Thursday, December 26, 2013

On Spirituality and Sexuality

I'm a Christian. And, I have gay friends. Weird? Maybe. For years, I've been struggling to come up with my own stand on the whole "God only created men and women, so homosexuals are abominations" issue. I've finally come up with an answer- or at least a sort-of answer.

First, we ask ourselves this. How do we know that God created only man and woman? Through the Bible. But that's the problem, isn't it? Everything we know about God and Jesus and Christianity is based on what we interpret from the words in the Bible. Note the word, interpret. We all accept that the Bible is God's Word. But we also have to acknowledge that most of its contents have been left for the reader to interpret spiritually. After all, if the Bible is to be interpreted literally, what would happen to us then?

Being a Christian is having a personal and spiritual relationship with God. The first thing we need to learn is to see the world in a way other than the physical manner. To understand and accept the presence of an alternate world- a spiritual world. And, as Christians, we accept that God- our God- dominates both worlds.

So, we go back to the issue at hand. "God only created men and women." Many have used Genesis to prove this. God created man, first. Adam. Then, because God didn't want him to be lonely, he created a woman- Eve.

The question I would like to ask everyone is this, How do we distinguish man from woman? Do we look at the genes- XY and XX chromosomes? Do we refer to the genitalia? Should we be basing this judgment on worldly things such as these? Should we, despite having our religion based on spirituality, base the decision of what a person is on flesh? Flesh being the very thing we should be overcoming?

I guess I don't really have an answer yet. But, posing these questions seem to be important. I may be wrong about this, but there is one thing I'm certain of. God teaches us to love. Regardless of that person's economic status. Regardless of what that person may have done. Regardless of who he was and is. Regardless of all these things, God asks us to love.

So, LOVE.