painting by Lisa Brunell text by John J. McGinnis
They say that wisdom come’s with age. With that in mind, my 64 years on this earth has led me to question traditional religious attitudes and traditional religious definitions. In particular, today I want to talk about the religious morality surrounding homosexuality that places so much pressure on Holy Scripture.
Why is this prejudice so deep and so widely assumed to be self-evident that major religious denominations simply quote the Bible as justification to continue their oppression and rejection of gay and lesbian people? Take the story of Sodom and Gomorrah. Here traditional religious churches cite this as a biblical account, which of course is justification of God’s condemnation of this behavior. If one was read this story more carefully, one might realize that it is a story involving hospitality laws, gang rape and violent malevolence toward women.
Claims of biblical literalism are not a call of people to the values of justice, but in reality a way to justify existing prejudice by keeping oneself secure inside a way of life that cannot be challenged by any new insight or fact. Those who adhere to the biblical literalism deny that homosexual orientation is not a matter of choice, but a matter of ontology; that is, it is of the being, not the doing. This phenomenon has been present in human life since the dawn of human history. How can we, the human population of the 21st century, really believe that the authors of the Bible had knowledge on this subject superior to those of our species now occupying terra firma?
There are those who claim that the Bible is very clear about homosexuality and take pains to quote selected passages to buttress their beliefs. Left out of their justifications are passages that condemn witches and mediums that were used until the eighteenth century to justify the murders of countless women, and that condemned homosexuality and justified the burning at the stake of mant persons thought to be living a responsible gay or lesbian life.
How can anyone who has read this book be so foolish as to proclaim that the Bible in every literal word was the divinely inspired, inherent word of god? Have they not simply read the text?
If all these things were part of a Bible that had to be believed as the literal word of God, I for one, cannot give myself in worship to such a deity. These words have been used throughout history to justify the divine right of kings, the continuation of slavery, the drowning of the Egyptians at the Red Sea, political oppression and mute the criticism of various injustices.
It is time to end this relentless oppression of others by claiming the Bible as God’s Word and thus relegating the majority of the non-believing human family that walks on this great planet as somehow subhuman.
