What is so bad about being gay?

Nuthin.

I get to look at being gay with fresh eyes every day.  As an older gay activist out for 30 years,, my own lover was in a straight marriage for 25 years, I am her first and she is coming out right and left and just came out to her family over New Years.   Over the phone, long distance big time.  U.S to Malaysia.   She had waited for two years... fear of rejection  ran deep.

What reation did she get?  "Congratulations! Are you happy?", and,"How is your ex?", the divorce is completely amicable.   Everything is actually working out very well for everyone.

She has joined my family and for the first time is experiencing family life with teen age boys, she has no kids of her own and mixing in my world everyone knows we are gay and a family  and in her world, very few know yet... somthing tells me this will all change very soon. :)

Never a dull moment.

Dar

IT is time for all my Christian brothers and sisters to understand - God can not be both infinitely loving AND use negative reinforcement. Negative reinforcement is not a technique my Triune Lord uses. More over, God never has.

This is how I believe: Either the Bible is 100% right and God is a God that employs negative reinforcement (which also implies limitation) OR God is an infinitely loving God which makes parts of the Bible flat-out wrong.

The Bible, having been written by the hands of men, represents the weak link.

We are spiritual beings seeking out a human existence. Gays and lesbians, transsexual and bisexuals all fall into this condition... as do we all.

If one feels a need to "defend" God and the Bible; if one gets angry in the debate - there is something wrong. God does not need to be defended. Where did that crazy notion ever come from, anyway?

Augustine, bishop of Hippo in North Africa (354-430), however, established the "principle of charity" in the art of interpreting and explaining biblical texts.  He felt that bitter, angry disputes about the meaning of scripture were rediculous.  The Bible is about  love; so to quarrel about the exact meaning of scripture was perverse.  Charity, love of God and love of neighbors is the essense of Christanity.  He repeated "But let us love the Lord our God will all our heart, with all our soul, and with all our mind, and our neighbors as ourselves."  And he pointed out that moral standards were culturally conditioned.  He established a Rule of Faith not as doctrine but as the spirit of love.  Whatever the men who wrote scripture had originally intended, a passage that was not conducive to love must be interpreted figuratively, because charity was the beginning and end of the Bible.

"Whoever, therefore, thinks that he understands the divine scriptures or any part of them so that it does not build the double love of God and of our neighbor does not understand it at all."

By habitually seeking a charitable explanation of disturbing texts, he felt Christians could learn to do the same things in their daily lives with their neighbors.  Any interpretation of scripture that spread hatred and dissension was illegitimate.  All exegesis (Greek: "to lead or guide out"; the art of interpreting and explaining biblical texts) must come from the principle of charity.

Instead of quoting the Bible with literal infallibility in order to denigrate gays (or women priests and pastors), we might recall Augustine's Rule of Faith:  always seek the most charitable interpretation of a text.  Augustine was not a literalist.  He believed and taught that any interpretation of scripture that spread hatred and dissension was illegitimate if not guided by the Principle of Charity. And after that, he urged Christians to serve their communities with love; not in endless debates of the meaning of this or that text taken literally. He wasted no time on literal meanings, but constantly sought what represented "spiritual senses that would take us beyond the broken human words."

I like being happy.