Hello “justdifficult”
Before I begin here, let me disavow myself from the crude historical notion that is often found in the Christian fundamentalist approach to history, whereby everything that happened in the Bible actually occurred, including such obvious fables as Jonah and the Whale. You and myopicbookworm seem to advocate for a scientism that pronounces just the opposite extreme, namely that the parables or myths of the bible could never really actually occurred and that to indulge ourselves to regard them as truth is “absurd.”

If I may, I would like to introduce you to a third position, one that most of the authors of the posts you see on this blog are using, namely Mythopoetic Thinking:

“There are contested interpretations of what constitutes myth, and it might in consequence seem impossible to overcome vagueness in describing “mythopoetic thinking.” The commonly held understanding of it is that myth is narrative or story. Louis Bouyer does not reject outright this common view, but he follows the phenomenologist and historian of religion Mircea Eliade (1907-1986) in finding a more precise understanding of it. With Eliade, he sees myth in its historical sense as a religious reality. Myth, he argues, is a narrative or story, but it is no mere fable or expression of infantile consciousness. Its referents are objective reality and the innermost experience of man’s subjectivity. Myth moves in both of these ultimate directions at once as it narrates the sacred history of the origin of the world and of man.”

Both Eliade and Bouyer hold that human consciousness is fundamentally oriented to seeing ultimate reality as a unified whole and as essentially personal. It is appropriately expressed in its objectivity through myth. In a manner reminiscent of Martin Heidegger’s later writings on art and poetry, both men see in mythopoetic experience man’s greatest openness to reality. Bouyer holds that this experience, which he calls “mythopoetic thinking” (pensées mythopoétique ), is the perceptual and noetic activity of man that is essential to the expression of true and synthetic cosmology. By means of it, we know the world to be an “essentially integrated whole”:

Mythopoetic thinking approaches cosmic reality first through a sure instinct that there exists a spontaneous accord between our spirit and that reality, then through the very quality which allows our spirit to grasp reality, not only from one specific and superficial viewpoint, but by means of a deep sympathy with its inner structure and its fundamental evolution.
Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought

The mythopoetic element of human reflection, in this understanding, does not rigidly split the world into a dichotomy of subject and object or seek the meaning of the whole through rational analysis alone. It directly senses the “accord between our spirit” and the cosmos. The very structure of the world and its physical development is thereby intuited to be synchronous to the human subject.

This intuitive, experiential manner of thinking sees the cosmos in its origin, order, unity, and destiny with reference to man and, at least vaguely, with reference to a personal and transcendent source of finite existence. It has been ruthlessly excoriated throughout much of the modern age, which presumes through science to show the truth of the world by studying it in terms of self-establishing and self-related physical nature. Much modern thought has reacted against this reductionist view.

Many eminent philosophers, especially following in the line of the insights of the nineteenth-century German tradition, have recognized that scientific objectivism or reductionism leads to an unbridgeable disjunction between the world-in-itself and subjective experience. This disjunction undermines the possibility of recognizing as a rational accomplishment the very science that is construed to be the path to demythologizing enlightenment. Scientific reductionism tends to “bifurcate” nature.”

This argument is the same one that JRR Tolkien introduced to his friend CS Lewis back on the 19th of September in 1931. A Joseph Pearse post that explains what happened is here: (http://payingattentiontothesky.com/2011/07/21/the-friendship-and-true-myth/)

I hope that sets the record straight. Nothing I post here is of the crude Christian fundamentalist reasoning that you and myopicbookworm discard with your equally crude scientism.

And as for “insulting” gay people, please. There is nothing in this well-reasoned, scholarly article that insults or disparages, so kindly take your Homosexualist activism elsewhere.
dj

There are a number of red herrings and non sequiturs made on the methodological level in this text, and they betray a mediocre analytical ability. For example: “A recent study of 961 Dutch gay and bisexual men found that 68% of respondents engaged in their first same-sex experience before coming-out,” he writes, in an effort to persuade us that homosexuality has its origins in nature. But which is indicative of a homosexual nature: one’s “coming out” (which in most cases is hindered and delayed by societal expectations), or one’s willingness or desire to engage in a same-sex experience?

On a theological level, I find his argumentation also frustrating, and bland. He rightly invokes such concepts as the unity of body and soul and the effects on this unity of original sin, but hasn’t the imagination necessary to to go beyond the notion that all this can mean is that a statistically deviant sexuality is a sinful one. Let’s first reason theologically. If we are to believe Jesus that “in Heaven, there shall be no marriage, but we shall all be like angels” — ungendered, I suppose — then don’t we have to accept that ALL sexuality, premised as it is upon a sexual difference native only to a postlapsarian world, is stained by original sin? “Natural law” doesn’t mean that heterosexual attraction and marriage is a Heavenly paradigm; it means that it’s the way of the world, and is in fact so imperfect that Jesus takes paints to tell us that it *won’t* be the way of Heaven. (By analogy: one of the consequences of the Fall, in Genesis, is that men will “dominate” women; in history this has indeed looked like a “natural law.” It doesn’t mean that we should accept it. Why is heteronormativity non-negotiable when male dominance over women, by any reasonable standard, is not?)

But really, apart from theology, the best sociological and anthropological research today suggests that the idea that “maleness or femaleness is ontologically grounded in the human person such that the person is always one or the other” is incomplete. Yes, there are “two genders” (generally speaking; the existence of hermaphrodites complicates this a bit). But it is equally clear from a look at the facts that, whatever their causes, there are multiple sexual orientations. This study has done little to persuade me that the “disorder” of homosexuality, from a Darwinian point of view, equals a moral or ethical disorder, or that actions are unethical simply per force of violating a Darwinian principle.

Peace,
Nicholas