Homosexuality and Religion

[lavendersparkle]

When I was chatting to Alec last night he told me about what he'd been up to that day, most of which had been spent preparing for a youth group he's leading this evening. he took a long time preparing it because he hasn't met this youth group before and because he was given a topic rather than a Bible verse. His topic is freedom and he's going to be studying the song of Zechariah, prophesies about what the messiah would be like and Paul's explanation of what the messiah was. Part of the song of Zechariah talks about being able to serve G@d without fear so Alec was looking through examples of people who were in some way not respectable who approached Jesus i.e. the Samaritan woman. One of the people he was looking at was the centurion who asked for healing for his son/slave/servant/friend/lover (isn't Greek a wonderfully ambiguous language).

This lead Alec into reading lots of online exegesis claiming that this story said showed the Jesus didn't think gay sex was wrong. There seem to be a number of problems with this exegesis:

1) It's not clear from the text that the centurion is actually in a gay relationship. The word used to describe their relationship could mean servant or slave or friend. It could mean boyfriend but it could not.

2) Even if the sick man were the in a sexual relationship with the centurion what does Jesus healing him show? That Jesus thought people shouldn't be excluded from medical care because they've had gay sex? I hope even the most conservative of Christians would agree with this. The Gospels describe Jesus healing lots of people, all of whom were sinners. This doesn't imply that he tacitly approved of all of their sins.

I think this points to a wider problem with a lot of Christian and Jewish justifications for why gay sex is allowed even though the Bible might seem to say that it isn't. I have heard several of these explanations put forward again and again:

1) Before {pick date of your choice between 0CE and today} there were no consensual, mutual homosexual relationships. All homosexual relationships in that time were abusive and about domination so when the Bible says 'don't lie with a man' it means 'don't have an abusive relationship with a man'.

There a couple of problems with this. Firstly, what evidence is there that mutual consensual gay relationships were invented at {insert date here}. Call me a hopeless romantic but I think it's quite likely that there have been consensual mutual gay relationships since time immemorial. Just look at the story of David and Jonathan. You can't have them as the poster boys of 'G@d loves gays' and then claim that Paul disapproved of gay sex because it was always abusive. Secondly, what about heterosexual relationships? Surely they have always been far more likely than gay relationships to be abusive because the scriptures were written in patriarchal and sexist societies. If G@d was so concerned about power imbalances, why prohibit gay sex but not heterosexual sex? Surely that's the wrong way around unless we're willing to say that the Bible is pretty much saying it's OK to rape women but not men because women are in some way second class citizens.

2) When the piece of scripture was written, gay prostitution was a really common way of worshipping the pagan gods so when it says 'don't lie with a man' it means 'don't engage in elaborate idolatrous rituals that just happen to involve ritualistic gay sex'.

This seems to be a slightly better line of attack. There are quite a few Torah prohibitions which seem to possibly be trying to prevent practices associated with idolatry, e.g. cooking a kid goat in it's mothers milk, marking the skin with tattoos or scars. However, even if we think that's might be the root of them, most Jews err on the safe side and still don't get tattoos or boils kid goats in their mother's milk because there may be other reasons for these commands that still hold today, such as compassion for animals and acknowledgment that one's body belongs to G@d. This line of attack works better for Christians who quite happily pick and choose which bits of the Torah apply to them and which don't. A greater problem is again, is there any evidence that big gay orgies were a regular part of religious practice in Ancient Egypt or Palestine. I have heard this claim again and again from religious liberals but never from and Egyptologist. Surely if you discovered evidence of the big gay orgy cult you'd be write some nice salacious popular history books about it and definitely get a Channel 4 documentary with tasteful, not at all for titillation, reconstructions of said gay orgies.

3) If we love each other and it doesn't hurt anyone else then it must be good.

