What is it with gays and religion?

[Brian37]

How is that different than all the pious Southern Baptists attending church while wearing mixed fabric clothing and not checking their women folk for menstruation BEFORE allowing them to enter their church building ??

IOW, asserting Literalism is NEVER a reason to ever be personally inconvenienced.

I'm not saying it's different to any other example. I'm just saying it's one more example of cherry-picking that I find confusing. I dunno how anyone can be literalist about the Bible in so many ways and then not notice how hateful it is against themselves.

Obviously not all Christian gay people are literalists who deny that the Bible says anything homophobic in it. That wasn't the point the point was merely to express my own confusion towards anyone who can read that book and deny that there's anything homophobic in it. It applies to everyone regardless of their sexuality... but basically I'm very suprised that there aren't less gay Christians. Iggy seems to suggest that gay people often give up Christianity when they come out as gay... but actually what is surprising is that doesn't happen very often despite all the homophobic hatred in the Bible.

I mean, if they genuinely think there's a God then the hate in the Bible against homosexuals isn't going to change their belief. It's only when anyone, regardless of their sexuality, denies all the homophobia in the Bible that I get really confused.

The reason liberal theists can still buy into old tribal books is that they fail to see that the book itself isn't where their empathy is coming from, but their own individual evolutionary empathy.

Other life displays empathy. Odds are if you raise a kitten and puppy together from birth they are far more likely to see each other as family. Elephants mourn their dead and the mothers are notoriously protective of their young.

But our human cruelty is also evolutionary too. We also see in other life acts of extreme cruelty. Male lions and male zebras will seek out and murder any young that is not of their loins if they are the alpha male in that group.

You cannot make life about one religion, all religions have decent non violent individuals who can be empathetic. Every nation has hospitals and prisons. That says to me that our behaviors, both good and bad, are not coming from the artificial labels humans invent, but stemming from our evolution. Humans are simply projecting their natural behaviors into the books and falsely thinking the book itself has magic powers.

But all religions do this.