Transcript History

(422) Homosexuality and the Bible - YouTube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pjnF6luy-VY

Transcript:

(00:01) well we are live welcome to everybody who is going to begin joining us online and welcome everybody who's here uh to our weekly history theology and philosophy meetup we do these uh pretty well every tuesday night at 7 30 here at toronto center place i'm the coordinator of the meetup my name is john hamer and i also serve as pastor of the community price toronto congregation whose facility this is and my background is in history but it's also through academic work through publishing in on the history of maps and things like this

(00:40) and so in this particular case we're going to be looking also um all the way back at some history in terms of antiquity and also some um textual criticism and as we're trying to uh talk about the sort of um not always fun topics of homosexuality in the bible which we picked this year because we it's um or we picked this week anyway because we're entering lgbtqia plus pride here in toronto so we always begin i don't i don't begin this time i don't have my uh slides that have the intro on here but we always begin by talking about our mission and

(01:25) our mission is built into our wall and it is invite everyone to community we have little icons that represent things continually learn and grow one of the ways that we believe in continually learning and growing is through um you know we're all past college age here um so many people when they're out of college unfortunately like you cease to read books uh the learning is already done but we have a wonderful community that gathers here for continually learning and growing to abolish poverty and needless suffering

(01:59) to pursue peace and justice and to live life meaningfully together and i'm really excited on these themes uh this week that we have uh as guests uh visiting us uh from kenya uh uh joseph and jennifer good to get to gundam is how it's supposed to happen i'm sorry joseph and jennifer tagunda who are partners with the congregation they are founders of a children's integrated center in kenya where uh anyway where they're doing just incredible work on in terms of this mission of continually learning and growing abolishing poverty

(02:42) and suffering and living life meaningfully uh and pursuing peace and so briefly uh just so we can talk about why we do those things that we as invited um uh joseph to just share briefly about what tanya is and what it does and how for example the congregation's little role that we had to help out with one of the programs can we get the microphone landra for joseph just speak into this one sorry i'm like five seconds that's okay hello my name is joseph kilgonda and i come all the way from kenya which is one of the countries of east africa

(03:34) are to the equator you are very far north we are the equator my background is also education so long as i don't swallow it yeah yeah that's good yeah my name is joseph kigunda and i come from kenya kenya is one of the countries of east africa and today i'm privileged to stand in your minds today and proclaim that the lord is always savior and the wrong of my savior and that in our middle east also i very humbly wish to recognize the presence of somebody who taught me in high school of achencharyango charles boyd was my teacher in chicago high school

(04:31) many years and going in mayor and my background is education so much of education of the deaf i took the education of the deaf at the university of rochester upstate new york and when i went back to kenya i was involved in the minister of education trying to give directions to the education of the deaf in the country the job i did until i went on retirement so when i went in retirement together with my wife jennifer we felt around this calling upon us to think of that other children who nobody actually cares about

(05:15) this is children with disabilities the deaf the mentally challenged and also children who have been taken from the streets of nairobi and the children from dysfunctional families we felt the lord is calling upon us to take care of this group of children normally nobody takes care all things about them tanya integration center was starting in the year 2000 by me and jennifer who's also backing around his special education and together we have worked together during the time we have been in operation we have seen the lord

(05:58) availing towards children fact normally you think you cannot do anything but he shows you the way how to go about it we have children who are mentally challenged we have the category of the deaf we have also children who are taken from the streets of nairobi we happen to be in the mars island masairan is area where people are stuck in their traditions they didn't change during the colonial time when the british were and colonized kenya they they remained very undermined and even today a few of them they they are very much held to their

(06:43) transitions they subject young children to the fgm this is a female genital mutation and they also give out young children girls as as young as 10 years to be married by old men who probably have even other three four or you know wives the children go and grow in those homes so we realize in tanya we need to give a warmth to this kind of children and retain them there and teach them and give them education so tanya as our children's home as well as a center in education where we teach them to date we have been able we are having

(07:32) about 172 children uh all from the primary school others in high school we are both in uh in high schools and also we have some in colleges and together with that we are very successful stories that you have seen over the years we have those who have managed despite their you know their challenges they have managed to be useful members of the society we have girls who have managed to you know to go through our system and they are employed and they are working and also we have managed to get those who can't work because of their anti-capping

(08:14) conditions but they are giving them trains we emphasize on trends skills and development among some of the cases that has been very unique is that we managed to to get a child from the national park who had been adopted by monkeys looks strange but it's a fact she was gotten there by you know a tourist when they went to visit and a like in a crew national park and then this child was taken to a children's home in nakuru when that children's home was closed her name with charity the name that she was given by for the manager who was learning the

(09:00) that that center she she was charity and she came up with this name she still have it this girl it was impossible to stay with other children she stood alone she was doing things alone she behaved more or less like the monkey but over the years now we have been without you for about four years she now has started giving a human face at least this can hit from the plate and before she was throwing foam on the floor and start picking it and what we have not managed to uh to to get from charity we have not managed to trade trainer so he's always

(09:43) on diapers we have others children like lucy lucy was actually gotten from the streets of nairobi she has a combination of mental challenge and also deafness and since the police could not understand this this child she end up she found a way to turn we have been able to actually really test this girl she is very very happy now and she can do she was drooping no she doesn't and this is able to absorb table manners and many many many other cases with me allow me to have my wife to just give a brief how are we we got involved

(10:26) as a family i think joseph what we'll do is um is that there'll be time afterwards for people who want to we'll be able to continue the discussion and also we have some wonderful brochures about tanya and all the wonderful work that's being done and so i thank you so much for being here and we're really excited um about all of the work you're doing and there'll be time after let me give this to you because it's next to my marker and so the good time afterwards uh we i don't think there's enough we can't just pass

(10:58) these all out but if you're interested in finding out about um the programs that all the incredible things that are happening obviously the anyway in tanya in terms of rescuing special needs girls and um some of the other things that joseph has already shared with there'll be plenty more to talk about it's a long term partnership as uh we've mentioned chuck uh who is a longtime former pastor of the congregation here has a 50-year relationship with going to kenya so on this so all right um let's see if this is is this going yes

(11:39) so so the topic tonight uh what does the bible say about homosexuality and um i'll i'll say that in the course of preparing this over the course of last week um i i was not as happy to read the exact verses again because i tend to not um let's say dwell on the particular person versus the get cherry picked um but we'll go through some of them today and uh and we'll we'll we'll see with what we did inside you're gonna do with it um so in the first place um here is my little icons here we've got a bible and we've got

(12:14) uh talking about you know here the gay pride flag where sorry the lgbt rainbow flag so although people assume that the short answer of this question is simply the bible says no you know to to this particular topic um i'm going to argue here actually that if we're going to have a short answer uh the short answer would probably be rather nothing in particular it's specifically let's say in terms of an actual focus on this particular topic nothing of relevance anyway to us today and so of course there are plenty of

(12:50) verses that have general relevance and so um from leviticus love your neighbor as yourself i am the lord and from galatians quoting that the entire law law is fulfilled in keeping this one commandment love your neighbor as yourself so in other words in general terms these sorts of ideas are um they're applicable throughout in different texts but i think in order to actually talk about this question we have to roll back a little bit and ask what is the bible and we've done this more than once in these kind of lectures

(13:26) andrew we're actually also running out of chairs okay so i don't know if there are don't worry yeah thank you um although it's often anyway in english read in a kind of an archaic english translation and that allows people to kind of feel like the bible is maybe speaking with a single voice and it's certainly published altogether as one text and so i just have here all of these wonderful begets and other kinds of archaic language that we read out of the bible and we can definitely think of like bible speak thou and thee

(14:02) and sort of kind of shakespearean with an emphasis on begetting and stuff in fact of course as we all know that this is not a single text at all but rather multiple texts and multiple voices that have been gathered together these texts have been written by scores of different authors in different languages over the course of centuries and that the different authors therefore necessarily have different world views even because it's too long a time period and also jumping through different languages from the earliest hebrew to

(14:36) aramaic to um finally greek in terms of the christian bible as we've seen when we've done different histories of the bible and the christianity in previous lectures we're all pretty aware that the canonization itself the collection of which titles and which books are going to actually be published together in the bible is essentially the last thing that happened and so because that is happening centuries after any of the books even the last of the books is being written more or less none of the certainly none of the earliest authors

(15:14) have any sense at all that their text is going to be somehow grouped together in this anthology that is going to be read together as a thing called the bible they are not speaking as if they understand that they are part of the bible they are writing their own text and that text eventually gets all grouped together but it's a very different perspective if you're thinking of that author's perspective at a certain point new testament writers for example are quite aware of let's say the canon that becomes the old testament because the new testament

(15:46) writers who are writing in greek the christian writers they're they when they think of scripture they're thinking of the greek old testament the septuagint the greek translation and so that has come together and has sort of they have essentially a set of texts which is much larger than the uh what's now considered the jewish canon so the jewish canon doesn't include some of these texts didn't end up making it into the hebrew bible of most almost all rabbinic judaism and it also includes books that more books than protestants have since

(16:18) protestants also share that same old testament perspective it's the one that catholics have right so catholics um or canon is based on that so we call that extra books the apocrypha and we're actually having yeah so july 17th we're having a thing on the apocrypha so that's that extra set of books that are not in either the hebrew or protestant canon but are in the catholic and orthodox kid so anyway these authors in all of these different texts don't have a sense that they are writing the bible you know at this thing that emerges much

(16:49) later the biblical authors then as a result strongly can disagree with each other they are writing their own text and then someone else is writing their own text they may well be aware of each other they may well be writing an answer to the other author um different biblical authors in the different traditions specifically are often quite at odds with each other so the authors for example of the wisdom tradition books uh for example things like proverbs and uh ecclesiastes and things like that are often quite um negative about the prophetic books

(17:27) and prophets and what prophets are saying prophet the prophetic people are likewise often decry the people who just think that they can get along with just wisdom when in fact the revealed word is what's more important as far as the prophets are concerned so they actually condemn each other within the text of the bible itself or what now is the bible each in their own little book what they're originally doing so an example uh that i think is pretty powerful if we go to deuteronomy one of the texts of the pentateuch the first five

(17:59) books of the bible they're often called the books of moses they're attributed to moses they're not written by moses there's a text in deuteronomy called where we read no half-breed may be admitted into the assembly of the lord or of yahweh not even his descendants to the tenth generation may be admitted into the assembly of yahweh no ammonite or moabite may be admitted to the assembly of yahweh not even his descendants to the tenth generation may be admitted to the assembly of yahweh never as long as you live um must you seek their welfare or

