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firstmode
Guest
LOL you do not know how far they take it!
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Charlotte408
Guest
he said some are born ‘eunuch’s’ as in born without functioning testes, or eunuchs as in castrated, by man…
far from homosexual. those with functioning testes that refuse to put them to proper use.
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Charlotte408
Guest
I’d love to know where exactly those billboards are my friend. clear channel is the radio station in my area…
thats ridiculous…and you know what they know? they know the average driver by will NOT know the bible well enough to know thats a load of carp, and wouldnt take the time to find out the truth…
irks me…taking advantage of the ignorant.
thats ridiculous…and you know what they know? they know the average driver by will NOT know the bible well enough to know thats a load of carp, and wouldnt take the time to find out the truth…
irks me…taking advantage of the ignorant.
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firstmode
Guest
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Usbek_de_Perse
Guest
You know, I did a fair amount of study of eunuchs, as eunuchs were characters in Montesquieu’s Lettres persanes, or the Persian Letters. There were two kinds of eunuchs, those whose genitals had entirely been removed, and those who were only gelded. In 17th century Persia, African eunuchs had their genitals removed, but some white eunuchs were only gelded. So, perhaps this Ethiopian eunuch got around the early requirement that Christians be circumcised by … ahem … not needing it. I always read that passage that way.
Remember that into the 19th century there were castrati in church choirs all over Italy, including at the St. Peter’s in the Vatican. Some amazing music has been written for them, including Mozart’s magnificent Exultate Jubilate. But I digress…
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crazzeto
Guest
@firstmode
Where in Gods name do they get the idea the Eunich = Gay?
Where in Gods name do they get the idea the Eunich = Gay?
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Usbek_de_Perse
Guest
self perception?
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crazzeto
Guest
So your theory was, maybe he was really just circomsised? Rather than actually a Eunich? And there for he must have been gay? Really???
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Deo_Volente
Guest
Grace & Peace!
Historically, a marriage was not about raising children because children are special gift from God. Marriage was about having children in order to create legacies, patrimonies and dynasties. It was about property and inheritance. One took a wife because that is what one did to unite two families, to consolidate wealth.
Greek homoerotic culture was a separate structure which had to do with culture and social prestige. A lover (erastes) would court a beloved (eromenos) who, in consultation with his family, would choose the lover he preferred and who would give his family a greater degree of social prestige. The beloved would learn from his lover what it is to be a citizen, how one is to behave in society, what beauty is, how to react to it, etc. Often, sexual activity would be involved, but specifically penetrative sex was looked downed upon as it was assumed that if a lover enjoyed penetration, he may wind up becoming too feminine and debased. Generally, however, the primary purpose of sexual pleasure was related to friendship (or so the Stoics taught, the Pythagoreans were much more puritanical), what we would, no doubt, think of as the unitive aspect of sex. Procreation was a social duty relating to patrimony and legacy; sex generally, however, was something pleasurable to share with a friend.
There were occasions when a lover and a beloved shacked up together. These relationships were tolerated, even permitted, but these folks were generally viewed as eccentric.
Natural law doesn’t quite enter into the picture here. What does is a particular understanding of the purposes of sex with relation to various social and cultural spheres as well as the making of a distinction made between the realms of men (social/public life) and of women (private/domestic life). A relationship with a woman had its place and that place was related to domesticity, to personal legacies, to inheritances–to the personal realm. A relationship with a man had its place and that place was related to taking part in the larger life of the polis, in learning one’s place in the world, in learning what it is to be both a man and a citizen in a particular cultural milieu, in receiving a particular cultural patrimony–the public realm.
Gay marriage would have been alien to the Greeks because there was no sense that the domestic realm of a woman / marriage should have anything to do with the social and cultural life of a man. Why would one wish to characterize one’s friendships and one’s public life in the terms of a domestic relationship? What did the two realms have to do with each other? A wife was not a friend or lover. A friend or lover was not a wife. Two different worlds, two different obligations, two different understandings of sex.
