blackarmchair

Which is super scary if you think about it. Anecdotes shouldn't be more powerful than logic/ideas; that sounds like a recipe for disaster.

I take issue with this line of reasoning.

1) Religious interpretations of the same texts vary widely.

2) Religious texts make claims based upon things that we are in principle barred from investigating or verifying (e.g. the supernatural, life after death, the will of transcendent beings, etc). Even religious claims about mundane aspects of the material world have an epistemological basis outside of it. For example, the OT may say "thou shalt not kill" but the reasoning behind why you're told not to kill is explicitly supernatural and diaphanous.

3) Therfore, we have to accept that all religious interpretations of minimum consistency are equally valid because we have no objective method for differentiating between them.

This means that your claim about the scriptures not condemning homosexuality is just as valid as someone else's who claims the opposite.

Asexual people have sexuality? Isn't that a contradiction?

Doesn't asexual mean "lacking a sexuality"?

I like what you said at first:

Exactly, and that is the starting point for a conversation more focused on the common sense question of "How should we treat our fellow human beings?"

But I'm not sure why you jumped to this:

Then we both go back to the book and realize that Jesus told us time and time and time again to love one another. That we can all agree on (that ascribe to the Christian religion).

If we agree that all religious interpretations are equally valid in principle then an opponent of yours can simply point to other sections in the Bible that prescribe the opposite of what you propose and we're back to square one.

I liked what you said first because you're hitting on something key: we don't use the Bible (or any holy book) as a source for morality; we use our reason to edit those books for what we like and discard what we don't.

This means any attempt to claim that the scripture doesn't ACTUALLY support condemnation of homosexuality is just as vacuous as any claims that it does support it. What you're articulating is your own interpretation based on your own reasoning.

There's nothing wrong with that and I'm happy you've reached the more compassionate conclusion. But let's not pretend that it makes sense to re-interpert bronze age books every so often to fit with our modern morality and pretend those books really meant that all along. It's silly and not believable.