(18:31) prosperity so this is a kind of a harsh one you know as a lot of among the different um things that are in the law let's say in that part in the deuteronomy the second law um so ezra oh yeah so the question is who are the half-breeds so in this case so moabites and ammonites are the neighbors of the people of israel so the people of israel this is written in the first temple period and so this is that period of time prior to the first destruction of jerusalem in 587 bc so that period of time there is a judah is a little hill kingdom in the

(19:14) iron age and judah's immediate neighbors are moab and edom and ammon and so if the person is from ammon which is essentially jordan uh or moab which is also over in jordan today um if you then marry one of them and you have a k and they you have a kid then that's a half brief and so the half-breeds are not allowed to be part of the assembly of israel they're not allowed to be part of israel as far as this commandment is concerned and by the way 10 generations later for moabites we're still you're still not allowed in

(19:52) because you that's um anyway the commandment right even if you have a wife who's one of those and it comes from among the ammonites that's right it is not the part that's right so the moabites aren't admitted and they're just and your descendants they're not allowed to be considered to be part of israel you can marry them but you're not supposed to so if you do you that you're your they and your children are going to be not considered part of israel yeah so because you're a half-breed then and so this is essentially saying that

(20:34) taint as far as this commandment is concerned lasts 10 generations so sins of the father or whatever are vested upon the children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren 10 generations and they're not admitted according to the law anyway so ezra who is one of the core leaders of the community after then we mentioned this this deuteronomy is written shortly before the few generations before the destruction of jerusalem by the babylonians then the people are in exile the leaders are in exile in babylon then babylon

(21:08) falls to persia the persian empire is this first great middle eastern world empire the persian empire the emperor allows the elite members of the israelite community who are in babylon to go back to jerusalem and rebuild the temple and create their own essentially judean province of the persian empire under persian rule and so ezra who is a member of the persian court but who is israelite by birth and practice um it goes back and is essentially one of the leaders who is allowed to be in charge of that little province

(21:42) then of the persian empire so he helps rebuild the temple and he also by tradition and probably scholars also think he may well be one of the um leaders who at least is in charge of supervising if not himself actually editing what becomes the torah what becomes the pentateuch those five books that are now attributed to moses but actually were originally made up of lots and lots of different sources that got put together in one collection so maybe ezra is the person who helped do that so ezra when we read about ezra ezra is

(22:17) in some of the historical books called in the protestant version of this anyway nehemiah and ezra are the books of nehemiah and ezra it's one double book in the jewish canon we read in the book of moses which is to say that quote that we had from deuteronomy so in other words deuteronomy 23 2 4 it was found to be laid down that no ammonite or moabite should ever be enter the assembly of god when the people so they're reading that aloud and when people heard that law uh they separated off from israel all those who were of mixed blood

(22:52) so this is a law that at the time of ezra people hadn't been aware of they now read it out loud as they're reading the law kind of for the first time and anybody who is of mixed blood now gets separated out and they don't count anymore as part of of israel and all those who had married foreign women they dismissed them together with their children so if you were already married to a moabite that's what you divorce them and all your kids you disown them all and so that was essentially ezra's response to this commandment which he wanted to very

(23:22) zealously um uphold right so as far as ezra's rules were there's israelites and there's everybody else moabites there's a very strong boundary and that boundary lasts forever 10 generations i mean that's as far as anybody can imagine that we've been my family's been in north america for 16 generations and that takes you back to 1600s so i mean anyway 10 generations that's a long time okay so however at the very same time as ezra there was a prophet uh who we don't know the name of this prophet is anonymous who is the author of a book called ruth

(24:03) and this author has a very very different view of israelite man marrying moabite women so if you are familiar with this the book of ruth it's a very short book but a very well-written and engaging book in the bible where essentially an israelite woman named naomi moves to moab is able has her with her sons and her husband her sons and husband all die meanwhile her sons have married moabite wives and more or less now she's without a kin group one of the one of the daughters-in-law goes back to her own people but ruth is this incredible

(24:42) um devoted family member daughter-in-law who more or less says you know i'll i don't know if i have this quote i didn't put it in but anyway you know i'll go where you go your god will be my god so she um essentially is adopted into israel and becomes a convert to the worship of yahweh to judaism uh first temple judaism uh and is there and as ultimately the most loyal uh potential member of the religion that you know that you would have then as in this story and what ends up happening as the um uh as the story you know unfolds or

(25:19) as it ends is essentially um so naomi up there is uh uh is the mother-in-law uh married again to this uh the boy the the boy that has died ruth and ultimately ends up finding a new husband in bethlehem where or he bring either bethlehem or even and where where her mother-in-law is from named boaz and he has a son named obed who has a son named jesse who has a son named david and so just within three generations ruth uh is the then great great great grandmother mother great great grandmother great great is all grandmother of

(25:57) david who is essentially you know the the most important uh you know king and the most important figure other than moses let's say in all of the old testament and so essentially what the author here of ruth is saying is that not only are can moabites enter the congregation of israel regardless of what it might say in deuteronomy but their children within not 10 generations but just a few generations not only can be come a part of that but can in fact be david himself the king so it's quite a competing perspective

(26:34) right at the same time so as we saw here anyway ezra anyway kind of a more on the side of the author of ruth than i am on ezra's side so if you can imagine but anyway that's my own partisan bias but anyway ezra believes in exclusion a very literal interpretation of law he refuses to admit moabites or children of mixed marriages and destroys the family as men following ezra renounce their wives and children right author ruth by contrast believes in inclusion tells a story that illustrates the fact that the law had never been interpreted literally

(27:05) uh ruth the moabite marries that uh boaz and israelite ruth follows yahweh has admitted the assembly and if the law were interpreted as ezra wanted king david would have to be excluded right so that's the that's that's um conflict right so just trying to illustrate here that there are competing voices that have different perspectives um they weren't always they weren't originally uh in the bible but then when they both all got made into what we now think of as the bible that means that different competing voices are all within that same text

(27:38) so the composite text is therefore self-contradictory right so both of these you know the author of ruth and also ezra are in the text as is the deuteronomy text the individual authors have often diametrically opposed views and the result is just inherently self-contradictory so what should also uh be clear to absolutely everybody i think is the authors are limited uh by a human capacity and their own context so every individual text is composed by a human author who is limited by his and in some cases her because there are

(28:18) female authors in the in the text too uh their own capacity and context so if they're all in the distant past they didn't have any access to the all kinds of knowledge and ideas that we take absolutely for granted and so that could you know as we've talked about in many other things that includes everything from physics and cosmology to chemistry genetics and then also ideas like the modern post-enlightenment idea of the self um and so these are ideas that we for example once we have those things once we um have our modern let's say idea of

(28:52) time that's based on the fact that we have clocks and our idea of maps that are based on the fact that our phones tell us where we are at all times all of these kind of ways that we think i was just talking about how where we are right now because we have computers it's more or less impossible for us not to think of our own brains as computers with hardware and software they obviously didn't have that metaphor for thinking about brains just 150 years ago what they were then thinking when they would make an analogy

(29:21) of how they understood their brains they would use mechanical instruments they think of it all like a wind up like the tin man or something like that because they had clocks and things like that you take that back to 2000 years they don't have any kind of wind-up things they're not thinking of their brains as little machines they're thinking of their brains as uh animals that need to be under control so it's the idea that uh you get the analogy that aristotle and everybody has is essentially that there's uh you have inside you the passions that

(29:49) are like the uh the horses and you have to be the charioteer or your intellect has to be the charioteer that keeps that that harnesses that right so essentially we have different paradigms that we can't actually hardly get out of we we have a sense for example that time is money because everything for us uh is on the one hand we measure time so precisely in our thinking about time at all times uh and then simultaneously every single thing that we do is monetized time is money would be absolutely meaningless to people 2000 years ago

(30:21) they don't have money in the same way that we do or think of it in the same way and they don't think of time the same way that we do okay so um even within all this one's context humans air so that's just nature of uh humanity nobody's perfect so necessarily then if we have a bunch of people that are limited and they're making mistakes when you bring that all together this is going to make a composite text that has lots of errors in it when it's combined this is also borne out through an unbelievably extensive

(30:54) academic study um that the biblical texts have been subjected to over the course of the past several centuries essentially the um the discipline of literary criticism itself which is the western academic discipline of reading the text and determining in terms of the textual criticism what was the original language of the text how can we reconstruct this text back to the earliest version of it because it has gone through for example all of these different copies that the monks have been doing throughout all of history and we have to get back to the

(31:29) original one that's lower criticism and then higher criticism uh which is who is the original author who was the original audience what does the text mean and how would it have been understood by its original audience so that kind of context so that discipline itself was essentially created to study the bible because people were very interested in the bible have been very interested in the bible um so that also now has shown some a bunch of findings that are that are conclusive so one of those findings is that some of

(31:59) the bible's texts are pseudo-big graphical switches to mean they are not written by who they who says who they say or they're written by um so an example would be several of the wisdom books claim that like ecclesiastes will claim that uh it's written by solomon um it's written many hundreds of years after the time period when solomon would have been alive if solomon is in fact a historical figure which isn't clear so we can't we can't say that for sure whether solomon is a literary character or whether there's a historical solomon

(32:35) and so um and so certainly though the book isn't written by him likewise we know that for the book of daniel for example which was written many hundreds of years after the events when daniel would have been alive and then once again we can tell that because literary criticism has identified just numerous anachronisms that allow us to date the book very precisely to whatever it is around the year 137 bc as opposed to when it needed to have been written which would have been like the five 560s bc so some of the books are definitely

(33:09) not what they claim to be so we know there are heirs historians have likewise shown that many of the stories within the different texts of the bible are not historical um and at a certain point a lot of this can't be too surprising we i mean i always mentioned we're aware that for example um the tower of babel uh this and many other stories like that um have all of the hallmarks of uh regular mythology where you essentially are wondering why do people all speak different languages one of the ways that people tell those stories is that they create

(33:42) sacred story or myth in order to describe those things as we now understand the history of the development of language obviously there was not simply one language all at once and then suddenly everybody was speaking different languages but rather languages have all been evolving in linguistics can take us back very far as it reconstructs the language family trees and we realize that sanskrit is related to latin etc and and arabic is related to hebrew but you know but otherwise those families are different from each other right

(34:17) um uh and although um then many people uphold a faith claim that the bible is inerrant that's just a tradition that isn't um uh that isn't the bible doesn't actually make that claim or in the text of the bible don't claim inerrancy for the bible and it also is demonstrably incorrect so that isn't meant to be attacking anybody's faith or how their their let's say the way they interpret christianity or judaism uh or their their actual faith in christianity and judaism but rather um to help you to then maybe say well if

