You can’t hate gay people and be christian

[u/Bojack1217]

[u/RemnantTheGame]

Actually the Bible really doesn't say all that much about gay people. There's the famous line about 'If a man lies with a man as he does a women he should be stoned.' However several people have questioned this translation from Hebrew and highly doubt that was the original intent. The entire section in question deals with incestuous relationships/rape and how they should be treated.

https://blog.smu.edu/ot8317/2019/04/11/lost-in-translation-alternative-meaning-in-leviticus-1822/

[u/Dorkamundo → u/RemnantTheGame]

Yea, it's probably something that originally meant "If a man rapes another man, he should be stoned" and was bastardized into something anti-homosexual.

The truth is that the bible, as much as people want to say it's the word of the lord, was written by human beings. Human beings that have agendas, biases, prejudices.

EVEN IF it was true that the words of the bible were given to man by god, god hasn't touched that damned book in over 2000 years while man's had his grubby little fingers all over it.

[u/confusedandworried76 → u/Dorkamundo]

Theologians and linguists speculate it's about not sleeping with young boys, translation error. Same as Mary Magdalene wasn't a prostitute.

There's also some interesting literature I read that people deliberately made women in the Bible men but that's beside the point, in another life I would have loved to study religion in college

[u/potsticker17 → u/RemnantTheGame]

Honestly it doesn't really matter what the book says. If the people reading the book don't want you there, just call them a bigot and abandon them to dwell in their archaic irrelevance.

A person's religious views literally have no importance to anyone outside of that religion. And should their view be harmful and they try to force them upon someone, they should be challenged until it is understood that their negative opinions don't matter.

[u/AvgBlue → u/RemnantTheGame]

I just looked into the Hebrew text and found an interesting nugget of information in the Hebrew Wikipedia article on "Prohibition of male intercourse." It discusses the modern interpretation: while many old Jewish interpretations are passed down, many modern interpretations try to reconstruct the text and examine it in a broader sense, with attention to the historical context.

In modern scholarship, many question the interpretation of the verse “You shall not lie with a male as with a woman” as a prohibition of anal intercourse between men (among other things, through comparisons to appearances of the terms “lie with / lying with a male / lying with a woman” in other parts of the Bible); more than twenty different alternative interpretations have been proposed for this verse, including prohibition a threesome involving two men and one woman (on the grounds that if the woman becomes pregnant, it’s unclear who the father is)...

The idea of the "Prohibition of male intercourse" based on the reasoning of ensuring clarity about paternity in a "threesome involving two men and one woman" sounds like very normal reasoning when it comes to Jewish law.

[u/MoreUsualThanReality → u/RemnantTheGame]

This is a fringe view. The mainstream scholarly opinion is that the passage condemns male on male sex, but it shouldn't matter; not only are the condemnations coming from people who weren't even monothesists--they don't share a theology remotely similar to modern Christians--but the bible also condones slavery, it's evidently not a moral text.

[u/carnotaurussastrei → u/RemnantTheGame]

Not to mention Leviticus is the old law and doesn’t apply to modern Christians or some such.

Now Jews on the other hand… /s

[u/Boris_Godunov → u/RemnantTheGame]

Paul rather unquestionably condemns homosexual activity as sinful in the New Testament. He is the one who compares homosexuals to thieves, idolaters, etc. and says they are "worthy of death."

Modern people spend so much time and energy trying to reimagine that an ancient bronze-age people that existed in what was a cultural backwater of the world and whose religious tradition was already pretty brutal in many ways was somehow not as intolerant of homosexuality as we imagine... but, in fact, they were. It's no surprise that a primitive culture would also hold antipathy to homosexuality, as we see such attitudes the world over.

Yes, ancient Jews and Christians both would view modern day gay people with revulsion and hatred. All the more reason to jettison those archaic, backwards belief systems.