Funny, even though I was raised wvith it as the predominant view, I'm always mystified when people dismiss gay relationships out of hand as constructions of sin.

It's easy to do that when it's all book-larnin' and one doesn't know a lot of people who are in well balanced loving gay relationships. These days, though, who is still so isolated that they don't know a bunch of gay couples? Perhaps some people are. I wouldn't think it would be very common, though. Thing is, Eldad, if you were to give a view based in reality rather than pure exegesis, such as "I know several gay couples who've been together for years, including some self-professed Christian ones, and as far as I'm concerned, what they think passes for love between themselves is valueless and wicked and they are just lustfully kidding themselves," then I could be reassured your viewpoint had gone beyond theoretical conjecture.

Many people who had the purely theoretical viewpoints have changed them in contact with gay communities - are these people weak-minded, or just realistic? The best book ever written for gay-positive Christians was written by a woman, Sylvia Pennington, who marched into San Francisco as a missionary with precisely this anti-gay viewpoint. But the Lord led her spirit elsewhere (or some might insist the devil did, but she was a sweet grandmother with a sharp mind, and she took such statements with humour.)

This is assuming that you do have a loving heart and that you care to be right about such things, as I think is true. We all know that there is a 'cadre' mindset, as they called it in the old Red China, where people will just be loyal to whatever seems to be the message of order from the top command unit, and will send their mother to a re-education camp without batting an eye if it seems to fit the order sheet. There are some Christians who take that viewpoint to gay relationships and would just illegalize them again and be done with it, but I haven't seen anything like that here.

Anyways, the thought that you're comfortable here because cbf doesn't call itself a church seems at first glance to be a non-sequitur. Most posters here don't support gay relationships anyways, so if this site decided to call itself a church, what would your objection be based in? Presumably your discomfort would have to be based in something other than support for same-sex relations.

In any case, there are many ecumenical churches these days that bring together, for example, Catholics and Protestants. They don't founder on disagreements about papal infallibility or even the all-important Apostolic Succession (which technically makes protestant clergy invalid to those from the Catholic/Orthodox faiths, except maybe Episcopal/Anglican/C of E clergy). Even views on abortion may differ! And that involves life and death, not just sex. The point is that people who worship God and love Jesus Christ have a lot in common, and yet, like Paul with the thorn in his flesh, they always find they have points of disagreement with other Christians. At what point can they worship together anyways? I can certainly see that if an ecumenical church community became so open about sexual matters that it became an institution that destabilized peoples' marriages (for example, because the couples became 'swingers' or married men started engaging in bisexual surrogacy - that is, having sex with other guys just out of entertainment, as in ancient Rome) then the offenders would need to be shown the door. But that's clearly functional rather than based in taboo-dread, since, no matter what I might think about gay relationships, taboo-dread is not my idea of the essence of the bible. I wouldn't avoid anyone based on the idea they were taboo, even in a church. Yes, a muslim or a jew or even a hindu (idols and all that) could sit beside me in church and I wouldn't move away. I've even gone to interfaith services.

If the ark of the covenant comes into my office and kills me for saying all this, I will know I was wrong.

Incidentally, as wikipedia says "While the Eastern Orthodox consider the text of the Apocalypse (Book of Revelation) to be a part of Scripture, it is also regarded to be a mystery. Speculation on the contents of Revelation are minimal and it is never read as part of the regular order of services." The attribution of statements in Revelation to Jesus is also a possible matter of disagreement, even among traditionalists.