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Yep, Scooter, that tolerance and understanding of “Man” for what he really is, and isn’t, is really dangerous. Jerry Falwell, Baker, and them spouting evangelicals with their hands in people’s wallets, or little boys underwear, are really right on with their condemnations and hypocrisy.
C.S. Lewis was speaking of the Church of England the State Church.
They are paid by the Government, same as civil servants.
The rest of the Anglican church is a vibrant growing concern, especially in Africa and South America
.
Many US Episcopal congregations fed up with unBiblical liberal teaching have left and put themselves under Evangelical African Bishops
Read, as in past tense. Screwtape Letters. Forget the other titles. I too am a Christian, currently member of local UMC but came out of Baptist childhood to Evangelical Episcopal at Truro Parish in Fairfax Va.
oldlego wrote: “”Many US Episcopal congregations fed up with unBiblical liberal teaching have left and put themselves under Evangelical African Bishops.”
To be specific, they have been upset with three things in particular. In the 70s we started to ordain women, then had the audacity to change the Book of Common Prayer (reinstating, by the way, one of the most ancient eucharistic liturgies of all – that one really upset “traditionalists”), and of course the open ordinations of gays.
They talk about unbiblical, but we have never once changed our stance on the bible which “containeth all things necessary to salvation.” We still use – and always have – the Apostles and Nicene Creeds as our statements of faith. But of course, people read scripture differently – and always have – and that ticks everyone else off.
As to “Evangelical African Bishops” that would include Peter Akinola who has advocated death to gays and refused to condemn genocide. If that’s what they want, let them embrace that kind of love.
Re: the Cartoon. You will note that the priest in front handing out the bonus points is Roman Catholic (the paper says, “Come back to Catholicism”).
This is a commentary on the crass move by Rome to woo disaffected Anglicans.
PS. The church in England was never the evangelical haven of American fundamentalists. Even before there was a Church of England, the English were among the least active church goers. C.S. Lewis, however, remained loyal the the C of E till his dying day.
Totally disingenuous. It is the Anglicans approaching Rome asking to rejoin. Enemies of the Catholic Church want them to be refused rather than accomodated.
It is the Anglicans who are fed up with the sodomite lovin’, abortion promotin’ Anglican Church who are asking to get into the only Church which still states that such behavior is sin.
^ Oh, labeling God as a god who created some men to sow their life giving seed in a toilet for destruction, rather than in a woman’s womb to bear fruit, is not high on His list?
I sure wouldn’t be too pleased if I gave all my sons a medical education and one used his knowledge to create pathogens for terrorists. I would be even more displeased if he proclaimed to the world, “My father knowingly gave me an education just for this purpose.”
But I hope you won’t mind if I stand over here a bit, because i was always taught that when one starts comparing himself to God, there was a good chance a lightening bolt was about to fry his sacreligious azz!
Who the heck do you think you are trying to equate understandings of a God which created heaven and earth with your paltrey posterior. With the God which created all living things and the you with the purile production of your penial puss?
How DARE you sir? Has God wasted his time giving you humility?
Man can know certain things about God which He has revealed through the testimony of nature. (Rom. 1) Therefore, you are inexcusable when you defend abortion and homosexual behavior (as well as any fornication outside marriage). The testimony of natural law shows us that the reproductive organs of male and female are complimentary and made for each other. A baby is a very small human being, even if it is not seen. We do not kill other human beings, and you liberals have a canary when we execute the most depraved of murderers, yet you casually execute the smallest human beings in the womb and think nothing of it. You can see that are made in complimentary fashion which is designed to bring forth life, yet you defend the use of our bodies in ways they were not meant to be used. Then, on top of that, you want to play amateur theologian, which is a pastime of most all liberals. Liberals who have neither time for Church nor Bible reading somehow become miniature St. Thomas Aquinases when it suits their purpose. The only thing that is sad is watching most of them make fools of themselves as they display their complete lack of theological understanding.
