From: stevek
Date: Mon Dec 25 17:43:56 MST 2006
Subject: Gays

Ron; I don't think I know you, but from what you've written, it is clear that your beliefs reflect pretty much mainline fundamentalist Christian orthodoxy - so I do know your perspective. I believe it may be of value to you if you were to recognize that that belief system is old and tired, and simply reflects a literal reading of the bible that can no longer stand the scrutiny of a dispassionate observer. The Christian bible is a midrashic effort on the part of the early Christian Jews to carry on the traditions of their faith tradition; that is Judaism. As the orthodox Jews tried to hang onto the teachings of the Torah, the new Christian Jews looked for ways to draw the stories of those books into their new experience with God that they saw in a man called Jesus. With that, they wrote the stories of Jesus in a manner that 'updated' what they knew from the Torah and the Hebrew bible upon which they were reared. There is nothing objective in that, but is simply a subjective attempt to use story telling (midrash)to carry forward the tales and myths that the Jewish people had written into their end of what we now know as the bible. Those tales necessarily included the social mores and norms of the times - including a fundamentally patriarchical social caste system, definitions of clean and unclean that science has now shown to be primative, the acceptance of slavery, and on and on. If you choose to "view the world through God's economy" and you define God's economy as having been stuck in a premodern social mileu that exited over 2,000 years ago, then I suspect a literal reading of the bible is ok for you. But we no longer believe in that 3 tiered universe in which they believed pre-Copernicus and Gallilio / both of whom were chastised or worse by the church for trying to drag it into a more scientifically relevant world view. God is necessarily vastly larger than any of our doctrines and dogmas - and especially that is true of those that result from reading the bible in a literal fashion. You cannot escape the truth that words are merely symbols / and God is larger than our symbols. How indeed can we describe the indescribable - we use the insufficiency of words. God's 'economy' is not locked up between the covers of the Christian bible / that is arrogant. Further you state that there is a 'specific Christian world view.' Is that so? Then what accounts for the multiplicty of denominations and the fracturing of the church along lines that address the exact issues you raise with your friend. The Episcopal church last week suffered a split over the issue of gay clergy. You worship at Our Saviour's Lutheran church - on our grounds, anyway - and this denomination has split within itself over the issue of female clergy. It is simply not the fact that there is a single Christian world view. Christianity cannot agree within its own doors the answer to those issues. I would suggest to you that the literal reading of the bible drives one to conclude that the moral understandings of a middle eastern society that existed 2,000 years ago are in fact those by which we need to still live. The trouble is that we ought not be bound by such a silly proposition. God is not sitting on top of the clouds (heaven) with us below (earth) and a lake of fire (hell) below. The flat earth society is long gone / would that the literalists finally see that too and begin to open the bible with new eyes that read the stories/myths as they were meant to be read by those who penned them - Jewish Christians who were telling their experiences of Jesus from a very Jewish perspective - not factual historical accounts, but midrashic interpretations of events that they tied to their Hebrew roots (Moses on Mt. Tabor in the presence of God / came down radiant - Jesus on Mt. of Transfiguration - shined brighter than anything on earth - Moses, Elijah, Elisha all parting the waters to enter the promised land - Jesus at the time of his baptism and the story says that the heavens (sky/water) parted and heaven shown through and the spirit descended on him indicating that he was the way to the promised land - Daniel 3 days in the lions den (tomb) with a stone rolled over the mouth of it - and yet he walked out of it - Jesus, as the story goes did the same and is in some fashion now considered to be alive in God...) I could go on and on, but the point is that the words were never written to be literally read and/or applied. Christianity is not the only religion in the world that promotes a high standard for human values as you state. That is religious bigotry and unfactual. Your friend is correct - a literal reading of the bible will lead one to be a homophobe and a sexist ("women are not to speak in church") Further, if your child disobeys you, you are to stone him to death - is that what you're after, too? Does your God really authorize mass murder, or even the killing of 2 who held back some money from the church? Did your God really literally condemn all of human history to damnation because some chick at a piece of fruit? Did Jesus really literally raise the dead and cause the blind to see again, thus violating the laws of science and nature that God had put into place - or may we read these stories as midrash to teach us that by following the teachings of that man, we are raised to a new life and our eyes are opened where they were once blinded. Do you also really believe that there is a literal geographic place called heaven that is lined with golden streets - and only those who understood correctly the literalness of your reading of the bible will go there for eternity to be with God / and those who misunderstood will burn in a literal geographic lake of fire for eternity. God will do that to those of his creation who misunderstood? These are the sorts of conundrums that literalizing the words of the bible lead to. You are correct - we all have our sin / and none is greater or lesser in scale than another. But society also grows and learns where some of it's own sin has lay; sexism was rampant in biblical times - it no longer is, except for within the 4 walls of fundamentalist churches, synagoges and mosques. Why does the village allow women to speak in church and to come in without their heads covered. The answer lies in the fact that we as a society have grown and learned the foolishness of those bonds we placed on our sisters. As for homosexuality - I, too struggle with understanding it as a life style, and yet we are learning through medicine that people do not necessarily elect that life style / it is inbred genetically. That also accounts for transgender men and women. Right psyche, but wrong plumbing. It is long past time that the Christian church stop inflicting it's old and tired premodern biases on what we in a postmodern age now know from sciencetific advancements and the advance of social norms and values that have come with that. The bible is myth/stories - they're true, but not in the main are they factual. There's a vast difference - start to read the bible through Jewish eyes, with the eyes of a story teller who is using midrash to connect his present experience of God with his traditional roots (Judaism) in the same fashion that the Hebrew bible was written. Once you do that, some of the scales will fall from your eyes and you will see that we are all God's children and can learn and grow from one another in sharing from our necessarily limited efforts to capture a deeper meaning of what God is. Ain't none of us got it. We all see in a mirror dimly. Steve K.

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