Replying to @abdiyaps @Jason #lgbt #bible

Okay, so you can find in the Bible where it condemns the act of a man who lies with another man as with a woman. Isn't that just the same as condemning homosexual sex? No. So human acts take on their meaning and character not just from being the physical act that they are, but from being that act in the context of a particular culture with particular beliefs, particular roles, particular values. In order to make the point, let's take another example. Imagine that I described an act in which one male has oral sex with another male. You might immediately think, "Oh, he's describing an act of homosexual sex," because you would think of that act within the context of your own culture. But then I would tell you that it's not within your own culture, it's within the culture of the Symbari people of Papua New Guinea. Out Symbari culture has extremely rigid gender roles and is very suspicious of women. So at a young age, say seven, eight, they take young males and they separate them from their mothers and they attempt to drain the femaleness out of them and fill them up with the maleness. Now this is achieved via a set of activities, one in which sticks are shoved into the nasal cavity producing blood, thus draining the feminine from the young boys. Second, the boys participate in oral acts with post-pubescent but pre-adult males so as to ingest maleness. Now notably, if a male continued to participate in these activities into adulthood, they would likely be rejected by the society. Having become males, they are expected to get wives, have sex with them and not have any desire for sex with other males. So here's the question, is the act that these young males participate in a homosexual sex act? Now if we just meant the biological act, the answer would be clearly yes. But hopefully something in your mind says, hold on, there's something wrong about that. And that's because this act clearly has none of the same meaning that a homosexual sex act would have in our culture. And this is something like what biblical scholars mean when they say that, the same sex acts described in the Bible are not homosexual sex in our sense and certainly do not refer to homosexuals. When the Bible talks about a male who lies with a male as with a female, it's talking about an act in a culture where the act, the power relations, the gender roles, the conceptions of sex are quite different from our own. And those people who do think it's about homosexual sex are really importing their own culture into their reading of the Bible. So yeah, I hope that helps explain some of the conceptual background of biblical studies on this issue.