4 posts tagged “christianity”

The argument for gay Jesus

http://www.religioustolerance.org/chr...

Judging by the anger among many Christians toward the Da Vinci Code book and movie, some find it difficult to wrap their minds around the concept of Jesus having been sexually active. The thoughts that he might have been gay are even more difficult to handle.

"J Richards" suggested that Mark 7:14-16 shows that Jesus approves of homosexual acts. The critical phrase reads: "There is nothing from without a man, that entering into him can defile him..." Richards suggests that Jesus gave great emphasis to this teaching, directing it to everyone. Richards suggests that the sentence refers to dietary laws and also extends to  "blood transfusions, medication, organ transplants, and artificial insemination" and to homosexual acts as well.

There was a certain Professor of Religion named Dr. "Smith," a studious man who taught at a small college in the Western United States. The professor taught the required survey course in Christianity at this particular institution. Every student was required to take this course his or her freshman year regardless of his or her major.

Although Dr. Smith tried hard to communicate the essence of the gospel in his class, he found that most of his students looked upon the course as nothing but required drudgery. Despite his best efforts, most students refused to take Christianity seriously.

This year, Dr. Smith had a special student named Steve. Steve was only a freshman, but was studying with the intent of going on to seminary for the ministry. Steve was popular, he was well liked, and he was an imposing physical specimen. He was now the starting center on the school football team, and was the best student in the professor's class.

One day, Dr. Smith asked Steve to stay after class so he could talk with him. "How many push-ups can you do?"

Steve said "I do about 200 every night."

"200. That's pretty good, Steve," the professor said. "Do you think you could do 300?"

Steve replied, "I don't know... I've never done 300 at a time."

"Do you think you could?" asked Dr. Smith again.

"Well, I can try," said Steve.

"Can you do 300 in sets of 10? I have a class project in mind and I need you to do about 300 push-ups in sets of ten for this to work. Can you do it? I need you to tell me you can do it," said the professor.

Steve said, "Well... I think I can...yeah, I can do it."

Dr. Smith said, "Good! I need you to do this on Friday. Let me explain what I have in mind...."

Friday came and Steve got to class early and sat in the front of the room. When class started, the professor pulled out a big box of donuts. No, these weren't the normal kinds of donuts, they were the extra fancy BIG kind, with cream centers and frosting swirls.

Everyone was pretty excited: it was Friday, the last class of the day, and they were going to get an early start on the weekend with a party in Dr. Smith's class.

The professor went to the first girl in the first row and asked, "Cynthia, do you want to have one of these donuts?"

Cynthia said, "Yes."

Dr. Smith then turned to Steve and asked, "Steve, would you do ten push-ups so that Cynthia can have a donut?"

"Sure." Steve jumped down from his desk to do a quick ten Then Steve again sat in his desk. The professor put a donut on Cynthia's desk.

Dr. Smith then went to Joe, the next person, and asked, "Joe, do you want a donut?"

Joe said, "Yes."

The professor asked, "Steve would you do ten push-ups so Joe can have a donut?" Steve did ten push-ups. Joe got a donut. And so it went, down the first aisle, Steve did ten pushups for every person before they got their donut. And down the second aisle, Dr.Smith came to Scott.

Scott was on the basketball team, and in as good condition as Steve. He was very popular and never lacking for female companionship. When the professor asked, "Scott do you want a donut?"

Scott's reply was, "Well, can I do my own pushups?"

Dr. Smith said, "No, Steve has to do them."

Then Scott said, "Well, I don't want one then."

The professor shrugged and then turned to Steve and asked, "Steve, would you do ten pushups so Scott can have a donut he doesn't want?" With perfect obedience Steve started to do ten pushups.

Scott said, "HEY! I said I didn't want one!"

Dr. Smith said, "Look, this is my classroom, my class, my desks, and these are my donuts. Just leave it on the desk if you don't want it." And he put a donut on Scott's desk.

