Homosexual affection may of course be an emotion which some find aesthetically disgusting, but one cannot base Christian morality on a capacity for disgust. Neither are we happy with the thought that all homosexual behaviour is sinful: motive and circumstances degrade or ennoble any act, and we feel that to list sexual acts as sins is to follow the letter rather than the spirit, to kill rather than to give life.Further we see no reason why the physical nature of a sexual act should be the criterion by which the question whether or not it is moral should be decided. An act which expresses true affection between two individuals and gives pleasure to them both, does not seem to us to be sinful by reason alone of the fact that it is homosexual.
Throughout nearly all its history and in the larger sections of the Church today, the myth of Adam and Eve (called without justifica*tion the Fall of Man)* is treated as though it were historical fact on which logical arguments can be built. In this way, sexuality came to be regarded as necessarily polluted with sin in that event. Even when rejected as historical fact, this myth still has its effect upon the attitude of some Christians to sexuality; it will therefore be wise to think more about it. First, this, like other myths, had an earlier Babylonian origin and was used for religious purposes by the Jewish teachers. Further, like all myths, it is a poetic and symbolic repre*sentation of the condition and predicament of man. It is not ex*clusively or even primarily concerned with sexuality. It is a myth representing the transition of man, either in his racial history (phylogenesis) or his development from babyhood (ontogenesis) from an unreflective obedience to instinct to a condition in which he is responsible for his actions, in which he can reflect on them and make judgments and moral choices, weighing up possible courses of action in the light of a concept of good and evil.
It is a story, not of man’s fall, but of man’s growing up, and of the pain that growing up involves. It is significant that God is recorded as saying (Gen. 3, v. 22): “Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil.” To recognise and love what is good is to know also what is evil, to fear it and to be tempted to it. To know the good is to know joy, but it is also to experience pain, to be tempted to pride and presumption.
You would still have to deal with the Puritans as well as the minority population of Quakers being a genuine American tradition, whereas the others are not.
Puritanism probably directly contributed to New England's later conversion to liberal Republicanism, and thence to liberal Democracy (save perhaps in parts of rural Vermont, whose Republicanism was always conservative), so the point stands in essence.
Published by the very first completely independent religious group in North America, whose existence on these shores predates the Revolution by a century, it's a crystal-clear look into America's genuine traditions (as opposed to, say, the Papists, alien to these shores, or the Southern Baptists, born in rebellion against the Nation).
Towards a Quaker View of Sex (1963) - p
It even includes an excellent dissertation on the naturalistic view of human morality, sexual and otherwise, which, though wanting in comparison to the Germanic (Schopenhauerian) view of moral development, still represents a step forward in comparison to the effete taking-for-granted of Biblical literalism most American Christians cling to like a security blanket:
The edict, which I hope you will take time to read, is still far too open minded and reasonable for some minds to digest which is all the shame as it discusses relationships which, in 1963 were not as public as they are today.
The ignorance in which you pontificate is amusing. There were Baptists in the south long before the civil war. Before the original revolution. And they go back a lot further on the Continent.
But whatever... back to your usual.... erm, idiom.
The Southern Baptist Convention was formed in 1844 in response to the rejection of a slaveholder, James Reeve, being rejected by the Foreign Mission wing of the American Baptist Society as a missionary. It later formalized in 1861 with the express purpose of administering to the spiritual needs of the white men of the Confederacy.
It is an institution founded in rebellion against the United States.
Baptists? Certainly. Southern Baptists, as in members of the Southern Baptist Convention? No.
Look above you.
And somehow those intellectual ties just start in the 19th century?
... the Southern Baptists, born in rebellion against the Nation.
The intellectual affiliation, in the form of a Convention dedicated exclusively to the evangelization "of those lashed by God and man alike", certainly does.
Note what I wrote in my initial post:
That was used as a noun, to signify my utter hatred for the Southern Baptist Convention, which has posed for years as the final arbiter of American religious and moral traditions (traditions it rejected in 1861).
It still had many of the traditions of the Baptist heritage. It didn't reject them wholesale.
