He said he thought it would be a good idea.

*unlurks*

The Greeks, you mean–history as a discipline really started with Thucydides.

*relurks*

If that’s the case, then that’s what I do mean, as far as “the West” is concerned. Thank you, Arynne.

(I include the qualification because, as with just about everything else, the Chinese probably got there two or three thousand years before “Western civilization” did.)

@ ZRAinSWVA

“Does one have to walk through life continuously repenting for being homosexual?”

Yes, I think that is what Mefferd does mean, or if not precisely that, then at least that one must walk through life regarding one’s homosexuality as a moral handicap which needs to be continually fought against and somehow surmounted or bypassed. Teaching people to treat themselves in this way is, of course, spiritual abuse par excellence.

I don’t see anything in the transcribed excerpt to suggest Mefferd means anything other than what people like her typically think about bisexual, lesbian and gay people who call themselves Christian. People like Mefferd only accept LGB people as Christian if we wallow continuously in guilt about our homosexuality. Tney want LGB people seriously lacking in self-esteem due to our realization of the sinfulness of our homosexuality. They want us to have been “taken down a few pegs” by the Lord.

They want us to feel “less than” good decent normal folks like Janet Mefferd.

Unhumble LGB people are not alright with people like Mefferd. The unspoken social contract they seem to offer is that they won’t be openly hostile toward LGB people if we are properly humble(d), repentant believers in a form of Christianity that they accept as genuine — unless they are in a pissy mood, in which case we have to accept their nasty little digs with grace and equanimity.

They mostly don’t wonder why so few of us want to follow their Christianity. Whether or not they’ll ever admit it, they understand that their Christianity is against homosexual people, not just our sexuality. And they don’t see their Christianity as at all separate from their social hostility toward us.

Jared, that’s actually a cultural reference, it was a regular bit on Saturday Night Live in the late 70′s.

And God do I feel old.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k80nW6AOhTs

And that’s my problem with Saturday Night Live, at least earlier SNL: their tendency to attack members of marginalized groups as such. I’m about as old at Timothy, and remember all too well.

So no, something unpleasant doesn’t suddenly become cute because it came from Saturday Night Live.

(Btw, this post is not directed at Timothy in particular. This is directed generally to the readers of this comments section.)

The Greeks, you mean–history as a discipline really started with Thucydides.

*relurks*

Since the historicity both of Moses and of the Israelites’ forty years of wandering in the desert are both historically problematic, there is little reason to take seriously the stone tablets which Moses brought down with him from Mount Sinai. I would guess that they are as mythical as Joseph Smith’s golden plates with the Book of Mormon engraved on them.

My impression is that before the Romans, no ancient “Western civilization” thought recording literal truth for historical purposes was in and of itself a good thing.

That, to me, is the most despicable part of this whole mess, and something that they are both in the wrong about.

And God do I feel old.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k80nW6AOhTs

Um, no. Please don’t attack women — even women whose views that you, I, and everyone else here might find downright morally repugnant — by calling them “sluts.” Thank you.