Luke Plant at All Unkept has written a really thorough response to the folks who think “God hates shrimp” is a meaningful comment on biblical sexual commands:
This post is written mainly for the benefit of atheists who think that the “God Hates Shrimps” retort does anything to undermine or expose the belief, held by evangelical Christians, that the Bible teaches that homosexual practice is a sin.
In the previous sentence, I used the word ‘benefit’ deliberately. Not only does an atheist holding a “God Hates Shrimps” board completely fail to trouble any evangelical Christian with half a clue, it actually portrays the atheist in a very bad light. Such a person is demonstrating that, on the one hand, they haven’t bothered to find out the first thing about why Christians believe that homosexual practice is a sin, and yet on the other, they think that they have a three-word killer argument that will bring 2000 years of Christian teaching to its knees in embarrassed confusion. In short, any evangelical Christian with half a clue will read those words as if they said “My ignorance is surpassed only by my arrogance”.
To his excellent study of the Hebrew and Greek biblical texts, I’d only add one thing as a specifically Orthodox perspective.
Christians after the age of the apostles use the scriptural condemnations of same-sex activity to express and explain this portion of the Church’s understanding that these relations are a distortion (i.e. sin) and cause spiritual damage. The consensus of Christian practice from first century to the first half of the twentieth is itself the Tradition in this regard. Orthodox Christians don’t construct a sexual morality from scratch by tying together Bible passages. That’s not necessary when the mind of the Church already reflects millennia of consistent abhorrence of these acts — as well as stern but compassionate pastoral support for those repenting from them.
A related article: The Gay Invention: Homosexuality is a linguistic as well as a moral error. (Touchstone Magazine)
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