Openly Gay Man Called To Serve in Key LDS Position

[sirkickyass]

Questions like these indicate why modern revelation is important. Two people relying solely on the Bible, and on historical Biblical interpretation, could very well come out with different answers to those questions.

I think that's the whole point. To my understanding AP was talking about the Bible specifically rather than "The Bible as interpreted by the present LDS church." I know that I was responding to the assertion that the Bible unequivocally condemns homosexual behavior.

I've pushed you on this before but you don't seem to be willing to go there: Modern revelation is changeable. Later revelation overrides prior revelation. That's the story behind the church's position on African-Americans holding the priesthood. It was outlawed until later revelation indicated that it was now ok. There seems to be some dispute as to whether this means that it was always ok for African Americans to be priesthood holders and it was only until a vessel interpreted the signs correctly (a position I believe you have taken before colton) or whether something had changed in heaven or on earth that now made it acceptable for African Americans to hold the priesthood. If you subscribe to the former and believe that people of color were always equal then there's space for modern revelation to be incorrect and influenced by the biases of the individual whom is communing with God. Given that, I think it's very difficult to have a hard line on this issue without also questioning whether your position would have supported Church discrimination in 1977.

 

[Gyp Rosetti]

Lot of gay experts up in here. Also lots of BYU bashing as usual. Do the math.

Would +10 if possible.

 

[Gyp Rosetti]

Freudian slip.

More like Fraudian...we're talking Dutch here.

 

[Ron Mexico]

OK, where's your evidence? I'm willing to do a little more research if you'll provide some links to legitimate evidence.

After reading some of your posts I'll agree with your argument defending BYU in the studies. I just don't like how people in the gay community are treated by the Mormon community. Whether or not it is church doctrine or not, gay people are treated poorly and it is sad. Not all of them, but a lot of Mormons preach acceptance and being kind to everyone then spew so much hate and it ruins good people's lives. This is not limited to Mormons or even religious people but it's more prevalent in conservative Utah where Mormons dominate the culture.

The fact that people feel the desire to be "cured" or are instructed to be "cured" because of who they are makes me cringe. I know people have different beliefs about being gay but I believe people are born that way. If some people are born males, some are born females, some are born both, and some are born neither, I don't think it is hard to make the leap to what sex they find attractive. The Mormon doctrine may or may not say these people are curable but large numbers of people inside the Mormon church attempt to cure people, or feel so bad about who they are they try to cure themselves and that bothers me.

I understand this is not all Mormons but the Mormon culture breeds these thoughts and actions for some reason.

 

[AtheistPreacher]

I think that's the whole point. To my understanding AP was talking about the Bible specifically rather than "The Bible as interpreted by the present LDS church." I know that I was responding to the assertion that the Bible unequivocally condemns homosexual behavior.

I've pushed you on this before but you don't seem to be willing to go there: Modern revelation is changeable. Later revelation overrides prior revelation.

Yes, I certainly wasn't talking about LDS Bible interpretation... frankly I don't know enough. I've made one pilgrimage to Utah to see a Stockton-Malone era Jazz home game, and I toured temple square and all, but that's about all the LDS exposure I've gotten. On the other hand, I was raised Catholic and had 13 years of Jesuit schooling. So when I'm making arguments like these, I have the Catholic view in mind, not the LDS view. They do seem pretty similar in their views on homosexuality anyway, at least from what I can tell.

As to the point about modern revelation... this is why I personally cannot subscribe to any religion that has a huge corpus of "revealed truths" and dogmatic assertions. The Bible describes a large number of ethical rules and standards that we now find appalling: subjugation of women, selling of women and children into slavery, killing your enemies with impunity, capital punishment for minor crimes. But people who identify themselves as believers in all of the Bible's revealed truths don't seem to have a problem ignoring these aforementioned troubling ethical guidelines. Once people all agree that such obviously unethical ideas are wrong, then those passages are simply ignored or written off as ancient cultural remnants. It just goes to show that nothing can ever really be written in stone. Even if it could be demonstrated that the Bible really strongly and definitively condemns homosexuality, it seems likely that, given enough time, it will likely become another of those things that gets written off as the ignorance of an ancient culture, much like the idea that men are fundamentally superior to women.

