Last week, I had a long and fascinating conversation with Shari Johnson — a retired dental hygienist, conservative voter, and evangelical Christian from Odessa, Texas — about what happened when her daughter announced, at age 37, that she was a lesbian. Johnson’s chain of reactions would sound familiar to many families of gay, lesbian, and transgender kids: shock and sorrow, followed by grudging acceptance, followed by a full embrace. What was striking, though, was the language she used — about prayers, appeals to God, and direct answers.
She talked about a day when she was driving to work, wrestling with the idea of her daughter’s upcoming wedding in Cambridge. “I said out loud in the car to God: ‘What event could a parent be asked to attend that would be worse than this one?’ ” Johnson said. “And his answer was, ‘a funeral.’ That’s how God speaks to me. It’s not a booming voice from Heaven; it’s a thought that I’ve never had before that I would never have myself. And it’s so contrary to my thinking that I know it has to be God.”
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Funny - a whole article about how religious people can potentially become more accepting of homosexuals. I have an idea: how about removing organized religion from your lives!!! Then you can use reason and logic to solve your everyday problems and stop being so bigoted about people who aren't like you.
Have a nice day ;-)
This is the fundamental difficulty with organized religion, it doesn't speak for god it speaks for the preacher, the priest, the Iman, the Rabbi who's doing the speaking. If people believe in some form of god then perhaps they should do like the lady in the story. Listen once in awhile instead of merely believing what they are told.
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Edward Schiappa, a visiting professor at MIT who has studied changing attitudes toward homosexuality, describes the problem as the difference between changing “empirical beliefs” and “identity beliefs.” I don't understand or actually agree with drawing a difference between empirical and identity beliefs. Identity means `you identify with God and with God's will. And how can you find out God's will? By interpreting the "Word" of God. If you follow sound hermeneutic rules, one should reach general life-affirming principles that can be applied across cultures and eons. If you don't do the above, one ends up with decontextualized half-true beliefs and values that are defended by folks passionately and stupidily. Bottom line? The strategy of choosing words to convince others is faulty. It's about engaging in theological and pastoral conversations at a community level. As a result, communities of faith will reach and live by solid principles that should be aligned with each other organically. Otherwise it ammounts to trickery.
The crux of the problem is there is nothing empirical, purely someone else's idea of the word of god. Lot of gods words out there in a lot of different books.
I am so tired of hearing about gay this and gay thats. The whole subject of homosexuality is grossly over-covered.
This is a problem with the swift reaction to Richard Mourdock, the Indiana Senate candidate who said last week that a child conceived through rape represented “God’s will.” Mourdock’s wording was clumsy and hurtful — and I disagree with him about abortion rights — but I don’t believe he actually meant to condone rape. Do you?
Well, yes, I have to believe that he actually meant to condone rape. How else is anyone to understand what he said, what he even suggests? IF God's will was a child conceived through rape, by necessity the very rape conceiving this child HAD TO BE God's will. If the rape was not God's will, then how was the child's conception to take place? How can anyone even begin to see anything other than an endorsement of that act of rape if the result of it is God's will?
But that, I believe, is the crux of the problem for those who chose to believe that EVERYTHING is God's will. I would like to know whether these people think that a woman in the process of being raped should stop the rapist and ask God whether she should let the rape continue if God's will is that she is to be impregnated by the rapist and conceive a child as a result of the rape? That sounds ludicrous, doesn't it?
But less ludicrous is the question: if a woman being assaulted and about to be raped has a chance to kill her rapist to escape her rape, according to these people, she should NOT defend herself since it is wrong to kill.
No matter what a woman has to accept being raped in these people's world. How do these people explain personal responsibility if everything is God's will? Raping itself is God's will... That is the problem NOT with the reaction to what that man said, it is the problem with what these people chose to believe.