Category: philosophy/religion topics
Yes, there is a site dedicated to Gay conservative Christians.
GayChristian101
Replete with salvation message telling us infidels we're going to hell. It's written using the typical conservative apologetic using Scripture texts and contexts and things. I actually see what they're saying.
I bring it up, because these are not fence sitters or so-called liberal Christians. They're even down on evolutionary science.
So to us skeptics it may be a bit comical, but take the skeptic hat off, put on your humanist hat and look: you've got someone who actually does believe the Christian thing. Not just because the family is doing it, but the real deal, as they say. But, they're gay. And they're unsatisfied with less literalist interpretations and all.
Their claim is all the gay scriptures - which aren't very many - are about fertility goddesses and things.
Anyway, I put it here because it might be useful to someone.
If you're an atheist or agnostic or other nontheist, it won't make sense to you personally. If you're a liberal Christian, what the conservatives claim aren't Christians, then it may or may not make sense to you. But if you're one of the literalist Bible-believing kind, and are either gay or know someone who's gay, might make some sense if you look at what they claim and read their references.
One word: Oxymoronic
Look, I get it. We're a couple atheists.
But, as I learned the other day, a conservative Christian who is also gay, takes no real ultimate comfort from one such as we are accepting them. After all, we are evil ooshunists, we're the pigs at eternity's pig roast. If you believe Thomas Aquinas, their joy will be made complete by our tormented screams. So naturally they wouldn't take our opinion seriously when it comes to acceptance.
But I put it out here not to mock it, but to posit something that most of the Conservative kind don't follow along with. And, if you read his texts, they read just like the apologetics that they used to try and get, and I quote, "Smart people like you," to read.
Skeptically, it's all jibberish to us who have taken off the glasses and given the whole theism thing the outsider test. But humanitarian wise, we could see fewer gay suicides.
It's a site for people who are gay but not skeptics, who are as fervent about their Christianity as the most fervent on this site, perhaps. But they know the anti-gay thing doesn't add up, because they are, well, gay. Kind of like if the Bible was anti-white, what would all the white Christians do?
Uh, yeah. What Leo said.
Everybody has their desperate and easily refutable way to make the bible not
apply to them. Its pathetic, but predictable. Christians, and all other religious
people for that matter, are by definition hypocrites. So this one isn't surprising,
and I don't really see any positives coming out of it. They're still bible believing
conservatives, the absolutely pure form of human stupidity. Nothing they do is
going to come to any good.
Unless they lie down in the path of an oncoming truck and cease to exist.
Thanks uncle for such interesting topic. After reading part of the webpage that Leo provide, it makes me wonder. And i'm asking this in a healthy discussion/debate way, like uncle said, not meanining as a mocking or whats ever. I wonder, how do gay/lesbian fit in with the Muslim/islamic culture/religion? There are countless, dare i say, scientific evidents to support that One's sexual prefference can be part of our making, aka biological influence, instead of, like some religion have suggest, part of our environmental influence. So, in this case, if, one happen to be gay/lesiban/bi sexual because of they are biologicly meant to be this way, what all these highly Godly orientated religion got to say with that?
Also, if in the Christian religion that God made us t o be who we be, to have such desire, etc etc, so, does that mean, the so call God itself/himself/themselves can also be gay/lesbian/bi sexual?
I'm not overly familiar with the Ar Kuram or however it spell, but i do sat in to their classes when i was at my primary shool just to see and to be curious about it. I do know some of the basic of the religion, but not a lot. So, have anyone like perhaps Cody, or even Leo study closely with the islamic/muslim religion from the critic point?
Again, Not looking for some mocking respond, but looking for some intelegent healthy debate/discussion that i think we, atheists or sami atheists have over this topic.
Of course it is. Other animals can have homosexual tentancies. And like it or not, we are animals.
The good I see coming out of this is fewer gay suicides, fewer gay street youth who were
kicked out of their parents' houses.
That's me taking off my rationalist hat, and putting on my humanist hat instead.
Joanne, I can't answer your question because most of what I know of religions is
sociopolitical.
I'd agree with you Leo, if this group were mainstream. They're not. So yes,
maybe one or two gay people will have a slightly better life than this, but not
enough to make up for the harm that conservative christians are doing in the
world today.
Oh, and Joanne, you're trying to use science to understand christians, don't.
They don't believe that homosexuality is genetic or biological. To them, its a
choice. So, because God said don't do it, and you chose to do it, you're going to
hell for doing it. That's how they think.
The irony of course is that lying is also a sin in the eyes of most religions, so if you're a gay person trying to live the "straight" life you're lying. So you're screwed either way.
Oh yes, but the god of the bible has lied himself. I forget what the verse numbers are, but that one in the old testament about god putting a lying spirit in the mouth of someone, and another in the new testament about god sending people strong delusions, that they should believe a lie.
Hmm, so, like what Leo and Cody said, so, if gay/lesbian is a choice, then, we are really screw then. They can't be straight, they can't be gay, so, sounds like, the only way is to, not choose to live...
Exactly. That's only one of the many thins that over the years has made me wash my hands of religion. Of course George Carlin was also a big help with that. LOL.
Well, since I study religions or whatever, Muslims are against homosexuality as well and it is not a choice, they are truly made to be that way.
