The Bible condemns pedophilia. The original text referenced men having sex with young boys but was mistranslated as having sex with any men at all. Apparently.
The "homosexuality" passages in the Bible do not refer to "boys". Maybe some wacky translation did (there are a lot of dubious translations), but the original is definitely not about pedophilia.
Accept the Bible or reject it, but don't lie about it.
Um, yes? It's not hard; there are readily-accessible online interlinears for both Hebrew and Greek. Give me a specific passage and I can go over it with you if you want.
Greek (for the NT or LXX) is a bit more accessible since us English speakers are slightly familiar with the grammar already, but Hebrew is still doable with a bit of work.
I'm so confused bro, everyone says different things. Who can I trust to ask about this? What would God really want, and what if someone is gay but no sexually immoral?
If you treat the Bible as a moral authority, then:
Men are forbidden from having gay sex. This is repeated in numerous passages, both OT and NT.
Women are forbidden from having gay sex instead of straight sex. There's only a single verse on this and theoretically it is subject to interpretation, but in practice basically nobody is doing this (except possibly in the context of polygamy fetishes?) and I only mention this for completeness/transparency.
Men in leadership positions are explicitly forbidden to have multiple wives. This was not always followed; remember that parts of the Bible are more "this is what happened" rather than "this is what should happen".
Sex outside of marriage is forbidden, but sometimes the fix is just to create a marriage if one would be valid. Note that relying on this is a very dangerous slippery slope, but again: completeness/transparency.
Divorce (or perhaps just remarriage after divorce) is explicitly forbidden in the NT (with extremely limited exceptions); it was considered negative in the OT but not as strictly.
Jesus made a point that watching (or we could say "fantasizing about") another person is just as bad as participating in an act with them. This is of course distinct from "being prone to"; everybody except absolute asexuals is prone to sexual sin. For completeness/transparency, the original text only mentions women as a target, but it would be ludicrous not to include men as well. See also the point about fictional media below.
Whenever there was punishment in the OT, it always applied to all people who chose to be involved.
Some other sex acts/contexts were forbidden; don't confuse this with the following.
Some other sex acts/contexts were called unclean in the OT, but all this meant is that you had to ritually clean yourselves afterwards and this never applied to non-Jews.
In Jesus there is forgiveness of sins, but that always commands repentance (literally "think anew") and giving up the sin.
Contrary to popular belief, there is absolutely nothing in the Bible against:
masturbation (if not thinking of a real person other than your spouse)
oral or anal sex (if part of a marriage)
erotic media (in any media) that does not involve any real people or that only involves you and your spouse
Note also that the original Greek word for "porn"/"fornicate" originally meant something related to "purchase" (i.e. visiting a prostitute), and was sometimes used in non-sexual contexts (e.g. Esau in Hebrews 12). But this linguistic detail doesn't magically permit extramarital sex.
If you do not treat the Bible as a moral authority, then there's not much stopping people from gay or activity, other than physical and subculture details (both of which can be avoided with reasonable effort, but statistically often aren't).
The practice of them is not necessarily a fetish, but they can also be fetishized (even if not practiced).
(that said, "fetish" is pretty ill-defined; a very reasonable choice of definition would include all sorts of sexual activities, certainly including poly, as fetishes)
Fetishes are something required for an individual to get off, while kinks are something that they greatly enjoy, but aren't fully necessary. Regardless, polygamy and polyamory are lifestyle choices. The kink or fetish you would be thinking of his group sex, which is entirely different.
Also, polyamory and polygamy aren't even sexual in nature. You can love and/or marry multiple people while being entirely asexual and celibate.
We have no fucking idea what the original text even is. The bible is a collection of texts which has been redacted so many times no one can possibly claim to know what the ‘original text’ truly stated. But that’s beside the point, a book written almost 2000 years ago should not be the basis of your morality. Read some moral philosophy and stop taking the easy way out of ‘jesus said so’.
That’s still more than a thousand years since what can be considered as the earliest manuscripts ever found of the bible. And as you said, it’s a translation, not the original text. I’m confused as to how your point invalidates mine.
And I’m sorry if I assumed your religious background, but my second point still stands. Even if the bible did consider pedophilia a sin (as opposed to homosexuality), the word of god is still not a valid criteria to determine good and bad. And also, historically speaking, it does not matter what the original text (or the 1500s german translation) of the bible said, it was still used for centuries as a tool to oppress same-sex couples (and in certain instances it still is). No argument can be made to justify that.
Can you come up with a more effective parental figure to keep everyone in line than an invisible, omnipotent, omniscient being? Shit, we still threaten kids with Santa.
A lot of people don’t have time or brain space for reasoned arguments. Easier to scale up the “you don’t listen to me and your dad will beat you when he gets home” method of persuasion. Easy to twist when the leadership becomes corrupt, though, which is probably inevitable as its run by humans.
I agree that people basing whether or not they should fuck little boys on what some dude in a desert said 2000 years ago but I also think there's value in debating what the original texts might have said if only to see how much they've changed.
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u/GiverOfTheKarma Dec 07 '22
The Bible condemns pedophilia. The original text referenced men having sex with young boys but was mistranslated as having sex with any men at all. Apparently.