Gender Orientation: An Example of Error in Morality Analysis

[Danmark]

I submit that the problem some Christians have in their insistence that homosexuality is a sin comes from their failure to separate to properly analyze the essence of morality.
The central thesis of this claim is that the point of morality in general and that of Jesus of Nazareth in particular is the focus on the essence of morality: kindness and regard for the welfare and happiness of others. This essential aspect of morality gets obscured by the errant thinking that focuses on particular examples.

[Wootah]

I submit that the problem some Christians have in their insistence that homosexuality is a sin comes from their failure to separate to properly analyze the essence of morality.
The central thesis of this claim is that the point of morality in general and that of Jesus of Nazareth in particular is the focus on the essence of morality: kindness and regard for the welfare and happiness of others. This essential aspect of morality gets obscured by the errant thinking that focuses on particular examples.

It is because of the essence of morality, kindness and regard for the welfare and happiness of others that we stand against homosexuality. The times I don't speak out I feel like I've let down the other person.

Similarly I just walked past a woman in the full arabic head gear and all I feel is shame for not helping her. Shame I should feel but what I won't do is treat the burka or homosexuality as morally acceptable.

Similarly I had dinner with some non Christian friends and I took a mildly suggestive stance against one of them possibly not pursuing sex early in a new relationship. Again I feel condemned by Jesus.

Jesus in the field of wheat was condemning my silence, which stems from my accepting societal norms and not speaking out. It was the adherence to the law and not the moral concern that Jesus objected to.

He was not condemning Christians for being moral but for letting laws or customs stop them from being moral.

How can I call myself friend or neighbor and act otherwise.

[DanieltheDragon]

[Replying to post 11 by Wootah]

Similarly I just walked past a woman in the full arabic head gear and all I feel is shame for not helping her. Shame I should feel but what I won't do is treat the burka or homosexuality as morally acceptable.

where in the bible is it a sin to wear Arabic head gear?

Similarly I had dinner with some non Christian friends and I took a mildly suggestive stance against one of them possibly not pursuing sex early in a new relationship. Again I feel condemned by Jesus.

Where in the bible does it state that Jesus wants you to intervene in the sexual lifestyles of your friends?

How can I call myself friend or neighbor and act otherwise.

There is a rule in car sales called the rule of 3. When you get one objection you press forward when you get a second objection to the same issue you try and redirect. When you get the third objection to the same issue you drop it all together.

If you have a concern about someones moral welfare mentioning your concern is fine emphasizing it is ok too. Constantly badgering people is a problem. So you can call yourself a friend by letting your position on the issue be known, but not forcing your position on your friends.

____________________________________________________________________

That being said if you have a particular position on homosexuality that might be a deterrent for you to be friends with LGBT individuals. I certainly would not want to be friends with someone who condemns my personal relationships and what I can't change about myself biologically.

Here is a hypothetical:


Having blonde hair is a sin. Having blue eyes is a sin. I believe that one can change their natural hair and eye color by willing it to be so. I condemn anyone for having blonde hair and blue eyes.

How many blonde hair blue eyed people would you reckon want to be my friend?

[Danmark]

I submit that the problem some Christians have in their insistence that homosexuality is a sin comes from their failure to separate to properly analyze the essence of morality.
The central thesis of this claim is that the point of morality in general and that of Jesus of Nazareth in particular is the focus on the essence of morality: kindness and regard for the welfare and happiness of others. This essential aspect of morality gets obscured by the errant thinking that focuses on particular examples.

It is because of the essence of morality, kindness and regard for the welfare and happiness of others that we stand against homosexuality. The times I don't speak out I feel like I've let down the other person.

Similarly I just walked past a woman in the full arabic head gear and all I feel is shame for not helping her. Shame I should feel but what I won't do is treat the burka or homosexuality as morally acceptable.

Similarly I had dinner with some non Christian friends and I took a mildly suggestive stance against one of them possibly not pursuing sex early in a new relationship. Again I feel condemned by Jesus.

Jesus in the field of wheat was condemning my silence, which stems from my accepting societal norms and not speaking out. It was the adherence to the law and not the moral concern that Jesus objected to.