I know I'm on slippery ground with this one as I'm dating someone my co-religionists would definitely say I shouldn't be in a relationship with and it would be quite easy to interpret Paul to say that Alec shouldn't be dating me. However, let's just look at the logical consequences of this idea. There are an awful lot of prohibited sexual relationships in Judaism some of which are retained by Christianity. Under the 'mutual love is enough' argument we would allow: cohenim marrying converts and divorcees, mumzirim marrying non-mumzer Jews by birth, marrying out, and incest. Depending upon what stream you're in you might be OK with some of those relationships but I've yet to hear a liberal Christian or Jew advocate tolerance of incest. If 'love is enough' what argument is there against incest that doesn't amount to 'urgh, it's just wrong innit' or depend upon eugenic arguments.

I'm not saying that I think gay sex is wrong. I'm saying could we please come up with some better justifications that aren't full of more holes than a swiss cheese.

Comments

[wildeabandon.livejournal.com]

As a datapoint, I'm a liberal Christian who advocates tolerance of intra-generational incest.

[naath.livejournal.com]

Incest> I think the most useful reason to make incest not allowed is that there is an enormous potential for abuse. I'm not against consensual incest, but I do think that it can be tricky to decide whether consent exists.

The rules about what sort of Jew certain sorts of Jew might marry - I don't really understand them, but if someone in one of those categories were to say "stuff this, I'm going to marry this Hindu that I am in love with" would they be chucked out of "being Jewish" or would they just have some sort of rank taken away from them? Is there really some argument that in order to properly shepherd your Jewish 'congregation' you need to be married to someone else who is going to help with that (and what's up with converts not being Jewish enough?).

[lavendersparkle.livejournal.com]

It's impossible to stop being Jewish even if you marry a Hindu, or for that matter a Church of England ordinand.

The rules in Judaism aren't enforced, you follow them because you think they are the Right Thing to Do. As with anything, there may be informal social sanctions if you don't follow the rules but, depending upon what jewish communities you move in, even those can be pretty weak and can be avoided by keeping what you're doing secret. For most Christians and Jews there isn't much of a Big Brother (other than G@d) checking what they're doing. For example, no one's checking whether Alec and I have sex, most of our friends probably think we're already at it like rabbits, but it's important to Alec to try to work out whether G@d wants him to have sex. Similarly, many gay Christians and Jews want to come to an honest opinion about whether G@d wants them to have sex and try to follow it. I think this is something that non-religious people sometimes have trouble understanding.

This isn't so true with clergy. Currently CofE clergy have to agree to follow the Windsor report that says that clergy are allowed to have same sex partners as long as the a celebate (a leave exactly what that means open to interpretation). CofE clergy are allowed to have non-Christian partners but have to get special permissio to marry a divorcee.

Currently there are no rabbinic colleges that will accept candidates with non-Jewish partners. Generally most rabbinic colleges expect their students to abide by roughly what their movement thinks a Good Jew should be doing, presumably because their supposed to be setting an example.

I think you've got mixed up between rabbis and cohenim. Rabbis are the people shepherding congregations. Cohenim are the people who would be preists in the temple if we still had a temple. I think the rules about who cohens can marry are mainly based upon some kind of idea that cohens should only marry virgins and divorcees and converts are assumed to not be virgins.

[naath.livejournal.com]

think you've got mixed up between rabbis and cohenim

Ah, yes I was. Whups - thanks for explaining.

It's all very complicated, I'm glad I don't think I need to follow such rules; obviously you have to make your own personal choice about whether you follow those rules - I only get annoyed about them when people tell me *I* should follow them too.

[robhu.livejournal.com]

Sorry, this is a complete aside, but...

Why don't the Jews build a new temple, and isn't it fairly important that they have a temple (which they haven't had for quite a long time)?

[lavendersparkle.livejournal.com]

I don't think the Muslims would appreciate us demolishing the Dome of the Rock to make room for it.