This understanding that a wife was not a friend or lover gets a little lost later in history. You need only look to the troubador tradition, or even to Dante, to see that Romantic love is not something one shares with a wife (Tristan and Isolde brings the lesson home with a subtextual message to keep extra-marital affairs platonic [understand here the particular lesson of the ladder of love in the Symposium], but not less passionate). But when one’s wife starts to become one’s lover, one enters the realm in which arranged marriages are no longer socially meaningful and the basic purposes of marriage (dynasty, legacy, inheritance) are put aside in favor of personal choice, pleasure, romance, and the familiar fetish of the family as we know it today. Thus, as the boundaries between the traditional realms of the masculine and the feminine get blurrier, is it any wonder that relationships in the one wish to look like relationships in the other until no distinction can be made between the two?
Under the Mercy,
Mark
All is grace and mercy! Deo gratias!
This is interesting, though not quite true. The Greeks didn’t allow homosexual marriage, per se, but were indeed quite tolerant of same sex sexual relationships. The distinction they made has nothing to do with natural law–like the distinction we make, it has everything to do with cultural bias and an understanding of the ends which various relationships serve
Historically, a marriage was not about raising children because children are special gift from God. Marriage was about having children in order to create legacies, patrimonies and dynasties. It was about property and inheritance. One took a wife because that is what one did to unite two families, to consolidate wealth.
Greek homoerotic culture was a separate structure which had to do with culture and social prestige. A lover (erastes) would court a beloved (eromenos) who, in consultation with his family, would choose the lover he preferred and who would give his family a greater degree of social prestige. The beloved would learn from his lover what it is to be a citizen, how one is to behave in society, what beauty is, how to react to it, etc. Often, sexual activity would be involved, but specifically penetrative sex was looked downed upon as it was assumed that if a lover enjoyed penetration, he may wind up becoming too feminine and debased. Generally, however, the primary purpose of sexual pleasure was related to friendship (or so the Stoics taught, the Pythagoreans were much more puritanical), what we would, no doubt, think of as the unitive aspect of sex. Procreation was a social duty relating to patrimony and legacy; sex generally, however, was something pleasurable to share with a friend.
There were occasions when a lover and a beloved shacked up together. These relationships were tolerated, even permitted, but these folks were generally viewed as eccentric.
Natural law doesn’t quite enter into the picture here. What does is a particular understanding of the purposes of sex with relation to various social and cultural spheres as well as the making of a distinction made between the realms of men (social/public life) and of women (private/domestic life). A relationship with a woman had its place and that place was related to domesticity, to personal legacies, to inheritances–to the personal realm. A relationship with a man had its place and that place was related to taking part in the larger life of the polis, in learning one’s place in the world, in learning what it is to be both a man and a citizen in a particular cultural milieu, in receiving a particular cultural patrimony–the public realm.
Gay marriage would have been alien to the Greeks because there was no sense that the domestic realm of a woman / marriage should have anything to do with the social and cultural life of a man. Why would one wish to characterize one’s friendships and one’s public life in the terms of a domestic relationship? What did the two realms have to do with each other? A wife was not a friend or lover. A friend or lover was not a wife. Two different worlds, two different obligations, two different understandings of sex.
This understanding that a wife was not a friend or lover gets a little lost later in history. You need only look to the troubador tradition, or even to Dante, to see that Romantic love is not something one shares with a wife (Tristan and Isolde brings the lesson home with a subtextual message to keep extra-marital affairs platonic [understand here the particular lesson of the ladder of love in the Symposium], but not less passionate). But when one’s wife starts to become one’s lover, one enters the realm in which arranged marriages are no longer socially meaningful and the basic purposes of marriage (dynasty, legacy, inheritance) are put aside in favor of personal choice, pleasure, romance, and the familiar fetish of the family as we know it today. Thus, as the boundaries between the traditional realms of the masculine and the feminine get blurrier, is it any wonder that relationships in the one wish to look like relationships in the other until no distinction can be made between the two?
Under the Mercy,
Mark
All is grace and mercy! Deo gratias!
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Usbek_de_Perse
Guest
My theory is that being a eunuch, there was – ahem-- nothing left to circumcise.
