Jasmine,

I welcome your decision to live as you believe God intended you to live.  Perhaps you need to give your mother some time.  How long did it take you to realize that you had such feelings and develop them?  Years, perhaps. It may take her twice that time to accept you and may never fully understand you. You need to show your mother love and patience and understanding and simply give her time.  Pray for her and tell her you are praying that the two of you again become close and understand and appreciate each other as you once did.  This is a very difficult experience for any parent.  I will pray for the both of you.

Andriy

1,600 years of Orthodox persecution of homosexuals and you want me to be the model of civility, courtesy, and Christian-like tolerance, and say, “Let’s all play nice,” with people who are preaching today the same unthinking homophobic claptrap that was the justification for persecuting homosexuals, even burning them at the stake for centuries by the Orthodox, who were ever so polite and never raised their voices as they committed their heinous crimes.

There is more than one kind of oppression. Some forms come with a sweet smile, as during the Spanish Inquisition, a crime committed by the Orthodoxy, by the way, when the Grand Inquisitor, as he was sending heretics–men who disagreed with the Orthodoxy–off to be tortured in an underground chamber or off to be burned at the stake, would sweetly smile and ever so civil, courteous, and Christian-like intone, “This is for the good of your soul, my son.” I’m not kidding. I can’t make that stuff up.

I’m through with being nice to homophobes who are guilty of using the same justification for persecuting homosexuals today that Orthodoxy has been deploying for 1,600 years.

Modern Orthodox members may not say they’re advocating blood in the streets, but that’s only because they know they can’t get away with it, what with iphones all around. I only slightly exaggerate. But I’m not exaggerating when I accuse them of advocating the spiritual persecution of homosexuals and the social stigmatization of them with arguments that cannot be defended, which has been proven by my posts.

And you prove my point, too. Instead of answering a single point, not a single, solitary one, that I made, you, like the Grand Inquisitor, urge civility, courtesy, and Christian-like behavior while you’re sticking it to me.

Have you even read Anonymous’ posts or Takis’ for that matter? Their judgmentalism of my point of view is palpable. They condemn my ideas without answering them. You condemn my manner without answering them. I’m not impressed. I know what you’re up to. I’ve run into it before.

In response to the UNFORGIVABLE 1,600 year old jihad against homosexuals by the Orthodox Church, I’ve declared a jihad against the homophobic jihadists. I don’t care who they are or how old they are, including the ever so polite, sweetly smiling, patient, civil, courteous, and Christian-like jihadists.

Christ compared Himself to homosexuals without condemning them nor calling them to repentance. What, then, are we to think of the Orthodox Church’s persecution of them?

Now you know where I’m coming from, I hope.

Having been joined with Your divinity, having been made Your most pure Body, I see the beauty. I reflect the Light of Your grace! And I wonder completely embarassed as to where I should sit, and what I should approach, and where I should put Your members down. What things shall I do, for what deeds shall I use the awesome and the divine?

Goethe meanwhile would say: “I have my frogs as my favourite company on earth”

(….)

And tell me how can anyone then have any form of sexual relations that are not (at least) ‘procreative’ and in ‘marriage’? I am jsut as ensleaved as the next person to them and more, but I do have the question… don’t you? How can one take holy communion and then be sodomised?
I am certainly NOT ever saying to punish anyone, I am just saying that we are called for something far higher than modernity’s language of constant self-justification calls to.

Wow! man! do you even realize how many conclusions you jump into?
It does NOT serve what you are saying well, (if anything, someone who jumps into your type of accusations come across as slightly delusional, and intolerant – all in the name of come “clarity of reasoning” and “tolerance”) I might not fully agree with either of the parties – but this conversation does feel like it is wasting anyone’s time because of your uncecessary long comments, not because of the other guys with whom I won’t get into an argument.
They do not sound like they are going to ‘spill any blood’ as you accuse them (!) and one is old -not young as you assume (!) – it would have been nice if this conversation was kept a little more civil, couteous and Christian-like as well as more to the point?

This is a two-fer.

I do confess to being a talker. That’s because when I get started it’s all free association, synapses firing in all directions. I compose music in the same way. I try to give form to my posts by replying point by point. But I know I digress. I don’t think, however, that my digressions are irrelevant. My experiences in the struggle count, too.

Having said that, you two have wasted my time. You’re not interested in ideas, which is precisely what is wrong with the orthodox membership today, or many of them, they who relish remaining ignorant while gripping ever tighter to their increasingly discredited, narrow, unscientific homophobic orthodoxy that has nothing to do with Jesus’ words nor His life, mindlessly repeating their orthodox mantras as if to ward off the rising flood of scientific knowledge swirling all around them.

