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title: "All the “anti-gay” Bible verses Christians cite are 100% fake"
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source: "https://medium.com/belover/how-to-talk-to-homophobic-christians-95c083a9ca94"
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author:
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- "[[Jonathan Poletti]]"
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published: 2024-06-07
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created: 2024-10-29
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description: "I grew up in church and heard it all—a lot. But how believable was it that ancient sacred teachings from Heaven boiled down to hating a sexual minority? That didn’t sound like God. They ended up…"
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tags:
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- "clippings"
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---
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## A religion badly misrepresents its supposedly sacred text
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[
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](https://medium.com/@belover?source=post_page---byline--95c083a9ca94--------------------------------)
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[
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](https://medium.com/belover?source=post_page---byline--95c083a9ca94--------------------------------)
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## In the Christian world, arguing about God and gays is pretty much a way of life. Most every day, the Bible verses will be flying at high velocity.
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I grew up in church and heard it all—a lot. But how believable was it that ancient sacred teachings from Heaven boiled down to hating a sexual minority? That didn’t sound like God.
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That sounded like Christians.
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Shutterstock
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## I went in for a look at the Bible verses the religion uses for its anti-gay crusade.
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They ended up being a whole lot of fake. Here’s the bigger picture. Christianity essentially runs on mistranslations. The Bible was written in dead languages, and what it “means” is often just a mystery.
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But the religion explained its own “rules” in references to passages that, on scrutiny, become quite different texts. To examine Christian references for most every sexual issues — masturbation, divorce, etc. — one finds a haze of weirdly translated passages and heavy doses of “interpretation.”
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## Consider Leviticus 18:22.
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The Old Testament verse much beloved by Christians seems to declare that heterosexuality is a divine state, and homosexuality an evil one. But I’m going over a pile of papers by Bible scholars who say that Leviticus 18:22, in the Hebrew text, is very different from Christian translations.
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> “And-with a male not you-will-lie ‘lyings-of’ a woman.”
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I don’t remember that Leviticus 18:22. I remember this one:
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> “You shall not lie with a male as with a woman”
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## As scholars note, Christianity really worked over the verse to get the Leviticus 18:22 it wanted.
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The result is really another text entirely. An *“as with”* was added, and the odd plural “lyings” were whisked away.
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What does the original text mean? Susan Pigott is an Evangelical professor of Hebrew at Logsdon Seminary. She [answers](https://medium.com/belover/leviticus-18-22-was-a-christian-hoax-61a8220e7a67): “Well, first it means that translators have taken great liberties in smoothing out these verses.”
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Like many scholars she thinks ‘lyings’ means ‘beds’, and she translates Leviticus 18:22 this way:
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> “And with a male you will not lay (on) the couches/beds of a woman.”
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Looking at that, and Leviticus 20:13, she [writes](https://scribalishess.wordpress.com/2014/02/28/leviticus-defiled-the-perversion-of-two-verses/):
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> ==*“Neither verse actually says ‘Do not lie with a male as with a woman.’ Instead, both say you should not lay with a male on the couches or beds of a woman.”*==
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## But all Bible verses that supposedly lay down anti-gay “rules” fall apart on scrutiny.
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In the ancient world there wasn’t even a concept of ‘sexual identity’ or ‘sexual preference’. Ancient people seemed often to be basically bisexual.
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Later on, Christianity insisted that a Greek word, *arsenokoitai*, defined as a problem in Corinthians 6:9 and 1 Timothy 1:10 meant ‘homosexual’.
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Not even scholars have any idea what this word means. There are no period uses, and later usages [don’t seem to suggest a sexual context](https://medium.com/belover/arsenkawhat-8129c409f330). It was all a Christian scam.
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## Surely Romans 1 proves God hates gays.
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That might seem obvious now, but it wasn’t for some three centuries. The Christian reading of Romans 1 as about homosexuality only happened after some delay—and [after they thought](https://www.jstor.org/stable/41480505) the chapter was a ban on female masturbation.
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The actual text is some kind of story that involves a lot of weird weirds and references to unknown events. After Romans 1 was “interpreted” to refer to homosexuality, however, it all seemed obvious? The words have been screamed from many a pulpit:
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> “Even their women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones. In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another.”
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## Except Romans 1 seems to be a story about evil beings who apparently go back to Creation.
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The passage says the unnamed evil subjects were *present* at Creation. Is this story about “homosexuals”? Even scholars find it’s [just unclear](https://books.google.com/books?id=gwCEWmb__UkC&pg=PA38&lpg=PA38&dq=%22remains+open-ended%2C+which+likely+precludes+a+modern+consensus+about+their+cultural+identity.%22&ots=E__pOqQSkv&sig=Fubtcnta37yIgG0J-nrun9s8h70&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiEzdfAxaTfAhWHdd8KHcsLB2AQ6AEwAHoECAIQAQ#v=onepage&q=%22remains%20open-ended%2C%20which%20likely%20precludes%20a%20modern%20consensus%20about%20their%20cultural%20identity.%22&f=false) who the passage concerned.
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Or that was so until a striking resemblance was noted to phrases used in the Dead Sea Scrolls. The story of Romans 1 came into focus. It was about [fallen angels](https://www.academia.edu/41771658/Romans_1_26_27_in_Its_Rhetorical_Tradition) and a story told, back in Genesis 6, about an effort to sire children with human women.
