“Logic!” said the Professor half to himself. “Why don’t they teach logic at these schools?” That’s C S Lewis writing in Chapter 5 of “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” and he goes on to write what has become known as the Trilemma, frequently used in relation to the claims of Jesus. Lewis wrote in the above book, that: “There are only three possibilities. Either your sister is telling lies, or she is mad, or she is telling the truth. You know she doesn’t tell lies and it is obvious that she is not mad. For the moment then and unless any further evidence turns up, we must assume that she is telling the truth.” However, I will ignore the Trilemma, and, for this blog, I want to appeal to logic.
Does God really hate gay people? Is God an angry God?
Of course not. There is no room for grace in anger.
Evangelicalism preaches that being gay (specifically, and LGBTQ+ more generally) is a rebellion against God. We are watching as many Christian churches, who had previously been more welcoming or at least passive towards the LGBTQ+ community, are starting to be cautious, if not outrightly antagonistic. Other churches who were antagonistic are doubling down and becoming even more hostile. And these are the places where Jesus is telling Christians to welcome the stranger, the dispossessed and the person on the edge of society. In Jesus name, how dare they! One of my friends (based somewhere in the UK) recently wrote to me, saying:
“I’ve put the work we were doing (rattling the church doors towards [being wide open to offering a warm welcome for our LGBTQ+ friends]) on ice. Trump and Farage and the like, really have turned the tide of sympathy to the cause. The air is so hostile out there, with any who are sitting on the fence, [now] hiding and holding back, and any who were against us, twice as militant as before, and so our community (particularly trans siblings) are so very vulnerable, and really in need of keeping their heads down.”
Those churches, and any who are similarly minded, must hang their heads in utter shame before Jesus! I would echo the challenge given by Joshua shortly before he died. After the Israelites had taken possession of much of the Promised Land, he urged them: “…choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve… But as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord.” Joshua 24:15
Many Christians have got themselves into a real fankle. They say that the Bible is against homosexuality, therefore, they conclude, it must be a lifestyle choice. They plug their fingers in their ears when the community says, “I didn’t choose this, nor did I want it”. These Christians then emphasise that being lesbian, gay and trans, results in being condemned by God for all time, although the Bible never condemns the person who is trans! (Later in this series we will again look at the Scriptures more closely, although I tackled this in my essay. Probably my thinking has finessed a little in the last ten years since I wrote that, as will the science, even if the politics has regressed in a harmful way.)
The theology Christians frequently use is suspect, if not downright wrong. The thinking goes like this: If Hitler/Mao/Stalin/Trump repented of their sins, God would forgive them. However, homosexuals cannot be forgiven because forgiveness requires repentance, and this necessitates a turning away from the path currently being followed. Because gay folk will not change, and continue to live as homosexuals, they can’t be serious about repentance, so forgiveness becomes impossible. The rationale being that when I die, if I have not been forgiven by God, I’m destined for hell, so gay people, including gay Christians, don’t have a chance. Besides Romans 1, 1 Corinthians 6: 9-11 and 1 Timothy 1: 8-12 specifically say God condemns the homosexual! Spoiler alert: God doesn’t – the interpretation is wrong, and we’ll cover that in a future blog.
If LGBTQ+ Christians are right that they cannot change and didn’t choose the gender or sexuality that they experience, then God must have created them like this, and if God subsequently condemns them for being “homosexual”, we have a massive theological problem, which I will explore shortly. But before we do that, let’s take a step backwards.
To quote from my original essay: The more time you spend looking at the area of sexuality and gender, the more you realise that both areas are a spectrum. Even the most fixed-view, non-affirming person will concede that some men are highly masculine and others quite feminine [and these will be labelled but Farage and Trump as “soft” or “effeminate”], and that you also have some very feminine women, and some quite masculine women. [The arrogant turbulent orange grifter and his lackies are always complaining about woke attitudes and the need for men to be strong and respected – so even he recognises there is a spectrum of masculinity – even if he hates it.] We talk about the autism spectrum, and how different people fit different parts of it, and sexuality is no different.
Being a Christian requires that you welcome and promote diversity, equality and inclusion – it’s right there in the pages of Scripture.
