The bible and homosexuality: Round 3

Masturbating by yourself is safer than oral sex between two lesbians.
You had to ask and I just felt it was my responsibility to answer. I hope I've satisfied your curiosity. lfen

Phat,Let's get back to the real old time religion, none of this modern watered down stuff. Let's you and I go out and burn some lambs and buy some slaves and stone to death some adulters!!I wish I could write like Mark Twain. He has written some very funny yet right on criticism of this unthinking attitude of religion: I think it's fine if you have a religion that makes you happy and loving, but not if it means you give up thinking! The ancients who wrote the various books that are assembled in the Bible have been improved upon. And I for one am grateful for churches that try to go forward rather than backwards.lfen

The organism at birth is the result of genetic and prenatal influences. Quite a bit of research has been done on the influence of hormones on the developing foteus and how that affects brain sex. This is still work in progress but it does appear that some transexuals for example have brains that are of different gender functioning than the genitals would indicate.You are right though that this is a complex area particularly as we've not factored in bisexuality. To me it is clear we are dealing with a continuum not an either/or situation. That being said I believe these are choices individuals should make for themselves. This is so ignorant, offensive, and well so dumb. You do a better job than any atheist on this forum of providing arguments why the Bible is bad. A woman could be threatened into silence. One fear response is to go numb and paralysed. A woman could be too inhibited and confused to scream. What the Bible seems to say is that a woman must scream or face the death penalty. This was not justice and no amount of lame apologetic rationalizations is going to excuse the sheer primativeness of much of these laws. Frankly, I'm disgusted that you attempt to palm this off on God. It's clearly primitive jurisprudence. There were improvements over Hamurabi and earlier codes but that doesn't make it God's law.I understand you want to believe you have a book from God and that God is good and so everything in the book is true. This is embracing childish nonsense and supersition and leads you into all sorts of silly rationalizations. Grow up, start thinking and studying the world, history, science and realize that the fundamentalist inerrant position is childish, stupid, wrong, and leads to the kinds of tortured illogical things that you are posting in this thread.I write this not in hatred of you but in righteous anger that you will not think but instead have to warp everything to support your emotional investment in taking a primitive book literally.Grow up.lfen

Ah, when you put it that way the justice is quite clear. um??? but I've forgotten, since it's so just, why aren't we currently stoning women who are raped and don't scream???? Probably because we don't listen to the Bible and love God enough. We have so slacked off from righteousness. I'm ashamed to admit that I've never done my duty and stoned anyone to death. Guess I'll just have to go hell for my lack of righteousness.lfen

Don't bet, you'd lose. I feel sad, disappointed, outraged and disgusted. None of those is what I feel when I feel great. It is possible to believe in divinity without believing literally everything in the Bible. And reading your arguments rubs my face in how far the emotional irrationality of inerrancy will take someone.lfen

Your argument is that law wasn't literal?????
People weren't to take rocks and batter the victim with them until they died of their injuries? What do you hold the Bible meant went it says "stoned" then? Is it meant like in Dylan's song "Everyone must get stoned"?I know someone on the losing end of a divorce settlement may feel like they have been dealt an injustice, but they are alive, they are not physically harmed. You've not even addressed the issues of what if the woman had children?lfen

I wrote: And RR replied: Believing in a world wide flood in the face of all the geological, historical, scientific evidence to the contrary is just silly indulgence in wishful thinking. Okay, I'd rather people didn't do that but no biggee if they do.However to believe that a rape victim should be stoned if she doens't respond in a specific way is a law God gave to the Jews goes beyond a silly indulgence to something that is a willingness to conform to authority, and that I find very disturbing. It's what good Germans did with Hitler and is based on the same basis that virtue involves unthinking obediance to authority. It was at this point that I felt my previous indulgent attitude towards inerrancy had brought me to the point you were rubbing my face in how much injustice ineranncy will contenance, whether the victim is a rape victim or a homosexual the Bible is used as a basis to support horrendous acts. I'm not saying you would do it, but there are homophobes, racists, sexist out there who are to one degree or another supported by the attitudes of religous fundamentalist to act in ways that people did act 2000 years ago. We have made some improvements and to claim those old ways were the request of God is repulsive to me.lfen

RR,You are speaking of emotional suffering and it sounds possibly of depression. There are two inter relating sources of that suffering that is a response to an event in life. One is a cognitive evaluation that leads you to believe it's terrible and unfair and unbearable. The other is a brain chemical shift that leads to prolonged suffering.I'm going to recommend a book to you, or any by the psychotherapist Albert Ellis, but this is very readable:How to stubbornly refuse to make yourself miserable about anything--yes, anything! BookAuthor: Ellis, Albert.
Publisher, Date: Secaucus, N.J. : L. Stuart, c1988.
ISBN: 0818404566 - Description: 215 p.The thing is what you've said here seems to come from these assumptions:Emotional suffering is more painful than being stoned therefore death by stoning is a mercy compared to living with emotional pain.A rape victim should be stoned because death through stoning will result in less suffering than if she lives with emotional suffering,This is a logical error that can be described as a clinical thought disorder and it can be typical of depression or the kinds of thinking that leads to depression.lfen

I put the emphasis on "One way is throught the bible". Are you acknowledging that there are other ways and traditions to knowing God?The Bible like all things can be used for good or evil or neutral purpose. What I strongly object to is the proposition that the bible is the inerrant word of the source of the universe. Attempting to maintain that false belief leads to being forced to make convulted rationalizations for abandoned cultural mores and laws. Primitive patriarch societies had some inhumanely severe practises and the priests of the culture and those implementing those practises often claimed to be doing the will of the God(s). I criticise those who promulgate this base notion of literalness. I criticise you for accepting it without doing reading and research in other fields.Believe in God and use that belief to improve yours and others life but be reasonable about it. You've given a long rambling rant that boils down to your belief that modern society is worse than ancient Jewish society. You've thought about this? It seems like the prophets were complaining about much of the same things in their day as you are complaining of. There were good and evil people then as now.You write of suffering. I think Buddhism addresses the problem of human suffering more effectively than Christianity does, but I also think Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy does a better job also. However, Christianity is far more wide spread in the west, it's very accessible and perhaps generally less demanding. You go to church, pray, and believe that after we are all dead God will make it all better. If that works for you then fine. But there isn't any need to use your religious beliefs to condemn or persecute others. Certainly in the history of the USA native Americans, African Americans, Jews,and homosexuals and other non christian groups have been far more persecuted than Christians, and often it was Christians doing the persecuting. I've admiration for the Quakers because they put everything on the line to HELP, not persecute, but simple HELP fellow humans who had been subject to slavery to gain freedom in Canada, while there where Christian pulpits in this country preaching on the bibical rightness of slavery.There is much about modern life I don't like. I don't even own a t.v. which spares me much annoyance. But we have a greater problem from over population than we do with to many people dying.My suggestion to you is to read some books on how to rationally managed your thinking and emotions. There are most likely some adaptions of these practises by Christian therapists even. But you are confounding your various emotional distresses and your beliefs until they make little sense at all except to communicate that you are upset.lfen

Not sure what you mean. The suffering of days gone by is a memory only, but we can suffer from memories in the present.Making a distinction between pain as a present nerve sensation, and suffering as the pain we feel mentally than in once sense most if not all suffering comes from memories, or better how we construe our memories.lfen