Here’s a good essay on homosexuality and the Bible by United Methodist minister. You can disagree with him — I’ll tell you now that he takes the liberal position — but you certainly can’t say that he doesn’t make an intelligent and faith-driven case for the pro-gay side.

http://www.forusa.org/articlesandresources/wink-homosexuality.html

And here the three next verses from the same passage:

For Adam was formed first, then Eve.
Further, Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and transgressed.
But she will be saved through motherhood, provided women persevere in faith and love and holiness, with self-control.

peterskim right. sweettoothed and changed et al. — it’s noble of you to try to split the difference, reduce the areas of disagreement, and be peacemakers. but peterskim is right that this is really an issue of whether homosexual love is inherently sinful. i think it’s terrible and cruel to make a homosexual feel guilty about his/her orientation. this is not on the level of telling someone to not be so mean or something. it’s on the level of making a black person feel inferior for being black. at least that’s the way I honestly see it.

I think Christians must seriously — and I mean seriously — consider the possibility of *dropping* this notion that homosexuality is sin. To me, it is exactly like the case of Galileo and (increasingly) Darwin: the more conservative Christians try to deny what science increasingly demonstrates to be true, the greater the permanent and irreparable damage will be to Christianity’s reputation. Christianity’s opposition to Galileo’s heliocentric theory of the universe caused incalculable damage to Christianity in the 17th century. I know, because I have studied this period. This mistake on the part of Christianity is single-handedly responsible for turning the majority the truly intelligent men (and women) of that century and the next into Deists, atheists, and pantheists. Sometimes you have to cut off a limb to save the trunk. And I don’t even think this is a limb. I really think it is an imagined limb of Christianity, just like the geocentric notion of the universe was.

OK that makes sense — it’s a consistent position — follow even the most uncool verses in the Bible. Now will you tell your sisters attending Sunday service to either cover their heads with some cloth, or cut their hair (short I assume)?

1 Corinthians 11:6 If a woman does not cover her head, she should have her hair cut off; and if it is a disgrace for a woman to have her hair cut or shaved off, she should cover her head.

I bet you’re going to interpret the heck out of this passage to make it say something else besides what it seems like it is saying. But liberal Christians have done no worse with the passages allegedly condemning homosexuality.

But I do agree with you that IF the Bible is condemning homosexuality absolutely, then it certainly is mandating Christians to do something terrible and cruel to their gay brothers and sisters, on par with kicking lepers out of the city.

Plus I truly believe that the sacrifice conservative Christians are asking of homosexuals — to either be celibate for life, or even worse, go against their natural sexual orientation — is about 1000 times greater than the sacrifice 1 Corinthians 11:6 is asking women when it tells them to keep their heads covered. And yet look what verses conservative Christians choose to stress, and which to totally ignore. This is what really stirs up a passionate sense of indignation and righteousness in me. I’m sorry that I get so worked up over this. I feel it is a great injustice and hypocrisy. I say this with enormous respect for everyone here who is on the other side of this issue.

FTL’s comment about Darwin is totally irrelevant. Isaac Newton believed he could turn iron into gold. Galileo thought that the tides were caused, not by the gravitational force field of the moon, but by the sloshing around of the earth’s oceans due the earth’s movement. You can find countless examples of this kind, where a scientific genius who made a great discovery also made a lot of errors that look quite dumb to us.

FTL is right that science has not yet conclusively demonstrated that being gay is genetic. But it is definitely moving in that direction, and in about 10 years, I suspect the proof will be decisive. Common sense already tells me that being gay is not a choice for most gays. Who the hell would want to be gay? Plus, there are already well-known cases of homoosexuality in nature, such as the famous case of the gay penguins (among other birds). Here is one recent report on an interesting study on human lesbians. It follows after the next sentence. OK I’m done with xanga for the day, or else I won’t get any productive work done! -cb

Dyed in the womb

Oct 9th 2003
From The Economist print edition

A lesbian’s sexual identity seems to be established before her birth

MEN and women blink differently when startled. That simple and well-established observation has led Qazi Rahman of the University of East London, in England, and his colleagues to evidence supporting the idea that homosexuality is a characteristic which people are born with, rather than one they acquire as they grow up. The team’s research, just published in Behavioral Neuroscience, shows that lesbians blink like heterosexual men. That, in turn, suggests that the part of their brain that controls this reflex has been masculinised in the womb.

