It seems that I won’t be convincing anyone on this forum that homosexuality is not a sin, and you’re never going to convince me it is, so the best option seems to be to agree to disagree.
Whereas, in all honesty from what I can tell it is in fact a sin, and it is almost inconceivable that one would be a Christian who has read scripture and think it wasn’t. Either of our views could come from the Church of England as far as most people are concerned
This is part, I think, of why some people turn to the Catholic church in these difficult times - even though the Church of England is a wonderful thing, almost nobody understands it any more. That along with all this qualification and uncertainty where not even the bible is accepted by people claiming to be from it.
To paraphrase a wise man - In much better times, the Church of England was something people took part in and dedicated a great deal of time and thought to.
Then in more recent but still better times, the Church of England was not something people wanted to go to, it was something they wanted to know was* there*. Like the arts council - as long as it was there you could feel that you belonged to a civilised country and all was well with the world.
In the now, we live in a world of moral relativism and vague mysticism, and where Christians feel they have any need for a church at all, it would not be surprising if some of them look for a sense of strength, unity, and at least some sense of integrity against a world where every moral issue is turned into a giant grey area and nothing is particularly good or particularly bad except at the very extreme ends of the spectrum - and even those get reversed.
The current Church of England does not stand against this phenomenon, it merely mirrors it.
As evidenced by the way that you can genuinely hold to a thing which flies in the face of the law and scripture, and so many in the Church of England would be diametrically opposed in favour of the explicit instructions we have been given, and the effect to an outsider would be dissonance.
When every moral statement on must be qualified in some way, this does not offer certainty.
This is not nasty criticism, I have love for the Church of England. It has real problems with nobody understanding it, and with moral relativism though.
