Menu
By:
Filters
What's new

Christian and Homosexual Stereotypes

MoDSec said:
You have no idea how happy I am that you're not a christian scientist. But off that bit and my huge sigh of relief,


I have no idea how you, or others in your position could possibly subscribe to that. It seems so completely alien to me! I have thought that the ambition to better ones self is a basic human drive that nearly every human possesses. Seeing someone simply turn a blind eye on understanding the universe because someone tells you "This is how it is," just boggles my mind! I can't conceive the notion of not asking why. When we're growing up we always ask why, why is the sky blue, why is that, why, why, why, why, why, why, until our mothers/fathers told us to shut up. What is it that makes you not want to ask these questions? What makes you want to not look further? I've spent every minute of my life trying to understand every facet of the universe around me, how is it that you're so comfortable not asking these questions or searching?
Click to expand...

Its don't ask question you don't want to know the answer to. There are some things in life that you need to just leave alone. Would you go into a lions den and ask him why do you eat? When... if you meet God then you can have all the answers you ever dreamt of answered. I know what i need to know to provide for my family and keep them safe, thats all that matters. I don't need to go looking for answers i have no business looking for. Plain and simple. Some things need to be left alone.
 
Baldoraxx said:
Its don't ask question you don't want to know the answer to. There are some things in life that you need to just leave alone. Would you go into a lions den and ask him why do you eat? When... if you meet God then you can have all the answers you ever dreamt of answered. I know what i need to know to provide for my family and keep them safe, thats all that matters. I don't need to go looking for answers i have no business looking for. Plain and simple. Some things need to be left alone.
Click to expand...

Because if people took that stance all the way through time, then going back to a previous statement for impact: Your child would NOT get any immunizations and would probably not even be born because you might be dead by now due to the lack of advance in modern medicine. Because that took people who wanted to look for answers beyond their own means. Beyond their family. Asking questions that had no answers and actually solving themselves.

This approach of "I have faith and therefore will not act" is a load of horse shit. If that were true, then you could not defend someone if they were being attacked, because you have to have faith God will protect them, you cannot help a sick or dying person, because they will be with God soon and it was his plan, and Oh there is a war going on? Who cares, I have faith it will work itself out, instead of trying to better ourselves to prevent it from happening in the future.

This is why America and Humanity in GENERAL is a lazy and a "slowly" evolving beast. If we would stop using Faith as an EXCUSE not to leave our comfort zone and support those who think so far outside the box it hurts, like we once did, but then stopped... but used faith as a reason to help one another reach new goals, conquer new areas of life, explore the world beyond our home... it could be quite amazing.

Religion as a crutch I don't get.

Religion as a way of better one self and the world around you, I do.
 
Baldoraxx said:
Its don't ask question you don't want to know the answer to. There are some things in life that you need to just leave alone. Would you go into a lions den and ask him why do you eat? When... if you meet God then you can have all the answers you ever dreamt of answered. I know what i need to know to provide for my family and keep them safe, thats all that matters. I don't need to go looking for answers i have no business looking for. Plain and simple. Some things need to be left alone.
Click to expand...
"Ignorance is Bliss". That is the only thing I could read in that statement.

I really don't want to weigh in on the subject itself until later, but I had to make that one comment. Irked the hell out of me.
 
As i have said, everybody has their own beliefs. I don't agree with yours and you don't agree with mine. I never said advancement was to be halted. I said genetics are a fine line. I am a blunt person. I will tell it how it is. I don't sweeten my words and write these tremendous paragraphs that beat around the bush. The fact is some things should not be answered, so for your advancement you will travel to the sun? Thats just plain stupid.
 
Gyoin said:
"Ignorance is Bliss". That is the only thing I could read in that statement.

I really don't want to weigh in on the subject itself until later, but I had to make that one comment. Irked the hell out of me.
Click to expand...
For some people it can be said "Can't fix stupid"
 
Baldoraxx said:
Its don't ask question you don't want to know the answer to. There are some things in life that you need to just leave alone. Would you go into a lions den and ask him why do you eat? When... if you meet God then you can have all the answers you ever dreamt of answered. I know what i need to know to provide for my family and keep them safe, thats all that matters. I don't need to go looking for answers i have no business looking for. Plain and simple. Some things need to be left alone.
Click to expand...
I'm glad that your faith and trust in God is sufficient for you. Personally, I feel the same way. The Bible says it, I believe it, case closed.

However, I also believe that there ARE anwers to the tough questions that challenge my faith, and I grow in my faith by meeting those questions and sorting out answers. What I find isn't always easy, complete, or make total sense, and in those situations I have to acknowledge that some things are not possible to understand completely. My faith takes it from there.

