Can Believers Really Afford to be Subtle?

In response to Amber at http://overflowofheart.blogspot.com/2008/10/no-more-biting-my-tongue.html
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Very nice post, Amber, welcome to the discussion! Not to echo 'austin mommy', but I think we are of the same mind with regards to this issue. The evidence is just not conclusive enough for an intellectually honest Christian to be able to universally condemn all homosexuals.

Seeing your, and others, answers to this has raised another interesting question in my mind. As believers, you are called to spread and defend the Bible's teachings. That includes the potential task of calling sinners out (in a presumably loving way) with the intent of helping them see the light. If that is the case, where do you draw the line between what you are comfortable taking a stand on and what you would rather just 'let god judge'? I mean, I would expect that you would have no problem (other than general embarrassment) holding a sign that says 'God Hates Rapists', but you would certainly be uncomfortable sitting with the Westboro Baptist Church congregation with a 'God Hates Fags' sign. If homosexuality is indeed a sin, aren't you commanded to stand against that sin with the same certainty that you would with murders, child molesters, or rapists? The Bible is pretty clear on the fact that all sins are equal, so wouldn’t allowing homosexuality (a potential sin) to go unquestioned leave you open to being potentially complicit in a sin? My point here is that I’m not sure that a believer is afforded the same kind of nuanced thinking of a nonbeliever. I have nothing to lose by being slow to judge, since I do not feel that my decisions will be scrutinized against some absolute standard. For the person living in anticipation of an ultimate reckoning by an all-knowing god, it would seem to be much more important to know exactly where the boundaries are. If that is the case, I’m not sure how you can ever feel comfortable in your salvation if there are still unknown sin-traps waiting to strike without your knowledge. Do you really want to get to heaven and then find out that all of those Levitical laws about eating meat and not speaking on the Sabbath were, for instance, actually meant to be enforced? Do you want to suffer in hell for all eternity because you incorrectly assumed that certain concepts in the Bible were merely cultural artifacts? Bringing this back to the topic of homosexuality, I would suggest that a Christian is obligated to take a stand on the issue one way or the other, as they are obligated to know all actions that are potentially displeasing to god. Unless you have homosexual tendencies, I suspect that the sense of urgency to take a side on this issue is simply not that great. If you never intend on practicing homosexuality, what difference – besides the salvation of potentially homosexual friends and family – does it make what the actual truth is; you are safe from judgment either way. Take this same example to other topics like gossip, white lies, drinking, overeating, or any other number of more mundane moral grey areas, and the need to take a stand becomes a bit more relevant. We both know people who would call any of those items on the list a condemnable sin, and if you have god’s judgment hanging over your head, doesn’t it become critically important to know if they are correct?

So can Christians be so subtle in their evaluation of sin? I am not asking for you to judge any one individual, as you are commanded to specifically avoid that, but I am asking about the sinfulness of these morally grey areas. Can you really be a comfortable Christian and have any moral ambiguity? If you are, in fact, forced to make these decisions, what criterion do you use? How do you resolve questions in the Bible that are poorly explained, especially when they are issues of salvation?

Also...

As a side note, you read the story of Lot correctly, and it is one of the more despicable stories in the Bible that people simply gloss over. The two men that Lot was protecting were angels, so he thought it better to let his daughters get raped than two messengers from heaven. Why he is commended for protecting two supernaturally powerful beings with the degrading of his helpless daughters is beyond me. There is no cultural ambiguity in that story, except for the fact that women were basically treated like property in most of the Bible. This practice is never questioned in the Bible, just like slavery. You can even make an argument that the Bible, by creating laws to govern the slave trade, is complicit in such a heinous act.

The Morality of Homosexuality

This is in response to the series of Blog entries by Matt Chewning on the topic of the morality of homosexuality at http://chewningjourney.blogspot.com/2008/10/one-last-blog-on-homosexuality.html

I apologize in advance for the format I used here, this was originally written as a direct response to Matt (hence the ‘I’s and ‘You’s), and I was being very informal in my writing style as a result. I also wrote it in a single plane ride to Buffalo as a total stream of consciousness, so I get a little herky-jerky with my points. Rather than go through and make it more refined though, I opted to keep the original feel, warts and all.
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Matt,

I generally shy away from the weakly moderated world of blogs, but the temptation to respond to your homosexuality posts was just too strong to resist. I don't know any of the commentators, so I apologize in advance for sticking my nose in where it might not be particularly welcome. With all that said, I’ll stick it in anyways :-)

First off, I appreciate your willingness to admit that you are potentially wrong here, as that is not a quality I see a lot in true believers. Honest inquiry should be a part of all of our lives, even those who purport to have a direct pipeline to god. I suspect that some of this skeptical rigor breaks down as we approach what is being referred to in the comments as ‘core beliefs’, but that is a topic for another day. Let me move on to my main points…

To make this easier, I would like to restate the beginning of your line of reasoning in a bit more of a condensed format:

1. Practiced (not repressed) Homosexuality is a type of Sexual Immorality
2. Sexual immorality hinders sanctification
3. God desires for us all to be sanctified
4. Practicing Homosexuality works against god, and in-so-doing runs the risk of being a condemnable sin (I do not want to overstate this one, as you already said that homosexuals are not all necessarily hell bound)

I hope I have it close enough, feel free to point out where I may have misstated things.

