Dogma Sucks

I have a dogmatic question I don’t understand.  Let’s say you have two people involved in some kind of church ministry; both are actively participating in things the Church at large considers sinful.  One person is remorseful and tries without success to change their behavior and is allowed to still take part; the other sees nothing wrong with what they’re doing, and is asked to step down until they see the error of their ways.

The way I’m seeing this, both people are engaged in wrong behavior without stopping…the only difference is in their thought processes, or as the Church calls it, their heart:  So if I’m understanding this right, it’s not sinning that gets you in trouble, it’s the way you think about it?

Please understand...this isn't a facetious question.

There are some things that I STILL don't "get" after being married for 20 years, and my poor wife just shakes her head and tells me, "It's an Aspy (Asperger's) thing; don't worry about, let it go..."

This might could be one of those things.

For example, this one is perfect.  Since I've been a teenager, I've had no moral issues with polyamory or polyfidelity.  While not socially acceptable almost anywhere, there are subgroups in this country and others that not only practice it, but it works for.

However, from a Christian perspective, this encompasses fornication and adultery AT LEAST.   From this Christian perspective, I can understand from reading that it is considered sin.  Jesus corrected the Samaritan woman at the well about her marital screw-ups (gently, of course), and there is the famous story in John 8:3-11 with the woman caught in the act.

Now, toss in my Aspy brain...in every instance where Jesus deals with adultery, it's the WOMAN that is at fault.  It's not until Paul that the issue is brought up in 1 Corinthians and a male is actually specified as the offender.  In every other case, it's generic with no mention of who is at fault, or it's the woman.

So to my Aspy mind, the definition of adultery hinged upon some definition that only affected women, not men.  Plus, it's never said WHY it's wrong...it just is.  Well, why is it wrong?  If a man lives with two women, and they're all in harmony, taking equal burdens emotionally and physically and even financially in the relationship, what's the big deal?  Or a woman with two men?  Or (scandalous thinking approaching!) two bisexual women and a man? Or two bisexual men with a woman?

Aspy's don't do well with "do it because", because when something happens that doesn't fit the precise circumstance, BOOM, confusion and disarray, questions and chaos.  We need to know why, so we can learn to do things when the norm doesn't fit.

I have to say...Christianity SUCKS for Aspy's.  Everyone is always saying, "The Bible says this, that, and the other thing"...ok, fine, that's great until a little digging shows that it either A: Doesn't say that, B: Is taken out of context so it APPEARS to say that, C: Actually means something else because of translation errors, or D: remembered incorrectly so as to say something else.

So then what?  You dig for the truth, and WHOA, it actually means something else!  Great example: Onanism.  What's that, you ask?  Spanking the monkey, jerking off, choking the chicken...masturbation.  The prohibition comes from Genesis, but the early translations were off, and the church leaders, largely uneducated in many cases in those early years of using that newfangled King James Bible, took the passage (heh) to refer to masturbation, focusing on that "spilling his seed" bit.

Let's see it in a more modern translation:  Genesis 38:8-10 "8 Y'hudah said to Onan, "Go and sleep with your brother's wife - perform the duty of a husband's brother to her, and preserve your brother's line of descent." 9 However, Onan knew that the child would not count as his; so whenever he had intercourse with his brother's wife, he spilled the semen on the ground, so as not to give his brother offspring. 10 What he did was evil from ADONAI's perspective, so he killed him too."

It wasn't the "seed spillin'" that he was struck down for...rather, it was the disobedience of not doing his directed duty that he was killed for.  At that time, if a man's brother died childless, it was his brother's duty to impregnate that man's wife so as to carry on the family.

Do you have ANY IDEA how much less stressful my childhood and early life would've been if I'd known THAT?  That learning the WHY of it, and not the "Don't do it, and just accept it" aspect?

So, yeah...dogma sucks.