So while I find such Bible talk interesting and entertaining on some level, I really think it's quite irrelevant. Ethical outlooks are going to develop and change... and what exactly is wrong with that? Nothing at all. If you want to start with a holy book like the Bible as a baseline, then fine, but the reality is that there are many such holy books and faiths with competing claims. In a pluralistic world, you need criteria external to such different faiths in order to distinguish which one is right. So why bother carrying around the ancient cultural baggage in the first place? I'd rather stay religiously neutral, listen to all sides of any given religious issue as best I can, and then decide for myself.

I spoke of criteria external to religious faiths to evaluate moral questions. For people who claim homosexuality is wrong, I have one basic and fundamental question that must be answered: exactly why and how are homosexual sex and homosexual relationships harmful to other individuals or to society? If there is no answer to this basic question, no actual criteria posed as to how gays are harmful, then there can be no debate at all, because there can be no common ground. It simply becomes Person A quoting his scriptures and Person B quoting her (different) scriptures. "Because God says so" or "because the Bible says so" isn't an argument, just a dogmatic assertion that shuts the door on further discussion.

 

[freakazoid]

the jewish fate supports anal intercourse between man and a woman

Does anyone know how one might go about converting? Where the hell is JPR when you need him?

 

[Beantown]

Does anyone know how one might go about converting? Where the hell is JPR when you need him?

Ask George Costanza.

 

[Gyp Rosetti]

Wish gay person isn't open about it? Seriously, listen to one for about three seconds and it's pretty obvious.

 

[franklin]

Atheist Preacher and SirkAss setting the standard for intellectual dishonesty in this thread. I would have expected the typical results driven commentary from Sticky, but I was a little let down by A_P, who is always top notch in his commentary.

Paul's use of the word "arsenokoitai" in the original Greek in 1 Corinthians is literally untranslatable, much less into anything relating to homosexuals.

Do you eat shrimp or wear shirts that have two different kinds of fabric? Those are biblical "abominations" too. If homosexuality is at the same level of sin as those then you're making a big to do about nothing.

You call the word nonsense and untranslatable then divert around JazzSpazz's Leviticus quote, which it is quite obvious to non-homosexual scholars (and a good deal of homosexual ones too now) that this is where Paul's new word originated from. But when you want to drive a point home, get Atheist Preacher to sustain the brethren...

1) Homosexuality didn't exist as a concept in Biblical days at all.

Right, they walked around bathhouses nekked and looked the other way when there junk fell into a boy's mouth.

This is a well used fallacy among the intellectually dishonest. Lack of literature on the subject is in no way evidence that it wasn't known. There are a half a billion conceivable reasons why it wasn't commonly discussed, but screw Occam's Razor here eh? Doesn't really matter as Plato wrote about it anyway.

There were men who had sex with other men or boys, but they weren't considered "gay." It simply never occurred to anyone that there was such a thing as a fundamental homosexual orientation/identity rather than just isolated homosexual acts.

Quite the quaint claim but unsubstantiated nonetheless.

2) Some of the words translated as "homosexuality" in fact are referring to anal intercourse, which need not be with a man.

Again this is Paul. And these are the examples I mentioned to colton earlier. The word used by Paul in Greek here is "arsenokoitai." It is literally a nonsense compound word that there is no record of any prior usage of in any source material. There were words that meant homosexuality available and Paul chose not to use those.

Because those words were not inclusive, as you've pointed out yourself.


The variety of available words that unsuitably fit Pauls definition is exaclty why he combined with explanation two other words. Claiming his choice to his audience as "nonsensical" is irrational based on the supporting literature. It's also perfectly consisten with Paul's practice of doing such. He invented a couple hundred new terms to match his "new" meaning.