Orthodox homophobia is killing young men and making the lives of those who don’t kill themselves a living hell. I think the time has come for men like I to speak out and against orthodoxy’s guilt, the hands of the orthodox dripping with the blood of the innocent, of them whom they have tormented over the centuries and continue to torment because of their homosexual nature, such as the disgraceful head of the Russian Orthodox Church today.

You refuse to read a few pages total I posted that would take no more time than your reading the morning newspaper or Matt Drudge. In fact, after posting them, I read over them keeping my fingers crossed that I wouldn’t find too many typos. Didn’t take that long. Bet you waste more time than that every day.

I sense a total absence of intellectual curiosity in you. So, yes, I agree with you, it would be a burden for you to read a few pages of argument that exposes your beliefs as indefensible. Your last post is a confession, whether you know it or not, that you’re incapable of responding to my critique of homophobic orthodoxy. Furthermore, you don’t even want to.

When Jesus was 12 He accompanied His parents to Jerusalem for Passover. When they left for home Jesus stayed behind in Jerusalem. His parents that night found Him missing and went back to Jerusalem to search for Him. Three days later they found Him in the Temple disputing with the teachers of Law, fielding deep questions with them and amazing them with His answers, His understanding far greater than theirs.

Now, three days is a long time. Longer than reading my posts would take. And He wasn’t mindlessly repeating, like you and Anonymous, rote memorizations of orthodox dogma. How do we know that? Because the teachers of the Law were amazed with His answers, that’s how. A 12 year old merely repeating the words of others He had memorized would not have amazed them.

Now, we know that the Jewish tradition is disputatious. Ever been to an orthodox Jewish yeshiva? Nothing but disputation over the Law using logical reasoning. So we know that the teachers of the Law were disputing with Jesus. And he fielded their questions with aplomb for three days. He didn’t complain, like you two, about how the conversation wasn’t what He thought it would be.

And to confirm my suspicion, you never attempted to respond to a single point I posted, appealing to heaven as what you think is a plausible excuse for your short-fall. It appears to me that all you two are interested in on this site is confirmation of your preconceived orthodox homophobic bullshit. I’ve seen how you push Andre around because he isn’t homophobic.

I have discovered that you’re not interested in exchanging ideas in dispute, as Jesus was, but rather in bloviating repetitiously your orthodox catechism. Be my guest. But don’t expect me to find it in the slightest interesting.

Except, unlike you, I will slog through your repetitious meaningless posts, full of ambiguous, other-worldly, and therefore, other-than-Christ language that sounds to you so important and deep precisely because of its other-worldliness, but to me sounds like cotton candy for the religiously deluded that, I suppose, supplies some deficiency you feel.

I’m no mind reader. But I’m good at smelling a rat, meaning I’m good at sniffing out a compensatory strategy to help cope with feelings of inadequacy in some personal aspect or other. In that case, religion becomes a pretext, not a faith.

I’ve run before into the ploy you attempt to use on me, a threat really, that because I don’t swallow your “orthodox truth on the matter of homosexuality” I’m beyond the pale, the Spirit has left the conversation. Orthodox ignoramuses, university professors of religion no less, in my own Church have tried that ploy on me when they found they couldn’t defend their usual claptrap against my objections. I’m unimpressed by such an obvious defense mechanism.

One thing you said, Anonymous, that intrigued me is that you find relevant the first-hand experiences of the Saints with heavenly matters. I, too, take such experiences of others seriously. And because of you I’m going to read about them. Any suggestions who?

But I don’t surrender my mind to them. And you do. How do I know that? Because immediately after you said that you quickly reminded me that you would rather be part of what the Saints say in consideration of their first-hand experiences with heavenly matters–so far so good–than rely on your own or anyone else’s fallen reasoning.

Why is reasoning always in your mind fallen? Why is it either-or to your way of thinking? Why can’t you do both, as the Scriptures even tell you to do, study the Scriptures, even what the Saints say, though what they say is not Scripture, plus reasoning?

Did not Jesus use reasoning in the Temple when He was disputing with the teachers of the Law? Again, He amazed them with His answers. They wouldn’t have been amazed if all He did was show how much dogma a 12 year old could memorize. He was involved for three days in a free-for-all, exchanging back and forth, using reasoning to field their, no doubt, increasingly pointed questions. It would be human nature for them to test Him on His ability to land on His field more and more as He amazed them more and more with His landing on His feet.

You harm yourself by calling the only thing about us that is like God, our rational faculty, “fallen.”

Don’t forget to guide me to some reading material about the Saints.

Question Anonymous: Did any Saint address homosexuality in particular such that he said indulging in one’s desire for another man in and of itself is a sin? If so, who?