fertile-ground:

prismatic-bell:

wynx-hates-pedos:

toorational:

thelogicalloganipus:

randomslasher:

thelogicalloganipus:

“the Bible says homosexuality is a sin” well the Bible also has a lot of sexism, rape, incest, violence and a lot of contradictory messages in general because it was written by people and people have agendas

I don’t really think that God even has the time to care about if people are gay like if he’s got a whole world to run there are more important things anyway

And if God is love, he’s not just loving me if I am what he wants; he’s loving me as the person he made me to be, which is a queer person

You can’t say “I love you, and I made you gay but I’m sending you to hell you awful sinner” my dude that doesn’t make sense it’s not like hell has a low population is it

The god I believe in loves queer people because that’s how he made us

the bible doesn’t condemn homosexuality anyway. It’s content taken out of context and misinterpreted over hundreds of years of translations, re-translations, and mis-translations. 

Hell, in Kenneth Davis’s Don’t Know Much About The Bible, there’s a passage that absolutely blows my mind and proves just how much we can misinterpret with simple translation mistakes: 

“In researching the world’s oldest city, for instance, I learned that Joshua’s Jericho is one of the oldest human settlements. It also lies on a major earthquake zone. Could that simple fact of geology have had anything to do with those famous walls tumbling down? Then I discovered that Moses and the tribes of Israel never crossed the Red Sea but escaped from Pharaoh and his chariots across the Sea of Reeds, an uncertain designation which might be one of several Egyptian lakes or a marshy section of the Nile Delta. This mistranslation crept into the Greek Septuagint version and was uncovered by modern scholars with access to old Hebrew manuscripts.”

The bible is one long-ass game of telephone, whispered around the world in dozens if not hundreds of languages, for thousands of years. I have a hard time knowing what my grandpa is talking about, when he starts going on about the technology or practices of his youth, and that was only about 80 years ago, in the same country and in the same language as me. So why every Joe on the streets thinks they can take one or two verses, completely out of context and probably mis-translated several times to boot, and use it to spout propaganda and hatred for an entire group of people will forever be beyond me. 

You’re all valid, and frankly, if there is a ‘loving God,’ then that God will be happy to see you happy. Seriously. 

I needed that. Thank you.

The Bible wasn’t faxed down from the sky, people, it’s been compiled and formulated for hundreds of years until it became what it is today. And yes, misinterpreted by whoever with whatever agenda-of-the-day.

And hypocrites always stick to the word and not the spirit of any religion: to love, to help, to respect, to protect, and to strive to make the world a better place.

Yup, Jesus never said ANYTHING against LGBT people. All he said was don’t be greedy, don’t be lustful and don’t be wrathful. The fact that LGBTphobes took those instructions out of context to justify their LGBTphobia is pretty telling!

Hey, your friendly neighborhood Jew here!

You guys know that verse in Leviticus that homophobes like to trot out? Well, I’m here to tell you:

They don’t read Hebrew and they don’t know shit.

And now here’s something you probably won’t hear from any of those Fine Christian Folks ™ anytime soon, either:

We do read Hebrew and we still don’t know shit.

Here’s the thing. The most “accurate” word-for-word translation of that verse would say “a man shall not lie with another man; it is forbidden.”

Here’s the issue.

The grammar surrounding “men” in that sentence isn’t correct, and the word I’ve translated as “forbidden” is “toevah,” a word so fucking old we literally don’t know what it meant anymore.

The strange sentence construction suggests that “lie with another man” uses a feminine construction you wouldn’t normally find in a sentence that’s entirely about men, and while “toevah” means “forbidden,” it’s not actually clear what is forbidden. Here’s an incomplete list of possibilities:

Pederasty (adult male/adolescent male sex) is full-stop forbidden, a man sleeping with a male prostitute is full-stop forbidden, a man sleeping with a man as part of any kind of sex magic or fertility ritual is forbidden.

And my rabbi’s personal interpretation, based on the sentence construction: a man shouldn’t sleep with another man in a woman’s bed. (So basically: don’t cheat on your wife with a dude, which is probably treated separately from “don’t commit adultery” because adultery would come with the risk of an illegitimate child.)

You’ll notice none of these involve “ew, you disgusting gays.”

Unless you accept a word-for-word literal translation with zero consideration for the social mores and other tribes surrounding Israel contemporary with the writing of Torah, nothing about this commandment has anything to do with our modern understanding of queer people having committed relationships. Once you start taking the rituals and practices of Israel’s contemporaries into account, it suddenly becomes clear why these prohibitions would have been put into place (sex magic was common in the cult of Ba’al, for example, while pederasty was practically a requirement in Greece).

If you’re just a person out there loving other people of the same gender as you? The Torah says nothing against you. But do you know what our literary tradition does say?

It puts you in the company of Naomi and Ruth.

Ruth is considered the first convert, and her vow to her mother-in-law Naomi (after Ruth’s husband’s death) forms the basis of our modern marriage vows. “Where you go, I shall go, and where you lodge, I shall lodge; your people shall be my people, and your G-d my G-d; and where you die I shall die, and there shall I be buried.” Ruth remarries as prescribed by law at the time, but even when a child is born of that new union, nobody calls it “Ruth’s and Boaz’s child”–they all say a child has been born to Ruth and Naomi.

You are in the company of a woman whose name we invoke in our prayers and whose life we celebrate. I wear her words around my shoulders on my tallit, my sacred prayer shawl. Since we consider that everything in the Tanakh is intended for learning and study, what might we take from this story, but that a queer person can be virtuous and beloved of G-d?

This reason is why we cannot make laws based on these books.

They are mythological tales, some based on real events, some based on anecdotal stories meant to teach, but still, they are the only the mythos of a people. A cultural commonality, and even sacred to a subset of the world, but other sunsets have different mythos passed down through generations. And we, in this non theocratic nation, should not be held accountable to a single interpretation of any mythos. We are on Native American land and we don’t follow their spiritual practices. We don’t let Zeus tell us what to do.

We choose the morality that fits our narrative.

Some people’s narrative is filled with anger and hate and they chose an interpretation that allows them to express that rage. Some people are filled with prejudice and need to oppress other people and there are religious interpretations that support that. That doesn’t make it right.

Religion has value, anthropologicaly. It highlights the values and struggles as a society saw them. But, as a societal construct, it must evolve. Just like we throw out incorrect tenants in science as we develop new theories. Just like we left the tribes and dictatorships of our past behind to form new governments.

Ideally, we need to let religion pass from law into mythos.