He was not condemning Christians for being moral but for letting laws or customs stop them from being moral.

How can I call myself friend or neighbor and act otherwise.

You've used some good examples of why I think your focus is wrong.
With the Burka clad woman, it is not her dress or her beliefs that are central, but whether she is happy and feels fulfilled. There's no value and making a judgment based on her clothing.

With your friend who is interested in an intimate relationship, the issue is not sex, but whether this is a good relationship for him and the person he is dating. Will being intimate enhance their relationship? Are they good for each other?

Jesus looked to the essential of the law, not its outward manifestation. Love is the essence of Christianity, not the way one dresses or how one is intimate. The judging approach you suggest sounds more like the approach of Pharisees about working on the Sabbath and less like that of Jesus who was more concerned with meeting needs.

[Haven]

It is because of the essence of morality, kindness and regard for the welfare and happiness of others that we stand against homosexuality.

What is moral, kind, or caring about homophobia? Being moral and kind isn't about taking people's civil and human rights away!

Ironically, your stance is more like the Old English meaning of kindness--tribalism/ethnocentrism instead of the modern meaning of love, acceptance, and understanding. Your religious beliefs require you to condemn innocent people because they don't love, live, believe, or worship like you. Is this really moral?

Similarly I just walked past a woman in the full arabic head gear and all I feel is shame for not helping her. Shame I should feel but what I won't do is treat the burka or homosexuality as morally acceptable.

You do realize that she may have chosen to wear that, right? I agree that she may have been coerced, and that would be wrong. But if she chose it, why is it immoral?

Also, burqas are not Arabic, they are Afghani. Many Arab women wear the niqab, which is less restrictive than the burqa.

Jesus in the field of wheat was condemning my silence, which stems from my accepting societal norms and not speaking out. It was the adherence to the law and not the moral concern that Jesus objected to.

He was not condemning Christians for being moral but for letting laws or customs stop them from being moral.

Why is homosexuality (or wearing a veil [Arab Christians do this too]) not morally acceptable? Because your cherry-picked interpretation of an English translation of an ancient book says so? That's based on so many assumptions (that the Bible is true, that the English translation is correct, that the book is the basis for morality, that the Bible actually condemns homosexuality) that need to be supported before you can even begin to make your case.

[Wootah]

[Replying to post 14 by Haven]

Please consider choosing to stop using the word homophobia on this forum. It is bring used as an adhominem but worse you using a medical term, phobia, inappropriately. And the third reason is that I fear it is used a short circuit in others so they don't have to engage.

[DanieltheDragon]

[Replying to post 15 by Wootah]

Homophobia is not necessarily a medical term. It is a term that covers a wide range of attitudes towards LGBT individuals. More accurately you would be practicing institutionalized homophobia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homophobia ... homophobia

This should help.

Let me ask you a question Do you view homosexual behavior as good neutral or bad?

if you answered bad that would be a negative attitude towards homosexual behavior

here is another question

Do you base your attitudes on homosexual behavior on religious texts?

If yes that means institutionalized homophobia.

Now I will agree that homophobic can be used as a pejorative but then again so can just about any adjective?

Haven:

What is moral, kind, or caring about homophobia?

Now Haven is clearly not using this in the pejorative sense in terms of an adhominem. Haven is clearly expressing a personal view with regards to a particular set of attitudes directed at LGBT individuals. Not expressing a personal view about you. That is the difference here.

There is nothing wrong with calling a spade a spade

If you have a negative attitude directed at LGBT's or Homosexual behavior that would be considered homophobic. Now could there be better words? Well sure but none have really caught on yet.


Perhaps Sexual prejudice is a better word?

[Wootah]

[Replying to post 16 by DanieltheDragon]

I won't allow the forum to degenerate into ad hominems. If I see a Christian posting here saying "why are you Christian phobic?" I would warn them as well.

I know someone who has a phobia and this knowledge clarifies for me that the word homophobia is misused so much that it is an institutionalised bias.

[Danmark]

[Replying to post 14 by Haven]

Please consider choosing to stop using the word homophobia on this forum. It is bring used as an adhominem but worse you using a medical term, phobia, inappropriately. And the third reason is that I fear it is used a short circuit in others so they don't have to engage.

