Article Response: Jesus, the church, and homosexuality

One of my facebook friends posted an article to his profile. He usually posts interesting stuff, so I checked it out. I found that the article he'd posted was wrong about a few things.

And see, this is why the Bible talks about those who are willingly ignorant, and those whose eyes are not open so they can't understand. When I read the Bible, I understand it. When they read it, they take the letter of the law and try to explain it—and they generally get it wrong.

{my notes will be italicized in brackets}

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10 Things I Wish The Church Knew About Homosexuality

1. If Jesus did not mention a subject, it cannot be essential to his teachings. {Yes, He did, actually. Consider again that first, Jesus is part of the trinity, and God strictly prohibits homosexuality.}

2. You are not being persecuted when prevented from persecuting others. {Not sure what this sentence means, actually… I think there's a typo. But here's the thing about persecution: If a true and honest Christian meets a homosexual, they aren't going to try and convert them or condemn them. They're going to befriend them. That's what Jesus would have done. The fact that many Christians are not only homophobes but also just avoid homosexuals shows how sin still effects Christians. We aren't perfect: we just know the standard. That doesn't mean we always meet it.}

3. Truth isn’t like wine that gets better with age. It’s more like manna you must recognize wherever you are and whoever you are with. {I'm not sure what this has to do with anything… But I think it's saying that truth is relative, or maybe that sometimes it isn't clear. This is true. This doesn't mean homosexuality is right. This isn't even an argument. I'm sorry, I don't mean to be rude, but seriously? If you're going to write an article about why Christians should accept homosexuals, at least make your points points!}

4. You cannot call it “special rights” when someone asks for the same rights you have. {of course not. But we have the right of marriage and of accepted love because we're doing it the way it was supposed to be done.}

5. It is no longer your personal religious view if you’re bothering someone else. {this is just outright incorrect. My views bother people—that's the way Christianity works. We're the salt of the earth. Ever pour salt on an open wound? Notice how it hurts like hell but it disinfects? That, right there, is Christianity and an example of Christ cleaning our nasty hearts. Our culture has gone beyond tolerance, and has re-defined the term to mean "acceptance." We have the freedom of religion, NOT the "freedom not to be offended or bothered."}

6. Marriage is a civil ceremony, which means it’s a civil right. {Wrong again: Marriage is a Holy covenant with God—even if the couple isn't saved. God created the covenant, and He says "A man shall leave his father and become united with his spouse." "One man and one woman." Those are God's rules for HIS covenant. We'd better respect that. I can't stop you from sleeping together or living together. That's fine. But it isn't marriage. Even if the government says it is: In God's book (and He's the one in charge) all you're doing is fornication.}

7. If how someone stimulates the pubic nerve has become the needle to your moral compass, you are the one who is lost. {I'm sorry, what? how does this relate to anything? did you run out of ideas to make it to ten?}

8. To condemn homosexuality, you must use parts of the Bible you don’t yourself obey. Anyone who obeyed every part of Leviticus would rightly be put in prison. {M'kay. First of all, we aren't under the old law anymore. Old testament, old covenant, old and fulfilled requirements. It's still a sin, but we don't have to do anything about it except love people like Jesus loved them. Second: It's not our job to condemn people. That's not what we do. That's God's job. Third: God doesn't just talk about homosexuality in Leviticus. He talks about it everywhere.}

9. If we do not do the right thing in our day, our grandchildren will look at us with same embarrassment we look at racist grandparents. {This is true! This has nothing to do with your argument, but this is true. "The right thing" is a bit vague, don't you think? My "right thing" would be making homosexual marriage illegal in all states. They can get a "civil union" or a "domestic partnership" or whatever, but it's not marriage. Your "right thing" would probably make it legal. Now I'm not talking about relative truth, just differing opinions.}

10. When Jesus forbade judging, that included you. {Also true. Again, nothing to do with your argument, since God judges homosexuals, and Christians simply love and serve them like they do everyone else.}

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This article annoys the crap out of me, mostly because they try to sound educated and experienced about the Bible, when really they have no idea what they're talking about. If you're going to bash the Bible, at least do your research.

Then again, like I said before. Non-Christians can read the Bible all they want, but unless God opens their eyes, they won't understand it. So I can't blame the writer.

But I still hold to my opinion that it's annoying.

The Bridge to Nowhere

I am doing a French presentation about Nature Writing, so I decided the best way to learn about it was to go do it.

This is the result.

It’s been a long time.

I haven’t written in ages. I’ve been focused on knitting and crocheting, because it makes me money. Writing doesn’t. Yet. Still working on that.

The whole way up here, my mind has been churning—I’ll write about this, and that. What a pretty sound. The grass is so green here.

Now that I’m here, nothing important comes to mind.

