Interesting Biblical Perspective on Homosexuality in the Bible. [View All]

[RJ Connors]

Just my inner ramblings for the day.

The religious right is always jumping up and down about how G-d is all against homosexuality and he's going to knock all of us dead because of it, and on and on and on. OK, whatever, these people, who constantly claim that a mere mortal cannot possible understand G-d, seem to know an awful lot about what he likes and dislikes. I wonder if they know whether or not G-d takes his coffee black or with creme and sugar.

But anyway, whenever I run into these kinds of people the first thing I ask is,"Well, what did Jesus have to say about homosexuality"? This is where I get blank stares or they start going into convulsions, because the answer is, if they actually do know something about their Bible, nothing. Jesus had zero, zip, zilch, nada, nil, to say about homosexuality.

I told one fundie a while back that I just didn't get why conservative Christians were so preoccupied with homosexual sex. (along with heterosexual sex which apparently they abhor that too unless it is for procreation), I told him that I really didn’t think about it too much but then again I'm not gay. It would seem also, based on scripture, Jesus didn't think about it too much either.

This is where they immediately resort to Leviticus and such in the Old Testament, or as I prefer to call it the Hebrew scriptures, or the Torah. I do that because I think that the phrase Old Testament has an ingrained cultural anti-Semitism in that, “your religion is old, outdated, meaningless, while ours, the New Testament, is the new and improved version”. Or as I like to refer to it, Bible 2.0

So they grab the Torah scriptures which they claim abhors homosexuality although several century’s worth of Rabbinical scholarship most often disagrees with that position. Isn't it interesting that when an O.T. cite of scripture works against the religious right they claim that we no longer follow the O.T. And if you are really dealing with an fundamentalist intellectual, (isn't that a contradiction in terms), they will say grace relieved us of the burden of following the O.T., hence we only have to do 10 of the 613 commandments, or 1.6% of them. Gives one a lot of free time I suppose.

But then, they turn around and if the O.T. supports their position, well then we are bound by Gawd to follow it. Kind of like you can tell weather or not they will claim a support for state rights, or federal rights, depending on which one will work out better for them.

So back to the main issue, lets suppose that the Torah Hebrew scripture does support the idea that homosexuality is an abomination to G-d. There are 6 passages they cite in this argument. One also finds that the Bible also has 6 passages that pertain to the absolute necessity of having accurate scales for use in commerce. To insure that you are dealing straight with you brother and not taking him for a ride.

Viewed in that context it would seem that the importance of homosexuality for G-d is right up there with the selling of produce. Which wouldn’t seem to me to be a front burner issue.

But then again, what do I know, I'm not as theologically well turned or astute as my fundamentalist brothers in the reading of the Biblios.