Alex's comments (member since Mar 21, 2008)

Alex's comments from the Guilty Pleasures group.

I don't believe in making life decisions for other people. I know I'd hate it if someone did something like that to me, and I believe we should do to others as we would wish to be done to us.

If it's the idea of a gay Christian group that sounds odd, Conrad, do you know of this website:

http://whosoever.org/index.shtml

Whosoever Magazine - it's a group for GBLT Christians. As a straight person I didn't have personal tragedy to get over, but I also didn't see how I could possibly remain in a faith that was institutionally homophobic. Whosoever saved my faith, and I'm certain that it has saved lives too.

"In fact, the victorious soldiers in battles would usually rape the vanquished ones -- despite the edict against "wasting seed" -- b/c it was a powerful way of demeaning someone. "

And there you start to get into one of the good reasons why the act might have to be forbidden by a good God until people's other knowledge of the world caught up enough to make it safe to start adding qualifications :) If the command is being used to stop the soldiers of your army from routinely abusing their defeated opponents, suddenly it becomes clear why a good God would forbid it.

Just as you say, using that to justify banning loving relationships is using it in a way it was never intended to be used.

Yes, one of the things I like about looking at the context is that it makes sense of why certain things were thought to be sins which are not thought to be sins now. If you were murdering an unborn child by masturbating, then of course it was wrong. You can suddenly see that the principle at work is one we would agree with - do not murder.

But also m/m penetrative sex involved making one man 'take the woman's place' - in other words they saw it as being an act which necessarily degraded one man. So it could never have been done in a way that was loving - degrading someone/wanting to be degraded and shamed - it's not a good thing.

You do have to value women as human beings before 'taking the woman's part' in anything becomes a non-humiliating thing to do for a man.

I have had extensive conversations with Biblical literalists, and they tend to end with my opponents suggesting that I am possessed by demons. I assume by this that I succeeded in at least worrying them a bit.

But it immediately gets into the question of how you interpret the Bible, whether you should take into account the mores of the times when it was written and the possibility that it was filtered through the merely human minds of its writers, or whether you treat it as if it was dictated, in English, to people who wrote it down with 100% accuracy.

Literalists are trained *not* to think about the Bible. In my own Christian tradition we are trained *to* examine the Bible, and consider it part of our religious duty to figure out what it meant at the time it was written, and what that tells us about what it actually means. But the two traditions can't really talk to each other. The literalists regard thinking independantly about the bible as a temptation, so no matter how you try to persuade them, they have a duty not to be persuaded. It's pretty hopeless.

My thought is that people don't want to have to think for themselves, particularly when that might mean losing the pleasure of looking down on others. Many churches appear to insist that 'God's word is unchanging' and use that to mean that the Bible can be taken on face value. Scriptural exegesis is considered just a way of cheating.

Yay! Thanks Lisa :) My book's called 'Captain's Surrender' - which, contrary to what you might expect from the cover, actually refers to a battle at sea ;) If you just click on my name it'll take you to more details. I've also got some of my favourite female authored m/m fiction up on my shelf; I recommend Erastes, Lee Rowan, Ruth Sims and Fiona Glass for a start :)

If you're interested in the genre you might find
http://speakitsname.wordpress.com/
for gay historical fiction and http://rainbow-reviews.com/
for everything else a good place to start looking.
Heh, and while I'm doing links, this is mine
http://www.alexbeecroft.com/

I write gay historical romance, (my first book came out on the first of January and it's a gay romance set in the 18th Century) and in my experience the majority of people writing gay romance are women.

It still is beneficial to have a masculine or gender neutral pen name, however, because there are gay readers who deliberately prefer not to read stuff written by women. You may find, though, that your largest audience is other women.