:shrug: if you want to claim
his posting as
your standard, that's on you. Left leaning persons do tend to have a greater affinity for spending others' money than their own, but that is a different topic.
glad to do so.
Leviticus 18 (NIV) provides for us a list of sexual restrictions. It basically boils down to: no incest, no bestiality, no child-sacrifice, no homosexuality, and if you start to bless and do these things, the Lord will remove his blessings from you. The last bit may be a Deuderonomistic comment, I don't know - I'm TAD and away from my books.
Leviticus 20 (NIV) has a similar list, adds in adultery (and magic!
), and includes various penalties to be assigned - the penalty for homosexuality being the same as adultery, bestiality, laying-with-your-fathers-wife and so on: death.
The penalty inclusion is important: there are basically three layers of Old Testament L/law: Universal Law, Cultural Law, and Ritual Law. So, for example, the dimensions of the temple as originally designed by Solomon are not and have never been considered as binding for any other building. Orthodox Jews who are part of that Talmudic tradition which grew out of the Pharisee movement of the NT era attempt to keep Universal and Cultural Law, while keeping what parts of the Ritual Law are possible without the presence of a central Temple.
Christians, however, hold that the penalty for
all sin is death, really. Maybe not immediately on this planet, but death of a far worse kind. Quite the dilemma, considering that each and all of us are sinners. The coming, death, and resurrection of Jesus didn't just remake how man interacted with God, it remade the shape of the entire universe. The NT, thus, has a series of discussions on at what points the new reality of mans' interaction with God supersedes the demands of the OT. In
Acts 10, for example, Peter has a series of visions where the Judaic cultural code is annulled, an alteration that is emphasized in an even more dramatic manner in the
Council at Jerusalem (Acts 15) when Peter, James, (with Barnabas and Paul in attendance) declare that circumcision is no longer required - nor indeed the Mosaic Law.
Which isn't to say there is
no law - the Universal Law is still very much in effect - and there are sexual components of it as well. Paul had to deal with several of them, particularly in his letters to the Corinthians (Corinth was a Navy Town
). In
I Corinthians 6, for example, he goes on a tear at them about Incest, and Adultery, and Homosexuality, and Prostitution, and Thieving, and Swindling (like I said, it was a sea port) and so on and so forth. He get's mad at them for suing each other, for lying about each other... you get the drift. Sexual immorality, he points out, is sort of unique:
Flee from sexual immorality. All other sins a person commits are outside the body, but whoever sins sexually, sins against their own body. Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; you were bought at a price.
There are other points where it comes up.
Romans 1 (NIV), for example. But I think you get the gist.
