But morphine has no lasting effects. A person addicted to heroin might be as enchanted by heroin as this girl by her glove, but that person would also see objectively negative consequences. Drug use, in this analogy, would be if the girl slightly burned her hand every time she wore it, and the burns were permanent, and eventually her hand got so burned it looked like nothing but scar tissue. But, with homosexuality, there are no consequences, at least not physically. If you, as a virgin, stay together with another girl, who is also a virgin, for your whole life, there are no consequences to sexual behavior. There is no emotional tearing, because she’s still in your life. There are no physical problems, because neither of you had the chance to develop STDs. The same applies to two men as well.
We’ve discussed this before, and I think that either (a) you’re wrong about this, and there are negative temporal consequences, or (b) homosexual activity is not wrong. In other words, I think your feeling of anger that God set things up this way is partially predicated on your firm conviction that God *arbitrarily *punishes homosexual activity.
If He does arbitrarily punish it, then it is not wrong. If any one of God’s commands is arbitrary, then God is not a moral authority. Arbitrary rulers do not deserve obedience.
But the fact that you think gay sex doesn’t have negative consequences doesn’t make it true. Lots of negative consequences in this life are invisible. The harmful effects of smoking, for example, were invisible for decades – though the beneficial effects were quite clear. Vioxx was a drug that seemed to completely cure the pain symptoms of people like my wife and my good friend – until my good friend had a heart attack at the age of 22. Logically, you have to accept the possibility that there are side effects of homosexual activity that haven’t been made clear to you.
Are you willing to accept that possibility, even if it seems ridiculous to you?
So, in reality, we only have negative consequences of homosexuality that God directly imbues us with as punishment. He created the world, and He created the spiritual harms of homosexuality; it is not possible for us to merely develop spiritual damage without His having created it, for He created everything.
But if there are spiritual harms to homosexual activity, He didn’t create those arbitrarily either. He created those because He longed for you to have the deepest and most fulfilling friendships with women possible, and because sexual contact wouldn’t contribute to that kind of intimacy. (Thus Plato writes that a lover and his beloved – both male – will profit in some ways by a sexual relationship, but will profit much more greatly by a nonsexual relationship. You don’t have to think of the left-handed glove as “all bad”, and the Church doesn’t teach that. It’s just an inferior way of seeking a very good thing: intimacy. The word for “sin” in Greek means “to miss the mark”. Lesbian sex between two women who genuinely love each other may be shooting at the right target, but it misses the mark).
The alternative to my interpretation, of course, is simple: God either doesn’t exist, or isn’t a moral authority (since He issues arbitrary commands).
So how would a loving God allow for sinful behavior to take place with literally zero temporal consequences? It doesn’t strike me as the Catholic God who says, after death, “You have spent your whole life taking care of another woman and doing nothing of harm to yourself in life, but I will still send you to Hell because you only follow 99% of my rules.”
God doesn’t want you to be motivated by fear of hell.
Yes, but the disease others are possessed with is masked by the wearing of their right-handed glove. Via the same logic, marriage is merely a mask of a disease as well. When their loved and cherished glove eventually loses its threads (the spouse dies), they will initially mourn, but eventually most people choose another glove, because the disease returns and they want to get rid of their disease and that of the person they love.
But that’s not the way marriage works. It doesn’t heal my wounds, and it doesn’t make me feel better. It has NONE of the numbing qualities of looking at porn or checking out other guys. The pain doesn’t go away when I make love to my dear wife. I experience profound pleasure, but it is not some great and wonderful moment of personal fulfillment.
If I had to choose between sex with my wife and heaven, it would be a simple choice to choose heaven. When I have to choose between my passion for men and heaven, I just don’t know. It’s VERY hard to choose, despite the obvious superiority of heaven. This is because I just, in my heart of hearts, don’t believe that God has anything better for me than this divine experience of worshipping my idol. As long as I don’t believe that, God has not captured my heart.
**He **wants you, S. He has something better for you. I know how hard it is to believe, because I don’t yet believe it myself (with respect to my own desires). But unless He doesn’t exist, it HAS TO be true.
But I appreciate your (name removed by moderator)ut Prodigal. I pray and pray for an understanding, but half of me wants to leave the Church. I don’t understand it. I know the Church is real; God imbued me with knowledge that the Church was real. So why won’t he give me understanding?
Are you willing to sacrifice every cherished belief that you have, to submit everything to scrutiny, in order to hear His answer to that question?
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