The Ultimate Revelation
If we believe in God as the creator then the creation is the ultimate revelation. Hence doctrine has to accomodate the creation or the nature of things.
The scientific consensus has determined that homosexuality is a natural phenomenon. So are hermaphrodites and barren couples. Therefore we ought to consider homosexuality part and parcel of creation.
Theology that does not reflect these manifestations fails to account for the creation and thus undermines itself.
When it became clear that naturalism contradicted racism, dogmatic insistence to the contrary crippled Mormon theology, corrupted the hearts of our children and damaged the Church as an organization. I hope that does not happen with sexism.
The scientific consensus has determined that homosexuality is a natural phenomenon. So are hermaphrodites and barren couples. Therefore we ought to consider homosexuality part and parcel of creation.
Theology that does not reflect these manifestations fails to account for the creation and thus undermines itself.
When it became clear that naturalism contradicted racism, dogmatic insistence to the contrary crippled Mormon theology, corrupted the hearts of our children and damaged the Church as an organization. I hope that does not happen with sexism.
posted by Hellmut at 09:23
5 Comments:
Hellmut,
I'm hoping that nature takes its course...church or no church. My feeling is that any church that continues to place dogma over scientific and natural observation is going to be increasingly irrelevant...unless, of course, people freak and we go back to the dark ages.
This is what I hope does not happen.
Hellmut, I think about this, also. Especially the hermaphrodite thing. Of course God makes mistakes. Or else He did it on purpose, which why would He purposely let someone be born with problems already?
Hmmm....think about that. I was born to a vicious alcoholic father and a mother who suffered from a birth defect herself (many people thought she was retarded, she wasn't, however, just seemed that way). It was rough.
I will say this again, I'm not trying to offend, but almost every homosexual person I know personally (about four:) were abused and molested as children. The other one of the five wasn't. I knew him since birth and he always had a feminine side.
Let me count how many I know for a minute: 7. Two from birth. The girl always seemed distant from boys, but only became gay when she revealed to her family her abuse at the hands of her uncle. Although perhaps she'd hidden it from us for years. She was actually engaged twice.
Five were abused. So there is that. I think it's a factor. My friend who is gay was really quite pretty, she'd been married to a man she loved dearly, he left her, she began to recover memories of abuse and now she's been in a committed relation to a very nice woman who I like very much for years.
You can't just deny that, Hellmut. The abuse factor.
But you were careful when you gave your example of barren couples and hermaphrodite people. What about severe birth defects, what about retardation, what about the horrible accident that seems so unfair? What about people like Jeffrey Dahmer? Was he born that way or did he become that way? What was God thinking?
Life isn't fair, and I don't know what God is thinking.
I come back to something that I don't understand, homosexuality. I see that people who are homosexual are good people, although I would hate that lifestyle. It seems to be a matter of nature AND nurture.
Bottom line for me, this is in God's hands. If the prophet says they shouldn't be married, I will support that. I will not support gay bashing or the awful violence that gay people suffer. I will not support their apparent damn, I forgot that word, screwing around a lot.
And God is going to have a lot of explaining to do. Boy.
PS, you know, that story about Mathew Shepherd? Well, there is a worse one here in Cedar City. I don't know why he didn't get the publicity, the public outcry.
This boy's last name was Church, he was from Delta. He was picked up by two drunks in a bar here and driven out in the sticks, where he was brutally tortured and murdered. The men were caught and convicted. I don't remember their sentence, it could have been the death penalty, but I don't think so.
This boy's family was devastated, the community was shocked and saddened, but no publicity. I don't know why it was handled like that.
Thanks for your post, Anne. Would you have a link to a news story about the murder in Delta by any chance? I would love to learn more about it.
There is no doubt that there are many gay people that are getting mistreated in our society. That does not mean that the mistreatment causes them to be gay. In some cases, it might be the other way around.
May be, people who have been mistreated in the past perceive you as a kind and nurturing person and seek you out. My impression of you is certainly one of a nice and caring woman. If I had something that bears on my soul then I would go and look for a person like you.
May be, the cluster of persons that you happen to have encountered is just a fluke of chance. The scientific literature that looks at thousands of cases, does not consider abuse a cause of homosexuality.
I comment that made back in January on Nine Moons seems to relate to the topic here:
The gay community has long described homosexuality as being part of the great diversity of mankind. I have never been willing to totally accept the idea that a homosexual orientation is simply a varient of human makeup like being left-handed or having blue eyes. It just seems too "broken." It doesn't take a scientist to convince anyone that men and women are physically designed for sexual coupling with each other. Yet, it is clear that homosexuality does widely occur in the animal kingdom. And coupled with the estimates that between 5 and 10% of the human population is homosexual, it does suggest that it is a "natural" aspect of life on this earth.
I see homosexuality as "diversity" more akin to the idea of "opposition in all things," which I don't believe is strictly black and white. Homosexuality, like left-handedness, diabetes, mental illness, gray hair, imperfect teeth, or olive colored skin, is part of the wonderous and complex fabric of the human condition. Sometimes tragic, sometimes beautiful, sometimes plain, these things are all part of the rich experience that mortality provides. And what matters is how we intersect and interact with the variety of people and situations with which we come in contact.
If we seek a divine purpose for human sexuality, the model in Genesis seems to fit, where men and women are called to join together and multiply and fill the earth. LDS doctrine gives this model its ultimate expression. Yet not everyone can achieve this ideal state, nor fulfill the command to bear children. Some people find that they cannot pair with the opposite sex. Others discover that they are infirtile and cannot produce offspring. A portion of humanity, for whatever reason, finds itself outside of the norm, the ideal, the divine plan for mankind. Yet here too, we believe that there is divine purpose underlying the incongruities of life. When we sorrow for the childless couple, we hope that, somewhere in the grand plan of the Creator, there is meaning to the apparent deficiency. I believe that somewhere in the wisdom of God there is purpose behind what we might perceive as the homosexual's broken existence.
Post a Comment
<< Home