I am certainly willing to agree to disagree for now, but we do come from very different backgrounds and perhaps if we keep posting here our worlds will come a little closer together.

A certain amount of your viewpoint rests on the premise that you're a simple fellow and God is too responsible to the average guy and gal to make conditions that would challenge them. I don't actually believe you're simple at all -- certainly you don't fear to take on complicated matters like zoophilia rather thoroughly -- but granted, none of us has an academic background in every possible topic related to scripture and I'm not sure we'd be a lot further ahead if we did. One thing I'll say about God and our understanding of things is that, at least when it comes to nature, things often seem to be almost understandable at a certain level, but then when we get to a deeper level, they become rather strange looking. The classic example is quantum mechanics, where ordinary matter has been shown to be to some extent a wave, similar to a light-wave. So you can pass a solid particle through a solid wall of other particles by having it turn into a wave at a small scale (quantum tunnelling) -- and this is so non-esoteric that it can be used to build a special sort of microscope.

Here's a quote from the wiki on that microscope http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scanning_tunneling_microscope): "Classically, an object hitting an impenetrable wall will bounce back. Imagine throwing a baseball to a friend on the other side of a mile high brick wall, directly at the wall. One would be rightfully astonished if, rather than bouncing back upon impact, the ball were to simply pass through to your friend on the other side of the wall. For objects of very small mass, as is the electron, wavelike nature has a more pronounced effect, so such an event, referred to as tunneling, has a much greater probability."

When it comes to nature, God does work in mysterious ways. Not everything is necessarily easy to understand (and certainly the Schrödinger’s equations given just under the chunk of text I quoted go far beyond my understanding, lol).

Heterosexuality in nature is just part of a complicated array of sexualities and reproductive asexualities. Why sexuality evolved is an ongoing scientific question, since asexual reproduction is more efficient, but the consensus at the moment seems to be that it helps to "drown out" bad mutations and, by making everyone genetically different, tends to outmaneuver the evolution of parasites. But it works just as well in species like the honeybee where most members of the public are non-reproductive and one polygamous adult produces thousands of children. There are many kinds of evolved non-reproductive animals that contribute to the well-being of their species, as well as many kinds of evolved homosexual behaviour that are contributory (for example in insects where males may inseminate other males with their sperm packets in order to provide extra food when supplies are low.)

I don't think that divinely blessed loving gay relationships are more difficult to understand than the scanning-tunnelling microscope. It may seem weird of God to apparently break a biological rule by allowing the evolution of a completely non-reproductive sexual interest in a sexually reproducing species, but clearly, this wouldn't be the only "weirdness" God built into the world. Perhaps it's our limited perspective that is weird, rather than God.

Now, if you're a creationist, then you needn't think about all this: you can just say Adam and Eve were created as they were and everyone who doesn't have sex as they did is a sinner. If you're an intelligent-design person (Bio-Calvinist, one could say), then you can say that God pre-conceived and set in motion the exact evolution of human heterosexuality so that it could be perfect and all the other sexualities that were created as a part of the human evolutionary process could be its incidental errors, akin to malformed limbs and congenital blindness. But if, like me, you believe that God truly created the worlds in a degree of freedom (which connects to why bad things can happen to good people, another essay topic), then heterosexuality emerges as a pure artifact of evolution, no more sacred in its own right than wisdom teeth.

What God contributes by communicating to humankind, in this view, is certain Godly ideas of how we evolved beings can best use our freedom: God inspires us as to how we can love each other and, where necessary, restrain ourselves in order to bring peace and joy to the lives of all of us. Part of this plan is indeed to lay out the best working of the most common sexuality, heterosexuality, with guidelines against errors that tend to produce grief, such as adultery. One sort of common sexual error is to use people or other creatures opportunistically as sex objects even though you could never form a classic sort of loving relationship with them, hence the mosaic laws against male use of men and animals in this exploitative way.

Love is a big, wide, much-abused word and I did realize at one point what might convince you that there were applications of this word that applied to gay relationships but not to zoophilia. We agree as Christians that the holy spirit is given as a counsellor to those who have accepted Jesus Christ. Much of the counsel of the Holy Spirit relates to how to treat people with love and with the justice that love commends. Animals, however, are not likely to interact with the Holy Spirit, as far as we know, or at least, they have not accepted Jesus Christ, as far as we know. Let's define a Christian loving sexual partnership as a partnership where both members have accepted Jesus Christ and can call upon the Lord in prayer for aid with their relationship, and can receive the counsel of the holy spirit to help raise their love to the level that God's grace makes possible for them.

This is a level of love that can be achieved in heterosexual marriages and gay partnerships but that can't be achieved in zoophilic relationships.

I know that some would say that as soon as you have gay sex, God hangs up the phone and the two partners might as well be animals to each other; such folks would cite I Corinthians for authority. Not only is that not my experience, but also, it goes against salvation through grace.

(In any case, the I Corinthians list of those who won't inherit the kingdom of heaven is surprisingly broad. For example, its category "revilers" [λοιδοροι] includes, if you look at a bible concordance, "contentious women." [see {http://www.antioch.com.sg/cgi-bin/bible/vines/find_term.pl#A1} and enter the search term "reviler," then look at the connection between 1_Cor_6:10 and Prov_25:24 and Prov_27:15]. Cat's wife may be in greater spiritual danger than he is! In any case, if everyone who ever reviled someone unfairly were excluded from the Kingdom of Heaven, there are a lot of gay- and pedophile-hating Christians that you don't need to worry about meeting when you get there. Just ask your friends and neighbours what they think about celibate pedophiles who gather together to post on a Christian boylover board, and see how many will cast themselves into eternal perdition by reviling us.)