Matthew's Journal

Can't I be an atheist and have opinions about christianity?

[x] I'm not a Christian, and in practice I think that people with either opinion on the subject can still be Christians, although I wouldn't presume to comment on whether someone who calls themselves a Christian really is one or not, and I wouldn't consider homosexuality to be sinful even if I did believe in God

Of course one question is do all people who are Christians share the same religion? If not, eg if there are *several* Christian religions, then Dr Nazir-Ali isn't really saying anyone isn't a Christian, just not his sort. Of course I suspect he thinks his sort is the 'real' sort. Edit: which is of course where you came in really.

I'm not a Christian, but was until fairly recently, and not being sure whether homosexual (and poly, and pre-marital) sexual relationships were sinful is a part of why I left.

In answer to your first question:

1/ I am not and do not want to be a theologian. Thinking thinkey thoughts about theological matters give me a headache. And I'm not very good at it. That's what we have bishops for, so I don't have to do it.

2/ I think that it's almost impossible to have any sort of sex life and *not* break one of the rules around sex. And while I do believe that sex is a powerful thing and therefore should be subject to some rules, it is blatently obvious that the rules themselves have also done a great deal of very real harm.

3/ I mistrust the politics behind all this. If homosexuality is wrong, what about co-habitation, divorce, adultery, etc..? I think that churches should also talk about these. Oh, but that would lead them with no congregation left. (I have a long grudge here about my mother's happy-clappy church who were quick to preach against all sorts of things, but were equally quick to perform her second marriage, as if her first marriage to my father hadn't happened, or was too insignificant to count, or something.)

4/ A deeper concern, following on from points 2 & 3 is that I don't really see where this leaves us. Are we really to say that someone who, say, has a drunken one-night stand in their teens is regarded as "married" to that person forever more, and can never again have a sexual relationship with anyone else? But what if their one-night partner was not a virgin - then they couldn't be married to each other. And how would the first person necessarily know whether their partner had been a virgin, and hence whether they were "married"? It all gets unworkable very fast.

5/ I think ultimately it comes down to whether or not generic-you thinks it's any of your business, whether or not you trust people to run their own lives as they see fit. Because if someone else makes their own moral choice about their own life, and it doesn't affect you - it comes down to whether or not you think you have a right to keep lecturing them about how bad they are that their moral choice is not the moral choice you think they should have made.

And this is why I ticked "other" for the second question too. I don't believe people's views on the first question say much, if anything, about their religious beliefs. I think it is more a difference in what control they should have over other people.

Edited for grammer fail

When I was a Christian, I thought gay sex was sinful, though I didn't have a particularly good justification for this other than that it was what the Bible said, so I'd better fall in line. I thought fellow believers who disagreed were mistaken but still Christians.

As both Rilstone and robhu have said, in some sense this is a debate about the authority and interpretation of the Bible. But the choice of the straw that broke the church's back is interesting, too. The church has not had a schism over divorce and remarriage (lately), despite that having much clearer New Testament guidance (can't do it except because of desertion or sexual immorality, if you do you're committing adultery). If you're going to have a schism, it makes sense to do it over a sin to which few of your members are tempted, I suppose.

I'm an atheist so don't really have a horse in this race, other than being gay. I can't help thinking the good bishops are missing something important. They can go on about heterosexuality being the natural order, or whatever, but that won't stop the vast majority of people I fancy and/or fall in love with being the same sex as me.

My position is, fundamentally, that if they think it's wrong then I will defend their right not to be made to do it.

In the case of acts that cause no actual harm to any person, like homosexuality, divorce, and believing in evolution, they are welcome to dislike them so long as they don't either attempt to stop someone else from doing them or create a hostile environment for those people. Public pronouncements like Dr Nazir-Ali's or Dr Fulham's definitely do this.

I understand that many of them do feel these acts are inherently harmful; to me, this falls firmly under the category of extraordinary claims requiring extraordinary evidence. Claims that they are "unnatural" are, as auntysarah points out, trivially wrong; claims that they are against scripture are debatable, endlessly debated, and only interesting if one takes a) a particular text and b) a particular interpretation of the text to be the One Truth. I don't have a problem with the idea that a patchwork text composed around two thousand years ago will be deeply embedded into that cultural context and occasionally just plain wrong, and even less so with the idea that a particular translation is infallible. (Yes, I have heard people claim this. Usually for the KJV.)

Regarding whether or not they are Christians, I wouldn't say they're not any more than I'd pay any attention to someone who told me I wasn't. I don't like sharing a religion with some of these people, but the bigots, homophobes, BNP supporters, evolution deniers, and kiddy fiddlers are Christians and they still have good & useful things to contribute.

I'm glad you made question one about 'committed same sex relationships' rather than homosexual sex, otherwise I would be much more equivocal about ticking boxes, so to speak.

I think that both the leadership of TEC and the FCA, indeed as most Christians are all the time, are failing in one important aspect of their discipleship - neither are taking scriptural authority, analysis and criticism seriously enough. Neither group are letting it shape their approach to the debate, or the formation of a truer understanding of sexual ethics.

Some members of TEC don't seem to accept that the Gospel is a challenge, responding to which doesn't always allow the hearer to do exactly what they'd like; some members of the FCA don't seem to notice the prominance which the bible (especially the Pauline letters) gives to charity, humility, unity in difference and community-building from within. Neither groups seems to give sufficient prominance to the biblical teaching on judgement and mutual subjection. Neither even wants to debate over the translation and complexity of what exactly the bible seems to say about homosexuality. In the case of the TEC this is regrettable, in the case of the FCA the irony is overwhelming.

"I'm a Christian, but wouldn't presume to comment on whether or not someone else who calls themselves a Christian really is one or not."

I liked this option, as I believe in self-definition. I am a practicing Christian, who has been told by an atheist, no less, that I am not a Christian. The reason being that the atheist in question believes that certain dogmatic beliefs, to which I do not subscribe, are indispensable for claiming that one is a Christian.