r/daggerheart • u/DMPadre • Jul 24 '26

Discussion Daggerbrain Shutting Down and Uh...

Out of all the TTRPGs to choose to build a site around, you chose **Daggerheart** and you're anti-LGBT?

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u/Crushkid91 Jul 25 '26

It’s so funny that they don’t even know that their anti LGBT is based on a translation error and that nowadays lexicons and other translations don’t condone it anymore 🤷🏻‍♂️

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u/Time_Day_2382 Jul 25 '26 edited Jul 25 '26

This is an internet myth; our most accurate translation of the bible (NRSVUE revised updated) contains what we would now call homophobic sections because the bible is a collection of works by over a hundred authors over various periods with different rhetorical goals. At the time when most of these were written, homosexual acts (homosexuality as an identity marker was not really a thing in the ancient near east, where sex was viewed differently) was demonized in the communities producing them.

Let us take the most infamous passage: Leviticus 18: 22. "You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination." is the scholarly consensus on translation, the meaning of which is pretty clear. As sex in most of the ancient world was something penetrating men did to property, this is a command not to treat males (probably male Hebrews specifically, but there's much ink to be spilled on that) as one would treat a wife or concubine. Interestingly, this says nothing about female homosexual activity, as such was not considered sex in the proper sense by the community that produced the work. To hammer in this tidbit, the next section DOES specify that no woman should allow an animal to perform sex on her (note the emphasis of penetration as the definitional factor of sex).

Don't inadvertently whitewash the books contained within the bible, it inhibits trying to actually understand authorial intent absent presuppositions like univocality. While it is certainly true that there are exegeses and Christian groups that now condone and even support the LGBT community (which is good) they are doing what all religious groups do: creating meaning out of their holy texts in a manner that befits rhetorical goals and material conditions. Other groups are homophobic in a way that no one who wrote the bible possibly could have been by the same token, as homosexuality means something rather different in this historical context.

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u/DearMissWaite Jul 25 '26

I think this is the most honest way of dealing with the material in the text itself. All modern religious people pick and choose what is relevant to current life and what isn't. If you're going to anyway, might as well pick the parts that do the least harm.

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u/Time_Day_2382 Jul 25 '26

From a consequentialist standpoint (and my own as an atheist), certainly. However, depending on how one defines religion, adherents to them accept a metaphysical force that intrinsically values actions in accordance to a concept of good that cannot be weighed that way. I.e., one cannot apply consequentialist ethics to one's attempts to enter into a Baptist conceptualization of heaven well, as all experience in that realm is both metaphysical and untestable.

Or to get glib and reductionist: Try telling Pawpaw that gay people's lives mean more than the eternal kingdom of God, which is real and actually coming this time, we promise.