Saturday, May 04, 2019

Pete Buttigieg's liberal approach to Christianity is much needed

Liberal and accepting Christianity has been around for years, but it tends to not get a lot of attention. The candidacy of Pete Buttigieg for US president is bringing more media focus to the side of Christianity that is more open to diverse peoples. Also the recent coming out of a student at BYU, a Morman university, is in the news. Among the many podcasts I listen to as I do my custodial job.

One main point that is made by Buttigieg is that being gay is his natural state. What he was, basically born as. God made him that way. Not a choice. One conservative caller pointed out that there are a lot of traits in various human natures that are not necessarily good to express. Like the urge to murder, that some people face.

I got to thinking that there is also another way to justify the diversity that we call homosexuality. One can ask, what is the harm? Most people know there is harm from a lot of our human emotions such as the urge toward murder. There is good reason to suppress many of our less socially comparable desires. As for love or sexual feelings between two consenting adults, what's the harm? I almost like that argument better than the more common "we can't help it, this is our natural state" argument.

In my thinking, asking what the harm is can lead to one of my favorite points about alternative lifestyles that seldom gets discussed. The problem of population growth. If more people were gay, or at least not as into procreation, the environment would be less endangered. The world is still facing the challenge of dealing with global warming while a projected 3 billion more people will be living on the planet in the next few decades. Even with birthrates dropping, there is still enough growth in the pipeline to bring us from 7 billion to 10 billion in the next few decades. We are having trouble accommodating 7 billion. Think of all the refugees. Conservatives talk about the "flood" of immigrants. Seems like we are headed toward a world of hate unless we become more accepting to folks who aren't necessarily in the mainstream of procreation.

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