I appreciate your civil response. At the same time I am confident the issue is most certainly, "some people are indeed born "homo/lesbian" and how do we responsibly regard that segment of our society?
Many of us are born with a propensity to adultery and fornication. ACTING on those propensities is sin. Having them is not.
Same with obesity actually (typically a symptom of gluttony). And alcohol abuse. I doubt I’m the only one who either is genetically disposed to anger, or who was taught it at a very early ago....but it is still sin.
I am confident the issue is most certainly, "some people are indeed born "homo/lesbian" and how do we responsibly regard that segment of our society?
No problem, they just need to live a chaste life. It is the sin of homosexual sex that God condemns, not specifically people who feel a same-sex attraction. While disordered, it is not a sin in and of itself.
I used to live as and identify as a lesbian in my younger years, when I was a liberal Christian who was pretty much only acquainted with the thinking of the world, so I’ll comment on that question.
Probably in other times and places, far fewer people with this temptation either pursued it in the past or pursue it today because life outside of modern, wealthy countries is much more difficult.
A couple years back, an article from a secular scholar was posted here in which the scholar said, IIRC, that he wasn’t opposed to homosexuality, yet had to report nevertheless that it’s not true that it was simply accepted by the ancient Greeks and Romans. Male homosexuality was acceptable only for the man taking the “male” position, while the “female” role was often typically forced on a slave since it was considered a humiliation. You have to wonder if that inequality might be due to the fact that the “female” position was and still is far more dangerous to take health-wise.
In the same way, in the days when almost everything had to be made literally from scratch, and parents would need their children to take care of them later in life, men and women generally needed each other much more from a practical standpoint just to get by.
Now in this time and place, worldliness, with all of its idols, is flourishing in every part of society. But still there are many people tempted by homosexuality who either reject it in the first place, or later leave it, because they accept that God says it’s a sin.
It’s not going to be the majority. But then again, it’s not going to be the majority of a population that accepts Christ, and it doesn’t seem to be the majority that seeks to avoid today’s worldliness, either.
I do have to say that something very troubling I see in today’s church in America is that there are many Christians who condemn homosexual acts, as they should, but at the same time have no trouble embracing virtually any and all other sin besides it due to the same worldliness.
Let me be clear, too, I’m not accusing anyone on this thread of that. I haven’t read through the posts in this thread very closely, and even if I did, I don’t know if I could judge one way or another about any particular person from just a few posts. The Lord will be the judge.
But all told, it is a definite attitude among a considerable number of Christians today.
And so it leads to, for example, when a Miss California, Carrie Prejean, was held up as a model for Biblical Christianity when she said that she believed, personally, that marriage was only between a man and a woman:
“We live in a land where you can choose same-sex marriage or opposite. And you know what, I think in my country, in my family, I think that I believe that a marriage should be between a man and a woman. No offense to anybody out there, but that’s how I was raised.”
Yet, not surprisingly, few Christians also said that Prejean was doing wrong by taking part in the contest in the first place, as it involved her wearing very immodest dress. Modesty for women is becoming largely rejected now by the church in America, and provocative dress even gets strenuously defended.
Of course, unbelievers seize on the hypocrisy of so many Christians embracing every form of worldliness while just rejecting homosexuality when it’s not their temptation, but justifying the others. They’re of course pleased with that hypocrisy, and have worked hard to bring it about, to ensnare Christians in every form of worldliness that they can, but many Christians have also worked right along with them. It’s been like, as Jesus taught, the blind leading the blind.
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It’s sometimes also argued that Romans 1 demonstrates that homosexual sin is in a special class, and the worst of all. But even if that would be so, that doesn’t mean that “modern life” in wealthy nations has made God reconsider what sexual sin is, and after further consideration, He’s decided just to retain homosexuality.
I have to take Romans 1 as not only exposing those who commit homosexual sin, but also exposing societies and nations that reject God, one sign of which then becomes the acceptability of homosexual sin, but it also takes on the character of the other sins listed in Romans 1.
All Christians today would simply do well to make sure that they humbly and in fear of Him consider EVERY WORD OF GOD, especially every word in the New Testament. In the end, we are all individually responsible to Him. And I say, consider every word of His “in fear,” because the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and it certainly seems that many Christians in the modern, wealthy world have yet to come to Christ through that beginning, but instead seem to take for granted His grace and make hard, mocking, and even condemning speeches, not against those they call “dour” Christians, but against God Himself. These same Christians often condemn the sin of homosexuality, yet are offended when God’s Word clearly doesn’t allow what they want to do.
No matter what temptations we individually face, we have to be willing to “take a loss” of the sin and believe in God’s promise of something better, partly in this world, and fully in the next.