Why doesn't God heal homosexuals?

[AgnosticBoy]

Or pedophiles. Sometimes they seem to pray so hard, but the feelings/temptations never go away. I’ve heard miraculous cures of cancer, genetic disorders etc. but just not this one. Why?

Or perhaps I missed a miraculous cure somewhere?

I understand that a lot of people with other diseases never get cured. But atleast they have hope. Hope to continue praying. But it seems like this one is a dark tunnel that ends only in death.

No one can answer your question in a matter of fact way unless God reveals his reasons. If you know that God has done miracles in the past, then you only know that God heals some and not others.

 

[stupidisasstupiddoes]

If same-sex attracted people in the Church had been listened to for the last 200 years, we would not have gay marriage today.

Can i asked you to expand upon this point? As you can see from my earlier posts; i have no anger or disgust towards people with SSA but i am very much against gay marriage - so I’m interested in why we lost this battle. Civil partnerships seemed the perfect compromise to me and most non-religious SSA people; i think gay marriage was pushed through by athiest hetrosexuals.

 

[thistle]

You are right that the Catechism apparently has a definition of homosexuality that goes against common usage. If we want to be very clear about it (and we should), the attraction to the same sex is not sinful, but sexual actions with the same sex are.

Yes but it is only the Church definition that matters even if that is a different definition from dictionaries.

 

[KevinK]

This assertion here:

Most ‘homosexuals’ are actually bisexuals who get shunned out of other communities until they find a home in the LGBT community.

 

[stupidisasstupiddoes]

This assertion here:

Well i’d suggest having a a look at this thread if you doubt that there are Catholics who treat homosexuals with contempt: Same sex public displays of affection at family events

Or this article if you think bisexuals are well treated in the LGBT community: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/the-establishment/bisexual-invisibility-the_b_9177988.html

 

[KevinK]

The assertion that most homosexuals are actually bisexuals is what I’m seeking a source for. By putting “homosexual” in quotations you are implying this is not a legitimate classification.

 

[stupidisasstupiddoes]

No it is, i explained to another person my view based on the kinsey scale and known prevalence of bisexuality which never shows up in the metrics. I don’t have hard data for it, but you look at the data and think “where are all the bisexuals?”. That’s all i want to say on the subject for now, it’s a rabbit hole and as i say, there’s no hard data. But to be clear, there are homosexuals.

 

[Lea101]

Not necessarily, not many people are aware of the difference and it will just cause hurt and confusion. Our understanding of language is mostly influenced by people around us rather than strictly catholic terms. Imo it’s just better to define the terms in the conversation first before moving on. Or else it sounds like the anti Christian idea that being gay = hell, although we keep saying it’s the actions

 

[Prodigal_Son]

Can i asked you to expand upon this point? As you can see from my earlier posts; i have no anger or disgust towards people with SSA but i am very much against gay marriage - so I’m interested in why we lost this battle.

I’m happy to expand on it. If you flash back to the 1500s or 1600s, people attracted to the same sex had very strong sanctions placed on their actions (at least in law), but they were relatively integrated into the society. When Shakespeare wrote with romantic attentions about a young man, in the Sonnets, people of his day did not think he was mentally ill. When Michaelangelo did similar things, this was considered normal, not indicative of being some “other kind of person”.

But with Wilde and Freud and the like, “homosexuality” (and “heterosexuality”) came to be a thing. This was bad for everyone, especially people attracted to the same sex. Michael Hannon has a BRILLIANT article about this in First Things, called “Against Heterosexuality”. Whereas attraction to the same sex had been talked about by Christians for centuries, as “just another sort of temptation people feel” – look at the writings of St. Aelred on this – suddenly people who felt attraction to the same sex were “another kind of person”. They had been “othered”.

How did people in the Church respond? Not by listening to these “others”. By further silencing and othering them. Whereas before people could talk about things surrounding same-sex attraction (if not always their sexual desires), increasingly that became taboo too. Any close friendships between men became subject to suspicion of being “gay”. Homosexuality was thought of as something to be cured, although – curiously enough – the cures never seemed to work. As you yourself discussed earlier in this thread, people who were attracted to both men and women decided to self-define either as “straight” or “gay”, because there was no room to just be a person who sometimes experienced attraction to both. In Shakespeare’s day, that was “normal”. But now it is either pathological or “special”.

If the Church had allowed SSA people to tell their stories, to talk about their experience of being forced out of the Church, then there would have been an avenue out of the madness we currently experience. People with SSA needed to be told that they were just like any other Christian tempted to do wrong, and that other people totally understood how you could have temptations like that. If this had happened, there would be no reason for them to try to seek the special status of “gayness”, and to try to change society to make way for gay liberation.

If we had decided not to imprison people attracted to the same sex, they would have never felt any need to be liberated. The imprisonment is NOT telling them that same-sex activity is wrong; the imprisonment is telling them that they are “not like the other boys”, and telling them that we don’t want to hear about their experience of life.

(This silencing is very present here on Catholic Answers Forums too, in my humble opinion).

 

[Edward_H]

The second article reminds me of the contempt that “deaf from birth” people have for the hard of hearing…witness the rejection of the last candidate for president of Gallaudet University…“he’s not deaf enough”.

An odd form of "elitism’…drawing up walls around themselves. “border wall” issue.

 

[stupidisasstupiddoes]

Crickey that’s a good answer.

