Sawwon Lee

stfuconservatives:

ethiopienne:

deliciouskaek:

14kgoldnyc:

sanityscraps:

goldenheartedrose:

soultired:

goldenheartedrose:

inflateablefilth:

nothingaboutus-withoutus:

artemispotter:

Leviticus 20:13:

If a man lies with a man as one lies with a woman, both of them have done what is detestable. They must be put to death; their blood will be on their own heads.

Nice try, Colbert.

Leviticus was written approximately 1400 years before Jesus’ birth.

Nice try, artemispotter.

Old Testament =/= New Testament. Seriously. Also, Leviticus also commands you to learn the Torah, which, if you’re getting Old and New confused, you clearly haven’t.

Not to mention the other ridiculous laws in Leviticus (and Deuteronomy, as well), including the following:

• No mixing of different types of fabric
• No having sex with a woman on her period
• Curse your mother or father? You must be killed
• Disabled people cannot worship God 
• Stubborn children should be stoned.

So…. still want to argue how valid the OT is?

Also, in the Bible!=Jesus said it, anyway.  Even in the NT, there are a lot of people who aren’t Jesus giving their opinions.

Truth.  

Only if the words are in red (in many translations) does it mean that Jesus said it.

FWIW, the apostle Paul and I would not have been friends.  Mortal enemies is more like it.

Hey, guys, remember that one time when Jesus declared Levitican law irrelevant?

The former regulation is set aside because it was weak and useless (for the law made nothing perfect), and a better hope is introduced, by which we draw near to God.

-Hebrews 7:18-19.

Having been Jewish for, you know, ever, I am endlessly amused at the Christian Right’s reliance on Leviticus. Even I, who didn’t understand the theological difference between Catholics and Protestants until I took a course on Christianity in college, knew that Jesus was totes anti-Leviticus.

Seriously, people…

^^^^^^^

Ugh thank you. Fellow Christian here. I’ve literally NEVER understood this logic. “hey guys let’s pick one arbitrary part of leviticus to harp on and ignore the fact that 99% of the new testament explicitly tells us the old covenants/laws no longer hold true”

I love it when self-professed “Christians” don’t know the ABSOLUTELY MOST SIMPLE basics of the difference between the Old and New Testament. If you are against gay marriage because of Leviticus, you should also keep kosher and be against tattoos. Otherwise you’re just another FLAMING HYPOCRITE.

-Jess

I’m probably going to regret this horribly. Either that or nobody (including me) will care. Whatever.

Matthew 5:17 states that Jesus did not come to abolish the Law or the Prophets, but rather to fulfill them. The reference to Hebrews, besides its reference to a single old regulation (the nature of the priesthood), comes from one of the ”lot of people who aren’t Jesus giving their opinions.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_views_on_the_old_covenant

The notion that Christianity is anti-Leviticus is advanced only by Dispensationalists and derivatives (as well as by the casual secular layman, I suppose, but such intuition is a rather unrigorous way to approach things). The Lutheran view of Leviticus, as far as I can grasp it from Wikipedia, is essentially that the old Law may be useful to guide the behavior of those baptised into new life, which is unhelpfully vague. This does not, however, imply any hypocrisy in selective interpretation of the Old Testament; given what is specified by the promise of Jesus, some laws will be more useful than others.

However, a common view (Catholic, Anglican, Calvinist) first proposed by Aquinas is the division of the Old Testament’s dictates into three major categories - Moral, Civil/Judicial, and Ritual/Ceremonial. This division generally accompanies the belief that only Moral dictates are applicable to the modern day; dictates against animal cross-breeding or kosher are no longer valid. Now, given this division, it is entirely possible to oppose both homosexuality and kosher without hypocrisy; there is a strong case to be made that Leviticus 20:13 ought to inform modern Christians in a moral sense if not in a civil one. 

The apology for homosexuality on one level, which I personally found unconvincing, is the notion that Leviticus 20 is largely ceremonial (see Leviticus 20:18 which condemns sex during menstruation, which is not clearly immoral for any reason). That seems to paint with too broad a brush.

The apology that I personally came to accept comes in part from musing on the nature of (sexual) sin. This is from a Catholic rather than a strictly Biblical perspective, and so it reflects on the capital sins, most notably pride (the most capital). Pride is the disordered prioritisation of the self over the proper role of God; more abstractly, sin can be considered as the disordered prioritisation of the physical world - Augustine’s City of Man - over the plan of God. Lust and sexual sins, thus, are prioritisation of bodily pleasure to the detriment of a proper Godly focus, which has historically manifested in heterosexual marriage.

With that established, let us look again at the Bible. “If a man has sexual relations with a man as one does with a woman,” it says. This unusual wording (as one does with a woman) points toward a salient fact - ancient Israel did not have a notion of “homosexuals”, per se, only of sexual deviants (see: David and Jonathan (no homo)). This suggests that the Bible does not discuss homosexuality, but rather a phenomenon that can be observed in (e.g.) Saudi Arabia - straight men who, out of desire for sex of any sort, will lay with other men. This is much more clearly sinful than homosexuality is, which makes it a more compelling way to read the historical document Leviticus. 

(Source: drunkonstevphen, via swing-thing)