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From: hutch@shark.UUCP (Stephen Hutchison)
Newsgroups: net.religion.christian
Subject: Re: modern Christianity's lack of responses to Boswell
Message-ID: <1282@shark.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 9-Mar-85 06:46:29 EST
Article-I.D.: shark.1282
Posted: Sat Mar  9 06:46:29 1985
Date-Received: Mon, 18-Mar-85 08:11:15 EST
References: <4935@fortune.UUCP> <4720@cbscc.UUCP> <278@bbnccv.UUCP> <343@teklds.UUCP> <156@cci-bdc.UUCP> <415@teklds.UUCP>
Reply-To: hutch@shark.UUCP (Stephen Hutchison)
Organization: Tektronix, Wilsonville OR
Lines: 44
Summary: 

In article <415@teklds.UUCP> larryg@teklds.UUCP (Karen Clark) writes:

>Homosexuality is along the same principle.  Sure their can be love
>between the same sex, but to have it become sexual isn't love anymore
>it is lust.  Jesus offers something more; Jesus wants to be your lover,
>to fulfill all your needs, right where you are if you will accept
>His love.
>
>karen

I am not convinced that this is valid.  If a man and a woman are in
love, and choose to marry according to the rules of their culture, and
then decide to have sex, by your argument, it is now lust and no longer
love.  I will forestall the eventual complaint and admit that if a man
and woman have sex only in order to procreate, and take no pleasure of
it, then lust may not be involved.  Sounds dreadful.

But if you admit that husband and wife can have sex without the
degradation of their love into lust, then you have made the cultural
institution of marriage the arbiter of whether or not sex is wrong.

The only possible reason by which a man and man, or woman and woman,
having chosen to love one another, would then be stayed from realizing
the sexual expression of their love, is that the culture forbids it.
We, as Christians, are often called to overthrow those institutional
chains with which our cultures bind us.  For instance, we are called to
strive against war, to be peacemakers.  Yet our culture has war deeply
ingrained in its every fibre.  We know that many things we are called
to fight against aren't necessarily explicit in the scriptures.  How
can you say that the cultural censure of homosexual marriages isn't one
of these areas?

Notes:

First, I am not necessarily endorsing homosexual marriages.  I am
merely saying that it isn't clear from scripture that it is something
we should oppose.  Prayre brings no clear answer either.  All I ever
got for my efforts was to be informed that homosexuality is not right
for me, and it was none of my business if it was right for others.

Second, you haven't made it clear why lust is wrong.  I offer that it
is wrong because in its normal unalloyed form, it prevents the luster
from seeing the lustee as a real person, another precious instance of
the image of God.