As someone who escaped, “God is love” as well as knowing gay people always was something a bit hard to reconcile, but not as much as you think. See, if you take all the sins in the Bible, or even just the ones in 1 Cor 6:9-11, then almost everyone in the world is a sinner. It works better on a sect that is small and consider most mainstream religions wrong, along with enough isolationism.
I neve4 had a blinding hatred for gay people, and had friends etc. To past me, a gay person was just as sinful as anyone who had sex outside of marriage. The passage above lists fornication, adultery, drunkards, revelers and such with what some translate as homosexuality(iirc there’s some who believe it meant pederasty instead.) A reviler isn’t really that bad in the grand scheme of things, and almost everyone I knew outside the religion had sex before marrriage.
Combined with little articles explaining homosexual feelings weren’t sinful, but acting on them were(same article pointing out straight people had to avoid sin in similar ways) I was fooled into thinking a weird “Well, I don’t agree with it, but it’s God’s rule and it’s his house…”
I think part of it also was that I definitely did not consider myself “better”, as I hated myself for “breaking God’s law” by masturbating to porn. I didn’t even do it that much, but if I got tempted enough I would hate myself for months on end, considering 6 months not doing so to be not quite adequate, and considering myself not worthy of romantic relationships due to my “problem.”
In a religion where everyone falls short of God’s glory, I didn’t really rank the sins, and tended to push to the back of my mind the things that didn’t feel right.
Religion strongly discourages thinking for yourself, even if you think something is OK. It tells you that you’re not good enough to make those decisions yourself, because see what happened when Adam and Eve did that? Cognitive Disonance is a feature.
As someone who escaped, “God is love” as well as knowing gay people always was something a bit hard to reconcile, but not as much as you think. See, if you take all the sins in the Bible, or even just the ones in 1 Cor 6:9-11, then almost everyone in the world is a sinner. It works better on a sect that is small and consider most mainstream religions wrong, along with enough isolationism.
I neve4 had a blinding hatred for gay people, and had friends etc. To past me, a gay person was just as sinful as anyone who had sex outside of marriage. The passage above lists fornication, adultery, drunkards, revelers and such with what some translate as homosexuality(iirc there’s some who believe it meant pederasty instead.) A reviler isn’t really that bad in the grand scheme of things, and almost everyone I knew outside the religion had sex before marrriage.
Combined with little articles explaining homosexual feelings weren’t sinful, but acting on them were(same article pointing out straight people had to avoid sin in similar ways) I was fooled into thinking a weird “Well, I don’t agree with it, but it’s God’s rule and it’s his house…”
I think part of it also was that I definitely did not consider myself “better”, as I hated myself for “breaking God’s law” by masturbating to porn. I didn’t even do it that much, but if I got tempted enough I would hate myself for months on end, considering 6 months not doing so to be not quite adequate, and considering myself not worthy of romantic relationships due to my “problem.”
In a religion where everyone falls short of God’s glory, I didn’t really rank the sins, and tended to push to the back of my mind the things that didn’t feel right.
Religion strongly discourages thinking for yourself, even if you think something is OK. It tells you that you’re not good enough to make those decisions yourself, because see what happened when Adam and Eve did that? Cognitive Disonance is a feature.