Ten Reasons Why Born Again Christians Should Support Gay Marriage
I recently shared part one of this article which contained reasons ten through six on why a born again Christian should be fighting for gay marriage. Those reasons spoke to realizing the spirit of “peace on earth, goodwill to our fellows” and similar principles in the lives of Born Again Christians if they supported gay marriage.
Now here we are and I am buying you a second cup of coffee with more urgency than before. I don’t mean to be dramatic, but while the first five reasons were around immediate effects of acceptance , reasons five through one speak directly to the Christian legacy and the souls of its believers.
The 5th Most Important Reason Why a Born Again Christian Should Fight for Gay Marriage: Morality. Some Christians believe that by declaring homosexuality to be a sin, and gay marriage a travesty, that they have answered the moral question and the issue is settled. It isn’t.
Those wishing to be “good gay people” have to grow their rules organically since they have been shut out of “morality” by this judgment. So an alternative set of rules develops with the alternate environment influencing the mainstream, potentially unraveling guarded precepts. If Born Again Christians want a say in defining the ultimate morality in partner relationships, they need to embrace gay marriage and contribute their voice.
The 4th Most Important Reason Why a Born Again Christian Should Fight for Gay Marriage: Family. In 1950 78% of families were lead by married couples. In 2010, that figure was 48%. Not only does that mean that the anti-gay marriage definition of what constitutes a family is now the minority, it means that it is disintegrating and a steady pace. Families therefore are being redefined. That is not a threat for Born Again Christians, it is a factual reality. To pretend it is not happening and attack the people who want essentially the same model that you do will result in the ultimate abandonment of that structure. To preserve it, you need to support gay marriage and its commitment to the nuclear family concept.
The 3rd Most Important Reason Why a Born Again Christian Should Fight for Gay Marriage: The Bible The Bible has been wielded like a weapon, mislabeled as legalistic, paternalistic constitutional “laws” , and simplistically anointed as “The” word of God. It has become a target for intense scrutiny.
The Bible will be degraded under examination. Why? Because everything its detractors say about it is true. It was constructed from thousands of sources and there were hundreds of versions, and a single one of those was translated and then later re-translated with prejudicial intentions another hundred times over. Many who were the “wisdom” behind all this interpretation were the same ones who tortured, launched Crusades, disparaged common science and fed their own greed.
The Bible has spiritual, historical and inspirational merit, but by continuing to hold it up as the sole source of their anti-marriage agenda, Born Again Christians will tarnish the Bible’s reputation forever.
The 2nd Most Important Reason Why a Born Again Christian Should Fight for Gay Marriage: Jesus Christ Christians are to embody Christ as the Savior and light to the world. Through participation in endeavors like fighting gay marriage, Christians have failed in this mandate. Miserably. It is not an exaggeration to say that not only are non-believers not attracted to Christ because of works by His followers, they are actively repelled.
Your most important spiritual purpose is at stake here. By supporting gay marriage, you live Christ’s second commandment…and begin the process of igniting the Truth and Love tin which you believe into the experience of others.
The Most Important Reason Why a Born Again Christian Should Fight for Gay Marriage: Your own character. Jesus gave the single touchstone to the integrity of a person: “by their fruits shall ye know them”. By opposing gay marriage, Born Again Christians have demonstrated rotten fruit. If they were to “win”, there are no winners. Gay families would exist and struggle. Teens would continue to feel demonized and commit suicide. Born Again Christians have the option to have the character of charity and generosity or the character of someone like this man spewing condemnation and hate Which of these people do you want to be?
I’ll look forward to our next cup of coffee.
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1 Corinthians 6:9-10
it is very clear here.
besides,
as a Christian, we don’t hate the people but their wrong action.
No, with actual research you will find that to be completely unclear. The reference in Corinthians was to “man bed” in the literal translation and scholars believe that to be men who preyed on young boys forced into temple prostitution. Modern translations include modern biases and prejudices. As a Christian, I do not hate– period. Christ did not tell the woman who had committed adultery that He hated her action, He told her that “neither do I judge ye”. If Christ did not hate people’s wrong actions, I am disturbed as a fellow Christian that you would represent that as a Christ-like thing to do. Maybe time to look at the mote in your own eye.
yes. John 8:11 –
“No-one, sir,” she said.
“Then neither do I condemn you,” Jesus declared. “Go now and leave your life of sin.”
Jesus tell her to leave her life of sin.
for Jesus accepted her but not her sins.