(34:54) this is the case if we can make uh demonstrably uh falsifiable uh truth claims if we and we and we demonstrate that those are false that doesn't mean that you have to abandon uh let's say your your broader tradition we just have to understand maybe it in a different way so let's reevaluate where we're at and understand what the text actually is so that you can have a different sense of it or a deeper sense of it okay so circle back you know so that's a little bit background on what the bible is and so now we'll go to more

(35:27) let's try to get into uh well not quite what does the bible say about homosexuality because first we got to do the other preface you know so what is homosexuality um a lot of people are very aware or already know the answer to this question but anyway we um we should still talk about it and get to put a little bit background in context on this too so um now where we're at in the course of my lifetime where it's now primarily understood in the context of sexual orientation as it's called so through a combination of genetics

(36:02) prenatal environmental factors maybe hormones every human is born with a sexual orientation which couldn't be seen along a continuum sexual orientation is different from gender and you know we'll make the point then the gender is also as we've now becoming increasingly aware i think all of us is also a spectrum so we'll just talk about sexual orientation here the majority of people obviously actually vast majority of people are born with a innate heterosexual orientation and that is to say they naturally have romantic and

(36:39) physical attraction to members of the opposite gender and because the numbers are so big it's um uh and society is kind of focused on you know you on you're always focused on your own perspective no matter what it's always been very hard for the people in the super majority group to imagine how anybody else you know is operating because it's so naturally a part of your existence but however a small but significant minority of the population and i try to get numbers way back in can kinsey's day they've made exaggera i think dramatic

(37:16) claims of saying maybe 10 as much as 10 of the people might um be lgbt in some way and that seems very high based on what um uh the different studies that have occurred now so maybe perhaps it's 3.4 percent of the adult population that was a gallup study there was another study i read that says more like the same numbers it could be more than that or or because people don't um all even if you have let's say uh gay orientation you may certainly not report that you may not want to tell anybody about it you may not even want to admit it to

(37:50) yourself and so in that case the number can be higher than what we're able to identify through studies so that proportion of the population then is naturally born with multiple different ones but including a homosexual orientation which is to say romantic and physical attraction to members of the same gender so um so here's the complexity that we're now becoming increasingly aware of right so if we're gonna say on the one hand here your gender there is maybe a spectrum potentially where you are identifying as either all the

(38:27) way male or all the way female or there's other options and possibilities though for example people who are intersex people who are asexual people you know who are transgender so anyway so there's other other those object options in terms of your own gender and then also attraction um and so essentially the idea on this is that if you are you know a man and you're attracted to men you're homosexual orientation right okay so orientation then as we just kind of mentioned here is different from identity so although people have had

(39:14) inborn homosexual orientation through in all cultures uh throughout time since prehistory so every culture despite the fact that many cultures don't think so don't maybe don't think that this is the case it'll still be the case in terms of uh biologically genetically and in actual orientation terms the existence of the orientation has really only been understood really in the light since the late 20th century and the new understanding we have has allowed many people uh with that orientation to publicly identify as gay men and lesbians

(39:49) like myself for example however not everybody as i mentioned with that orientation is in euphemism out of the closet and that can mean not only to others so they might be reluctant to tell anybody about this minority orientation and try to pass you know as the majority or um they may not be willing or able to admit it to themselves or they may be hiding it from themselves for at various reasons and so in fact um in the in the gay community one of the one of the additional burdens uh often is is that there's a bunch of let's say guys who

(40:27) have really repressed their uh sexual orientation and are then also quite obsessed with it uh and then let's say hyper religious and zealous and opposing and being anti-gay a while back a psychological study was done in which a number of men were gathered and then their uh homophobic responses were ranked so they're rated as to how homophobic they were and then they were then later after that they were exposed to homo erotica or gay porn yeah and the level of excitement was was physically measured okay um and it

(41:14) turns out that the more homophobic their responses the more excited they were yeah okay yeah so that's a wonderful correlation and it has been um a real you know a real uh great benefit throughout history as there's been a bunch of guys who have really decided that this is their uh thing that they want to you know be interested or obsessed with and sometimes you wonder why is that guy so obsessed with this particular time why does he always talk about it you know and that's kind of a thing so um in terms of you know how this all

(41:48) developed i don't know maybe this is so the why this would be a lot of people think well genetically how does this make any sense don't your genes need to um you know propagate and things like that if you're uh if you're gay like me i'm not going to have it i'm not you can't have kids but you might not and i'm not having any kids so how is that going to work won't that just always dead end and go away um and so one of the possibilities is as we understand um you know not everything that is going on we are very self-focused

(42:16) and we really think of us whereas i think like all of our genes are less interested and particularly who they're riding around in on the one hand and then in fact there isn't um there is also the fact that we are part of uh traditionally kin groups and and and tribal groups and and and things like that and so and one one explanation that i've heard that i always like is that um uh for women if they have gay brothers it is a very big survival benefit for their kids because essentially you have uncles that are around to you know help

(42:58) provide for that kid where maybe that that be dad that they actually have is not you know anybody less less helpful and that kind of thing anyway having more people around and then in general better for the tribe in general because you have people who maybe are more worried about um the tribe uh then they are worried about let's say any of their own individual kids because they're less focused on that and so that's certainly um anyway one of the things i we're going to have shaheen is going to be able to comment on that so the and so

(43:24) whether or not that's the case that's something that i've always anyway no it's it's a it's a great theory and um another thing that ties into it is the theory of why women experience menopause right because if it was genes just wanting to propagate themselves through you right then older women wouldn't need menopause to just keep having their own kids but at some point it was you know your genes kind of figured out that it was worthwhile investing in your kids kids as opposed to your own after a certain age right good point so all right

(43:55) so it's more complicated than when people first thought of how genetics work let's say um and we're emphasizing individual survival and ultimately that went down this whole social darwinism thing that people had these ideas about in the 19th century that hopefully were getting passed so okay so we talked about then orientation we talked about identity now also we have activity so heterosexual and homosexual activity so it should probably be very understood but people i think have been nervous about it for a whole long time

(44:27) um that men with heterosexual orientation can have sex with other men without any effect on their orientation so just because you're a guy and you're having all the sex with other guys that does not make you gay in terms of your orientation even though um people have been worried that it does for a whole long time and you maybe wonder be asked why do you keep doing that you know i don't know you can be open to that kind of question people you know anyway but anyway it doesn't actually it doesn't have an effect um uh heterosexual men um

(45:00) often when you ask why are they doing it okay so one reason is you know throughout history is when they're in a community uh where women are very very scarce or unavailable so we're very well aware of this uh phenomenon in prisons for example uh navy ships people are pretty aware of this monasteries also in societies that um are more successful at not uh having let's say dating and things like that so where women are you can't interact with women and there's no chance of pre-marital sex and that kind of a thing in that case so

(45:36) there'll be um middle eastern societies uh for example they're even though they're not don't necessarily believe in gay people in terms of an orientation there is perhaps in some cases more gay sex happening because essentially uh young straight guys are not able to interact with you know and have sex with women um so they wouldn't it doesn't make them gay so it's it's homosexual activity um and so likewise it should go without saying that in the opposite direction is that natural people with natural homosexual

(46:11) orientation throughout history can marry men can marry women and then raise heteronormative families and throughout time and societies where let's say marriage was more about let's say conveying property or uh kin group and things like that and less about the more more recent issues and interests in romantic love and things like that it was quite normal let's say for a person or a couple to marry and not necessarily have an arranged marriage and not necessarily be fond of each other you know and that wouldn't be any

(46:50) different right so in that case then throughout time those people with uh who nevertheless have women and women who have uh homosexual sexual orientation uh wouldn't be visible in the society right so no way to pick it out and so one of the things then as we see about it even though people like look back in time and then we see movies like i know 300 it seems pretty gay so i don't know anyway but you know what the ancient greeks are doing so the elite men who are having um same-sex relationships as a as a cultural thing there is no

(47:31) um that's not any more percent higher percentage of the population it's still going to be like 3.5 of the population who have homosexual orientation it's most of by far therefore the overwhelming majority of the men who are engaged in those relationships are have heterosexual orientation so it isn't it has nothing to do with this orientation question so that all seems clear okay so okay now we circle back after the two prefaces now we're gonna have to actually read verses i think i hope not anyway i guess we will see oh no we do we have more

(48:03) things to say again okay all the bio biblical authors i'm just going to point out here are ignorant of this thing that we just took for granted and understand without too much problem right so this idea of sexual orientation it's only been understood recently no one in biblical times and biblical times is a long period of time if you count the new testament in addition to the old testament was aware of the existence of sexual orientation so as a result no author of any text that's included in the bible has anything to say

(48:31) about actual homosexuality which is to say sexual or the sexual orientation right because they're not aware of inborn same-sex orientation they have all ancient societies or all societies know something is going on they don't know what's going on you know or why it's going on or why you know some people are so interested in what's going on even if they don't you know if they seem to be against it so anyway so again so biblical authors then are aware of homosexual activity and a few of them write about it and almost everything

(49:08) they write about it is not pleasant but all of their views have to be then read in the context of their ignorance of sexual orientation um so you know some of these guys are saying yuck they don't like that this is impure this is causing visual impurity this is an abomination and some of these guys are kind of like writing why am i constantly tempted with this everybody seems to be tempted by you know wanting to have sex with guys and it's just it's how does people fight this thing off you know and you wonder why they why

(49:35) they keep asking about it yeah and why wouldn't they take the next logical step and infer the presence of sexual orientation one way or the other so for the so the question is why didn't anybody kind of come up with this as an idea and understand about it um so authors and everyone else certainly understood the existence of it so they understand the existence of activity activity and what is that based on if not something like orientation well you can come up with all kinds of theories [Laughter] yeah the question is so the question's a

(50:18) valid one right so so it seems like to us because again like i kind of said when we cross a threshold of ideas and we have a new paradigm and we understand something it's so natural so we understand you know it's such a such a natural or understandable explanation about why um why some people are are you know interested in this and some people aren't and so but but again until you get across that just because we we know it and it's obvious to us everybody that's on the other side of before they came up with that idea

(50:52) you know even if this idea i mean not all of our ideas not all of our ideas are inventions sometimes our ideas are better explanations about something that is happening naturally right so at a certain point now we think of let's say all species as evolving and we think of those species as uh working on filling or not you know or they're surviving because they are filling particular environmental niches and things like that we just mean we say oh that's very well adapted to that that particular environment we were

