As I said before I’d like to focus on social issues more this year. Sadly, although my goal is to influence my generation, I feel as if it is easier for me to write to fellow conservatives on social issues. Today my writing is intended for Christians, not because I want to exclude anyone but because the arguments and topics here are presented in a way that might only seem tolerable to other Christians. If any non-conservative Christians stumble upon this article please keep in mind this is not worded or written with your point of view and counterarguments in mind. Also most social issues, especially this one, I do not believe in taking a political stance for or against. Government should not be involved in these issues. This article is purely for arguments amongst worldviews and opinions, not law and politics. Although I do believe people need to voluntarily accept a religious standard in order to uphold their liberties, this article isn’t about making that argument today. Before you start reading this keep in mind it’s extremely long compared to recent articles and you might want to wait for more spare time. I’ve basically compiled a primary topic that I’ve developed over the past 8 years into one article so obviously this is gonna be long.

Something that has bothered me while among modern churches is how they often draw this effortless picture on faith. I’ve heard countless sermons across many denominations teaching us how we cannot get to heaven without faith and how works are pretty much useless. My Baptist school would constantly pick apart other religions for being “based on works”, but in reality I think neither of these ideas match up. Religion where salvation is not faith based is nearly pointless, because we cannot physically wash away our imperfection. Religion without works just shows that you have no faith, because what is faith if you aren’t willing to work upon it? Like, your school/ church is full of people who believe their was a man named Jesus, but why are they all unashamedly bullies? People have used this modern way of religion to justify a multitude of sins, believing that they can get away with anything because Christianity is faith based. We spent so much time telling people they’re forgiven that church leaders never really took the time to check if their congregation understood that Jesus told the adulterous he saved from being stoned, “go and sin no more” not “go and live in blissful ignorance cuz I’ll just infinitely forgive you.” The book of James actually covers this very issue by stating, “Indeed, just as the body without spirit is dead, so too faith without actions is dead.” (James 2:26).

Where am I getting with this? Well throughout my years in “Christian” schools I’ve noticed a very hypocritical standard (specifically the larger the school gets). These students live in families that only understand morals by what they’ve been taught, instead of seeking out their own answers. Here we get to the primary topic of this article. Most the people at my school understood homosexuality as a sin, but were left completely ignorant when it came to what the Bible actually says about sexuality. I believe this is because Christian parents for the past century have found these things too sensitive to talk about to their children, and over many years each generation conforms more and more to our lustful culture. Hollywood and schools don’t hesitate to “educate” children about sex, and when parents leave it without a moral standard it’s no wonder we wound up where we are today. Although I’m extremely uncomfortable talking about sexuality (or even saying “sexuality” out loud), it’s time someone covered this in full. I hate the term maturity and I’ll get to that later, but I’m simply putting that in the top of this blog post because I’m not going to be sugarcoating any terms.

My idea’s of sexuality started due to something I’ve despised since I first heard of its existence in 5th grade, sex-ed. I felt this stuff too “grown-up” and didn’t quite understand why, but just knew it was wrong to talk about. Somehow by switching between schools I managed to basically skip a majority of it by taking a very unorganized online class in 8th grade. However in 6th grade our science class still taught about sex, and within one year had introduced us kids to something very “mature”. Now here’s where things kick off. I hate the word mature, it makes no sense to me. How is everything that we were told is sinful listed as “mature”? Strip clubs are called “Gentlemen clubs”, pornography is for “mature audiences” and ironically the age people call you “mature” is when you can legally do or watch all the other bad things. Since when does morality change with age? This is what turned me into a social rebel once I looked into the Bible for myself. In 6th grade they said boys will become attracted to girls, they pre-programmed us to justify lust. They told us it was natural to look at each other, yet still enforced a dress code. To me these big “Christian” schools are what happen when you try to make a church from a computer database, there is no soul or purpose or reason. You’re punished for dressing differently, but never told why that’s wrong. Meanwhile they’re telling boys how they’ll just uncontrollably be attracted to girls for their physical body. Welp, sure enough when you live in a society that tells you what is and isn’t attractive, people tend to be that way. So when I finally left that school and learned what the Bible said I was about as angry as 80% of Donald Trump supporters.

