User: Thixia

Totoro:

Thank you for your responce and recognizing that not all Christians are like that.

It bothers me too. How can somebody who says they belive in Jesus and all that he teachers, so obviously hate others?

You are right it: Some Christians do obess over a few verses, and make a huge deal out of them. Yet they ignore other verses. It's not just homosexuality. It's spanking for instance. So many Christians say "spare the rod spoil the child", and then use that to ingore countless other verses on mercy, love, and forgiveness. It baffles me.

Sometimes I wish they would take a page from the Big Book (From AA), and say "Life and Let Life", or "You do your program and I'll do mine" or in other words "Mind your own business".

It comes down to this: Not everybody who says they are a Christian and thinks they are going to heaven will go to heaven. Jesus will say to some of them "get away from me I never knew you". Christians should really ask themselfs "Am I what God wants me to be". "Am I loveing" "Am I a Christian", instead of taking everybody elses inventory they should do their own.

If it really doesn't affect you, don't worry about it.

I know that some Christians think that what they are doing is evangelism, but how can you possibly think that evangelism that scares everybody in a 10 mile radius away from you, is at all effective?

Yes Malph in some ways you are right. Some christians really seem to have it out for certian groups: homosexuals, abortionists, ect.

But not all Christians.

The only requirment to go to heaven is to believe in Jesus Christ, that Jesus Christ is your Lord and Saviour, and confess it with your mouth. This includes believing he has forgiven all of your sins.

That's it.

I don't see in there, at all that if you are gay you should become straight, or that you should change yourself in any way before becoming a Christian.

My cousin who is gay asked me if he could be a Christian.

I said "ya why not?"

He said "I'm gay you know"

So?

I've done alot of thinking about my answer since then, and I still believe it 100%.

I'm sorry that gay people have been treeted so horribly by people who say they are Christians. It's aweful, and it is not, definitly not God's will.

In fact they are the sinners, not gays, when they act like that.

Thixia

PS - Did you take the id "malph" off of Happy Days?

End of subject

Your poll did not give me the choices I would have picked, so I often had to pick "other".

As a person with a cousin about 10 years older than me, who is gay, I was exposed to the "is he gay" "is he not gay" and the horrible "he should get AIDS and die" conversations before I even knew what being gay was. I was quite young when I asked what they ment, and was told I'd understand when I was older.

My cousin moved out of the country by the time I was old enough to know, but still all the contraversy stayed behind in the family discussions. I never really understood why it was such a big deal, and why anybody would even care - after all we only saw him at Christmas, and who really cares, he was a nice person anyway.

I am a Christian. I became a Christian when I was an older teen, and I was first confronted with the whole "gay is a sin" idea when I went to bible school just a few months latter. I really didn't realise this would be such a big deal, and I might not have gone if I had.

I stanchly stood up for my cousin. Most of these people had never met a gay person (or at least didn't think they had), so how could they judge what they have never met.

It was that refusal to go with what everybody else thought in this area and others that made me very unpopular in bible school.

But it's so easy to have these ideas when you have been raised in a Christian Family and have never met anybody who wasn't Christian until you were an adult. It's a little harder when you were raised in a non-Christian family, and know people who are gay, children out of wedlock, people who concidred abortion, ect. These people and more are all in my extended family, and I just can't have these attitudes.

Besides as you say it isn't love. Jesus hung out with those that the regioius sects of his day called sinfull, and thought that if you even went into those houses you would become "dirty".

The whole parable of the good samaritian is I think misunderstood today. In that time the samaritians were concidered a dirty, sinful people. People walked around that town instead of through it because they thought just being on the same soil as a bunch of samaritians would make them dirty and sinful as well. They hated the samaritians. In Jesus storey it was the samaritain that played the hero part. And when he said "who is your neigbour", he was talking to those who were not sameritains.

If you took that parabal and updated it to today, could you not say that the samaritians part could be played by a gay person?

How would that change things?

Such an interesting thing to think about.

And that is why, I think my job as a Christian is not to condemn but to love (in the way that love realy is).

Besides I'd be spitting at my own family if I didn't.

Even saying that - all Christians should love - by that I don't mean do the things you mentioned in your poll, I mean, love as in the parable of the good samaritian. Unfortunaltly you are right, they don't always do that.

My cousin has moved back home now. He unfortunatly does have AIDS, like my Aunt (not his mother) wished he would get. And sometimes when I am visiting I find myself the only straight person in a roomful of homosexuals, and I enjoy those visits.

Please forgive me if I have alot of spelling and typos. I haven't put my contacts in yet.

I question if this is true or not, but true or not, it is sad.