Whether a person is gay or not depends on who they are attracted to sexually. The Bible, for example, contains proscriptions against sexual acts, not sexual orientations.
Traditional Christianity is restrictive of sexual conduct in general, and does put same-sex attracted persons at a disadvantage with respect to being able to have a morally acceptable sex life. Some Christians are not fully traditionalists on sexual issues, however. However, it is a mistake to say that Christianity teaches that there is something wrong with being gay. It doesn't say that at all.
To this is can be replied that not only sexual acts, but the lust for them, can be sinful. However, because Christianity makes a crucial distinction between temptation and sin (Jesus experienced the former but not the latter).
In fact, if you take literally the statement that Jesus was tempted in all things just as we are, (Heb: 4:15), then we have to conclude that the Bible teaches that Jesus was bisexual. He experienced temptation both to hetersexual sin and to homosexual sin, so he had to have been bisexual. QED.
28 comments:
What the hell?
Your poor logic would also prove that Jesus was not sinless since he would also have to have been tempted to cover up a lie.
Poor exegesis, victor.
"Traditional Christianity is restrictive of sexual conduct in general"
And this Tradition came from Plato not The Bible.
http://solascripturachristianliberty.blogspot.com/2015/03/plato-augustine-and-traditional.html
I'm pretty sure that doesn't mean that Jesus "was tempted" as referring to inner turmoil. Example, I have never once been tempted to get drunk - as in, I have never felt any desire at all to do so - but I have had plenty of people try to talk me into getting drunk. So I have been tempted externally, as an outside action toward me, but I have never been tempted in my mind, as a desire.
I'd imagine it's the same with Jesus. He was tempted of the devil, which alludes to someone trying to lure him. It doesn't mean he actually saw appeal in those things.
The Book of Hebrews teaches that Jesus was Tempted in all the same Temptations we are. Being Tempted isn't a Sin.
@oozzielionel:
"Your poor logic would also prove that Jesus was not sinless since he would also have to have been tempted to cover up a lie."
A variation of this same argument can be used to refute the specific argument Victor gives. If Jesus was bissexual, it means he had a desire to have sexual intercourse with members of the male sex. Such desires are objectively disordered, so if follows that Jesus was objectively disordered, at least insofar as his desires, which means that he was not perfect, something that Christian tradition and scripture explicitly reject.
LoL,
While VR's logic is for shit, yours isn't much better.
An "external" invitation to sin isn't a temptation unless there is something about that sin that appeals to you in some way. Just as you have never been tempted to get drunk, neither have I (nor to get stoned) -- myself, I simply cannot understand the appeal of getting drunk (or stoned).
On the othe hand, if getting drunk (or stoned) is understood as a species of evading (or temporarily repudiating) one's intellectual and/or moral responsibilities, then I can understand the temptation, at least on an intellectual level. For, sloth/procrastination *is* a temptation to me.
"In fact, if you take literally the statement that Jesus was tempted in all things just as we are, (Heb: 4:15), then we have to conclude that the Bible teaches that Jesus was bisexual. He experienced temptation both to hetersexual sin and to homosexual sin, so he had to have been bisexual. QED."
The Bible teaches that Jesus was [a computer hacker wannabe]. I'm not kidding
In fact, if you take literally the statement that Jesus was tempted in all things just as we are, (Heb: 4:15), then we have to conclude that the Bible teaches that Jesus was [tempted to hack computers]. He experienced temptation both to [bank robbery] and to [white collar theft], so he had to have been [ computer hacker wannabe]. QED.
The thing to be understood (*) about sin and temptation is that the sin is not itself the temptation; rather, the sin is the payload attached to the temptation. The temptation is some thing that is good, or at least desirable, in itself which one desires strongly enough that one contemplates committing the sin in hopes of attaining the desire.
(*) the thing which most people don't understand, and generally refuse to understand
When Satan tempted Christ by offering him the rule of all the kingdoms of the earth if only he (Christ) wold worship him (Satan), the sin of bowing down to Satan was not the temptation. Nor was receiving the rule of all the earth the temptation -- he was going to receive that anyway. No, the temptaion was the (false) promise to receive the rule of all the earth the easy way, without experiencing Calvary and passing through Death ... "Worship me, Jesus, and I will help you fulfill your Father's will *without* you having to experience the pain of separation from him."
Sins seem to involve a temptation/ resist or submit structure. But we are also taught that the desire for some things, as opposed to acting on them, is a sin. That leaves an interesting problem. It should therefore sometimes be true of me that I can say "I was tempted to desire X, but I resisted. But how can you resist the temptation to desire something without actually desiring it?
To be gay, you don't have to perform any gay acts. You can be gay if you are have gay desires.