I confess my lack of humility, but do not see how I am equating myself with God.
On the contrary, I was trying to show that if even a mere man is disturbed by false witness by another man; how much more should we expect the Lord to enact justice when false witness is committed against Him by His creatures.
When a man declares, “I am gay (meaning God created him for sodomy),” he is making a false statement about his Creator - the God Who created us in His Image - male and female. It is blasphemy.
^God has no physical body. Male and female represents the reality that God has a Bride - namely Man(kind).
It was “not good (godlike) for the man to be alone” in the Garden because, after God created Man(kind), He was no longer alone; He had committed Himself to a Bride.
To illustrate this theology to the man, God gave him a bride as well - the woman.
The man/woman relationship is a catechism of the God/Man relationship.
Irish, aside from being offensive with your language, you are also wrong, especially about what I wrote. For a church (Roman Catholicism) that has a rather long tradition of pedophilia among its priests, not to mention homosexuality and having children out of wedlock but then hushing it up, I’d say Rome doesn’t have much room for talking.
Regarding abortion, since you do not know our church’s stance, I will enlighten you. It is opposed by the church. However, the church also recognizes that making it illegal has been a profound failure, and our approach is to find better ways of cutting the number of abortions. Where you focus on punishing offenders, we focus on helping women find other means.
Yes, we have gay priests and bishops (not many but some), and so do the Romans. The big difference is, Roman Catholics lie about it.
Now, as to the cartoon: Unless you are blind, you will note that the priest in front has a pamphlet that says, “Come back to Catholicism.”
And by the way, Anglicans DO affirm the Nicene Creed every Sunday as well as the Apostle’s Creed. What about you?
And just for fun, here’s another wrench to throw into the works. The pope is a head of state (Vatican City), openly jumping into the provence of another head of state (the Queen of England who is also officially head of the Church of England). Wonder what kind of diplomatic fireworks could come of that. Unlike the Episcopal Church, the C of E is state run, and if she wanted, she could make life very interesting for those who “poped.”
But that’s the point Charlie, that to think that God’s emotions are the same as our emotions is completely honest, but not the way you’ll like.
In your argument lives the presupposition that God is made in Man’s image. I know you don’t want to think so, and I know that me saying “but it is” doesn’t convince you.
God is made in man’s image. If for no other reason than that man could not conceive of God in any other manner than what is familiar to him at the time. Man is restricted by his vocabulary….
Here’s an example… Suppose you built a time machine and you transported yourself and your machine back to the time of Saul. You meet with the first Jewish King and you tell him that your cell phone still works. You hold the phone up to his ear and you wife says “Hi!”. Then you explain to him about how radio waves work… Where would you start? Visible light? As far as he knows sight is something that goes away from him, he doesn’t even conceive that sight is caused by light being bounced off something and then travelling to his eye.
When God spoke through man (as if) to write the Bible, they had to use terms that they understood, otherwise the Bible would be filled with words we still don’t understand today.
So if we can agree that the above is true, then we can see that man created God in an image that man can imagine, “man’s image.”
To assume that the God which created the Universe can be so petty as to fit into our definition is like believing that our early ancestors’ perception of light represented the entire electromagnetic spectrum.
RV: Are you coming from a faith tradition that rejects the Incarnation? It makes no sense to me that you think I am confusing God with Man. The Scriptures are filled with similes and analogies to help us approach the unapproachable Godhead.
Christians also believe ”the Word became flesh” in Jesus Christ. The God Who created the universe did deign to “be so petty” as to become one of us. The Divine Bridegroom came to the rescue of His Bride who was enslaved by sin.
charlie, this is interesting; I’d like to learn more. Earlier, you said the Bible was literal truth; here you say it’s similies and analogies. Which is it?
I won’t say I come from a faith tradition, I was essentially raised by wolves.