My first comment has to do with the presumption that Homosexuality is immoral. I realize that you weren’t necessarily trying to get into details on every point, but this seems too important to put out there as simply a brute fact. The article you referenced did bring up some of those points, but I guess I was more interested in what you personally found compelling. In what feels like a sort of half justification, you did hint around at the fact that homosexuals are performing sexual acts outside of marriage. The logic follows that even if homosexual sex itself was permissible, it is happening in a ‘non-sanctioned’ manner, so it is still immoral. This is a rather sinister catch-22. Conservative Christianity makes marriage a requirement for sexual intimacy, denies homosexuals the right to marry, and then condemns them for not being celibate. The game has clearly been rigged, and it isn’t a surprise that many homosexuals simply choose not to play by the Church’s rules. If the reasoning behind this view was as clearly stated in the Bible as say idolatry, I could understand the hard-line stance. After all, if someone was born to be more prone to idol worship than average, the Church would still condemn the practice. The case just isn’t that compelling for Homosexuality though. All of the supposed pro/anti homosexuality scriptures that I have ever read are ambiguous at best. My personal opinion is that this has far less to do with Biblical authority and more to do with the Church’s historical resistance to modernity. The Church has embraced Nazism, denied the heliocentric model of the solar system, burned progressive women as witches, and slaughtered whole nations on similarly speculative claims. While the Church does change eventually, it is a tiresome process to behold. This point has already been made by others, so I won’t belabor it. From the standpoint of logical consistency though, it is important to demonstrate the truth of foundational facts before erecting a rational edifice on top of them.

One other small comment I wanted to make has to do with the general view of scripture as authoritative. I can understand that, as a believer, you are far more willing than I am to accept the divine origins of the Bible, and it is not my intention to try and disabuse you of this belief (at least not today ;-). Assuming that the Bible can be used to ferret out God’s desires, you still have the problem of interpretation. No matter how much of a literalist you choose to be, the words still have to pass through millions of neural interpreters before they can coalesce into a meaningful concept for you to understand. You may choose to do whatever you want with this concept, but it has already been tainted by the dirty water of your brain long before your conscious mind presents it to you for deliberation. These thoughts were subject to all of the potential biases and misconceptions that come with our somewhat quirky cognitive systems. My point here is that we are all very unreliable interpreters of information, and we rely on preexisting belief to drive a lot of our current understanding (see confirmation bias and motivated reasoning). As our prefrontal cortex – the ‘smart’ part of our brain that differentiates us from other animals – is a very recent evolutionary invention, we are still not really good at using it. More often than not, we unwittingly fall back on our older and more primitive reflexive system that tends to drive us to make similar conclusions over and over again by either ignoring conflicting evidence or rationalizing it away. The scientific method exists for this very reason. Since human beings cannot be trusted to be objective in even simple circumstances and with deliberate effort, elaborate steps such as double-blinding must be taken to force impartiality on us. Anyone claiming to have the way to read the Bible would have to first demonstrate that they have taken great pains to overcome this innate human weakness. The fact that there are countless interpretations of the Bible spanning countless sects speaks to the near impossibility of this feat. If there was truly a correct way to read the Bible, I would expect that the continuous effort poured into Biblical studies would show a convergence of ideas. In reality though, what we see is far closer to the effect typically associated with specious models. Rather than a demonstrable convergence of thought, we see ideas spinning off in all directions at all speeds with continual divergences. Churches split, religions schism, denominations subdivide ad infinitum. The claim that any one of these particular examples of chaos just happens to be the right one is a claim that requires extraordinary evidence to back it up.

From the perspective of a nonbeliever, the Bible is filled with many falsehoods, inconsistencies, and just plain weirdness. The popularity of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam make the obvious point that these problems are not fatal, or at the very least, these problems can be explained away through some clever exegetical jujitsu. Why is all of this important? Well, when you start talking about ‘high views’ and ‘low views’ of scripture, you make it sound like there is a cut and dry way to read and interpret such a document. Even if the Bible was written with true academic dispassion – which is so very far from the truth – the supernatural nature of many of its claims leave huge grey areas for people to insert their own personal and improvable claims. There isn’t even agreement over the so-called ‘core values’ of faith, as I can easily point to groups that run the gambit on every theological idea imaginable. The further they get from your own personal ‘core values’ the more likely you are to brand them as fringe or even cultish in some cases. It is certainly your right to differentiate yourselves from those who you disagree with, but the criterion to make that distinction is wholly your own. Whatever factors brought you to religion (family, friends, community, etc.), were powerful enough to instill a lasting belief structure within you. Now that these beliefs are fully integrated into your thought process, the momentum generated by your reflexive brain will make it extremely difficult to step back and be truly objective.

So, you might be wondering what this has to do with the original point regarding homosexuality. My point is simple. You are making judgments about the morality of individual behavior based off of a book that is inconsistently interpreted at best. I would have the same concerns for your interpretation of ‘core values’, so when we start talking about a morally ambiguous topic like homosexuality, you stretch my credulity. I am not demanding that you toss out the Bible, and I respect the personal reverence you have for its teachings. All I am asking is that you take the same hard skepticism that you have in other aspects of your life and apply it to your understanding of the Bible as well. Even if the Bible is the perfect word of god, we are not perfect interpreters by any stretch of the imagination. More harm will come from jumping to conclusions than from patient deliberation. No hate crimes have ever been committed because someone was slow to judge, and no one has ever been ostracized due to conscientious objectivity.

As always, I have a great respect for your willingness to engage in healthy debate, and I look forward to your response. You can never have too many differing opinions when it comes to topics like this, and I really enjoy the different (for me anyways) perspective you bring to the table.

-Brian