Homosexuality and Christianity

First and foremost, I tell people that Jesus did not talk about homosexuality.  I've read the Bible and as much as I look I don't see anywhere that Jesus spoke about these issues. He talked a lot about God instead. Consequently I think the failure of the present day church is that it has been brought down into the realm of social discourse.
What L'Chaim means is 'to life'.  Fundamentally Christianity is about creativity as was Judaism before.  This issue with homosexuality in Deuteronomy was that a tribe's success in the days before the Industrial Age depended on reproductive numbers. The more in a family, the more power; the more in the tribe ,the greater the number of warriors. Warriors meant you could get slaves. Slaves and peasants tended the fields.
(Note that the argument of Islamists today is that they will rule the world through the fertile wombs of their women. Much of Islam remains in a pre industrial consciousness due to the denial of fundamental freedoms for most especially women.)
The role of the Mother in the Church is sacrosanct.  When childless girls were elevated to high status in the church without being celibate nuns, the same with celibate priests, the introduction of whether one was lesbian or homosexual or heterosexual became a mute point.
Celibacy by contrast is associated with spirituality and increased enlightenment in many religions not just Christianity.
The onset of 99% effective chemical birth control in the 1950's and choice of abhorrent abortion over celebration of birth and motherhood were game changers.
Paul was an old Jewish leader who made mistakes.  Nothing Jesus says is dated but some of what Paul says had a short shelf life. Jesus was God and Man.  Paul was at best a godly man.   I can't accept the infallibility of the Bible when I read about Paul's statements regarding slaves. He was a Rabbi and may have been married but the evidence suggests not.  His comments regarding women and men and marriage aren't necessarily wrong but somehow sound dated. Nothing Jesus says sounds dated except his local and historic metaphors, mostly about fishing and farming.  It's lost on kids living in a concrete jungle of parking lots of mechanicals.
So Individualism is central to all these discontents. The destruction of the family is fundamental aetheist communism. The religion of the STATE as God as created by Marx and Engels and Lenin and Stalin an Mao is simply based on the reality that individuals can be dominated by the fundamental divide and conquer tactic of the State.  So we have the rise of Individualism out of Marx and Engels who were outspoken about the need to destroy the family.  They didn't like Mothers especially theirs and others.
Jesus by contrast simply said that God must come first even if that separates you from family. Jesus did love his mother.  Marx wanted family ties destroyed with only one relationship of importance, that of individual and Aetheist God State, (the committee).  Even the Kings and Emperors of old supported the serf's family.  Family was the fundamental unit of society not the individual.
Today all the sexuality and social issues especially around "Identity Politics' is a priori about individuals.  Jesus spoke of the individual relationship with God.  In my relationships with others in my family and community I reflect my fundamental relationship with Jesus Christ.
The tendency of Evangelicals to call the Bible, the Old and New Testament is flawed. The GOOD NEWS is the Gospels. All else is secondary.  All else is truly commentary.  Jesus summed up the scriptures with the statement Love God and Love Thy Neighbour as Thyself.  This is a key to understanding every phrase in the rest of the Bible, everything said by Paul, everything said by Isaiah. If it doesn't fundamentally agree with what Jesus says its being misinterpreted or cherry picked or selected out of context.
I personally identify as a Christian and as a member of the family of Christians.  I am first and foremost a Christian as that speaks to my most important relationship, that with my Lord Jesus Christ.  Jesus Christ is the name I use when I speak to my God.  All other relationships sexual or otherwise take a distant second. I don't hear that in Church dialogues and see the emphasis in Gay flavoured churches and Anti Gay churches as missing the point.
The point of Christianity is Jesus.  I like hearing and sharing his Holy Name.

