Comments on: Christians behaving badly

By: Frank

Frank — Wed, 30 May 2018 22:13:28 +0000

As for being bullied, perhaps I can provide a basis for comparison. I attended a Catholic all boys high school and I got called “faggot” every day because I followed Christ’s own example of charity to outcasts. The other boys assumed Stephen was gay. I befriended him to help him carry his cross and discovered I was gay. No priest ever defended either one of us.
In a Catholic high school in the 1970’s, there were no GSA’s and no “It Gets Better” campaign. At 13, I read in our school’s library a quote from St. John Chrysostom calling me worse than a murderer and saying I would be better off dead.
Having no standard of right and wrong other than my religion at the time, I had no resistance to the hateful ideas that Catholics and other Christians believed about gays. They said we molested children; they compared us to men who raped angels (Sodomites). They said we were insane. When gays died they were denied funerals merely because of their orientation and the assumption they must be acting on it.
If I had trusted anyone at my high school and discussed what I was worried about, I would have been expelled and committed as an inpatient for brainwashing (“conversion therapy”). This would have meant the loss of higher education and the hope that I could escape my situation.
Every day for four years, I carried a razor blade with me; only compassion for my mother stopped me from using it.
I had concluded I was damned by the time I was 14, although I stayed a virgin. I would not be responsible for leading anyone else to damnation.
This was the worst time of my life; it made having cancer twice seem trivial by comparison. Being afraid of death is not as bad as wanting it or, worse still, thinking you deserve it.
I stayed Catholic anyway, but I learned that Christians don’t turn off the persecution of gays just because they behave well. In 1992, my Church endorsed the right to discriminate against gays in employment, education, housing, and military service. I expected outrage from my fellow Catholics because this endorsement was persecution of even celibate gays. That outrage never came.
I finally quit the Church at 39 when I read that the Church was introducing “reparative therapy” for gay students in junior high and high school. I knew that this therapy would lead to more suicides. I renounced my religion right then and burned every reminder I had of it in my home.
During all that turmoil, I had achieved a PhD in mathematics in four years while under treatment for cancer. I remember finishing a take home exam while I was being prepped for an orchiectomy. The second cancer hit when I was a postdoc at Princeton. I worked through that one too and the results of our work were published in _Science_, one of the two most prestigious science journals in the world.

By: Frank

Frank — Wed, 30 May 2018 22:13:27 +0000

Mary writes:
“Just because a person quotes the bible does not mean they understand nor practice its principles.”
That’s the usual Christian “No true Scotsman” defense. It’s a logical fallacy.
“People mistreat other people.”
Yep. :”Stuff” happens.
Gays get their brains beaten out with two-by-fours and the murderers get lenient sentences because a Christian judge approves of their motive., which you don’t seem to give a damn about, but you’re being “bullied.”

By: Frank

Frank — Wed, 30 May 2018 22:09:34 +0000

Richard,
What strikes me about Paul’s letter to the Romans is that he claims homosexuals were cursed by God with homosexuality for not believing in Him. This very same curse results in daily temptation that God can then use as an excuse for damning them.
It is, in essence, the license that Christians have for treating gays as not only morally suspect but less than human.
I would counter that Paul persecuted (that’s a euphemism for “mass-murdered” Christians) but was born again to mark 5% of the human race for a life a persecution and frequently violent death followed by damnation. BUT CHRISTIANS AREN’T PERFECT JUST FORGIVEN.

By: Mary

Mary — Wed, 30 May 2018 22:09:34 +0000

Just because a person quotes the bible does not mean they understand nor practice its principles.
People mistreat other people.

By: Richard Willmer

Richard Willmer — Wed, 30 May 2018 22:09:34 +0000

I cannot see any Biblical text that suggests that gay people per se are in any way intrinsically less ‘moral’ than heterosexual persons. The very few texts that purport to deal with ‘homosexuality’ can be interpreted in a number of ways. In the New Testament, the most interesting, and – perhaps – important, reference to ‘homosexuality’ is that in Romans 1. When I read that chapter (which should never be ‘isolated’ from the chapter immediately following it), what strikes me about the text is that what is actually being condemned is not a particular sexual behaviour, but attitudes and behaviours that lead to people becoming prey to “envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice.” (v. 29)
The truth, as it appears to be the case, to ‘experts’ and non-experts’ alike, that there are many gay people who are not filled with “envy, murder, …“, and some straight people who are. This suggest to me and to many other Christians that it is not same-sex relationships per se that are being ‘condemned’ here.
And the O.T.? Well, what is it says about God must always be subordinated to the Revelation – as Christians believe – of God in Christ. It is no accident – but rather a fundamentally Christian expression of belief about the nature of God – that, in the Mass, the most important Scripture is that from one of the Gospel accounts. Some ‘Bible-believing Christians’ say that there is no ‘pecking order’ when it comes to the various parts of the Bible. I could not disagree with them more!