Anyone who is startled by an unexpected noise tends to blink. If, however, the startling noise is preceded by a quieter sound, this blink is not so vigorous as it would otherwise have been. It is this lack of vigour which differs between the sexes. Men blink less vigorously than women when primed in this way.

Given such a clear and simple distinction, testing the responses of homosexuals to noise seemed an obvious experiment to do. So Dr Rahman and his colleagues did it. Their subjects, men and women, gay and straight, were sat down one by one in a dimly lit room. The muscles that cause blinking were wired up with recording electrodes, and the subjects were fitted with headphones through which the sounds (sometimes a single startling noise, and sometimes a combination of soft and loud) were fed.

In the latter case, as compared with the former, straight men had blinks that were 40% less vigorous. In the case of straight women the drop was 13%. Lesbians dropped 33% which, statistically, made them more similar to straight men than straight women. Gay men were also intermediate, although in their case the difference was not statistically significant. Even in this apparently trivial matter, it seems, lesbians have male-like brains. So what is going on?

By default, people are female. Without the influence of testosterone in the womb, a fetus will develop into a girl. The way testosterone acts to turn a fetus male is still poorly understood. It seems likely, though, that different organs respond independently to the hormone, and may do so at different times. Hormonal surges at critical moments could thus cause particular organs in an otherwise female body to become “maleâ€. (A lull in hormone production might have the opposite effect.) If the organ concerned is the brain, the result is more male-like behaviour including, possibly, male-type sexual preferences.

Previous research has provided some evidence for this idea. Lesbians, for instance, are more accurate throwers of objects such as darts than straight women. In this they resemble straight men in a way that has nothing to do with sexual preference. And tissues other than the brain’s may be affected, too. On average, lesbians have ring fingers that are longer than their index fingers, a feature that is typical of men but not of heterosexual women. In that context, a difference in the blink of an eye is no surprise at all.

http://www.economist.com/science/displayStory.cfm?story_id=2121955

mamania and sweettoothed — points about preaching to self and the validity of God’s truth standing on its own well made & acknowledged

changed: We need to add Catholics to the head coverings camp. In fact, is there any religious painting you’ve seen from the 18th century or before in which women do not have their heads covered? I don’t know if I’ve ever seen one.

“For 2,000 years, Catholic women have veiled themselves before entering a church or any time they are in the presence of the Blessed Sacrament (e.g., during sick calls). It was written into the 1917 Code of Canon Law, Canon 1262, that women must cover their heads — “especially when they approach the holy table” (“mulieres autem, capite cooperto et modeste vestitae, maxime cum ad mensam Dominicam accedunt”)  – but during the Second Vatican Council, Bugnini (the same Freemason who designed the Novus Ordo Mass) was asked by journalists if women would still have to cover their heads. His reply, perhaps innocently enough, was that the issue was not being discussed. The journalists (as journalists are wont to do with Church teaching) took his answer as a “no,” and printed their misinformation in newspapers all over the world. Since then, most Catholic women in the “Novus Ordo world” have lost the tradition. “

http://www.kensmen.com/catholic/theveil.html

Peter, this last quote echoes your earlier comment that “for thousands of years, Bible-believing peoples have upheld the interpretation that homosexuality is a sin . . . it is difficult for me to just throw out thousands of years of rigorous scholarship and God-given wisdom regarding this issue.” It seems that the head-covering rule was also observed for 1800+, maybe even 1900+ years of Christian history.

