Mike Murray
1 min readJun 14, 2023

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The interpretations of translations of translations of writings created thousands of years ago always end up serving the interests of the current holders of “truth”. The book of Leviticus is portrayed as representing God’s instructions to Moses for how people should conduct themselves. What’s most likely is that these instructions were created by leaders trying to bring about some semblance of order to an otherwise unruly collection of tribes, in order to establish a sustainable civilization. Part of that effort undoubtedly included prohibitions on behaviors considered to be deviant at the time, because those behaviors were counterproductive to developing a coherent social order. You can’t have people, pretty much men exclusively, running around raping, committing incest, cavorting with animals, and the like and have the type of social cohesion needed to create a civilization under harsh environmental conditions. And yes, homosexuality was considered to be an undesirable, deviant behavior. Prohibiting homosexual behavior may have been completely appropriate in the context of those times, which we can never fully understand. I suspect it was quite a different phenomenon than “being with the one you love”. Just as we should not judge people who struggled to survive under conditions we cannot imagine, we should not automatically apply those ancient mores to today’s societies. And hiding behind the myth that these were instructions from God (YHWH) to scorn people who choose a loving relationship with someone of the same gender should itself be scorned.

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