Rainbow Ready, Responding to the LGBTQ Culture with Grace and Truth, CMDS National Conference, 2017

Dr. Ted Fenske presented a remarkably complete and well rounded presentation of Christian physician interface with what I’ll call, Straight meets Queer.  I rudely came late but was truly impressed.The take home point was that to him homosexuality and all matters of gay culture were not a reflection of sexual brokenness in any special way but rather as part of a continuum of humaness and sin.  Christians hold that lifelong monogamous married loving sex and family are  biblical.  So Dr. Fenske pointed out that ‘Serial monogamy and promiscuity’ are no different as sin.  The Biblical bar is rather high. We are humans. There’s hope and grace.  The issue was that we as physicians are not there to judge and exclude but to include and  treat disease. He pointed out the high rates of suicide,  infectious disease, PTSD and violence in this community. I’d argue that much of this is simply the consequence of addiction.  He emphasized the need for physicians to treat the ill not judge them.  We have always done this. The idea that we ‘hate’ gays" is media driven narrative, a kind of fake news when it comes to Christian physicians.  We have always worked and served in the gay culture.  He reflected on our role in the Aids epidemic.  He went on to discuss the difficulties transexuals encountered.  Always he spoke with compassion and concern.
The Question and Answer period was really interesting.  Several Christian physicians worked in inner city clinics and spoke of their appreciation of the professional relationships and patients they had in the  gay culture. As someone who has been called heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, transvestite, divorced, serial monogamist, promiscuous,  and worst of all a sinner.  I felt strangely at home with this group of humble clinicians who appeared so much holier than me, not that I felt any less a clinician or a doctor even though I know the closer I am to Jesus the better I am a healer.   I shared how I’d corrected one gay man who insisted  that doing drugs was  being gay.  It was just good medicine to refer him to a treatment centre run by a gay counsellor in long term recovery.  I might not struggle with lust  as much as I do with the  Hagen Daz,   but I didn’t feel the  judgement in the air that I feel sometimes among those who insist they are for diversity.  But only if one is diverse like them.  The doctors who spoke seemed as  aware of their own brokenness in different ways as I am ever aware of my own. I didn’t see scapegoating here.    The take home message I most enjoyed was the goal was holiness not heterosexuality. Make Jesus the issue.

John 1:5

John 1: 5  “The light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it."
I read this today in the the one year Bible App. I’d read the Bible with a One Year Bible Book a decade or so again.  One of the times I read the Bible cover to cover realizing how each reading of the spiritual text provides a deeper meaning.  The app and the book simply break up the Bible into a daily reading which if one is religious about it results in the Bible being read fully by the end of the year.  Having done this several times I’ve missed days and either gone back and read those bits or just moved on staying with the calendar.
I’ve read John 1 countless times but today was comforted by this line today. “The light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not over come it."
I was thinking of cancer, fear and anger.  I was thinking also of prayer as that light. I was thinking of purpose and direction.  All those grand ideas and ideals that move life forward.  Those are the light. Like love.  They move forward into the darkness.  The mystery is solved as the light illuminates.
I lose faith so often and them am reminded of my personal insignificance but that despite that there is this oneness of force and energy I can tap into with prayer.  I can rise above my cynicism and negative and know that the darkness will not overcome the light.  The light pierces the darkness.
It’s a new day.  I’m off to work. There’s a theatre production tonight.  I’ve perused Facebook and seen that my friends are still there, each in their own lives most of them rather funny.  We share a lot of humour.  I love the humour of my friends.  Humour is a light.  Its is not overcome by the darkness of despair.
I love my psychiatrist mentor friend, Dr. Phillip Ney who said, “Bitter old people are a dime a dozen.  You can become one or choose to be something different.”
I’ll shower before going out to work today and put on some clean clothes.  I notice that most people ,except maybe those who I see at Walmart sometimes, late in the evening, still do this.  But few, including myself, dress up and clean up the insides.  I have such a tendency to complain, especially about government and taxes, to be negative about the waste and laws and bureaucracy.  I waste parts of my day complaining and even sometimes gossiping.  Here I am given this wonderful capacity of speech to sing praise and thanks and I use it to whine.  I must remember at least today to celebrate life.  The light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not over come it.
We will not be defeated.  Will will overcome.
Thank you God. Thank you Jesus.

