Westboro Baptist Church VS. Anonymous

WOAH buddy we put them on a pedestal because they defend our country and do things others are afraid to do and they sacrifice themselves, My grandpa almost died saving some vietnamese school children from the Viet Cong, I'm sorry if this offends you but honestly I put soldiers that sacrifice their lives for us and others on THE HIGHEST pedastal, i'm going into the air force as well because i have the urge to protect people ......no hard feelings

Defend your country by killing other people in their countries and bombing schools from the coast.
I respect people who fought against Hitler, and Saddam Hussein, but I can't respect people for being paid killers.
Many of the people in Afghanistan today are mercenaries, not regular armed forces Americans love so much.

Vietnam invaded America?

Westboro seem like doomsday nutjobs.

Edited by Nollog, 27 December 2012 - 02:18 PM.

Mournblade,

Your post is a handy summary of modern liberal/revisionist biblical scholarship, but it is seriously flawed both logically and historically, and offends basic common sense. As a practicing Roman Catholic I want to offer a brief response so that more than your side and Phyrexian's equally interesting perspective can be taken into account.

Technically, no, as Levitacus is in the old testament, which was directed at the Jews. All the laws in the old testament were basically overridden by Jesus and the new testament.

I realize that different Christian traditions interpret the Old Testament and its relation to the New Testament differently, but this is a gross oversimplification of any of those traditions. To begin with, your statement flatly contradicts Jesus' own words as recorded in Matthew's gospel: "Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have come not to abolish them but to fulfill them." Second, the Ten Commandments are part of the Old Testament, and they have always been a defining part of Christian moral theology. Third, Leviticus' teaching on homosexuality is related to the understanding, deeply ingrained in ancient Hebrew culture, that sexuality was expressed between men and women in marriage. This understanding was derived from the book of Genesis, where Adam is given a woman as his partner, and this understanding is repeated by Jesus in the gospels.

Whenever people use the term of homosexuality today in reference to the new testament, they fail to understand that the word didn't exist back then. Going back to Greek translations, it gets vague and rather than condemning homosexuality, it can be interpreted that it condemns feminine men for being weak or lazy.

Which passage in the New Testament specifically are you referring to when you say that the translation of the Greek is "vague" and could just mean men being weak or lazy? I studied Classics in college, have a master's degree in Ancient Christianity from a major research university, and read Greek on a daily basis. I teach Latin and Greek for a living. When I read the New Testament, I do so in Greek. I also heard these very arguments when I was taking my New Testament class with the renowned textual critic Bart Ehrman (author of "Misquoting Jesus" and "God's Problem"). I'm not trying to toot my own horn here, but I just want to point out that I've done what you recommend at the end of your post and studied these issues extensively but find it disingenuous for you to make it sound like there's one acceptable opinion here. It's important that you not overstate your case by making it sound more "obvious" than it really is that Christians for 2000 years have simply been getting it wrong and forcing their own agendas into the bible when they translate it, and that anyone with half a brain would obviously recognize this when studying a very difficult language, 2000 years of Church History and theological reflection, etc.

Anyway, the fact that there is no one word for homosexuality in Greek is irrelevant, as they didn't have words for many of the things for which we have words. The question is whether or not the early Christians understood what we call homosexual acts to be morally neutral, morally positive, or morally negative. See below...

You said:

Plus never did Jesus or the letters mention homosexuality at all.

I disagree. In the first chapter of the letter to the Romans, Paul wrote:

Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves...For this reason God gave them up to dishonorable passions. Their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural, and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in their own persons the due penalty for their error.

Here Paul says that for men to have passion for men and women for women is the opposite of "natural relations." He calls what they're doing "shameful acts" and "dishonorable passions." Sure he doesn't use one specific word, but to say that this issue is never mentioned in the gospels and letters is quite unfair, as he clearly describes homosexual acts in this passage.
As for Jesus, there are probably a lot of things he didn't say since most people can't say everything that could possibly ever be said in one lifetime. The New Testament is also short, and a lot of what Jesus said wasn't written down. What we know from the gospels is that his moral teaching was in line with Jewish moral teaching. The one thing we know he modified was divorce, except this doesn't help the "Jesus didn't mention homosexuality" case because he actually made it more strict than Moses' teachings on divorce, not less. The fact is, Paul's teaching and other literature from early and later Church History are clear, and Jesus' statements about morality are consistent with earlier Jewish moral codes and later Christian reflections on morality. That we would expect anything different on this one case of homosexuality is a very weak argument from silence.

It's not so much nitpicking the bible, as it is the translators who wanted to enforce their own homophobia and etc... This becomes ironic...

On the contrary, it is quite useful for people who have a social agenda to push and want to label others as bigots or homophobes to argue that what the people who hold the despised social view (in this case that homosexual acts are immoral) are doing is not holding to an ancient tradition taught by the founders of their religion, but purposefully twisting their own religious texts to make them suit their own hateful views. Indeed, the revisionist points you propose would have us believe that, as it turns out, those men who lived 2000 years ago in a culture that by modern standards was highly restrictive in terms of sexuality actually didn't care about this sort of thing and probably thought just like modern post-Enlightenment secularists!

Let me be clear that my goal is not to convince you are anyone else of the validity of the moral code contained in the New Testament, nor am I saying that Westboro Baptist Church represents anything resembling a Christian moral code. My point is that Phyrexian's original point here was quite good. There's no point in trying to change an ancient religion, that was born in a culture MUCH different from the modern western world, to suit modern western moral sensibilities. Just reject it and move along. I wouldn't tell Muslims that the Qur'an and Hadith actually support women's rights if we pay attention to the fascinating findings of modern scholarship - I'd just tell them they're wrong and their sources are outdated and shouldn't be taken seriously in the modern world. This is the part about "offensive against common sense" that I mentioned in the beginning. It's a much more honest approach, one that I as a Catholic, perhaps strangely, prefer to the attempt of modern liberals to tell us that we've simply been fooling ourselves about our religion's moral teachings for 2 millenia or that we're so hateful that we'd change the bible if it said something we didn't want it to say, (which btw assumes that traditional Christian sexual ethics have anything to do with hating people who don't subscribe to them). In my opinion it'd also be a more intellectually honest way of handling the data.

Edited by WiiNC, 27 December 2012 - 03:13 PM.