chaonaut
Who else is looking forward to–regardless of the outcome of this election–being told throughout 2025 that it is of vital importance that we get in line with the Democratic party above all else so that we can ensure that the Republican candidate does not win the 2030 election?
If you can’t see daylight between the parties, and hold that they are identical rather than one being markedly less awful than the other (note: less awful, they still have are awful in their way), then you are as annoying as the people who were screaming back in 2021 that anyone who wasn’t voting Biden in 2024 is a monster (please, tell me again how criticizing Biden is the worst thing I can do to keep Trump out of office). Y’all are catastrophizing so hard that you’ve forgotten how to build political power, and are relying on big orgs to do it for you.
I’m not sure how “tens of billions of dollars of military aid” counts as not intervening in a foreign conflict.
It is a bit galling to be told endlessly that we must shut up and choose when the choice is “genocide or more genocide”, even when the reason Harris is on the top of the ballot at all is as a result of speaking up about the issues with Biden. I’m not all that comfortable merely accepting that, to escape the chopping block myself, I must remain silent about my family members. I’m sorry that Harris is so tied to Israel’s expansionist agenda that my inability to stomach rampant slaughter is threatening her and the Democratic party’s chances against Trump and the Republican party, but I can’t let some tens of thousands of killing go.
Not my point. You absolutely can point to homophobic passages of the Bible. You can also point to passages of the Bible that are not talking about homosexuality in specific, but that are commonly interpreted as such. My point is that expecting even Christians to agree with other Christians about what texta constitute the Bible let alone what those specific texts actually say is an exercise in futility.
This is the why of the existence of all the various sects and denominations of Christianity. There are theologians who have done lots of academic work to show how the Bible does not need to be homophobic. There are others who have worked just as hard to justify doing grievous harm to homosexuals. Trying to explain both of those with the One True Reading of the Bible is committing the same error they do.
For my queer ass, if Christians all spontaneously decided to follow the theology of Rev. Fred Rodgers tomorrow, I’m gonna breathe a sigh of relief and leave them alone to be just the nicest people and hope they stay that way.
Expecting Christians to follow a given text to the letter will always be setting yourself up for failure. Not only do people pick and choose the doctrine they follow (or more often have it picked and chosen for them by their spiritual leader), different traditions have different emphasis and even different texts they’re operating off of. Expecting an legalistic following of a specific interpretation will leave you expecting far different behavior that most of your observations will show.
Sorry, but it’s actually pretty hard to dismiss the Romans passage, but it is something that can be chalked up to Paul being sex negative, going so far as to exhort people to be chaste or get married if they can’t control their passion if, as he noted, they were not free from such passion as he claimed to be. The other passages commonly cited don’t reference homosexuality nearly as directly, but it would not be a difficult argument to make that the word choices were specifically defaming homosexuality (especially given how common it is for people to use the same sort of defamation). Which isn’t to say that every denomination adheres to the same interpretation of these passages, but they aren’t on as theologically shaky ground as we might hope.