Why do Christians like to fixate so much on homosexuality?

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@ Philologos, could you please edit your quote tags?

I would if I could. I hit the quote, the whole thing comes in, I get to choose either let the post grow to six pages long like some people I know do with email exchanges or else cut bits out and have it look lousy.

Hang on a bit, I will see can I edit a more legible version in Word.

The above passages apply solely to Israelites, Jews and Samaritans



You're quoting from King James. Another translation of Deuteronomy 23:17 reads



It would be acceptable for an Israelite woman to become a prostitute--just not at a church, where prostitution was a part of the ritual.

As far as I can tell, they feel sure that it's about the sexual conduct/stigma they see, and how 'correct' this one person, or that one person is "supposed to be" for them. I think culture is a really big feeder of this, because it brings different things out of different people. Yeah, the homosexual thing is really looked at alot these days, and people who prefer to be ignorant are of course going to try to stay there.

I've seen plenty of ignorance about various groups in Church of Christ churches. (pick one.) It's ok to enough Christians, that so and so behind a podium quotes some verse, then compares it like he does. I've noticed that my Christian fundamentalist mother, will literaly, and deliberatly make him correct in her head many times. Never mind knowing the details of the other group in question for most of these people. My mother's mind is a little more open than some. If it wasn't, she would be an ignorant racist, who let herself stay one because it "felt smart".

Any time it's discussed with such people, they immediatly think "oh NO. (person here) is sleeping around with.. (often with no proof or mentioned partner) They'll screw anyone that's..... " You'd think there were no biological mechanisms at all, and just an attitude like "ok. I think I will wake up and just be a battered, disowned gay today!" It's what they learned through life, and it's all they keep with. Are some of them homosexuals? Who knows?

Last edited by LiendaBalla on 12 Feb 2011, 9:17 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Interesting, insofar as the Church of Christ congregation up the road from me is very emphatic about being an LGBT-inclusive church. Is that not a denominational stand then?

Okay, LKL, best I can do.

Bolt shot. Let the homosexuality dixated people do the resst of it. On this topic as of this post I no longer care whether people have enough mutual respect to listen straight.

ATTEMPTED QUOTE EDIT IN WORD:

LKL: I responded to what you wrote, not what you thought or what you meant. If you thought or meant something other than what you wrote, it's up to you to clarify it.

PHILOLOGOS: Bloody L, as they say in Blighty. You respond to "sex is sexist" by saying that is irrelevant to + / - homosexuality. How is that a response to anything I said? Of for that matter thought?

PHILOLOGOS : EXPLAINING - in response to you - "sex is sexist" I said,

PHILOLOGOS : Gender - the fact of a difference - makes sexism inevitable. Sexual activity is necessarily sexist in that the gender and number of the participants makes a difference in what transpires and how the participants perceive it.


You come back with:

LKL: Same-sex couples do it differently than hetero couples. So? That is no more any of my business than the fact that some hetero couples like whips and bondage.

PHILOLOGOS: Did I claim anywhere in here it was your business. my business, or Michael Moore's business? Is THIS responding to what I actually said?

Passing lightly over some more disconnect: I said:
PHILOLOGOS: Was I talking about that? Did I define what I mean by legitimacy? Did you? The original topic I believe, was why do Christians fixate on homosexuality - NOT are same sex couples legitimate.
AND you say:

LKL: *snort*
You're being disingenuous.

PHILOLOGOS: Like how disingenuous? Please return to the original post and READ it.

I came into the thread pointing out that - forget other Christians - I am by no means fixated on homosexuality. If it had said, is homosexuality, or same sex marriage, or polygamy legitimate, I would have said nothing. Not interested. I would not be saying this to you except that you have misrepresented my words, and that I do not readily take.
I stated:
PHILOLOGOS:
If I did not say before, I am Christian, I rarely think and less often talk about same sex couples. Or opposite sex couples. Or tennis. [love].
You said - I missed it before, but will respond now:
LKL :That statement doesn't jibe with the one above where you claim that it's impossible to be 'gender-blind.'
PHILOLOGOS: No? How not? I did not say I am gender blind. I am not I did not say I do not think about sex. I do; odds are I have thougfh about sex, sometimes intensively, longer than you have. I say I do not think about same sex or opposite sex couples. I am very self centered; I do think about the couple I am half of. A lot.

PHILOLOGOD: When I say you have the right not to distinguish right and privilege, you say:

LKL: "I appreciate you acknowledging my right to my own opinion on where rights come from, especially given that you stated your view previously as though it were a commonly-acknowledged given."

PHILOLOGOS: Wrong. I stated the definitions I know and the definitions I use. I think you will find those definitions have had considerable currency, but idiolects vary.

