.

I'm wonderfully happy, thank you. The fact that there are people in the world who want to play silly games with translations does not impinge on my happiness in the slightest.

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. Then, on that exegesis, I work out how that should apply in how I live my life.

There will always be others who practice eisegesis - trying to force the Bible to say what they want it to say, no matter how absurd or unlikely interpretations might thereby emerge. That makes me no more unhappy than knowing that people engage in any other kind of nonsense. It's a free country - so live and let live.

But when Christians proclaim moral teaching from these sentences you need to be damn sure you have it correct and there is no ambiguity.

I certainly don't proclaim any moral teaching from verses in Leviticus. My moral teaching is based on the teachings of the New Testament.

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.

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.

OK, whatever turns you on. Thanks for making that clear.

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.

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.

When you have facts that demonstrate what I said was wrong, rather than yet another appeal to authority, get back to me.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

If sex is a gift, then why should only those who are not gay get to partake?

Is there a reason?

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.

But you are proclaiming your own authority and judgement when you say you believe every word of it. That is a judgement you have made.

I'm not questioning whether it was the right decision or not (there is another thread for that). You may say that you are very certain you are correct and that the evidence supports your judgement. But it is important to remember it is a decision you made. You made a decision what to believe. Others have made a different decision what to believe. We are all flawed human beings, so all decisions should be examined.

We should not simply default to speaking with the authority of God merely because we believe we have made the right decision as to what to believe.

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

The strange thing is it was Christians who started the abolitionist movement, inspired by the same book that was being used as a justification for slavery. Yes we now think Christians never supported slavery, I wouldn't go as far as to say Christians claim they never supported slavery, it's just we don't think about it much other than 'slavery is wrong, it's in the bible'.
And yes, one day gay marriage will be normal and acceptable to Christians who will not have been around when it wasn't. They won't think it was ever not normal.
That's presuming Christianity stays a mainstream religion and doesn't become a radical, reactionary faith that clings to stuff simply because it defines them as separate and different. Which may happen. The other proviso is that Islam doesn't become the dominant religion in which case all bets are off, slavery may even make a comeback!

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.
OH and it's the protestant churches that are embracing gay marriage now, not the RCC. The evangelical movement isn't homogeneous enough to lump it all together but quite a strong pro gay movement in that too.

riveratom wrote: »

If sex is a gift, then why should only those who are not gay get to partake?

Is there a reason?

Anybody?