(51:27) hanging around uh on our balcony we lived just up the street on the 24th floor of an apartment building and we are watching how all the hawks are helping out with the pigeons and so they fly around and they scream and the pigeons go nuts uh and we're saying how neat it is that the hawks are proving to be so adaptable of now being able to live in the city they live in a lot of buildings and and everything like that and so essentially we we think of that as a terms of of how adaptable you know uh an ad hoc is to its environment that

(52:01) it's encountered with and so therefore it's likely to survive and propagate and if it can do that i mean we can see how well squirrels are doing and so in other words if that you know those kind of rats and other things if hawks can and pigeons if hawks can also do that we'll have lots and lots of hawks for the foreseeable future but anyway i'm just saying we think of it that way because we are very aware of the idea of natural selection because we are on this side of darwin right before that you think well what

(52:28) were people doing for the previous 5 000 years how are they not understanding that that's how was happening so to them they very naturally or their assumption was because um speciation happened so slowly they just assumed that each category of animal is its own category that has always existed so there has always been hawks and a hawk is a completely different thing from a falcon frankly which is i can't even tell with the part and fell apart or whatever because i'm not i pay enough of attention to them but anyway um so and they're very different

(53:01) thing in a completely separate thing from an eagle or any other thing so in other words so they were always been in they've always been hawks and that's the way it uh they were created and so they had to actually come up with a question as a question that nobody was able to solve which came first the chicken you know or the egg and in the past people really thought the answer to that was chicken so in other words there was a chicken at some point it was created and then there and then eggs came from that chicken

(53:26) whereas now i think we understand that in fact there's eggs and eggs have gone back for a whole long time and eventually uh the eggs are you know essentially now we have chickens that are have come from those eggs or whatever but essentially the eggs were there first so i'm not chicken eggs because they were the preceding thing that you know the chickens have evolved from right okay uh so why didn't they think of that so they had a bunch of different other explanations about about what this would be about and so because

(53:59) uh i would say that the main one of the main reasons is that because um it's fairly natural enough for people with uh heterosexual orientation to engage in homosexual activity um there's lots and lots of animals or you know dolphins and everybody are all are doing that very naturally whether the dolphin it's not just the dolphins that you know that have same-sex orientation you know that are engaged in that kind of play and so because that's happening we saw that the culture i mean we see it both like you say in the community of

(54:36) of male only communities like armies and navies and also um monasteries also uh prisons likewise um it's just something that we saw like in ancient societies like the greeks and romans is quite again common right and so as a result of that for the whole super majority of people so we're talking about 90 96 of the population it would never occur to them that this thing that they were doing when they were a kid before they got serious and got married and did their duty and raised a family and all this kind of thing

(55:10) and ceased to be as interested and worried about sex as they really were when they were 17 and all this kind of thing they don't think of that as just being something that you are it's something that you did as a phase when you were a kid or that you were tempted by or whatever it was so i think that it would be very it was quite reasonable for people to jump to that kind of a conclusion or they had all kinds of other explanations about why anything anybody was feeling anything so you are there's a force that's outside

(55:37) of you that's acting on you so some god has um tempted you iras or lust or anything like that or the devil in other words you have had desires that are are coming from an outside force that's acting on people and they make those explanations because those will also come there's a comment or a question yeah this is actually a comment about um i guess homosexual relationships in uh ancient greece yeah which uh you said that they might have viewed it as a phase i think that uh among like aristocratic greek males when they took like a younger lover it

(56:20) was expected that later on they would put the affair aside and get married that's right when they entered public life right so and that didn't really affect their i guess is right largely heterosexual so it just has a lot to do with the way that different societies conceive of uh sexual relationships right yeah and so like you say in those circumstances in that culture there is no no reason at all for like they said this 97 percent of the population to think that you know what they understand homosexual activity

(56:52) has anything to do with uh innate orientation since their innate orientation is heterosexual you had a comment esther i also had a comment thank you for switching chairs also too i remember reading something am i talking to microphone can you guys hear me okay i i think also too class dynamics played a role as well in these kind of uh context because i remember reading how roman law the patriot finale is like the head of the house he had sexual like he had sexual access to his slaves male and female and it was

(57:21) expected that at his property he could have sex with his male slaves and it wasn't seen it was just seen as like using your property like it wasn't even seen as like having a relationship or anything like that so there's even questions too of like how do you how do you understand the person how do you understand how the person existed as a person and so on as well so there's even class dynamics in those contexts too right yeah yeah so specifically like you say so the romans who have a different view of it than the greeks do

(57:46) um the roman idea i mean we still have some of this bias in in where because we inherited so much from rome conceptually but the roman idea is essentially real men penetrate uh you know women and the feminine is to be penetrated real men are dominant and all these kind of things and so it literally doesn't matter at all for a roman gentleman um you know who he is penetrating you know or what or anything you know because that is what you do you know what i mean and that kind of a thing and so it was not it was not seen

(58:20) in any way you know as being so we have all kinds of things also we kind of tie up with what we think of in terms of the homosexual orientation and identity and things like that you could be um you know you as a roman man i mean you could have that you know you could have that either way but essentially if you were then also though um the problem for the romans is way less so like you're um mentioning about with the greeks a young uh greek aristocrat alcibiades who could be having a an affair where he is the passive partner

(58:50) to socrates and that's you know quite an honorable thing that you can tell people about for the rest of your life uh you know when you you know grow up and things like that for the romans um to have ever been the passive partner was is seen as really unmanly and really bad and so um julius caesar uh it was rumored had had that relationship like that with the king of bithynia so one of the important client kings of uh of a roman kingdom in the in in what's not turkey and so one of the things that you know just caused a

(59:24) huge shame for caesar when he had his military victory and he's marching through um through the city of rome it should be his great day of triumph and everything like that and his soldiers saluted him with the phrase ave kaiser uh regina bithini i which to say hail caesar queen of bithynia and so you know this is a huge you know i mean that's like so for that was a you know there's nothing you do but anyway it was a you know it was very shameful for so they have that kind of idea i mean we we have this we have on our biases now

(59:53) we have the idea that uh homosexual orientation in men is equated with or associated with effeminacy uh the ancient greeks had exactly the opposite idea although they didn't understand our orientation but they definitely felt that if you were in terms of homosexual activity they didn't know anything about orientation but um if you were hanging around women are too interested in having sex with women you would tend to become effeminate because they would want you to wash and wear perfume and you know whatever you'd

(1:00:20) go and be in womanly in womanly pursuits whereas if you could hang out with the guys and have sex with them you would be really manly and so the manly guys you know the real tough guys and smelly guys are the ones that are you know having a lot of gay sex you know so that's how it would work yes you have sorry i saw the ad in now magazine for for tonight yes just wondering if you could introduce yourself oh yeah yeah yeah i'm sorry so before the other introduction so my name is john hamer and i am uh serve on the one hand as

(1:00:53) pastor of the community price toronto congregation who's building center place this is toronto center place i also serve as the coordinator of this meetup my background uh is in history although it's a primarily medieval history but i also studied ancient roman and greek history as well uh at the university of michigan uh and i went from there into academic publishing so that's got my background so um okay so biblical authors some of them are although they're all ignorant about orientation some of them however they're very aware of

(1:01:28) homosexual activity um just like the greeks and romans were aware of it and a few of them wrote about it but uh and all their views that have to be in that context right so um i'm going to say as a pastor just as errors of biblical authors who are ignorant of things like the earth's sphericity so the initial world view of the prophets of the earliest parts of the old testament is essentially they believe in a flat earth that has four corners that has a a hemisphere dome on top of it and above that is chaotic waters and below that out blow

(1:02:08) hell under the underneath or the shoal underneath is also chaos waters that world view turned out to be incorrect that's how they understood it based on you know it's not science but anyway the natural philosophy uh and explanations and mythological explanations that they'd had up until that time but just because they may have written that we have to again understand them for their limitations capacity their own historical context and understand the message that they have um based on that so so in so in the same way that we don't think

(1:02:47) most of us we shouldn't i don't think that the earth is flat based on a couple passages of the bible we know it's spherical and people jews and christians and muslims throughout history have known that the statements are made in ignorance and they should likewise be dismissed as error when they're talking about it so i've already dismissed them all before i even gave you a quote from the bible so so with that we'll actually hit some of these so um from the old testament or hebrew bible old testament for the christians we'll

(1:03:18) just talk about the story of sodom and gomorrah then we'll talk about the wonderful levitical prohibitions and then we'll get to the new testament where we'll talk about paul's long sets of musings that he has and why maybe he has those and then other statements in the new testament that are probably all about paul and then we'll just say what does jesus have to say on the subject so the myth of sodom and gomorrah comes from the j source as we said or the yaw with source so we've had um lectures previously on the documentary

(1:03:56) hypothesis of how the five books attributed to moses have been were assembled this is the most robust uh explanation that literary critics of the bible have been able to come up with to explain um how we understand these underlying source texts essentially you will get to different places uh in genesis exodus leviticus numbers in deuteronomy and suddenly you will hear different language being used uh and some of the authors have uh very particular ways that they write and then that stops and you hear this other you know very separate

(1:04:39) and different voice and then you come back to the other voice and it's all interspliced and spliced all together in kind of a crazy way and so this is the understood then to be at some point later an editor has gone through and combined separate texts it would be as if for christians if we were to take the four gospels that we currently have and you do what sometimes is called a harmony of the gospels where you take splice them all up you put them in kind of the order you think and you just put them each one after the other and it would

(1:05:12) essentially be one book and you wouldn't realize that there had originally been four books right and as a result of that you would have a lot of duplicated stories where the stories are told in duplicate and triplicate and the sodom and gomorrah story is actually one of those stories that has a complete duplicate so it's told later in a completely different context the same strange thing happens where people come to a town and the people anyway uh we'll talk about the story so anyway so so this is a compilation when we when

(1:05:42) we look then if we're going to understand any of the stories we have to look at who was the author and when so that we understand the author in their context so the j author is uh where we find the myth of sodom and gomorrah and the j author is probably the oldest uh component of the five com the different source texts that uh make up the pentateuch so um probably dates to the period after the destruction of the northern kingdom of israel so the um if you'll remember that the israel had been split the northern ten tribes and essentially the

(1:06:19) lower two tribes uh the assyrians destroyed the northern kingdom in 720 and then there's a period then when the southern kingdom comes into its own it flourishes and there's a vast amount of literary writing and this is where almost all of the texts that we have of the earliest parts of the bible come from and so because of all this writing that takes place in that time period then before the babylonians destroyed jerusalem so this author the yahwest author the j source is generally the most compelling um of these authors people can like

