Today's Fundamentalist Confrontation

• Mary: [Read] Romans 1:26 -27. It's not judging someone as doing wrong, it's what the word of God says. If a person believes what the Bible says to be true and it says to love and be kind to one another.. .they should also believe it when it says that exchanging natural relations for unnatural relations is evil and depraved. Read all the Bible and pray for understanding and knowledge.

  
  
• And, here is my response to "Mary":

Durrell: "The word of God" is not the "words of God." 

The bible is the Hebrew canon plus 27 "books" (the so-called "New" Testament) that were included by a "vote" at a council convened by a secular government (btw, "James" and "Revelation" almost didn't make the cut). The Christian bible was "closed" hundreds of years after Jesus, and what we think it says usually has more to do with us than with the text itself. 

Slaves obey your masters, women be silent in church, women being forced to marry their rapists or their dead husband's nearest male relative, Canaanites should be destroyed, etc. are not usually held up as non-negotiables even though they are clearly in "the word of God." No one takes everything in the bible literally (or we wouldn't eat pork and shell fish, we would beat our kids, divorcees would not be permitted to remarry, and everyone would literally "tithe"); so to use one of six isolated verses to justify your own homo-hatred is in fact judgment and it is every bit as much "cherry picking" as those you accuse. 

Meanwhile, same-sex attraction and love are not "unnatural" affections for those who are gay, and the Romans passage you misquote says that God gave them their "reprobate" minds as a punishment for idolatry...gay isn't the sin in a literal reading of the text, it's the punishment for worshiping idols (and of course, many people turn "the word of God" into an idol, so you better watch out!). 

The bible has been used to justify slavery, segregation, child abuse, wars, the subjugation of women, anti-Semitism (oddly, since almost every person in the bible was Jewish), Islamaphobia, and homophobia. Quoting a verse to spread your hate and then denying that it's hate because you have a verse is circular reasoning which only reduces the bible to a weapon. You are free to be as anti-gay as you wish, but please stop blaming your prejudice on God. (dw)