Thank you for informing me of what I understand, and what I don’t understand. I appreciate your mind reading abilities nearly as much as you do, no doubt.
Unrepented mortal sin - ANY unrepented mortal sin - gets you to the same place, regardless of whether or not you find this teaching “spiteful”.
I don’t find the teaching spiteful, I find your choice of analogy intentional inflammatory. You know as well as I do that a kiss is not equivalent to violent murder.
Again - it’s not the same thing. The severity of the sin, however IS.
Elizabeth, I didn’t mean to suggest you personally thought homosexuality is equivalent to murder. I only suggested that some might make the comparison, and that one has to use reason as well as logic to point out the distinctions. If one wishes to think homosexual behavior is disordered based on natural law, moral relativism, and so on, that’s also fine with me (and this I’m fairly sure you do believe). I agree that gay people should not go around accusing or assuming all straight people are their enemies. That would be just as illogical as Blacks assuming all White people are their enemies, or Jews believing all Gentiles are antisemitic. Progress has been made on all these fronts. However, I do believe that gays (and Blacks and Jews and others), given their history of being persecuted, can understandably hold such beliefs, and be suspicious, even resentful of the straight world, including the Church (and the Synagogue!). And I’m not saying the Church has directly persecuted homosexuals. In fact, it was the Nazis who did: the first holocaust consisted of rounding up gay people. But many other societies throughout history have persecuted them as well. I think we are all entitled to have whatever personal beliefs we like about homosexuality, but let’s, all of us, have respect for people who are gay. A final note regarding the “strong primal forces” within all of us, which I assume you mean are our moral compass. I haven’t admitted this because I’m not quite sure about it. I’m not sure that, let’s say, “hit men” and “serial killers” have such a moral compass: again, Freud would agree that in some people there is a very deficient superego. My own religion believes we do, so much so that there is no concept of original sin in Judaism, but rather the belief that we are born with the potential for good. Now, I do believe most of us have such a primal force; but, at the same time, I don’t believe gay behavior is disordered. Hence, my belief that the “guilty conscience” that some gay people may have is more based on their experiences of not fitting in with society, whether due to society’s prejudiced attitudes or through simple observation that they are not the same as others with respect to their sexual preferences. And by society, I don’t mean only those who discriminate against gays, but also everyday life, reflected in the media and other social institutions, that emphasizes heterosexual behavior and often ignores other types of sexual behavior. I admit that the topic of homosexuality is discussed much more frequently than in the past, and this in itself is a good thing in my view. There was a time that it was never even discussed, just as topics such as divorce and cancer were hidden. Society is much more open now about such issues, and I view this as progress, not decline. (In several other areas, however, I see decline in society, such as government and music! Yes, I can also be conservative on certain issues.)
:bigyikes:
Why shouldn’t the species just disappear? 
How would you account for the extensive study in Netherlands, where society has a history of being more accepting of gays than in other Western countries (same-sex couples have been free to marry there since 2001) and, yet, the study reflects a high rate of psychiatric disorders with homosexual behavior? Does not the study undermine the assumption that social rejection and homophobia cause increased psychiatric illness among gays?
younger homosexuals were not at lower risk for suicidality than older homosexuals in comparison with their heterosexual counterparts. Among homosexual men, perceived discrimination was associated with suicidality.
You are posting studies done by NARTH as true and unbais?
Do you know what PubMed.gov is? And the Netherlands Institute of Mental Health?
did you read the study you posted by chance?
While Sandfort is regarded as a good researcher in this field, one always has to look carefully at the methodology of a study. This study, and others of the kind, have their own specific criteria for defining homosexuality that don’t always reflect most gay people’s lives. The criterion for selecting participants here is based on defining homosexuality in terms of behavior only (not same-sex attraction without behavior or romantic relationships) and, equally as significant, in terms of whether participants had engaged in ANY same-sex behavior during the past year. This means only ONE “gay encounter” qualifies in the selection process of participants who self-report as homosexual, although other participants may have had more than one experience (but this information is unspecified). For most real-life homosexual relationships, this does not constitute homosexual behavior, just as one “straight encounter” would not define a person necessarily as engaging on a regular basis in heterosexual behavior. Unless one wishes to conclude that EVEN one homosexual experience is correlated with mental disorder and suicide attempt (which seems unlikely and silly), it is unclear regarding what the findings mean with regard to sexual behavior. Further, the findings report a much more significant relationship between mental disorder and male homosexual behavior (defined as mentioned above) than female homosexual behavior. Thus, not only homosexual behavior, however defined, is significant, but also gender. One would have to examine the interactive effects of sexuality and gender as well.
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
Extremely well thought and well expressed. To the extent of my researching, I’ve come across no definitive scientific conclusion about the “cause(s)” of homosexuality.Again, there is simply no evidence that even you or I was born “with a [predetermined] sexual orientation.” All the psychological study of real human subjects points to the contrary. We are open and receptive to sexual experiences when we are born; we experiment fluidly with our sexuality in our young years: this is the standard pattern. The fact that an orientation eventually develops and that we are not conscious of when and how it develops, at moments in time, does not mean that we were “born” one way. No, one does not “choose” in the sense of choosing between flavors of ice cream; rather, one makes choices depending on feedback supplied and feedback absent, on attempts at bonding tried, and attempts rewarded or rejected; on patterns of reward and on perceived acceptance of me-just-as-I-am by people of the same sex and people of the opposite sex, combined with hormonal configurations and other aspects of physiology – as they all interact with each other in a complex way.
The fact that, given all that, a “logical” choice seems to emerge for most individuals, does not mean either that a homosexual person becomes that way out of masochism, nor that the heterosexual becomes that way out of a societal preference for approval. The “choices” (more like drifts) became apparent, logical, and conveniently indicated over time, for both orientations. Nevertheless, it does not mean that a homosexual is not opposing what is truly ordered in the universe.
Your theory that depression is all about rejection is just your theory. There is no evidence that it is definitively about societal rejection. (1) Homosexuals who live in a homosexual saturated environment, with exponential levels of approval, including often from their families who join P-FLAG, etc., nevertheless can be quite unhappy within extremely tolerant environments; (2) Homosexuals who live in disapproving environments are sometimes well-adjusted socially.
Unlike you, I did not attempt to prove the unprovable. I said, in post 345, that it was equally possible that our Unconscious, and our consciences, are screaming at us all the time, or at least trying to, and our repression of that Unconscious conscience can result in depresssion – and not only with regard to sexuality issues, but with regard to much else in life, as any student of literature would have to be aware of. You, OTOH, reject entirely that there is any core of the human person that unconsciously “knows” before the conscious knows. That is quite an unscientific statement on your part. It makes you look as if you simply have an agenda to blame society,entirely, for not accepting what it has legitimate difficulty accpeting.
Thank you so much – mostly for taking the time to read and consider.
Yes, TG Sandfort is a trained social psychologist and a professor of clinical psychology with excellent credentials. He is skilled in both quantitative and qualitative approaches in terms of research methods. That is why he obtained the honor of conducting the Dutch studies on which I sought your opinion. Do you have a reference that I can check with regard to your criticism on his methodology?
I understand your point of view. I still find your position fundamentally deficient in moral value by any definition. A kiss is never equivalent to murder. It seems we have reached an irreconcilable stopping point in this particular discussion.