>>23748Eh, not really. At least I don't think it is. Personally I am chilling.
>You’d possibly be correct to say that if he didn’t used scripture to lay out what that good order was intended to be. But since we have his word that says explicitly that we are ordered as male and female; we are supposed to marry; and we’re supposed to multiply, it’s difficult to really square all of that with gay/lesbian/trans sexual encounters. I suspected you might say this, which is why I asked about sola scriptura and/or literalism. Without room for "I think this passage [has a lot of Paul's personal opinion in it/describes ancient Jewish rites which developed out of material necessity (e.g. curtailing the spread of disease, in the case of things like 'uncleanliness' when menstruating)] and don't consider it the raw literal unadulterated Word of God", you are correct that it's difficult to square scripture with a good deal of LGBTQ identities and lifestyles. I don't know that it's necessarily impossible to do it per se, but even if it isn't, it would certainly take a better Bible scholar than myself. For me, prayer and meditation play a bigger role in shaping my theology than scripture, though that isn't by any means to imply scripture isn't of critical importance, especially the gospels. Still, I'm much more of a sola caritas girlie than anything else. (While we're at it, I am also a universalist, for that matter.)
>I don’t know if there is any amount for self modification that can make you meaningfully not a male or not a femaleI think that even the fact that it is possible, with exogenous hormones, for a so-called "natal male" ("AMAB") to have a sexed-hormone composition that is more in line with that of a female than a male, is enough of a counterpoint to disprove this. One might respond with "yes, but even if someone's endocrine makeup resembles a [female/male], they still have [male/female] [genitals/skeletal structure/chromosomes/socialization/upbringing/etc.]", and we could go in circles for hours on where the goalposts are or ought to be. Or one of us could just say "you know what, I guess this is actually just a semantic disagreement, isn't it. neither of us is actually even telling the other to live our lives any differently than we already are, so I guess it doesn't really have to be that deep" and call it a day.
>Like you mentioned, this is probably more metaphysical than it is just biological.Indeed.
>Are you still orthodox?No. There is definitely still Orthodox influence in my theology but as far as the church is concerned I've been lapsed for decades at this point. I've thought about going back, and come remarkably close to it, but considering I'm transsexual, I'm not sure they'd have me, and not sure I'd have them either. I do have a good friend who is also a trans woman, and I know she was Orthodox and attended her local Orthodox church for a good while (before completely packing up and moving to a whole different continent), but I think she too left Orthodoxy after a while. I know she is still Christian, as I'm in a Christian queer groupchat with her and a handful of others on Signal, but I haven't really pressed her on denominational specifics, I just know she left Orthodoxy for a while and in the process also kind of left Christianity. But "leaving Christianity" is a bit hard, since nobody actually has much of a choice in what they believe to be true.
Modern Orthodoxy is a bit depressing to me, to be honest. There are a lot of edgelord adult converts (no shade against adult converts as a whole, specifically not against you; there's no wrong time to find God, I'm just calling it like I see it) who are primarily there because they think it's based and trad and in line with their reactionary sociopolitical beliefs, rather than because they truly resonate with its theology, appreciate its rich history and mysticism, or can even say what they "prefer" about it over, say, Catholicism or one of the many Protestantisms, at least not beyond "caths/prots are woke >:( I want to have acceptable targets, I want there to be children of God that I'm allowed to hate >:("
The most recent church services I've attended have been Lutheran, though I'm not confirmed within the Lutheran church. Between you and me, I've been considering it! My local parish is lovely. But if someone put a gun to my head and shouted "label your religious belief and affiliation or I shoot!" I'd say "Christian Quaker", or some hyper-precise autistic way of communicating the same.
>I hope you can tell that I’m trying to have an actual fruitful conversation here. LolI can, and I appreciate it. Sorry to spook you with my question, didn't mean to but I know there's a lot of bad faith discourse out there.
>>23749I /am/ horribly bad at being social, that much is certainly true.
This post was edited by its author on .