Noah the Movie

Noah, the movie, is a Biblical story retold by writers Darren Aronofsky and Ari Handel.  Darren Aronofsky is also an amazing director.  The story is not exactly true to the Biblical tale I read in Sunday School, but really, close enough.  The story of Isaac gets mixed up in gender and time but otherwise it's all Noah.  This is a courageous suspenseful epic of the first order.  It truly captures the holy as well as Hollywood has ever done given its love of Caesar.
The first world is so corrupt that God brings a flood to cleanse it. Noah is advised by God to build an Ark. Two of every kind of living animals and bird and reptile comes aboard.  Noah wants to leave behind the corrupt. He and his family flee.  A new world begins.  I don’t think I’m ‘spoiling’ this once universally known western tale.  There are many other creation stories of floods and survival but this one is my favourite.  The movie mercifully does it justice.
Russell Crowe stars as Noah. Move over Charleston Heston when it comes to historical portrayal.  Jennifer Connelly stars as Noah’s wife Naameh.   Watching the two at the peak conflict I was reminded of the greatest duo performances of all time, Burton and Taylor and  Bogart and Bacall.  Jennifer Connelly matches the power and performance of Russell Crowe whose Noah is truly Shakespearian.  Anthony Hopkins plays Noah’s grandfather masterfully.  He’s a Gandalf type character and divinely human.Emma Watson brings wisdom and depth to the role of Ila, mother of the new world, wife of Shem. Ray Winstone’s portrayal of Tubal-Cain, the evil king, was masterfully human.  Logan Lerman captured the adolescent vengeful Ham to perfection.  Leo McHugh was a delightful young Japheth.  
I loved the whole movie. I couldn’t help but feel how we all would be better off if our movies were more real and inspirational as this one, rather than the too often propagandistic and distracting.  This is not a reality show. Thank God, the Kardashians aren't in it. The only Ducks are the quacking variety.   I would recommend this to everyone who wants to be touched by the greatness of theatre, the marvels of story and the best of directing and acting at it's finest.  