Going back a few decades, I remember the church teaching me that in the eyes of God I was unique. I was important to God, because God had given me/us gifts and abilities to use on behalf of others, to build up the church. If gender and sexuality are binary, that reduces our uniqueness. To go a step further I would argue that it matters very little to God what we are like biologically, but God cares far more about how much of the imago Dei (the image of God) we radiate and reflect. In an earlier Blog, nearly three years ago, I asked the question about whether God was male or female as I believe the answer to be neither, and both, so you can look back at that when you get time. With regard to our uniqueness, I asked ChatGPT some questions about what makes us unique in God’s eyes. If you are interested in reading the discussion, you can download it from my Dropbox here, as it’s too long to include in this blog.
To take a dip into biology, let’s look at our bodies. When I moved away from London to Scotland, I kept spotting people who looked similar to those I had left behind down south. I saw my friend Bob walking down the street close to my home – except he wasn’t Bob, and this one was walking a dog! And Lizzie, a friend I used to play badminton with near Crystal Palace, with her tight, multi-coloured and braided hair, crossed the path in front of me to go into a bookshop. Except it wasn’t her. When I looked more closely, they were different – similar, but clearly very different – height, build, etc, but her face and hair …! My brain was playing with me! Consider facial recognition technology. That wouldn’t work if we were all fairly similar.
We have many facial features: eyes, eye-brows/lashes, noses, mouths, ears, and facial hair – and they all contribute to make us look different to each other. Focussing on one feature, our hair, has different natural colours, different thicknesses and natural styles (unless the barber models it on someone else). Some people’s hair stands on end, whilst other people’s hair lies flat. Some have lots of hair and others somewhat less.
White-skinned people have different coloured eyes, whether brown, blue, green etc or shades of those. You sometimes have those who are heterochromic – those who have two eyes of differing colours. Brown-skinned people also have varying shades of brown eyes, but the shadings, although there, are less obvious. Obviously, we have different coloured skins, black, brown, white, etc with an almost infinite array of shades and combinations of those colours. There is a huge array of Chinese skin tones from the light brown of Tibetans to the pale white of the Northern Han Chinese.
Our mouths come in different sizes with different jaw structures, and our teeth differ: for example, my wisdom teeth didn’t come through because there wasn’t enough room, others have had them removed, or teeth have twisted. Frequently forensic scientists will use dental records to identify badly damaged bodies. Then we have different shapes and sizes of noses with different sizes of nasal cavities inside. We are all different.
Looking at our circulatory system – whilst our main arteries are fairly consistent one to another, the minor vessels and branching, will vary markedly, and additionally, some will be closer to the surface of the skin than others.
Our torsos are all different. We have differing lung capacities, differing arm spans, differing hand sizes. People’s leg-lengths will differ from each other, with feet stuck on the end which are also of different lengths and widths, and toes that also differ from others around us. We are all different.
If we look at gut microbiomes, we are all very different, though close life-partners will have more similarities than unrelated peoples, but they won’t be identical. Individual factors (host genetics, long-term diet differences, past antibiotic use, illnesses, age, immune system, and unique exposures) create persistent differences. Shared environment and behaviours increase overlap, but each person retains a distinct microbial signature. We are all different.
Some peoples body sizes and shapes cause health problems, whether that be heart related, bone development and injury, or digestion problems. Even our male or female genitals widely differ in size, colour, shape and effectiveness. Contrary to what churches seem to infer, there is no standard binary male or female genital organ that is the same as either every other male or every other female. We are different – get over it!
Our bodies age at different rates. While the body’s performance generally declines over time and the risk of age-related diseases increases, people of the same age can differ greatly in health and physical aging. We are all different.
Clearly, we are all built very differently, at our basic level. Even if you took me back through a time-portal, back to when I was 12 or 13 and gave my body perfect health and perfect eyesight, and I trained harder than any usual Olympian, I could never have become an Olympic sportsman in any sport. My legs are not long enough to be a sprinter (let alone a Usain Bolt!), my lung capacity not large enough to be a distance runner, my hand/eye co-ordination wouldn’t be good enough for ball games, my height, arms and lung capacity are not good enough for a swimmer or rower. Take for example, the lung capacities of Matt Pinsent and Sir Steve Redgrave (British multi Gold Medal Olympian Rowers), which are said to be 8.5-litres and 7-litres respectively, whereas the average male is 5.8-litres.
The swimmer Michael Phelps is another exception: “his arm span (6ft 7in) is greater than his height (6ft 4in). His lung capacity is said to be 12 litres — double the average man’s. His size 14 feet are more like flippers”. In my case I know from using lung capacity testing devices that mine is lower than the average male. Maybe I have the physique for tiddly winks! We are all different.