My point is that you're being too arbitrary in what you value as an American tradition and that which is not.
I'm not talking about the Baptist heritage. I'm talking about America's religio-moral heritage - a rather broader topic, and one which involves the Baptists far less than they tend to involve themselves.
My broader (and not particularly concealed) point is that all traditions are arbitrary, and one can easily make a case that Quaker tolerance, being vastly older in this nation than the convoluted combination of Manifest Destiny and moral rigidity found in the SBC, or the deference to authority found in Catholicism, represents a truer form of 'Americanism' than these others.
I don't really hide my contempt for arguments from tradition, but I thought it'd be fun to dabble.
You're holding up the Quakers to be the quintessential American religious tradition, whereas we know that while it was a significant tradition, it was far from the prominent one. Those that held less high opinions on homosexuality tended to be the most prominent, from heritages that had been domesticated far longer than the Quaker tradition, and even had been exported to the colonies prior to that.
I don't know if I really buy the idea you are trying to be skeptical about the notion of tradition so much as trying to establish what was tradition.
Published by the very first completely independent religious group in North America, whose existence on these shores predates the Revolution by a century, it's a crystal-clear look into America's genuine traditions (as opposed to, say, the Papists, alien to these shores, or the Southern Baptists, born in rebellion against the Nation).
Towards a Quaker View of Sex (1963) - p
It even includes an excellent dissertation on the naturalistic view of human morality, sexual and otherwise, which, though wanting in comparison to the Germanic (Schopenhauerian) view of moral development, still represents a step forward in comparison to the effete taking-for-granted of Biblical literalism most American Christians cling to like a security blanket:
The edict, which I hope you will take time to read, is still far too open minded and reasonable for some minds to digest which is all the shame as it discusses relationships which, in 1963 were not as public as they are today.
Unfortunately, the focus of your dissertation has narrowed to the preface remark concerning which faith was actually the "first independent one" in America. I say unfortunate because it diverts from the main thesis point, that Quakers do not consider homosexuality innately sinful or that the love same-sex couples express does not have the same value in the sight of God as heterosexual love.
It is an important example showing that not all Christian faiths holds the same puritanical beliefs on the subject. Too bad that you made what appears to some as a misstatment of fact which leads them to ignore the underlying issue and dismiss the entire thesis.
The "entire thesis", actually, had nothing to do with the views of Quakerism on homosexuality. It has to do with the notion of 'Tradition', and how it "informs our actions" - or, more appropriately, how nobody in the world actually pays heed to Tradition.
The entire OP is a Trojan Horse, y'know.
Strange. The section you cited, and my reading of the section in your link, seem to indicate a significant tolerance of same-sex relations. I see that the author does not consider homosexuality an orientation but rather a choice for w/e reasons, but that does not matter to me. Choice or not I don't consider it either a sin or something deserving of descrimination.
So perhaps being a little clearer about what your essential thesis is would have prevented me from mistaking your intent (whatever that intent actually is).
My intent was to attack religiously-derived narratives of American history by postulating an alternative narrative to that offered by groups like the Southern Baptist Convention: that the Quakers were the first to "bear the torch of Christianity" on this continent (whether that is strictly true or not is irrelevant, just as it's irrelevant whether or not the SBC, or other hardline groups, hew to a "more American" form of Christianity), and that, consequentially, they form the main thread of American religious and moral thought to lead us through the labyrinth - that we ought to follow their lead, being, as they are, the instigators and conservators of our Tradition.
I used this little Quaker book as an expy through which to suggest this view, not with any idea that it'd be taken seriously - the Quakers are as ever a minority group, and no self-victimizing majority ever heeds the views of minorities - but to call into question the entire idea of philosophizing from Tradition.
Well, in that case you've provided the answer to your own question. Societal "tradition" is based upon the majority view; not the minority view even though a minority may have it's own traditions (like Judaism). Since the vast majority of American religious groups of European lineage cleve to similar ideals on such subjects those shared ideals become the foundation for accepted "traditon" and no amount of pointing to minor counterexamples will affect this. :twocents:
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