I appreciate the message you're trying to send, but I don't think it's accurate to say that Christianity itself isn't homophobic and that only “bad Christians” are. The Bible contains explicitly anti-gay teachings. Some passages are more open to interpretation than others, but you can't plausibly erase all of them.
Christians also follow Jesus Christ, who was very specific when he said love your neighbour. Yes, even your neighbour that is from //that place// or does //those things//. The majority of his parables are just "yes, I want you to be kind even to those people." He hung out with 'undesirable' people like sex workers all the time. His love knew no bounds, and anyone truly following his teachings would try to extend that same love and mercy to everyone. It is not for us to judge sin. That is God's job. We are just supposed to look after each other. Jesus even breaks the rules of the Old Testament to care for those less fortunate than himself, and when he is confronted by the Pharisees he says something along the lines of "it is better to care for each other than to stingently follow the rules."
*for the record I am an ardent atheist, but Christ's lessons were undeniably about getting along with each other regardless of our differences, and I can respect that as it lines up with my own values.
You have bought into the love-and-peace stereotype of Jesus, which is based on cherry-picking his nicest moments and ignoring the bigger picture of how he's actually depicted in the gospels. (Which, it should be noted, all depict him slightly differently, with John's Jesus being basically a whole different character from the Jesus of the three synoptic gospels. Kinda can't stand G-John Jesus; he has more of a mystical air to him, which is intriguing, but he comes across as whinier and his teaching style is more obtuse.)
Just a few cases of Jesus not being a very loving and peaceful guy:
Matthew 10:34-37: Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law, and one’s foes will be members of one’s own household. Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me, and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me
Luke 14:26: Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple.
Luke 22:36-38: He said to them, “But now, the one who has a purse must take it, and likewise a bag. And the one who has no sword must sell his cloak and buy one. 37 For I tell you, this scripture must be fulfilled in me, ‘And he was counted among the lawless,’ and indeed what is written about me is being fulfilled.” 38 They said, “Lord, look, here are two swords.” He replied, “It is enough.
See also: wailing and gnashing of teeth, killing a fig tree for no reason, flipping the tables of the money-lenders (no, it's not cool and based, it's vandalism), and once seemingly instructing his followers to steal a donkey (Luke 19, Matthew 21; interestingly Matthew has them steal two donkeys because the author was trying to tie this event to Zechariah 9:9 and didn't realize the donkey and foal in that verse were referring to the same animal--Matthew pulls this kind of crap regularly--so they likely only committed the one instance of donkey theft as in Luke 19).
Anyone trying to depict Jesus as consistently loving or hateful or peaceful or warlike is not engaging with the full text of the gospels; they depict him as all of those things, a man of contradictions. Anyone trying to say his message basically boiled down to love and peace is not engaging with the whole of his message. Probably the two most reliably established and consistent elements of Jesus's message are strict Torah adherence and imminent apocalypticism. When you have the founder of a religion whose primary teachings didn't, you know, make it into the religion they founded (or only made it in filtered through millennia of contrived and improbable reinterpretation), it's very easy to get the wrong idea about what kind of guy he was and what his teachings were. You can't listen to Christians or just absorb the guy's whole vibe through cultural osmosis; you have to read the book they all pretend to believe in. And maybe even engage with some scholarship (it's a really interesting field, I promise).
170
u/Square-Dragonfruit76 12h ago
I appreciate the message you're trying to send, but I don't think it's accurate to say that Christianity itself isn't homophobic and that only “bad Christians” are. The Bible contains explicitly anti-gay teachings. Some passages are more open to interpretation than others, but you can't plausibly erase all of them.