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Throw out the OT? Sure! Does that mean we can forget Creation, the Fall, Original Sin, the Ten Commandments, and all those *cough*"prophesies"*cough* that Jesus "miraculously fulfilled?
The NT is all about "love" and "compassion?" Sure. Except Hell. Remember that? The thing Jesus introduced to us when he told us about a place where fire burns and never consumes? The place where the worm eats but never dies? That place? So loving and sweet I could shit myself.
Oh, the NT. The superbible with all its stories about scorpions with women's hair and lion's manes and anhels with six wings and great beasts that rule the earth and whores who ride dragons and give birth to rivers of blood. Such a story for the whole damned family.
No, I'm not.
I am talking about fact vs.. fiction.
You said that gay people shouldn't get upset when you say that being gay is a choice because that is simply your belief.
But not all beliefs are equally sacrosanct.
You believe in God and Christianity and all that, and that is your right.
However facts are facts. You can believe that God will hold you up if you step off a building, but if you do you will fall. You can believe that the earth is flat, but the earth isn't flat.
It is one thing to talk about your belief in your own subjective experiences. It is another when you deny facts or the experiences of others.
Because if you are straight then you have NO personal experience with actually being gay. How can you tell someone that they chose to be gay when you are not that person and that person tells you that they didn't?
I don't believe in your god or religion, but where, exactly, have I negated your experience? I haven't. I have argued against your illogic and your false statements of fact, but I have not, even once, addressed your experience.
But when you tell me that I chose to be gay you are telling me that I don't know my own experiences, and also that I am lying.
Where am I intolerant against Christian? My only intolerance against Christians is when Christians try to impose their beliefs on others through legislation.
You can believe what you want, but when you are wrong I will point it out. You are wrong that gay people chose to be gay.
You can insult people all you want, but when you call me a liar you have no right to expect I will accept that and keep my mouth shut.
I have never pushed for legislation to deny rights to Christians.
I have never tried to harm a Christian.
I have never suggested that Christians are mentally ill.
I have never denied anyone the right to pray, attend church, or adhere to any beliefs they want to.
What I have done is point out when people misrepresent me, lie about me, and hold false beliefs about me. You can adhere to your beliefs. You can believe I am a liar who chose to be gay but for some reason wants to deny that, but it is not true and I will not let that falsehood go unchallenged.
Christians make up the majority of people in this country. Over 90% of the elected officials in government are Christian. Christians have the most privilege in this country over anyone else.
You should have to experience real discrimination once in a while to see how good you have it, so forgive me if I don't give you sympathy over all the oppression you face as a member of the ruling class of people in this country.
As I already said, if so many Christians didn't use their religion and the Bible as a weapon against others then others wouldn't have any reason to attack back. When you use something as a weapon against others you invite retaliation. You make your weapons targets.
If you are upset at people criticizing Christianity, the Bible, and Christians in general then don't get mad at the people fighting back. Get mad at the Christians who are initiating the attacks and inviting the retaliation.
Let me say this again so you will understand.
I wouldn't care, think about, or talk about Christians' beliefs, practices or anything else if it weren't for the fact that so many Christians use their religion to attack, oppress, and lie about others. Do you really think I enjoy spending my time thinking and fighting against Christianity? I would much prefer that Christians and everyone else leave each other alone. But far too many Christians don't, and so forces the rest of us to defend ourselves. And then when we defend ourselves you cry persecution and act like WE are the ones being mean towards YOU.
When you say that I chose to be gay (not that it should matter regarding equal treatment since after all Christianity is chosen as well), you are not just expressing a believe. You are lying about me and misrepresenting my actual experience.
So again I say, how is that different than if I claimed you didn't really believe in Christianity? Because although I don't believe in Christianity I have never denied the sincerity of those who say they do, nor denied their experience. I only deny it when they blatantly lie about things.
