Is homosexuality a bad thing?

It is largely the Judeo-Christian tradition which has a stake in gay-bashing. I could not hope to explain why, other than to note the christians probably absorbed the bigotry along with the rest of the racism, sexism and elitism of the old testament.

In colonial America, regulation of non-procreative sexual practices - regulation that carried harsh penalties but was rarely enforced - stemmed from Christian religious teachings and reflected the need for procreative sex to increase the population. Colonial sexual regulation included such non-procreative acts as masturbation, and sodomy laws applied equally to male-male, male-female, and human-animal sexual activity. "Sodomy" was not the equivalent of "homosexual conduct." It was understood as a particular, discrete, act, not as an indication of a person's sexuality or sexual orientation.

Not until the end of the nineteenth century did lawmakers and medical writing recognize sexual "inversion" or what we would today call homosexuality. The phrase "homosexual sodomy" would have been literally incomprehensible to the Framers of the Constitution, for the very concept of homosexuality as a discrete psychological condition and source of personal identity was not available until the late 1800s.

I only 'cherish' the Old Testament as an interesting peice of folklore and as it gives insight into Western religion and philosophy. If you choose to write it off as bigoted crap and not see it as a window to understanding these things, I suppose that is your prerogative.

Strawman . . . i made no such contention--that's nothing more than a snotty accusation attempting to belittle someone who disagrees with you.

I could not hope to explain why, other than to note the christians probably absorbed the bigotry along with the rest of the racism, sexism and elitism of the old testament.

You may defend the old testament as you will--it is, nevertheless, the source upon which fundamentalist christians lean for their condemnation of homosexuality.

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Strawman . . . i made no such contention--that's nothing more than a snotty accusation attempting to belittle someone who disagrees with you.

And yet...

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I could not hope to explain why, other than to note the christians probably absorbed the bigotry along with the rest of the racism, sexism and elitism of the old testament.

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You may defend the old testament as you will--it is, nevertheless, the source upon which fundamentalist christians lean for their condemnation of homosexuality.

If you can't see how the source of both Judaism and Christianity can be used to understand the philosophy behind these religions, I'm at a loss to explain further. I personally don't think I'm disagreeing with you at all on this topic - you showed that hatred of homosexuality was not prevalent in history, and I showed that it was a recent development. I'm only diagreeing that the OT has anything to do with it.

People are narrow-minded. There is no other way for them to be. Christians and Jews are not special in this respect.

What shows that you do not care about the information contained in the OT is that you constantly degrade it and the people who followed its teachings.

You tell me that it is 'mine' - that is, that it is not 'yours' and that you wish to distance youself from it.

You think that it is only about bigotry because it seems bigoted from your perspective.

You are unable to see beyond this bigotry and describe the real meat of it as 'unoriginal'.

This 'unoriginality' is part of what makes it interesting, since it means that parts of the legends can be traced back to other cultures and thus their evolution can be better understood.

rufio wrote:

People are narrow-minded. There is no other way for them to be. Christians and Jews are not special in this respect.

Look up the word tautology.

Most of what it contains, which wasn't borrowed from other sources, was made up from whole cloth--you won't find any historical corroboration for the fairy tales therein. Before the Babylonian captivity, it is doubtful that it even existed in any form which we would recognize, beyond portions of what now constitutes Genesis.

After the captivity, the Jews returned to Palestine with all kinds of nifty new ideas like monotheism and a world-wide flood.

by and large, though, it is rather a dull docuent, with very little of much use for the student of history.

I neither distance myself from it, nor embrace it.

As ancient texts go, is is pretty unreliable for any other use than to know what sort of bigotry motivated the Jews of two and half millenia ago.

Apart from that, it's too unreliable for history, and too unoriginal for a source on Semitic culture.

You make this series of statements on the basis of your offended rage, not on the basis of any knowledge of me.

It is certainly bigoted.

From the American Heritage Dictionary, big·ot, n., One who is strongly partial to one's own group, religion, race, or politics and is intolerant of those who differ. You won't find a better description of the old testament Jews than that.

The "meat" of it? How very silly. Come up with some substantitve, unique contribution to the culture of humanity which it provides, and which was not borrowed from another source, and i might buy that.

You are just throwing phrases around, you have provided no substance.

All that the study of derivative material will teach anyone is how the material was treated after it was derived. It teaches nothing about anything other than what the Jews thought of what they had borrowed. The only "evolution" involved is the tailoring of the borrowed material to a spurious Jewish history.

You make it more an more apparent that you've taken a fascination for the old testament (no doubt the product of the course you took)

and now are a perfervid defender of what you overrate as a source of history and cultural information.

You link a book by Richard Friedman, who is a world-renowned biblical scholar. It apparently doesn't occur to you that someone who has made the bible a life's study is someone whose work would tend to make the bible central to all his theses.

Because Mr. Friedman is so fascinated by the bible is not evidence that the bible is not full of racism, sexism and elitism, and it not evidence that the Jews were not bigots.

You are obsessed, but that is your problem, and not mine.

There is a good deal of interest in history and culture in the world which lies beyond and completely apart from the Judeo-christian tradition. Having been raised in a culture steeped in the mummery of those religions, i have long found my interest elsewhere. Too bad if you don't like it.

I assert, once again, that the Judeo-christian tradition is the only cultural tradition in the world of which i know which actively condemns homosexuality. I assert once again that i suspect that this derives from the condemnations of homosexuality in the old testament.