Fulcrum has published this article:
Changing Sexual Orientation and Identity? The APA Report by Andrew Goddard and Glynn Harrison.
This is a discussion of this report:
Report of the American Psychological Association Task Force on Appropriate Therapeutic Responses to Sexual Orientation.
According to this testimony the rebellion of humankind against God darkens our mind and subverts our understanding of God and creation ( And why do these words not apply to Evo understandings of homosexuality. It very well could be that they have misread creation and fellow creatures. That it is their idolatry of heterosexuality and self that leads them to such misreading. The real questions are how does grace look like in the life of a homosexual person rather than how do we fit those people into our Evo-heterosexual program. Many people seem blind to the grace that is found… Read more »
Charlotte originally drew attention to this article on an earlier thread, where she said: Somewhat related to the Gledhill-and-Spong matter: Over at the Fulcrum Forums, Andrew Goddard and Glynn Harrison attack the American Psychiatric Association for saying that attempts to turn gays straight are hurtful: http://www.fulcrum-anglican.org.uk/page.cfm?ID=475 According to Goddard and Harrison, the APA’s science is bad. Reason? It doesn’t give them the answer they want: “To every theory, however, [the Church] must put the question whether it is adequate to the understanding of human nature and its redemption that the Gospel proclaims.” (Which Church, which Gospel, you might well ask… Read more »
RE American 6-Day Creationists and British Evos: “Both say they always know all the answers in advance. Both say: If science doesn’t give us the answer we want, then science must be wrong, because we are always right. Complete lack of understanding of the purpose of science there — not to mention arrogance, self-centeredness, and lack of charity and humility.”
That sums it up as neatly as I’ve ever heard it Simon, and says it all.
And this will certainly be the long-term undoing of Christianity, if these types keep up this nonsense.
“According to Goddard and Harrison, the APA’s science is bad. Reason? It doesn’t give them the answer they want…” Well put indeed, Simon! Sadly – tragically – the price of their blind devotion to the (hermeneutical) assumption that Christianity MUST exclude homosexuality (and, oddly, that medical science is thus wrong) is far too often exacted in human flesh. Tell a lesbian/gay teenager often enough that s/he is “in need of healing”, “fundamentally disordered”, or – effectively – shouldn’t really exist in the first place and the effect on that young person’s emotional well-being will be predictably bad. Anyone who thinks… Read more »
Imagine if the word “Jewish” replaced “homosexual” in this tortured piece, which presents itself as refining on the scientific methodology of the APA but is actually motivated by scriptural fundamentalism of the most barren kind. Bishop Spong is right — these people are not bona fide academic inquirers or even fatuous sillies. They are in bad faith. Their discourse deserves not a respectful hearing but the analysis and condemnation that many similar Anti-Semitic discourses of the past receive.
I don’t think any of the God arguments will do, simply because there is enough nasty in the world that the loving God would not want, and the nonsense of a ‘fall’ allows that in the human sphere. The argument has to be evolutionary, that the most successful creatures that evolve are those that evolve evolvability – that means having in any population minorities of all kinds of flexible kinds, all of which are nurtured within the group, so to be able to adapt to rapid environmental change. Goddard and company just want to maintain the status of writings of… Read more »
I fear I’m as concerned with methodological problems in the Fulcrum post as in the APA article. They place a lot of importance on the lack of randomized controlled trials. However, they miss a point. Psychological studies do not, indeed, lend themselves to randomized controlled trials because the patients have a choice in seeking care, in the problem for which they seek care, and in the treatment they choose for it. Thus, the patient ends up predisposed to one treatment or another prior to seeking help in the first place. Moreover, these are persons seeking help. That is, these are… Read more »
To follow what Simon sez, for those who think it is a choice to be gay, ask those folk if THEY could CHOOSE to be gay….the response will be (duh!, and horrified!), ‘of course not”….SO! Why do they think it is a choice?
“For the biblical writers the phenomena of homosexual behaviour are not addressed solely as wilfully perverse acts but in generalised terms, and are located within the broader context of human idolatry.” All the attempts of Goddard and Harrison to present themselves as persons who take seriously the findings of social science and are well versed in Scripture scholarship fall to pieces in the utterly homophobic statement above, which seems to form the kernel of their view of lesbians and gay men. For these writers there are no persons whose same sex affectivity is fundamental to who they are. Actually, there… Read more »
Very well said Karen — it is human beings who are at stake in these fatuous mind-games. Perhaps when Hitler et al. discussed “the Jewish problem” they had similarly reduced the human beings concerned to pawns or ciphers of their ideological ponderings. Just as a bright contrast, here’s a Lloyd Webber composition sung by the late Stephen Gately: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ogjFSW7PqRY
Fundamentalists do not reason like other people: they begin with a conclusion and then work backwards from it.
That is what we are seeing here.
Can someone please explain to me how such people managed to take over the Church of England?
TA readers will understand how shocked we (LGCM) were in the run up Lambeth 2008 to discover that the same Prof Glyn Harrison had been made the official rapporteur on medical matters by the listening guy Canon Phil Groves. We expressed our outrage but were met with the claim that only someone like Harrison would be accepted by the wider Communion and given the categorical assurance that Harrison would have nothing to do with the extremists at NARTH and did not support reparative therapy. We found out for ourselves that this was all lies, but unfortunately too many liberal “leaders”… Read more »
“TA readers will understand how shocked we (LGCM) were in the run up Lambeth 2008 to discover that the same Prof Glyn Harrison had been made the official rapporteur on medical matters by the listening guy Canon Phil Groves.” Martin Reynolds Thank you, Martin, for letting the cat out of the bag on this one. I guess not many of us who were not privy to the arrangement made for Harrison to represent evidence of the medical view at Lambeth 2008 would have been aware of this important fact This begs the question: “Who arranged for this obviously biassed interpreter… Read more »
The fact that the church is not prepared to accept the view which is overwhelmingly believed by the medical, scientific and caring professions explains why it is becoming so very marginalised, and why its view is not regarded with respect
I’ve just about stopped reading those Fulcrum essays in any great detail. Why? Because when they stoop to bother reading modern science – especially that hot button queer stuff – they always end up trying to put available data and heuristics back into their old presuppositional negative wine skins. Naturally, as some parable or other said so long ago – this bursts the old wine skins, split asunder, and confirms a lingering Fulcrum deep suspicion that new wine is always destructive or dangerous. Bravo to Pluralist again, for noting that the key element that needs theological reflection is no longer… Read more »
“Can someone please explain to me how such people managed to take over the Church of England?” They came speaking a language we did not understand, expounding concepts we had never heard of as though acceptance of them were basic to being Christian, with the assumption that their brand of Christianity was the only right path, backed up with the novel idea, which we had never dealt with before but which seemed to make a kind of sense, that if it wasn’t in the Bible, it wasn’t Christianity. Included with it was highly emotional worship that some people no doubt… Read more »