The similes and analogies, whose existence you point to only go to show the truth of my assertion. God (assuming that there is such a thing, and assuming that that such a thing is an anthropomorfic being) is of such a complexity that He was forced to simplify His word such that similes and analogies would help the human mind create Him in their imagination.
In doing so man has infused God with the likeness of man, with the authority of the Father.
The image of God is imperfect even as He is perfection itself (which is what the post about the irony of God and Socrates and the sophists of today’s right wing was about). The OT God was a vain being that demanded total obessiance or He would destroy the world with his wrath. But vainty and wrath are two”deadly” sins.
How can this be? The Bible is God’s word and yet there is this imperfection in it? It can be because man tried his best to interpret the Words, but there was not translation for God’s language to the vocabulary of the prophets. (Just like Saul would have no vocabulary to understand how your time travelled cell phone worked.)
Overall, I can’t see how a Being that invented gravity gives two shakes about where you put your pee pee!
I find much more of it unbelievable too. And even when I accept the basic premises, I find it very hard to believe that a God who created a universe where the intricacy is amazing beyond words, where everything logically follows something else (our problem is we’re trying to work backwards) and yet The Word makes no logical sense. It doesn’t follow that the same “Guy” did both works.
It’s all of the above. I am not intelligent enough to explain Aquinas but if you’re interested here is the link that explains the four senses of biblical exegesis:
”There are four senses of Sacred Scripture: history, which speaks of things done; allegory, in which one thing is understood from another; tropology, that is, moral discussion, in which is treated the ordering of habits; and anagogy, through which, in order to treat of the highest and heavenly things, we are led upward.”
”I was essentially raised by wolves.” I hope it wasn’t that bad. ;-)
You are absolutely correct that if God did not create Man in His Image, than man created god in his image. This defines the chasm between the Christian and the Rationalist.
What the rationalist sees as “vanity and wrath” in the OT, the Christian sees as justice and mercy in the light of revelation.
Before the Redemption and the advent of the Divine Mercy, the only way to make satisfaction for sin was justice. God sentencing men to death in the OT was actually an act of mercy. Their suffering justice in this life meant they could be saved in the next.
This is poorly explained. Do we have a resident theologian?
No, Charlie, it was well explained, and I thank for the clarification.
And I’m enjoying the conversation and I thank you for that too.
But let’s follow the track a bit further.
There was a time when man was completely at the mercy of God’s judgment in this life. Then came Jesus who died for our sins.
But this isn’t to say that God will NEVER do those things (the flood, the making His people wander through the desert for 40 years, the making them the scapegoat of the “new” religion, the nuking of Sodom & G the stoning at the city walls so on and so on and so on) again. In fact Revelations says that the mother of all retributional acts is yet to come. The difference being that this time there is an escape clause which lets the “Lots” amongst us be saved even when we live amongst the Gomohharians (by accepting Jesus Christ as our Savior).
The Rapture is God’s “Smart Bomb” wherein the saved will be plucked from the flesh (in other words, killed which ties into that whole OT “saved by killing” meme) before the rest get roasted in the fire, (which hurts so much more than being drowned BTW). So God is still the same OT God with the same short fuse, but with a more evil plan for evil. He’s gone high tech!
Doesn’t matter. The gap remains the same. The God that created the pathway for evolution is not the kind of God who cares about the things we care about (and only because we want to believe that God cares about it).
Here’s something fun> (One of) The old paradox (s) is If God can do anything, can God create a rock that He can’t lift?
Oooohhh… Seems like a stumper, except that if you agree that God created everything then God created the laws of gravity (complex little buggers by the way). Therefore God COULD create a rock that he could not lift, but to do so he would have to rewrite the Laws Of Gravity such that the universe would be destroyed in the process.
The point being that our understanding of God is so fractional that to state with some authority that thus and such is an abomination before Him is in and of itself blasphemy.