One major contradiction, love thou neighbor...just saying.
So Bryan, this site doesn't suggest the gays live as straights. Quite the contrary.
Joanne, Cody's right, one cannot reconcile science with religion. There are an awful lot of Christian apologetics that make it *sound* that way, but as soon as you start digging a little deeper, not very deep, mond you, it goes away pretty quickly. A lot of people who are Christians and support the sciences are either closet atheists, or they are soon-to-be atheists.
I used to say, when we were in the churches, you get any ordinary guy away from the leaders, and in particular away from his wife, he will admit all the doubts she doesn't want brought up. The reason so many educated men in America go to those places? Because she says it's best for the kids. And if he stops, or is found out for his unorthodox beliefs, it becomes a 'concern', which is code for goon squad alert. Of course, my bias would be that I would be attracted to hanging around with such people. But a surprising number, when by themselves or with friendlies, would come out with their serious doubts. Perhaps this is wh they are so fierce for orthodoxy and accountability. The sex accountability is just a cover for the real doubters like us. Sort of like your head shop hidden behind the bar, when I was in college and up here those things weren't technically legal.
It's a weird thing, religion supposed to be all patriarchal, and yet I knew more men going around on eggshells so as not to upset her, but attempting to reconcile.
The men you see who are really committed are either the alpha types making a living off it, or they are born into it and have risen through the ranks, or they are an ex-druggie who came to faith as a way out of drugs. Replacing one drug with another, if I say so myself. Those of us who tried, occasionally, to argue for the magnificence of the universe for its own sake, or a faith/science cooperative effort in one of their classes, were shot down by Christians finding us in need of reform.
There's a lot of middle-aged atheists coming out and away, once the kids are grown and duties to that effect having been fulfilled.
If they can't get evolution right, I think most of them can't get homosexuals right either.
But I brought this site up for two reasons: hoping that some person who isn't given to skepticism but is gay will remain as they are, in both ways, at least until they can perhaps take off the religious glasses. And remain alive.
The other thing, which we haven't heard from yet, was to see what Christians on this site would say in response to that site.
Anyway I sidetracked a little bit there, but yes, Cody is right, they aren't really compatible with science. There are outliers, like Francis Collins, but his books were roundly rejected by churches we were at. My mere suggestion of them for their library put me in the definite unorthodox camp of "well-you're-okay-because-of-your-wife." And Francis Collins, while he is an evolutionary biologist, supports their main last straw argument, that of moral first cause. That and C.S. Lewis' plumby English Gentleman schoolmaster arguments.
But, maybe this group of gay Christias will invent a gay church like the MCC, only for the Bible Literalist kind.
The critical word here is born, not made.
But many people do suggest this. They advocateso-calledconvertion therapy which is proven to do more harm than good in the long run. But the gay who undergoes it is still living a lie because they're being something other than what they truly are.
I dated a girl all through highschool, and eventually ended the relationship, once I fully understood that my preference was something I was stuck with and something I'd never grow out of. To this day, I hear from gay guys who are married to women or who have been married to women, and they still say that god has taken their gay desire away. Never mind the fact that they refer to wanting to play around with another guy. Apparently, desire isn't really a desire unless it's acted upon. All I can say to that is, we all have the ability to put on the blinders, but some can take it to extremes.
That's just it, though, guys.
This site isn't talking about gays hiding out in straight marriages. It is new in that it is somehow orthodox Christian and also affirming of gay marriages.
Anyone who looks at it will see that's what they are supporting. As Joanne has done.
I'm a bit disappointede none of the frequent Christians on here have deigned to look or write back and tell us what they think.
As a skeptic, of course, I don't buy any of the religion aspect. As a humanist, I feel it will probably be a better state for some human beings: some who are both conservative Christian, and also gay.
But anyway, anyone who actually looks at the site will see it for what it is, affirming gays' getting married.
If the guy I talked to recently is any indications, gays who consider themselves evangelical Christians don't take any solace from us atheists accepting them. Not in a way that makes sense to their spirituality. I'm not calling it a delusion here, for sake of the real human beings that are in this space.
Just because they're gay doesn't mean they're given to skepticism, have studied any rational disciplines like the sciences or engineering, or at the very most, would be willing to take off the glasses and look at religion for what it is: their personal religion.
They're gay means, ... they're gay. We can't expect they will all magically become rational atheists like us. Wow I said magic and rational in the same sentence! lol.
I was hoping theists would weigh in on this, perhaps orthodox theists.
I'll admit, in thought I am an atheist, a rationalist, yes. But in mindset towards other people I am unashamedly a humanist. That last part will no doubt upset the antitheist as much as it has upset evangelical Christians.
I am not particular to what fiction people believe, but I would do whatever possible to see they stay alive, especially these heavily oppressed groups like the gays.
Again, this site doesn't condone the hiding or reparative therapies or any of that. They've done what religious people have done for millennia: figured out how to make their texts match what's actually going on. And they've done it in a rather convincing manner, from an evangelical apologetic perspective.
Fellow nontheists, if we look at it like you look upon the anthropological works of Turnball, Fagan and others, I think it can be constructive.
But it is interesting that no Christian on here has apparently dared to look at it, even to blast us for mentioning it.