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The issue of "acceptance/rejection" is a smokescreen. It's not really about either accepting or rejecting anything. It's about a critical and honest exegesis of what's there, and weighing the relevance of the message, based upon 1) one's exegetical discoveries, and 2) the litmus test of love and relationship-building.
You're absolutely correct. But where we run into trouble is when definitions of what constitutes compassion and compassionate acts differ widely. Many fundamentalists would say that rejecting homosexuality is compassionate, because they're exhibiting "tough love" by saying "no" to sin. That's why, in my previous post, I stressed the importance of honest and critical exegesis. Many fundamentalists don't do that. They simply take the sentences at face value without digging into the issues of translational problems and cultural projection. We need to know what was said, and why it was said. Then we need to use reason and apply a test of how does our conclusion stack up with principles of love and relationship-building.
Like Sojourer, I'd argue that it isn't about accepting or rejecting. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that framing of the issue has a fundamentalist bias, since it assumes that there is something coherent to accept or reject. In fact the Bible's contents as well as its significance are things that are subject to negotiation. Figuring out what it has to say is difficult enough, and then we have to figure out what that means to us today.
OK, maybe it is complicated for some people. I suppose some people can justify anything by claiming to do it in the name of "love." These same folks love to beat their children and claim it's a loving act (there's a thread on that somewhere). This happens because they don't know what love really is. They think the ends justify the means, but love is all about the means, all about the present moment. Being horrible to somebody because you think it will help them down the road doesn't mean you aren't being horrible to them. The point is that they're causing pain where there needn't be any, based entirely on superstitious beliefs and unexamined prejudices and phobias. Love is about accepting people and breaking down divisions, not about reinforcing them. Love is the fundamental understanding that other people (including gay people) are not really separate from you. What you do to them, you do to yourself. There is no difference.
It's cool. Lol.
It's because Christianity makes more of a divide between the physical and the spiritual than modern Judaism and Islam. Modern Judaism and Islam are very concerned with worldly and tribal affairs, while Christianity is focused on the soul. It's similar to Gnosticism and the Dharmic religions in that respect.
No, I think that's a red herring. Jesus stressed feeding, clothing, visiting, giving drink, healing physical illness, and alleviating suffering. He used agrarian metaphors. I think it's false to say that there's some kind of divide inherent to Xy. For Paul, resurrection was a physical standing up -- not just some amorphous, spiritual something.
How is it that men ALWAYS come up with reasons that a threesome is just dandy? As long as it's one man and two women. Hypocritical much?
Jesus was an ascetic itinerant preacher and encouraged His followers to turn away from material things. The way the early Christians lived as described in Acts is a good depiction of what He expected. They basically lived in communes and shared everything, much like monastic communities do, except they had married people with them.
Was he? Or is that the way the much later gospels paint him?
Living in communes doesn't necessarily imply some divide between the physical and the spiritual. In fact, it only shows that Xy is, by the way you describe it, much more like Islam and judaism in it's desire and concern for community.
You can believe what you want, but this kind of ad hominem isn't an argument either, and it's pretty typical in this context, so perhaps that should be indicative of something. No, I don't find the arguments cogent because they fail at both the logical and ethical levels. People who hold that position seem to be incapable of forming an argument that is persuasive to people who don't already agree with them (or who aren't impressed by logical fallacies such as appeals to tradition and question-begging), and when they fail, we get lovely gems like this, which shifts the burden onto the audience.
Historically that is fairly accurate, if one accepts the man was in fact, Jesus. After his death, however, things changed a great deal save for Essenes and Gnostics. I cannot agree that what Jesus taught was reiterated in acts, as that was allegedly written by Paul who never met the man. And further, a good deal of his 'rules' we're not in keeping, IMO, with what Christ taught.
If anyone can write a cogent argument, it is the poster who you quoted. His arguments are well presented and thought out. You may disagree of course, but that doesn't diminish the point of his post.
