asbestosman wrote:By the way, I wonder what your reasoning is.
Hi Asbestos,
I don't believe homosexuality is a sin. Paul appeals to the natural order in concluding that it is an offense against God. But I have two problems with his reasoning:
1) When Jesus summed up the prophets and the Law, he did so in terms of love, not in terms of conformity to the natural order. I think that Paul has invented this as an additional basic principle and thereby departed from the gospel preached by Jesus. Note that the same faulty appeal to the natural order appears in the Pauline and pseudo-Pauline injunctions against women.
2) It's quite clear from modern research that the natural order is not as clear cut as it might have looked from a pre-modern perspective. In fact, if Paul's premise about offense-against-nature being sin is admitted, one could argue that those who are born with homosexual predilections would be sinning if they acted against them and tried to alter who they were created to be.
I think it's also worth pointing out that 1) the extreme abhorrence of sexual sin is very Victorian and 2) the abhorrence of homosexuality in the Old Testament was based on the purity logic that Jesus abrogated when he did things like disregard food laws, touch menstrual women, spurn rigid Sabbath observance, and commune with lepers/Samaritans/sinners.
I think sinning should be legal so long as it doesn't hurt others, but that's just me I suppose. Of course, I see a difference between behavior that isn't illegal and behavior that the law specially recognizes, but that's a different topic.
When I'm discussing this with my more conservative friends, I employ the following argument:
According to James 2:10, "For whosoever shall keep the whole law, and yet offend in one point, he is guilty of all." By this logic, we're all guilty of homosexuality. We're all abominable sodomites. This passage in James (and others, like the lists of sins that place homosexuality next to gluttony or the verse in Romans that makes the wages of sin-- all sin-- death) suggests that there is no gradation of sin in God's eyes. The only real gradation would seem to emerge from the effects/consequences of our sins. Murder is the most atrocious sin of all, because it deprives another of life. Thievery, violence, cheating, dishonesty-- all of these have negative consequences for other people. Homosexuality, on the other hand, is a more private sin and thus on the lower end of the totem pole in terms of scope of consequences. This suggests that, at the very least, we have bigger fish to fry.
-Chris