[Vision2020] Homosexuality

[Michael]

Joan Wrote:

I believe in one God in one piece, not a three-in-one, triune god. I agree
that sex can be amazing (and also, alas, amazingly dull), but it does not,
for me, reveal the Trinitarian nature of the divine. I also don't agree that
the "pleasure and ritual of sex" are an "ultimate expression of love and
affection." I'm not willing to accord my G-spot that much significance. Sex
is sex, and theology is theology; or, as Freud put it, sometimes a cigar is
just a cigar. 

 

Me:

Then you worship a god who is eternally sexless; no warm embracing, no
dancing, no pleasure of communion. He was eternally alone before he decided
to create something else.  This god did not look down on creation and say
Let Us make man and woman in Our image.  Rather, you have, at best,
something more like a masturbating god. Right?   It is interesting that you
find the meaning of sex to reside in your individual G-spot.  Surely, the
pleasure and ritual of sex are not necessarily an ultimate expression of
love and affection.  In our fallen world, they usually are not.  This is due
to a lack of love, selfishness, emotional and physical problems, etc.  But I
would be surprised if you argued that the pleasure and ritual of sex ARE NOT
SUPPOSED TO BE the ultimate expression of love and affection. Is this what
you are maintaining? 

Joan Wrote:

Paul and Solomon are not in accord, and I would not quote them in the same
context. Solomon, like David before him, was an enthusiastically sexual man.
Solomon was a true ladies man; the James Bond of the ancient Hebrew world. 

 

Me:

Paul and Solomon, at the end of their lives and after amazingly diverse life
experiences, both concluded with the same thing: all is vanity without the
blessing of God; it is best to obey his commandments. 

 

Joan Wrote:

My mother never told me that sex with a donkey was wrong; somehow, I just
knew. 

 

Me:

I've commented a bit to this in my response to Joe.  To add to that a bit
however, I'd be interested to know how you morally distinguish so strongly
between sex with a donkey and leaving your husband for another woman.

 

I'm not sure how your argument from Sodom and Gomorrah is supposed to work,
and I'm still not sure how you see hospitality working this way in the
narrative.  What we do know is that the Lord had already determined to
destroy Sodom and he had already included Abraham in on his counsels of war.
"Their sin is exceedingly grave" (18:20).  The angels visited Sodom merely
because the compassion of the Lord was upon Lot (19:16); the angels were
showing hesed to the family, they were showing lovingkindness (19:19).  The
brutality of the men demanding relations with Lot's guests seems to show how
the city was unrighteous, but this was not the cause of the Lord's
determination for its destruction.

 

Joan Wrote:
This is not the case, but I think I'll let my partner, who has a PhD in
Victorian Literature, deal with this. In the meantime, I'll just admit here
and now that I've read more than my fair share of Victorian porn, and let me
assure you, they had an excellent understanding of homosexuality. So, too,
did earlier popular writers. Ever read Moll Flanders? Or Fanny Hill? And
medieval literature knew a thing or six about homosexuality -- the Decameron
is little more than a bag of dirty stories. Really good dirty stories, but
dirty stories nonetheless. If you want to go back further, to the Rome of
Jesus' or Paul's day, you'll find that homosexuality was commonplace. It was
marriage between one man and one woman, marriage for the sake of
heterosexual love, that was unusual.



Me: 

I was only referring to the public Christian discourse on homosexuality. I
agree that homosexuality was rampant in the ancient world; women, in turn
were more despised.  The homosexually pedophilic and subordinated marital
culture of Sparta was horrifying; admittedly, homosexual to the core.  But
what I would like to know is that if the rise of homosexuality is nothing
more than the natural result of biological determination of sexual drives
(the genetic thing and all that; just the release of unnatural prohibition)
then how can you have entire civilizations that are at times almost entirely
homosexual and then at other times entirely heterosexual?  

 

Thanks,

Michael Metzler

 

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