What I offer criticism of, is the offhand "Hell is for homos," which -- like most bumper-sticker-length aphorisms --- is troublesome because it fails to make a couple of important distinctions:
If "homos" is taken to mean "people who have a homosexual orientation," --- and that's often the meaning taken --- it's simply false. No kind of orientation in itself puts you in hell. Orientation is an attraction pattern, even a temptation pattern, but not a sin.
The phrase suggests a -- possibly unintended --- link between "hell" and "homo" only --- as if it this were the one hellish sin.
Consider covetousness. This is quite openly displayed and flagrantly encouraged all around us --- think of it, it's the "soul" of the advertising industry --- and one never encounters, on Free Republic anyway, a flip phrase like
Yet that is also Scriptural --- and of course I take it seriously.
We probably don't need to keep lobbing these particular issues back and forth, because I think we're actually in substantial agreement on these.
But imagine the uproar I'd kick up if I were to say
This being Hiroshima Day and all.
Yet that is equally true: target-equals-city bombing being, according to our religion, forbidden because it is indiscriminate killing, a damnable crime. The Church says we could know this from Natural Law; we ought to also know it from the 20+ times in Scripture where God says that the shedding of innocent blood is an abomination in His eyes.
Excusing homosexual vice is not a thing to which we FReepers are prone. Excusing other sins --- well, I should look to my own faults. I've been guilty of that.
“Yet that is equally true: target-equals-city bombing being, according to our religion, forbidden because it is indiscriminate killing, a damnable crime. “
I agree that homosexuality need not be continually brought up as a special evil; nor do I wish to dismiss it as a nothing.
Quick response to Hiroshima, flyers were dropped warning the people to leave the city. Therefore I don’t think it was a sin.