So if athletes who win medals are those whose bodies are built in a specific way that makes them ideal for a particular sport, maybe we ought to ban them from any future competition, because, forgetting drugs, they have an in-built advantage that means they have a head-start on everyone else, so it’s really not fair on others. One person I play badminton with is taller than me with longer arms, and great reflexes. As a badminton partner, he’s great, but as an opponent, impossible, because he can reach shots, he has no right to get! It doesn’t matter whether he is close to the net, or at the back of the court, he anticipates your shot, covers the ground and finds the gap you’ve left – and it doesn’t matter how hard and well-placed your shot is!
The playing field is far from level. If we banned athletes whose bodies gave then an inherent advantage, that would mean the next ranked athletes down got a chance, except they would stand a better chance than you or me, because their legs are a bit longer, their reflexes quicker, they are a bit stronger, greater stamina, and a better eye for accuracy. Let’s ban those too. I trust you see where we are driving. We are all uniquely different – there is no uniformity.
With all that in mind – oh and talking about the mind, how many differences are there in our brains? We’ve mentioned the Autism spectrum, but what about the things that really interest you and me? Some things change as we go through life and respond to life experiences, like my own interest in the theology of sexuality. But what about my interests in music, sport, amateur photography, sports and conservation volunteering, Podcasts, computers and technology. Some of you might share some of those too, but then, what music do you and I like? Is it the same? That’s unlikely. Okay, what about sport? Does that mean an interest in playing, or watching, or both? Do you play a sport? Which sports do you watch? We are all different.
Do you enjoy taking pictures? That’ll again increase the diversity. What podcasts do you like listening to? What type of people are you attracted to? And at this stage I’m not thinking of romance but purely enjoying spending time with over a mug of tea, a beer, or a meal. We are all different.
Some of you may be great artists, sculptors, poets and fiction writers. When I need to be creative, I must mimic what others have done, and I trust God can make use of that too. I enjoy photography and have used a handful of my own pictures over the years for the website. However, I tend to look at photos that I like, taken by other people, and ask “could I do something similar, and if so, how?” so nothing is original. We are all different.
What goes on in our minds is very different from each other. I know no-one who likes the same music as me, enjoys playing and watching the same sports as me, and has identical interests to me. So why is it so hard to understand that just as you don’t get excited by the same music as me, you aren’t interested in the same life partner as me, and indeed you have your own likes, drives and interests? Think about that for a minute, we must have differing attractions or large numbers of people will be left behind with no-one to love, and no-one to love them. We must be all different.
We haven’t even talked about our propensity to respond differently to disease. Some people seem to escape things like Covid, and others are debilitated by them. Why? About 6% of those who caught Covid, developed what has been called as Long Covid, and it looks like the presence of a bacterium in the respiratory system helped to prevent Long Covid for certain people. Some people develop cancers or diabetes, or other major health issues. The causes of some of these health issues will be genetics passed down by our parents and grandparents, some is from our environment, but much is still unknown. Has the message got through yet? We are all different.
Fingerprints? A clue from God that we are all different?
So please tell me, why on God’s good Earth would you think there can only be two possible genders and sexualities? Let’s ask that question from a different angle. Many Christian’s argue that the Fall (Genesis 3 – where people sinned for the first time) resulted in Creation coming under the curse of God. In that worldview, this meant that death and disease entered the world for the first time, and the argument is that at this point there were only male and female (Adam and Eve). If today, there were only two genders, and people were only ever attracted to those of the opposite sex, wouldn’t you be curious as to why and how this one area of our humanity totally escaped the effects of the Fall which affected literally everything else that defines us as human beings.
The argument seems to be that Adam and Eve were templates, not just aspirational ideals for creation, so anything that has changed from those two people, is as a result of the Fall and therefore against the intention and design of God. Hence if we were consistent to God’s original design, we must also expect that we would all have the same body, shoe, hat and glove size, and none of our skin colours would differ. We would have matching IQ’s and physical abilities. How boring would that be‽
All too often Christians use the term “abomination” about anyone who is not straight, cisgendered, without thinking through the logic of their position. We will probably come back to that term “abomination” in a future blog because it isn’t as dreadful as many Christians seem to think (and it’ll show they haven’t done their homework, because it is no worse than eating shellfish, or Israelites and Egyptians eating together!).
Obviously, all that anti-diversity thinking is both literal and theological nonsense. As for same sex behaviour, we see evidence of that in many creatures in nature, both great and small. Among non-human primates it is considered widespread and you don’t have to spend much time researching, before you find well‑attested and scholarly peer‑reviewed papers demonstrating how widespread it is across creation. If being homosexual is sinful, are the birds and animals individually sinful as well? Clearly that’s daft!