hey, it looks like FTL is open to the possibility that head-coverings might be required even for modern Christian women. of course, i oppose that view, though I think it is a position that must be held by anyone who says homosexuality is a sin based on the Bible.

http://www.xanga.com/item.aspx?user=faiththrough_love_iswhatcounts&tab=weblogs&uid=144036846

sorry for typos and errors in last para, which should read:

The question is why the percentage jumps from 11 (adopted siblings, sharing NO genes) to 22 (fraternal twins, sharing 50 percent of genes) to 52 percent (identical twins, sharing 100 percent of genes). If this result is replicated in further studies, this would be strong evidence of some genetic component. We’re talking about an 136 to 372 percent increase in the probability of being gay due to the genetic factor alone. This means that genes DO have something to do with being gay.

Also check out this study that was published last year in the journal of child psychology and psychiatry. There is a significant correlation between left-handedness and homosexuality:

Handedness preference was assessed in 205 boys with gender identity disorder and 205 clinical control boys referred for other reasons. Boys with gender identity disorder were significantly more likely to be left-handed than the clinical control boys (19.5% vs. 8.3%, respectively). The boys with gender identity disorder, but not the clinical control boys, also had a significantly higher rate of left-handedness compared to three independent, general population studies of nonreferred boys (11.8%; N = 14,253) by Hardyck, Goldman, and Petrinovich (1975), Calnan and Richardson (1976), and Eaton, Chipperfield, Ritchot, and Kostiuk (1996). Left-handedness appears to be a behavioral marker of an underlying neurobiological process associated with gender identity disorder in boys.

http://journals.cambridge.org/bin/bladerunner?30REQEVENT=&REQAUTH=0&500000REQSUB=&REQSTR1=S0021963001007582

Here is another revealing parallel. IQ. Everyone acknowledges now that genes have a lot to do with a person’s IQ. The estimate here of the heritability of IQ is about 60 percent. Yet it also seems true that a part of IQ is environmentally determined. But no one infers from this environmental component of IQ that a person’s IQ can be easily changed once they are an adult. In fact, the consensus seems to be the opposite, that a person’s IQ, once they are an adult, has very little change of varying all that much. (IQ is an age-group-normalized measurement.) The case seems the same with homosexuality. The heritability of homosexuality has been estimated by researchers so far to be between 31 and 74 percent, which is in the same ballpark as IQ.

A few additional observations about heritability and IQ will underscore the need for great caution in drawing any inferences about the sources of differences in IQ. A common method for measuring heritability relies on comparisons of the correlations of IQ among one-egg twins raised by their biological parents compared with two-egg twins raised by their biological parents. Suppose your neighbor is one of triplets. One of them is your neighbor’s one -egg twin, the other is his two egg (fraternal) twin. Suppose that you can predict the IQ of the one egg twin very reliably from the IQ of your neighbor, but your prediction of the IQ of the two egg twin will be much less reliable. This difference would be an indication of high heritability of IQ because one-egg twins share all their genes whereas two-egg twins normally share half their genes.

Heritability studies of IQ within White populations in the US and northern Europe have tended to yield moderately high heritabilities: Herrnstein’s and Murray’s 60 percent is a reasonable figure.

http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/faculty/block/papers/Heritability.html

So in other words, I was indeed aware of precisely what just said in clarification, that “My point here was not that I say it is unalterable by one’s own efforts, but that others do.” You were arguing hypothetically on that point — I did know that & I think my comment was responsive to that fact.

Let me give an example to help illustrate this last point as clearly as I can.

Let’s say there is a guy, let’s call him Forrest, whose IQ in the mentally retarded range, below 70. Let’s say IQ is 60 percent heritable. So 40 percent of the variation is from the environment. Let’s say that it was partly because Forrest ate poisoned shrimp, or not enough calcium when he was a kid, or something analogous that he had an IQ no higher than 70 — this would represent the 40 percent of IQ variation unrelated to genes. But the fact remains: nothing is going to change the fact that Forrest is mentally retarded once he has attained maturity. His biological development, both before birth and between birth and adulthood (which represents the window of opportunity for “environmental factors” to work), locked him into the sub-70 range.