Are you also gay if you are tempted to have gay desires but to resist the temptation to have those desires, as opposed to never being tempted to even have those desires.
Lewis once said that he didn't preach about gay issues (even though he accepted the traditional Christian proscriptions) because he didn't have the inclinations at all. It is important to Jesus that he knows what it is like to experience all the desires that result in my besetting sins. But what if I am struggling with gay desires? How can Jesus identify with me, if he was so straight it would never occur to him to even face such desires?
Just as the word isn't "fetus", but rather "baby", so too, the word isn't "gay", it's "homosexual". "Fetus" is a word of leftist politics employed to hide the baby being murdered; "gay" is a word of leftist politics employed to hide the choice to sin or not to sin in a particular way.
Victor, since when are you a troublemaker. I'm shocked.
To be gay, you don't have to perform any gay acts. You can be gay if you are have gay desires.
You forgot the most important part: you can't be a Trump supporter.
More seriously, Jesus doesn't need to face every single desire out there. Powerful desire, full stop, seems to do the trick.
Or are you making the argument that heterosexual desire is completely unlike homosexual desire? Play that game and I think you'll find yourself committed to something that'll get you excommunicated from the left-wing church.
Other than a vague implication in Crude's latest comment, I don't think anyone has actually tried to show what is wrong with VR's exegesis. Several people have parodied it, and I think the parodies are right but only show that VR's exegesis is wrong not where his mistake is.
The implication in Crude's comment is that when we say "Jesus was tempted in every way", to get from there to "Jesus was tempted to perform sexual acts with men", one must assume that would involve being tempted in a "different way" from being "tempted to perform sexual acts with men".
This isn't clear at all to me. Now I don't wish to debate whether these are or are different "ways" we need only ask what the text commits us to ... and in this case I see no reason to think that the writer had in mind that these were relevantly different ways of being tempted.
"Other than a vague implication in Crude's latest comment ... Several people have parodied it ..."
I guess the parody was too subtle (to say nothing about my posts about what temptation is). Do you think you might have got it if I had thrown in some days of the week or hours of the day, as though the time one experiences a temptation or commits a sin makes it a different temptation or sin.
@Steve Lovell:
"Several people have parodied it, and I think the parodies are right but only show that VR's exegesis is wrong not where his mistake is."
This is simply not correct. For a parody to work -- and you concede the parodies advanced work -- and not be say, a strawman, it has to have the same relevant features of the original argument and show they lead to absurdity. And the relevant exegetical failure in the original argument is, in Victor's *own* words, "In fact, if you take literally the statement that Jesus was tempted in all things just as we are" -- the "in all things" cannot be taken in the literal sense Victor is taking, that Jesus literally suffered all temptations that have ever beset any and all human beings. The fact that the parodiers do not make everything explicit is not a fault of the parody.
grodrigues: "A variation of this same argument can be used to refute the specific argument Victor gives. If Jesus was bissexual, it means he had a desire to have sexual intercourse with members of the male sex. Such desires are objectively disordered, so if follows that Jesus was objectively disordered, at least insofar as his desires, which means that he was not perfect, something that Christian tradition and scripture explicitly reject."
I hadn't noticed this comment before. It's way up near the start of the thread, and it refutes Steve Lovell's claim than no one "has actually tried to show what is wrong with VR's exegesis[, ...] where his mistake is."
Homosexual desire is a species of fetish (*). Those afflicted by it are akin to those sad souls of whom we sometimes hear who are sexually aroused by shoes or feet, or who cannot acheive "completion" unless they are stroking silk or nylon.
Are fetishists "born that way"?
The vast majority of men afflicted with homosexual desire were sexually abused in some way when they were very young (and not necessarily by a man). Also, most were constantly accused of being "queer" when they were very young, before they had any sexual interest one way or another. What? Suddenly the things that people say about you, especially when your psyche is still young/tender, don't affect you.
People *constantly* reinterpret their own memories in light of subsequent experiences. Keep this in mind.
It is normal and natural -- possibly even necessary -- for young boys to experience hero-worship of a series of men and older boys; and it's best if a boy's first hero is his own father. This is not sexual in the sense of desiring to "bang" these men or older boys. It is sexual in the sense of learning what it is to be a man, what differentiates being a man from being a woman.
This hero-worship is a species of love, but it is not erotic. It may be a very emotionally intense love, but it is not erotic.
However, as people *constantly* reinterpret their own memories in light of subsequent experiences, it is very often the case that when a young man gets caught up in homosexual practice, he begins to reinterpret his childhood hero-worship experiences as having contained erotic content they did not have.
