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There are many good things that are happy and beneficial that do not deserve special recognition by the church or the state. There are many vices that should be discouraged by the church and state, even though some people will practice said vice and seem to be happy in practicing it.
It's not a perfect analogy, I was just making a point about language. The "boss" relationship is inherently different than the "friend" relationship, different relationships deserve different words. It's not a perfect analogy because one can be a boss and a friend, maybe I'll think of a better analogy.
Christianity (until recent progressive Christianity) has always recognized the basic human reality that men and women are different, have different strengths and weaknesses, are complementary, and therefore have different spheres of responsibility, different rights and duties. It's hard to remember this now that as Americans we are so long removed from existential war, but the state is primary an agent of violent force, that is the state is an organization of men who use violence to protect their land and women from other organized violent men, and as such of course governance rights of the state are going to be of men. "Loving your neighbor" is an entirely different question than whether person should have say, "a vote", (ie decision-making power over the apparatus of violence).
Everyone believes in sin, secular people just have different words for it. A vice or a personal sin, is something that feels good but is ultimately bad for the person doing it, you don't need religion to understand the concept, it's just without religion you have to reinvent and throw out all the work done on helping people effectively deal with vices.
But specifically you asked how a "Christian" who loves their neighbor could not want to support their neighbor in X. Well if the Christian loves their neighbor, and their religion teaches X is a sin, that means that X is ultimately bad for that person, therefore if they actually loved their neighbor they would want to discourage their neighbor from doing X.
Apples, oranges, cheese and carburetors. These are entirely unlike phenomena and must be analyzed separately
I think that gay men are, yes. I'd recommend reading "And the Band Played On" by Randy Shilts. Lesbian women are different phenomenon.
Eggs are expensive, sperm is cheap. Women are the gatekeepers of sex, while men are the gatekeepers of commitment. So, naturally, gay men have tons of commitment-free sex, while lesbian women move-in with each other at the drop of a hat and promptly suffer from lesbian bed death. Hence the following joke:
Gay men are ridiculously promiscuous and have a culture based largely around casual sex. Patient zero for the AIDS epidemic, Gaetan Dugas, famously had over 2,500 sexual partners. Gay "marriage" looks like two gays cruising together for pickups, as wingmen (what Dan Savage calls "monogamish"), rather than anything a straight couple would recognize as a marriage.
Think about how much sex the average man would have if every woman he met was as eager to fuck as he was; that's what it's like to be a gay man. It's disgusting.
I mean, that just tells me the problem is men, not homosexuality.
Men are fine; their level of horniness is correct for dealing with female passivity and resistance. Problems arise when men redirect their reproductive impulses from their natural complement towards a union that can never bear fruit.
Women who do the same are not much better; moving-in together with a near-stranger, suffering from a dead bedroom because neither can take the sexual initiative, truly staggering levels of domestic violence, and doing it all over again immediately after a breakup because women are serially monogamous... lesbian dysfunction is different from gay dysfunction, because women are different from men, but it is still a dysfunction.
The only way to avoid dysfunction is to fulfill our proper telos by seeking partners of the opposite sex, as Gnon intended.
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I agree with this. The apostle Paul even said, "not everything is beneficial." Though, I suspect that you believe that non-hetero relationships fall into the "vice" category.
That's fair.
I would put it more generally, that everyone believes that there are things we do that hurt others or hurt others and/or the larger society. How is a healthy non-hetero relationship something that fits that definition?
I find it interesting you use the bolded word to describe those things, because truthfully, they are concepts that humankind has made up to describe things. Paul famously said, "There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus." It would appear to me that the walls we use to divide each other are are not needed in God's Kingdom. Jesus even said that of marriage -- "For in the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven." (Matthew 22:30)
To put it bluntly, the problem is not a loving (caritas) relationship between two men or two women, which is all fine and good, the problem is using each other as mutual masturbation aids or sticking dicks up each others poopy holes. I would suggest that doing so is like eating that potato chip or masturbating to porn. It feels good in the moment, but ultimately leaves you empty and just wanting more stimulation/titillation while building a habit of mind that ultimately makes a person unsatisfied and less happy than they would be if the relationship was affectionate but not erotic.
I mean, I don't like any of those things because I'm asexual, but even if I wasn't, I wouldn't take such a hard-line stance against such things. I don't understand the fixation that conservative Christians have with sex acts that aren't PIV. I just don't get it. If you don't like them, don't partake in them, but don't try and make someone else's life miserable just because you ascribe to those beliefs.
What's you understanding of the role of the homosexual community (and also the hard drug community, similar arguments applied) in the emergence and spread of the AIDS pandemic? Wikipedia lists 42 million dead, among them something like half of the pre-AIDS male homosexuals in America.
Very little, to be honest.
Mm.
Suppose we have the following two statements:
"There's nothing wrong with these acts or the communities that celebrate engaging in them."
"These communities were ground-zero for a plague that has to date killed an amount of people roughly equivalent to a world war, and the acts they engaged in and their celebration of those acts resulted in a highly disproportionate amount of what we know term super-spreading, particularly in the early stages of that pandemic."
Are these statements compatible?
Would you consider conservatives dangerous, due to their behavior in spreading the Covid plague?
Have you considered that part of why AIDS was so dangerous, was because we didn't really have the concept of "AIDS" back then?
I don't think Conservative behavior had any significantly disproportional impact on spreading the Covid plague. But then, I observe that there were a lot of people who disagreed very strongly with my assessment, who called people like my own family members "plague rats", who advocated firing them from their jobs or even putting them in camps, or any of a wide variety of social or legal sanctions in between.
Meanwhile, I observe that Homosexual (and hard drug user) behavior appears to have had a very significant impact on spreading AIDS as widely as possible in the early years of the outbreak. The contrast between the treatment of those opposed to lockdowns or vaccine mandates for COVID, and those who for selfish reasons actively spread an extremely lethal plague as widely as possible is my whole point here.
My understanding is that from fairly early on, they understood that there was an infectious, lethal pathogen, and they understood that it was being spread primarily by homosexual practices and drug use. Further, my understanding is that some gay men intentionally spread it as much as possible, and more gay men staunchly opposed any restrictions on homosexual activity. Eventually this opposition was at least partially overcome, but by then AIDS was endemic.
Does that description seem inaccurate to you?
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American culture and institutions are actively promoting experimental sex acts though -- from the books in schools to pride parades every June to media on TV to the State Department flying flags at embassies worldwide that have colors to represent erotic tendencies. It's not the Christians are not the only party who are obsessed. Christians think these things are bad, and thus, to the extent that we have common culture (public schools, parades, mass media) that sends messaging about sex acts, it would rather that message discourage non-martial non-PIV rather than encourage it.
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Is Paul saying there is no male or female on Earth right now as we go about our daily business of living and build institutions to govern our current Earthly society? Is he saying we are not to make distinctions between males and females, not to make different sets of duties and rules for males and females? This is very obviously not the case, because Paul himself does that all the time. What Paul is saying is that men and women, Jew and Greek, have equal ability to hear the word of God, be baptized, receive the Eucharist, and enter the kingdom of God. The Christian message and the Christian sacraments are not just for one nation, or one sex, or just for an aristocrats or priestly caste.
This is really, really obvious from reading the context around your quote and from reading Paul. Have you actually read Paul fully yourself, have you actually engaged with traditional Christian teaching on these topics previously, or are you just repeating talking points you have acquired second-hand?
I understand. Perhaps my argument there wasn't well-founded.
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