These ten reasons have merit, but because they are based on a single false assumption, they will fail to convince so-called “Born Again” Christians. They can serve only as cheerleading for those who already disagree with Born Again Christians. Born Again, or Evangelical, Christians operate under a certain assumption about the Bible. If you want them to accept Gay Marriage, it will not help to challenge unnecessarily the assumption that more than any other remains the foundation of their identity. You need to explain that Gay marriage fits in a biblical view of marriage, despite the rare anti-homosexual verses scattered here and there in this large book. Pulling an isolated quotation from the vast and complex set of documents that together make the Bible cannot settle the issue. I refer interested readers to this blogpost: http://goodwordsunlimited.blogspot.com/2012_11_07_archive.html
Moreover, those whom God loved the most, those with whom he made a covenant with: Noah, Abraham, Moses, Jesus…pleaded on behalf of others who ‘sinned’ or as in the case of Jesus, were considered sinners by the world. They asked God to spare them and begged for mercy for them to God. I truly believe that we will not hear the true song of the bridegroom and the bride, lost for so long we have forgotten the words, until we allow people to love who they love. Provided it is adult and consensual no one should get in the way of true love.
These people who judge and accuse homosexuals are not true Christians and could better be described as Jews as they have not accepted the new Covenant but would rather hold to (in part) to the Old Testament. That said, while they harp on the homosexuality part of the law – they do not keep kosher, they divorce as they see fit, they are hypocrites and adulterers, and do not follow ANY law that is a choice. The only law that they seek to enforce it seems to me is the one that is NOT a choice. That is the stumbling block set before them.
I honestly have a hard time believing that a book can tell me how to live my life and what kind of person I should be. To me, living my life by the bible is no different than living my life by I dunno, say Harry Potter. The fact of the matter is, the bible as we know it today is not the original bible. Through translations and rewrites the bible is just a book. It’s a nice story. I do have a relationship with God, and I know within my heart that I am living the way he would want me to. Not because some book tells me so, but because of my time in prayer and meditation with God.
‘A man who lies with another man should be stoned’ this can be interpreted many different ways to me (yes I am joking around) quite a few of my good friends happen to be gay and born again christians I don’t see why everyone can’t be like this yes take the bible the way you want it to believe but its also upsetting many different people not just gay people. I myself am a lesbian wiccan but because of my religion I won’t start kicking off that christians killed my people and are horrible evil people, no everyone deserves the respect of everyone else.
The Bible says that a raped woman was to marry her rapist….we certainly don’t do that anymore and thank God! Why do we get to pick and chose what to believe and follow and impose our rights onto others? IMO, the new testament gave us only two commandments….love your neighbor and love God. Period. It clearly states several times throughout the Bible that only God gets to judge….
Those who do not want to realize that JESUS IS THE WORD…think about this…If the bible is infallible, then why didnt Jesus Himself obey it? The woman caught in adultery, according to the LAW/Torah/scriptures of the day…that gal should have been stoned, no ifs, ands, or buts, but what happened? Jesus after telling the “RELIGIOUS”..folks where to go (he without sin cast the first stone, remember that part?) let the woman go…clearly Jesus Himself was didnt obey the written word…
Good points on the “infallible word of God.” As I was taught and as described in the introduction of the Gospel of John that Jesus is “the word” the word became flesh. So how can the bible be the word of God when it’s Jesus the Christ who is the Word of God.
If Jesus is God, like he claimed to be, and God inspired the Bible, then the Bible is the Word of God. Jesus is also the Word of God, as he spoke only what the Father told him to speak. If you read the rest of John and think about it, it makes sense. It’s somewhat hard to get through, as it contains more philosophy than the other gospels, but it’s well worth the read.
McSassifrass, that sounds like bible idolatry to me. To be “inspired by” is not the same as being. To say that I’m “inspired” by Michael Jordan is not the same as saying “I am” Michael Jordan. How you linked that all up-God-Jesus-Bible, that’s not the Trinity I follow. To say that the Holy Bible is the Word of God? After reading the gospel of John? Godspeed.
I don’t think so. I don’t worship the Bible, but I do understand it as God-breathed, coming from God, and inspired by God. It was written by many different people, but the same God gave them the words.
Jesus is the Word who became flesh. He is the fulfillment of prophecy. He comes before the Bible, created the world, and is the Savior of men. Of course the Trinity is the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. I never said the Bible was part of that. However, I respect the Bible as the Word of God – how God speaks to us and how he has spoken to generations before us.
One point: you don’t have understand something for it to be true. God is bigger than us and each one of us has a different capacity to understand different things. That’s good. God made us all different. He also made us limited. You can understand more things than your little child can. He has to learn to trust you when you tell him to do things, especially when he doesn’t understand “why” yet. Knowing God’s character from experience, from the Bible, and from others, I trust him completely. I don’t have to completely understand every detail of everything first. If God says it’s true, and God doesn’t lie, then its true.
