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Showing posts with the label Yahweh

Does the Bible condemn gay homosexual people?

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Portal of the Church of Pilgrims, in Washington, DC, with a LGBT banner. (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) It is the sin for which Sodom gains its reputation as ungodly, wicked, and deserving of divine judgment ( Genesis 18–19). Terms used in the Hebrew (yādaʿ) and the Greek (synginomai) meaning “to know” (Genesis 19:5) must have a sexual connotation and are among several euphemisms for sexual intercourse used in the Old Testament . Homosexuality is the sin or crime that the Benjaminites committed at Gibeah (Judges 19–20), which so enraged the rest of Israel that they almost eradicated the Benjaminites. None of the passages will sustain the view that the sin involved at Sodom or Gibeah was merely inhospitality or violence; none of the texts cites inhospitality. Revisionist attempts to use patristic interpretations fail. The church fathers simply do not support these arguments. The references in Deuteronomy and Kings refer mainly to male prostitutes used in religious settings. This mu...

The immorality of the Grammy Awards and immoral homosexuality

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Every passing week makes it simply more obvious that the American culture is essentially one prolonged celebration of immorality. This is true at the popular level—gay marriage at the Grammys ? Really?—as well as at the more erudite academic level, where it is a virtue to be critically authoritative with a healthy disdain for absolute truth. Photo by Matt Sayles/Invision/AP–used under Fair Use While once we held to a Christian veneer, now sexual sin is  pushed as progressive, abortion is funded by tax dollars, and the fear of the Lord has been replaced with the celebration of self. Where people used to blush, they now boast. Having been been “liberated” from biblical ethics , our society has instead produced a culture of death. People define virtue not on God ’s terms, but instead as doing what is right in their own eyes. Even in churches the gospel of grace is often replaced with a man-centered watered-down substitute, as if acceptability were the goal and compromise th...