“the Bible says homosexuality is a sin” well the Bible also has a lot of sexism, rape, incest, violence and a lot of contradictory messages in general because it was written by people and people have agendas
I don’t really think that God even has the time to care about if people are gay like if he’s got a whole world to run there are more important things anyway
And if God is love, he’s not just loving me if I am what he wants; he’s loving me as the person he made me to be, which is a queer person
You can’t say “I love you, and I made you gay but I’m sending you to hell you awful sinner” my dude that doesn’t make sense it’s not like hell has a low population is it
The god I believe in loves queer people because that’s how he made us
the bible doesn’t condemn homosexuality anyway. It’s content taken out of context and misinterpreted over hundreds of years of translations, re-translations, and mis-translations.
Hell, in Kenneth Davis’s Don’t Know Much About The Bible, there’s a passage that absolutely blows my mind and proves just how much we can misinterpret with simple translation mistakes:
“In researching the world’s oldest city, for instance, I learned that Joshua’s Jericho is one of the oldest human settlements. It also lies on a major earthquake zone. Could that simple fact of geology have had anything to do with those famous walls tumbling down? Then I discovered that Moses and the tribes of Israel never crossed the Red Sea but escaped from Pharaoh and his chariots across the Sea of Reeds, an uncertain designation which might be one of several Egyptian lakes or a marshy section of the Nile Delta. This mistranslation crept into the Greek Septuagint version and was uncovered by modern scholars with access to old Hebrew manuscripts.”
The bible is one long-ass game of telephone, whispered around the world in dozens if not hundreds of languages, for thousands of years. I have a hard time knowing what my grandpa is talking about, when he starts going on about the technology or practices of his youth, and that was only about 80 years ago, in the same country and in the same language as me. So why every Joe on the streets thinks they can take one or two verses, completely out of context and probably mis-translated several times to boot, and use it to spout propaganda and hatred for an entire group of people will forever be beyond me.
You’re all valid, and frankly, if there is a ‘loving God,’ then that God will be happy to see you happy. Seriously.
I needed that. Thank you.
The Bible wasn’t faxed down from the sky, people, it’s been compiled and formulated for hundreds of years until it became what it is today. And yes, misinterpreted by whoever with whatever agenda-of-the-day.
And hypocrites always stick to the word and not the spirit of any religion: to love, to help, to respect, to protect, and to strive to make the world a better place.
Yup, Jesus never said ANYTHING against LGBT people. All he said was don’t be greedy, don’t be lustful and don’t be wrathful. The fact that LGBTphobes took those instructions out of context to justify their LGBTphobia is pretty telling!
Hey, your friendly neighborhood Jew here!
You guys know that verse in Leviticus that homophobes like to trot out? Well, I’m here to tell you:
They don’t read Hebrew and they don’t know shit.
And now here’s something you probably won’t hear from any of those Fine Christian Folks ™ anytime soon, either:
We do read Hebrew and we still don’t know shit.
Here’s the thing. The most “accurate” word-for-word translation of that verse would say “a man shall not lie with another man; it is forbidden.”
Here’s the issue.
The grammar surrounding “men” in that sentence isn’t correct, and the word I’ve translated as “forbidden” is “toevah,” a word so fucking old we literally don’t know what it meant anymore.
The strange sentence construction suggests that “lie with another man” uses a feminine construction you wouldn’t normally find in a sentence that’s entirely about men, and while “toevah” means “forbidden,” it’s not actually clear what is forbidden. Here’s an incomplete list of possibilities:
Pederasty (adult male/adolescent male sex) is full-stop forbidden, a man sleeping with a male prostitute is full-stop forbidden, a man sleeping with a man as part of any kind of sex magic or fertility ritual is forbidden.
And my rabbi’s personal interpretation, based on the sentence construction: a man shouldn’t sleep with another man in a woman’s bed. (So basically: don’t cheat on your wife with a dude, which is probably treated separately from “don’t commit adultery” because adultery would come with the risk of an illegitimate child.)
You’ll notice none of these involve “ew, you disgusting gays.”
Unless you accept a word-for-word literal translation with zero consideration for the social mores and other tribes surrounding Israel contemporary with the writing of Torah, nothing about this commandment has anything to do with our modern understanding of queer people having committed relationships. Once you start taking the rituals and practices of Israel’s contemporaries into account, it suddenly becomes clear why these prohibitions would have been put into place (sex magic was common in the cult of Ba’al, for example, while pederasty was practically a requirement in Greece).
If you’re just a person out there loving other people of the same gender as you?The Torah says nothing against you. But do you know what our literary tradition does say?
It puts you in the company of Naomi and Ruth.
Ruth is considered the first convert, and her vow to her mother-in-law Naomi (after Ruth’s husband’s death) forms the basis of our modern marriage vows. “Where you go, I shall go, and where you lodge, I shall lodge; your people shall be my people, and your G-d my G-d; and where you die I shall die, and there shall I be buried.” Ruth remarries as prescribed by law at the time, but even when a child is born of that new union, nobody calls it “Ruth’s and Boaz’s child”–they all say a child has been born to Ruth and Naomi.
