Extracted from :

From: davephx@primenet.com (Dave Hutchison)
Subject: Re: Homosexuality Is Perfectly Natural
Date: 11 Dec 1995 16:03:26 -0700
Organization: Liberated Christians
Lines: 162
Sender: root@primenet.com
Message-ID: <30ccb89f.1672631@news>

Gino Filippelli <101345.1043@compuserve.com> wrote:

>The Lord made Adam for Eve, and Eve for Adam. The Lord destroyed
>Sodom and Gommorah for their homosexual activities. The Lord
>plainly condemns it-so do I!

What ignorance. Where on earth to you get these ideas? Surely your not a Christian!

Sodom and Gomorrah

Some teach that the sins of Sodom and Gomorrah was homosexual. This has no theological support. A careful look at scripture corrects such ignorance.

Perhaps one of the most misleading term in English is the use of the word sodomy to describe anal penetration and/or male homosexuality. The mere fact of this linguistic development sealed in the minds of many English speaking people that Sodom was destroyed because of homosexuality. The Church's false teaching on this issue is an abomination and travesty, not loving homosexuals that are unfairly condemned by this ignorance.

God appeared to Abraham telling him that he and Sara would have a child and they were going to investigate the wickedness in Sodom & Gomorrah. Thinking God would destroy the cities, Abraham made a deal with God, that He would not destroy the cities if 10 righteous people could be found in Sodom where Abraham's nephew Lot lived.

God sends two angels to Sodom, where Abraham's nephew, Lot, persuades the angels to stay at his home. Genesis 19 records that "all the people from every quarter" surround Lot's house demanding "to know them". It was common in those times to use violent and brutal rape as a way to humiliate and establish power over another, not unlike in some prison situations today. It is also done by heterosexual males which is very unnatural for them. This was part of the terrible acts of pederasty, the opposite of today's loving homosexual natural relationships.

Lot attempts to protect the visitors sent by God by offering his two virgin daughters to be raped. The people of Sodom refuse them and the angels render the crowd blind. Lot and his family are then rescued by the angels as the cities are destroyed.

ALL of Sodom's people participated in the assault on Lot's house; in no culture has more than a small minority (7-10%) of the population been naturally homosexual. Therefore it can be assumed most of the violators were heterosexual. Also since there were "young and old" would indicate that someone must have been having heterosexual sex to produce the young!

Lot's offer to give his daughters to be raped suggests he knew the crowd had heterosexual interests - in fact offering young women for sexual hospitality was common. While it is unclear, even if homosexual rape was what the people were after, it was to defile the strangers unnaturally between mostly heterosexual males against another heterosexual male as in pederasty. This rape attempt has nothing to do with loving, consenting homosexual love and was clearly not the reason for God's destruction of Sodom.

God spared Lot and his daughters from the destruction of Sodom. Genesis 19:33-36 goes on to say how the daughters got Lot drunk and committed incest with him. Would God destroy two cities for homosexuality and save these people so they would go right out and commit incest?

Homosexuality can not be called one of the sins of Sodom, Gomorrah or Gilbeah since it is not in any of the lists of their sins given in the O.T. Ezekiel 16:48-50 lists the specific sins of Sodom as pride, plenty, laziness, uncaring for needy, haughty and worshipping idols - which was an abomination - not homosexuality.

Some try and see in the word "abomination" a false reference to homosexual activity. This word translated abomination is to'ebah in Hebrew and is frequently found in the Old Testament. If one reads it in context every where it appears it is always connected with idolatry - never homosexuality. Just a few examples are in Deut 7:25- 26 where it is the idol used in false worship, Proverbs 21:27 having to do with broader false worship etc. The people of Sodom were involved in idolatry.

The attempts to stretch "abomination" to "unclean" acts in Leviticus as to mean homosexuality is just as false. That would mean that we would be justified to claim that the sin of Sodom was that of shellfish eating, beard trimming or that the sin of Sodom was menstruation on the part of the womenfolk for the same reason.

Jude 7 also provides another view of the sin of Sodom: "Even as Sodom and Gomorrah, and the cities about them in like manner, giving themselves over to fornication and going after strange flesh..." In another discussion of fornication it is clear it is idolatry and has nothing to do with sexuality. But what is this strange flesh reference?

A view of strange flesh comes from Gen 6. Here we read of a time when the "sons of God" cohabited with the "daughters of humans", resulting in a strange progeny called in the Hebrew "nephilim", a rare word indicating something weird or strange.

To examine what is meant by "sons of God" look to Job 1:6. Here we see that Satan, a fallen angel, was before God as one of the "sons of God" we would understand the "sons of God" to be other angels. We again get the understanding that "sons of God are angels from Job 38:7. Strange flesh means a linking between angelic flesh and human flesh. Remembering that the two visitors to Lot in Sodom were angels, we see this was also going after strange flesh. This has nothing to do with homosexuality, but of the mixing of two distinct orders of creation.

Why Not Condemn Heterosexuals Based on Parallel Events in Gilbeah?

Judges 19 tells of a very similar event in Gilbeah, using the same words as in the Sodom story, except that the house guest was a man, not an angel, and the people accepted the concubine women visitor of the man. The concubine was raped until she died and the city was destroyed. As in the Sodom story, the sex of the victim is not important, it is the violent abuse of the stranger - not sex - that is the sin. The concubine of Gibeah and the angel of Sodom were both acceptable victims because they were strangers. This was a typical pederastrial practice, to rape strangers regardless of sex.

Gen 34 tells of a rape of Jacob's daughter Dinah by Shechem the Hivite. As a result of this heterosexual rape, Shechem's home town was destroyed. Yet in spite of this destruction, we hear no one condemning heterosexuality on the basis of this passage, but rather a condemnation of rape. So also is the case with Sodom but even worse the attempted rape of strange flesh (angels).

Historic Reasons For False Teaching Of Sodom

Although the original understanding of Sodom (having nothing to do with homosexuality), survived in some circles until well into the Middle Ages, the increasing emphasis of Hellenistic Jewish and Christian moralists on sexual purity gave rise in late Jewish apocrypha and early Christian writings to associations of Sodom with sexual excesses of various sorts.

But in the intellectual environment vehemently opposed to the casual hedonism of the Hellenistic world, many issues which had not been specifically sexual became so; this was the case with sexual questions such as onanism and homosexuality. This was done by just slightly altering the greek words!

The Judaeo-Platonist schools such is in Alexandria, greatly influenced some early Christians, since they combined the authority of classical learning with a tradition of Old Testament scholarship (responsible for the Septuagint translation which most Christians used).

For Christians, The Alexandrian rule had great influence in what was considered "natural". In the third century Clement of Alexandria asserted that "to have sex for any purpose other than to produce children is to violate nature."

This concept was also taught by Philo to Platonist Jews. Any use of human sexuality, potential or actual, which did not produce legitimate offspring violated "nature". All moral issues were subordinate to the primary duty of males to procreate. Celibacy was as "unnatural" as homosexuality, failure to divorce a barren wife was "unnatural", as was masturbation.