We KNOW what causes Boys now (God MAY grant us boys to answer our prayers, but we now know by what mechanism he would work to achieve this result) We KNOW what causes Girls, and we KNOW that sometimes the division isn’t complete. And we know WHY.
Since we know these things, we know that their existence isn’t a “Choice” it’s a biological fact (at least in some cases) and if we are to believe that its part of “God’s plan” then the idea that Homosexuality is a sin in God’s eye is illogical. Illogical doesn’t make any sense from a being that is so precise as to has the same laws of gravity work at the atomic level and the universal level.
Who knows maybe God was pizzed off at Sodom and Gomorrah for something else and the historians just blamed it on the gays to deflect investigation into their experiments with petrochemicals and sodium counterfeiting ray guns (after all, salt was the currency of the time, so turning Lot’s wife into a pillar of it would be sort of like making Lot a wealthy man)
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Comments (28) Jump to Comments Form
RussellNash said, 27 days ago
“Just give us all of your money and we’ll see what we can do about your soul.”
scottfreitas
said,
26 days ago
CS Lewis pointed out way back in the 50s and 60s that the Anglican church had become apostate, weak, more of a danger to men’s souls than a help…
I think it is safe to say the Anglicans have only gotten worse with time.
dtriedel said, 26 days ago
Anyone for indulgences? $.50 a pop.
dtroutma said, 26 days ago
Yep, Scooter, that tolerance and understanding of “Man” for what he really is, and isn’t, is really dangerous. Jerry Falwell, Baker, and them spouting evangelicals with their hands in people’s wallets, or little boys underwear, are really right on with their condemnations and hypocrisy.
oldlegodad
said,
26 days ago
C.S. Lewis was speaking of the Church of England the State Church.
They are paid by the Government, same as civil servants.
The rest of the Anglican church is a vibrant growing concern, especially in Africa and South America
.
Many US Episcopal congregations fed up with unBiblical liberal teaching have left and put themselves under Evangelical African Bishops
parkersinthehouse said, 26 days ago
wow dad - you read c s lewis? he’s a christian yaknow. his finding God is a tender and beautiful story
oldlegodad
said,
26 days ago
Read, as in past tense. Screwtape Letters. Forget the other titles. I too am a Christian, currently member of local UMC but came out of Baptist childhood to Evangelical Episcopal at Truro Parish in Fairfax Va.
cdward said, 25 days ago
oldlego wrote: “”Many US Episcopal congregations fed up with unBiblical liberal teaching have left and put themselves under Evangelical African Bishops.”
To be specific, they have been upset with three things in particular. In the 70s we started to ordain women, then had the audacity to change the Book of Common Prayer (reinstating, by the way, one of the most ancient eucharistic liturgies of all – that one really upset “traditionalists”), and of course the open ordinations of gays.
They talk about unbiblical, but we have never once changed our stance on the bible which “containeth all things necessary to salvation.” We still use – and always have – the Apostles and Nicene Creeds as our statements of faith. But of course, people read scripture differently – and always have – and that ticks everyone else off.
As to “Evangelical African Bishops” that would include Peter Akinola who has advocated death to gays and refused to condemn genocide. If that’s what they want, let them embrace that kind of love.
cdward said, 25 days ago
Re: the Cartoon. You will note that the priest in front handing out the bonus points is Roman Catholic (the paper says, “Come back to Catholicism”).
This is a commentary on the crass move by Rome to woo disaffected Anglicans.
PS. The church in England was never the evangelical haven of American fundamentalists. Even before there was a Church of England, the English were among the least active church goers. C.S. Lewis, however, remained loyal the the C of E till his dying day.
charlie555 said, 25 days ago
Totally disingenuous. It is the Anglicans approaching Rome asking to rejoin. Enemies of the Catholic Church want them to be refused rather than accomodated.
IrishEddieOHara said, 25 days ago
cdward – got yer head up yer arse again????
It is the Anglicans who are fed up with the sodomite lovin’, abortion promotin’ Anglican Church who are asking to get into the only Church which still states that such behavior is sin.
