RE: What do christians have against gay people
December 20, 2010 at 11:44 am
(This post was last modified: December 20, 2010 at 11:45 am by Minimalist.)
(December 20, 2010 at 8:10 am)Skipper Wrote: Because the bible wasn't the word or thoughts or idea or laws of a god but of men who lived in a time when homosexuality was not understood and feared.
I wonder about that, Skippy. A lot of it comes down to when this bullshit was actually a) written initially and b) edited.
I'm more and more impressed with the arguments that the OT was a late redaction. Common elements of folklore and Canaanite history were overlaid with a lot of pious horseshit in the Persian period to give the allegedly returning "exiles" a rationale for being the ruling class. "We were dragged away by the Babylonians but we have been FREED by the great Cyrus of Persia." The fact is that the Jews were loyal subjects of the Persian empire until Alexander the Great came rolling through.
There is no indication that Judaea was an important region to the Greeks (Herodotus doesn't even mention it) ....or really anyone else as it was a backward shithole. It did become a battleground between the Ptolemies in Egypt and the Seleucid Greeks in Syria in the wake of Alexander's death. But the next big event is the Maccabaean revolt c 160. There is every indication that this was a legitimate local revolt against the Seleucid king, Anitochus IV which means that it became a "Judaean" v "Greek" war and in any war propaganda plays a part. Homosexuality was probably not unknown among all cultures to one degree or another but the Greeks had institutionalized it. What better way to rally the people against the Greeks than by declaring that god himself had declared that they were deserving of death because of their unholy practices?
Once you get rid of the foolish idea that the OT is a divinely inspired religious text it becomes easier to see it as a mainly political document.