In more extended form, since the destruction of the second temple Jews hae never been in control of the land that the temple has to stand on (temple mount), or at least never been in enough of control of it to be able to do what they wanted with it without causing a huge war that would kill a sizable chunk of the world Jewish population. Even if we did control the land and could build on it without upsetting a few billion people, I think a lot of the details about how exactly to build the temple and run things within it, have been lost in the mists of time. Due to these problems, most Jews who believe that the temple will be rebuilt think that it will only be rebuilt when the messiah comes, there's world peace and everyone realises that we were right all along so they don't mind us rebuilding the temple.

We've managed quite well for nearly two millenia without a temple. Quite a lot of Jews aren't actually that keen on having another one, particularly if it involves animal sacrifices.

[robhu.livejournal.com]

(I have been reading stuff about this for the last 30 minutes but I'm not getting anywhere)

Why can't you build it elsewhere? Wouldn't a temple elsewhere be better than no temple at all?

What are the worst case consequences of not having the temple?

The animal sacrifices thing is odd, surely if you're commanded to do so by your deity you ought to do it, and you ought to consider such sacrifices to be morally OK.

[lethargic-man.livejournal.com]

Why can't you build it elsewhere? Wouldn't a temple elsewhere be better than no temple at all?

Deuteronomy is heavily in favour (http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=deuteronomy%2012;&version=31;) of centralised worship. The Davidic dynasty invested a lot of effort in making the place of that centralisation Jerusalem. After centuries of this, it became unthinkable for it to be anywhere else; it's one of the four holy cities of Judaism.

What are the worst case consequences of not having the temple?

Business as usual. :o) Whilst it's important to Orthodox Judaism that there is a Temple, there are also injunctions in the Talmud against trying to reverse the Exile and bringing the Messiah (both of which are linked with the building of the Temple) by force. (Historically, this was because the last time the Jews had tried to do so, in the Bar Kochba revolt, it had resulted in hundreds of thousands of Jews being killed, and vast numbers more being carried off into slavery by the Romans; however, Judaism subsequently retconned theological reasons for not forcing the end of days.)

The animal sacrifices thing is odd, surely if you're commanded to do so by your deity you ought to do it, and you ought to consider such sacrifices to be morally OK.

The thing is, some Jews, including the notable mediaeval commentator Maimonides (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maimonides), consider that sacrifices were never necessary to the worship of G-d, but were rather a sop to a people not ready for a religion without. Now religion based on prayer rather than sacrifices is normal, to reinstate them would be a backward step.

But in any case, Judaism is not, and has never been, bound by the literal word of the Bible. The Torah, for example, mandates capital punishment; but the rabbis of antiquity legislated it out of effective existence. As Rabbi Jeremy Gordon puts it, they were passionately in favour of the existence of the death penalty, and passionately against its practice.

[lethargic-man.livejournal.com]

It's impossible to stop being Jewish even if you marry a Hindu, or for that matter a Church of England ordinand.

Or even if you become the Bishop of Birmingham. :o)

I think the rules about who cohens can marry are mainly based upon some kind of idea that cohens should only marry virgins and divorcees and converts are assumed to not be virgins.

Cohanim can marry converts; it's only the Cohen Gadol who can't. (Also, cohanim are not forbidden from marrying non-virgins, but זוֹנוֹת—a distinction of more than theoretical interest to me (and which I shan't lecture you about any more, since you were sitting next to me at the appropriate talk (http://lethargic-man.livejournal.com/123785.html) :o)).)

[lavendersparkle.livejournal.com]

I shall bow to your superior knowledge as you were awake and diligently taking notes.

[curious-reader.livejournal.com]

Incest has been proven as dangerous for the children who might be born out of that relationship because they might have inherited diseases like those who can't stop bleeding. The Royal families already proofed it. Even 1st cousin's is nowadays incestrial (but not according to the Bible).

The problem with the prohibition of Jewish intermarriage is often that reason that the Rabbi's are concerned that the person who intermarries looses his/her identity. If the mother is not Jewish or does not convert her children won't be Jewish. The mother is more important as you can be sure who gave birth to the child but not who gave the sperm.