(1:06:51) different ones some people may be like the e author but the j author is the one who's telling stories like adam and eve and kane and abel and and and some of these um very memorable stories so also this is where the sodom and gomorrah story is so according to the story as it's now in genesis 18 and 19 two angels uh visit abraham's nephew lot who lives in the city called sodom and before but before we read before they lay down the men of the city even the men of sodom compassed a house round both young and old and all

(1:07:24) the people from every quarter and they called him to lot and said unto him where are the men that came into the this night bring them out unto us that we may know them in the biblical sense right so we may have sex with them um so although these original sodomites in the story are technically talking about gang-raping male angels the idea that the activity here is male male i'm going to argue is way less relevant than the main point which is that the city has failed to respect uh the ancient especially in the middle

(1:07:58) east but anyway all across the ancient world guest host relationship to the extent that the citizens are intent on gang-raping their guests and indeed lot is um tries to entice you know tries to get them to not think of the angels by you know offering a daughter to you know to have instead to commit atrocities on and that happens in the duplicated story as well uh in the duplicated story what ends up happening is that the um the priest who has a female slave actually leaves the uh gives a slave and they actually out

(1:08:29) to the men of the city who end up um raping and killing her almost nearly almost to death but then she dies um uh and so it's in in that case again it's a duplicate it's a story that's told twice in the bible and in the one instance i mean anyway they're pretty indiscriminate about who they're doing this horrible thing to so valerie has a comment i'm just wondering why they use the device of referring to the city as a she sort of like a ship and her daughters because it seems that that's not really pertinent in this

(1:09:06) case i'm saying i'm thinking too like in revelation how rome is referred to us as a shield yeah as a she is that like conventional or or is it putting women down or what yeah so what i yeah i was gonna say is so that's what ends up happening here is um so this net you're going ahead to the next passage and so um i'm gonna suggest here that uh so let's address the question okay so um ezekiel who's going to talk about this story is talking about sodom and he calls sodom the city she um and her daughters which is to say

(1:09:43) the inhabitants um and so it's harder for us in english to get a sense of gendered nouns because we just don't do that but i mean it's in in in almost all languages nouns have gender and often cities are female and lands are female which is why for many countries we'll call it the motherland you know so the country is also a gendered female but it doesn't have to be because for example for the germans they call their homeland the fatherland right and so um it just depends i think on what the the um you know orbs in latin is

(1:10:24) is female gender and so rome uh therefore is um is is personified as a female deity and uh and so that would be true for a lot a lot of ancient cultures and cities but some of them would have it the other way where the city would be a man so in this case uh ezekiel is understanding sodom to be as he's talking poetically the prophets are also poets and so as he's talking uh poetically about sodom he's saying she and her daughters this is how he's understanding he interprets that story so he is also an ancient writer an ancient prophet but

(1:10:59) he's writing just after the fall of jerusalem so it's later and now reading this story this is how he interpreted it and how it's widely interpreted by the other prophets at that time she and her daughters were arrogant overfed and unconcerned they did not help the poor and the needy they were haughty and did detestable things before me saith the lord so before the lord so the um the focus here is right they're doing all of these um they're not doing guest host things they are not helping the poor in the needy in

(1:11:29) other words this is this is the reason for as they're interpreting that um it's later uh interpreted by the end by the end of the second temple period by even jesus's time early christians are interpreting uh this story not as guest hosts which is less important to them and instead now because of being part of hellenistic society where the greeks are having a lot of this uh male male cultural thing at the elite level uh the people who are the culture i think anyway the culture of the judeans at this point now are

(1:12:05) identifying this practices as being foreign to them because in other words this is a common thing it's a practice in the gymnasiums and things like that in all of these uh greek uh or hellenized cities that have been planted all around the middle east including like alexandria egypt and everything like that so in other words in all of these cities this is part of the norm now and uh and so because this has come in um the locals have decided that this is a foreign thing this is an our thing as the english will say this is the french

(1:12:37) disease right and then the french said it was the italians and the italians said it was the greeks you know greeks were it was the greeks but anyway so they don't have any they can't blame anybody but anyway so so that's just normal so okay so um this word then became so the story became interpreted that way and in english the word becomes associated with uh homosexual activity although in a technical sense it means uh in the legal sense i think in how sodomy was used it means pretty much any non-non-vaginal intercourse

(1:13:14) the biblical story um anyway it acquired that that interpretation by the time by the new testament times okay um okay next so i'm discarding sodom and gomorrah i don't think that's about homosexuality or even homosexual sex so there we are uh next levitical prohibitions in the p source so one of the other sources so we talked about the j source one of the other sources is the priestly source the priestly source is the most verbose uh the boringest part of the of the bible so the priestly source is the part where

(1:13:49) um the text starts to just drawn on and on about how many ephods and how many um uh you know how that what the items are how do they assemble the different um uh vehicles inside the temple in order to have proper um uh rituals and all this kind of thing so the priestly author is wildly concerned with everything from rituals vessels uh sacrifices things like ritual impurity uh the priestly author is almost certainly a zadakite priest or an aranid priest in other words a person who claims or believes that he is a descendant of

(1:14:26) aaron the high priest and brother with brother of um moses and also then from zeddok who is the high priest under um under king david and so they call themselves zanzatokites or ultimately we say in the new testament time sadducees and so it's of that clan and so the priestly author is very concerned with those kind of things probably writing as the last of the five i'm sorry well asked of the source texts that get made into the pentateuch either shortly before the destruction of jerusalem in 587 or sometime well during the exile or sometime when

(1:15:01) they right after they get back so later than the j source so the priestly author is a source of two most widely quoted condemnations of homosexual activity in the book of leviticus uh among all the hundreds of prohibitions that are there and they are you shall not lie with a male as with a woman it is an abomination if a man lies with a male as with a woman both of them have committed an abomination uh they shall surely be put to death their blood is upon them so those are the the very very strong condemnations that exist within the

(1:15:36) levitical text from the priestly author this is written as though the priestly author is writing law as though this is delivered by moses in fact we know it's written as we say hundreds of years after that it's written as though it were talking to the tribes prior to entry into the land as they are wandering around israel in fact it is essentially all of the prohibitions and all the different laws that the leaders of the temple cult in jerusalem would like to highlight for ritual purity so these are things that applying

(1:16:16) essentially initially to that priestly caste almost exclusively in practice but ultimately over time as uh rabbinic judas jewish identity for example became much more focused on having everybody participate in and uh and obey priestly ritual purity and other kinds of priestly laws ultimately became more mainstreamized into um anyway to rabbinical rabbinic judaism so but it wouldn't have been until really even after let's say new testament times so as of the new testament it's only a very small fraction of uh jewish people who would be let's say

(1:17:01) following all of the different laws and most of them would are were arguing with and and um most of them were wanting that viewpoint were starting to formulate that as a basis of the religion a religion that had previously been focused on the temple cult and the priestly cult and sacrifice and things like that when the temple is destroyed by the romans the next temple is destroyed we end up having a a new version of the religion because it can't be focused on the temple since the temple's gone there's a question that chuck has do we have

(1:17:31) wait wait one second chuck you got to get the microphone i remember in a course that i had once we were told that the word abomination originally did not have the negative connotation that now carries that in fact it just meant not of our tradition so that so that it was not judgmental i don't know how factual that is so so i might i'm given to understand so this is i mean obviously abomination is our one of our english translations for the word i am not a hebrew scholar um my ancient language is latin and so anyway and so what we have is my

(1:18:09) understanding is i've read the underlying word there are multiple words in hebrew that have gotten translated over time as abomination in the english the particular one here is one that is used especially for idolatry and so this is um in a whole long list of different things about not worshiping idols for example uh you know so like i say the the authors of this law are the priests the leaders of the of the priesthood in the temple in jerusalem the word main meaning is um i had it back here is ritually impure so

(1:18:49) ritual purity is really important in terms of what the priests are able to do so we have that a little of that understanding of it in the in the christian parable of the good samaritan where the priests uh and the couple people anyway anyway people who the priest and the pharisee both don't want to come in contact with a corpse which they think the samaritan is the i mean not the surrender they think the wounded person is a corpse uh because if they do they'll become ritually impure they won't be able to go to the sabbath and things like that

(1:19:17) right and so there is a um a very it's a big long list of things that would uh that are considered ritual impurities and part of that context also uh for these laws the reason why they may be included here and this is in some ways speculative but anyway some scholars suggest that one of the reasons why it may well be on the particular laundry list that we find it in is that really up until the destruction of the temple just a few generations before the destruction of the original temple not the one not the second temple

(1:19:50) so that when this is when the original then when this leviticus law is being written um uh the temple under king manasseh uh who had been one of the predecessors to king josiah when there is this major reform and all of the deuteronomic laws deuteronomy gets found and there's all of these kind of emphasis new emphasis on the law up until that time there were all sorts of idols in the jerusalem temple lander had a lecture on this there was all sorts of polytheism that is essentially regular pagan practices that are happening and

(1:20:25) among those were as it says in the bible itself among those were pagan prostitution so temple prostitution both male and female temple prostitutes were at the jerusalem temple then within the kind of like just in a couple generations of when this law would have been written and so it's possible uh that what they're saying here is we are expelling um let's say the non-monolateralist proto-monotheist practices as we are getting rid of the different worship of all the different gods one of the things that is not going to be part

(1:21:04) of yahweh's practice one of the things that is not going to be part of the the new new religion that we are having here first temple judaism is not going to be temple prostitution anymore so we're getting rid of men lying with men as with a woman so valerie i'm sorry thank you urgent yeah the death penalty there um on the bottom line uh like in our eyes that sounds like it's therefore a really really big deal and very bad because we have the death penalty for so few things in our society but i'm wondering like you know if it's a

(1:21:46) like you're saying about a ritual impurity and there were strong i taken laws against that would there be like parallel examples of other impure acts that would merit the death penalty like i don't know eating eating a pork sandwich while sitting in the temple waving about an idol or or well or or adultery or if you know somebody who's not allowed to be going to the into the temple sanctuary were to go in there then that is also you know a death penalty offense right so there was a um even up until uh the new testament times there's when

(1:22:20) that when the temple is technically under within the roman empire there is nevertheless a sign that says gentiles can't go any further here you know on on penalty of death right so there is those kind of things like you say for desecration um it's also an ancient law code uh antiquity they don't have we can we just very cavalierly or especially the united states very cavalierly put people in prison all the time because there's a bazillion prisons and it's very easy to do that they really don't have any prisons and

(1:22:46) um it prison's a very ad hoc thing all the way up to modern times and so ancient law codes were um you cut the hand off then you know this kind of thing i mean in other words you don't have you can't you don't have any prison that you can stick people in for the next 40 years because no one has that kind of luxury so they will kill people or they would um exact fines or you would potentially have corporal punishment and so that's much more common in ancient law codes generally and yes so this is fascinating so according to possibly some