It’s a beautiful place: quiet, for a college campus. Probably only because it’s break and there’s only a few dozen people here. There’s a sound of some sort of electrical factory equipment far off in the distance, and every once in a while I hear the chirp of a utility van go by.

I hear the wind approach, like the enemy in the battle, slowly stirring up sound and getting louder as it gets closer. It brushes the leaves and moves the grass before it dances through my hair and tickles my skin.

Where I am is like a pelvis. It’s a bowl-shaped valley, small, but photography tricks could make it look endless because of the shapes of the hills and the positioning of the trees. There is a stone wall surrounding the quarters of the valley—the iliac crest—and stone steps in the middle where the wall joins, leading back up to the real world—the symphosis pubis.

Anatomically, I sit in the sacrum.

It’s a small foot bridge made of stone, a little bit of a slant, and curls connecting the handrail to the stone. Only two feet off the ground at the highest point, it leads from one hill—well, lump—to the other. It doesn’t join anything, it doesn’t protect from anything.

Does it serve a purpose?

Does the tailbone serve a purpose?

The girl who told me about The Bridge to Nowhere is a nutrition major, she said it was near the nutrition building, and that’s all I knew about where it was. I’d lived in Buchanan, one of the dorms in upper campus, for a semester. But I’d never gone to this side of upper campus: I’d had no reason to. Walking up to Buchanan the way I used to made me miss living there. I missed the beauty, the wind, the trees, the solitude, the fifteen minute hike to get to classes. I almost wanted to move back—then I remembered they didn’t have single rooms, private bathrooms, or kitchens. So that idea went out the window.

I found the bridge. {girl}had said she used to go up there and sit and listen to God, and pray. It sounded like a lovely place to explore on a boring windy dark day all alone on campus.

{boy} said the LARPers met here for tournaments and battles, or something. I’d seen some pictures, and I knew it was beautiful, but I didn’t know it was quite this symbolic.

At least, I found it to be symbolic. Symbolic of someone I love.

I was pretty sure nature writing was about looking at God’s creation and trying to see His glory, and power in it. I still think that’s true. Why else write about art but to worship the artist?

But the bridge made me think about trials, hard times, warfare, like {boy}'sLARP battles. Spiritual battles God puts in our lives. Sometimes they don’t look like they’re important, sometimes they look like one more pointless hoop to jump through, one more hill to hike up, one more bridge to cross. They feel like they’re just stupid things that are in our lives for no reason.

But the tailbone is there for a reason. It took us a while to figure out why we have one. It turns out we have ligaments attached to this “useless remains of evolution” and if you didn’t have one, you wouldn’t be able to stand up, sit down, walk, lay down… basically, you couldn’t go anywhere.

Maybe this was a pointless bridge, totally useless to some people, like the people who built it there. They were probably thinking “why in hell are we building a bridge that doesn’t have water or thorns or lava under it?”

But it served as a quiet place for {girl}. A battle field for {boy}.

A man who was betrayed, broken, wrongly accused, thrown in jail, and then forced to remember the unfair sin against him every day for the rest of his life may spend his days trying to understand why he was forced to cross this bridge. And he may never know. But maybe it serves as something higher and better. Maybe it’s a blessing, a lesson, a way to worship God, not to the one who was broken, but to someone else.

Does God do stuff like that?

I heard the rain before I felt it. It fell on the leaves and made a sound a child taking off his swimsuit, and letting the sand from the beach fall into the bathtub or onto the kitchen floor.

I snapped my notebook shut and threw everything into my bag, and headed up the hill towards the symphosis pubis. The steps were obnoxiously steep, and I was out of breath by the time I got up. I sighed at the trees, wishing I could be as beautiful as them in their death. I started the long walk back down to my dorm.

I stopped to pick some little purple flowers, and then went into a café I’d never been to before. Now I sit in a window seat eating a pastry and sipping a bad latte, waiting for my Love to text me, telling me he’s finally here on campus after two months of not seeing each other, to see me, to hold me, to kiss me, to remind me of the Glory and fulfilled promises of my highest Father.

I will take him to The Bridge to Nowhere, to the tailbone of the valley, and maybe he’ll remember that sometimes things that seem pointless really serve a greater purpose—if only for future joy.

Homosexuality from a Berean's perspective

BTW, Berean is a term from Acts 17, where the church in Berea was congratulated because they tested everything they were being taught against what they knew was true from the old testiment. I consider myself non-denominational, but also a Berean, because I test everything I hear against what I know to be true.

This is a nerdfighter video. I would ask you please watch it before reading the post. There are some weird sexual facts about bed bugs (awkward…) but I'd like you to watch it not only because it's interesting and funny, but it brings up a good point.

you can skip it if you really want, and my post will, hopefully, still make sense.

(note: I'd say this is for ages 16+)

 

My response:

It's interesting to me to see a non-Christian's perspective on homosexuality. Hank made this video for National Coming Out Day.

