The straw man is that I'm supposedly saying that the Adversary isn't sometimes involved, that grooming never happens or that gay men were never abused as children,
@rockfox. I'm simply asserting that the evidence shows that the vast majority of both gay men and straight men were not sexually abused as children, that no correlative empirical research has ever come close to demonstrating that there is a causal relationship between sexual abuse and sexual orientation, and that the vast majority of children targeted by homosexual men are already exhibiting precursor signs of being homosexual themselves, just as the vast majority of children targeted by heterosexual men are already exhibiting precursor signs of being heterosexual themselves, not to mention the known fact that, per capita, those who commit sexual assault against young children are more likely to be straight than gay.
Now, look, you'll get no argument from me about that: if I were to bet on (i) 70 top experts chosen for their ability to steer straight along the path assigned to them from a High Priest -- someone like Caiaphas, correct? -- or on (ii) one hobbled lay person (no matter
how much access he could possibly have to advanced, cumulative knowledge or research compiled by other experts in the meantime), I, too, would lean very, very heavily toward choosing to follow the path of the LXX. Hands down. No contest. Sayonara, baby.
Keep in mind, though, that this is a tangent off of a rabbit hole in the main discussion. I don't mind being the Goat in this, and I don't at all mind acknowledging that I haven't come
close to proving that Lev. 20:13 means something other than what most everybody believes it means (I think I keep saying that), but that doesn't change my main set of assertions related to the Queer Choir, and that is (1) that they're not coming for
your children, (2) they are children of Yah before they come close to qualifying as spawn of the Adversary, and (3) if anyone is ever going to be effective at persuading the lost among the Queer Choir or the macro community it represents, they are going to have to take a much more persuasive and loving tack than to promote questionable certainty about (a) their intention to recruit more gays to sustain their herd, (b) there being no genetic basis for homosexuality, or (c) that the only explanation for homosexuality is recruitment or abuse-induced mental illness that supposedly causes them to go queer.
OK, still hunting for the nuggets here.
Both are accurate, you assert, but what about if they're
substantively different? If that were to be the case, could they really both be accurate?
Secondly, you're consistently avoiding one of the points I'm making. This is not a matter of the Hebrew they translated from somehow staying the same between 300 B.C. to 2020 A.D. but now being improperly understood by modern scholars while somehow having been
perfectly understood by 70 pre-Messiah Dr. Faucis or 70 Wayne Grudems or even 70 Menachem Begins, because if that were the case the much more likely scenario would be that the modern scholars would be equally as likely to now fail to understand the Septuagint as they would be to fail to understand the Hebrew of that era.
What I'm suggesting is that the Hebrew might have to be
teased to create an ironclad assertion that Lev. 20:13 euphemistically or idiomatically prohibits some not-fully-articulated aspect of male-male homosexuality. What I'm also asserting is that, when many modern rabbis, many scholars of ancient Hebrew, many scholars of ancient Greek, and many modern algorithmic digital translation tools translate the English of modern English translations
or the LXX back into Hebrew, a different set of characters emerges from the ones that are purported to have
produced the LXX's 'accuracy.' (I do know I'm leaving out their collective spiritual intuition that imbued them with the power of gleaning the meaning others have missed.) I found other modern Jewish scholars online who made this assertion well before I came to the point of wondering if they might be correct.
Yeah, yeah, I know, they were probably all Jewish homo drag queens; that'll let us write them off!
This is all part of one of the most loaded, taboo-laden discussions we could possibly have. It's so forbidden in our culture that everyone has to stumble over themselves to be the first to declare and remind everyone else that
they would never do such a thing, have never even had one solitary thought along those lines, and wouldn't even be caught dead associating with someone who could even hum the Flintstones theme.
So let me shift this particular theological debate to an entirely different topic: the use of
ekklesia in Scripture and how it was purposefully transformed by the translators of the Latin Vulgate to shift its meaning. It's a Greek word that means assembly (you know, as in, where two or more are gathered in My name . . .). Gradually, through a series of translations that began with the Vulgate and continued with the King James (so-called Authorized) Version (which used the Vulgate as its bedrock) and twisted further by subsequent English-language translations that used the KVJ as their bedrock, the meaning has changed from an assembly of human beings to either or both of:
- the building where people gather instead of the people who gather, wherever they gather;
- an organization that people who gather belong to that commits itself to a common extra-Scriptural creed and meets in the buildings that people gather in that carry the title that was formerly meant to describe the gathering that people do.
Both of which the average Christian now assumes you have to comply with in order to be right with your Creator.
Thus, the meaning of what we call 'church' has been purposefully shifted. Instead of church (
ekklesia) being the gathering of people, it's the organization that a person belongs to (i.e., "What
church [club] do you belong to?) and the building where s/he goes to meet with fellow club members (i.e., "
Where do you go to church?).
Were these translations (the two I mentioned being commissioned from the highest level of the Roman and Anglican churches, respectively), both of which had extant Hebrew and Greek LXX manuscripts at their disposal,
accurate in their translations? Or were they not only possessed of an agenda to make these changes but
expected to make them? What came before and what came after the translation are clearly different meanings; are we to assume that those change agendas were God-breathed? Or are we to assume that only the
LXX was God-breathed of all the translations? I'll reveal
my bias: the LXX was no more devoid of purposefully-injected bias than were the Vulgate or the KJV. And I suspect that it was widely known at the time of the creation of each of these major productions that bias was inherent in the commissioning of them. The KJV, because it's the only copyrighted Bible, has been marketed so thoroughly that it's the most likely Bible to now be in the hands of Christians worldwide and is even promoted by the Amish as the only legitimate Scripture despite the fact that it was commissioned by their forebears' biggest persecutor. But at the time of its introduction, the Anglos refused to obtain copies. Even after all other English translations were banned by King James, 60 years passed before it became the Bible used by the majority of English citizens -- because they knew on the ground that it was a con job forced on them by a tyrant who wanted to instill upon himself the Divine Right of Kings; he was the man who most inspired flight to the New World. They knew there was something dishonest about it, beginning with the project head being a man who was transferred to run it from his previous position as the head of the Anglican Inquisition.
Insisting that one had to belong to the Church of England and attend regular services at the buildings constructed by that organization wasn't even the most heinous of the purposeful mistranslations. I chose it because it's less controversial than some other things I could have used as examples of why it's nearly diabolical to assign Divinity to translation projects: the KJV's purposeful insistence on full injection of the Vulgate's purposeful mistranslation of six different Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek words with six different meanings (including one that was the name for the land-fill trash dump outside Jerusalem) into a term (Hell) meant to imply eternal conscious torment is a far more controversial one, but I feared that limiting myself to articulating that would only create further resistance to being able to see how translations are man-made, not God-made endeavors.
My rough-outline expose of the manipulation of Scripture by Constantine and the early church fathers to scare people into cathedral pews and drain their pockets by changing
ekklesia (gathering) to an organized religion and places where one is required to make paid visits is an example of scriptural corruption purposefully introduced by human actors. This isn't something I made up or imagined. I suggest Viola's
Pagan Christianity as a starting point if you doubt me.
