Thanks, Chris!

About "Can sexual love between two men be honored by God?"

Like many people, I would say yes to this, and there is a very long discussion below between Rainboy and I where we debated the idea in great detail. So I won't start it up again here; interested people can add to that thread.

About "Can sexual love between a man and a boy be honored by God?", I am not sure how to approach that question with you without getting into deep discussion, which as you say, you may not comfortable with. The word 'boy' includes both people who are above the common legal age of consent and people who are below it. Within the people who are below the common legal age of consent, it includes prepubescent boys from baby to quite sophisticated 12-13, as well as completely behaviourally different teens. So the short answer to the question is obviously going to be "yes and no."

I think we should sort one thing out just to prepare the ground for a fair discussion, though. Remember when the Spanish royal family banned the Jewish religion in Spain and expelled the very large numbers of Jews who became the ancestors of many of today's Sephardic Jewish people. You may know that many people pretended to convert to Christianity but continued to practice Judaism in secret. Not just to practice it themselves, but to teach it to their children, so these hidden, false converts carried on for generations. Whenever they were discovered, though, they tended to be executed by the Spanish inquisition as apostates.

The same type of thing was done by Christians in southern Japan in the Meiji era, where Christianity was punishable by execution, and by Christians in the Soviet Union, where several types of worship guaranteed a trip to the Gulag.

Now, to raise a child "against society's laws" to believe in a forbidden religion that, if he or she is caught, could lead to severe punishment, persecution or even death -- is it ethical? Is it terribly wrong because it might harm the child? It certainly puts the child into extreme danger that he or she would not otherwise be in. Not just temporary danger, either, but rather, lifelong danger.

Did the Christians of Nagasaki engage in reckless use of innocent children, by encouraging each of their children to break society's lethal laws and practise Christianity, or did they instead communicate an ongoing spark of heroism? What about the children themselves -- were they abused by religious freak parents, as so many people would say today, or did they have a human right to undertake the risks of moral heroism at a young age?

The fact is that society's laws, historically, have propagated every evil and atrocity and banned innumerable good things. In your own country, interracial marriage was banned until the mid-1960's in over a dozen states. You folks in the US had slaves for at least 30 years longer than we did in the British empiyah -- naughty, naughty. Your democratic constitutional founders were mostly slavers! Yes, your law got off to a very good start from the skeptic's point of view.

If the current state of the law is going to hold a winning hand of cards in our discussion, then there's no point us discussing anything. If we can admit the law MIGHT be not just wrong, but perhaps also wicked (just because laws so often have been) then we can have a fair discussion. That's not to say the law is wicked; we just need to be willing to reject it in principle if it is. And in doing that, we don't need to say that the people who drafted the law had wicked intentions. In fact, almost all wicked laws have been drafted by people who had good intentions but just couldn't see very far beyond their own noses.

So if you can tell me, "ok, I admit that it's possible the law sometimes really can be an ass that ought not to be obeyed, however convenient it might be to obey it," then we can have a sane, though dangerous, discussion. If you want to take another big step and say "children also have a right to fundamental justice and need not be ethically yoked to wicked laws just because of the social risk reduction involved," then we can go a little further. Though don't expect me to then say that I think all adult-child sex is 'honored by God' -- I am just trying to get this difficult red herring, the law, out of the way.