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Friday, May 14, 2010

Christians, when it comes to homosexuality, man up.

This is a blog post from one of my favorite bloggers John Shore who's blogs are about how to be a Christian realistically and not a wacko. Since I know that who ever reads this will have a fairly short attention span, I'll cut out the parts that aren't that important. Enjoy :)


“We’re all sinners,” runs the refrain. “We all struggle to overcome our sinful ways. Homosexuality is a sin. Just like all of us must strive to control our sinful behavior, so the homosexual must strive to overcome his or her sexual predilection. Even if a person is born gay or lesbian — even if homosexuality is genetic — a homosexual must still strive to overcome the ungodly behaviors toward which he or she is inclined, the same as we all must overcome our lower nature in order to realize our highest.”

That proposition is so logically flawed it should embarrass any Christian who hears it, let alone says it. It completely ignores the crucial, absolute difference between homosexuality and the other sins people typically struggle against committing, which is that committing virtually every kind of sin except homosexuality objectively and tangibly hurts someone. If you lie, steal, cheat, rob, have an extramarital affair, are too greedy, are too selfish, waste your family’s money, and/or do any other kind of sin you can think of, someone, in no uncertain or abstract terms, gets hurt. That rule never changes, and it has as much to do with theology or philosophy as a brick to the head has to do with architecture.

But you take the Bible out of the equation, and what grounds is there for determining that homosexuality is wrong? Who does such love hurt? When two men are affectionately holding hands, who is getting hurt? When two women are snuggling together on their couch watching TV, who is being hurt?

Virtually all other behaviors Christians typically considered sinful can be readily understood as objectively and clearly wrong without any reference to the Bible. But you take the Bible out of a Christian’s hands, and he has no arrow left to shoot at the gay man or lesbian. He’s without recourse, justification, argument. Without his Bible to quote from, he has virtually nothing upon which to base his claim that homosexuality is wrong.

A dim-witted child could see that homosexuality isn’t the same as other kinds of sins. It’s distinctly, absolutely, categorically different. [H]omosexuality shouldn’t be classified as a sin, because it doesn’t meet the first, most important criterion of being a sin, which is manifestly causing harm.

I’m a Christian, and no two ways about it. But I can’t be a Christian so severely lacking in logical powers that I don’t notice the difference between homosexuality and all the other kinds of sins anyone’s always doing. The latter hurts people; the former doesn’t. They’re that far apart.

Also, it’s high time Christians were honest about the fact that asserting that homosexuals should stop acting homosexual necessarily means asserting that they should spend their lives never knowing the loving intimacy with another that straight people enjoy and know to be the best and richest experience in life. Asking a homosexual to give up homosexual love isn’t at all like asking him to give up booze, or greed, or any other such negative thing. It’s asking him to give up love.

I hear a lot of Christians asserting that gays and lesbians should stop acting like gays and lesbians. But I never hear any of them saying the unavoidable follow-up to that — saying what that actually means — which is that gay and lesbian men and women should spend their lives never experiencing what people most commonly mean when they use the word “love.”

When, all along, the Bible couldn’t be more clear about love being the primary characteristic of God. (1 John 4:8: “Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.” 1 John 4:16: “God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in him.”)

Something is seriously wrong somewhere in the mix between Christians and Christianity. (And it’s spelled Paul — whom I love, but about whom we really should be more clear. But that’s for another post.)

I want to be the very best Christian I can. And that means being as scrupulously honest as I can. And on the topic of homosexuality, that means admitting that being gay is not like any other sin, and that the Christian proscription of homosexuality is nothing less than a call for anyone who is gay to live their entire life never experiencing the physical expressions of love that all of we straight people happily accept as one of the very best things about being alive. Those two things are true, no matter how many logic-challenged pastors daring to call themselves compassionate Bible lovers claim otherwise.


I didn't cut out that much but if you'd like to read the whole thing, here's the link:

http://johnshore.com/2010/03/13/christians-when-it-comes-to-homosexuality-man-up/

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