Questions like are homosexuals born that way or is evolution true do not shake the foundations of my faith, so I'm perfectly willing to investigate, compare with scripture, and modify my position as needed. Now, if some one said they had found the skeleton of Jesus Christ and they have the genetic and historical information to prove it, I would be in a situation where I would need to dogmatically state my position and defy logic and reason.

That's exactly what I would do because there is no evidence, no argument, no reasoning that can persuade me away from the core tenents of my faith. Like Baldo, I would say that what God says is good enough for me. Let God be true and every man a liar.
 
Keleynal said:
I'm glad that your faith and trust in God is sufficient for you. Personally, I feel the same way. The Bible says it, I believe it, case closed.

However, I also believe that there ARE anwers to the tough questions that challenge my faith, and I grow in my faith by meeting those questions and sorting out answers. What I find isn't always easy, complete, or make total sense, and in those situations I have to acknowledge that some things are not possible to understand completely. My faith takes it from there.

Questions like are homosexuals born that way or is evolution true do not shake the foundations of my faith, so I'm perfectly willing to investigate, compare with scripture, and modify my position as needed. Now, if some one said they had found the skeleton of Jesus Christ and they have the genetic and historical information to prove it, I would be in a situation where I would need to dogmatically state my position and defy logic and reason.

That's exactly what I would do because there is no evidence, no argument, no reasoning that can persuade me away from the core tenents of my faith. Like Baldo, I would say that what God says is good enough for me. Let God be true and every man a liar.
Click to expand...
Thank you, you put it in words that i cannot.
 
Baldoraxx said:
As i have said, everybody has their own beliefs. I don't agree with yours and you don't agree with mine. I never said advancement was to be halted. I said genetics are a fine line. I am a blunt person. I will tell it how it is. I don't sweeten my words and write these tremendous paragraphs that beat around the bush. The fact is some things should not be answered, so for your advancement you will travel to the sun? Thats just plain stupid.
Click to expand...

But what could traveling to the sun HURT? Why would exploring the universe be against "God's Plan"? Is that in the Bible? Maybe the Sun has a fairy unicorn home, like the one in North Korea. :p

Not to mention exploration and out of the box thinking create the games we love to play. These fantasy worlds. Would we want those to go away too?
 
Baldoraxx said:
As i have said, everybody has their own beliefs. I don't agree with yours and you don't agree with mine. I never said advancement was to be halted. I said genetics are a fine line. I am a blunt person. I will tell it how it is. I don't sweeten my words and write these tremendous paragraphs that beat around the bush. The fact is some things should not be answered, so for your advancement you will travel to the sun? Thats just plain stupid.
Click to expand...
I think it would be fantastic to travel to the sun. Why did God create such a vast universe if we weren't meant to explore? Scientific advancement and human progress are not feared by me because all it reveals are more aspects of God's grand design and creativity. Trist sees the universe as evidence of evolution; I see it as evidence of God's existence.

The only times in the Bible I see God witholding knowledge is when a prophet is writing about future events and God in essence says "That's too much information, the world is not yet ready." God didn't serve us all the answers on a silver platter. I don't tell my daughter the answers to her test questions, it's much better and more satisfying for her to find the answers herself. That's why the Bible didn't come with the schematics for an internal combustion engine or a map of the human genome. Not because we weren't supposed to know, but because God wants us to be able to have our own achievements.
 
Keleynal said:
I think it would be fantastic to travel to the sun. Why did God create such a vast universe if we weren't meant to explore? Scientific advancement and human progress are not feared by me because all it reveals are more aspects of God's grand design and creativity. Trist sees the universe as evidence of evolution; I see it as evidence of God's existence.

The only times in the Bible I see God witholding knowledge is when a prophet is writing about future events and God in essence says "That's too much information, the world is not yet ready." God didn't serve us all the answers on a silver platter. I don't tell my daughter the answers to her test questions, it's much better and more satisfying for her to find the answers herself. That's why the Bible didn't come with the schematics for an internal combustion engine or a map of the human genome. Not because we weren't supposed to know, but because God wants us to be able to have our own achievements.
Click to expand...

YES MOAR ACHIEVEMENTS! Without it, you get GW2 and the lack of motivation to log into life.
 
tr1age said:
But what could traveling to the sun HURT? Why would exploring the universe be against "God's Plan"? Is that in the Bible? Maybe the Sun has a fairy unicorn home, like the one in North Korea. :p

Not to mention exploration and out of the box thinking create the games we love to play. These fantasy worlds. Would we want those to go away too?
Click to expand...
I will agree with you that some questions need to be answered but not all of them. Yes i heard about the unicorn in North Korea lol but it was propaganda geared at shoring up the rule of Kim Jong Eun.
Ill build you a rocket so you can go to the sun, i know i don't want to go.
 
