Homosexuality, Aids, and God

[K-Dog]

Since HIV has been around my entire life, I have grown up hearing sermons about it being God's divine justice or a curse to homosexuality. But now that I am an adult, I have very different thoughts on the topic of aids.

First of all, I don't believe God 'punishes' people. He uses things like aids to draw people to Himself and remind them that they need Him. It is a sometimes less than gentle prodding to get someone to open their eyes and see their need for His salvation and grace. This is true for gay people and straight people alike.

In the Bible, there was a disease that was almost identical in every important way to HIV today. It was leprosy. As horrifying a disease as Aids is, leprosy was just as nasty. If one were a leper, he could look forward to being ostracized from the community, having their flesh rot away, and certain death with no hope for a cure. In fact leprosy was never cured. It was eradicated by rounding up all the lepers on the planet and exiling them to some island so the germ couldn't propagate any longer.

Here is the crux of the matter though. Jesus healed the lepers. On multiple occassions, when a leper came to Jesus with faith, and asked to be healed they were. If Jesus was willing and able to heal the leper in his time, he is willing and able to heal people dying of aids in ours. The important ingredient is we are not asking enough.

We need to do something as a community here. We need to start praying fervently that God will use something that has been so terrible for so long for His glory. Pray that the incurable will be healed and that people be made whole. The Bible says the fervent prayer of a righteous man avails much. Get prayer chains going all across the country and world that God will use this to both draw lost gays into His kingdom and to show the world that He does not hate homosexuals but wants them to come into the fullness of life that is their birth right.

If we can get everyone praying this and believing it will actually happen, then we can live to see the most miraculous wonder of our generation. When people who the church says God hates come to the altar, ask for healing for an incurable disease, and at their next doctor appointment are found to have no HIV in their body anywhere.

Will you pray this with me, and will you get everyone you know to pray the same?

[tdogg]

Prayer is good.

But without money for research, treatment, prevention it will be difficult to conquer. By teaching abstinence only in schools, we perpetuate STDs, HIV and teenage pregnancy. By listening to rumors and lies, we become too afraid to do anything, to help, to think about it. Prayer is good, but we need to become active in the effort to educate about HIV, make money for research and treatments, take care of our fellow humans who are living with HIV. Prayer is good but without action it is a hollow 'attempt' to make ourselves feel better without actually putting any effort into it.

[K-Dog]

Don't get me wrong. I am not the type of person who says we should climb into an ivory tower and just hope and pray that the world will all be ok. You're right that we need to put massive resources into the problem as a whole. The problem for me is I am not a microbiologist and I am not wealthy. I give what I can for both cancer and aids research, but it is a miniscule amount. Especially when compared to the needs involved.

What I can do, and what everyone can do old or young, rich or poor, black or white, gay or straight is pray. It won't make the overall problem of aids go away, just like Jesus didn't make the overall problem of leprosy go away, but for those he healed it wasn't a problem any more.

Science has done research on the power of prayer, or faith, or whatever you want to call it. What they found was that people who had some sort of faith that they would get better faired better in treatment than those who didn't. They can't say why it happened just that it did. I can say that it happened because God is still capable of miracles.

I don't believe that aids will go away from the power of prayer alone. I do believe that it can save some individuals though. And if you think about it, would it not be worth praying for if it led to one person being spared from what is truly a horrible disease?

Once aids destroys a person's immune system, all kinds of nasty things start to happen. They get rare and exotic diseases. Some people even start having different types of moss growing right on their skin and it has to be scraped off every day. Your energy is drained, you feel sick all the time, and you only get worse rather than better.

If I were a microbiologist, I would design a system that tricks the hiv into thinking it is attaching itself to the helper t cell, but instead it is only putting its rna strand into a neutral medium and dying. It would work sort of like dialisys does for kidney patients, and over time would screen out the virus. Medicine uses a similar technique all the time to put things into the body, so logically there is no reason it shouldn't work to take things out but of course nobody wants to listen to ideas like that.

That is why we have prayer. I know that God doesn't always think like I do, but I also know he will listen when I come to him in prayer. It doesn't matter how dumb or unconventional my ideas are because he has the power to turn anything into reality.

[Gennee]

You both make good points.


Gennee

[K-Dog]

One other important aspect that can come from prayer and not from medical science is a social one. I have no doubt that, given enough time and resources, someone or some group of people will be able to eventually find a cure for aids.

But there is something that God can do which would help the LGBT community argue a moral issue. If he cures gay people of this disease miraculously, it would show that he loves people who are gay. After all, he wouldn't cure someone if he didn't love and cherish them as much as everyone else.

I think it is fitting since this forum is about using faith to attain freedom from religious persecution. Just a thought.

[Rick336]

Originally Posted by K-Dog

But there is something that God can do which would help the LGBT community argue a moral issue. If he cures gay people of this disease miraculously, it would show that he loves people who are gay. After all, he wouldn't cure someone if he didn't love and cherish them as much as everyone else.

Yes. And while he's at it, he can cure cancer too. And Alzheimers. And down's syndrome. And heart disease. And multiple sclerosis, and diabetes, and hodgkin's disease, and tuberculosis, and parkinson’s disease, schizophrenia, cystic fibrosis, depression, influenza, malaria, hepatitis, anemia, birth defects, glaucoma, amblyopic, fibrosis dysphasia, scoliosis, hemophilia, pneumonia, cholera, diphtheria, shingles, bipolar disorder, sickle cell anemia, world hunger........



Rick

[bnmoore]

Already does. Your faith makes you whole, not God's. God isn't sick. Ask her next time you see her.