So, if I have made the case that each of us is more or less unique, let’s bring God further into the discussion. If it is a total affront to God for people to be anything other than straight cis-gendered, why do they exist? Simple answer – God made them. Anyone who has spent time truly getting to know anyone in or around the LGBTQ+ community knows this is not a lifestyle choice, but integral to their very being, and they can no more choose to change, as I can choose to change the natural colour of my eyes.
If God made them LGBTQ+, God must be happy with what He created. Indeed Genesis 1 says 31 God saw all that he had made, and it was very good. If being LGBTQ+ is an offence to God, what can they do? Their choice is to live a lie – a life of denial of who they are, which itself conflicts with other Biblical principles. Besides, this denial frequently results in severe stress-related conditions – again something which shouldn’t happen if it were a requirement by God. Don’t forget that one of the things that Jesus said (In Matthew 11) was: 28 “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. 29 Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. 30 For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” Jesus says it is easy to come to God and be accepted. Living a lie, a life of enforced self-denial, of stress, and enforced celibacy, makes the words of Jesus shallow, hollow and false. A really dodgy theology!
To rewrite something in my original essay: “So, I come back to my original conundrum – God’s character. Did he really create a group of people solely to have their dignity diminished by society, and sadly the church? Did he make them solely destined to live lives of frustration, with no hope of change?”
We believe that what God creates, he considers, “Good”, and is “well-pleased” with His work. So, when He creates someone who is gay, He looks on them and says He is well-pleased. You have a theological problem if you disagree with that sentence, because they are made in God’s image, just as you and I are.”
I have created a highly subjective list of some of God’s characteristics. By the way, I asked ChatGPT for a list and it came back with 120(!), so I’m going with my list of about 40 from my essay written 10 years ago! The ones I have capitalised are the ones which, to me, seem to be at odds with “Does God create LGBTQ+ folk, simply to condemn them for living in accordance with their created orientation and sexuality?”
| Awesome | GRACE | Patient |
| COMPASSIONATE | Helper | RATIONAL |
| Conqueror | Holiness | RESPECT |
| Counsellor | Immanent/Fully present and accessible | RIGHTEOUS |
| CREATOR | Immutable/Unchanging | Self-existent |
| Deliverer | Infinitude | Self-sufficient |
| Encourager | JUSTICE | Sovereignty |
| Eternal | LOVE | Sustainer |
| Faithfull | LOYAL | Tolerant/Slow to anger |
| Forgiving | Majestic | Transcendent |
| GENEROUS | MERCY | Trinity |
| GENTLE | Omnipotent | TRUTH |
| GOODNESS | Omnipresent | Wisdom |
| Omniscient | Zealous |
If God does condemn LGBTQ+ people for being who they are, then there is a conflict with the CAPITALISED aspects of God’s character. So that’s nearly a third, and you might want to add others from this list or edit a few, but as I said ten years ago (with some slight changes), how can God demonstrate Tolerance, if LGBTQ+ people simply behave in accordance with his creative direction! I didn’t highlight Forgiving, because I’m now convinced that being LGBTQ+ isn’t something needing forgiveness, so it doesn’t apply. Even if being LGBTQ+ caused conflict with just one aspect of God’s character, I would want to find an explanation and would need to raise serious questions – it shouldn’t conflict with ANY aspect of God’s character – not a single one! The number CAPITALISED simply doesn’t matter. The fact that it conflicts with so many, should give anyone grave concern.
As I wrote 10 years ago: Since 2015, part of the impetus for this work has been Micah 6: 8, which says: “He has shown you, O mortal, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.”
It has therefore become, for me, a matter of understanding and seeing God’s Justice and Mercy become a reality for a relatively small but highly significant group of people, particularly in the light of the vitriolic invective targeted by some people including increasing numbers of those who claim to be Christians. Sadly, we are also seeing a growing number of churches who feel they must harden their positions to protect God’s Kingdom, as if God needed our protection! Essentially, they are really responding to ignorance and fear, which is never a good catalyst for change. And to be blunt it shows the lack of Biblical understanding and teaching in many of our churches.
“Logic!” said the Professor half to himself. “Why don’t they teach logic at these schools?”
Next time I’m planning to look at the attitude of the church and its relationship with the Bible and science, although that may change a little. We’ll see!
Changing Minds 