Mount Joy College, Hope Alive

Dr. Phillip Ney and Marie invited me to a dinner at Mount Joy College near Victoria.  Members and associates of the Hope Alive Counsellors would be present. I looked forward to an evening with Phillip. He’s so inspiring:  a brilliant academic, researcher, gifted psychiatrist, author of many books and countless articles, a world class sailor, world traveller, theologian and deep thinking Christian, father, husband and mentor. He founded the international scientifically based Hope Alive Counselling service to help women and families come to terms with the grief that followed abortion for so many.  He has devoted so much of his life to Pro Life, stopping the wanton killing of a whole generation.
Tonight he shared the Israeli doctors’ remark, “We are doing to our own people what Hitler wanted us to do. How can this be good."
I have long been appalled at all the Canadians who have died thanks to the madness of Morgentaller’s rage.
I had taken the ferry across driving my Mazda Miata M5 sportscar not anticipating the heavy snowfall that had me parking my Miata sport car half way of the mountain where Mount Joy College is.  I had to walk the rest of the way arriving just in time for dinner.  Gilbert, my cockapoo, was thoroughly delighted to meet Dr. Ney’s dogs, a shepherd and lab, Bosun and Star.  Together they ran circles around the place inside and out. Marie, Phillips wife and fellow physician, a genetics researcher  who left Paris for the west coast of Canada, is also a fabulous cook.  What a feast. Salmon and ham and salads and those scrumptious little potatoes I love so much, and more and more, with ice cream and apple something to top it off.
I’ve known Mel on line for years and we’ve communicated and shared patients but this was our first face to face. He’s as warm and knowledgeable in person.  I met Nikky, an electronics engineer and liked him right off.  Al, a construction contractor,  turned out to be the one who with Mel and Phillip had done so much of the work on the building we were in.  He, admitted he loved to work with his hands whether the tool was guitar or hammer,  and loved showing us the special features of this rustic complex with great hall, fabulous views and lots of furnished rooms for students and guests.
There was a  beautiful pianist from Toronto whose music was such a joy.  She and Al and Mel and Phillip so entertained us after the meal playing the songs that Phillip has composed for Hope Alive.  I love his simple messages and diverse uplifting music.  Together they played a blues pieces I especially loved.  Alex, a Catholic pro life advocate shared his love of his children and grand children. I enjoyed the men talking of the love of their children. Phillip and Maries, son now at university, was with us.  Another woman, the administrator, her name slips me, but her laughter I’ll never forget.  A couple shared the stories of their marriage and love and the love of their children.  We sat in comfortable couches about the wood burning stove or at the table where we had eaten and later shared tea.
We talked of the Bible, teachings. Phillip talked of the Hope Alive trainings in all the countries around the world where  counsellors, so many knew and loved,  were helping women and men deal with the devastations abortions had caused in their lives. So many post abortion had depressions which didn’t resolved till they came to terms with their terrible grief.   Phillip led us in prayer.  Eventually people had to leave.  The music concluded and the men stayed about talking before sleep called.  Then we went off to various rooms. Gilbert was disappointed his new friends Star and Bosun went off with Phillip to the family home.
I slept so well in the quiet of the country, awaking refreshed and content. I’d decided to stay on the West Coast a while longer despite my love hate with my boat and the increasing vulnerability in my work where the years of lacking resources and devolution of the health care system was increasingly telling on me.  Together we’d talked late into the night as each caring person expressed the same frustration with the feeling they are increasingly penalized and threatened  for being human. Legalism and militarization, perfectionism, and all the unrealistic demands. Drugs of stupidity,  abortion and now euthanasia were the ’new world order’.  It’s okay to be concerned.  Anyone awake would be.
I felt so much that I was not alone and wondered how I’d come to feel that the problem was mine and I alone had to solve it for myself.  That’s the beauty of Hope Alive.  Gathered together the most difficult decisions become simple in the presence of Phillip and other Christians.
It was a rushed morning gathering for church.  The trouble was the road down had filled with snow.  Alex’s truck got stuck up high while I got my Miata sportscar stuck half way down. My poor little miata like the city and highway royalty she is was very disturbed that I’d brought her to this wilderness with all this awful snow. We gave up trying to free it.  Together in one vehicles we headed out to church.  Marie had walked in the morning to her nearby mass.  We four men arrived late to the Bible Based Baptish church where the preacher was talking synchronistically about legalism and non conformity and the god of this world as compared to the need of a Christian  living up to the inner and outer ideals of Jesus.
I felt a bit like I was back in the church of my childhood, Trinity Baptist.  The curtains behind the minister concealed the full immersion pool.   I enjoyed standing and singing the closing hymn remembering singing like this with my mother, aunt, father and brother.  After we joined for fellowship over coffee and cookies.  I liked this part, meeting a biologist and talking more with Mel and Nikki.
Phillip drove us then then to Sooke to see the  great sailing ship, Horizon Unbound.  He takes families and youth out for trips around Vancouver Island. It sleeps 22.  I ‘d seen it once before when the mast wasn’t up and the insides weren’t finished. Then it was a real question mark to me if it really could become the sailing ship, Phillip envisioned. Well, here it was and good ship it is.  What a remarkable transformation.  it’s a veritable ocean going craft of skookum construction and design with back ups and safety features the very same as I made in my boat for my solo off shore sailing the Pacific.  Dr. Ney is an old Navy man and it sure tells in this durable ship.
Gilbert loved it too but he most loved a seal he met. He was startled and barked alarm but then got up the nerve to come closer. A fisherman had caught quite a few salmon and was throwing heads to the seal.
Back at Mount Joy College we began the feat of freeing all the vehicles.   First it we shovelled out Alex’s Ranger, then with Phillip in his jeep and a long rope pulling up hill, Phillips son on a come along to a tree keeping the truck from sliding sideways into the rock.  Amazingly we got it free. Marie had shovelling as well before deciding we all needed crackers and cheese for a snack.   Meanwhile Philip was under the vehicles tying ropes with bow hitches.
I provided weight in the back of the truck which I certainly had to contribute.  Then we  more easily cleared Phillips 4 by 4 which had become stuck trying to go around the Ranger.  After that it was my little Miata.  With a rope on the undercarriage I was able to drive the car backward while Phillip pulled downhill on a rope with his jeep. I turned the car around in a bare patch of road beneath a tree then drove the rest of the way down with Alex and Gilbert beside me.
At the bottom I did a happy dance.  Phillip had always had faith while I confess I was a doubting Thomas and amazed at the miracle of getting all the vehicles unstuck without any damage to undercarriage, paint jobs or bodies.
I thanked the Neys for their hospitality.   I really should have come in my truck but who would have guessed such an incredible snowfall.
It was a great weekend. We even celebrated Canada’s men’s hockey team winning the Winter Olympics against Sweeden. What an incredible time of good Christian fellowship, fine music, fine food, church, and ship and snow bound vehicle adventures.  It is never a dull moment around Mount Joy College and the Neys.