Get yer facts right, son.
4uk4ata said, 25 days ago
Religious disputes are always fun to watch, as long as you are at a safe distance.
Personally, I think sexual orientation is not exactly that high on the Lord’s sin list, maybe at about the same spot as eating seafood.
charlie555 said, 24 days ago
^ Oh, labeling God as a god who created some men to sow their life giving seed in a toilet for destruction, rather than in a woman’s womb to bear fruit, is not high on His list?
I sure wouldn’t be too pleased if I gave all my sons a medical education and one used his knowledge to create pathogens for terrorists. I would be even more displeased if he proclaimed to the world, “My father knowingly gave me an education just for this purpose.”
ReasonsVentriloquist said, 24 days ago
Charlie555,
Poetic.
But I hope you won’t mind if I stand over here a bit, because i was always taught that when one starts comparing himself to God, there was a good chance a lightening bolt was about to fry his sacreligious azz!
Who the heck do you think you are trying to equate understandings of a God which created heaven and earth with your paltrey posterior. With the God which created all living things and the you with the purile production of your penial puss?
How DARE you sir? Has God wasted his time giving you humility?
IrishEddieOHara said, 24 days ago
Man can know certain things about God which He has revealed through the testimony of nature. (Rom. 1) Therefore, you are inexcusable when you defend abortion and homosexual behavior (as well as any fornication outside marriage). The testimony of natural law shows us that the reproductive organs of male and female are complimentary and made for each other. A baby is a very small human being, even if it is not seen. We do not kill other human beings, and you liberals have a canary when we execute the most depraved of murderers, yet you casually execute the smallest human beings in the womb and think nothing of it. You can see that are made in complimentary fashion which is designed to bring forth life, yet you defend the use of our bodies in ways they were not meant to be used. Then, on top of that, you want to play amateur theologian, which is a pastime of most all liberals. Liberals who have neither time for Church nor Bible reading somehow become miniature St. Thomas Aquinases when it suits their purpose. The only thing that is sad is watching most of them make fools of themselves as they display their complete lack of theological understanding.
charlie555 said, 24 days ago
RV:
I confess my lack of humility, but do not see how I am equating myself with God.
On the contrary, I was trying to show that if even a mere man is disturbed by false witness by another man; how much more should we expect the Lord to enact justice when false witness is committed against Him by His creatures.
When a man declares, “I am gay (meaning God created him for sodomy),” he is making a false statement about his Creator - the God Who created us in His Image - male and female. It is blasphemy.
dtroutma said, 24 days ago
Uh, Charlie, God is transgender???
charlie555 said, 23 days ago
^God has no physical body. Male and female represents the reality that God has a Bride - namely Man(kind).
It was “not good (godlike) for the man to be alone” in the Garden because, after God created Man(kind), He was no longer alone; He had committed Himself to a Bride.
To illustrate this theology to the man, God gave him a bride as well - the woman.
The man/woman relationship is a catechism of the God/Man relationship.
cdward said, 23 days ago
Irish, aside from being offensive with your language, you are also wrong, especially about what I wrote. For a church (Roman Catholicism) that has a rather long tradition of pedophilia among its priests, not to mention homosexuality and having children out of wedlock but then hushing it up, I’d say Rome doesn’t have much room for talking.
Regarding abortion, since you do not know our church’s stance, I will enlighten you. It is opposed by the church. However, the church also recognizes that making it illegal has been a profound failure, and our approach is to find better ways of cutting the number of abortions. Where you focus on punishing offenders, we focus on helping women find other means.
Yes, we have gay priests and bishops (not many but some), and so do the Romans. The big difference is, Roman Catholics lie about it.
Now, as to the cartoon: Unless you are blind, you will note that the priest in front has a pamphlet that says, “Come back to Catholicism.”
And by the way, Anglicans DO affirm the Nicene Creed every Sunday as well as the Apostle’s Creed. What about you?
