ROMANS 1 WHERE PAUL CONDEMNS LESBIAN AND GAY SEX IS DISTORTED IN MANY CIRCLES

A minority of theologians concerned about teaching positions and perhaps popularity do lie about what the Bible says.  No historian would read the texts and conclude that the Bible is LGBT inclusive.  So the theologians are overreaching and overstepping.  Real theology does not work in a bubble - that is fundamentalism.  Picking one or two theologians just because they agree with you or suit your view is dishonest.  You are always going to have cranks and dissidents and a good theologian can have a blind spot with religious texts or some texts.  The lies from religionists will worsen the more religion is penalised and defunded for anti-gay teaching.  How people can think the Bible which preaches taking up your cross every day to follow Jesus and is not about walking softly on paths of daisies to Heaven should fit modern ideas of happiness is inexplicable.  The answer is they know the stupidity of it but it is about popularity.

Paul elsewhere affirmed the moral teaching of the Law of Moses on sex for he excommunicated a man for living with his stepmother.  This is a violation of Leviticus 18:8 and Deuteronomy 22:30.  That explains why this man was singled out as an example for while people might raise eyebrows at a man doing that it was not necessarily incest or hurting his father.  He picked him out of several he must have known about because this specific sin matched something specified in the Law as wrong.  The Bible calls gay sex an abomination.  It demands in the name of God that this sin be punished by a cruel death at the hands of the people to picture their total distancing themselves from this sin.  People make out the abomination was a word for violations of ritual purity law or ceremonial laws or Hebrew customs.  But this was not that kind of abomination for nobody was put to death for breaking any laws only moral ones or ones that turned to other gods or to the occult.

As Romans 1 clearly shows Paul was against homosexuality and lesbianism it is a target for inclusivist hypocrites in the Church.  They cannot agree on how to get it reconciled with their wish to affirm gay sexual relationships.  That alone shows something is amiss.  It takes too much cognitive dissonance to heed their sophistic meanderings.  The person is left with a deep down sense that Paul in fact did condemn them and that is the obvious truth.  And their "affirmation" leaves those LGBTQ who don't want a regular sex partner out in the cold and dismissed as immoral immature "whoremongers" and left with a threat of homophobic violence.  They shift the threat from some LGBTQ to others though they recognise that religious texts have led many to feel they should abuse those people.

Romans 1 never says it targets any particular culture. So notions that Paul was only thinking of sex practices in the Temple of Isis are out.        Where is the data on these practices in Rome?  It does not exist.  And Rome had its own gods and goddesses so why are we talking about the Temples of Isis?  JP Holding in his book Christian Answers to this Generations Questions writes, "Paul offers an explicit condemnation of homosexual behaviour in Romans 1:27-8.  Some also claim that Paul refers to some sort of cultural behaviour, like temple prostitution, but we know from the works of Jewish writers who were contemporaries of Paul (Josephus, and Philo) that the language Paul uses reflects typical objections to homosexuality by the Jews of his day."

The letter was written to his followers and he said elsewhere he was not going to judge outsiders. Do you want to think that Christians were in danger of going to the Temple of Isis? If so he would have said so. And if gay sex is okay then it is okay then, it is just abusing it to offer it to Isis. He makes no difference between committed love and promiscuous sex. He just says men should be with women and women with men.  If gay sex is okay then surely sleeping around is abusing it but he never mentions the level of homosexual practice.  It is about that it happens at all.

Obvious nonsense like the Isis argument is trying to get around Bible texts and does not help the cause of LGBT rights. It is counter-productive and doing the opposite of what is supposedly intended and a minority of people do use tricks like that to get the people they pretend to defend targeted by making it sound like you need to be stupid to stand up for them.  In time people are going to mistrust LGBT and their allies as liars.

Paul says the men give up relations with women and women with men so man hungers for man and woman for woman. This would suggest he knows nothing of homosexuality or lesbian as something unchangeable. But many gays and lesbians claim they did give up heterosexual relationships and were not born that way.  And what about bisexuals?  He wrote that these sinners get what they deserve including death in the end. That is a strange way to write if all he meant was people turning from their heterosexual orientation to have gay sex.  It includes those who lightly dabble and those who are deeply involved.

All attempts to dismiss Romans 1 condemning gay sex assume that Paul did not have our modern idea of LGBT relationships.  And those who say that say that men lived with men  and women with women secretly if not openly expect us to assume that too!  Paul as a pastor would have met them.  If Paul had lived experience of being gay, then he did know what he was talking about.  There is no evidence that Paul did not know that stable gay relationships happen.  It is just speculation and it is an insult to the intelligence to try and get around a text by arrogantly pontificating that you are in a position to say what he did or did not know.

The notion that 1 Corinthians 6:9-10 which slams abusers of themselves with mankind speaks of men interfering with boys not loving same sex relationships is bizarre considering that people who were virtually still children made up the majority of newly wed couples. And it is reading back modern notions of sex into the Bible. Back then all people considered anal sex as as abuse perhaps as in using somebody’s body the wrong way more than abuse in the sense of setting out to hurt the person. Why would Paul condemn man and boy instead of a wiser, “having sex with a child is wrong”? To single out man and boy would be homophobic and imply disapproval of men with men. It's too pointed not to be homophobic. 

You see some in the Church trying to say that science seems to suggest that being LGBT is a non-pathological minority variant in the human condition.  Well that still does not tell us if we should or should not affirm LGBT bedroom relations.  And they use the word "seems".  That is not strong support for LGBT.

Also, why is all that effort needed to get Bibles to "affirm" LGBT and not needed to affirm other groupings such as atheists or religions that are so linked with a particular race you cannot criticise them without being racist?  Where are the theologians getting around the statements that the Jewish public campaigned to have Jesus nailed on a cross?  Where are the theologians trying to be inclusive to Muslims who are saying that maybe the Bible does not clearly say that Jesus died on the cross?  It is a serious thing to accuse the Qur'an of being so wrong on this, it says Issa [commonly assumed to be Jesus!] did not die on a cross. Such a thing would only be a lie if it is not true and would be tantamount to saying that Hitler never existed.  Some claims are so big that if they are made they are never mistakes but obvious lies.   Why is Bible affirmation of all LGBT people as human not enough?  The religious affirmers are treating the LGBT person as if the only thing that matters is affirming them as LGBT as if nothing else matters about them.  That is not inclusion at all.

As an atheist, I hold that we are made by an undesigned pattern that nature fell into.  Thus there is no reason to let nature run its course.  It is not able to think.  It is not sacred.  Make yourself.  This affirms that it is your body do do what you want with.  People say this is turning you into a commodity.  We are all commodities anyway.  Another can treat your body like a commodity but the point is it is your body.  You are not making money but giving it if you need to have an abortion or change your gender medically or whatever.  You do what you want and if this means involving those who treat you like an object so what as long as you are doing what you want.    Their doing that is little and the main thing is you are NOT doing it to yourself but doing what you want.  Atheism has no doubt that being self-made not god-made is what you should care about.  But once you bring in God you risk people thinking that he knows what he is doing and we should not change our bodies or use them in a way that violates nature.