Keleynal said:
A perfectly legitimate argument, Dash. I need to research it more before I feel comfortable making a reply. I have read some great stuff on this question, but I don't recall everything off the top of my head. I'm not a theologian by trade. I promise not to dodge it, but meet in head on.

As far as homosexuality being a choice or a natural predisposition, I think both can factor into the situation. Consider cases where an individual is straight for 30-40 years, then suddenly has a fling with another man. Was that man suppressing his true self all those years, or did he decide to try something different for whatever reasons?

I've met several individuals who used to be gay. One of them said that he still dealt with feelings towards other men, but he was making a decision not to act upon it because he was now convinced that it was immoral. He had no plans to date or marry because he still felt no attraction to women.

Another gentleman came to my college and spoke at a chapel. He was so effeminate in his manner of speaking and movements that many in the crowd were uncomfortable. He had been gay his entire life, from about age 10 if I recall correctly. In his mid-20s he was living as a woman and months away from getting a sex change operation. I don't recall exactly what impacted him, but he became a Christian and decided that the right thing for him to do was to drop that lifestyle. He said it was a long, difficult process and he would never be completely free of the lifestyle, referencing his feminine manner of acting. He called it "scars from his past."

Now, was he born gay and is now denying himself, or was he born straight and fell into a lifestyle to help him deal with personal trauma (he had been abused by male relatives and had no mother present). Or maybe God worked a miracle in his life that enabled him to walk away from a lifestyle he was naturally predisposed to. We can argue it in circles all day long. I really don't care. What I care about is that this man was hurting deeply and the lifestyle he was living was not satisfying or healing him, it was just glossing over the wounds. He did eventually marry and have children, but his message wasn't that God made him straight- that was only a secondary effect. What he found in Christ completed him in ways that he had previously thought only becoming a woman could do. He now has a ministry that reaches out to the LGBT community. His message is not God wants to heal you of homosexuality, it's God wants to heal your heart and complete your life.

Not every person he has brought to Christ has also left the lifestyle. He doesn't see it as necessary to force them into anything. The important thing is that they are on the path; it's up to God to prompt them to make any changes, it's up to them to respond. God loves them before they respond to Him, and he loves them just as much afterward. He doesn't require them to be straight before entering His family. Christians who focus on the lifestyle rather than the person are doing it wrong.

Anecdotes don't prove a thing, but they do provide real life perspective for issues that can be treated as theoretical or clinical.

That talk is what moved me out of homophobia and into compassion. It's the same process of healing that I've seen in people trying to fill thier lives with anything and everything except God. It was at that moment that I realized that members of the LGBT community were not untouchables. They were not to be feared and hated, but loved and accepted just like everyone else God created. Do they have issues to deal with? Of course, just like everyone else in the world, and God is more interested in the state of our souls than the state of our love life.
Click to expand...


I can't help but feel that a lot of this is religious peer pressure, while the other is a lack of understanding that Sexuality is fluid. I once believed I was a straight man, but about the age of 14 I discovered I had an incredible taste in certain types of men. I saw for the first time ever, an attractive man and I explored that. Turns out I have great interest in men, more so than I originally thought, I'd just never taken the time to look. As I've come to terms with that, I've learned a lot of things, and one of them is that it's common to label people such as myself, by both the LGBT community AND the straight community, as being non existent.

The fact that I have an interest in both men and women puts me in a unique position, the position where I can pretend to be a straight man if I deem it necessary. I know that I am not, nor will I ever be, but that does not mean that I can't pretend to be. It is possible that these men that do these things of their own free will and abandon their marriages for their homosexual tendencies are either like myself, or have been playing to peer pressure. I discovered at the age of 14 that I had an interest in some men, but I was afraid of acting on it because it seemed wrong. It seemed wrong because all of my life I was told how I should act and how I should behave. I was afraid of losing my friends, my family, my room and board. For the next two years I felt awful, every time I had any thought on the matter I would immediately silence it as I did not want to be ostracized by my community and lose everything else that was dear to me.

Those were the two most miserable years of my life so far and I may not be a gay man, but I know how they feel. Having to fake laugh every time people you knew made some joke about fags, and about how they beat the crap out of that cock sucker the previous day. Having to sit there and listen to family members talk about how if their son ever turned out gay they'd kick him out, cut him off, and disown him, and I have it easy compared to what a gay man has. I could fake it and still satisfy most of my urges, but damn it, it was STILL not enough! Since I've came to terms with myself and wasn't going to be able to be beaten to a pulp by anyone(6'3 and a big mother fucker) and live in an accepting enough area that not everyone will hate me, I let it out. And I felt indescribably more free and more happy.

Now this is where as a man you're gay and as a woman you're just going through a phase. I've been told by homosexual, and straight people alike that I'm greedy, untrustworthy, disgusting, trash, spawn of satan, worthless, non-existent, and more! It's so hard for people to believe than any man or woman could possibly adore both genders of their species.