I’d like to tell all those people who said “it’s only natural” and “sex makes you a man” and try to jam all this awkward and disturbing “science” into my 12 year old brain that Jesus did not say “become a man” he said, “unless you change and become like little children, you won’t even enter the Kingdom of Heaven!” (Matthew 18:3). But that’s not the last you’ll hear from him in this article. So while my school was justifying heterosexual lust as just some kind uncontrollable stage in life, most other places were justifying any kind of lust. When I was introduced to social media I was instantly smacked in the face by all the world’s problems, and knowing that some of my friends were open to this since late elementary definitely explains millennials now. Parents to the millennial generation really should have kept more track of their children, because for most cases the moral decay is because no one bothered to watch what their kids were looking up when Facebook became a thing. Anyways, once I was introduced to these issues in the world and then open to communicate with anyone else in the world, I had to quickly develop details I had never thought about in my worldview. It seemed that everyone I met online had issues involving our sex-driven-culture and I had to further my understanding on what the Bible says.

First off like the majority of pre-Obama Christians, I knew homosexuality was a sin, but didn’t quite know how that added up. Most people online argued it was just because of some old verse in Leviticus, many liberals in which argued it was about stoning people… Well I then looked into how Jesus fulfilled the law, and how those verses were only meant to preserve the early Hebrews and how Ezekiel 18:32 (still in the Old Testament) says, “For I take no pleasure in the death of anyone, declares the Sovereign Lord. Repent and Live!”  But then that lead me to wonder where does it say in the New Testament about homosexual thoughts and acts being a sin, and not simply something that Jews were suppose to abstain from like eating pork or wearing something of two fabrics. Well it turns out there are multiple places in the New Testament where sleeping with the same-sex is either a list among sins (1 Corinthians 6) , or considered unnatural (Romans 1). Jesus in Matthew 19 when explaining adultery as a sin quoted Genesis 2:24 which reads “therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.” Very politically incorrect if you ask me.

Now obviously Bible verses aren’t enough to convince non-Christians of something like this, which is why one day I want to write a completely different article explaining this in liberal terms. However the reason homosexual thoughts and acts are a sin has nothing to do with the person or love or health. We’re getting to the bigger point in all of this. God created us all to love each other. Loving the same-sex is not a sin, and even kissing, holding hands and cuddling aren’t necessarily sinful. Our culture thinks of these things as something more intimate so that’s something more debatable, but you have to remember that during Jesus’ time it must have not been uncommon for a kiss to be an innocent greeting otherwise Judas probably would have betrayed Jesus with some other form of greeting. Sadly we live in a time that’s redefined love and confused it with lust and attraction. Forget the idea of anything physical being innocent when simply being kind to someone is often confused with flirting, because actual love has become so rare. What I’m getting at is the sin isn’t within any love, it’s within lust. But once drawing that conclusion I wondered, “well does that mean if two of the same-sex had sex out of love is that justified?” And here’s the difference. God made us with a purpose, and those feeling are not even something exclusively for pleasure OR for love. It is something that is only suppose to be shared between the parents of a family. God created male and female to be partners, and as husband and wife to lead a family. Which consequently means we were designed to leave those very intimate feelings with who we are suppose to marry. This is where we get to a place where even modern conservatives get moderate.

The reason we say homosexual thoughts and actions are wrong is because God created man and women to marry and lead a family. Well this means not just homosexual pleasure, but any sexual pleasure outside of marriage would be just as bad.  On a side note, this is why the term making love has always bothered me; because sex is only suppose to be with the person you’ve decided to spend your life with and only if you both want to do it. So “making love” should actually refer to all the innocent things that made and built that loyal relationship before anything sexual happened. When God created this world there was no sin. We were created to only be leading a family with one person and in a world without death we’d share our lives with that same person forever. In a world corrupted by sin obviously people die, hearts are broken and things happen. But the closest thing to our original intent is to save our virginity for that person we’ll spend the rest of our lives with. I’d suggest (as the most logical conclusion) if someone truly wants you to be there’s, they’d be willing to wait and marry you before doing anything sexual with you.

