LoveHate Hero: GAY=SIN?

One of God’s Commandments is “love thy neighbor as thyself”. So basically treat others as how you would want to be treated. Love others and decipate the hate. Interesting, when christians say this and yet oppose homosexuality. There is a good amount of christians who believe being gay is a sin. The Bible verse, Leviticus 20:13 says, “A man who sleeps with another man is an abomination and should be executed”. Now then, the book of Leviticus is pretty much a holiness code which isn’t put into play in today’s modern age. I mean, everything in Leviticus is no longer applied today. You don’t see guys getting burned at the stake for sleeping with both his wife and her mother. The book puts prohibitations on working on the Sabath and wearing mixed garments for example. So it’s a bunch of rules that no longer seem to hold much power over today. But people still use this book to condenm getting tatoos and, yes, condenm homosexuality. If you look at the verse of Leviticus 20:13, it says sleeping with another man was an abomination. An abomination is something vile, shameful, or detestable action, condition or habit. Back then, an abomination wasn’t a law. It was something non-Jews did that they considered displeasing to God. So pertaining to homosexuality, it doesn’t have too much to do with it. Here’s why; the verse of Genesis 38:9-10 condemn masturbation. It is considered an abomination worth of death for the reason of what was believed as fact back then. The Hebrew pre-scientific understanding was that the male semen carried the life of a baby. It was seen as the male containing the entire baby in the semen and the woman was seen as only the vessel meant for carrying it. They didn’t know all about ovulation and eggs. This passage condenms masturbation, to the extent of death, because it was seen as murder. A man would ejaculate his sperm without a woman’s vagina to serve as vessel. From the fact that masturbation is ejaculating without a woman’s vagina being present carries out to the point that the man wasted a life; in essence, killed a potential life. Drawing from this conclusion, it is seen that the verse back in Leviticus is considered an abomination for the reason that the man’s semen, the life of the baby, was going to no use. It isn’t so much the fact of having sex with another guy being bad, but wasting the potential life as being bad. Exactly what goes into making a baby was not known back then other than from visual knowledge. From that, people back then thought the man’s semen was the essence of life and the woman’s vagina serving as a vessel or incubater for the baby to develop. The passage does not condemn homosexuality as wrong for the sole fact of being gay, but for the misconception that male semen were babies. That the semen or ‘babies’ were being killed by not being deposited into a woman’s vagina to develop. It was considered murder back then. That is not the case today.

Another passage in scripture that is used to condemn gays is in 1 Corinthians 6:9 and 1 Timothy 1:10. The two passages lean toward condemning homosexuality. In these passages, Paul is growing frustrated with the christians in Ephesus and Corinth, which are fighting amonst themselves. Paul stresses that fact that treating each other wrongly is breaking God’s heart. When asked how they should treat each other, Paul says they should treat one another as how the Jewish laws say on the tablets of stone. Paul ends up restating some of what is written in these documents; don’t kill one another, don’t cheat on your spouse, don’t steal. He goes on with what shouldn’t be done; idoltery, whoremongering, prejury. In the original Greek, the words malokois and arsenokoitai. The word malokois most closely translates to ‘effeminate call boys’ or also translated to ‘male prostitutes’. The word arsenokoitai has yet to be translated from the fact that Greek scholars don’t know what it means. Scholars have related this word with ‘effeminate call boys’ as another name for them. But in the year of 1958, a Greek translater took it upon himself to rename both these words as ‘homosexuals’ even though there is no such word in the Greek or Hebrew language. This word proceeded to replace both these words in English-language Bibles. As a result of this, people have been using the two verses of 1 Cor. 6:9 and 1 Tim. 1:10 as evidence that homosexuality is sin. It is being said because a man translating the original Greek words into English decided to take the unknown meaning of arsenokoitai ; replacing it with the word ‘homosexual’. Taking the word arsenokoitai into its original context, it can be said that Paul was not referring to being gay. As evidence from history, Paul could very well be condemning married men who took sexual pleasure with hairless young boys (malokios), as they would do with young, smooth-skined girls. He could very well be condemning the act of having sex with a child. It doesn’t seem to refer to being homosexual. But due to the fact that the word arsenokoitai still doesn’t have a proper translation still causes debate.

Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, a german social scientist, was the first officialy declare homosexuals as being a distinct class of individuals. That they were not freaks of nature, but human beings simply with a different sexual orientation. Many neurologist have supported that being homosexual is a biological factor. They have performed brain scans of both homosexual and heterosexual subjects revealing key structures of a homosexual’s  brain that control emotion, mood and aggressiveness are similar to a straight person of the opposite sex. To put it bluntly, the parts of a gay’s brain, like emotion and mood, look very similar to that of a woman’s. That is something you can’t learn. You can’t learn something and automatically change your biological features. The ruling that you can only be gay by learning it is iffy, if not, a fallacy. It is more likely that it is something that you are born with. If it is something that is learned then, like any learned behavior, can be unlearned through conditioning. If you take a dog and teach it to sit by command, then it is possible to make him unlearn that trick. By punishing the dog whenever you give him the command of sitting down, then the dog will most likely not perform the command out of fear of being punished. If being gay was something learned, then it could be unlearned through punishment. Many believe that by rejection, a gay person will learn the error of his ways and return to being straight. That is a fallacy. If a gay person were to go back to being straight, then either: A. He wasn’t gay to begin with, just confused as to what being gay was exactly. or B. In order to avoid further anguish from society, he will put on a facade of being straight just to gain acceptance. That, in my opinion, is falling into temptation. By succumbing to what the world demands of you is falling into sin. You are willing to give up who you are in order to recieve recognition. Being gay or lesbian does not mean that you are hated by God. No, He loves every person and desires to have a personal relationship with each and everyone of us, if we allow Him to. My belief is that Christ died for all of us so that our sins will be forgiven, and by accepting Him into our hearts we will  recieve salvation.

Is being gay or lesbian a sin? Verily, verily I proclaim that no; being gay or lesbian is not a sin. This is something that even I learned when I was researching and writing this post. To be perfectly honest, I thought that being gay or lesbian was a sin. I simply thought that the act of having sex with the same sex was a sin. I would go with the arguement that having sex with the same sex wasn’t always constantly running through a gay person’s mind. I would say it was a train of thought and the only sin was when sex was initiated. Apperantly, I have proven myself wrong with the evidence accumulated thus far. From what people have learned and experienced, people will treat a gay differently. What gripes me is when christians condemn gays. They say all this blasphemy of “God hates fags!”. No, he does not. What I want to stress even more is the belief that being gay automatically sends you to hell. Total garbage. Since when does being who you are condemn you to hell? If that is the case, then why would God make you gay just so you can go to hell? There is no logic behind this. The misconception of a gay having to go straight to recieve salvation is also complete rubbish. Like I’ve stated before, you can’t change who you are. You can be gay or lesbian and still be a christian. That is a belief I stand by.

If I was old enough to vote, I’d say YES for same sex marriage. Voting NO is limiting a person of their right of happiness. Marriage isn’t something I know a lot about in the Bible. But when marriage started to involve the state, I don’t see how religion has as much reason or hold, but that’s just me.  I believe and agree with every single thing Keith Olbermann had to say. I rarely agree with one person’s side when it comes to big issues like this.

Information courtesy of Rev. Mel White, co-founder of Soulforce and the Holy Bible.

Advertisement