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I don’t think there’s a huge moral difference between having sex with 100 men in a day (which is admittedly unusual) and 100 men in a year (which is comparatively common). In both cases you’re treating sex as a trivial thing.
The number of people one sleeps with has no moral dimension as far as I can tell. A doctor who saves people's lives and sleeps with dozens of people a month is morally better than a celibate or monogamous murderer.
That works only as long as 10 righteous people are still left in Sodom.
Note that Genesis does not specify exactly what sins the people of Sodom had committed.
However, the book of Ezekiel, chapter 16, verse 49, describes it as:
The Talmud further expands on Sodom's mis-deeds; they generally involve either callousness towards the poor or hostility to foreigners.
This is a really strange take, since in Genesis the men of Sodom immediately try to rape the angels that are sent to Lot to warn him to get out. Genesis hardly leaves you wandering what could have been so bad about these people that they were condemned.
No, this take is entirely consistent with the actual context of the time. The emphasis on the crime being due to homosexuality is the more modern reinterpretation.
Other ancient texts such as the Talmud and the Midrash go into significantly more detail about the sins of Sodom, and they revolve entirely around lack of hospitality, cruelty, and miserliness.
The biblical story of Sodom makes sense in this context when you understand that threats of rape were commonly used to ward off intruders. As just one example, in Roman culture the god Priapus (also depicted with an enormously exaggerated phallus) was frequently used as a 'no-entry' symbol at the entrance to properties, with the implied (or in many cases with humorous inscriptions) that any trespassers would be subject to sexual violence.
It's actually a great case study in how easy it is to misinterpret stories out of other cultures - something that as you say can seem entirely obvious can have very different meanings to the people and cultures of the time.
Either I am misunderstanding Blueberry's comment which started this digression, or you and Celestial-body-NOS are. Neither Blueberry nor I at any point said that homosexuality was the sole reason for the sinfulness attributed to the people of Sodom.
I fully agree that lack of hospitality was a major component. What I disagreed with was this statement:
I claim this gives a false impression of the account in Genesis which includes a striking account of the wickedness of that people.
Side note: the case for homosexuality not being a major component of Sodom's wickedness is pretty weak. First: homosexuality is only spoken of in the Old Testament in this and one other similar narrative passage (Judges 20) describing exceptionally wicked peoples, and in prohibitions which call it an abomination.
Second: The Ezekiel passage does indeed ascribe miserliness and idleness to the Sodomites in verse 49, but it also continues in verse 50:
Third: The New Testament in Jude summarizes the sin of Sodom and Gomorrah as "giving themselves over to sexual immorality".
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Because the angels were foreigners. The men of Sodom were not motivated by desire for the angels; they sought to degrade them, for having the temerity to exist as foreigners. (Some interpretations speculate that the mob wanted to interrogate the angels, 'knowing' them in a more literal sense.)
Lot's offer of his daughters was not a contrast between same-sex and opposite-sex attraction, but an attempt to protect his guests by whatever means he could think of. (Sacred hospitality was considered very important in the Ancient Mediterranean; cf. the Classical myth of Philemon and Baucis, in which Jupiter and Mercury visit a village incognito and are turned away by everyone except the titular couple, who invite them into their small home, resulting in the village being turned into a pond and the inhabitants into fish, the house of Philemon and Baucis being turned into an ornate temple, and the granting of their request that they would die at the same time as each other, at which time they were turned into trees [an oak and a linden].)
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Citation needed.
No citation needed. Sleeping with 100 people in a year is a strict superset of sleeping with 100 people in a day. Also… common sense.
Well, duh. I got the impression that doglatine was making a stronger claim than that though.
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