Now by this time, Steve had begun to slow down a little. He just stayed on the floor between sets because it took too much effort to be getting up and down. You could start to see a little perspiration coming out around his brow. The professor started down the third row. Now the students were beginning to get a little angry.

Dr. Smith asked Jenny, "Jenny, do you want a donut?"

Sternly, Jenny said, "No."

Then Dr. Smith asked Steve, "Steve, would you do ten more push-ups so Jenny can have a donut that she doesn't want?" Steve did ten... Jenny got a donut.

By now, a growing sense of uneasiness filled the room. The students were beginning to say "No" and there were all these uneaten donuts on the desks. Steve also had to really put forth a lot of extra effort to get these pushups done for each donut. There began to be a small pool of sweat on the floor beneath his face, his arms and brow were beginning to get red because of the physical effort involved. Dr. Smith asked Robert, who was the most vocal unbeliever in the class, to watch Steve do each push up to make sure he did the full ten pushups in a set because he couldn't bear to watch all of Steve's work for all of those uneaten donuts. He sent Robert over to where Steve was so Robert could count the set and watch Steve closely.

The professor started down the fourth row.

During his class, however, some students from other classes had wandered in and sat down on the steps along the radiators that ran down the sides of the room. When the professor realized this, he did a quick count and saw that now there were 34 students in the room. He started to worry if Steve would be able to make it. Dr. Smith went on to the next person and the next and the next. Near the end of that row, Steve was really having a rough time. He was taking a lot more time to complete each set.

Steve asked the professor, "Do I have to make my nose touch on each one?"

Dr. Smith thought for a moment, "Well, they're your pushups. You are in charge now. You can do them any way that you want." And the professor went on.

A few moments later, Jason, a recent transfer student, came to the room and was about to come in when all the students yelled in one voice, "NO! Don't come in! Stay out!" Jason didn't know what was going on.

Steve picked up his head and said, "No, let him come."

Professor Smith said, "You realize that if Jason comes in you will have to do ten pushups for him?"

Steve said, "Yes, let him come in. Give him a donut"

The professor said, "Okay, Steve, I'll let you get Jason's out of the way right now. Jason, do you want a donut?"

Jason, new to the room, hardly knew what was going on. "Yes," he said, "give me a donut."

"Steve, will you do ten push-ups so that Jason can have a donut?" Steve did ten pushups very slowly and with great effort. Jason, bewildered, was handed a donut and sat down. Dr. Smith finished the fourth row, then started on those visitors seated by the heaters. Steve's arms were now shaking with each push-up in a struggle to lift himself against the force of gravity. Sweat was profusely dropping off of his face and, by this time, there was no sound except his heavy breathing; there was not a dry eye in the room.

The very last two students in the room were two young women, both cheerleaders, and very popular. The professor went to Linda, the second to last, and asked, "Linda, do you want a doughnut?"

Linda said, very sadly, "No, thank you, I had Reese's for breakfast!"

"Shit, you had candy for breakfast?!"

"Not candy, Reese's Puff Cereal!"

So she pours me a bowl and I shove the spoon in my mouth. Then a completely orgasmic wave of peanut butter and chocolately taste bombards my taste buds.

Reese's Puff Cereal;

It's Reese's, FOR BREAKFAST!

Wasted the day on Yahoo Answers.  Prolly shoulda gone to bed hours ago.  But I wrote this in reply to a God Warrior who was ranting about how gays try to justify homosexuality as "natural," and I was rather fond of how it turned out (you know, simultaneously neutral and inflammatory), so I thought I'd post it here too.  Enjoy.  Discuss.