Sexual orientation is different than personality. One of the misconceptions poor Hank had was that since his personality mixed well with girls but he didn't have crushes on them, maybe his sexual orientation matched theirs, since his personality matched theirs.

I really like knives and violent movies. I like hanging out with guys. I write crime thrillers about kick-ass guys (and girls) who blow things up. Am I attracted to women because most of the time it's men who like movies like that? absolutely not. My Sis has mostly guy friends… I think she has three girlfriends total, and she's friends with them mostly because I am (Victory, her sister, and a girl in the state we used to live in). Does that mean our sexual orientations are closer on the scale of Male than of Female? I'd beg to differ. Our personalities might be, but sexual orientation is a totally different scale, and it's not really a scale at all. It's a box, and it's determined by your DNA and your anatomy. Again, some people get confused by their personality, but that doesn't determine your sexuality.

A lot of people say they "knew they were gay" or "were born this way," but science has shown us that when we really get to the bottom of homosexuality, it's usually because of a bad experience, or confusion, such as Hank's confusion, or the confusion of my character in my book. my character decides that she hates guys because they're mean, so if she hates guys, she MUST like girls! it made sense to a little kid at the time. when she falls in love with a guy in high school, she get's REALLY confused.   sometimes but not always, someone will be confused because of sexual abuse as a child. Nobody is born gay. They are born male or female.

Now: do I have a problem with gay people? am I condemning them to hell? do I hate them? let me answer each one.

Do I have a problem with them? Define problem. I have a lot of homosexual friends. They are great friends to me. Some of my ballet students are gay. Some of my writing friends are lesbians. I write a novel about a girl who thinks she is a lesbian (email me if you're curious, because I'm not going to write about the book on this blog). Now: I have a problem with homosexuality itself. not the people, but the sin. It's disgusting. it makes me sad. it's against God's commands and it's against nature.

(if you disagree with me about it being against nature and tell me "almost every other species has homosexuality," my only argument is "every other species can still reproduce from homosexuality. they don't do it because they're confused, they do it because it's part of their survival. if two males can't have sex and have a baby, or two females can't have sex and have a baby, it's against nature.)

Also: It doesn't matter if I have a problem with it or not, because I'm not God (more on that below). God is the one who created us, God is the one who rules this universe and all of creation. If God is the one who has a problem with it, I would be smart if I were you and do what He says.

Second question: Am I condemning them to hell? no, I'm not. I'm not God. I'm a Christian, but I'm not God. Again, I hate the sin, not the people. My job on earth is to glorify God, enjoy Him forever, and go into all the world and preach the gospel and make disciples. My job is to love my neighbor as myself. My job is to trust and obey. You've heard it all before, but that's really what it boils down to. Take my life and let it be, ever only all for thee. My job is not telling people who is going to hell because of what they're doing. THAT IS GOD'S JOB. seriously. God is the one who says "You're disobeying me, you're in sin, you need my help, you need to come to me." God is the one who says "Take up your cross and follow me." God is the one who may say "Depart from me, I never knew you." (scariest words in the Bible, btw.) Condemning is not my job.

Third: Do I hate them? No. Based on everything you just read, do you think I hate them? Of course not. Again, I have homosexual friends. I don't hate them. I pray for them and I love them and I try to show them that true followers of Christ don't hate/condemn them, but that really we're no different than them.

That's right, I said it. Christians are no different than homosexuals. When it all boils down to it, we're all humans, we're all sinners, we're all separated from Christ. The only difference is Christians are redeemed, and homosexuals are not. But neither are serial killers. neither are drug addicts. neither are rapists. let's get a little dirtier: neither is your second grade math teacher who didn't believe in Jesus, but didn't tell you not to believe in Him either. neither is a Muslim or Buddhist. neither is a Catholic who believes they're going to heaven because they say Hail Mary's. (I'll write about my beliefs on Catholics another day, but in a nutshell: I believe some Catholics are saved, and some are not.) we're all dead, but Christ makes us alive.

Sin is sin. There are no degrees of sin. If my mom tells me I can have two and only two cookies, and I take three, that's sin. If I sleep with another woman, that's sin. It's the same word, it's the same meaning. I know it's a huge difference to us, but it's still sin to God, and He's the one who makes the rules, and I have no right to say any different. THAT right there is why I can't hate homosexuals: because they sin just like I do, their sin is no worse than mine, they are no different than me.

And I am commanded to love everyone as I love myself. Hopefully I love others more than I love myself.

Also: that amazing video that will BLOW YOUR MIND really is amazing. I kinda want to know the answer to the mystery!!! and I want to watch more videos by him.

Question for you:

Would you like more video response posts? And, was this absurdly long and did you skip it because I'm pathetic and long winded (or you were busy)?