There’s more than just that though. We’ve been told since the very beginning that lust is natural, or that we’re born certain ways. I’d like to say that like any sin, we are called to control ourselves and that the purpose God’s given us is way more fulfilling than any worldly desire we could chase. That’s why it’s not just lust for the same-sex, but all other lust is against our original intent. Jesus said in Matthew 5:28 that “everyone who looks at a women with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” In plain English, looking at a girl lustfully is sinful. This is why I do not believe in any common belief of sexual orientation. Some people say they are heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, pansexual, asexual and who knows what they’ll have created by 2020, but to me there’s no need for labels other than I am a Christian. I’m not hetero, homo, bi or pan. I don’t get enjoyment by chasing around someone for their body parts. The person I love is for that person alone and I’ll only see that person or any person alone no matter how much of their physical body I might be able to see. I wasn’t always that way thanks to that year of 6th grade brainwashing, but contrary to liberal belief it is possible to change your “sexual orientation”, maybe it just requires God. I’m not asexual though either, because I will probably love every bit of my wife so much that I’ll be attracted to everything she does. That isn’t heterosexuality though, because it will be just my wife as a person, not just because she has the body parts that are on every single female body. If they create a term for “attracted to people for their person, and only one person” then I’m that. You could probably call that Christianity though.

Now here’s something everyone but liberals are afraid to talk about and frankly I hate saying the word. Lately everyone has been trying to normalize masturbation. They’re trying to teach it in schools to 11 year old boys and girls, most Christian boys I’ve heard try to justify it as “natural” and very few people ever talk about it (except liberals… cuz I believe they confuse the words “progress” and “sexual desire” quite often). I’ve yet to personally know of any other guy who doesn’t do it, but then again I’m no liberal who goes around talking about this kind of stuff in public (I’ve actually been nervous about posting this for the past two weeks). What I’ve said before could probably lead you to your own conclusion, but to me it would only make sense that if masturbation is ok then homosexuality is ok. If homosexual actions were made out of love it would only be sinful because those actions were made with someone who isn’t a spouse in God’s eyes. Masturbation, like the very weird band Lust Control once said, “it’s artificial sex.” People justify it by calling it “natural” but one of the main points of Christianity is not to conform to what is natural in this world. When the sexual revolution once tried to be scientific they even said homosexuality was natural by looking into the animal kingdom (and recently I’ve seen the same argument for polygamy). God’s purpose for humanity, our nature before sin entered the world, that’s what we should strive for. Masturbation is creating a feeling that should be saved and shared with that really special someone that God puts into our lives. Multiple times in the Bible I believe there is references to masturbation as a sin also. So if you don’t take my philosophy for it I’m still going to hold my skepticism to the idea that at least one of these verses isn’t referring to masturbation.

Matthew 5:28-30
“…everyone who looks at a women with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart. If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away… and if your right hand caused you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. For it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body go to hell.”

1 Corinthians 6:18
Flee from sexual immorality. Every other sin a person commits is outside the body, but the sexually immoral person sins against his own body.

1 Corinthians 7: 8-9
But I say to the unmarried and to the widows: It is good for them if they remain unmarried even as I am; but if they cannot exercises self-control, let them marry. For it is better to marry than to burn with passion.
My version of relationship-love has nothing to do with the body. I could find any girl with the same body parts, if I bought what this world sold me I could judge them based on a scale or comparison to what is stereotypically “attractive” or healthy. However people aren’t objects or programs or a complicated system of reactions, we all think and feel and understand independently. Every body is beautiful when you love everybody, and I believe that equally. Physical beauty is relative, and people shouldn’t be rated on something so materialistic. True beauty is what’s beneath the skin. More importantly, when what is beneath the skin turns out to be your soulmate THAT is the most attractive thing in our little world, not the body and not any physical pleasure. That’s the way God intended it, and that is truly more beautiful than anything Hollywood could come up with. At least… as Darrell Castle would say, “that’s the way I see it.”