Francis: Church should apologize to homosexuals

ABC News is reporting:

"Pope Francis says gays — and all the other people the church has marginalized, such as the poor and the exploited — deserve an apology."

Really?   Then by extension,  Francis is implying that God owes homosexuals an apology.  For God destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah for engaging in unnatural vice:

"We are about to destroy this place, for the outcry reaching the Lord against those here is so great that the Lord has sent us to destroy it.” (Genesis 19:13).

The rejection of homosexual behavior that is found in the Old Testament is well known. In Genesis 19, two angels in disguise visit the city of Sodom and are offered hospitality and shelter by Lot. During the night, the men of Sodom demand that Lot hand over his guests for homosexual intercourse. Lot refuses, and the angels blind the men of Sodom. Lot and his household escape, and the town is destroyed by fire "because the outcry against its people has become great before the Lord" (Gen. 19:13).


Throughout history, Jewish and Christian scholars have recognized that one of the chief sins involved in God’s destruction of Sodom was its people’s homosexual behavior. But today, certain homosexual activists promote the idea that the sin of Sodom was merely a lack of hospitality. Although inhospitality is a sin, it is clearly the homosexual behavior of the Sodomites that is singled out for special criticism in the account of their city’s destruction. We must look to Scripture’s own interpretation of the sin of Sodom.

Jude 7 records that Sodom and Gomorrah "acted immorally and indulged in unnatural lust." Ezekiel says that Sodom committed "abominable things" (Ezek. 16:50), which could refer to homosexual and heterosexual acts of sin. Lot even offered his two virgin daughters in place of his guests, but the men of Sodom rejected the offer, preferring homosexual sex over heterosexual sex (Gen. 19:8–9). Ezekiel does allude to a lack of hospitality in saying that Sodom "did not aid the poor and needy" (Ezek. 16:49). So homosexual acts and a lack of hospitality both contributed to the destruction of Sodom, with the former being the far greater sin, the "abominable thing" that set off God’s wrath.

But the Sodom incident is not the only time the Old Testament deals with homosexuality. An explicit condemnation is found in the book of Leviticus: "You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination. . . . If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination; they shall be put to death, their blood is upon them" (Lev. 18:22, 20:13).

Reinterpreting Scripture


To discount this, some homosexual activists have argued that moral imperatives from the Old Testament can be dismissed since there were certain ceremonial requirements at the time—such as not eating pork, or circumcising male babies—that are no longer binding.


While the Old Testament’s ceremonial requirements are no longer binding, its moral requirements are. God may issue different ceremonies for use in different times and cultures, but his moral requirements are eternal and are binding on all cultures.

Confirming this fact is the New Testament’s forceful rejection of homosexual behavior as well. In Romans 1, Paul attributes the homosexual desires of some to a refusal to acknowledge and worship God. He says, "For this reason God gave them up to dishonorable passions. Their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural, and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in their own persons the due penalty for their error. And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a base mind and to improper conduct. . . . Though they know God’s decree that those who do such things deserve to die, they not only do them but approve those who practice them" (Rom. 1:26–28, 32).

Elsewhere Paul again warns that homosexual behavior is one of the sins that will deprive one of heaven: "Do you not know that the wicked will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: Neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers nor male prostitutes nor homosexual offenders nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God" (1 Cor. 6:9–10, NIV).

All of Scripture teaches the unacceptability of homosexual behavior. But the rejection of this behavior is not an arbitrary prohibition. It, like other moral imperatives, is rooted in natural law—the design that God has built into human nature."

The Catholic Church has nothing to apologize for.   It is Francis who must apologize.   To the faithful.

Stephen Hawking advances abiogenesis in a desperate attempt to uphold failed evolutionary theories

Stephen Hawking is at it again. Not long ago he warned us about "aliens" from outer space potentially being a threat on our horizon. At this point, any sane person would have written off this confused soul. What may once have been a great mind has apparently degenerated into madness.

Mr. Hawking is at it again. While he has no difficulty believing in the existence of intelligent alien beings, the idea of a Creator-God is just too much for him. In his new book entitled "The Grand Design," Mr. Hawking writes, "..the universe can and will create itself from nothing...Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist..It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.."

While Mr. Hawking is waiting for the Mother-Ship to beam him up, let's examine what Dr. Gerald L. Schroeder has to say about the subject. In his book entitled "Genesis and the Big Bang: The Discovery of Harmony Between Modern Science and the Bible," he writes, "In 1936, Alexander Ivanovich Oparin, a Russian biochemist, published a book titled 'The Origin of Life.' In it, he described the conditions likely to have existed on the primitive earth and the random chemical and physical processes possible in such an environment. These processes, he asserted, inevitably led to life. Seventeen years later, Stanley Miller used almost these same conditions in his experiment to produce amino acids. Oparin speculated and Miller proved that lightning and other sources of energy naturally present on Earth could convert inorganic molecules into several of the compounds present in life.

But how was nature to get these individual molecules organized into the complex array found even in the simplest forms of life? In theory, the needed sequence that would carry the basic molecules through the complex path ending in a true protein could occur step-by-step in chance reactions over long periods of time. The difficulty with such a slow and random process is that just as there is a given probability of forming an intermediate product in this chain of products leading to life, there is also a probability of its spontaneous dissolution.

At each step as we go from simple to more complex compounds, we are in a sense swimming upstream in the flow of entropy. The result is that the likelihood of the disintegration of a newly formed organic compound is much greater than the likelihood of its formation.

If destruction predominates over formation, how is it that living organisms regularly produce complex compounds and do so in copious amounts? Life does it by working in the highly protected environment within its cells, by using catalysts that have the ability to select and concentrate the needed chemicals and to increase rates and extents of reactions, and by expending considerable energy to accomplish the tasks. The protected environment needed by life is found within life itself.

From the simplest to the highest forms of life, if the cellular system fails, the organism dies. Its subsequent rapid decay is clear evidence for the chemical instability of the compounds from which life is composed. The catalysts of living organisms, called enzymes, are themselves proteins produced by already-living cells. A reaction that may take seconds within an enzyme-driven, temperature-controlled 98 degrees Farenheit system of an animal might take years or longer in an uncatalyzed system. Neither enzyme nor protective cell wall were available to the molecules that preceded life. As we experience it, life is required to produce life." (pp. 109-110).

So what's behind Mr. Hawking's fantasy? Dr. Dietrich von Hildebrand said it best: "The egocentric sovereignty that modern man arrogates to himself bans everything that has the character of coming from above, of imposing bonds upon us, and of calling for an adequate response. Modern man also shuns all the factors in life which are gifts, which he cannot grant to himself: they remind him of his dependence upon something greater than himself and above himself..."

It has been said that there is a fine line between genius and madness. I think Stephen Hawking has crossed that line.

Related reading: The intellectual insecurity of the atheist and where it eventually leads.