David Deavel, writing for Unique for a Reason, explores the difficulties that homosexuals who are interested in living celibate, orthodox Christian lives often meet with from within the Church as much as from without. Ron Belgau, a Catholic homosexual pursuing his PhD in philosophy at St. Louis University, explains:
We embrace the traditional understanding that God created us male and female, and that His plan for sexual intimacy is only properly fulfilled in the union of husband and wife in marriage. However, this blog was born out of frustration with the prevailing narratives about homosexuality from those who embrace this traditionally Christian sexual ethic: an excessive focus on political issues, and the ubiquity of reparative therapy in one form or another. We want to see more discussion of celibacy, friendship, the value of the single life and similar topics.
To this, Dave responds:
He is realistic, noting that there are certainly “unhealthy and destructive ways” to achieve celibacy. But he is also hopeful, because he understands that this paradox is a human phenomenon, applicable not just to same-sex attractions, but many other conditions in which we find ourselves. We all struggle with our own temptations and failures to resist them—we all know some part of life in which the pain of dealing with them honestly seems too much to bear. At least it feels that way.
Of course, describing homosexual attraction as just another sinful inclination among many others have doesn’t have much purchase even inside some Christian circles.
Read more here.
June 21st, 2012 | 7:01 pm
ceteris paribus, are attempts at chastity more difficult for those with same-sex attraction than they are for anyone else? perhaps there are data one way or another.
June 22nd, 2012 | 11:15 am
People of ALL faiths tend to go through all kinds of theological gymnastics when it comes to “picking and choosing” which scriptures to pay heed to and which to conveniently ignore. The same people who insist that God never changing His mind are quick to invoke “new covenants” that allow them to overlook ancient laws governing diet, dress, and social interaction. They say we no longer need to observe a lot of the rules set down in the book of Leviticus, for example… but you’d better not even THINK about questioning the literal view of Biblical Creation.
I’m reminded of a commentator on a Southern Baptist website who wrote, “I can’t reconcile how someone could feel he or she was born with strong homosexual feelings, love Christ and yet take on the limitations of what seem to me to be straightforward biblical teachings. That’s …agonizing, and I don’t really understand it.”.
And this is the weird thing: “Straighforward biblical teachings” should at least be understandable to the average person. So often I hear it said, “OUR ways are not GOD’s ways,” as if God was some sort of inscrutable alien being.
Consider The Golden Rule: We do unto others as we would have them do unto us. Put all the religious dogma and ritual aside, and this is what our laws boil down to. We don’t lie or bear false witness because we won’t want people to lie to us. We don’t steal from other people because we do not want people stealing from us. We don’t betray the trust of our spouses because we wouldn’t want them doing the same to us. Same goes for killing and a variety of other “bad” behaviors.
And yet somehow there seems to be this sheepish adherence to a double standard for Gay and Straight people. If you’re Straight, it’s all so wonderful to be able to find a compatible person of the opposite sex, court and get engaged and marry and live happily ever after. But if you’re Gay, all of that is completely out of the question. Don’t even bother trying to find a compatible person. Lesbians and Gay men are precluded from any hope for romance or commitment. Gay people are simply told: “Gosh, sorry about that. You make us uncomfortable; acknowledging your existence means we might have to revise what we’ve been teaching all these years – meaning, Whoops! No infallible Magisterium or “literal” Bible… so you’ll just have to sacrifice your life and any hope of finding somebody to love. Tough luck, kid. God said it, I don’t necessarily understand it, but there it is.” How could this be considered a good value judgment?
Fortunately, the reason increasing numbers of Americans (including our President) support marriage equality is because they have learned to make better value judgments. The reason couples choose to marry is to make a solemn declaration before friends and family members that they wish to make a commitment to one another’s happiness, health, and well-being, to the exclusion of all others. Those friends and family members will subsequently act as a force of encouragement for that couple to hold fast to their vows. THAT’S what makes marriage a good thing, whether the couple in question is Straight OR Gay.
June 22nd, 2012 | 4:35 pm
People of ALL faiths tend to go through all kinds of theological gymnastics when it comes to “picking and choosing” which scriptures to pay heed to and which to conveniently ignore. The same people who insist that God never changing His mind are quick to invoke “new covenants” that allow them to overlook ancient laws governing diet, dress, and social interaction.
Then Jesus himself is imperfect, because Jesus seemed to have no problem with the idea that His coming replaced the need for certain rules, while not replacing the need for certain other rules.
But Christians do not believe this is a problem. They believe, rather, that different types of law exist on different levels and/or serve different purposes. The coming of Jesus meant that certain sacrificial and ceremonial rituals were no longer necessary – correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t he explicitly address the part about stoning adulterers? – but that doesn’t mean we can just pick and choose any rule we like.
Ultimately, in Christianity, there is a certain amount of having to deal directly with God and your own conscience in understanding. This is inevitable (I believe it is inevitable for any religion) because that which is beyond our comprehension is, well, beyond what we’re capable of talking about. When I was a teenager I was very bothered by the various contradictions I saw in the Bible; later, as an adult, I realized it is experience itself that is paradoxical, and I realized that those seemingly contradictory passages in the Bible contained the wisdom that enables a person to know how to deal with the reality of the existence of unanswerable questions.
Humanism has come along and created higher standards for journalism, without realizing how these higher standards are based on their own understanding of the world as inherently and completely material and scientifically discoverable. Their notion of what details are important to record – and why – is different from the way ancient Biblical writers thought and wrote. Their notion of how one thinks about problems is materialistic. They do not seek wisdom; they seek material fact and reject the entire idea of seeking for wisdom as “superstition”. The scientific method has on many occasions led people to ignore wisdom in favor of details. Sometimes those details lead right back to where a wise man would have started in the first place. Consider how science has so often treated sick or disabled people: ignoring what the sick or disabled person thinks or feels, and focus on measurement and external observation to understand sickness. They did that with cancer patients in the 1950s through the 1980s, until studies showed that treating cancer patients like cattle got worse results than treating cancer patients with dignity and respect. But the same scientific community is still treating cognitively and mentally disabled people like cattle – because people with things like autism or depression still don’t benefit from dignity or respect, I guess.
And yet intuition still outperforms reason in many areas of human reason. By “intuition” I mean our subconscious pattern recognition abilities (that “sixth sense” or “hidden voice” that warns you of danger in time to get out of the way “in time” – while your reason will spend a week and a half figuring out what happened, after the fact). So why should those who are open to the possibility of such a thing as a “holy spirit” feel constrained to limit ourselves to reason, when reason has been shown so many times to be way behind the curve when it comes to figuring out what’s going on?
There’s a place for reason, and a place for literal journalism which is based on materialism. But whether or not everything in this world is material, it is demonstrably true that not everything in this world is measurably material. For those things that are at the edges of what we are capable of understanding, there is no way to use literal, journalistic language to describe these realities. There is no way to describe these realities without resorting to figurative language, and without struggling with issues of interpretation and re-interpretation.
Now: people who actually know their Christian doctrine can go ahead and rip apart all the parts I got wrong
June 25th, 2012 | 12:58 pm
Blake – “The” scientific community isn’t quite so monolithic as you seem to imply above. One of our children is on the autism spectrum, and I can assure you he’s been treated with dignity and respect by everyone we’ve consulted with.
No pursuit is without its zealous excesses. Speaking of treating people like cattle, the Catholic church as a whole isn’t to blame for what happened at the Magdalene asylums. If you’re willing to recognize that, then perhaps you might see “the scientific community” through more than one lens.
June 25th, 2012 | 1:00 pm
That’s no challenge to reason. The issue is when intuition and reason reach different conclusions…
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