As one who sometimes takes the root words of terms too literally, I understand why someone would object to the term homophobia. However, the word has become part of our lexicon and there is nothing necessarily pejorative about its use. It describes certain attitudes, as explained by a portion of this piece from Wikipedia:

In 1971, Kenneth Smith used homophobia as a personality profile to describe the psychological aversion to homosexuality.[16] Weinberg also used it this way in his 1972 book Society and the Healthy Homosexual,[17] published one year before the American Psychiatric Association voted to remove homosexuality from its list of mental disorders.[18][19] Weinberg's term became an important tool for gay and lesbian activists, advocates, and their allies.[10] He describes the concept as a medical phobia:[17]
[A] phobia about homosexuals.... It was a fear of homosexuals which seemed to be associated with a fear of contagion, a fear of reducing the things one fought for — home and family. It was a religious fear and it had led to great brutality as fear always does.[10]
In 1981, homophobia was used for the first time in The Times (of London) to report that the General Synod of the Church of England voted to refuse to condemn homosexuality.

I am fully aware that some Muslims and Christians consider "homosexual" behavior a "sin," and that they claim and may sincerely believe that what they consider to be "God's" pronouncements are the controlling factor in declaration that it is a "sin."

However, most of the secular and scientific world considers that the same reasons that some Biblical writers may have called it a sin are also based on their own culture imbued fears of homosexuality as if it were a contagious pathogen, something laden with irrational fear and lack of understanding. These fears have had their usual effect: brutality and discrimination.

Whether religion functions as an excuse to hate and fear, or whether it simply provides the moral basis to object to certain behavior is not something we can necessarily impute to everyone who calls "homosexual" practices a "sin."

All I can say for my own sense of this issue is that the feelings I hear expressed against the gay community and the "gay lifestyle" resonate to me with the same vibrations I've sensed in the past about racial, ethnic, and religious prejudices.

[Haven]

[Replying to post 14 by Haven]

Please consider choosing to stop using the word homophobia on this forum. It is bring used as an adhominem but worse you using a medical term, phobia, inappropriately. And the third reason is that I fear it is used a short circuit in others so they don't have to engage.

I'm sorry, but I'll keep calling anti-gay bias what it is -- homophobia. It's not against the rules of the forum, and it's not an ad hominem (because it's relevant to the conversation). Should racism not be called "racism" because it paints people with racial prejudices in a bad light?

Homophobia doesn't refer to a literal clinical phobia, but to aversion to LGB people and sexuality. Words aren't always the sum of their parts, and can shift in meaning. Take my example of kindness in my last post -- it literally means tribalism/racism/ethnocentrism (the quality of being exclusively dedicated to one's own "kind"/in-group/people), but has shifted in meaning over the past few centuries to something a lot more positive. Homophobia has also shifted away from the literal meaning of its parts to refer to anti-gay bias more generally. Why is this a problem? Language isn't static, it evolves and changes.

[cool_name123]

I submit that the problem some Christians have in their insistence that homosexuality is a sin comes from their failure to separate to properly analyze the essence of morality.
The central thesis of this claim is that the point of morality in general and that of Jesus of Nazareth in particular is the focus on the essence of morality: kindness and regard for the welfare and happiness of others. This essential aspect of morality gets obscured by the errant thinking that focuses on particular examples.

Alright, bear with me here as I’ve got an idea which I’m currently working through so haven’t quite nailed down exactly how best to articulate it as of yet... But it seems somewhat relevant here so I figured I’d use this as a testing ground of sort.

I agree that there is a failure of sorts going on in how we address morality. And while I think you’re on the right track with the attempting to separate examples from intent, I think it can be pushed one step further still in stating that this error in moral Christian thought actually stems from a fundamental mis-understanding of sin itself.