(*) I didn't say it is *merely* fetish
I don't think we can be that specific, Victor. Otherwise we could say that since Jesus wasn't sexually tempted by the cashier at the Food 'n Stuff down the street from my old apartment, but I was, there was a temptation I experienced that Jesus didn't. The temptations have to be generalized, and I would think that the most we could claim here is that, as a human being, Jesus experienced sexual temptation. To be more particular than that strains the text.
^ which was the main point of my computer-hacker parody.
Clearly people have a different understanding of what it means to show where someone went wrong than I do. In my view a parody is a little like a reductio ad absurdum. It demonstrates that a falsehood or contradiction follows from the assumption that the position in question is true.
Suppose I produce an argument for the conclusion that the square-root-of-2 is a rational number. Those who wish to contradict me may simply offer proofs that the square-root-of-2 is irrational, and that my conclusion is therefore wrong. But that doesn't tell me where my "demonstration" went wrong, only that it went wrong. Indeed, unless we bring in other factors it would be epistemically just as legitimate to say
my "demonstration" refutes your reductio. I think the dialectic here is pretty much the same as this.
Or another way to think of it, it's like the difference between an undercutting and a rebutting defeater. Where possible, I think we should have both and the parodies only provide the latter (unless they come with an accompanying narrative).
Steve Lovell: "In my view a parody is a little like a reductio ad absurdum."
"Parody" was the word you used, thus I (and I presume grodrigues) responded with that term. Normally, I'd use the phrase "reductio ad absurdum"
Steve Lovell: "Clearly people have a different understanding of what it means to show where someone went wrong than I do. [A reductio ad absurdum] demonstrates that a falsehood or contradiction follows from the assumption that the position in question is true."
And you can't see it?
IF it is true that a reductio ad absurdum "demonstrates that a falsehood or contradiction follows from the assumption that the position in question is true", and it is true, THEN that reductio ad absurdum has deminstrated *where* the reasoning goes wrong -- in the proposition.
VR,
"You can be gay if you are have gay desires."
No, Replace
"you have gay desires"
to "you entertain gay desires".
Desires per se are not sinful but it is sinful to entertain illicit desires.
^ Exactly. And entertaining desires is how they become the sort of temptations that hard (for us) to distinguish from sin and then give rise to acts of sin.
One of the (very annoying) things about persons afflicted with homosexuality -- and more so if they identify as "gay" -- is that nearly everything they think and do and say circles around their homosexual desire. It's so tedious trying to be a friend to a homosexual, because that's *all* most of them can talk about -- no matter what the subject is, most of them will try to steer it toward homosexuality.
Ilion,
We agree about the substantive issue in question, but for the record I don't think you are understanding my point.
If I present an argument for conclusion P, you can't say "That's where you went wrong. When you asserted that P". Well, you can, but it wouldn't be an especially helpful thing to say.
Victor presented an informal argument for a conclusion. The thread has developed a little since my first comment, but my point was that parodying that argument doesn't show what is wrong with the argument.
In this case, the premises of the argument seem to be things we as Christians accept as true, so if we want to reject the conclusion we need to either say that the premises while true are not true in the sense which is required for the argument, or that one or more of the inferential steps are not logically correct. A parody does neither of these things (and nor does a reductio) though it may help a person to do those things for themselves.
Do you still disagree?
Steve Lovell,
Victor has been adequately answered, LoL wrote immediately that it"doesn't mean that Jesus "was tempted" as referring to inner turmoil".
"Being tempted" means "tested". Jesus was tested by Satan. We can infer nothing about mental states of Jesus (always a fruitless endeavor).
Victor's exegesis relied upon a false meaning being put on a crucial word and it was immediately pointed out.
I agree Gyan, indeed my last post began with the point that I agree with Ilion about the substantive issue in question.
What I object to at this stage are
(i) Ilion's attempts to say I don't understand what's going on in this thread (or whatever it is he is asserting when he says "And you can't see it?")
(ii) The idea that the parodies, in and of themselves without any further explanation, show what is wrong with VR's exegesis.
Grod tacitly admitted my point when he said that you can't fault a parody for not making everything explicit. I agree with that. I wasn't faulting the parodies. I was saying they didn't do everything one might want to be done ... so I went on to say more explicitly than had been said what I thought was wrong with the exegesis. I take clarity to be a virtue.
While I often agree with Ilion's points, I'm frankly tired of his posturing. He gives the impression of being absolutely certain of everything he ever writes on here. No issue is ever nuanced or subtle. He's right, and anyone who disagrees with him is wrong ... and not only are they wrong when they disagree with him, they are even wrong when they point out that he hasn't said everything that could or should be said. His statements exhaust all truths worth asserting on any subject.
I very much hope and even believe this caricature of Ilion's self-image is wrong, but that's how he comes off as viewing himself here on DI.
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