“…and the two shall become one flesh…”
Funny how many people in my church are divorced and remarried, and funny how they support “biblical marriage.” We even have a prominent member in our church that was married, divorced, started a relationship with a married woman, she divorced, they lived together, and then they got married. I guess to be fair neither were Christians prior to this relationship. But why does their marriage get sanctified and two men can’t be?
But yeah, let’s judge they gays.
One thing that really bugs me about the concept of “biblical marriage”, is God’s hatred of homosexuality. Two (wo)men who love each other, are attracted to the same sex under no control of themselves, decide to express the natural instincts not just sexually but romantically…and they deserved to be killed. Stoned death. People picking up rocks and throwing them at their heads until the gays die from blunt force trauma.
Clearly God is love.
Many Christians will say:
But that’s Old Testament law. We don’t follow the law of Moses in it’s cultural intricacies. Just like we don’t abstain from pork or shell fish…that was then. We live under Christ now!
But can I ask you a question?
- Who gave Moses the Law?
- Wasn’t it God?
- Just like the 10 Commandments, isn’t the law against homosexuality from God’s own lips?
- And what is the punishment for breaking this law?
Death by rocks thrown at you!
- Who’s idea was it to punish homosexuality this way?
- Moses?
Nope
I’m beginning to think that the Westboro Baptist Church Folks are right:
I mean seriously. If a person cannot control which gender they’re are attracted to, but yet they decide to act on that attraction they deserve to be brutally murdered for it?
Yet God loves them? WTF?!
I know most modern American Evangelicals would never condone killing someone just because they are gay, but that was exactly what God himself commanded in the Old Testament. And quite honestly it doesn’t look much better in the New Testament.
Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones. 27 In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed shameful acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their error.
28 Furthermore, just as they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, so God gave them over to a depraved mind, so that they do what ought not to be done. 29 They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. They are gossips, 30 slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents; 31 they have no understanding, no fidelity, no love, no mercy. 32 Although they know God’s righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practice them.
Romans 1
Just to recap: Men inflamed with lust for one another will
“receive in themselves the due penalty for their error.”
And by
“God’s righteous decree…those who so such things deserve death”
Some will point out:
But God also condemns adultery as punishable by death. So your previous example of the divorced man, he too would have suffered the same fate.
I guess you’re kind of right. Moses would have had him killed as well…in theory. BUT THERE IS A HUGE DIFFERENCE! The man mentioned earlier broke his vow before God and cause another woman to do the same. Then proceeded to live in sin, a flagrant disrespect of God’s holiness. Yet the church has no problem accepting him? We say things like:
Well that was in the past…Christ has redeemed him and forgiven him.
But the gay man has no chance of redemption. Never will he be allowed to love once, and if he does, is there any hope for him in the scriptures?
Celibacy.
But the divorced adulterer, he is free to find love and no one will judge him.
Clearly, God is love.
Sorry for the rant.
Pastor No Faith 
It says right there in the bible: “God gave them over to shameful lusts…”. They must have done something bad (first) for God to “give them over to…”. So that was then. Now, in today’s days, God has nothing to do with it. Gay people are naturally born gay, so there is nothing wrong about it. Only when “God gives them over…” (maybe because they angered him by doing something else wrong?) do they have to be punished. If they are naturally gay, that’s Nature, there’s nothing you need to punish.
I’m not a Bible interpreter, but that’s my way of looking at it!
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I don’t know, that sounds like it would create more problems. I heard an NPR piece on women who got married younger and were straight, but later in life after divorce they discovered a more fluid sexuality. So people who start out straight but then their sexuality shifts, it’s because God’s mad at them?
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It also makes Homosexual desire “shameful”
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Sorry, I guess what I wrote sounds different than what I think! I’ll have to ponder on this some more so I can word it better.
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No problem. Love to hear back from you.
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Spot on about the disparity between divorce and homosexuality as issues. Jesus actually said quite a lot about divorce, and nothing about being gay. I wonder if claiming that the BIble is itself homophobic ultimately only confirms the prejudices of those who read it in a homophobic way. You’re effectively saying, ‘You think the same as the BIble, and that’s terrible!’ which conservatively-minded Chritsians aren’t going to feel that challenged by. I think a far more powerful strategy for combatting religiously-sanctioned homophobis is to develop a liberal, inclusive reading of scripture. I won’t go into liberal readings of Romans 1 and Lev 18:22 here, but there are plenty about, and they challenge bigots by taking away the scriptural warrant that they think they have. Cheers!
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OK, but what if Paul was talking about himself? He talked about those shameless Greeks who deserve to die. However, later in this letter he says that HE deserves to die! Bishop Shelby Spong’s explanation is that Paul’s problem was that he was a gay man and suffered great guilt because of it.
Run with this idea and a lot of things click into place. Like his contradictory and changings attitudes about circumcision, the fact that he suffered at one time from a shameful disease and his rather low opinion of marriage.
As for Jesus’ idea about marriage. In Matthew he says that the only reason for divorce is “pornea” which may be fornication, adultery, behaving like a prostitute or however you want to slice it and dice it when you translate it into English. Elsewhere he is quoted as saying that people who remarry after divorce are committing adultery.
What a load of humbug!
Fortunately, this nonsense has been rejected even by Bible-believing Christians.
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