Revelations - Elaine Pagels

Revelations, "Visions, Prophecy and Politics in the Book of Revelations", by Elaine Engels was just published this year,2012, by Viking Press. Pagels is the Harrington Spear Paine Professor of Religion at Princeton University. I've so enjoyed previous books by her. The first I read was Gnostic Gospels, a thoroughly intriguing discussion of the questions raised by new digs uncovering gospels excluded by Constantine when Christianity became the state religion.  Her Beyond Belief, The Secret Gospel of Thomas was equally fascinating. Thomas is the one gospel that has been almost re included into the Bible by protestant authorities.  The Origin of Satan was disturbing to say the least. I may disagree with Professor Pagels findings but her research is impeccable and thoroughly thought provoking. Now there are other books of her that I've read including one on Judas. Now I'm excited to get down to reading Revelations. I've not been particularly interested in Revelations because it seemed so metaphoric.
The difficulty is finding time. I want to read Revelations in the Bible again also. I came across this book in Chapters looking for a gift for a friend, and now must find sometime to study what I really want to study.  Most of my life though I've been studying what I need to  for the sake of patients, something I love to do.  But there's been all this other reading I have to do which often isn't relevant to my life, or for  my patients but some how serves the interest of others with their own agendas.
I can't wait to read Pagels Revelations. Maybe with more prayer I may even gain some insights into Revelations, itself.  To date it has been a real mystery.

Inerrancy of the Bible

Fundamentalists have long held that the Bible is the 'true word of God'.  They insist that the Bible is without error.  It's painful at times to listen to the twisted and convoluted ways that they will explain and apologise for obvious 'errors' in the Bible.  These 'errors' may simply be scientific errors. The Bible was written before Copernicus.  The astronomy of the day was scientifically in error.  Perhaps the world revolved around the Sun back then and the sun rose rather than as we know today the 'earth' rises.  Perhaps the inconsistencies between the Gospels themselves weren't errors in observations or interpretation.
Yesterday is gone and the world of the Bible may well have been magical.  Alternatively though the Bible is clearly inspired truth, the world is a sinful place, a place of error by it's very nature. The joy of the Bible is perhaps that if it is read with prayer the truth about the Spiritual world, the nature of God, the true nature of this World, may be understood.
William Hordern in New Directions in Theology Today, 1966 stated "To both the Fundamentalist and the non conservative, it often seems that the new conservative is trying to say, "The Bible is inerrant, but of course this does not mean that it is without error."  Historically there was a lot of 'cherry picking' of the Bible.  One line was used to justify all manner of rude and inhuman carrying on.  Biblical study today encourages one to see individual parts of the Bible in terms of the whole.
Jesus said the whole of scripture could be summed up, "Love God and Love your neighbour as yourself."  This seems a central key.  Anything that seems to contradict this must be seriously challenged.  Anything that coincides with this central message of truth is by association true.  The Bible was written not as an historical text, a scientific text, a novel, a psychology, a sociology or any lesser part aspect of man's existence. It was written as a Holy Book. It is a book about God and man's relationship with God. Given the billions of people who have come closer to God thanks to this Holy Book, it's doing it's job.  The Bible doesn't err but men, such as I, certainly do.

