Afterthoughts are sometimes the most important.

As I hinted in another post this morning, it worries me a bit that some posters and some threads are locked into an unhealthy oppositionalism. Our God, our faith, and our world is just bigger than all of this, of course. Visitors have remarked on how stuck we are in patterns of conflict on a very few issues. But the truly nagging concern is that "flaming" is unhealthy for those who do it.

Unhealthy? Sure-- if one reaches the point where one is actually hearing scarcely any of what others are trying to say but firing volleys anyway, then one is practising a habit that disables concerned listening. Concerned listening is an important part of the moral life that one lives in the real world. Jesus did it. St Paul did it. We must do it. When an online pursuit begins to model interpersonal relations that would lead to moral failure in the real world, then we are using a website to rehearse moral failure. Bad idea.

 In real relationships, missteps that are indulged online are not without consequences that one might care about rather a lot. At that point, the parallel with pornography is hard to ignore.

The odds that somebody is learning to be a more polarised, less Christian listener on precisely the topics on which people need to be heard well seem, unfortunately, high.

The fact that we may be citing scripture as we do it does not magically deliver us from these consequences. Instead, it just deadens us to the scriptures too!

Now since I don't know the villagers as well as I'd like, not all are as gifted in self-control as they someday will be, and all have posted some terrific stuff, I tend not to blame individuals for the temperature of discussion. But since it takes two sides to keep up a feud, we all do bear some individual responsibility for lowering that.

We should all think twice, three times, even seven times seventy times, before posting stuff that fulfils our own desire to argue but not another's desire to be heard. And if we are sure that we are not erring in this way in our own minds, we should beware that our posts online may be encouraging this all the same.

Origen Adam-- Nonetheless, Phil Almond is right to point out the importance of renewing a space in the church for single persons, and that such a space might be enlivened by, among others, celibate homosexuals. And you do seem to agree with that. So...?

@Phil Almond

Unfortunately I doubt we agree on anything. We would probably disagree on what day it is! I certainly don't believe in the wrath of God nor original sin and I now attend a church which tickles my ears in the way I like.

I was just lamenting that if we'd been told to accept our sexuality but remain celibate maybe I wouldn't have been screwed-up by the ex-gay movement like I was. It makes me thoroughly angry that people like Anglican Mainstream are still peddling the lie that gay people can get healed and become straight. And so I approve of someone who is coming-out but trying to stay celibate. However as someone somewhere else remarked, he is only 29 so will probably become pro-gay eventually!

Origen Adam

Having listened to the Wes Hill interview, noting your 16 April 2012 post on this thread, and recalling my 25 September 2010 post on the thread “Review of Andrew Marin ‘Love is an orientation’” it seems to me that Wes Hill, you and me are agreeing with each other, providing I and those who agree with me search our hearts to see if we have a blind spot about single people in the Church. Is that how you see it?

Phil Almond

Thanks for flagging this up Ambrose StJohn redivivus. I just wish that me and my peer group were given this advice 20 years ago instead of being told that "homosexuals don't exist" by Alan Storkey at Spring Harvest, and told by True Freedom Trust that we could get healed and become straight.

I see acceptance of one's sexuality and celibacy as a much better way of dealing with things than the denial of it by the church and the ex-gay movement.

A new book advocates celibacy for all gay Christians, it is written by a Christian writer who is living this way.

He has been speaking at Oak  Hill, and also gave an interview.

http://www.oakhill.ac.uk/people/wes_hill.html