The Problem is (like anything else), Certain Leaders of organized religion missread/missinterperate what the Bible is or they intentionally manipulate it for thier own needs. The Bible like any other book is not an instruction manual at all and is in fact a history book. If you read it like a History book then you can look at it the way it was meant to be read and learn from it that way. So all the laws in the Old Testament describes what the laws were at that time as written by the religous groups of the time. i.e. Leviticus was written by the Levites a big religious group at the time. Most churches and religions are based on what was said and ignore the who(as in who were the people who said it)the when(when it was said)etc. so lets look at it from that perspective the Bible records (it doesn’t actually say anything) that Jesus who was the son of God said “that only through my teachings can you reach heaven. And he only gave two instructions 1 Have no other Gods before him(notice the phrase other Gods before him meaning you can infact recognise other spirits just put God first)And 2 Treat other people the way you would want to be treated by them. But all religions aside I am a Human too and think it is wrong to hurt someone for simply being the way that God created them.
Your post is a timely cotnirbution to the debate
Bravo! Finally some common sense! Since I was a little girl and first attempting to read this tome, I recognized that the Bible was written by many different people, translated many times from language to language and sort of a tangled mess, to be honest. I could see that the power of women had been stripped away (virgin birth?) and although some of the stories are interesting to read and sound a positive note, other parts are horridly violent, and not productive to a constructive modern argument at all. I find it interesting that so many Christians of today choose to cherry pick these stories, and only quote the parts they think are important. They conveniently ignore (at least in public) the references to animal and human sacrifice, promoting murder, raping of women, and condoning slavery.
While I DO believe that Jesus Christ was a Great Man and Teacher, I do not hold a lot of faith in some of his followers, even the ones who originally wrote the Bible. Or the others who translated it, over and over again, and chose certain words driven by their biases. The Bible was written and reproduced by men, not a supernatural being in the sky called God. Therefore it is flawed, as humans are as well.
In the end, I can not fathom in this day and age, when we have the benefit of so much enlightenment and global history at our fingertips, how people can argue against LOVE.
“Eight words the Wiccan Rede fulfill, An it harm none do what ye will.”
http://www.buzzfeed.com/donnad/how-gay-rights-is-nothing-like-legalizing-beastali
I have a question for you. If you think Jesus was a “Great Man and Teacher”, why would he say something like this? Wouldn’t it make him crazy?
John 6:53-59, NIV
53 Jesus said to them, “I tell you the truth, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. 54 Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day. 55 For my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink. 56 Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in him. 57 Just as the living Father sent me and I live because of the Father, so the one who feeds on me will live because of me. 58 This is the bread that came down from heaven. Your forefathers ate manna and died, but he who feeds on this bread will live forever.” 59 He said this while teaching in the synagogue in Capernaum.
Yes, i knew there were words like this attributed to Jesus in the Bible. However, I have known many lovely Christians who pick and choose only the positive statements in the Bible to believe in, so they are obviously being influenced by Jesus in a good way. It’s the people who choose to follow the negative aspects that I have a problem with as it clashes with my belief, which is to ‘Harm None’. And also, this all goes back so the source. Who knows if Jesus actually said this, or if someone else said it for him?
I think we’re talking about two different “Christians”, then. Christians are those who follow Christ Jesus, the Son of God. You cannot follow Him a little bit and have the rest of your life be in complete opposition to Him. That’s not a true devotion. Basically, if someone decides to be a Christian, to follow Christ, he or she should do it with a whole heart or not do it at all.
Here’s a recent article that shows the difference between real Christianity and living out Christian morals:
http://www.albertmohler.com/2012/09/11/christian-values-cannot-save-anyone/?utm_source=Albert+Mohler&utm_campaign=9b88e1727c-Albert_Mohler_Email_August_6_20128_6_2012&utm_medium=email
Well, my friends don’t eat flesh and drink blood, so they don’t follow the Bible to the level of your original post to me. The revere Jesus for the loving teacher they believe he was. They are very loving people, and in my eyes contribute greatly to the common good of our society. They give other people the benefit of the doubt that as adults we are free to make our own choices. And they are able to discuss with me my differing spiritual beliefs without trying to force me to their way of thinking.
The other type of Christian I refer to can not stand me for my differing views, and tells me I’m going to hell because I don’t believe the exact same thing that they do. They might “follow Christ Jesus, the Son of God”, but because they are so intolerant of others who might be a little different, I see them as pompous and ignorant. I’m not trying to change their mind about their own beliefs, except where they intrude on my beliefs. And I would never try to convince anyone to become a Pagan (or a heterosexual if they weren’t). Why can’t we all just get along peacefully?
He was simply making the point that he was spiritual food and that only by listening to his teaching can you get to heaven. See you just made the same mistake every religious leader makes you picked a small exerpt from a story to make your point here is the whole story.