I believe that these men who went through these instances (married 20 years, before being gay; submitting to religion when they were gay; suppressing their born desires) were products of the peer pressure, that I felt, that kept me from revealing anything and pretending to be something I wasn't for two years. Or, that they are bisexual and lack an understanding of their own sexuality.


~That took a while to write... lets look over the stuff that's been posted while I typed this... Hmm... not travel to the sun that's... well okay tristian got that..... but wh- Oh wait there's gyoin.... Well jeeze.. I guess I'll just post this... Maybe put it in a spoiler too... yeah... let's do that... that's a lot of words..... yeah... gonna do that....~
 
Baldoraxx said:
The fact is some things should not be answered, so for your advancement you will travel to the sun? Thats just plain stupid.
Click to expand...
Does all scientific inquiry really seem that dangerous to you? Because people were dissatisfied with not knowing and pushed the boundaries of human understanding, we live in the greatest time in history. Our lifespans are longer than ever, we can stimulate our minds at our leisure, and we have incredible technology - without which this conversation would be impossible. A disease that once ravaged continents has been completely eradicated. One billion people were saved from starvation through improved farming techniques. Every day, men and women work tirelessly to save lives and reduce suffering because they aren't seduced by complacency and short-sightedness.

Understanding the universe makes our lives better, not worse, in every possible way. Vague doom-saying will not change reality.
 
Red Omen said:
Does all scientific inquiry really seem that dangerous to you? Because people were dissatisfied with not knowing and pushed the boundaries of human understanding, we live in the greatest time in history. Our lifespans are longer than ever, we can stimulate our minds at our leisure, and we have incredible technology - without which this conversation would be impossible. A disease that once ravaged continents has been completely eradicated. One billion people were saved from starvation through improved farming techniques. Every day, men and women work tirelessly to save lives and reduce suffering because they aren't seduced by complacency and short-sightedness.

Understanding the universe makes our lives better, not worse, in every possible way. Vague doom-saying will not change reality.
Click to expand...
Do you not look around you? Almost every country is in dept, ours is growing everyday. Its in the trillions. We are on the verge of being in another great depression. We are at war, we have been at war for years.
 
MoDSec said:
Now this is where as a man you're gay and as a woman you're just going through a phase. I've been told by homosexual, and straight people alike that I'm greedy, untrustworthy, disgusting, trash, spawn of satan, worthless, non-existent, and more! It's so hard for people to believe than any man or woman could possibly adore both genders of their species.
Click to expand...

That is a fascinating insight. The pressure and abuse within the gay community towards those that aren't gay enough or deviantly gay... I had never considered that. I guess people hate people who are different from them everywhere we go.

Thanks for sharing from your personal experience. That's where all this actually matters. We can throw around theories and theology all day, but that's not going to help people that are feeling rejected and unloved.

I'm sorry you had bad experiences with Christians. We screw up a lot, but I believe that Jesus didn't condemn you; He suffered with you. He loves you, no strings attached. If you let Him, He can complete you.
 
Baldoraxx said:
Do you not look around you? Almost every country is in dept, ours is growing everyday. Its in the trillions. We are on the verge of being in another great depression. We are at war, we have been at war for years.
Click to expand...
I feel like I just got whiplash from that change in direction. Are you arguing that the TIMING of exploring and discovering things is not right? That our resources are better used elsewhere at this point in time? Or are you saying that exploration and discovery is best left alone forever?
 
Keleynal said:
I feel like I just got whiplash from that change in direction. Are you arguing that the TIMING of exploring and discovering things is not right? That our resources are better used elsewhere at this point in time? Or are you saying that exploration and discovery is best left alone forever?
Click to expand...
Didn't mean to turn the thread around but this is what i was asked and i answered.
 
Baldoraxx said:
Didn't mean to turn the thread around but this is what i was asked and i answered.
Click to expand...
Your answer confused me. I'm trying to understand what you meant. Are you saying that advancement has not made our lives better because we still experience problems like war, famine, and debt?

If so, I would point out that we no longer have to fight polio, the bubonic plague, or leprousy (in developed countries). Disabled people can become handicapable with prosthetics (a 1 legged man ran in the last Olympics. not the Special Olympics. THE Olympics). In America, our access to food, housing, clothing, and other necessities, even for the very poorest among us is unprecedented in the world. Do I really need to go on?

It's obvious we have a long way to go, but look how far we've come. Every generation seems to think that things are now the worst it has ever been. People are more depraved. There are more natural disasters. There is more crime. How can the world continue? Maybe every generation is right, but somehow the world is still here.

Our current problems shouldn't cause us despair, they should inspire us to overcome them. I think both science and faith have a role to play in that.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top Bottom