Читать книгу For We Know in Part - Robert Henrikson - Страница 7

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Then it struck us that what is true for most people now might have also been true in ancient times. We believe that God did not choose to reveal to the ancients all that He reveals to us today or will reveal in the future. For example, didn’t God let the ancients ascribe epilepsy to demon possession and accept slavery as a normal reality? It makes sense that ‘sexual orientation’ is also one of those mysteries that is only now being explained with any reasonable clarity. Because homo-naturality as we know it today is a relatively recently defined orientation, it could not have been known to the writers of Scripture.

Yes, our understanding of sexuality has moved from superstition toward a point closer to science only in the last 120 years or so. The coinage of the word "homosexual" first happened in 1892 as a noun and in 1912 as an adjective, according to Barnhart's Dictionary of Etymology. The concept of a homosexual orientation obtained its first validation when the American Psychological Association in 1975 removed the term from its manual of mental disorders. What was once an oversimplified blanket condemnation of a whole group of people will, we believe, eventually be shown to be a complex but explainable phenomenon describing an un-chosen human condition that is as natural as heterosexuality.