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In the Bible, angels are sexual, but copulation with humans as evidently forbidden. To “abandon natural relations” was evil angels reproducing with females who had another nature, i.e. deities with humans.
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## Christians re-wrote many Bible stories — like Sodom and Gomorrah.
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Churches still teach that a story in Genesis is about the men of some town being gang-raping gays, so God punishes them with fireballs from the sky. And that means: gays will be *punished*.
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Well, that’s what the religion says. To read the Sodom story about God hating gays is, however, ludicruous on its face. Women are raped in the Bible and that doesn’t mean heterosexual sex is being banned.
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Then there’s problematic facts that Chrisitans prefer to ignore. The Sodom event is referred to many times elsewhere in the Bible without any reference to sex crime. In Ezekiel 16, God explained what the problem had been. The city was “arrogant, overfed and unconcerned…” The Sodom story is typically read in Judaism as a story about inhospitality.
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## The Sodom story is really an exercise in Christian fraudulent “interpretation.”
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Christian readings ignore many details to create their contrived conclusions. The story in Genesis has some kind of “[grave sin](https://books.google.com/books?id=ta9AAQAAQBAJ&pg=PA136&lpg=PA136&dq=The+reader+is+not+yet+told+the+exact+content+of+Sodoms&ots=eBL0lCqgLq&sig=xUUr4mi-n_6BrxpIgJjzAFu5Yh0&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjTq4m7zqbfAhUoU98KHZ0lDPYQ6AEwAHoECAkQAQ#v=onepage&q=The%20reader%20is%20not%20yet%20told%20the%20exact%20content%20of%20Sodoms&f=false)” being committed in Sodom that drew God from Heaven down to earth to investigate (Gen 18:21–23). The punishment on Sodom and Gomorrah is decided on *before* the angels even arrive.
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The sin the city has committed isn’t specified, but an “outcry” was heard as a result, and this is usually a cue in the Bible to murder (cf. Gen 4:-9–11; Exo 2:23–3:7; Isa 5:7). The ‘outcry’ is done by souls in Heaven.
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## Detail by detail, a startling portrait fills in that you’d never hear about in church.
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Sodom was a city at war. The angels who arrive are suspected of being spies. The men of the city come wanting to ‘know’ them, which doesn’t mean rape. It means they want to interrogate them.
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I go over detail after detail. Lot attempts a [hostage exchange](https://www.academia.edu/8657029/Hospitality_Hostiles_and_Hostages_On_the_Legal_Background_to_Genesis_19.1-9). He wants to put up two daughters for collateral until his two guests leave.
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And Christianity read it all as about gay rape.
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## The dirty secret of Christianity is that its ideas don’t come from the Bible.
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To read the Bible as being about anti-homosexuality is just absurd. The gospels are stories of unmarried, childless outsiders who go around talking about concepts like the ‘Kingdom of Heaven’. There is no prompt to marriage, having children, or raising them in a nuclear family.
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Jesus speaks of himself as gender-neutral and has typically been read in Christian tradition as very androgynous. He often calls himself the ‘son of Man’. As the scholar Walter Wink [notes](https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Human_Being/8yKleFG676MC?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=%22In+Hebrew+the+phrase+simply+means+%27a+human+being%27%22&printsec=frontcover): “In Hebrew the phrase simply means ‘a human being’.”
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Jesus has a special love for a younger disciple, known only as ‘the one that Jesus loved’. This was a set-up for a religion of “family values”? Not really.
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## Jesus was a remarkable teacher who describes a very extreme form of loving.
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He wants followers to love each other — and even to love *enemies* (Mt 5:55). This isn’t a love focused on a spouse, family, clan, culture or country. It’s love for everybody. The idea is impractical, absurd, and maybe divine.
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To “love” is also the teaching of the apostle Paul, as in Galatians 5:6: “The only thing that counts is faith expressing itself through love.”
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It’s Peter’s teaching in 1 Peter 4:8: “Above all, love each other deeply.”
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John cites “love one another” fully *five* times in the 1 John letter alone (3:11, 3:23, 4:7, 4:11, 4:12). You might start to think it was really the Christian teaching all along—that Christians ignored.
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## The Bible has queer stories the religion conceals.
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From David and Jonathan to [Ruth and Naomi](https://medium.com/p/df915def6a49), the Old Testament is clearly marked by curiously intense same-sex ‘friendships’. It continues on into the New Testament. There’s the [Centurion and his slave](https://medium.com/p/93fd1e0b448f), who in Luke 7:2 was “dear” or “precious” to him.
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There’s Philemon, a man who [fell in love](https://medium.com/p/bfa4608f1b72) with his sex slave.
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There’s also the [apparent rape of Jesus](https://medium.com/belover/the-case-that-jesus-was-raped-1eb16deb91eb) by Roman soldiers during the crucifixion story. That is a “gay rape” actually indicated in the Bible, and which Christianity very carefully ignores.
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## The religion in its current form clearly doesn’t like the Bible, or Jesus.
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Christians wanted a sex-punishing religion, and he was that strange unmarried man who wandered around talking to people.
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The religion clearly has no interest in what Jesus said about sex.
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He said to love each other. 🔶
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