So tell me, how am I denying your experience when I tell you that you are wrong about me choosing to be gay? What, exactly, is your so called personal experience regarding my life, my mind, and my choices? Unless you are living in my head or the head of other gay people then you have NO personal experience on this issue, and when you say that gay people chose to be gay you are NOT talking about personal experiences. You are talking about something you don't know anything about. When we say you are wrong we are not negating your pesonal experience because this isn't a personal experience for you. YOU haven't experienced it.
Everyone has a right to their opinion. No one has the right to make up their own "facts".
Sorry to read of your eyesight issues and of your frustrations with your eldest's choices at the moment.
Venomlash told you that he is a Jew. The NT is part of the Christian faith. Perhaps, just my own thought, Micah 6:8 could offer some insight. Venomlash is more equipped to answer your questions.
I'm not sure what your saying about choice. I can guess that you are saying that you capable of believing that being gay is a choice, perhaps obligated by your faith, and not allow that belief to permit you to discriminate, harass, advocate against your LGBT brothers and sisters? And, you can emphathize with our Fourtunate, because your work enviornment is hostile to Christianity which means you get harassed? Maybe you are saying that you want the opportunity to learn from your LGBT brothers and sisters to understand what they mean by it is not a choice, because that continually comes into conflict with what you have grown up with, been taught, and is intertwined with your faith? Maybe you are asking to be judged by your actions and you would like others to do the same with regard to your being a Christian? If my musings are but a bit accurate, then I would kindly recommend that you deeply understand the community you are commenting in now has many, many LGBT people who have been deeply wounded (physically, emotionally, mentally, and sexually) and discriminated against by people who identified themselves as Christians. And, it can be a bit rough to hear the expressions of hurt and to remind yourself that if you are not that Christian, then they are not talking to you. And, I truly understand that it is hard, especially if your identity has come inseparable from your faith to you. Being here can teach you the importance of turning ones cheek. You will need to trust that they are not directing things specifically towards you. And you'll have to wait for them to see your character and to see your unwillingness to tolerate their being mistreated. These are my suggestions.
Good luck on your journey. Please be mindful of your health and make sure you're getting enough rest.
Kind regards,
kim
Answer not a fool according to his folly, lest thou also be like unto him.
Answer a fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own conceit. (KJV)
Here, educate yourselves.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_…
But for anyone that brings it up, I tell them that I'll accept that the the story of Sodom is appropriate to apply to our modern day public policy if they will apply the rest of the story as well. After all Lot, the hero, offered up his young virgin daughters to be raped. God does not condemn this. In fact Lot is still the hero and still saved from the destruction. We have laws against that in our country. Should they be changed to allow parents to force their daughters into sex? This is consistent with much of the Bible, Old and New Testament. There is far more in the Bible that reinforce the notion that women are mere property than the entire subject of homosexuality. Shouldn't our laws then make women property?
And we can't forget that the story ends with Lot's daughters having sex with him. What do we make of that?
Obviously, the bible does deal equivocally with something called "slavery;" it's right there in black and white. But the problem is that here, you suddenly reject any contextualization or historicity. You say that the "bad kind" of slavery "existed" when Paul was alive. But critiques of that "bad kind" are indeed in the bible, showing that treatment of people under the umbrella of "slavery" was indisputably a concern to the bible's authors.
Harris asserts that "the bible got slavery wrong." Nominally speaking, it did. The problem is that "got," "slavery," and "wrong" are words that tunnel carelessly through time, comparing something whose horror became apparent (yes, even to thickheaded churchmen) as the institution transited the 18th and 19th centuries, with something that, in the first century, had a breadth of forms and occupied a level of societal indispensability not unlike that of capitalism today. "Slaves" constituted a huge chunk of Roman society, at one point around 40% of the population of Italy as a whole. Their status was widely varied and always in flux: first they could become freedmen by merit, then they couldn't, then they could again.
What "slavery" was when the bible was first authored appears to have encompassed everything from true chattel slavery to something that not unreasonably compares, de facto, to minimum wage labor today. "Slavery" appears to have meant "being on the short end of the power stick," and the authors of the bible could not conceive of society without it. The slave was not considered to be something other than human, and could become free, something which would cease to be true only later. Several popes of the early Christian church were themselves former slaves.
