What the Bible says about LGBTQ people

(This is lifted from a response I wrote to someone on Quora.)

Genesis 19:4 Before they had gone to bed, all the men from every part of the city of Sodom—both young and old—surrounded the house. 5 They called to Lot, “Where are the men who came to you tonight? Bring them out to us so that we can have sex with them.”

Yes, pretty bad. This is, however, a story about gang rape, which I would say is bad regardless of the gender of the victims. Do you think gang rape is only bad when the victims are male? Then you must approve of the gang rape in Judges 19, right?

Judges 19:22 While they were enjoying themselves, some of the wicked men of the city surrounded the house. Pounding on the door, they shouted to the old man who owned the house, “Bring out the man who came to your house so we can have sex with him.” 23 The owner of the house went outside and said to them, “No, my friends, don't be so vile. Since this man is my guest, don't do this outrageous thing. 24 Look, here is my virgin daughter, and his concubine. I will bring them out to you now, and you can use them and do to them whatever you wish. But as for this man, don't do such an outrageous thing.” 25 But the men would not listen to him. So the man took his concubine and sent her outside to them, and they raped her and abused her throughout the night, and at dawn they let her go.

Totally acceptable behavior, right? Oh, but Ezekiel says:

Ezekiel 16:49 “Now this was the sin of your sister Sodom: She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy. 50 They were haughty and did detestable things before me. Therefore I did away with them as you have seen.”

like being inhospitable to me; but then what's more inhospitable than gang rape? Let's move on to Leviticus, shall we?

Leviticus 18:22 “Do not have sexual relations with a man as one does with a woman; that is detestable.”

There's that “detestable” again, or, as whatever source you're using says, “abomination”. Do you know what else is an “abomination” (same Hebrew word תּוֹעֵבָה)?

• Egyptians eating at the same table as Jews (Genesis 43:32)
• Jews making a sacrifice in view of Egyptians (Exodus 8:26)
• Eating pork or shellfish (Deuteronomy 14:3)
• Remarriage to your ex-wife (Deuteronomy 24:4)
• Having different size weights in your house (Deuteronomy 25:16)

Wow. Nonetheless, I do think this verse is describing something very serious, due to a different Hebrew word. The word translated “man” here is not the Hebrew word for man (אִישׁ) but another word (זָכָר), that is sometimes translated “young male". A lot of translations older than the KJV, particularly in other languages, translate this word to be “boy”, making this verse about pederasty. The fact that pedophilia is a terrible thing, but the Bible addresses it nowhere (else) seems very odd. The rest of the sexual sins listed in Leviticus 18 have reasons why they are wrong, but this one doesn't. If it's about pedophilia, does it really need an explanation?

Romans 1:18 The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people, who suppress the truth by their wickedness, 19 since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. 20 For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse. 21 For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. 22 Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools 23 and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like a mortal human being and birds andnimals and reptiles. 24 Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. 25 They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen. 26 Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones. 27 In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed shameful acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their error. 28 Furthermore, just as they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, so God gave them over to a depraved mind, so that they do what ought not to be done. 29 They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. They are gossips, 30 slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents; 31 they have no understanding, no fidelity, no love, no mercy. 32 Although they know God's righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practice them.

This is the whole of the Romans passage, to give context. As you can see from verse 23, it’s about idolatry. This is about why idolatry is wrong, and what idolatry does to a person who practices it. While verse 27 is clearly about men having sex with men, verse 26 is actually not about women having sex with women; people just think that because of the proximity to verse 27, but if you look, it's not there. “Natural sexual relations” is a euphemism for procreative sex; these women are probably practicing anal and oral sex with men as temple prostitutes. So what about verse 27? While it’s men having sex with men, these are clearly heterosexual men who have become perverted because it says they “abandoned natural relations with women” and “God gave them over to shameful lusts…and received in themselves the due penalty”. This doesn't sound like homosexuals, because gay men didn't leave women and then feel penalized for having sex with men; they like having sex with men! These are apparently heterosexual men that got perverted sexually because they perverted worship, and they aren't actually enjoying themselves. As you can see from the last few verses, they also developed a lot of other problems besides sexual ones.