And just for fun, here’s another wrench to throw into the works. The pope is a head of state (Vatican City), openly jumping into the provence of another head of state (the Queen of England who is also officially head of the Church of England). Wonder what kind of diplomatic fireworks could come of that. Unlike the Episcopal Church, the C of E is state run, and if she wanted, she could make life very interesting for those who “poped.”
ReasonsVentriloquist said, 23 days ago
But that’s the point Charlie, that to think that God’s emotions are the same as our emotions is completely honest, but not the way you’ll like.
In your argument lives the presupposition that God is made in Man’s image. I know you don’t want to think so, and I know that me saying “but it is” doesn’t convince you.
God is made in man’s image. If for no other reason than that man could not conceive of God in any other manner than what is familiar to him at the time. Man is restricted by his vocabulary….
Here’s an example… Suppose you built a time machine and you transported yourself and your machine back to the time of Saul. You meet with the first Jewish King and you tell him that your cell phone still works. You hold the phone up to his ear and you wife says “Hi!”. Then you explain to him about how radio waves work… Where would you start? Visible light? As far as he knows sight is something that goes away from him, he doesn’t even conceive that sight is caused by light being bounced off something and then travelling to his eye.
When God spoke through man (as if) to write the Bible, they had to use terms that they understood, otherwise the Bible would be filled with words we still don’t understand today.
So if we can agree that the above is true, then we can see that man created God in an image that man can imagine, “man’s image.”
To assume that the God which created the Universe can be so petty as to fit into our definition is like believing that our early ancestors’ perception of light represented the entire electromagnetic spectrum.
It’s blasphemous.
ReasonsVentriloquist said, 23 days ago
” Unlike the Episcopal Church, the C of E is state run, and if she wanted, she could make life very interesting for those who “’poped.’”
Yeah, and if you don’t believe Cdward, ask the Catholics in Ireland how it’s been not “unpoping” themselves by converting to Henry’s “church”!
charlie555 said, 23 days ago
RV: Are you coming from a faith tradition that rejects the Incarnation? It makes no sense to me that you think I am confusing God with Man. The Scriptures are filled with similes and analogies to help us approach the unapproachable Godhead.
Christians also believe ”the Word became flesh” in Jesus Christ. The God Who created the universe did deign to “be so petty” as to become one of us. The Divine Bridegroom came to the rescue of His Bride who was enslaved by sin.
DrCanuck said, 23 days ago
charlie, this is interesting; I’d like to learn more. Earlier, you said the Bible was literal truth; here you say it’s similies and analogies. Which is it?
ReasonsVentriloquist said, 23 days ago
Charlie555,
I won’t say I come from a faith tradition, I was essentially raised by wolves.
The similes and analogies, whose existence you point to only go to show the truth of my assertion. God (assuming that there is such a thing, and assuming that that such a thing is an anthropomorfic being) is of such a complexity that He was forced to simplify His word such that similes and analogies would help the human mind create Him in their imagination.
In doing so man has infused God with the likeness of man, with the authority of the Father.
The image of God is imperfect even as He is perfection itself (which is what the post about the irony of God and Socrates and the sophists of today’s right wing was about). The OT God was a vain being that demanded total obessiance or He would destroy the world with his wrath. But vainty and wrath are two”deadly” sins.
How can this be? The Bible is God’s word and yet there is this imperfection in it? It can be because man tried his best to interpret the Words, but there was not translation for God’s language to the vocabulary of the prophets. (Just like Saul would have no vocabulary to understand how your time travelled cell phone worked.)
Overall, I can’t see how a Being that invented gravity gives two shakes about where you put your pee pee!