[naath.livejournal.com]

Diseases that are caused by recessive genes are more likely in the children of closely related people - this is true.

HOWEVER:
1)you could have you DNA screened for such dangerous genes.
2)you could just not have children
3)non-incestuous couples can still share recessive genes

The point about the children of a non-Jewish mother not being considered Jewish is one that goes some way to explaining why certain Jewish men must marry Jewish women - that does make some sense.

[emperor]

You might be interested in "A Question of Truth", where the author deals with the Roman Catholic Church's position on homosexuality.

[cesy.livejournal.com]

Well said.
I'm still waiting for one of those many people who believe that "If it doesn't hurt anyone, it's fine" yet "incest is still wrong" to give me a logical reason.

[rjw76]

While I do not subscribe to the view you have outlined above, the risk of accidental pregnancy becomes rather more important if there is a much higher chance of the child having some of the genetic problems associated with sibling mating.

I realise this doesn't cover incest between people who for whatever reason couldn't have children. It's just.. something to consider.

[lavendersparkle.livejournal.com]

I think a problem with that argument is that we don't generally think it should be illegal for two people to have sex if they are both carriers of a horrible genetic disease. We don't think that people who have horrible non-recessive genetic diseases should be oblidged to never have potentially procreative sex or be sterilised. You could make an argument that conceiving a child that you knew to be at high risk of having a genetic disease would be immoral. However, I don't think that very rare parenting between close relatives would be that likely to result in children with genetic problems unless the parents had a particular genetic problem to begin with.

[oedipamaas49.livejournal.com]

I would say the power differential between parents and children is so large that consent isn't possible. Maybe not necessarily between siblings, but even there I'd say there's enough of an imbalance of power to make incest a really bad idea.

To put it differently: I can conceive of situations where consensual incest would be possible, but I reckon they're outnumbered by cases where it would involve coercion.

I'm not sure how much that's just me rationalising being squicked by the idea, though.

[lavendersparkle.livejournal.com]

What about if a man had been completely uninvolved in his daughters unbringing? If you're strangers who just happen to be genetically related do the power dynamic problems still apply?

From what I've heard, consensual incestuous relationships tend to be between people who did not know each other when they were growing up. Humans seem to have an instinct against being sexually attracted to their close social family. I've heard of cases of people who were half siblings marrying and then discovering that they have a shared father.

I still think that if the problem is power dynamics, surely we should have laws against rape, child abuse and domestic abuse rather than against things that may be statistically correlated with them.

[naath.livejournal.com]

Humans have (apparently) an instinct against being sexually attracted to the people they were raised with - whether actually related or not. But, at the same time, an instinct to mate with people with similar genetics. Which suggests that ending up with the sibling you never knew you had if you meet them later in life is, er, more likely than some people think it ought to be.

[weebleflip.livejournal.com]

I'd assume the major response would be, "incest hurts potential children". As rjw76 commented, this doesn't apply to couples who can't have children. Various surveys claim to have shown that most incestuous relationships are abusive. Whilst this will be heavily skewed by the fact that abusive ones are more often brought to light, protection of children too young/too obedient to parent to say no would probably be another major argument in favor of incest being classed as wrong.
~KT

[lavendersparkle.livejournal.com]

protection of children too young/too obedient to parent to say no would probably be another major argument in favor of incest being classed as wrong.

Surely this is an argument for making sex with a minor illegal or coercive sex illegal.

[oedipamaas49.livejournal.com]

I'm not convinced there are better reasons, beyond 'being nice to people is more important than being a good Jew/Christian'. if you find any, post them!

[lavendersparkle.livejournal.com]

I've heard better reasons.

1) Is that the Bible is divinely inspired but not infallible. Therefore when one finds a a part that appears to be immoral one may question whether it is really what G@d wants or the product of an imperfect author.

2) Another, mainly Jewish, approach is to ask what exactly 'lie with a man as with a woman' means. Some Jewish opinions have come to the conclusion that it only refers to some sexual acts between men and therefore some other sexual acts are permitted.

