religion and homosexuality

if Jesus were on earth today in the flesh, he'd be in jail by now.

jonb,
IF familial genetics hold true, I'll take care of your bro for you !!!!!! Even if he's also a 1%er, I'll give it a go. :evilgrin:

Oh, I fixed it. Something about the addition of 1%-99% made us all a bit straighter.

And yeah, if Jesus were alive today, he'd be arrested. Oh, wait . . .

If anyone's actually interested, Jesus himself never mentions homosexuality in anything canon. I'm wondering what kind of hermeneutics can explain the modern obsession with homosexuality. Of course, distracting from their own, often very severe, moral failings might be a reason.

you mean the bible doesn't attribute any mention of homosexuality to jesus. I bet he actually said plenty about it, and lots of other things, that nobody remembered by the time they wrote the bible. which is yet another reason why treating the bible as the "word of god" is really retarded.

Well call me retarded, but I do regard the Bible as the Word of God. Jesus never does mention homosexuality, because it's something that doesn't affect your relationship with your neighbor. Jesus summed up the OT laws in His two commandments, they were not about condemnation, but about love. Jesus was all about compassion.

I'm not going to get into details, but the Bible and Christianity have been proven over and over to be true in my life. There have been too many unexplainable circumstances. I even had one incident today. All I know is that my faith is strong, that Jesus loves everyone, regardless of what they are. We have all sinned an fallen short of the glory of God. The long and short of it is that a denomination is a man made entity, and when humans get into the mix, it's going to be a screwed up mess. So stop placing blame on the organization, and focus on God. Maybe if some of you would focus your energy on making the church on earth a better place, some of the hypocrites that run them might see their wrongs.

I'm blessed that I'm in a great church, but a lot of churches have never experienced anything outside their little world. They don't realize that they have gay people in their congregation who are in the closet. They don't realize that they have people with terminal illnesses who have not sinned and been stricken with the disease as punishment. It takes people to educate and open their eyes, but if all people do is bitch about how wrong "the church" is, it can never be corrected. I personally think Jesus would flip if he saw how a lot of the preachers are, but instead of always condeming why not try to make a positive impact on what could really do something tremendous for the world.

I'm bi, by preference, but faithful in marriage, so I guess that makes me a hybrid hetero? Who knows. I'm very attracted to men, but I absolutely adore my wife. I feel I'm more spiritual than religious, although I am active in church. I tend to shake people down to their sox when they get dogmatic. However, I have many gay friends in my own church, and I find them to be some of the most loving, descent people on the planet. My church does not condone homosexuality. But since sexual preference is rarely a conscious choice, I can't see that God has any less love for them than for anyone else. It's what's in the heart that counts, if you know anything of the life of Christ.

I have learned from my own studies that Christ did the opposite of what most Christians do today. He condemned the righteous (pharasees and saducees and the like) and forgave the sinners, ate with them, blessed them, and healed them.

What's up with that? Show me in the Good Book where homos are condemned to hell.

Something to think about.

Buff

funny thing: jesus didn't actually write anything in the bible. in fact crap all of the new testament was even written until christianity was developing a power base and needed the visual legitimacy of its own holy books. from a historical perspective it's gotta be pretty damn up in the air as to the accuracy of any of those accounts -- and that's even if you actually believe in god and believe that jesus was his son, or messenger, or whatever you like. I don't, so it's all academic to me -- I'm just pointing out that you should be careful entrusting your moral and ethical standards to documents which were written essentially for political purposes.

As I have written elsewhere, I am a practicing Catholic. I don't view belonging to an organized religion as being stupid, backwards, or any of the other negative things that others seem to indicate. It has provided me with a sense of community. I can't imagine my life without the Church. Many people don't realize it, but the Catholic Church is much more accepting than it was before the 1960's. There is an organization called Dignity which addresses concerns of gay Catholics. Many chapters actually meet in the activities building or rectory of a Catholic Church and a priest is often the moderator. How's that for acceptance? Many Christian denominations have similar organizations. Here are some of them:

Epicopalian/Anglican - Integrity
Baptist - Welcoming and Affirming Baptists; Honesty
Eastern Orthodox - Axios
Lutheran - Lutherans Concerned
Methodist - Affirmation
Presbyterian - More Light Presbyterians; Presbyterians for Lesbian and Gay Concerns
Christian Scientist - Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgendered Christian Scientists
Disciples of Christ - Gay, Lesbian and Affirming Disciples Alliance
Evangelical Christian - Evangelicals Concerned
Jehovah's Witness - Common Bond
Mormon - Affirmation
Mennonite/Brethren - Council for Lesbian and Gay Concerns
Pentecostal - Fellowship of Reconciling Pentecostals International
Quaker - Q-Light
Seventh Day Adventist - Kinship International
Unitarian Universalist - Interweave
United Church of Christ - Coalition for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Concerns

There are also organizations for gay Jews, Muslims and Buddhists.

I view organized religion as a cancer on the face of the earth. It has been the basis of so many wars and so much hatred. Is it all negative? No. But the bad outweighs the good in my opinion.

