I have recently come to the belief that anti homosexuality was a backlash to pagan cultures.
The Story of Gilgamesh, the oldest recorded legend, involves an intimate relationship between two men
Male on male rape was an act that the pagans took part in (eg sodom & gomorrah) and it makes sense that those less brutish, thoughful early jews who were afraid to be raped or even subdued by a dominant man would just make it the clearest indication of all in their scripture.
Im not sure how many of you have read this section that deals with man on man action
Time for some bible study!
Do not have intercourse with a woman during her monthly period because she is ritually unclean. Do not have intercourse with another man's wife; that would make you ritually unclean. Do not hand over any of your children to be used in the worship of the god Molech, because that would being disgrace on the name of Go, the Lord. No man is to have sexual relations with another man; God hates that. No man or woman is to have sexual relations with an animal; that perversion makes you ritually unclean.
This is taken straight from the good news bible.
Leviticus 18, 19-23
Homosexual relations are not even ritually unclean! God JUST HATES IT!!
wow i love the bible
it gets taken so far! and out of context!
check this out, a bit further on, leviticus 19, 26-28
Do not eat any meat with blood still in it. Do not practice any kind of magic. Do not cut the hair on the sides of your head or trim your beard or tatto yourselves or cut gashes in your boidy to mourn for the dead. I am the LORD.
These are som very central notions of the jewish and christian faiths and depending on the strength of the faith, these are taken with different degrees of seriousness.
Basically though, these practices are merely practices of pagans and barbarians.
All this passage is saying is 'dont be a barbarian!'
but its read as if God has some specific issue with those practices in and of themselves.
Whoever this God fellow is, whether real, alien, or a character of some prolific philosophers, he was speaking to people who did not have a doctrine of practices that they could rely on and spread everywhere to steer people into social order. Scriptures like Leviticus represent ancient codes of behavior that can be taught to people, indoctrinated, even, merely to avoid situations that are associated with social disorder at the time.
The harsh penalties in leviticus reflect the general method of law at the time.
Death penalty is a normal function of human behavior.. it has likely spurred human evolution incredibly. Think about it this way, by killing people who do not conform to social order, you naturally, or artificially, select a breed of people that can adapt to whatever the social order is at the time. Sometimes the laws are just arbitrary and only have to be good on the whole to have a beneficial effect on the community (whereas strict justice is a concept that comes later when smart wealthy people realise that they could potentially be killed for their crimes, which is a consequence that cannot be bought-out-of).
The jews happened to have a rather good set of laws and this allowed them to prosper, and coexist with Romans, for example. The strict sexual and marriage laws ensured very carefully that parents of offspring could be identified and to prevent rogue males from spreading their seed into the socially respectable families. That is their function, it is not that God has some 'problem' or moral crisis with the notions of intermaritual sex.
All of the food practices that define a lot of Jewish life, in Leviticus 11, seem very reasonable:
Do not eat camels, rock badgers, or rabbits. Do not eat pigs. Only eat seafood with fins.
Do not eat a heap of birds
Do not eat winged insects
Moles, rats, mice and lizards are unclean
If any of these unclean corpses ends up on any thing or in any pot, that thing must be destroyed or discarded.
These are taken as important laws given by God almighty to Moses for his people before they entered their new land (Canaan).
This is essentially a survival guide for a NEW CIVILISATION. These people were on an exodus from a culture that they considered confused and abominable.
The writings/laws that moses shared with people were like a text/stories that could be picked up/learned by travelling people moving into a new land in order to survive and maintain peace.
They are not meant to have a higher meaning - they are meant for people who have no direction and need some general guidelines to direct their basal notions of eating, human relations, trade practices, appropriate rituals, farming practices, capital punishment, etc.
A lot of those animals that I mentioned are very broad categories.. but you may notice that it generally includes:
shellfish
Rodents
Birds that kill rodents
poisonous or blood sucking insects
And then also camels, 'rock badgers' (no idea) seagulls, lizards
basically though these are all animals that indeed you would want to stay away from if you do not have very good sanitary practices.
Nowadays we can make sure food is clean, usually
Shellfish are pretty notorious for causing stomash discomfort and illness
and rodents of course are the bane of human existance.
killing rodent-killing birds and camels might just be an unfunctional practice to perform.
The jews make special precaution to drain the blood from meat.. but I think it is taking a very old law too far.. I think the original idea was to simply not eat meat that is pouring with blood, which would have probably been a common pagan practice that led to illness.
Leviticus 11 45
I am the Lord who brought you out of Egypt so that I could be your God.
Seems like God saved Moses' people because he saw them to be orderly enough and found them suitable to 'save' and thus have them as his own little colony of people, who would obey him. I mean thats the whole point of being a Lord isnt it? You make decisions over the land and the people serve you and worship you because you sustain (if you are a good lord) the order in their land.
So as he saves the people, who must leave all of their civilisation behind (though they did not have much power in egypt id imagine), he needs to give them orders for how to live, and it is assumed that this order will allow them to live and survive and be a testament to the Lord that saved them.
And in light of this, anti homosexuality seems clearly a means of avoiding a practice that was associated with paganism and with men being infatuated with other men's ideas.
But more realistically it seems like it was added into the bible at a later date.. it doesnt really follow the format of any of the text around it. If you trully believe in the bible then YOU BETTER HATE GAYS because it is the only sexual practice that God outright hates without a reason
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