The concept of gay as something you "are" as opposed to something you "do" is only about a hundred years old; it coincided with the rise of modern psychology.  Before then, people might say you were performing homosexual acts, but they didn't say you "were" a homosexual.  They did, generally, in many parts of the world, consider heterosexual sex as more "natural" than homosexual sex.  But it would be more accurate to say that they thought of everyone as a potential bisexual.  Except that they thought no such thing, because they didn't even have words for straights, gays and in-betweeners so they could have thoughts about them.  This is almost definitely the only reason the bible never specifically criticizes gay people.  After all, they had seen gay sex before, that much is clear; they simply didn't think having gay sex made you "a homo."  Never occured to them in the first place.

On a side note, that part in the Bible where it says "Thou shalt not lie with a man as with a woman; it is an abomination"?  Well, you can tell from that sentence that they knew what "lying with a woman" meant.  It meant the same thing back then as it does now.  We've got lots of examples to show that ancient people knew what you were talking about if you would "lie with a man," or a horse, or a dog, or anything else you could think of to lie with.  To add "as with a woman" to mean "homosexually" would be just as redundant then as calling someone a "gay homosexual" is today.  So why not just say "Thou shalt not lie with a man; it is an abomination"?  Simple: linguists agree that they are talking about a specific kind of sex with a man.  Most likely sex with a man DRESSED as a woman, and/or a man tucking in or hiding his genitals; in general, trying to look like a woman to the guy who's "on top."  The abomination, then, is that you are denying that God made you just like you're supposed to be.  In short, you aren't supposed to have sex with a tranny in drag, for the same basic reason you're not supposed to admire a person with tattoos or other body modification (except circumcision, of course).  It means you're denying God's perfection--that's the bad part.  Putting a penis in a butt, male or female, is a total red herring, like masturbation.  You're just not supposed to put one in a vagina, unless you're trying to have a baby, and then only with your wife.  Apart from that, being horny, or doing any of the many weird things horny anythings do... is just "natural," and not even worth commenting on.

Christianity has more than its share of problems.  It's been so long since the last time God appeared as burning vegetation and ordered us to carve His word in stone, that people can now pretty much use the Bible to prove or disprove anything they darn well please.  It's no secret anymore: the Bible has been repeatedly mistranslated over the centuries.  Sometimes by accident, and sometimes deliberately, to further the agendas of various fringe factions.  (And some of them were massively successful... we now call them Roman Catholics!)

Yes, there are plenty of sensible, logical reasons for us to abandon Christianity altogether.  Unfortunately, sanity and logic still aren't enough to prove, finally and conclusively, that Christianity is just a huge crock.  There remains the slim chance that everything the Bible says about the afterlife is REAL.

Can you imagine, for a moment, that you played the same lottery numbers every day of your life, never winning anything (or, at least, not much), and then one day, you said to yourself "This is silly... the odds of me ever winning this thing are astronomical!"  And so you stopped playing the numbers.  And then, the very next day, they picked your numbers to win a multi-million-dollar jackpot.  Can you imagine how bad that would be?  Well, abandoning Christianity has the potential to be millions of times worse than even that!

Which is why I endorse the "Cover Your Ass" school of religious belief.  Learn a little about as many different religions as you can, try to loosely adhere to the spirit if not the letter of their teachings, and hope whoever turns out to be in charge of everything will let you get off on good behavior, or at least good intentions.  I figure SOMETHING, SOMEWHERE has to be the Ultimate Power in the Universe by the rules of semantics alone, and I definitely get the impression that it isn't a human, or even our collective unconsciousness.

(Here's a helpful hint for you: ignore Judaism as much as you can!  It turns out that Jewish people believe that people who haven't heard about it will simply be judged on Seven Noahite (or Noahide) Commandments, which for the most part read like a stripped-down version of the Christian Ten Commandments!  It's two... two... two religions in one!  But Jewish people will try to get you to learn about a million other little rules if you seem interested, which helps them win points with their Big Guy In the Sky.  In the meantime, you might burn in Hell for disobeying these rules once you learn them.  Good deal for them, bad for you.  So mainly just try to avoid eating the flesh and drinking the blood of live animals, and just worry about Christianity.  Also, note that lots of religions promise to go easy on those who have never "heard the Good Word," though few so explicitly offer the sweet deal the Jews have given us.  This is what makes the Jellynail "Cover Your Ass" system work for you!  Thanks, guys!)