It isn't until florid racism meets mercantile opportunity in West Africa and the New World that we get the horror of human beings stacked on top of each other like sardines in ship holds, Constitutions naming them three-fifths of human at best, and racist theories of the inherent unsuitability of such types of individuals to freedom. Under these conditions, the gross maltreatment that was widespread chattel slavery became something different from what it had been in the past: so violently exploitative and conceptually apart from any standard workings of society that only those with vested economic interest could deceive themselves deeply enough to continue to defend it as such. The Catholic church, for its part, did not do so. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Supremo_…
So while using "getting slavery wrong" as a cudgel against biblical literalists does hit 'em where it hurts, it does so at the cost of blowing the historical and contextual analysis of the bible in that case, something which in other contexts (such as gay rights and gender equality) advances humanistic concerns, and rightly so. The "slavery" that was "gotten wrong" simply was not the intractable racist horror that the justifiers of North Atlantic slavery later sought to misuse biblical passages in order to defend. As you point out, abolitionists were able to use the bible itself to make that case. If we flatten complexity to simplicity here, we shoot ourselves in the foot.
Dan, if you care to welcome religious allies in supporting full equality for GLBT people, believe me, you've got them. Lots of them, I, and many co-religionists I personally know, among them, including some in the Catholic clergy itself.
Harris, in contrast, can't accept any such allies. Harris speaks in eliminationist terms: he will, to the face of a highly educated and intellectual rabbi (David Wolpe), compare Judaism to believing in a reincarnated Elvis, arguing that the religious should suffer the same social penalties for their beliefs as the insane. When Harris says "the bible got slavery wrong," he says it for the purpose of vitiating the bible's moral authority entirely. He's not interested in historical analysis; he's interested in polemics.
I know you don't intend to force people to "choose between God or Gay," as some hypersensitive antagonists have accused you of. Citing the likes of Harris makes that needlessly harder to perceive, and makes those asshole critics look more correct than they have a right to.
The straightforward answer is that the church leadership at that time was doing what Jesus had instructed them to do: binding and loosing, allowing & disallowing. What they were not doing was hermetically sealing the Truth in mayonaise jar under Funk & Wagnalls' porch for all time. But that is how the current church views scripture, and THAT is the real problem. They have created a definition of Scripture that Scripture doesn't even say about itself.
Romans CRUCIFIED slaves. They raped, tortured, and killed them without any penalty whatsoever. In the South slave owners were PROSECUTED for severely injuring a slave. Some planter were EXECUTED themselves for killing a slave.
In Rome it is true that slaves could buy their freedom. Perhaps you did not know that slaves in the South could also buy their freedom? In fact, nearly 10% of blacks in the South population were 'freedmen' at any time.
Roman slavery did not relentlessly teach the racial inferiority of the slaves as was done in South, but this attempt to sugarcoat Roman practices as a way to further condemn Southern slavery is as transparent as Christian apologists "judging" (judge not lest you be judged) homosexuals over a a plate of shellfish (if a man lies with a man it is an abomination; do not eat shellfish, it is an abomination unto the Lord).
Get your history right.
"But tell me, how can someone say they hate homosexuality, but don't hate someone for whom homosexuality is an inherent part of their makeup? It's like saying someone doesn't hate black people, they just hate people being black."
Its because some Christians are still suffering under the delusion that homosexuality is a choice, not something you are born with and can't change.
"A cursory examination of the New Testament makes it clear that such a type of slavery is wrong and explicitly anti-Christian. (Matthew 7:12, Col 4:1, John 13:34.)"
Matthew 7:12 is the golden rule and John 13:34 is the command to love one another. Neither say anything specifically about slavery. In fact, both of those passages could be just as easily cited as an argument to treat homosexuals equally. Col 4:1 says to treat your slaves fairly. It doesn't say free them or to not have slaves. Take the three together and the New Testament says that slavery's fine as long as you're nice to your slaves.