You are in the company of a woman whose name we invoke in our prayers and whose life we celebrate. I wear her words around my shoulders on my tallit, my sacred prayer shawl. Since we consider that everything in the Tanakh is intended for learning and study, what might we take from this story, but that a queer person can be virtuous and beloved of G-d?
this is Nepenthes ampullaria, and they actually do this! they sit on the forest floor and eat leaf litter that falls into their pitchers, making them technically detritivores from our petty human meat-eating point of view.
the face of cannibalism
These are SO CUTE
Yeah it’s wild I mean technically plants already “feed on detritus” I guess, but they wait for those nutrients to integrate with the soil. This plant evolved to catch insects for extra nutrients, then stumbled onto the fact that it could just catch EVEN FRESHER DIRT instead.
I’ve heard anecdotes that staghorn ferns in the wild might do something similar but I can’t find much about that??
Pre-dirt dirt!
i didn’t even consider this…..pre-dirt dirt……what do i do with this information…..
a rare closeup of a black swift, found throughout north america and small parts of south america. swifts are rarely seen up close; they spend more of their life in air than any other species of bird - they eat, drink, mate and sleep while in flight. they are incapable of perching like other birds; they must cling to vertical surfaces.
I had to look this up because “sleep while in flight” ????
but yeah, apparently completely true. these birds stay aloft for as much as 10 months nonstop, feed on insects, spend more energy at night (when there aren’t warm thermals to ride) and at dawn and dusk climb to 10,000 ft altitude where the 30 min slow descent is probably when they catch their sleep.
they’re unusually long-lived for such active critters (20 yrs) and they may be limiting energy expenditure by being extremely aerodynamic and narrow bodied. Also a single bird travels the distance of about 7 roundtrip journeys to the moon in its lifetime (>3 million miles).
A male colleague was making fun of the #metoo movement a few days ago, and many more (I’m one of 5 women in a department of 200 men) joined in. So I raised my voice and said I was glad women were speaking up about sexual harassment and assault and that I hoped that everyone who perpetuated this toxic behavior got taken down.
“Yeah but it’s a trend now, lots of them are just saying it for their 15 minutes of fame.” He then continued to say that he didn’t know anyone who had been harassed or any man who had done it.
I asked him if he had a daughter. He did. I asked him how old she was. She was was 17. I told him I’d bet my rent money that his daughter had experienced sexual harassment.
“That’s impossible.”
“Did you ask her?”
“No.”
“Well then, do it.”
The next day, he came in the office with five bouquets of flowers for all the women in our department, including me. He publicly apologized for making fun of sexual harassment and for making our lives harder by doing so. He said that he simply hadn’t known how widespread it was. Apparently, his daughter deals with it very regularly. She hadn’t told him because of the way he spoke about assault cases that were on the news. She thought he’d think less of her if she’d mention it. It was her idea that he should make a public announcement. He said he felt like a bad father.
I said: “You were. Same goes for everyone who laughed with you. Be better, now you know better. And educate other men that still think the same way you did yesterday. And next time someone tells you about an experience they have, don’t automatically assume that because you haven’t seen it, it’s not true. That kind of willful ignorance is why we still deal with this shit.”
He also offered to pay my rent as that was part of the bet, but I told him I’d rather have him put effort in being a person his daughter and wife could be proud of.
In conversation the other day my mom stopped and asked my dad about what percentage of women he thought had experienced sexual harassment. He said about 20-30% maybe. My mom told him that both of us had been harassed multiple times at work (same goes for both of her sisters) and that she had actually been assaulted by a groper on a public bus. I have never seen anyone’s face go slack so quickly before as he realized that literally every woman in his family had experienced this. And while I’m glad he believed us and has changed his view on that subject I still can’t shake the frustration, the anger, that it required being sat down and spoonfed these incidents that we didn’t particularly wanted to relive. This is something that women have been saying for years, but men just never listen. Not even when they’re forced to sit in mandatory harassment in the workplace training seminars.
my mom has a friend who has a failed program-service dog and he’s literally my favorite creature
He’s a really smart lab, he learned all the commands, but he just has an affinity for doing them whenever he wants
So this lady’s dog literally turns on-off lights, opens doors, opens the fridge, etc… at his own wishes.
Her house looks like its baby-proofed, with kid safe locks on everything and stuff, but really she just has a dog that’s learned all the mobility service dog commands but has a mind of his own.
y’know…. conversations about world war ii would be a lot more bearable and constructive if white men found that period rightly horrific rather than pornographic
We glorify war because it’s the only time we’re allowed to release the beast and not go to jail for it.
You want to see who a man truly is, put him in a battle.
Man is never more himself, than when he has nothing to lose.
you’re not fucking odysseus, go to therapy
Aaaaand this is why men must stifle ourselves. Warriors must suppress their feelings for fear of being seen as psychotic.
please get help like on the real, forreal, no jokes, get help
We go to war to defend the nation, a nation in peril.
Men die in war. They shed their blood and die defending their country.
Warriors don’t glorify war.
Warriors are not beasts.
Warriors are Men with feelings.
Warriors are human!
Warriors are fighters, trained with fight skills, with trained and conditioned bodies, imbued with the Moral Virtues of Humility, Integrity, Selflessness, Self Control and always showing Respect.
Warriors are in full possession of their Manhood, deserving to be shown Respect.
“You’re rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic, my friend.” Is such a brilliant line that sounds like it came outta the cigarette addled mouth of some noir detective interrogating a slimy perp, but no, it was actually Justin McElroy admonishing his brother’s driving skills in American Truck Simulator™️ and I think it’s beautiful how we can all just say words
This blog is attempting to be an art blog. Really it's a fandom blog with some art sprinkled in. If you're looking for the SFW art blog it's Bunniedoodles.tumblr.com
