Well, I've decided to put all of this in one place. Homosexuality is peeking through all the other threads. I've ranted on it a lot. Maybe if I give it a place it will all filter over and stay off of the other threads - some. And it gives me a chance to put all of my statements in one place. I will be adding them in chunks over the next few days, hopefully without trying to argue any points until I am done. The reason I talk about this is not just to get religion off of homosexuality. It is to allay fears. It is a mistake that homosexuality has been associated with Scripture the way it has. But what this means is that we don't need to be afraid of it for those reasons. Then we can unlink religion and gay rights so they don't fight each other, and that will be good for both sides. There is another side of it. The Bible verses are still there. If they do not refer to homosexuality then they refer to something else we may not be attending to. It's always twofold with misunderstandings of this kind. There's the thing we hit that we shouldn't have, and the thing we missed that we should have hit. In this case, the thing we miss is the perversion of the natural self in the name of mistaken ideas about God.
I first heard arguments claiming that the Bible does not condemn homosexuality about twenty years ago. Usually this involves an appeal to the cultural context of the Bible, etc. Much of what I'm going to say you can find in other places, for example and . On the other hand, I tend to make a more or less fundamentalist argument, meaning that I can keep the Scriptures as my only source of content, referring outside of them only when they tell me to (They will.) and to get language information. Those of you who have read my stuff know that I always mean more fundamental than "The Fundamentals" or anything today called "fundamentalism". I don't consider myself finished until I've "cracked the code" in the original languages. The Greek New Testament clearly obviates the Old Testament codes on homosexual content and explains its own treatment of the matter very clearly. Though some call any talk that the Bible does not condemn homosexuality "revisionist", I will make the countercharge: that the condemnation of homosexuality is a Roman revisionist interpretation of Scripture. It is just so ancient that most people consider it fundamental.
I should point out that I do not take the Bible as the sole source of religious truth, nor do I consider it infallible. But I will never use these as parts of my argument. In order to claim that the Bible condemns homosexuality, you have to add information to it. The information that has been added may boil down to only one thing, that "fornication" means any kind of sex outside of marriage. It really means "visiting prostitutes". This will be a key to the Apostolic reinterpretation of the sexual codes in Acts.
The idea to reconsider homosexuality does not come, as some claim, from some source outside of Christianity, or from atheists, or from evolution, or from other such new ideas. There is a new idea, the idea that all men are created equal, and its associated ideas of civil justice, that have clearly motivated this change and placed it in the last two centuries, but it does not come from a non-Christian source. I, in fact, got most of my personal motivation from three people, one of whom was a Baptist Sunday school teacher, another a Lutheran minister, and the third a Catholic priest.
