BHP journal: Homosexual Cult Prostitution in Israel

This section was at once interesting and exasperating.

Exasperating in that I honestly don't have the time to put up with this level of ignorance (details below). The only reason I can carry on right now is that the next section is on the Law, which is important and should be pretty interesting. And that's the end of the chapter so we can change topics. Good grief.

Interesting in that I didn't know about (likely) homosexual cult prostitution being mentioned so often in the Old Testament.

There are several things in Gagnon's analysis that I find absolutely absurd, but I don't have time to address them all. So I'll just go with the most astounding.

In addressing the (fully legitimate) argument that the condemnation of homosexual cult prostitution does not necessarily condemn modern consensual and committed same sex relationships, he says this:

Such a rationale would overlook the ancient Near Eastern context. The Mesopotamian evidence explored at the beginning of this chapter makes clear that the most acceptable form of same-sex intercourse - not the least acceptable was precisely same-sex intercourse conducted in a religious context. Otherwise for a man to want to be penetrated by another man was generally regarded as disgraceful.

The logic here is, of course committed and consensual same-sex relationships would have been forbidden, because homosexual cult prostitution was forbidden.

Now I know that this whole exercise take a bit of speculation, but with this type of irresponsible logic, how can somebody take this as a good faith analysis? It's just not.

And again, this was just one of several mind-blowing statements in this section.

But it's just interesting enough to keep going! I'm learning stuff!