Jesus was Gay? Why are the activists so conservative then?
Brock A. Shaver
November 18, 2006
A follow-up on the earlier article about the Gospel's repeated references to Jesus' 'beloved,' John. Was Jesus gay?
It is amazing what blocks the progress of ideas. Why is the gay movement so 'conservative?'
They want to be accepted by the mainstream. They don't want to be scorned. They want to be accepted as normal as heterosexuals, comfortable in their own skin.
A worthy goal. Accepting themselves, and being accepted by others. Brought up in the middle class. Feeling middle class, with just something different and harmless. They have enough on their plate battling the unconscious assumptions about the 'natural order' of creating life, family, and homophobia without taking on any other major structures in society's psyche.
Jesus being gay is just a boundary they can't cross. It would shut down communication by violating the most sacred man in history. The outrage may inspire further violence against them, as the radical religious try to protect the man of peace. One step at a time. The goal is to 'normalize' the orientation.
Gays avoid the Church. Christians are the most obstinant group in their beliefs. Their worldview imprisoned in that small story tucked away in the Bible. It is armour plated. Reason cannot penetrate it. And circumspection from outside its box is a rare thing.
The Church is the institutional oppressor of gays. It declares it a sin. It created the 'natural order' psychology of the West. It determines what reality is. It can't be talked with. The gay movement has to talk around it, to secular society, the one that freed the slaves and liberated women despite what St. Paul said.
The gay movement really just wants to be accepted as a normal part of secular modern society. So its banal, not fierce. Its not going to challenge the Church on something so fundamental as what 'Jesus' beloved' really is referring to. No one really knows. But it is certainly a strange reference.
Catholics keep people focused on the celibacy issue. To battle that, women have slowly introduced the thought that Mary Magdeline was Jesus' girlfriend. But that came about after 200 years of academic attack on the Bible, followed by the sexual revolution and women's liberation being accepted by society in general.
It is like rock 'n roll, condemned in the 1950's by the Church, and now a fixture on the altar of modern sanctuaries to replace the choir and attract young people. Times change. People soften up. Heterosexuals have to come to terms with the definition of marriage changing. It's a generational thing.
There are so many associations that keep us from exploring our taboos.
Reincarnation is one of them. Life in India is so bad, with its widespread poverty and ugly caste system, that it creates a bias against considering past lives. Reincarnation is justification for treating people badly, especially the Untouchables. So the West veers away from the subject, since we don't have any spiritual inklings in our society anyway, beyond prayer and coincidences. We fail to stop and realize that we created just as horrible a social system with our zero-sum theory of life (one life to live, one chance to get into heaven). The debate is muddied because we don't understand our own assumptions. It just needed to be named to make it obvious.
I was watching a program where a fundamentalist was asking a lesbian, on the subject of same-sex marriage, whether polygamy was okay, now that the definition of marriage was up for grabs.
The woman said no, that's not what its all about. The subject is a taboo, even for gays (proof of their middle class values). But what makes the gay agenda possible is the reduction of the issues to mere concept, a neutral malleable idea that we can manipulate the meaning any way we like. The Church always did this with its Jesus story. Now society does this with any meaning. Its called freedom.
But what's wrong with polygamy? It is associated with weird Christian groups out west that force 13 year old girls into marrying creepy middle age men. Or the strange communes of the hippie era, the free love that just didn't work. As one former hippie said, it was just too much work managing multiple partners.
But what's wrong with polygamy? The marriage issue is confined to the Church's theology that says, like Adam and Eve, it is meant for two human spirits to become one. The Church says that it is meant for the creation of life, children and a family, thus reflecting God's Creation. And, just as the wars of the Old Testament involving God's connivance are downplayed now, so too are all the Partriarchs with their hundreds of wives and concubines. It was socially 'contextual,' as the theologian say.
But in this day-and-age of freedom, where you can do anything as long as you don't hurt someone, polygamy the concept should also be considered okay. Who cares? Half of all 'regular' marriages end in divorce, so the institution is in shambles under the old rules anyway. And marriage counsellors point out that friction in a marriage often comes about when one partner has a very low sex drive, and the other a high libido. Sexual issues in the hetero community are just as confused as straight people feel about toward homosexuals.
