Religion & Homosexuality

[ShiftyNJ]

LOL you're terrible, and I'm totally stealing that.

[LJay]

While I agree with your perspective in many ways, when you wrote that "John Calvin...wise man.", I shot chicken noodle soup out of my nose! ROFLMAO!!! (edit: to elaborate, he was considered by many to be the founder of the Christian Literalist Movement--the people who believe that the Bible is the *LITERAL* word of God..i.e. that the world was created in 7 periods of 24 hours each, and the world is only 6000 years old, ect...).

~Beaux

[MENTION=13210]Beaux[/MENTION]

May be, though I was writing simply in reference to his comment about Revelation.

My experience of Calvin's legacy is in the form of the Presbyterian Church and though there are certainly some very stiff necked forms of that, the Presbyterians I know are not literalists at all but extremely careful scholars of biblical criticism who can recognize metaphors and figurative writing easily.


PS: Chicken noodle soup is good with a lemon squeezed into it.

[MikeW]

...So feel free to discuss this important topic.

You started this topic a week ago and it isn't until today that people start replying to it? Well... at least I've quoted you so you'll know your topic is getting responses. IDK. GS is SO weird sometimes.

As for the topic itself. Sigh. ... I was a red-letter New Testament carrying Souther Baptist pre-teen who KNEW that he was a cock sucking faggot (had not yet heard the word "gay" referencing sexuality, see my signature). I never felt *JEZUS* (which is how it is pronounced where I'm from) would give a flying fuck what the hell I did with my dick or anyone else's. Once the church burned to the ground on the day I was to have been Baptized (age 12, they do things late in the Protestant realm), I got the clear message FROM GOD ALL FUCKING MIGTY HIS/HER SELF that, "This is not your path."

All-m-®ighty then. So.. the question I was left asking myself is, what the hell is THAT supposed to mean?

I can tell you this. If you' believe in god, any god, you are wrong. If you don't believe in god, any god, you are wrong. The whole human race, with a few very rare exceptions, has the whole thing WRONG.

People think that what they think has something to do with what is or isn't. That's wrong. What you think is just what you think and it doesn't have anything to do with what IS... at least not when we're trying to "think" and "talk" about the numinous and ineffable. No sir-E. You can't get THERE from *here*. You can't THINK yourself to it.

OTOH, if you've ever gotten outside of this 3+1 (three dimensions of space plus one dimension of time) experiential realm and stood naked on the edge of the 4+1 (5th dimension)... THEN (and only then) MIGHT you have some sort of clue.

Still, when and if you go to "thinking" or "talking" about it you're back once again in the 3+1 realm. In the 4+1 there's nothing to be said or done. It just IS. And that's that.

Homosexuality? Bah, bro. Its just sexual energy. That's all it is. Not to say that isn't anything. Quite the contrary. It is something amazing. Ecstatic even. Like... seriously... orgasm is the closest MOST people get to a truly "religious" experience on a day-to-day basis. Right?

Why the hell do you think we like to do it so much?

GOD (well, one representation anyway) LOOKS LIKE THIS:







In fact, the original crucifix was horny:



This particular object is thought to be OVER 300,000 years old!



So religion and sexuality... yeah... It's OUR (contemporary humankind's) idea that these two things aren't connected. Bull fucking pucky. Our ancient ancestors KNEW better.

As Above So Below.









Ok, ok, enough of my particular brand of blasphemy hopefully equally aimed at the theists and atheists among us.

Just remember, next time you have the BIG O... there is a Sufi saying: "God is closer to you than your jugular vein."

it might indeed be so.

[LJay]

That sounded Episcopalian to me, Shifty.

[1and1]

Science and faith do not cancel each other out. The head of my church (well, until Sunday, when her term expires) holds a doctorate in oceanography and has been urging the US to take climate change seriously. We are not creationists and do not take everything in the bible literally.

I understand that it makes no sense in the modern world, but the modern world is not exactly ordered, is it? Senseless wars, gratuitous violence, great inequality. I found community in the church (including meeting my dude) and it has been a framework for my work in social justice. So it has value for me, and it sounds like the OP has had a similar experience in the RCC. I understand your experience may be different.

We know that rabbits do not talk back to farmers, but that does not make Aesop's wisdom any less useful.

Fair, my man. Fair.

[LJay]

Waitaminute, Mike.

What is this about people having orgasms day to day? I wanna go there!

[MikeW]

Waitaminute, Mike.

What is this about people having orgasms day to day? I wanna go there!

IDK, man. Given the amount of porn available online there's a hell of a lot of orgasmic energy being released on this planet day-to-day. Now, maybe you're one of those once in a blue moon kinda guys, IDK. As for myself, once a day is minimum. Three times is max. But then I'm running 100mg of T-e every four to five days which has me kicking butt in the gym and fucking (well, metaphorically speaking) like a wild animal.

[ShiftyNJ]

That sounded Episcopalian to me, Shifty.

LOL and there's a reason for that. How many oceanographer-pilot-bishops are there running around, particularly female ones?

I believe we have met in That Other Place (which I recently Left in a Big Huff again, poor [MENTION=20947]MikeW[/MENTION] got to talk me off the ledge). Glad to see you here, too, which is where I plan to remain.

[ShiftyNJ]

YI can tell you this. If you' believe in god, any god, you are wrong. If you don't believe in god, any god, you are wrong. The whole human race, with a few very rare exceptions, has the whole thing WRONG.

People think that what they think has something to do with what is or isn't. That's wrong. What you think is just what you think and it doesn't have anything to do with what IS... at least not when we're trying to "think" and "talk" about the numinous and ineffable. No sir-E. You can't get THERE from *here*. You can't THINK yourself to it.

OTOH, if you've ever gotten outside of this 3+1 (three dimensions of space plus one dimension of time) experiential realm and stood naked on the edge of the 4+1 (5th dimension)... THEN (and only then) MIGHT you have some sort of clue.

Still, when and if you go to "thinking" or "talking" about it you're back once again in the 3+1 realm. In the 4+1 there's nothing to be said or done. It just IS. And that's that.

LOVED this.

The same oceanographer-pilot-bishop, when challenged by the hard-liners in our church to state categorically that Jesus Christ is the only path to salvation, bluntly refused, saying (paraphrasing here) "To state that the way my tradition understands God is the only valid way God might manifest to anyone, anywhere, is to put God in a very small box."

Any attempt to explain the unexplainable is, by definition, flawed. Christian theologians were saying very early on that the Bible stories were not to be read as history or fact, but as lessons... it was only later that we started beating each other with chapter and verse and trying to be more "Biblically correct" than the next guy.

I focus on the salvation story based on the fragments we know of the life of Jesus, who, yes, called himself (a) son of God (but aren't we all, metaphorically speaking, products of the same creation?) but more importantly in the present moment, preached compassion and generosity and looking out for those who have less. He could be the Son of Zoltar, but if we did what he suggested, the world would be a shit-ton of a better place.

[Insertnamehere]

EDIT:

F*ck all I typed

religion = bullshit, god = non-existent until factually proven otherwise....that's it.

Also, I think it's pretty damn obvious why LGBTs and religion don't go hand in hand most of the time