1 Corinthians 6:9 Or do you not know that wrongdoers will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: Neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers nor men who have sex with men 10 nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God. 11 And that is what some of you were. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God.

Here's 1 Corinthians 6:9 with context from the NIV. The phrase “men who have sex with men” in many other translations is rendered “homosexuals”, but it’s a translation of two Greek words, μαλακοι and αρσενοκοιται. Now, μαλακοι is a word we know the meaning of, it essentially means “soft" and was a word that 1st century Jews used as a pejorative for clean-shaven gentiles; what that would have to do with sex is unclear. The other word, αρσενοκοιται, is a word that, despite what your source claims, nobody knows what Paul meant by it, because this is the first place the word ever appeared in Greek literature: Paul made it up. If It’s supposed to mean “homosexuals”, it’s a bit odd, because 5th century church father John the Faster wrote a letter to a fellow pastor expressing concern that some of the men in his congregation might have committed “αρσενοκοιτια” (English supposedly “homosexuality”) with their wives. How does a man commit homosexuality with his wife? The word likely is a sexual sin as it includes a root meaning “bed", but the nature of the sexual sin is unknown. (When Martin Luther translated the Bible into German, he translated αρσενοκοιται as “boy molester”, whatever that is worth.) The thing is, no Bible in any language translated this word into “homosexuals” before the 1946 Revised Standard Version, of which the head of the translation team later admitted that it was a poor choice. It was fixed in the NRSV, but in the meantime, scores of translators followed the RSV’s lead and made the same translation choice.

So now, millions of Christians, many of whom were already homophobic most likely, got confirmation from badly translated Bible verses that “homosexuals” were bad people, this despite verse 11, which says that whatever all of the sins that are listed in verses 9-10 are, they're things you can put behind you when you are saved. Meanwhile, thousands of young gay and transgender Christian kids are praying fervently for God to fix them, and that prayer never gets answered. Is God unable to fix those “sins", like God has limited power on what sins he can set someone free from? Of course not! God can fix any sin, don't you agree? Modern science has taught us that sexual orientation and gender are things that we are born with, however. In other words, God makes LGBTQIA children. And God doesn't make mistakes!

The Bible never condemns homosexuality, and it never says anything at all about transgender people.

It's not a living, but could it be?

I recently read a book by an online marketer who has this whole system for supposedly making a living through writing. Definitely, like many writers of all sorts, I’ve got an interest in the idea, but I also have my doubts.

I’ve never tried to monetize any of my online work, and I’ve never had enough of an online following to make it seem worthwhile. I would consider the idea certainly if my content were a bit less eclectic, and that garnered a real following. I figure I would focus on writing about topics related to religion, as that’s my greatest area of interest, but is that marketable?

The idea of writing about religion and getting paid for it isn’t far-fetched; there are plenty of people who do that for a living, even on Substack. It seems like a lot of these people have some sort of formal training, however. I follow Father Nathan Monk, but I assume as a priest, he’s been to seminary. The sort of stuff that I would write about would probably be similar to a lot of what he writes about, and while I don’t believe he makes a living off of writing, he’s got a respectable following, at least.

Anyway, it seems like being more focused would be a plus in having a following. While I enjoy writing on a wide range of topics, and don’t think I’ll stop doing that here at least, I think someone who’s a paid subscriber wants some consistency. I know the few people that I have paid subscriptions for are consistently writing on specific topics I’m interested in. I do follow a few people who are more eclectic like me, but not with paid subscriptions.

So if anyone is still reading, what do you think? Is there an audience out there for an agnostic Christian writing about issues of faith and doubt?