You might be interested to know that my wife and Number 1 Son, when I asked, endorsed your definition. Since she is a bit younger than I, it may be a generational thing. But in any case, whatever you do, I always speak for me, not for the community. I often have NO idea what the general public thinks or says or does.

You said, somewhat less than relevantly,
LKL:
How comforting that must have been to the Lovings when the police broke into their bedroom and pointed guns at them.

PHILOLOGOS: Read my lips.. " Marriage is not the certificate, nor the tax break."
To swhich you said:

LKL: A big part of marriage is the social recognition of, and respect for, the bond. If the certificate were meaningless, Christians would not be working so very hard to keep homosexuals from getting it.

PHILOLOGOS: I do not speak for all Christians, nor for all who call themselves Christians, nor for all outsiders assume to be Christians. I speak - now and back then and forever - for me because it is all I am qualified to speak for. And I work FOR no marriage but my own and those of the Inner Circle including, when he gets there, Number 1 Son. I work AGAINST no marriage - neither absolute marriage nor blessed marriage nor state-licensed marriage.

AND I finish off:

PHILOLOGOS: I may tell you, I have had MY marriage worked against - undermined and persecuted and eventually annihilated. It was not fun. I would not - do not - do that.

I say - AGAIN - attack what I say not what you think a Christian bad guy has to be saying. Actually, THAT is one thing the people working against my marriage were doing. They decided I was bad, which meant everything I said HAD to be bad, especially if they had no idea what I was saying.

This would make your one out of my eight. Plus, there is my Grandfather. In my oppinion, he's far more annoying. (let's just say I could go on and on about him... Yes, he's a homophobe.) Our eight groups will let people sit in their seats. If they don't know who you are, you could take their lord supper with them, and they won't know. Tell them everything, and you might get feedback from them ignoreing it "Yeah you never said that", to subtle convert attempts.

With my mom's church, every time their preacher wants to talk about sinning, he throws the gays in there, and applies it to just the sex. The group two times before this one.... Where do I start?

Last edited by LiendaBalla on 12 Feb 2011, 9:49 pm, edited 5 times in total.

If I might jump in here ...

=============
a·bom·i·na·tion (noun)
1. anything abominable; anything greatly disliked or abhorred.
2. intense aversion or loathing; detestation: He regarded lying with abomination.
3. a vile, shameful, or detestable action, condition, habit, etc.: Spitting in public is an abomination.
=============

If I happened to believe eating ice cream (or spitting in public) was an abomination, I would consider an eater of ice cream to be an abominator (or a spitter), not an abomination himself or herself ... and I suppose the same could be said of a swallower ... and at least in some circles, there is nothing illogical about a Christian being either.

I think it goes:

People believed in God through the 20th century

It is now the 21st century

ERGO, nobody believes in God, QED

Ah ... so maybe the age of enlightenment yet remains ahead if I might ever bother catching up with it?

I find if I look at where I was ten years back, or where I was when I was Number 1 Son's age, I look pretty enlightened. At his age I would either have beenb real impressed at me or thought I was weirdly incomprehensible.

Which of course I am.

It is to climb a mountain. The way ahead seems endless. Look back, and the foothills are incredibly tiny.

Ok, it really seems to me that I was responding to what you wrote. You brought up gender differences, I'm thinking, for the traditional claim that male/male parts don't fit together as naturally as male/female parts. Yes? If no, why did you bring up gender differences?
And, I reiterate: why does that matter? Why does it matter to anyone if it's a guy giving a blowjob to another guy, rather than a girl giving a blowjob to a guy? Why do we care? Why do we talk about it? The simple fact that a lot of Christians talk about it all the time is a de facto statement that they think it is their business.



Christians fixating on homosexuality are almost universally Christians fixating on how homosexuality is bad.
from the OP:
Of course they consider homosexuality to be an abomination, and have highlighted the relevant passages in their Bibles.

But, I think that they overly obsess about it. Every election, there has to be some defining issue where a candidate can demonstrate his moral superiority by expressing his opposition to homosexuality.

Considering homosexuality bad, expressing one's opposition, considering it to be an abomination, are generally ways of saying that homosexuality is illegetimate.
In other words, I am interpreting the title of the thread as being roughly synonymous with 'why are Christians so doggedly set in considering homosexuality illegitimate?'
The OP made an offhand remark about how some Christians are just making up for their own closeted gay feelings, which has been absolutely proven true in some cases but cannot be assumed to be the norm, given how many Christians there are in anti-gay communities and the limited percentage of the population that seems to actually be gay. But I don't think that was the point of the thread.