(1:23:23) fundamentalist christians who don't advocate or affirm homosexuality they'll take this leviticus scripture and they'll listen to the arguments of people who are pro-homosexual yeah and they'll say so for example how this is under the law so we dismiss it for today and that um pro-homosexuals would say yeah because it's under the law then we can do away with it yeah okay so the some fundamental christians would say well so was having sex with an animal yeah so they would argue and so my question would to you would be

(1:24:06) just afterwards they would argue that because i know you guys are tracking with me because we don't today advocate or permission people to have sex with animals we still think that's an abomination or something's wrong with that the christians fundamental questions were argued because because that has transferred and we don't necessarily today think that's normal yeah what would be the reason that it's not why we can't have sex with animals well if we can't have sex with animals today because if we think that's abnormal

(1:24:45) why then can't do we think if homosexuality is right permissible to the lord anyone uh following me here because i'm having a hard time i know what i want so they'll say okay so just sam yeah okay but leviticus is saying this is this it was under the law so these guys that are pro-homosexual are saying it's under the law so we can do it so it doesn't exist so homosexuality is okay today but what are they going to say about animals right where they're having sex with animals we're going to say that now it's okay we

(1:25:31) can have just sex with animals because it's under the same law so they would argue that homosexual they would argue that it's okay that they would argue that our argument that homosexuality is okay because it was under the law it doesn't it is is a terrible argument because also what what was under the leviticus law was having sex with animals right but now common sense is like we would think maybe that's not cool so how do we argue right to the fundamental christians who count our argument that it was under the law

(1:26:11) by their arguments stating that we don't that the having sex with animals is right i could have wrote this down i totally get it i get what you mean i completely understand you so don't worry thank you so um john just it's all i'm not sure how many more slides we have left we're okay yeah we're okay okay but that's a fascinating question that i think should should have so we should revisit that question later during the day okay i'm going to answer the question right sure so so the question is so the question is

(1:26:46) how can we okay so if so if if leviticus also prohibits bestiality and we are now um we are now saying that oh well that's leviticus i mean i think actually if the next slide is going to be like this right okay so if we're going to say as christians nowadays and margin is saying here but if reverend isn't out of sin and reverend lovejoy said marge everything is a sin have you sat down and read this thing technically we're not even allowed to go to the bathroom right right okay so we have just more or less dismissed the law

(1:27:18) because we've said those we've put divided context for those particular levitical practice prohibitions uh and so then why then do we prohibit or how can we uh uh argue that it's wrong to have bestiality and so for christians um it's not it's not a problem to be able to make that argument because uh you don't want to do things the idea of the new covenant is not that we need a whole set of laws with thou shalt not we aren't going back to not do we're not we're not not having sex with animals because of leviticus

(1:27:53) we are not having sex with animals because the animal is not able to give consent the animal is uh you were um imposing and imposing your selfishness and uh and this sort of thing onto animals so this is a prohibition of essentially the heart of jesus's teachings of uh you know do unto others and and respecting the least of these and everything else even so in so in the same way animals then would fall under that right and so it's not something that we have to have um the list of al sharp notes with 2000 different

(1:28:25) commandments because the idea of the christian idea of of this is we need to discern what's right you know based on principles like that and not based on let's say letter of law but spirit of it so i think we can avoid having sex with animals legitimately so it's my hope anyway so i'm going to argue and just in the anticipation of your question my slide here is exactly at the levitical law for christianity technically isn't an issue at all i spent a bunch of time on it and i tried to explain um one of the ways how we can understand

(1:29:04) it because a lot of members of our community of jewish background or muslim backgrounds in other words just because christians can get away get away from this pretty quick leviticus we didn't want to not uh to leave everybody else in the lurch and so the rabbis will tell you that this will only the application of levitical law is really only the people of israel and probably only within that particular time period it isn't something that uh is incumbent upon you know everybody is a gentile here so although fundamentalist christians i

(1:29:34) think are confused and ultimately i'm going to even say hypocritical here uh on this subject christianity is actually founded on a rejection of levitical law so we are not following all these different things like the rev livejoy has i mean i'm eating shellfish i we are wearing mixed uh tweed or whatever we i mean there's all of the i mean i have cheeseburgers you know and you know in other words we're having milk and and i turn on the lights on saturday you know i do not only rest on saturday in other words all the

(1:30:05) different prohibitions all of the political law we are simply not um following that and we haven't been christianity hasn't been since it emerged as its own religion in the original schism between christianity and second temple judaism back just in the time of the apostles after christ so christians don't practice levitical law the earliest christian writer we have goes so far as to say this is paul you who want to be justified by the law have cut yourselves off from christ you have fallen away from grace if you go in now and do all the things

(1:30:39) in life you go and you know paul says if you go and have yourself circumcised you might as well um you might as well just say it'll not only not do anything for you it functionally means you're rejecting christ you're rejecting christianity and so that's a very strong formulation that he made but it is um completely consonant with essentially all of the ways that jesus was operating where he was healing people on the sabbath or uh doing different things that were meant to be demonstrations that the law isn't what

(1:31:08) is important that we uh follow it literally but rather that we have a sense of the spirit of it and in that sense christianity in making that argument we should not caricature judaism or islam christians tend to do that and say that judaism is only rule-based and things like that there is all kinds of place for deliberation mercy and all sorts of things within judaism even if you were going to let's say go back to this and you are subject to this levitical law and this death sentence is the the you also according to the law have to have

(1:31:42) two witnesses who caught them in flagrante delicto and they have to testify and all these kind of things and there's a it's a very complicated standard for anybody to actually you know actually meet and so uh yeah and people won't won't do that generally um so anyway christians can get out of the leviticus ones pretty easy because we don't practice levitical law it has no bearing on on christianity so um paul you know so we have mentioned paul here in terms of him being one of the early formulators of this christian theology

(1:32:16) who was he he'd been a pharisee he'd been a practitioner of jewish law converted around the year 35 a.d or ce and became what is functionally a second founder of christianity uh it only became known as christianity in his lifetime at the lifetime of jesus it was not called that um paul helps formulate this emerging christian theology that rejects levitical law unfortunately he also is unusually interested in homosexuality so if only he'd if only he'd gotten rid of law and shut up we wouldn't have to worry about this but

(1:32:48) the lecture continues okay so so paul has a very odd obsession with homosexuality the traditional by the time he is around now uh traditionally judeans or jews second temple jews have come up with this uh cause of gay orientation as essentially they don't and they don't know about orientation anyway the cause of being interested in homosexual activity is because it's a it's a foreign influence right and so i mentioned there are hellenized cities all around geek cities they see this as a foreign thing and when they explain it

(1:33:21) um essentially the idea is that they've seen these naked greek statues or something like that and that somehow has caused them to go greek crazy and so for example we have here in romans one of the one of these passages of the christian new testament about homosexuality exchanging the glory of immortal god for the image shaped like mortal man as a result god has given them up to shameful passions women have exchanged natural intercourse for unnatural and men to burn with lust for one another so he has the sense then that the cause of

(1:33:56) the temptation as um as we were talking about before you know what what causes this in is so he's paul's theory here and i mean the general theory was foreign influence but possibly here because the the gods are so have such good statues you know this kind of thing do you want to comment quickly we have to be fast with the comments now i was just gonna say that can't communicate um then it's an abomination because even like i mean the the withdrawal method was good so so the quest yeah that's a good point so one of the things and this is kind of

(1:34:45) common in ancient thinking so ancient people really um got a sense often and aristotle as you've been doing this all the time that you have you something is for something and so as a way as opposed to where we now are where we understand evolution where um peop birds don't have wings in order to fly you know i mean it didn't it's not planned that way right so in other words it ends up evolving because there was a series of adaptive strategies or whatever that and have ended up working but um for aristotle the more important

(1:35:17) thing was what is a wing for flying you know some other words the purpose so every single thing wings can't have it's then as far as you're concerned since everything has a purpose which is flying then you can't have another purpose which is maybe keeping you warm or any number of other things because you're not you're not you're so fixated on the one purpose thing so you might well think you know tongues are for you know talking but it may well be tongues are for tasting maybe tongues are for licking you know whatever so in

(1:35:44) other words so in fact things actually have multiple purposes and what it turns out is even though um even though ancient people in a lot of cases did have this kind of start to have this sensation or thinking that sex is for procreation it turns out that sex is for all kinds of things uh and and quite naturally so and so that's just something that also is an ancient bias that you know is just inherent right here and also mentioned we didn't get to mention this but um for it would have been good if for uh people of the jewish background you know

(1:36:15) for lesbians because in that entire list of all the different things that uh the priestly author wants to forbid which really is a big long list you know like evelyn lovejoy was saying there um you know women having sex with women is not on that list so it's something that the priestly author just never even could think of he couldn't figure out how that would work i guess so anyway it didn't get forbidden but it does unfortunately for people who are jewish it does get forbidden by the rabbis and so then paul brings it up here too

(1:36:41) you have a comment well you have to have the microphone thank you i often find that evangelicals who are really selective literatures in other words they take the passages from the bible literally they select that they discount the others where you talk about selfish or passages that support slavery right they will seize on those passages which see homosexuality as immoral as an abomination right some literals perhaps you can comment on this see this letter in romans that paul has written as a bridge between the old testament

(1:37:16) and the new testament for their ongoing condemnation of homosexuality yes no you're exactly right um it in order to do that no one who like i say because we are not you can tell very clearly that no christians no matter what fundamentalists are not obeying levitical law thoroughly because we know what that looks like because we can see what orthodox jews are doing right and so it's simply not happening so they are definitely like you say cherry-picking and they're picking the things out that they want to interpret literally um

(1:37:46) again when i get this quote in terms of like paul's and they're using paul here to say you know paul has been has very strong statements against that paul says um we are uh ministers of a new testament a new covenant um uh not uh not of the letter but of the spirit for the letter which is say the literal brings death but the spirit gives life so early christianity is not about uh literal interpretation is in fact condemning that continuously so this is unfortunately an issue like you say it's crazy that once even though that's the entire purpose of

(1:38:25) the religion people it turns out do like hard fast rules and they would like to and fall back on on judging and coming up with the list of do's and don'ts and thou shalt nots and they and that kind of a thing and that ultimately i would say is a rejection of actual christianity it's a rejection of jesus's gospel and nevertheless christians went right to it very very fast and so that has also been part of the tradition for thousands of years but i um i would just argue that it's uh it's clearly at odds with uh the actual christian gospel