The story of Lance Twiggs

So this is just a rant about what I feel I am seeing happen in Utah right now. As you well know, so long as you haven't been living under a rock, on September 10th, Charlie Kirk was assassinated at a public event in Utah, just as he happened to be talking with someone about transgender mass shooters. Kirk, being a darling of the far-right, was assumed by many to have been shot by a far-left activist. Many on the right essentially called for a war against the left in America.

Then, the shooter was caught, and it was, in fact, a white conservative Christian male, as so many shooters are. Etchings on the bullet casings seemed to point to the shooter being a member of the Groyper movement, essentially neo-Nazi trolls. This was, of course, a bit of a letdown for Kirk's fans, who were really itching for a fight with the left.

So then, the whole story makes a swing way out into left field. The shooter lived in an apartment with other men his age. One of them was named Lance Twiggs, and when he was interviewed, he was dressed in an animal onesie.

 

This is where the official story goes from there: the FBI claims to have gotten hold of texts between the shooter and Twiggs. These texts revealed that Twiggs was in fact the shooter's transgender girlfriend, and the real reason for Kirk's assassination was retribution for his transphobia.

There have been a lot of articles in the news about the relationship with Twiggs, and what sort of a person Twiggs was. In none of these articles does anyone who knew him refer to Twiggs as transgender, or use feminine pronouns for him. Many people have commented on how the texts don't sound like they were written by someone the shooter's age. Personally, I keep questioning what transgender woman (as the vast majority of transgender people rename themselves after coming out) names herself "Lance".

I actually have friends who are believing the official story, but to me, it sounds like completely fabricated bullshit to place the blame for the death of Kirk on transgender people. What do others think?

Does life begin at conception?

Okay, let's break this down. The most common thing I hear about a fertilized egg being a "person" and how life "begins at conception" is this argument that "it's a living thing in a woman's body that has different DNA". There's a big problem with this.

That's also an apt description of a cancerous tumor, or a parasite. If this is really what you have as your argument, then you are effectively arguing that we shouldn't treat cancer and we shouldn't try to remove a parasite. Is that what you want?

"But the 'unborn baby' has human DNA!" you respond. Yes, this fertilized egg has human DNA, but do you really want to call anything with human DNA a "person" and claim that killing it is "murder"? Biologists and doctors estimate that fully half of all fertilized eggs fail to survive nine months for purely natural reasons, most of them from simply failing to implant. That means that every time you have unprotected sex and the woman is fertile, there's a 50% chance that you are committing murder. All that "trying to have a baby" stuff? You're a serial killer.

Oh, it gets worse. So much worse. You know what else is alive in a woman's body that has different human DNA? Egg cells. They're alive, and each one is a potential baby. If you're a woman who has a menstrual cycle, once a month your body releases one (at least, could be more; I have fraternal twins) egg cell, which has about 24 hours to live and get fertilized. Every time you ovulate and you don't get pregnant, you've committed murder, at least according to your logic. It was alive, with its own human DNA, and you murdered that "unborn baby".

But of course, it's so much worse for men, because, according to the internet, "A healthy adult male can release between 40 million and 1.2 billion sperm cells in a single ejaculation." Each one is a living thing with its own unique human DNA, and how many will actually end up fertilizing an egg? This isn't murder, it's fucking genocide. Hundreds of millions of "unborn babies" with every single ejaculation.

Is this ridiculous? Yes it is.

Now those of us who are a little more sane about these things say that saying a fertilized egg is a person is like saying throwing a couple eggs with flour and sugar in a bowl is a cake. A cake and a person are both things that start with certain ingredients, but take time and a process in order to be complete. A bag of flour is not a cake. Flour, sugar, and eggs in a bowl is not a cake. Flour, sugar, and eggs mixed together in a cake pan and set in a cold oven is not a cake. That cake pan ten minutes later in a warm oven is still not a cake. It's not a cake until it has spent the full time at the full temperature in the oven and has been taken out. Then, and only then, is it a cake.