Polygamy falls into the area of polyamory, loving multiply partners. For small groups this is okay. Between mature, consenting adults, what's the big deal? It is just strange and threatening to both straight and gay humans who fear jealousy and all those other issues. So gays are just like heteros, just a little different.
The historical Jesus is just a myth. Who knows? Maybe the 'beloved' was written about by a gay chronicler at the time, pushing his/her agenda. Perhaps Jesus was gay, bisexual, celibate, hitched to Mary Magdeline, or into 'free love.' We just don't know. Jesus vanished from historical evidence. All we have is the hearsay of people who listened to the Apostles' stories of Jesus.
What it points to is the constriction of meaning around the foundation of the Western psyche. We pride ourselves in our individual freedom. We will decide meaning, not some oppressive authority that wants to dominate us. How deeply do we understand our own meaning, what is guiding it, the assumptions about what reality is? Jesus being gay is irrelevant outside of a political argument. There is no such thing as gender in the spirit world, in actual reality. The feminine and the masculine are in varying degrees in both men and women. Wisdom is feminine, energy is masculine. Women love wise men, and men like energetic women. There are 'butch' females, and effeminate males. Its a spectrum.
It goes to show how sex and gender are such massive, unexplored realms that still unconsciously control us. It keeps us from truly understanding the nature of spiritual reality.
Combined with the reality of past lives, the two are irrelevant. In this life you're a fundamentalist male preacher, in the last you were a woman, in the one before your were gay. A taste of each.
What did the experiences teach your soul? It all weaves together.
But we are bound to our Western view of reality: there are only four spirits, God, Jesus, souls and the devil. Reality is only God, humans and inert matter. Spirituality is rather limited. So we get torn up over gender and sexual issues.
Western civilization does not understand Creation. The dominant mind decides what reality is through science and reason. And it is based on the limited reference points that we are socialized into from birth.
How many other 'taboos' are we blocking through unconscious assumptions, that are keeping us from expanding our spiritual understanding of all reality.
It blocking us from knowing God as well.
It is amazing what blocks the progress of ideas. Why is the gay movement so 'conservative?'
They want to be accepted by the mainstream. They don't want to be scorned. They want to be accepted as normal as heterosexuals, comfortable in their own skin.
A worthy goal. Accepting themselves, and being accepted by others. Brought up in the middle class. Feeling middle class, with just something different and harmless. They have enough on their plate battling the unconscious assumptions about the 'natural order' of creating life, family, and homophobia without taking on any other major structures in society's psyche.
Jesus being gay is just a boundary they can't cross. It would shut down communication by violating the most sacred man in history. The outrage may inspire further violence against them, as the radical religious try to protect the man of peace. One step at a time. The goal is to 'normalize' the orientation.
Gays avoid the Church. Christians are the most obstinant group in their beliefs. Their worldview imprisoned in that small story tucked away in the Bible. It is armour plated. Reason cannot penetrate it. And circumspection from outside its box is a rare thing.
The Church is the institutional oppressor of gays. It declares it a sin. It created the 'natural order' psychology of the West. It determines what reality is. It can't be talked with. The gay movement has to talk around it, to secular society, the one that freed the slaves and liberated women despite what St. Paul said.
The gay movement really just wants to be accepted as a normal part of secular modern society. So its banal, not fierce. Its not going to challenge the Church on something so fundamental as what 'Jesus' beloved' really is referring to. No one really knows. But it is certainly a strange reference.
Catholics keep people focused on the celibacy issue. To battle that, women have slowly introduced the thought that Mary Magdeline was Jesus' girlfriend. But that came about after 200 years of academic attack on the Bible, followed by the sexual revolution and women's liberation being accepted by society in general.
It is like rock 'n roll, condemned in the 1950's by the Church, and now a fixture on the altar of modern sanctuaries to replace the choir and attract young people. Times change. People soften up. Heterosexuals have to come to terms with the definition of marriage changing. It's a generational thing.