3) Some people have argued from experience that they experience their physical relationship with their partner of the same sex as a holy on an instinctual/mystical/spiritual level and therefore conclude that it must be permitted even if they don't understand how that fits in with the Bible.

4) I can't find it now but I think Andrew Wrilstone (http://andrewrilstone.blogspot.com/) wrote something about it talking quite persuasively about what criteria Christians should use to reject some Biblical rules.

[nameandnature]

wrt 4, Rilstone's old sites which contained most of his essays are currently down. You might be thinking of The Ballad of Reading Diocese, which archive.org luckily has a copy of. Rilstone ends up sounding a bit depressed by the choice between the National God Service liberals who are making up as they go along, and the New English Reformed Denomination evangelicals who really believe this stuff but as a consequence think that God hates fags (or, more correctly, faggotry, I suppose: hate the sin love the sinner and all that).

[lavendersparkle.livejournal.com]

Yes, that's the one.

[oedipamaas49.livejournal.com]

ooh, I shall hunt down Rilstone. Everything I've read by him has been fantastic, so even going through his archives should be fun

[cesy.livejournal.com]

Surely, "being nice to people is an important part of being a good Jew/Christian" as well? Also, believing that something someone does is morally wrong doesn't stop you being nice to them.

[amyheartssiroc.livejournal.com]

I heard recently a Muslim explanation of "homosexuality is an abomination" which began with, "Well, it depends on what you mean by abomination..."

Personally I'm just happy when people try to explain things rather than just "I don't like this so I'm going to ignore it."

[mummyfrances.livejournal.com]

I will be emailing ytou a copy of my dissertation when it is finished then.....

Incidentally, I think I may have met conservative "Christians" who believe gay people should not have medical care. At least, the rest of their shit leads me to believe they would think that.

I don't know much (actually, anything) about the Egyptians, but I can point you to at least one cult (if I could only remember the bloody name... I will get back to you on that bit) from ancient Rome with mass gay orgies and so on. The reason they are not shouting them out from the hills is becuase in the land of Classics, orgies are old news: sorry.

:)

[chess]

I don't think there is any sound argument against incest which does not depend either on eugenics arguments or power imbalance arguments (the latter obviously being invalidated in the siblings-separated-at-birth case).

The main reason I can see for not advocating incest (or, indeed, gay relationships, or women's rights) is the 'be above reproach in your society wherever possible' argument - that Christians (and presumably Jews, although I haven't studied that one as much) should not do anything which would bring them opprobrium from the people around them unless they are obliged to do that thing by a moral imperative, as opposed to just wanting to do that thing for their own comfort. In Christianity this is explicitly framed as being for the purpose of making people more likely to convert. (It's been a while since I looked into this, but ISTR that it's all in the Letters somewhere.)

[nameandnature]

This line of attack works better for Christians who quite happily pick and choose which bits of the Torah apply to them and which don't.

If they want to claim to be Bible-believing Christians, they can do this with some Biblical justification: the Council of Jerusalem recorded in Acts 15 gives Gentile Christians a lot of latitude, but does prohibit sexual immorality (or "fornication" as the KJV puts it). So Christians could argue that the Torah's prohibitions on homosexuality were part of the sexual immorality rules while still eating pork without inconsistency (but not while eating black pudding, I hope you noticed). In the NT, Paul's letters have their own passages which can be taken to prohibit at least some forms of homosexuality, but like the OT passages, there are arguments about the cultural context.

My water-tight justification for the claim God doesn't say that homosexuality isn't intrinsically immoral is that God isn't real. This shortcuts a lot of arguments about what we can and cannot justify from the scriptures, I find.

[gaytheist1.livejournal.com]

It's been a while, but wasn't there something about Jesus saying he wasn't invalidating the law of Moses? Wouldn't that keep Christians, if they were really "strictly bible believing" from eating pork and other such things?