3) For something that is supposed to be such a terrible sin, there is very little in the Bible that could even *possibly* be construed as condemning homosexuality... six or seven passages at most, and many of these are suspect, and all but the Sodom story are very brief one-line or two-line sort of things. Don't you think there would have been more material on this if it's such an important issue? By way of comparison, look at all the Biblical material on adultery and divorce.

Many things are inferred culturally and need not be expounded upon. We have no reason to believe homosexuallity wasn't one of them inside Hebrew society when in fact the opposite is culturally established. But let us pretend otherwise. There are people living on Mars too.

4) Most significant of all, I think, for those wishing to construe the Sodom story as one which preaches against homosexuality, is that homosexuality is never identified as Sodom's sin. Sodom does, in fact, become a constant symbol of sinfulness in the OT, one which various prophets refer back to as an example of how not to be. But the sin of Sodom is identified explicitly in several places, most notably Ezekiel 16, as being morally and ethically lax, ignoring the poor and practicing the worst inhospitality. Further, none of the other passages traditionally understood as condemning homosexuality made any reference to the Sodom story... which at the very least would be very unusual, since the Biblical authors liked to tie their teachings back to well-known stories.

I find the point on the attempt to rape angels to be fair.

Human sexuality is a weird and twisted web with a spectrum of desires. To piggyback a little bit on AthiestPreacher's point though even when there was a concept of men sleeping with other young men the Greeks had a word for that "paiderasste." That's not the word used by Paul in 1 Corinthians (the actual word is a nonsense compound that appears nowhere else prior to Paul's usage) but it gets translated as being about homosexuals in some standard texts anyway and is used (including in this very thread) as an example of biblical prohibition.

You've stated 23 available descriptives. Had Paul used one then you'd no doubt be explaining that away as narrowly encompassing. Paul created a new word inclusive of all others.

 

[TheSilencer1313]

Hahaha funny..... an openly gay man that doesn't have sex.

 

[Scat]

Atheist Preacher and SirkAss setting the standard for intellectual dishonesty in this thread. I would have expected the typical results driven commentary from Sticky, but I was a little let down by A_P, who is always top notch in his commentary.






You call the word nonsense and untranslatable then divert around JazzSpazz's Leviticus quote, which it is quite obvious to non-homosexual scholars (and a good deal of homosexual ones too now) that this is where Paul's new word originated from. But when you want to drive a point home, get Atheist Preacher to sustain the brethren...




Right, they walked around bathhouses nekked and looked the other way when there junk fell into a boy's mouth.

This is a well used fallacy among the intellectually dishonest. Lack of literature on the subject is in no way evidence that it wasn't known. There are a half a billion conceivable reasons why it wasn't commonly discussed, but screw Occam's Razor here eh? Doesn't really matter as Plato wrote about it anyway.




Quite the quaint claim but unsubstantiated nonetheless.





Because those words were not inclusive, as you've pointed out yourself.


The variety of available words that unsuitably fit Pauls definition is exaclty why he combined with explanation two other words. Claiming his choice to his audience as "nonsensical" is irrational based on the supporting literature. It's also perfectly consisten with Paul's practice of doing such. He invented a couple hundred new terms to match his "new" meaning.




Many things are inferred culturally and need not be expounded upon. We have no reason to believe homosexuallity wasn't one of them inside Hebrew society when in fact the opposite is culturally established. But let us pretend otherwise. There are people living on Mars too.



I find the point on the attempt to rape angels to be fair.




You've stated 23 available descriptives. Had Paul used one then you'd no doubt be explaining that away as narrowly encompassing. Paul created a new word inclusive of all others.

Congrats on your moment of sobriety... now back to the gin.

 

[MVP]

Religion is teddy bear for adults, does not matter if it is preached by straight or gay... People who do not need toys could care less..... so whatever