So it is with a baby.

It's artificial, but it's not intelligence

So my phone's battery was dying, and as sometimes occurs to me in such situations, I thought maybe I should turn it off to save the last bit of the battery in case I needed it for an emergency. I pulled out my phone and pressed down on the power button, which had always in the past been the way to shut down the phone, but a recent software update had apparently changed that. I was greeted by a message that I had activated the "AI assistant" for my phone now, and what would I like to ask it? There was no option to shut off the assistant, or to shut off the phone, and I struggled in vain to pull up the phone's settings and find the setting that would reprogram the button to do what it used to. The phone died.

This was more than simply a minor frustration. I don't want an AI assistant on my phone. I just want to use my phone the same as I always have. I'm tired of the way AI chatbots have become so pervasive in our society, and I want it to stop.

Earlier this year, I applied for a job. To my dismay, I found that the job application process was gatekept by an AI chatbot. It asked me if I would prefer an interview on Tuesday at 11:00 or 2:30. I responded that neither was convenient for me. The bot said, "Okay, let me know if there is anything else I can help you with." It couldn't help me with scheduling an interview at a different time. It couldn't connect me with a human. It couldn't seem to actually help me in any way, and it was my only contact at the company I had applied to. I never got an interview.

I don't want an AI assistant on my phone, but I also don't want one on my search results. I don't want AI to sum up what's happening on my social media, or to help me write a post. I don't want AI to help me navigate your website or to rewrite my resume. I certainly don't want AI to manage my health insurance coverage or the operations of my government.

One of the biggest problems with AI is that the I is supposed to stand for "Intelligence", which seems to be completely lacking in the AI chatbots that tech companies are presenting us with. They seem to be rather accomplished at sounding fairly human, but not so accomplished at actually thinking about what they have to say. They'll say whatever sounds like the right thing to say based on sentences that they have read, rather than what might be actual fact. And that seems to be the state of the science as it now stands.

This is problematic on many different levels, one of which is the amount of misinformation that is out there in the world that no doubt was a big part of the data that was fed into these language models. The other part is that people seem to be very ready to trust AI to feed them "facts", completely oblivious to the fact that that's not what they are programmed to do. I had an argument with a woman on social media on an important topic, and on her side of the conversation, there was a lot of, "ChatGPT says..." I couldn't seem to explain to her that ChatGPT was not actually a source for factual information, and she just kept going back to ChatGPT for her source. I know this will not be the last time I have such a conversation.

The other problem with this technology, for those not in the know, is the fact that it requires a massive amount of energy to operate. Behind these bots are data centers that are using up a great deal of power, and also using literal tons of water to cool their processors. All of this just to supply users with more sophisticated sounding misinformation.

I don't want to be part of it. More than that, I want to make it go away, because I feel like it's hurting our society. It's not artificial intelligence, it's artificial stupidity, and it seems like people who use it stop using their brains. But like so much technology in the past, it's out there, and there's no putting the genie back in the bottle.

A Plea for Understanding

Senator Padilla (D), Senator Schiff (D), Representative Levin (D)

I’ve come to a point where I feel there is no use in pleading with you anymore. I have written countless letters and signed dozens of petitions asking you to stop, but you continue. My Representative and my Senators insist on voting for every new shipment of weapons to Israel, in violation of Leahy Laws, international law, and common decency.

The world has changed since the Holocaust. What the Nazis were able to do largely in secret would never be a secret in the 21st century. What is happening in Palestine is a genocide, livestreamed to the world. Not only do Palestinians record the atrocities committed against them, but Israeli soldiers themselves proudly video themselves committing them and post them on social media.