It is also possible that no matter what the environment would have been in his youth, Forrest would have ended up retarded. Maybe his genes were so strongly biased toward a low IQ that he would have had an IQ of 50 and the most the environment could raise this by the time he was an adult was 20 points.

So is Forrest to blame for being retarded? Is it his choice to be retarded? No. Maybe his parents could be blamed, though in many cases it would be totally unclear what they did to contribute to his retardation (wrong food? wrong climate?), and his genes could certainly be blamed. But the fact remains that the condition of mental retardation is not something that we can fairly expect to “convert” Forrest out of.

I hope this analogy is clear enough now.

I’m not saying that this analogy between IQ and homosexuality IS true, but that it COULD BE true, and given the direction of scientific research, seems to be INCREASINGLY true.

OK I think I see your points, and will probably address them over the next 10 or posts in pieces and sallies (changed – if you can please don’t push down this post off the top of your blog!!!)

Regardless of the percentage breakdown of nature vs. nurture, conservative Christians would argue that following through on those impulses is sin because the Bible says so. They would say it’s similar to having urges to murder, steal, or molest children — regardless of how those urges came about (nature vs. nurture), we have a moral duty to resist those urges.

OK I assume this is a statement of braymp, your position. Right?

I find it very curious that conservative Christians (including yourself, on this xanga) spend so much time trying to argue that homosexuality is not ingrained but chosen. They know, as well as I do, that it does indeed matter in the court of conscience whether this is the case. We want to obeying God’s commands AND feel that they are not unjust.

Moreover, you can definitely find Biblical permission, even command, to use your human conscience. I quote Wink again:

Approached from the point of view of the Spirit rather than the letter, the question ceases to be “What does Scripture command?”, and becomes “What is the Word that the Spirit speaks to the churches now, in the light of Scripture, tradition, theology, and, yes, psychology, genetics, anthropology, and biology? We can’t continue to build ethics on the basis of bad science. In a little-remembered statement, Jesus said, “Why do you not judge for yourselves what is right?” (Luke 12:57). Such sovereign freedom strikes terror in the hearts of many Christians’; they would rather be under law and be told what is right. Yet Paul himself echoes Jesus’ sentiment when he says, “Do you not know that we are to judge angels? How much more, matters pertaining to this life!” (1 Cor. 6:3 RSV). The last thing Paul would want is for people to respond to his ethical advice as a new law engraved on tablets of stone. He is himself trying to “judge for himself what is right.” If now new evidence is in on the phenomenon of homosexuality, are we not obligated – no, free – to reevaluate the whole issue in the light of all the available data and decide what is right, under God, for ourselves? Is this not the radical freedom for obedience in which the gospel establishes us?

And my favorite piece of evidence is the allegorical Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil in the Genesis story. Adam and Eve DID eat the fruit of that Tree. It even quotes God as saying as if they had gone on to eat of the Tree of Life, they would have been just like Him.

Genesis 3:22 And the LORD God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever

The second prong of this argument is that Paul was a human being. Human beings make errors, particularly errors that are universal in their time. He was wrong about the proper status of women, he was wrong about when Jesus could be expected to return, and he was wrong, I respectfully submit, about the “unnaturalness” of homosexuality for real homosexuals.

braymp: thanks for joining in on this discussion. I know changed. But you add another very informed and intelligent voice.

I’m not dodging the question — I’m just buying some time as I figure out the best way to construct a response… In the meantime, maybe this issue is distinct enough from homosexuality to start it on a new thread?

“Are you saying that if somehow allegorically eat of the tree of life, then we will be able to judge morality perfectly (fix our compasses)? If so, how does that play out in real life? i.e. Where can I find this tree?”