I find much more of it unbelievable too. And even when I accept the basic premises, I find it very hard to believe that a God who created a universe where the intricacy is amazing beyond words, where everything logically follows something else (our problem is we’re trying to work backwards) and yet The Word makes no logical sense. It doesn’t follow that the same “Guy” did both works.
charlie555 said, 23 days ago
DrC:
It’s all of the above. I am not intelligent enough to explain Aquinas but if you’re interested here is the link that explains the four senses of biblical exegesis:
http://www.rtforum.org/lt/lt38.html
Quote:
”There are four senses of Sacred Scripture: history, which speaks of things done; allegory, in which one thing is understood from another; tropology, that is, moral discussion, in which is treated the ordering of habits; and anagogy, through which, in order to treat of the highest and heavenly things, we are led upward.”
charlie555 said, 23 days ago
RV:
”I was essentially raised by wolves.” I hope it wasn’t that bad. ;-)
You are absolutely correct that if God did not create Man in His Image, than man created god in his image. This defines the chasm between the Christian and the Rationalist.
What the rationalist sees as “vanity and wrath” in the OT, the Christian sees as justice and mercy in the light of revelation.
Before the Redemption and the advent of the Divine Mercy, the only way to make satisfaction for sin was justice. God sentencing men to death in the OT was actually an act of mercy. Their suffering justice in this life meant they could be saved in the next.
This is poorly explained. Do we have a resident theologian?
Corosive Frog said, 23 days ago
Naaah, sorry padre. I only collect karma points. (buddhists get it)
ReasonsVentriloquist said, 22 days ago
No, Charlie, it was well explained, and I thank for the clarification.
And I’m enjoying the conversation and I thank you for that too.
But let’s follow the track a bit further.
There was a time when man was completely at the mercy of God’s judgment in this life. Then came Jesus who died for our sins.
But this isn’t to say that God will NEVER do those things (the flood, the making His people wander through the desert for 40 years, the making them the scapegoat of the “new” religion, the nuking of Sodom & G the stoning at the city walls so on and so on and so on) again. In fact Revelations says that the mother of all retributional acts is yet to come. The difference being that this time there is an escape clause which lets the “Lots” amongst us be saved even when we live amongst the Gomohharians (by accepting Jesus Christ as our Savior).
The Rapture is God’s “Smart Bomb” wherein the saved will be plucked from the flesh (in other words, killed which ties into that whole OT “saved by killing” meme) before the rest get roasted in the fire, (which hurts so much more than being drowned BTW). So God is still the same OT God with the same short fuse, but with a more evil plan for evil. He’s gone high tech!
Doesn’t matter. The gap remains the same. The God that created the pathway for evolution is not the kind of God who cares about the things we care about (and only because we want to believe that God cares about it).
Here’s something fun> (One of) The old paradox (s) is If God can do anything, can God create a rock that He can’t lift?
Oooohhh… Seems like a stumper, except that if you agree that God created everything then God created the laws of gravity (complex little buggers by the way). Therefore God COULD create a rock that he could not lift, but to do so he would have to rewrite the Laws Of Gravity such that the universe would be destroyed in the process.
The point being that our understanding of God is so fractional that to state with some authority that thus and such is an abomination before Him is in and of itself blasphemy.
We KNOW what causes Boys now (God MAY grant us boys to answer our prayers, but we now know by what mechanism he would work to achieve this result) We KNOW what causes Girls, and we KNOW that sometimes the division isn’t complete. And we know WHY.
Since we know these things, we know that their existence isn’t a “Choice” it’s a biological fact (at least in some cases) and if we are to believe that its part of “God’s plan” then the idea that Homosexuality is a sin in God’s eye is illogical. Illogical doesn’t make any sense from a being that is so precise as to has the same laws of gravity work at the atomic level and the universal level.
Who knows maybe God was pizzed off at Sodom and Gomorrah for something else and the historians just blamed it on the gays to deflect investigation into their experiments with petrochemicals and sodium counterfeiting ray guns (after all, salt was the currency of the time, so turning Lot’s wife into a pillar of it would be sort of like making Lot a wealthy man)