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FightingFat
Guest
I’m with you on this and I think it’s important to recognise that the Catholic Church doesn’t condemn homosexuality–but homosexual acts. Love is love is love and God is love…So if two people love each other, how can we condemn that love? Love doesn’t mean you have to have some form of sexual relationship however.
The best way to understand this–through reason-- is by learning about the theology of the body. If you adhere to that doctrine, it makes perfect sense why homosexuals can not marry!
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crazzeto
Guest
Exactly what I was talking about, though I used fewer words. The bolded sentance is the main point, homosexual marrage was never ever allowed, why? Because what was the point? It was against natural law, despite the fact that the Greek were pro-gay.
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Barry_Gabriel
Guest
I know who Bwahny Fwank is. I lived in Mass for 15 years and still have a brother there. He tells me everything political going on in the Bay State. He hates Frank. Are you sure he wrote that missive above? Even for him it sounds ridiculous and downright stupid. Though the people in his riding are blue collar and actually fairly conservative, they keep voting this guy back in! The mind boggles.
BTW, I live in Canada. Though sodomy is legal here, sex with animals is not (yet). :banghead::whacky:
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Usbek_de_Perse
Guest
I would say the Greeks accepted same-sex acts.
Be careful about the word “gay”. It is a modern term that I would not use even to describe Oscar Wilde. Over time, many have engaged in homosexual acts, but have not self-identified as homosexual, or even bisexual. The overt personal identification as homosexual, or “gay”, appears to be a modern phenomenon.
An interesting question: were those mentioned by St. Paul in Romans openly committed homosexuals or otherwise as the Greeks in a previous post in this thread?
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Usbek_de_Perse
Guest
Barney Frank is probably the consumer’s best friend on the House banking committee. Whatever you say about his personal life, he is reelected because he is an effective legislator who ably represents his constituents.
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Deo_Volente
Guest
Grace & Peace!
1–The Greeks followed natural law in this regard if by natural law one understands the idea that the realm of women should be separate from the realm of men and that sex in either realm is oriented to different purposes and subject to separate kinds of cultural regulation and sanction.
2–Homosexual marriage was not allowed for two reasons–A) why debase a perfectly good sexual friendship by associating it with the womanly world of domestic marriage? B) Same sex relationships were already recognized in society under a different social structure. Why? Because same sex relationships and marriage relationships served different social functions–they therefore had their own socially recognized structures.
3–We, on the other hand, as a culture, do not have these separate structures, nor do we have the sense of the absolute inviolability of the masculine and feminine realms, particularly since a: the advent of the idea that romance is required in a marriage and; b: the end of WWII and the entrance of women into the workforce in which the masculine and feminine social realms mixed irrevocably. Therefore, it makes more sense for us to speak of gay marriage than for the Greeks due to the difference in our cultural values (specifically due to the difference between how we conceive of the masculine and the feminine) in addition to the lack of any broadly recognized *specific *social structure in which a same sex relationship can be conducted openly. Marriage is the limit of our vocabulary in this regard and by it we are culturally forced (for all intents and purposes) to understand any loving commitment between two people by this term–we have no other option.
4–The Greeks were not pro-gay. They did not have our understanding of gay or straight or what have you. They understood sexuality to be complex, to have various purposes which could be expressed in various contexts. They understood that there was a relationship between beauty and sexual desire and created structures within which that desire could be celebrated or expressed. They understood that one should not become a slave to one’s passions. They understood that a sexual relationship between two men was fundamentally different than a sexual relationship between a man and a woman and they did not feel it necessary to make either sort of relationship culturally anathema. Both relationships were to be conducted according to specific cultural guidelines relating to the specific spheres in which the relationships took place. There is no understanding of gay, straight, or bi here.
Under the Mercy,
Mark
All is grace and mercy! Deo gratias!
Let’s get a little more serious.
1–The Greeks followed natural law in this regard if by natural law one understands the idea that the realm of women should be separate from the realm of men and that sex in either realm is oriented to different purposes and subject to separate kinds of cultural regulation and sanction.