I’m not saying this at all. It may be astonishing, but the verse is clear that God believed that the Tree of KNowledge gave Adam and Eve the ability to tell right and wrong as clearly as God does. Now, that does not mean that humans have the same ability to hold thmselves to doing what they know is right or refraining from what is wrong, as Paul makes clear in the famous passage about the law of his bodily members. It also doesn’t mean that people can’t purposely neglect right and wrong through inattention, denial, or self-deception, like a McDonald’s executive might when confronted with Supersize Me. But the verse seems absolutely clear that we can generally trust our consciences.

I must make it clear that I do not take an aggressive position on a situation where conscience conflicts will the known will of God. The problem is that the will of God is not clearly known on a vast variety of moral issues, including homosexuality. The only interpretation of the will of God we have here in the Bible is Paul’s statement on it. As for the Old Testament, the Old Covenant rules on homosexuality are not in force, any more than the rule that we should execute homosexuals is or avoid touching a menstruating woman.

Let us also take the great example of the America Civil War as a case in point. There were Christians on both sides of the slavery issue. Indeed, the Southern Christians gave a really hard time to Northern Christian abolitionists because they could point to verses in Paul and other parts of the Bible that condoned slavery. Here is a perfect case where God did indeed leave it up to us to use our consciences.

Ambraham Lincoln knew this very well, hence he gave his great 2nd Inaugural Address, which stated:

Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes.

i am like a great vampire who looks forward to points of argument as if they were juicy victims filled with sweet, nutritious and invigorating blood

Here’s a detailed comparison of conservative and liberal interpretations of the Tree of Knowledge and of the Genesis story generally:

http://www.religioustolerance.org/sin_gene.htm

changed I think I agree with your “pragmatic” view — it sounds very humane and sensible

but maybe the “groupthink” label shouldn’t be derogatory

Critical thought and debate are corrosive to consensus, and communities do depend on some degree of real consensus. If change comes to communities, it will likely be incremental and only periodic and in doses that are manageable, rather than through a really radical and intense questioning and free-for-all over first principles.

So maybe it is best that we have “groupthinkers” to consolidate traditions and communities, with all their warmth, humanity, fervor, certainty, stability, and reassurance, while others serve as “freethinkers” who stand apart, challenge, analyze, probe, modify, and innovate.

I believe that God did make human beings diverse for a good reason, and that is why we have these very different temperaments, two of the most basic being conservative, and revolutionary. These two temperaments are so deeply divided that they see two different almost completely different Jesuses. The conservative sees a Savior from Sin, an Interceder between Man and God, and the reason for the passive and self-abnegating virtues of Faith, Submission, and Forebearance; the revolutionary temperament sees as a revolutionary, an active and reforming spirit, an inspiration for further progress, a rebel, a radical breaker from tradition, an impulse toward the new and the better.

Could God, being aware of the temperamental diversity he created, have intended Jesus to give courage and example to both of these inflections of the human spirit at the same time? In no other religion that I know of, does this internal tension between reform and tradition exist as dramatically as it does in Christianity. Even conservative Christians today, are themselves a product of a revolutionary revolt against Catholicism, a great democratizing revolt based on the invention of the printing press, which put a Bible in every believer’s hands and gave laypeople the literacy and ability to interpret scripture for themselves. This changed the whole nature of the Christian faith, by opening the door to the proliferation of sects and denominations due to the inevitable disagreements that would arise from everyone being equally able to judge what the Bible says and means. This in turn helped give rise to the modern liberal principle of religious toleration. It also made faith a much more personal choice than it was in the middle ages, when people felt free to burn heretics, threaten people with torture to compel a conversion, and buy indulgences to help save the dead.

I think this dialectic will continue. I believe that the vast improvements in our historical knowledge and scholarly and interpretive techniques over the last 400 years, but especially over the last 200 years, has pushed us toward the cusp of another revolution in the character and tenor of Christian faith. But I’m just human so I could very well be wrong. In the end “The Almighty has His own purposes” and we are the players in a great ideological and historical drama we’ve been placed in, just as the Americans were during the Slavery Crisis in the 19th century.