[nameandnature]

You're thinking of Matt 5:17-20. I'm not an expert on the early church, but I think what happened is that the early Christians were still observant Jews (which at that point meant involvement in the Jewish sacrificial system, as we're pre-70 AD and the Roman destruction of the Temple, so Judaism looked quite different to how it does today).

In the book of Acts, which is Luke's sequel to his gospel detailing what happened after Jesus had left, you can read about the Christians getting converts who were god-fearers (Gentiles sympathetic to Jewish thought) and just plain Gentiles. The apostle Paul founded a lot of Gentile churches, and it looks like he was telling them that if you're a Gentile, you don't need to become Jewish to follow Jesus. Some of the Jewish Christians gave conflicting advice to Paul's to some of the Gentile Christians, so you get letters like Galatians where Paul tells Gentiles that if they allow themselves to be circumcised "Christ will be of no value to you at all" (he also famously says he wishes the Jewish Christians who've been saying this would go the whole way and cut their dicks off).

Anyway, at some point (I'm not sure whether it's before or after Paul writes to the Galatians) there's a summit meeting in Jerusalem (where the Jewish Christian church is), and, if you believe Luke, they agree that the Gentile Christians don't need to keep the whole Law, only the really important bits.

[gaytheist1.livejournal.com]

(Stepping in from abortiondebate) 'ello. Opposite side of the isle, but hey, can't agree on everything.


Right, so, the incest thing. When a child grows up, his/her family is, obviously, a big part of what forms that child into an adult. If a parent or sibling, who had something to do with that child's upbringing, proceeds to have a sexual relationship with that person, it has an incredibly huge power imbalence. From day one, the child was groomed to be a potential sexual partner of the older people in his/her life.

For this reason, I have much more of a problem with sexual relationships between close relatives by adoption than I do with the same relation through blood.

Honestly, while it makes my stomach churn to imagine a brother and sister, even seperately raised, together, I can't see a justification to make them stop. It's not my right to chose for them. They should, however, as an ethical, but not legal obligation, submit to genetic screening as a debt to their potential children. If the pair is gay, or otherwise unable to concieve together, well, that's entirely their business and they carry no responsibility of any kind to anyone else about it.

[lavendersparkle.livejournal.com]

Welcome to my little bit of the internet.

At first I read your user name as gay theist, but then reading your blog corrected me. I've got quite a few queer people reading this blog and quite a few atheists and I was about to say that you were the first queer atheist but then I remembered the lovely naath.

I hope you find my blog interesting and don't get too bored by the wedding planning which will doubtless infest it over the next eight months.

Just for my own curiosity and ego, what made you look over from abortiondebate?

[gaytheist1.livejournal.com]

It's pretty interesting so far.

The idea of conversion has always fascinated me. As a kid, I was raised to be a believer, and the argument was always set up as "there are good Christians" and there are, basically, atheists and atheists who dress themselves in Christian clothing.

Of course, the more I grew, the more my mind went against the training, and though it has sometimes been difficult to override the programming in my daily life, do it anyway. I can't imagine what that override must be like when a person adopts a new religion entirely, rather than just discarding one. It's pretty fascinating to me.

Wedding plans are usually boring, but in your case, it seems an interesting problem to set up. In most of the interfaith couples I've seen, at least one of the pair is essentially non-practicing in whatever religion they are, so the main issue is more about the incorporation of cultural rituals. You and your gentleman, I gather, are quite active in your respective belief systems, so this one is quite a bit more complicated. The fact that you're a convert only makes it more so, I should think, because it's such a public and defining event, and consequently, has to be Jewish enough to "prove you were serious" and yet, Christian enough to include your husband-to-be as more than an accessory after the fact.

I looked over here because I saw something about Jewish law, and was genuinely suprised to find a Jewish pro-lifer, and certainly a Jewish, feminist pro-lifer. Identities that seem to be contradictions (but aren't really) fascinate me.