The Jews then complained about Him, because He said, “I am the bread which came down from heaven.” 42 And they said, “Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How is it then that He says, ‘I have come down from heaven’?”
43 Jesus therefore answered and said to them, “Do not murmur among yourselves. 44 No one can come to Me unless the Father who sent Me draws him; and I will raise him up at the last day. 45 It is written in the prophets, ‘And they shall all be taught by God.’[a] Therefore everyone who has heard and learned[b] from the Father comes to Me. 46 Not that anyone has seen the Father, except He who is from God; He has seen the Father. 47 Most assuredly, I say to you, he who believes in Me[c] has everlasting life. 48 I am the bread of life. 49 Your fathers ate the manna in the wilderness, and are dead. 50 This is the bread which comes down from heaven, that one may eat of it and not die. 51 I am the living bread which came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever; and the bread that I shall give is My flesh, which I shall give for the life of the world.”
52 The Jews therefore quarreled among themselves, saying, “How can this Man give us His flesh to eat?”
53 Then Jesus said to them, “Most assuredly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, you have no life in you. 54 Whoever eats My flesh and drinks My blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day. 55 For My flesh is food indeed,[d] and My blood is drink indeed. 56 He who eats My flesh and drinks My blood abides in Me, and I in him. 57 As the living Father sent Me, and I live because of the Father, so he who feeds on Me will live because of Me. 58 This is the bread which came down from heaven—not as your fathers ate the manna, and are dead. He who eats this bread will live forever.”
59 These things He said in the synagogue as He taught in Capernaum.
“The Bible has spiritual, historical and inspirational merit, but by continuing to hold it up as the sole source of their anti-marriage agenda, Born Again Christians will tarnish the Bible’s reputation forever.”
If a Born Again Christian believes the Bible is the infallible Word of God, there is no reason NOT to hold it up as the fundamental source of Truth. By your statement, it seems that Christians are falsely believing in the truth of the Bible, hiding any flaws by not being as vocal.
Jesus Christ. Yes, Jesus Christ’s love is infinite, amazing. He saved sinners like us. Although we must love everyone as Christ has loved us, it doesn’t mean we have to condone sin. Yes, we may love the liar, but we aren’t saying that lying is bad. In the same way, Christians should have the love of God towards the person, but also the justice and holiness of God towards the sin.
Think about it. How is marriage defined? In the Bible?
Hi S… you are double posting, so I will also be repetitive. The Bible describes several kind of marriages…a brother and a sister, a man and two sisters, a man and multiple wives. It never does address what it specifically has to be. Jesus referred to marriage between a man and a woman when He was asked about DIVORCE. He did not describe what all marriages should be.
If any Born Again Christian TRULY believed that the Bible was the “infallible Word of God”, that person would be a scary individual indeed. The Bible supports slavery, racism, rape, the earth is flat theory, mysogeny and the killing of not only gay people, but people who work on Saturdays. I do not know of any Born Again Christians who truly believe any of that. The Born Again Christians who claim the Bible is infallible are not being honest… what they are really saying is their point of view is “infallible”. They are often not really aware of what the Bible really says and why. Also… if you want to get really specific… the Bible itself points to somewhere else as the “infallible Word of God” and Gods law (do you know where that is? 10 points if you do!) So, that sets a conundrum… how can something be the “infallible word of God, if it, being infallible, says that something else in fact is the infallible source? yikes.
So… you want to compare homosexuality to the sin of lying. Think carefully on why you can’t do that. CONTEXT. Sin has to have context. If someone lies to spare someone unecessary grief, or to save the lives of innocents… is it a sin? Most would say no. What is the context of homosexuality? Those who want to call it a sin don’t have an answer for that…they want anything without context to be considered sin, and it does not work that way.
Thank you for the discussion.
Hello Rob,
I apologize. I was just passing through and noticed this post. Where in the Bible does it state another source as “infallible”? I couldn’t find the word “infallible” in a simple word search of the Bible and the other two places I thought it could be was John 1 or somewhere in Revelation. Please let me know.
McSass
Great article, hopefully this will appeal to the heart and intellect of some of the christians out there who are just being to religious for the welfare of their fellow men and themselves…there is a book…How to follow Jesus without embaressing God…a lot of christians in this day and age should get a copy…people are just tired of the “religious spirits” and are wanting to embrace and be embraced by a loving Father…Blessings!
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Some wonderful points! Thank you for laying it out there so clearly.
As a Christian, I applaud this article, especially the last reason–Jesus Christ. This is what we are called to do. It’s what Jesus did when he walked on this earth.
wonderful post Rob! As you know I am one of those Christians who am ashamed to be called a Christian because of people like this man spewing his hate. And calling out a mother and her children? I wonder how they sleep at night.