And, at least in America, it is so filled with hypocrisy. People pick and choose which verses they want to believe. There are references to gays not being able to get into heaven, so we are evil and we must be written into the constitution as inferior. If the bible is the ultimate truth, why is the same attention not given by bible thumpers to the references to people who eat shrimp, women who wear ruby red, guys who "spill their seed on the ground" etc. None of them are eligible to enter the pearly gates either. There are some pretty ridiculous passages in the "good book" that don't get much attention. One, if I am not mistaken, says that if your brother's wife dies, you must make her pregnant. Um, I think not.

This is 2005. Not 20 BC. Its all a crock and it needs to go away. But it won't.

Jacinto,

Thanks for providing this list of supporting groups for each denomination. I would add that most of these groups will welcome people from other denominatoins as well if a local chapter is not close by in their denomination.

I will give a reply to all of this later. Each denomination will have its own definitions and such for this subject. In my church there are over 8 million members nationwide. Now really do you think that everyone who is United Methodist is in total agreement on anything. No.

But the doctrine of the church is simple. All people are sinners. That is none are perfect. At God's Table the Sacrament provides atonment for all sin and shortcomings. Our worst sins are not what we have done, but what we haven't done. So in the United Methodist Church the official doctrine is that all people are welcome to the Table to receive HOly Communion which is to become in total communion with God and to have all sin and shortcomings forgiven and forgotten. All people Christian and non Christian are welcome to the Table of the Lord.

Only people who are single and not activve sexually and married people may be clergy in the Untied Methodsit Church. This is true. But there is no restriction anywhere else. There are many paid organists, choir directors and even deacons who are practicing homosexuals.

All people are of sacred worth. God want all of his chidlren at his table with him and not necessarily the Christian table. But God is a loving God. If someone doesn't make it into heaven it will only be because they didnn't want to go in.

This homophobia is out of control. Homosexuals will be in heaven. One must know the history of why some things were written when they were written. I will tell that story which will surprise some of our people. The Bible is not as anto gay as it is made out to be. In fact it may not be at all but that is another post. Later.


I know you can take a verse here and a verse there and prove me wrong. But what I wrote is what I believe and what I think a majority of United Methodist would agree with.

Well - I'm an atheist - and thank God I am! ;)

Freddie makes some great points about Christian churches. In my church which is dually aligned with two different Baptist conventions (Baptists do not have denominations, because each Baptist congregation is autonomous, so we belong to "conventions", which are made up of autonomous churches of supposedly similar mindesets) The American Baptist Churches in the USA run the gamut from extremely liberal (questioning the doctrine of the Trinity, questioning if Jesus was the Son of God, saying that the Bible is just a bunch of writings by holy men) to very evangelical churches, while the Southern Baptist Convention is what is generally thought of when someone mentions "Baptist"--the ultra-conservative, Bible-thumping, redneck, fat, blowhard, hairsprayed, good-ol' boy preacher, who while condemning everything from the pulpit does exactly the opposite in his personal life. My congregation is American Baptist, and is pretty much middle of the road leaning toward the evangelical side, but having people of the educated social strata, they realize that there is a lot more than just black and white to every side of the argument.

When we have communion, the Pastor always makes it clear that the Table of the Lord is open to all believers, not just Baptists. It's not our church's altar, it's God's altar, and it's time for all Christians to commune together.

What matters is that a person has faith in God through Jesus, not if someone was gay. That's like saying only brown eyed people will go to heaven. Jesus makes it clear in the Bible that we are to love God and our neighbor as ourselves. (Mark 12:29-34) Jesus also talks about love in John 13:34, " a new comand I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another."

In Luke 12:1-12, Jesus clearly speaks out against hypocrisy, "the yeast of the Pharisees", and talks about the worth of each human. If God knows the very number of the hairs on our heads, and knows each sparrow, why do you think that He wouldn't care about you? It seems pretty clear to me. People try to over analyze it. The christian message is very basic, that's the whole thing. We only need faith the size of a mustard seed. People go in trying to be all grandiose about it, and God only wants us to have faith like a child. Just be open to Him, because God wants a relationship with you.

Well, if it's not mentioned, it obviously meant he didn't have an opinion on it one way or the other. Any assumption of Jesus saying anything about homosexuality would therefore be a type of hermeneutic jujitsu.

Well, if it's not mentioned, it obviously meant he didn't have an opinion on it one way or the other.[/b][/quote]
... or the guys writing it didn't agree with whatever his opinion was, or simply weren't around to hear it. my point is that whatever the bible claims jesus said or did was already filtered through at least several decades of word-of-mouth before it was written down.

I'm a Muslim...(ahhh!! run away!!), and every religious figure in christianity is in Islam also.

The book of barnabus (which was written by one of the apostles of Jesus, I'm pretty sure his name was...barnabus...) actually has some quotes of jesus condeming homosexuality. Not sure exactly what it was.

Many prophets in christian (and muslim) stories are said to at sometime condemn homosexuality. We can try to dance around the fact that these any sect of christianity condemns it, but if you study, you will see that it does condemn homosexuality.

My question isn't if your sect of christianity condemns homosexuality, my question is do you know it says homosexuality is wrong, but still follow the religion anyway.