Virtually everyone knows now. There are very few people who are uninformed despite mainstream western media refusing to cover it for the most part. It’s genocide, and there are only those who oppose genocide, and those who support it. Apparently the U.S. government, along with the governments of a handful of other countries, are supporters. Democrats and Republicans alike know full well that war crimes are being committed by the IDF daily, and yet they send more weapons. No matter what the people say, the weapons will continue to flow into this genocide until every last Palestinian is dead.

So at this point, I feel the only recourse I have is to ask, “Why?” If you won’t end the genocide, can you at least tell me why it is necessary in your mind? Is it the case that since Jews were the victims of a genocide, they have free reign to commit genocide in turn? Is it that genocide doesn’t matter when the victims are brown skinned? Is it because Muslims are inherently evil in your mind (despite the fact that some Palestinians are Christians, and Israel doesn’t care)? Is it once again about money, as the Israelis want to build a canal right through Gaza, or so I have heard? What is it in your mind that makes genocide acceptable? Please, explain it to me.

It’s not about the hostages, as Hamas has on many occasions offered to release the hostages under very reasonable conditions. It’s not even really about Hamas, as Israel has consistently throughout the past 21 months targeted civilians, mainly killing women and children. No, it’s about putting an end to Palestinians once and for all, which is genocide. We all know it, including you. But you send more weapons still.

So tell me, what is it that you tell yourself this is all about? What allows you to see your bombs dropped on defenseless children, and you sleep at night? I myself have a hard time sleeping knowing that my taxes are paying for this. But you apparently have the answer. Please, let me know.

And Tango Makes Controversy

So, many years ago, I was rather proud to say that my blog was one of the leading sources for introspective posts on the subject of gay penguins. I wanted to talk about gay penguins again, because it seems to be a topic that never ceases to be a fount of subject material.

 

In particular, I wanted to talk about book banning and the children's book And Tango Makes Three. It's a delightful book based on the true story of New York Zoo penguins Roy and Silo who paired up for mating season; both were male penguins. The zookeepers, noting that obviously Roy and Silo could not produce an egg, found an egg that was not being tended to and gave it to the couple. The egg hatched into a baby girl penguin named Tango, and they were a penguin family with two dads. It's a cute true story about some penguins, who wouldn't love it?

Well, And Tango Makes Three was the #1 most challenged book for 2006 through 2010 (except for 2009, when it was merely #2), and continues to be a target for book banners in 2025, twenty years after its initial publishing. What's so offensive?

It's conservative Christians' belief that any media that touches on the subject of LGBTQIA+ individuals (even animals!) is immediately classified as pornographic. This is a very strange viewpoint which defies logic other than the logic of bigotry.

See, apparently if you talk about two men being in love with each other, it's inherently implying the existence of gay sex, and sex is porn. Never mind that the existence of heterosexual couples likewise implies the existence of sex (especially if the couple has children), but of course, straight sex is somehow less pornographic than gay sex. Oh, and transgender people are also somehow pornographic by their very existence, even though gender is separate from sex. (Imagine if Finding Nemo had given mention of the fact that clownfish are transsexual in nature; there goes your G rating, right?)

A part of this aversion to LGBTQIA+ subject material for children is this strange idea that exposing children to the idea of gay people (and penguins!) will make them turn gay, and exposure to transgender people will make them turn transgender. This is despite the fact that science continues to assert that sexual orientation and gender are determined before birth, and the fact that children who are exposed to exclusively cishet media still turn out LGBTQ. Listen people, you're not protecting children; you may in fact be hurting children who are enriched by the existence of diversity in the media they consume. And LGBTQIA+ children (who, sorry, not sorry, but they do exist) will love to have representation in the books and films they see.

Anyway, in the end, it's not really about protecting anyone from inappropriate material, unless of course you have a warped idea about what constitutes "inappropriate" based on bigoted ideas of of what's acceptable. There used to be (and still are) a lot of people who felt that media portrayal of mixed-race couples was inappropriate. We've mostly evolved as a society past that, and we need to evolve past stigmatizing LGBTQIA+ people. And penguins.