There are so many associations that keep us from exploring our taboos.
Reincarnation is one of them. Life in India is so bad, with its widespread poverty and ugly caste system, that it creates a bias against considering past lives. Reincarnation is justification for treating people badly, especially the Untouchables. So the West veers away from the subject, since we don't have any spiritual inklings in our society anyway, beyond prayer and coincidences. We fail to stop and realize that we created just as horrible a social system with our zero-sum theory of life (one life to live, one chance to get into heaven). The debate is muddied because we don't understand our own assumptions. It just needed to be named to make it obvious.
I was watching a program where a fundamentalist was asking a lesbian, on the subject of same-sex marriage, whether polygamy was okay, now that the definition of marriage was up for grabs.
The woman said no, that's not what its all about. The subject is a taboo, even for gays (proof of their middle class values). But what makes the gay agenda possible is the reduction of the issues to mere concept, a neutral malleable idea that we can manipulate the meaning any way we like. The Church always did this with its Jesus story. Now society does this with any meaning. Its called freedom.
But what's wrong with polygamy? It is associated with weird Christian groups out west that force 13 year old girls into marrying creepy middle age men. Or the strange communes of the hippie era, the free love that just didn't work. As one former hippie said, it was just too much work managing multiple partners.
But what's wrong with polygamy? The marriage issue is confined to the Church's theology that says, like Adam and Eve, it is meant for two human spirits to become one. The Church says that it is meant for the creation of life, children and a family, thus reflecting God's Creation. And, just as the wars of the Old Testament involving God's connivance are downplayed now, so too are all the Partriarchs with their hundreds of wives and concubines. It was socially 'contextual,' as the theologian say.
But in this day-and-age of freedom, where you can do anything as long as you don't hurt someone, polygamy the concept should also be considered okay. Who cares? Half of all 'regular' marriages end in divorce, so the institution is in shambles under the old rules anyway. And marriage counsellors point out that friction in a marriage often comes about when one partner has a very low sex drive, and the other a high libido. Sexual issues in the hetero community are just as confused as straight people feel about toward homosexuals.
Polygamy falls into the area of polyamory, loving multiply partners. For small groups this is okay. Between mature, consenting adults, what's the big deal? It is just strange and threatening to both straight and gay humans who fear jealousy and all those other issues. So gays are just like heteros, just a little different.
The historical Jesus is just a myth. Who knows? Maybe the 'beloved' was written about by a gay chronicler at the time, pushing his/her agenda. Perhaps Jesus was gay, bisexual, celibate, hitched to Mary Magdeline, or into 'free love.' We just don't know. Jesus vanished from historical evidence. All we have is the hearsay of people who listened to the Apostles' stories of Jesus.
What it points to is the constriction of meaning around the foundation of the Western psyche. We pride ourselves in our individual freedom. We will decide meaning, not some oppressive authority that wants to dominate us. How deeply do we understand our own meaning, what is guiding it, the assumptions about what reality is? Jesus being gay is irrelevant outside of a political argument. There is no such thing as gender in the spirit world, in actual reality. The feminine and the masculine are in varying degrees in both men and women. Wisdom is feminine, energy is masculine. Women love wise men, and men like energetic women. There are 'butch' females, and effeminate males. Its a spectrum.
It goes to show how sex and gender are such massive, unexplored realms that still unconsciously control us. It keeps us from truly understanding the nature of spiritual reality.
Combined with the reality of past lives, the two are irrelevant. In this life you're a fundamentalist male preacher, in the last you were a woman, in the one before your were gay. A taste of each.
What did the experiences teach your soul? It all weaves together.
But we are bound to our Western view of reality: there are only four spirits, God, Jesus, souls and the devil. Reality is only God, humans and inert matter. Spirituality is rather limited. So we get torn up over gender and sexual issues.
Western civilization does not understand Creation. The dominant mind decides what reality is through science and reason. And it is based on the limited reference points that we are socialized into from birth.
How many other 'taboos' are we blocking through unconscious assumptions, that are keeping us from expanding our spiritual understanding of all reality.
It blocking us from knowing God as well.
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