(1:39:01) so so this is one of those passages and paul is is talking about that because again he's very focused on it we may wonder why is he actually even bringing this up in this letter to the romans so um this is his last letter and he's writing it to the uh church in rome because he's trying to get in on their kind of good side and so they will potentially he's he's been kicked out of all of the eastern part of the roman empire by his enemies as enemies we can find out through reading the new testament are largely the apostles in the church in jerusalem

(1:39:39) essentially the people that are followers of james the brother of jesus who um are at odds with paul and paul all of paul's interpretations and so what he's writing here to the people in the church of rome is i had to leave all of my previous churches that i founded all around the corinthians and all these other guys and i'm intending to take a mission mission work now to spain and create all new ones but i'm hoping to stop in rome and maybe you guys will be able to contribute to my mission and more or less fund me

(1:40:07) and so why then does he kind of make this kind of strange again as he's kind of making his big sum up of all theology it's kind of strange for him to again come back here and go and dwell on um this idea that uh uh anyway that people have all this sex lust so um so i'm going to say are you here this is a case that we've made in another lecture what if you're jewish and you're born gay so if you are you know as we were asking so jane asked this so if you if you are as straight you know have heterosexual orientation

(1:40:42) uh and you're jewish this makes all the sense in the world those greeks are looking at their statues and things like that but if you're like paul and you're somebody who has continuously um obeyed the law you're not a pagan you're not you haven't learned it from those things how is it that he he might have be suffering from all the same kind of lust that the pagans have because of their paganism and so paul here in romans comes up with his own interpretation of this and so he says he says had it not been for the law

(1:41:13) i should never have been acquainted with sin for example i should never have known what it was to covet if the law had not said you shall not covet though the commandment through commandment sin found its opportunity and produced in me all kinds of wrong desires so the law is what causes desires for jews as far as paul is concerned and the law is the problem which is one of the reasons why he is a rejecter ultimately of law legalism and his interpretations so why like i say you have this topic um if what we're going to find out

(1:41:48) anyway given that jesus is not saying a lot about this uh so it's not a core part of the new movement of christianity why is paul devoting so much thought in his magnum opus to the romans so in addition to this paul felt the need to explain why he unlike other apostles didn't travel with a wife so normally all of the different apostles peter and everybody take their wife around with them as their companion but instead paul always has younger male companions timothy titus sylvanias uh etc so paul also talks in his letter to

(1:42:24) philemon's owner he describes uh i'm sorry on simus i'm trying to think about it one is the slave i'm sorry the owner is philemon in the letter the little letter to filament he describes um slave as his beloved brother both in the flesh and in the lord paul confesses in corinthians a thorn was given me in the flesh a messenger of satan to harass me to keep me from being too elated three times i sought the lord about this that it should leave me to leave me but he said my grace is sufficient for you for my power is made perfect in weakness

(1:43:01) so anyway we can't say you know this you know this is specula this is scholarly speculation many scholars have said there are lots of different ways where paul here is potentially what he is doing is he's confused as to why people are constantly tempted with same-sex temptation right uh and so and he has become obsessed with this topic maybe this is the reason we mentioned at the beginning that this is one of the unfortunately burdens that gay people have had to bear is that there have been a bunch of gay people in history who um anyway who

(1:43:40) don't aren't uh aren't out to themselves or uh would like to um anyway like to have this not be the case and this sort of thing reads like it we can't know so nevertheless uh when we mentioned before that paul's enemies uh the james james in church so the brother of jesus who is a leader of the church back in jerusalem their church is called encoded language the poor uh and so paul is often talking about how he's taking up a collection for the poor of jerusalem so essentially that church is what that's called it's led by

(1:44:17) the brothers of jesus and in their letters in their text or not it's not actually but by them but texts from that community that are ascribed to james and jude it's not written by the actual brothers but anyway the author of jude writes to warn other christians of certain intruders who have stolen it among you who pervert the grace of our god into licentiousness jude compares them to those in sodom which in the same manner as they indulge in sexual immorality and pursue a natural lust so essentially james is more or less saying that our enemies

(1:44:51) who uh anyway many scholars argue these are the two sides of this war the paulists versus the jamesians james essentially and the jerusalem church are more or less making anti-homosexual slurs against paul so further he he writes these dreamers also defiled the flesh reject authority and slander the glorious ones his the james ian church doesn't want to reject law so they um believe in law and works paul says essentially wants to reject works and law and and have a church focused on grace and spiritualism not literalism so all the dream although the

(1:45:33) dreamers in james's letter are unnamed and so therefore it made it into the new testament and didn't get edited out which of which certainly would have been because paul's church ultimately won the expansion of that letter in second peter ii peter is not written by peter it's a text that took the letter of jude and recap expanded it and recast it as a new text as if it was by peter uh it's also from the james ian church it names them with coded phrases who these dreamers are and he calls them kane balaam and korra so korra's name

(1:46:08) in hebrew is bald head kane is the ancestor of tent dwellers so paul the one thing we uh description we have on him is that he's bald he's a tent maker moses and enemy balaam had israel act treacherously against the lord by eating a food sacrifice before the gods of moab paul argues that christians are free to eat the meat of pagan that was sacrificed to pagan temples and things like that so on all these ways then it's possible then these jamesian are identifying the people who they are saying and indulging in the sins of sodom and in

(1:46:43) general are getting rid of law that same argument that the fundamentalists are making they're making for paul in general anyway so there's this also this sense then that other people are also calling paul gay or homosexual you know they don't know about orientation but they're called saying that he has uh has been tempted that way or that he's acted that way um whether or not there's no particular reason for us to think that based on paul's um uh uh uh own writings i would think that it's more likely that he has these at this orientation and

(1:47:19) temptations which he's not acting on right and that's why he's uh having having this kind of uh anyway internal aux yes with comment uh if paul and james were so divided as you're arguing there were two separate churches why did both both men james and paul along with peter and the other disciples all agree with each other at the council of jerusalem as described in the book of acts yes so um the book of acts i would argue is it's written late later than that it's not written by an eyewitness yeah we can talk a little

(1:48:02) well we'll just this will be quickly lander's finding me that i can't go this slow so but anyway uh and so what we can say about that is that because um the author of acts which is also the author of luke is somebody from paul's church but who isn't you know there's just to say one of these greek congregations and probably doesn't have a judean background is not an affiliate of the james ian church um we are now long past the deaths of both paul and james we are now past the time when there's a threat between the two and the new the

(1:48:34) new um narrative that the author of acts would like to um to portray is essentially how christianity has spread and expanded and so there's no particular reason or agenda to um go back and and say this is all our dirty laundry but rather to say this is how um uh this is how we papered we were able to recover from this differences we know about that council uh is actually from the uh as paul writes about it himself um and so because we have that and it differs from how uh uh from luke's description uh more or less what we have is that paul

(1:49:11) paul made a deal he's as he says with the other pillars of the church in jerusalem the acknowledged pillars peter james and john and that was that he could continue his mission among the gentiles but he'd take up a collection for the poor of jerusalem which is to say the jamesian church and that he was given to understand that it would be all right for him in that mission to not obey levitical laws in other words he could not have to circumcise people he would not have to he could eat um with uh the two different peoples could eat

(1:49:39) so christians who were jews christians who gentile wouldn't otherwise be able to eat with each other if they if they weren't all obeying levitical law anyway he understood that to be the deal he later found um continuously people apostles from the jamesian church were not honoring that deal as paul understood it and so he writes about that and complains bitterly about that to the galatians and other people so i would argue then that the it's ongoing and uh it's simply that acts tells the story late and doesn't and tries to

(1:50:06) empty emphasize all the conflict but we get the conflict when we paul okay so and we're done you're gonna be happy so okay so anyway um what i'm gonna argue then anyway what does jesus have to say about uh homosexual activity so he actually is saying nothing he doesn't bring it up at all so he doesn't say anything in particular beyond his general message of inclusion and also like i say this message of not uh not having legalism but rather that we're ruled by the spirit and by principle now instead of by a literalistic rule

(1:50:44) and that is the last slide so thank you yes first question um just because i happen to be sitting here here again so we we know now that um genes that are linked to homosexuality have been traced to a certain region on the x chromosome we don't know exactly what their location is we know that they're on the x chromosome yeah and it it makes sense if you think about it from from a genetic point of view that the x chromosome which is doubly inherited in females and singly inherited in males would carry genes that would push you

(1:51:30) towards having sex with men because if you think about it from a woman's point of view you know especially before the you know the the 19th century with no anesthesia no anesthetic you had a 50 50 chance of dying in childbirth you know and if you look at charts of women's lives and you look at like the death rate like if you look at ages between 10 to say 40 the death rate spikes almost to 100 because women would die in childbirth and so in order to push you over this this this hurdle you'd have to have something

(1:52:05) that drives you towards having sex with men yeah right and if these genes are on there and they're x chromosome linked then guess what guys get them too yeah you know and it might be that some x chromosomes just carry stronger driving genes towards that gotcha that's neat i hadn't heard that before um valerie yeah um uh in the last week i picked up at the subway uh publication uh oddly enough uh from the united states uh by um a christian uh fundamentalist group yes and i was struck by their language around uh how much of a threat homosexuality is

(1:52:49) to the sanctity of the family and it's not just gay marriage but you know just adultery homosexuality etc and um i know that there's nothing in the new testament that's specifically against you know that or that that makes that link but uh it was not augustine that said it's better to marry than to burn they have prohibition against adultery how is it that the american christian fundies uh made this association that somehow you know holy matrimony the sanctity of the family is threatened by well a gay marriage but b even

(1:53:32) homosexuality in particular i'm just wondering you know what your thoughts on that might be yeah so i mean they're not they're not getting this out of like they just made that up yesterday the um the the context really then from the biblical period here um there is a lot more that ultimately ends up being paul is not only worried about gay sex he's worried about sex in general and he doesn't think it's particularly good and one it's really out of his writings that uh that christian clergy in the west the catholics for example

(1:54:03) um are supposed to take of celibacy and things like that and in general um it was viewed all through in the christian west anyway all through history if you could avoid sex altogether that would be the best and so if you um if you can do a thing where i mean actually the rhythm method was um was recommended because by this whole time period that you're spending not having sex that's teaching you to you know not have sex maybe the rest of the time so in other words the more that you can get to the point where you finally don't

(1:54:32) have sex at all anymore um as far as kind of where they were people were at it's part of the overall um sort of anti-physical thing that people that christianity is sort of probably inheriting from um this kind of zoroastrian dualism the kind of manichaeism and things like that so essentially the in plato is even the flesh is pretty bad uh the the all the philosophers you know the mind and spirit is what are what's good and elevated and light and so if you are indulging in things that are carnal whether it is let's say gluttony or

