Vishvavajra
Active Member
I used to think so. Then I read a bit deeper, and now I'm convinced Paul is often trying to get at more or less the opposite of what modern Christians tend to think he's saying. He draws on Leviticus, for example, but at the same time he insists that that sort of purity is an illusion. He gives recommendations for behavior while also pointing out that there is no Law and that everything is permitted. If one takes his culturally-based recommendations at face value as a kind of coherent moral code, Paul comes off as pretty awful and not at all wise. If one takes Paul as trying to convey the basic principles of a radically different approach to morality through the medium of familiar cultural attitudes, then it paints a different picture. The problem is that the latter makes him much harder to read and understand, and few people these days have the patience, so they just pick out individual statements and treat them as Word of God.
Jesus, incidentally, does the same thing as Paul: he doesn't really issue commandments or try to construct a comprehensive moral code, but rather challenges people to think in new ways about morality by seeing through the external rules to the core principles. What people miss about that approach is that it actually means the external rules are negotiable. This approach is in fact a huge part of Christianity's reason for existence, yet so few Christians today appreciate it. Most would prefer to go back to the Law and leave the thinking to someone else.
As others have pointed out, it's entirely natural. All people really mean when they call something "unnatural" is "it makes me feel icky." It really isn't possible to make any moral argument from natural law without begging the question, since people will see whatever they want to see, rather than what's there. And really, if you're at the point where you're calling the entire world sinful, rather than people's attitudes, then you've painted yourself into a corner, in that there is no demonstrable example of anything that isn't sinful.
As for finding truth in experience, that's certainly the correct approach. Of course, there's nothing whatsoever in homosexual relationships that indicates they are in any way harmful or wrong, so the experience demonstrates that they are fine. The only special problem homosexual couples have is that heterosexuals won't stop oppressing them. In every other respect their experiences are functionally identical.
