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Where Do You Get Your Morals From?: Lot's Story (i.imgur.com)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/atheism@lemmy.world
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[–] 52 points 2 years ago (4 children)

I've been getting into some early Christian / Biblical textual analysis and history and apparently the people who wrote the Sodom story would not have understood the concept of homosexuality as an orientation, their conception was entirely act-based and focused on penetrator vs penetrated.

So this story, the primary anti-gay biblical story, is better understood as showing the Sodomites violating Guest Right, and Lot being such a good host that he expends resources (gives away his daughters to be raped) to keep his guests safe.

Just goes to show how cultural context is important in reading texts.

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  • [–] 9 points 2 years ago*

    The preceding chapter is all about Abraham badgering God over the destruction of a city. He starts by saying "Okay, but would you destroy the city if fifty of its inhabitants didn't deserve it? What about forty-five? Forty? Thirty? Ten, even?" And in the end, God sends Angels down to pull the last righteous man in Sodom out of town before its destroyed.

    The guest right passage is intended to illustrate him as a self-less man who would stand at the door before an angry mob to protect his new friends.

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  • [–] 8 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    apparently the people who wrote the Sodom story would not have understood the concept of homosexuality as an orientation, their conception was entirely act-based and focused on penetrator vs penetrated.

    This is true for every culture except the current postmodern context in which we find ourselves.

    The development of our current understanding of sexuality is a byproduct of the Green Revolution and the massive abundance of food in the western world. When you're hungry or in fear of being hungry, sex occupies less of your mind.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago

    The story of Lut in Quran is explicitly about homosexuality. Idk how well they understood homosexuality but they were at least aware of it well before the green revolution

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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago

    I love that it's an anti-gay story, and it was completely made up. Sodom and Gomorrah were not real places. The guy who wrote Genesis literally couldn't think of a real world reason why homosexuality or just sodomy was immoral so he made up a fairy tale.

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  • [–] [S] 3 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    Maybe it's the primary anti-gay story, but aren't there verses about "not lying with a man as with a woman"? And the punishment for that is to be stoned to death?

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  • [–] 8 points 2 years ago

    There is, but the translation is not perfect and I have seen the argument that the Hebrew translates closer to "you shall not lie with a close male relative as you would your wife" since there is a lot of incest mentioned in the list of prohibitions, or I've also seen it argued that it's implying "male sex worker", the word for "man" in that passage is not the normal word for "man" used in the rest of the Bible.

    And I have also heard the context of the entire section being about priestly purity, so it's more like you wouldn't be able to perform rituals after having the wrong type of sex until you are purified, but it's on the same level as women being unclean when they are menstruating.

    But the better argument to me is that Leviticus is specifically part of the Jewish Law, and people since the Apostle Paul have been saying you can't keep the Jewish Law and be a good Christian, because Jesus replaced all those rules. So it's actually a sin if you're Christian and insisting people abide by the rules in Levitivus.

    (This is why I think this stuff is interesting)

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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    But married heteros doing oral, anal, mutual masturbation, or sex during a period is all forbidden. Yet all queer hating Christians don't speak out against any of that hetero/married sin.

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