Throughout the NT sin is constantly understood as a break in a relationship, Paul constantly talks about sin using relational wisdom based language that cannot be understood properly outside of this context, as Eugene Peterson puts it in 'Unnecessary Pastor’:

There is a great chasm in our Western world in the way words are used. . . It is the split between words that describe the world and reality. . . and words that express the world and reality by entering it. . . Describing words can be set under the latin term scientia, expressing words under the term sapientia - or in English, science and wisdom. Science is information stored in the head that can be used impersonally; wisdom is intelligence that comes from the heart, which can only be lived personally in relationships. . . The “sound words" that Paul writes about are all sapientia, “wisdom-lived words�. What the Ephesians were engaged in was scientia, “godless chatter.� This is an important distinction to make because we are taught in school from childhood to speak in scientia but not in sapientia.

Dawn, M., & Peterson, E. (2000). The Unnecessary Pastor: Rediscovering the Call (p. 133-134). Grand Rapids, MI: W.B. Eerdmans.

When we start to understand the wisdom Paul speaks throughout his ministry as being relational in nature we begin to see sin as this thing that is really all about broken relations it is no longer this thing that commands punishment but rather a thing that invites forgiveness. Ivan Illich puts this thought into words better than just about anyone else I have ever read.

People now tend to understand sin in the light of its "criminalization" by the Church during the Middle Ages and afterwards . . . It was this criminalization which generated the modern idea of conscience as an inward formation by moral rules or norms. It made possible the isolation and anguish which drive the modern individual, and it also obscured the fact that what the New Testament calls sin is not a moral wrong but a turning away or a falling short. Sin, as the New Testament understands it, is something that is revealed only in the light of its possible forgiveness. To believe in sin, therefore, is to celebrate, as a gift beyond full understanding, the fact that one is being forgiven. Contrition is a sweet glorification of the new relationship for which the Samaritan stands, a relationship which is free, and therefore vulnerable and fragile, but always capable of healing, just as nature was then conceived as always in the process of healing.

Illich, I., & Cayley, D. (2005). The Rivers North of the Future: The Testament of Ivan Illich as told to David Cayley. (pp. 53-54). Toronto: Anansi.

Understanding sin in this light removes this legalistic morality of ‘you need to check all these boxes correctly’ and moves it into a much more intimate realm wherein sin outside of a relationship does not make sense and isn’t really even a thing.

Have your actions created a break in your realtionship with this other person? people generally don't wan't a moralistic grey area where they have to think about these sorts of things, they just want to know the motions so they can check the boxes and confirm they are ok.

Has the actions of this person in some way created a break in your relationship with said person? no? then they have not sinned against you... Has it created a break in their relationship with God? Well, you’re not God so what business is it of yours? By condemning those whom one thinks are in poor relation with God you are casting Judgements not only on this hypothetical person but also on God himself which is even more of a no-no than judging others biblically speaking.
I would even go as far as to say that when you cast judgement on others that you may be just sinning against God as you yourself are now participating in casting Judgement upon God by deciding for him who is not in right relation with him? Jesus even explains what kind of effect this can have on your relationship with God as he delivers the parable of the talents. And here I’m going to use the words of Jacques Ellul because he just explains this one so well.

I would almost say that God does exactly what we expected or wanted him to do all along, as we see in the parable of the talents. The third servant returns his one talent by saying that he knew his master to be hard and without mercy, even harvesting where he had not sown. God replies that because the servant thought of him in this way, he will be that way and behave accordingly. I believe this to be absolutely fundamental. If we completely place out faith and trust in the God of love and freedom, we will encounter this God of love and freedom.

Ellul, J., & Vanderburg, W. (n.d.). On Being Rich and Poor: Christianity in a Time of Economic Globalization (p. 129).

It comes back to the whole idea of ‘Judge not lest ye be Judged’. The relationship you craft between yourself and your heavenly creator is entirely your own and how you understand sin and Christian morality will influence this relationship. Which is why while this notion of intent you bring up is a good starting point, it does not push the issue far enough as I think the reason people misplace emphasis is because they tend to be legitimately concerned with how not to sin which is how they come to their understanding of morality. So in my mind, understanding what sin really is along with how it can dictate your relationship with God is imperative to understanding proper Christian morality.

Also in editing this I realized I did not use gender inclusive language at all in referring to God... just pretend like I did if it bothers you. I tend not to because I really like the visual of the Father/Son relationship, but I am not at all against God taking on other forms/relational roles in other situations.