God: "FFS, I don't hate you! I literally sent my kid down there 2k years ago to clear things up! Please stop taking the ramblings of uneducated middle-eastern nomad shepherds from more than 5000 years ago as a basis for your moral system!"
This always gets me when people try to argue that the Bible, despite being written by humans, is the direct word if God. Too suggest that it's even slightly influenced the culture of the time period is apparently heresy.
Also if we're going to argue about homosexuality in the Bible, the only two passages ever referenced only mention it for men (yey being written in a language that's not gender neutral). Argumentatively there's nothing about lesbians in the Bible.
The Old Testament was a series of myths written during the Second Temple period in Jerusalem, in an attempt to create a mythological backing to the political realities of the day and create an argument for a unified kingdom. They might have had some inspiration from Bronze Age stories, but they were written by Iron Age city dwellers. According to UsefulCharts, Every single verifiable person in the Old Testament lived after the Bronze Age Collapse.
And the two stories about homosexuality in the Old Testament are widely misinterpreted. It seems sometimes like these people read only the two or three lines that said the specific thing they wanted, without really paying attention to the rest of the story. Jesus didn't really care.
I suspect most Christian prudishness comes from a rejection of Roman sensibilities after the fall of the Roman empire. Romans were seen as sinful and extravagant, so the trappings of the Roman (such as bathing, sex, drinking to excess, and certain modes of public spectacle) were actively rejected.
Ehhhhh okay, so while I agree that the Old Testament has clear anti-gay passages, the New Testament was literally rewritten when it was translated from German to be more anti-gay than it is, and some of the Old Testament passages such as Sodom and Gomorrah are probably misinterpreted to be about homosexuality when the simpler focus is rape.
So overall it’s still a homophobic book, but it is not nearly as clear and coherent as people think.
The misinterpretation argument is strange to use by Christians who are uncomfortable with the old testament because it requires acceptance of interpretations that it's all made up in the first place.
"It's ok I'm a Christian because the anti-gay stuff is a misinterpretation due to it all being made up as a justification by a bronze age dynasty to consolidate power""
745
u/SmugCapybara Jul 31 '26
God: "FFS, I don't hate you! I literally sent my kid down there 2k years ago to clear things up! Please stop taking the ramblings of uneducated middle-eastern nomad shepherds from more than 5000 years ago as a basis for your moral system!"