.
Ok. That's great for you. Just out of curiosity, do you defend gays when Christians around you assume that you're a bigot like them (or, if everyone in your circle is as open-minded as you, do you write letters defending the honor of Christianity as a non-bigoted organization when you hear Pat Robertson, or any one of dozens of other loathsome Christian leaders, spreading hate on the airwaves or in print)? Or do you only speak up when non-Christians start to mention how fed up they are with Christians spreading hate? Because, frankly, that's the only time I generally see Christians speaking out on the topic with anything other than bigotry.


It doesn't jibe because when you recognize a same-sex couple, you are saying that it is impossible to not recognize them as other than heterosexual and therefore you are thinking of them as a same-sex couple.
Or, I don't know... I live in California. Maybe the gays are all closeted where you live, so you don't ever have to think about their existence?


I'll give you that one. I probably over-reacted.
Idiolect: another neologism, idiology + dialect?


Ok, whether you personally work for or against marriage is a sort of different point than whether or not marriage is more than the license. If marriage weren't about social recognition, there wouldn't be a big ceremony when people decided to permanently hook up. They'd mail in their papers to the state, and mention it to their friends at work in the same way that they might mention that their favorite Lacrosse team won a game. Certainly no one else would ever think it was important enough to threaten them with bodily harm over it.

as for your personal actions - ok, you're not in the game. You consider yourself to have no skin in the game. That's fine - but if you speak only for yourself, why are you even posting here as if you, yourself, were being attacked? I will grant that we should probably specify, 'vocal Christians,' or something like that, rather than saying 'Christians' in general. Are you trying to speak for the (minority?) of Christians who aren't interested in gays at all? If so, why the disclaimer that you only speak for yourself? Are you just trying to distance yourself from the vocal Christians who are a**holes about the subject?

AND I finish off:


Kind of you.


I say, again, that I have been attempting to have a conversation/argument with you the entire time, and am responding to what you say to the best of my understanding of it.

I am sure we all understand one man's belief is another man's bigotry, so that is the end of that.

I am sure that a belief untested is not a belief worth not testing.
I know that when I was a child I had ever reason to believe blindly in a good number of things that contradiction forced me to reassess. I am far better for it.

What I am doing here, is merely this, Leejosepho. By NathanA explaining this, he not only "educates" me but he will reaffirm it in his own mind. Or perhaps he will make adjustments in his beliefs.

You know my Father was a bigot. Basically get the definition and cross off the different bigotries you can have and he was that man. I emulated my Father. At an age of about my son's now, I suddenly had a moment of ..."Why?"

That Italian kid at school never did anything that may actually give rise to him being bad. That black girl at school doesn't have any of the characteristics he ascribes to black people, the gay couple he rented a house to seemed really nice and normal despite him scoffing about how degenerate they were, and most woman I knew did not seem to fit his sexist criteria. Contradictory information and a questioning and subsequent dropping of a tested belief system.

BUT if what you are saying is that belief is static and unquestionable and ought not be tested i suppose that the forum is not a place to discuss such things. This is my interest and I mistook the Politics, Philosophy and Religion as being the place to discuss exactly that.

Is that what you are saying here...."enough of that?" or did you mean something entirely different and in fact we are able to talk about such things in this designated forum?

Supposing I believed eating ice cream was an abomination ...

That means I would actually like to go try some or that I need to actually do so to see how it feels or what might happen?

Hardly.

If you have a belief you would like to have tested, please post it and ask.

LKL - I will do this in segments and ignore as much as I can:

Philologos wrote:
Gender - the fact of a difference - makes sexism inevitable. Sexual activity is necessarily sexist in that the gender and number of the participants makes a difference in what transpires and how the participants perceive it.
Quote:
LKL: Same-sex couples do it differently than hetero couples. So? That is no more any of my business than the fact that some hetero couples like whips and bondage.


PHILOLOGOS: Did I claim anywhere in here it was your business. my business, or Michael Moore's business? Is THIS responding to what I actually said?

Ok, it really seems to me that I was responding to what you wrote. You brought up gender differences, I'm thinking, for the traditional claim that male/male parts don't fit together as naturally as male/female parts. Yes? If no, why did you bring up gender differences?
And, I reiterate: why does that matter? Why does it matter to anyone if it's a guy giving a blowjob to another guy, rather than a girl giving a blowjob to a guy? Why do we care? Why do we talk about it? The simple fact that a lot of Christians talk about it all the time is a de facto statement that they think it is their business.

No. I did NOT bring up gender differences for any such reason. I brought them up SIMPLY to support my statement that sex automatically involves gender-based differences - whatever the combo,

Obviuously you are not used to people saying something simple and straight without an under message.

I do not blame you - most communication is more undercurrent than straight statement. But I would have thought a Wrong Planeteer might have noticed that some of us prefer to put the message on top.
'
I say again - I do not talk about it. I am not now talking about homosexuality. I am talking about honest non-subverted communication.