2–Homosexual marriage was not allowed for two reasons–A) why debase a perfectly good sexual friendship by associating it with the womanly world of domestic marriage? B) Same sex relationships were already recognized in society under a different social structure. Why? Because same sex relationships and marriage relationships served different social functions–they therefore had their own socially recognized structures.
3–We, on the other hand, as a culture, do not have these separate structures, nor do we have the sense of the absolute inviolability of the masculine and feminine realms, particularly since a: the advent of the idea that romance is required in a marriage and; b: the end of WWII and the entrance of women into the workforce in which the masculine and feminine social realms mixed irrevocably. Therefore, it makes more sense for us to speak of gay marriage than for the Greeks due to the difference in our cultural values (specifically due to the difference between how we conceive of the masculine and the feminine) in addition to the lack of any broadly recognized *specific *social structure in which a same sex relationship can be conducted openly. Marriage is the limit of our vocabulary in this regard and by it we are culturally forced (for all intents and purposes) to understand any loving commitment between two people by this term–we have no other option.
4–The Greeks were not pro-gay. They did not have our understanding of gay or straight or what have you. They understood sexuality to be complex, to have various purposes which could be expressed in various contexts. They understood that there was a relationship between beauty and sexual desire and created structures within which that desire could be celebrated or expressed. They understood that one should not become a slave to one’s passions. They understood that a sexual relationship between two men was fundamentally different than a sexual relationship between a man and a woman and they did not feel it necessary to make either sort of relationship culturally anathema. Both relationships were to be conducted according to specific cultural guidelines relating to the specific spheres in which the relationships took place. There is no understanding of gay, straight, or bi here.
Under the Mercy,
Mark
All is grace and mercy! Deo gratias!
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Barry_Gabriel
Guest
I am sure he does… without telling them of course his own personal agenda.
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Barry_Gabriel
Guest
It is not stated what these “relationships” were. One can speculate, but it would be a waste of time and brain power.
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Deo_Volente
Guest
Grace & Peace!
To me, the argument in Romans is clear–giving oneself up to passions is a poor choice. We all do it. But it does terrible things to us. But thank God for his grace given to us in Jesus Christ! To read Romans as Paul’s pronouncement on sexual ethics is to miss the point entirely. There is a way we can go which leads from passion to passion to death. No external law thrown into that mix will change the inevitable outcome of the equation–it can only heighten the sense of our condemnation. But there is a way we can go which leads from brokenness to wholeness to life. This way of love is an interior law of grace which liberates through Jesus Christ. Jesus is, in fact, this way, and we become more and more like him as travel this path.
St. Augustine, when pressed for a law to follow said, “Love, then do what you will.” I think this is a great summary of St. James’ own Royal Law of Love. It’s deceptively simple, but there’s a lot in it to digest. Is it possible to do what we will if we do not Love? Is our will only truly our own when we do love? Who wills in us when we do not will in love? I think all of this goes back to Paul’s point in Romans.
Under the Mercy,
Mark
All is grace and mercy! Deo gratias!
I’ve heard it said that Paul so intentionally crafted his argument in Romans 1 that no one, regardless of persuasion, can come out of it looking particularly good. That’s part of Paul’s genius, I think.
To me, the argument in Romans is clear–giving oneself up to passions is a poor choice. We all do it. But it does terrible things to us. But thank God for his grace given to us in Jesus Christ! To read Romans as Paul’s pronouncement on sexual ethics is to miss the point entirely. There is a way we can go which leads from passion to passion to death. No external law thrown into that mix will change the inevitable outcome of the equation–it can only heighten the sense of our condemnation. But there is a way we can go which leads from brokenness to wholeness to life. This way of love is an interior law of grace which liberates through Jesus Christ. Jesus is, in fact, this way, and we become more and more like him as travel this path.
St. Augustine, when pressed for a law to follow said, “Love, then do what you will.” I think this is a great summary of St. James’ own Royal Law of Love. It’s deceptively simple, but there’s a lot in it to digest. Is it possible to do what we will if we do not Love? Is our will only truly our own when we do love? Who wills in us when we do not will in love? I think all of this goes back to Paul’s point in Romans.
Under the Mercy,
Mark
All is grace and mercy! Deo gratias!
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