(1:55:04) getting drunk or whether it is you know having sex um all of these things are the implication of all these things is that you're not focusing on the spiritual and so throughout um all of christian history so it's not this this recent time but i mean justinian um who is a christian emperor uh theodosius the first christian uh the first emperor who uh made christianity the state religion of the roman empire outlawed um passive uh section you know they're roman again they don't like passive gay sex homosexual sex and then justinian who a

(1:55:39) later successor uh many centuries and a couple centuries later outlawed both you know uh penetrative and uh passive uh gay sex nevertheless throughout all those centuries uh rome continued to license and collect the taxes on all the male brothels right so it's so it's a christianity has this fraught relationship where on the one hand there is the um the sense that this is you shouldn't be doing it and uh uh and it's sex in general is bad you know like the holy saints and queens and things like that would just stop having like the reason why edward

(1:56:13) uh the confessor the last uh norman king uh um the last anglo-saxon king didn't have any kids because his saintly wife he's a saint insanely wife they didn't have any you know they have no kids because they're not having sex in other words you would do that kind of thing and then enter monasteries where you would then continue to not have sex and so that was a that was a goal and an agenda item in the west and so um what ends up happening though uh i think as a result of that is quite naturally we talked about how

(1:56:44) um when um societies let's say become all male societies there's going to be more homosexual activity regardless of sexual orientation so you know this is the navy you know as an example the british navy or whatever right so it's very you know it's just a well-known um idea that you know when they're not able to get to singapore you know there's gonna be you know uh homosexual sex happening well that attracted i presume lots and lots of people who uh some lots of young men who let's say were ha did have same-sex orientation

(1:57:18) even though they didn't know it right they might well maybe i'll go to the navy and that i think is also something that was happening throughout all of christian history in terms of the clergy and monasteries so if you had a kid you kind of like oh that one's kind of for god this one's to go off and be a knight and so they'd stick them in the monastery they'd have sent them off to be the priest and things like that and so as a result of that there is a weird relationship with um let's say people with gay with

(1:57:46) homosexual orientation and the clergy throughout christian history and likewise there is between women and the the church so women in some ways are are not you know there's a patriarchal order they're not able to be the leaders and yet they're the people who are most connected to the church right and so anyway for all of these these kind of reasons i would say when the breakdown happened and now um uh all of the religious denominations in general are collapsing in the 20th century uh we now have open understanding of sexual orientation and

(1:58:19) now uh acknowledged uh gay identity and lesbian identity so now there's a kind of a breakdown between that traditional relationship uh and how the previously those guys would have been in the church and leading the church now they um now they're not and and the people who are still in church are condemning that right and so anyway if you can get once you can actually make the leap and get over it turn you know and not be upset about it anymore it turns out gay guys still like to come back to church you know and so here i am right so

(1:58:52) anyway so when you can but why but why i don't get the connection between you know what is really like a relatively small percentage of the population that has nothing to do with the um condition of the family like there is a big breakdown of the family the divorce rate is huge right but i remember reading somewhere that 60 plus divorces are actually initiated by women so like you'd think the fundies would speak out against women's autonomy or something why are they blaming it on on gays and gay marriage that i don't get

(1:59:21) well i think they are upset about women's autonomy and they are upset about being allowed to get divorced um you know and so i think that that also happens so i think what happened is in this particular case is that um it's on the one hand religious but it's also there's there came to be in the 1970s especially um an agreed upon set of um american tribalism where they picked out a couple different things including abortion uh including homosexuality or whatever and those things got hardened into being the list

(1:59:51) uh it could have just as it could have just easily been anything else right and i think so yes he has a comment or a question probably why i'm wrong uh just about this last uh slide yes um i think there's definitely some regardless of if we think jesus said anything about homosexuality in scripture or not personally i think i'd argue that in parts of matthew where he talks about how a man must leave his his mother and father to cleave to his wife that is a pretty specific uh affirmation on what jesus thinks the family is especially

(2:00:37) when he also went to the wedding at cana but regardless of that because that's in scripture yeah we can't really say well what did jesus say about homosexual activity if we say if we can explain those things away and say oh well that's he didn't say any of that therefore he didn't say anything against homosexual activity but the gospel of john uh near the end of the his gospel account says something to the degree of uh not everything that jesus said has been written in this book right so we can't really assume that

(2:01:16) just because it's not in the bible jesus didn't say it sure and then i can understand people now saying well how do you know what jesus said if it's not in the bible right i think the importance of that comes down to church tradition i think also paul says that when he says to the brothers adhere to everything i've written to you by word or by the traditions we have passed down to you so the traditions seem to be on the same level as scripture yeah and tradition capital t tradition you could say uh has faithfully been

(2:01:59) preserved uh by the catholic church and i think the churches authoritatively with the authority jesus gave to them uh especially peter in matthew 16 18 and on the day of pentecost to go and make disciples of all nations i think the church has faithfully kept that tradition of renouncing all homosexual activity and i think that's truthfully uh to the teachings of jesus okay well so um the argument obviously christianity is in chisholm they're of course the largest denomination within christianity is the catholic church and and

(2:02:47) definitely within the catholic understanding of of christianity tradition scripture the apostolic fathers and the apostolic succession so the early you know are all all sources of authority obviously that was a major um uh point of contention uh between the church that remained headquartered to rome and that that continues to uh have that apostolic succession and obviously all of the uh churches that have emerged from protestantism subsequently so it's a so we have that in general with the different traditions we have

(2:03:27) that disagreement but i definitely respect the history and tradition of the the catholic church i'm a big student of of catholicism i disagree with a lot of the ideas of it theologically and i have a different perspective on um on jesus uh historical jesus and also on christ theologically but i mean i'm with we're in different you know parts of the movement and so that's i i respect your interpretation yep oh rudy i didn't know that uh paul had had written about female homosexuality but uh as you said that there is nothing

(2:04:10) in the old testament about uh females having sex with others which which i was aware of yeah i've wondered if maybe perhaps the writers of the old testament did not know that uh that women have done this that their goodness is well this is a problem when i guess this is so in especially when all those prohibitions are coming from the priestly author and the priests the levitical priests are men uh uh it doesn't mean that there was no um you know holy women and prophetesses and judges and things like that who are

(2:04:42) women uh in ancient israel but the people who are in the temple cult and the levitical uh ironic line actually not levitical the arid headline the zadakite priests are all men and they may be um when you have this all-male thing they may don't they oftentimes aren't thinking of women and so then women like you say maybe we're under the radar on that you know so yeah and so i'm sorry there was a comment here a question john if as you say that there are so many different authors to the bible yes so many contradictory views in fact

(2:05:17) is it safe to assume that really you can look for passages in the bible to support almost anything you want to believe in from the subjugation of women to the promotion of slavery and condemnation of one's sexuality and if that is the case perhaps just perhaps we have to look beyond the literal truth of the bible to its spiritual truth i i couldn't well i could thoroughly agree with you so yes part of the problem is since it's internally self-contradictory since it makes like you say both those cases so you talk about the

(2:05:51) subjugation of women um there are passages in paul and in the letters attributed to paul that are saying that women shouldn't speak in church right and so women have to obey their husbands or submit to their husbands so this has become a very big thing in let's say um dominion is protestant fundamentalist churches where there's a whole big ethic of women's submission that they have but i would argue that writing at exactly that same time in that same way that there's those the ruth and ezra have those competing views

(2:06:20) right next to each other we also have um counter to that um that position of paul's follower in timothy and the letter to timothy we have the author of luke who is making a point that um when jesus as a babe is brought to the temple the person that um first identifies you know his role as the christ you know is a prophetess and she not only is able to be in the role of a of a prophet herself but she speaks in the temple so she can obviously speak in the church so that story in the same way that we have the story of ruth

(2:06:58) which is showing moabitesses moabite women can be included as can their children likewise we have an important sacred story contributed to us by the author of the gospel of luke that women can speak in the holy places right and and are part of it so like you say we can have both and so that's why um literalism only works if you cherry pick uh and so that's why we have to instead look at each individual author all the different contexts and frankly um look at their limitations and discern the truth uh the god so for our prison

(2:07:34) our concept of scripture in my church is that scripture is not to be worshipped or idolized uh that scripture has been used to discriminate against classes of people races our book of scripture calls upon the church to repent of those practices and to and condemns those and we also understand scripture to not to be so for us theologically christ is the word of god not the bible the bible is a human response to the divine written by human authors the different times in the in history and the purpose of scripture then is not

(2:08:14) to be some kind of a rule book uh that is beating us over the head and oppressing us but rather it's something that points us to god in our own lives as a living a living thing that's understood through uh personal uh revelation and um spiritual understanding right and discerned for our own time so shaheen yeah i have a quick question um i i heard somewhere that for a while when paul was traveling um and spreading the message of christ that he was traveling with a woman named sakla yes and that she was actually quite active and

(2:08:51) wasn't submissive in any way and that she baptized herself yes so that's from a apocryphal book or a one of the letters one of the stories of paul the letters of paul it's acts of paul and thecla that didn't make it into the new testament so it's not non-canonical so it isn't um authoritative then for any of the christian traditions including the catholic church or the eastern churches although uh fekla is i think regarded as a saint in the eastern orthodox church and has a shrine and thing like that um the story is essentially um a

(2:09:27) hellenistic romance novel and it's an amazing tale and so it's one of the reasons why it was among the most popular uh books in the in early christianity and so uh it was very popular it's well well preserved it's illustrated in all kinds of things and but what we can mostly get out of that is um it was quite normal in the early church people understood um that that apostles often were companions went out by twos um this is they still when they still had a memory of apostles so later there's no apostles anymore in in

(2:10:00) mainline christian line of christianity but anyway they they're sent out in twos largely as paul explains each one the male what possible has his wife there and the idea of it is is because they're important christian disciples uh uh apostles who are women and we have junior paul mentions in the letter to romans who uh who is one of anyway a woman who's one of the apostles and thekla in other words is another not a historical apostle but all the people in the early church accepted that story because it was quite

(2:10:31) normal for them to understand that there would have been a female companion to the male apostle right and so that's um we can see that in terms of as we look back at the earliest church unfortunately what ended up happening in that sort of a sense so we're talking about like the tradition as the tradition evolved the the components of the church uh that ended up being the proto-orthodox the church of the institutional church as it won ultimately uh was able to um you know follow this sort of uh suppressing women's voices more or at

(2:11:01) least coordinating them into abby's and nunneries and things like that as of n uh and as opposed to let's say being a clergy which would have been accessible as clergy before that was all formalized all right guys we can continue this thank you so much thank you very much you're very very [Music] welcome [Music] you