So, can I ask some questions?

Roger J Carlson

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Do not attempt to bring me to Christ. It's not necessary and will only piss me off. ....

....Yeah, I think this is the battle you SHOULD be fighting. Converting LGBT people to Christianity before converting your branch of Christianity to loving acceptance is fundamentally the wrong way to go about this.
Trust me when I say I'm not about to invite any LGBTQ people to my church any time soon. In fact, I've never been big on inviting people to church. My focus has never been to bring people to church so they can find Christ, it's been to introduce Christ to people (mostly by how I live) so they can find a church.

By the same reasoning, I'm not out to "convert" Christians, either. You can't convert people. People convert themselves. What I'm hoping to do eventually, is to help Christians to see LGBTQ people as people, who are every bit as worthy of God's love as anyone.
 

Dave.C.Robinson

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I actually think Canada is a good place to look for examples of the LGBT community and Christianity interacting positively, particularly when it comes to Protestantism. Both the current Moderator of the United Church, Canada's largest Protestant denomination, and her immediate predecessor in office are gay. Both are also married.

While not an evangelical church, I think the United Church is definitely one place to look.
 

kuwisdelu

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Trust me when I say I'm not about to invite any LGBTQ people to my church any time soon. In fact, I've never been big on inviting people to church. My focus has never been to bring people to church so they can find Christ, it's been to introduce Christ to people (mostly by how I live) so they can find a church.

I think it's a shame that going to a Christian church often comes with such heavy expectations.

Because I actually think inviting people to visit your religious observances and visiting others can be a great experience when it doesn't come with any expectation of conversion.

I actually like experiencing religious observances from other cultures, and inviting people to our kachina dances to experience mine.
 

edutton

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And, yes, I will check out the gospels. Are those in the New Testament?
Looks like this got missed - yes, the Gospels are the first four books of the New Testament (the ones named after dudes :) ). They are the closest that we have to eyewitness accounts of the life of Jesus, although even they were written 30-70 years after the presumed crucifixion...
 

leifwright

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Looks like I got into this late, but as a former fundamentalist-turned-infidel pastor (you can read about my Christianity journey in my book, Deadly Vows), I have to say the idea of "sin" isn't really what's at issue.

What's at issue is fundamentalist christianity's insistence that if they think something is gross, they'll find a reason in the Bible to hate it.

The often-quoted passages in the Bible purportedly against homosexuality must absolutely be taken out of context to support that point of view. The Bible never had a stance on homosexuality in general one way or another.

In fact, one of its key characters, King David, was at the very least bisexual.

The idea that God can "cure" homosexuality is at its heart an admission by fundamentalists that God makes mistakes. I'm not saying homosexuality is a mistake, I'm saying that's what they believe, yet they - apparently without irony - say God can fix the "mistake" that he ostensibly made.

It's ludicrous, obviously. Homosexuality is no more a mistake than heterosexuality is. And God will no more "cure" homosexuality than he will heterosexuality.

My opinion (based in great deal on scripture, but I find it boring and pompous to quote it to support my point) is that God does not give two shits who you're attracted to or who you have sex with.

Hell, even anti-adultery laws in the Bible were based in the idea that women were the property of men. If you support that idea, then you can legitimately support God's varying prohibitions on sex. But Jesus later contradicted those prohibitions, saying God allowed people to follow those rules because he knew they wouldn't listen when he said there was no such prohibition in his mind.

The whole thing is kind of stupid when you think of it like that.
 

leifwright

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You know the really ironic thing ... I've read the Bible 31 times and I've yet to find a single anti-LGBTQ line in it. All those verse pastors quote? I looked them up, and when read IN CONTEXT (as opposed to flinging around lines at random) they have nothing to do with LGBTQ at all. Yeah, even Sodom and Gomorrah.

I'm heterosexual, but my dad quit talking to me for two years when I made this point to him. I've read the Bible dozens of times, multiple times in Hebrew. Sodom and Gomorrah was about people being assholes, not about people liking to put their dicks in assholes.

One pastor gave me a list of anti-gay verses in the Bible. Some 300+ verses, throughout Old and New Testaments. Okay, when you take the list and just read the list, yeah, it does SEEM like god hates gays. But then, you take the list and you read those lines IN CONTEXT and boy does it say something totally different.

They love giving lists, because it saves them the trouble of being attracted to you while they're trying to get you to join their churches.
 

NoirSuede

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One day Lot is taking a walk and he meets three strangers, who at first he thought were women, but upon talking to them, realized they were men, then he realizes "OMG! They aren't HUMANS! No wonder they look like females! OMG! Wife and daughters come look at these guys! Have you ever seen anything like them? They look like women! OMG they are male and I thought they were females, but they aren't because aren't Humans, they are angels, messengers of god, quick cook dinner for them!"

I believe the correct term for men who look like females is Bishōnen
 

MacAllister

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This is getting extraordinarily weird, eccentric, and inaccurate. That long and digressive post may well be the most bizarre and fanciful reading of the Sodom and Gomorrah story I've ever encountered -- and I grew up in a fundamentalist cult.

But the weird contentiousness? It's got to stop if this thread is going to stay open.
 
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leifwright

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This is getting extraordinarily weird, eccentric, and inaccurate. That long and digressive post may well be the most bizarre and fanciful reading of the Sodom and Gomorrah story I've ever encountered -- and I grew up in a fundamentalist cult.

But the weird contentiousness? It's got to stop if this thread is going to stay open.

It took liberties, for sure, but Sodom and Gomorrah was certainly about anything other than homosexuality. Yes, some townspeople asked for Lot to throw the angels out so they could bone them, but the angels, who were sent to destroy the city, were already there to destroy the city before the proposition was made.

The story has long been misappropriated for anti-gay rhetoric because of that simple fact, so I think allowing a little poetic license on the other side is justified.
 

darkprincealain

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I think if it's outreach that they are looking for, even after bringing your church to loving acceptance, they should be well prepared for the idea that some people are just going to have too much life experience with Evangelicals to see your church for what it is. It's one thing to not understand privilege, and be educated on that subject, but quite another to not get a chance to stop experiencing it constantly. Yes, we have marriage now in the states. But I can marry Friday and literally be fired or evicted on Monday for being who I am.

And that's really just for starters. To experience what it feels like to be alone and not really have a role model because your very existence is shunned, that can really make a wreck of people. All I'm saying is, talk about setting yourself a high bar.