People with SSA needed to be told that they were just like any other Christian tempted to do wrong

See i totally get that. I’ve never seen a decent arguement for why acting on SSA is unique in sins (I’ve seen attempts). I can’t tell if the rampant attacks on SSA people come from miserable people surpressing their own SSA or people who lack the compassion to imagine other peoples battles with a very difficult temptation that they were lucky enough not to have.

 

[stupidisasstupiddoes]

The second article reminds me of the contempt that “deaf from birth” people have for the hard of hearing…witness the rejection of the last candidate for president of Gallaudet University…“he’s not deaf enough”.

Good analogy! Unfortunately small organisations can be a breeding ground for narcissism.

 

[Catholicwife32]

Meaning just like a person has sexual temptations, and its illogical to want to stop them, maybe homosexuality is a temptation afterall? Maybe that’s why there’s no miraculous cure?

Homosexual temptations are the same as heterosexual ones. You’re not supposed to act on them. That said, moral culpability is the issue here. Whether we’re talking about sexual addiction or habitual sin, the reality is that sin resides in the will, not in factors outside of your control. As such, the homosexual person needs to embrace the teaching with the humility of knowing they don’t save themselves. Beating yourself up for any sinful behavior is NOT humility and does not motivate someone to avoid sin.

And frankly, there many conditions that there are no miraculous cures for. There are plenty of mental illnesses that just prevent someone from being able to take care of themselves. So they end up in mental hospitals, group homes, or homeless. They have regular therapy and are on prescription medication to take the edge off the illness, but they’re never cured. There are also chronic physical diseases like this.

 

[Prodigal_Son]

Beating yourself up for any sinful behavior is NOT humility and does not motivate someone to avoid sin.

Hear, hear!

(16ch)

 

[AgnosticBoy]

The assertion that most homosexuals are actually bisexuals is what I’m seeking a source for. By putting “homosexual” in quotations you are implying this is not a legitimate classification.

Homosexuality is a legitimate classification in terms of definition, but it is not always correctly applied or adopted by people. I know of a few women who were in hetero marriages but after the marriage ended they now call themselves lesbians. The problem is there’s a lack of ‘objective’ measure for homosexuality. People choose based off of current feelings and behavior (which is subjective), or may even overlook and suppress same-sex or hetero feelings. SO in my view, there’s a lack of objective measure to determine if someone is exclusively homosexual or straight as opposed to really being bisexual and not noticing it.

 

[AgnosticBoy]

No it is, i explained to another person my view based on the kinsey scale and known prevalence of bisexuality which never shows up in the metrics. I don’t have hard data for it, but you look at the data and think “where are all the bisexuals?”. That’s all i want to say on the subject for now, it’s a rabbit hole and as i say, there’s no hard data. But to be clear, there are homosexuals.

There are studies that support that people’s sexuality may be more open than what they think. Even the Kinsey Scale may be too limited and I say that because sexuality can sometimes go beyond gender. Dr.Meredith Chivers studies show that heterosexual women can be sexually stimulated by viewing sexual scenes that are the opposite of their sexual orientation and even species. Here’s from the abstract:

Previous research suggests that women’s genital arousal is an automatic response to sexual stimuli, whereas men’s genital arousal is dependent upon stimulus features specific to their sexual interests. In this study, we tested the hypothesis that a nonhuman sexual stimulus would elicit a genital response in women but not in men. Eighteen heterosexual women and 18 heterosexual men viewed seven sexual film stimuli, six human films and one nonhuman primate film, while measurements of genital and subjective sexual arousal were recorded. Women showed small increases in genital arousal to the nonhuman stimulus and large increases in genital arousal to both human male and female stimuli. Men did not show any genital arousal to the nonhuman stimulus and demonstrated a category-specific pattern of arousal to the human stimuli that corresponded to their stated sexual orientation. These results suggest that stimulus features necessary to evoke genital arousal are much less specific in women than in men.

Source: A sex difference in features that elicit genital response - PubMed

 

[Edward_H]

There is a danger in totally “collapsing” all sexual sins (or all sins) into one bucket.

It’s a temptation against the full use of the intellect and our reasoning.

SSA is inherently disordered. Opposite sex attraction is not.

Desiring what God designed to give us is not inherently evil. It’s a great good that needs to be acquired in a way that is also according to God’s plan for us.

The sensitive appetites need to pursued in accord with the intellect and what the rational appetites (that is the will).

The will is an “appetite” if you think about it properly, a desire to pursue something. It “inclines the being toward the good known by the intellect”. A good will pursues the true good. A disordered will pursues something less than good, or pursues a good in a disordered way (e.g, adultery).

 

[stupidisasstupiddoes]

There is a danger in totally “collapsing” all sexual sins (or all sins) into one bucket.

It’s a temptation against the full use of the intellect and our reasoning.

I think it’s against the full use of my reasoning to assume that i am committing less sin by fluke of my personality which is not orientated towards SSA. We already have venial and mortal sin categories, i find that totally sufficient.

 

[Edward_H]

I think to attribute super-substantial aspects of behavior to “fluke of personality” is itself an offense against the intellect.

In fact, it’s letting emotion drive the bus, not the intellect or the will.

 

[stupidisasstupiddoes]

I think to attribute super-substantial aspects of behavior to “fluke of personality” is itself an offense against the intellect.

In fact, it’s letting emotion drive the bus, not the intellect or the will

Have you been following this thread where multiple scientific studies can determine factors that make someone more likely to have SSA? They meet the exact definition of a fluke or do you dispute the scientific studies mentioned?