Christianity and Homosexuality

Christianity and Homosexuality is a big topic.

This post, more so than many of my others, is for the benefit of myself; I am attempting to organise and summarise my own thoughts on the issue so far. I do not intend or expect that I will bring anything new to the debate.

I am heterosexual, but I have known friends and colleagues who are gay. If you are a Christian living in this culture you are going to be questioned about your views on this eventually. It is a question of when, not if, that question will arrive. So it is worth calmly thinking about it beforehand.

Discussion With A Seeker

The following is the outline of some major points covered in a discussion I have been having with a friend who is seeking to test the idea of Christianity. In some ways our minds work in a similar way, and so I was happy to spend time to think through any questions. The actual discussion happened across many hours on more than one day, but I remember the following 3 questions because in my opinion they were highlights or central points.

Christianity is just one religion out of many in the world, and there is so much within it to think about before I would feel I could commit myself to it.

There isn't enough time in anyone's life to sample or even evaluate every single human religion or faith. Even in Christianity, there is too much to assess within a single lifetime, evident by the fact that committed Christians never stop exploring and learning more about what they believe. Therefore it makes sense to direct your focus to a single question: Was Jesus really raised from the dead after His crucifixion?

Evangelism - Part 2

The following is adapted from the second half of a talk I gave at WYnet Summer Camp 2011. The theme for the week was Discipleship, and I spoke towards the end of the event about mission-ship, or evangelism.

In the first half of the talk, I spoke about What evangelism is, the Context of bad news that makes the Good News worth listening to, and the Distractions of issues secondary to Jesus' death and resurrection.

I introduced the talk by saying that I knew they (the teens) had, or could get, advice on how to be "nice people" very easily, and therefore I wanted to cut straight to stuff about evangelism that could be applied in their school and college lives.

Who

A possbile next question for the simple act of evanglism is "Who do we evangelise to- friends or strangers?" Well, considering the example of Jesus, the answer appears to be "both." He gave lots of time and attention to explaining God to his closest friends, the disciples, but He also healed and preached to thousands of other people in first century Israel.

Sight vs. Sound

Memory hides from me where the inspiration came from, but as a teenager I would enjoy asking friends a certain question. I would say, "If you had to be either deaf or blind, which you rather be?"

Most of my friends usually thought about it for a few seconds, and then they replied that they would rather be deaf. Or, in other words, they valued their sight more than their ability to hear. I began to think of this as a typical response from people in England, because most of us in this country have a desire to be independent.

Out of the five senses in our bodies, the sense of sight is probably the one that gives us most independence. Lose your sight and you can't see in front of yourself, can't read signs, and can't distinguish between colour coded items.You need to ask a helper what is going on around you, and feel which direction a guide-dog is pulling you towards for safety when walking.

Art vs. Self Expression

It seems like everyone has an opinion on art, but that most discussions on the subject end in the fashionable question "what is art?" and then the politically correct statement that "anything can be art", which is the same as saying that nothing is. If I invent a new adjective, and say that everything can be described with this word, then I have invented a useless word that doesn't actually mean anything helpful.

My own idea is that Art should be made a separate category from Self Expression. I would suggest that real Art does not need a blurb, but is self-explanatory to most observers, and recognisable for what it is meant to portray. This also means that creating good Art becomes a task of physical skill again, instead of a mental task of weirding your audience out with bodily fluids and scrap.

2 Reasons to Trust Authors

There are lots of non-fiction books by religious and spiritual people. They often contain views and explanations about life. They often disagree. How do you sort through the masses of material for something worth some of your time?

If you trust the writings of a person, you must trust the authority of that person. I have found that when I look for books to add to my One-day-I-will-read-this list, I am more likely to decide that I trust an author if the following 2 reasons are true.

Philosophy and Circles

A common criticism I see online is that someones worldview, or philosophy for life, is circular. It is considered a negative point when someones opinion of how things work backs itself up against any questions.

An example of a circular argument that would annoy an atheist might go something like:
"There is a God, who is beyond our understanding."
"Can you prove that?"
"Not conclusively, no, because he is beyond our understanding."

It is obvious that a circular argument can be annoying, but I do not think this refutes it. Other than circular, there is only one other form that a worldview can be, and I do not think it is necesserily superior. The other form is incomplete.

Passions per Heart

The charities I have regularly given to have included Oxfam, Children in Need and Christians Against Poverty [CAP]. Of those, I've only recently been passionate about Oxfam and CAP. Children in Need was one of those instances of being caught in the high street by someone with a clipboard, and after one year I stopped the money going out from my bank account.

I will buy Fairtrade products if they are available, and I was going to buy one of the items anyway. I don't often drop spare change in the plastic collection containers next to shop tills, and I have almost never given spare change to charity reps or homeless people in the street.

There are definately some conflicting items on this list, but I'm thinking here about what I'm passionate about, because that is what usually fuels my decision to act on the variety of good causes available.

Faith and Evidence

Any article or video on the web that mentions anything about religion usually has a predictably long thread of comments by users expressing their own opinions. Apparently, people have plenty of views on the subject (which personally, I hardly find surprising!)

One of the ideas that often makes its way onto these mile-long threads goes something along the lines of "Your belief is based on faith, and faith means ignoring any evidence on the subject, hence you, sir, are an idiot."

I disagree with this. I consider faith to be something that, in my experience, usually complements the known evidence. I have found it distinctly rare for a persons faith to go in the opposite direction of available evidence.

Imagine a scale running from top to bottom. At the top of the scale is "I believe this is true", at the bottom is "I believe this is false", and in the middle is "I don't know". People will be born, for most topics, with nothing on that scale. The default position for believing any topical item will be the neutral- the middle- "I don't know".

Debate vs. Discuss

We usually think that whoever 'wins' a debate or discussion is 'right'. It seems more true to say that whoever 'wins' these is either the better debater, or has the most facts and data to hand, or both.

I do, of course, still believe that we can discern what is 'Right', or true about reality, from debates and discussions. But I'd like to distinguish between my thoughts on two words here, and which one I prefer.