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See...ths funny thing is i'm the only one in this thread that i know to be queer. But as i'm also Christian, i get supurbly tired of the "blame it on God" stuff that gets thrown around.
Will, i don't know what to say to you, other than your reading of Roman culture is seriously flawed. Stoic ethics states that being penetrated is serious problem for a man...and so too is the desire for lots to sex. They are feminizing influences that reduce one's ability to control the body.
i'll try to put it another way.
To a Stoic (THE dominant discourse of upper class Roman society in the Imperial period) the problem of life is desire and fragility. You can be hurt, and you can want for what you don't have...and that is a problem. To be perfect is to be noblely above the harm of the world and desire for things in it. The perfect being is:
Masculine, firm, cool, unaffected, governed by proper spirit (pnuema) and impervious.
Imperfect beings desire sex, are warm, quick tempered, feminine, fragile, and responsive to stimuli.
There are no strict dichotomies, but continums. Education, training, rhetoric, everything is a practice for the high status male to control and discipline body and mind in to perfection.
Paul picks up on a lot of this rhetoric, and changes it in some interesting ways. Control of the body is huge for Romans...that's why crucifixtion is so shaming. But to Paul, it's a place to show the ultimate impermeability of God's power. That's quite a reversal. But in some places, notably in gender and sex...Paul takes on those ethics without substatial revision.
Pornea (sex, desire, immorality) weakens the body. The Spirit of Christ is in the mind of the beleiver, but by letting Pornea in one's self, the beliver allows Christ to be penetrated by that pollution. Like the Stoics, Paul doesn't care if one is pentrating or being penetrated...it is the desire for sex that is the signal of weakness. But taking it a step further, it isn't just the person that's harmed...Paul literally thinks that fornication (of any gender/orientation) allows Christ to be fucked by sin.
Yeah...Christianity has a role in coding queer sex as negative. But they didn't come up with this whole cloth. And there is reason to believe that outside the conversion of Constantine...we'd still be living in a homophobic society.
Dale Martin wrote a masterful work on this subject...The Corinthian Body, where he talks about Paul's adoption of Stoic ethics, and the various issues around body control that lead to this whole mess we currently find ourselves in. It's a touch technical, but if you're interested in the origins of discourses of self-policing and desire as sin...it's pretty invaluable.
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For God so loved creation, that God sent God's only Son that whosoever believed should not perish, but have everlasting life.
-John 3:16
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