I recommend studying not just popular religions, but also unpopular and even dead religions, for the same reason stated before: there's just no way of knowing for sure they're wrong.  Can you really be sure a god doesn't exist just because all his followers died out?  Of course not.  (Would you know what to do if you died and found yourself standing on a rainbow bridge in front of a pumped-up Norwegian wielding a double-headed axe?  There are even stranger hypotheses than that out there!)  Similarly, it might be a good idea to study a few fake religions, just in case they actually knew more than even they suspected.  And why not make up a few of your own?  You've got a good imagination, right?  Face it, whatever's waiting for us on "the other side" is probably actually weirder than any of us have so far anticipated... even in our wildest dreams!

But let's get back to Christianity and its Bible again.  Sure, the King James Version is good enough... if you don't mind reading a book that's been run through history's longest game of "telephone."  A book that has been translated from Aramaic to Greek to Latin to ancient French to Old English to Middle English to Modern English... probably with a few steps in between which I've forgotten.  A book which has clearly been mistranslated and altered repeatedly along the way.  A book which existed only in spoken form for centuries before ever being written down to begin with... and which was probably already a little screwed up at that point in time.

And some people really don't care.  Some just think of the Bible as a great work of epic science fiction; they're fine with either the "original theatrical release" or the "director's cut."  And some would argue that all these alterations must surely be the work of God Himself, slowly nudging the Bible over the millennia into an ever-more-perfect form.  Fine; but if you really believe that, then what is God trying to tell you by letting you read this, right now?

What you need is a Bible that has been screwed around with as little as possible... which resembles the earliest Aramaic versions as much as possible, while still being written in English.  To this end, I'm officially endorsing the Dr. Lamsa translation, available new in paperback for $35 through the Noohra Foundation, or used for half as much through Campusi.com.   As far as I know, this is the only direct Aramaic-to-English Bible you can get.  Dr. Lamsa, born on the Iraq-Turkey border, isn't just a scholar of ancient Aramaic; he was also raised in an area that speaks a modern descendant of the language, and has been slow to change over the centuries since Biblical times.  (Nice to see xenophobia and dogmatism actually being good for something for a change, isn't it, folks?)  This puts the late Dr. Lamsa in the unique position of being able to explain some of the idiomatic expressions used throughout the Bible.  For instance, did you know that "hell" was an ancient Assyrian slang term for "mental torment?"  Kinda like when we say someone is "wack" nowadays.  So when they said that people would burn in hellfire forever without God, they were just saying that people without God would be forever messed-up in the head.  Gee, you'd think your preacher would've mentioned that at some point!

Or how "turned to a pillar of salt" meant "had a stroke and died."  Not to say we know for sure that Lot's wife didn't actually turn into a pillar of salt, mind you.  It just might be worth knowing that when Ba'ahb down at the ancient Assyrian Bar & Grill would tell his drinking buddies that his aunt turned into a pillar of salt last week, they would assume she died of a stroke.  They would no more assume she actually turned into a real pillar of salt than your friends, upon hearing you had "water on the knee," would grab some cups and expect a geyser of Evian to come gushing out at any minute.

Dr. Lamsa found over twelve thousand major differences between his version of the Bible and the King James version, and countless minor ones.  I can't promise you that he wasn't trying to push his own agenda, or that his version of the Bible is the "real" one.  (Even if his translations were perfect, there's still the matter of the generations of oral repetition that transpired before anyone bothered to write this stuff down.)  Your local reverend will probably pooh-pooh the whole thing, especially since it causes many of the modern tenets of Christianity t come crashing down.  But as best I know, you just can't find a less meddled-with Bible anywhere in the world.  Not in English, anyways.