The Evolution of God

http://www.evolutionofgod.net/

I'm really enjoying Robert Wright's book, the Evolution of God. Robert Wright taught philosophy at Princeton and religion at University of Pennsylvania. I'm 120 pages into this 459 page book which is written in a friendly manner which makes it the best seller it is. I picked it up at the airport as an "airplane" book. Its definitely not a 'beach book' though. I've found myself reading it with a pen and making notes in the margin and underling other points of interest. It's a book once read that I'll put in the library and probably refer to whether I agree with this philosopher theologian (oxymoron, if ever there was one). I don't know where he's going with this book either but I'm really enjoying the journey.

It's a myth smasher for sure. It's looking at the stories from Judaeism, Islam and Christianity that shaped the view of God that is present today. Wright draws from archeology and anthropology. I'm a big fan of Jared Diamond and Wright does to religion what Diamond does to economics.

I believe each day miraculously springs into existence and each moment is a God given fact but human interpretation of the unfolding of time, the universe and God seems always a matter of difference.

Wright first explores the Hunter Gatherer, Shaman and Chiefdon, developments and later looks at the 'warrior' gods and God which are part of the Yahweh tradition of the God of Abraham and indeed the God of Jacob. Archeologists have indeed uncovered so much of Canaan and Egypt that they're able to cross reference the highly edited biblical account of the Old Testament against what is found in the ground. "The story told in the Bible has in some cases been obliterated by story told in the ground." There was 'no mass exodus out of Egypt."

The development of monotheism indeed occurred in Egypt with Amun and Aten and it is quite possible that some of the herdsmen of Canaan were slaves and brought this back with them. It seems undeniable though that the Israelites were originally Canaanites and that their God was perceieved as one of the many Gods of the day. Why else would God be 'jealous', were there no other Gods. "Who is like thee, O Lord, among the Gods." Asks scriptures. The 'transcendent' God derives from the 'tribal' God of Gods. Whether there was ever more than one God with many dimensions, its pretty clear that the early Israelites were polytheistic , monolateralist, before their eventual monotheism.

El , the Canaan creator God of Northern Israel appears to coalesce with the Yahweh warrior God of southern Israel and the character of God grows.

Wright is really discussing at length the development of a Monotheism with ethical core and universalism.

Given the editing and 're editting' of the Bible the question does arise at how much of the 'story' survived given the later writers desire to paint Israel in the best light and show their God as the best and only God.

It's equally not surprising that Jesus got crucified for 'messing' with this. Wright is definitely 'messing' himself. I am enjoying reading him as he does, like Jesus, question the Phillistines of then and now. Certainly God, of Jesus and the Bible, are big enough to take a little poking from this very fine scholar.

I'm looking forward to reading more, whether I agree or not. Of course I could be consorting with the devil. Listening to the woman talking about the apple is what got us into trouble in the first place. But since we're still talking and sometimes listening to women I am willing to listen to Wright even if at the end of his book I'll have to smite him for 'heresy'. Better still I could "censor" him and 'blacklist' him and maybe even call his writing 'smut'. Much as I prefer smiting, the God of Jesus and God of the Bible is today a forgiving God.

Damn.

The Greatest Commandment

The Greatest Commandment
One of the teachers of the law came and heard them debating. Noticing that Jesus had given them a good answer , he asked him. “Of all the commandments, which is the most important?”
The most important one,” answered Jesus,”is this: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength. The second is this: “Love your neighbor as yourself. There is no greater commandment than these.”
Mark 12 : 28-31
Cherry picking , when it comes to the Bible is taking passage out of context of the entire message of the Bible which is summed up by Jesus in the “Greatest Commandment”.