On a lark, I've been reading Romans 1:26-27. A whole two sentences! I'm an advanced reader, you see.

If you are unfamiliar with the New Testament, or (more broadly) unfamiliar with passages from the New Testament that get pulled out to justify hilariously broad claims about how society "ought" to work—you know, the way Charles Manson proved that a line from "Helter Skelter" meant race wars should happen—then the short of it is, these two lines from Romans are the "smoking gun" in the quest to prove that men shouldn't fuck each other. The King James Version, for instance, translates these two lines as follows:

Funny how the KJV swerves from awkward phrasings ("that recompense of their error which was meet" reads like a mean Cormac McCarthy parody) to glorious phrasings (work that which is unseemly, baby!). The Bible: it's a wild time! 

But, of course, this is just one interpretation of this passage: the New International Version, for instance, instead renders it like this:

Aha! Here we have something that looks a lot more like a condemnation of homosexuality! Out with that "natural use of the woman" (but isn't that passive tense delightfully gross?), in with "natural relations with women." And those unseemly workings are now more clearly "shameful acts with other men." Men! Bein' lewd with men!

Want it to be more explicit? Okay, let's get real modern. Here's the New International Reader's Version, published in 1998:

1998: in which the translators completely lost trust in their readers, and threw the word "sex" into goddamn everything. Those women, doing sexy wrongsex with other sexwomen! Those men, sex sex wrong sex sex!

These translations are necessary, because kids these days don't bother with their Greek. And translations can be all kinds of fun! Thomas Jefferson, for instance, was so steadfast in his deism (read: "hipster Christian-themed atheism") that he created his own version of the New Testament, cutting out every instance of magic or miracles or supernatural bullshit (his word, not mine). His theory: Jesus was great without the literal Son-of-God stuff. Which leads to the kind-of-funny conclusion, where Jesus dies on the cross and is stuck in a cemetery and that's all, folks!

But none of these are "the" Bible. They are, at best, attempts to do the Bible justice. Some of them are standalone triumphs of narrative and literary art: the King James Version is hailed for its language, and is obviously one of the greatest influences on the modern English language full-stop. Translation is an art unto itself. But we're not talking about art here: we're talking about the Literal* Word of God. And we take that so damn seriously that a near-plurality of Americans are willing to look at these two sentences as justification for outlawing, not only gay marriage, but anal penetration itself.

If we're going to understand God, we need to look at these words as God wrote them. Never you mind that Romans was explicitly written by Saint Paul, a canonical human man. The Bible is the Word. It is infallible. Hear ye these proclamations, just as God Godself intended:

Phew! Just reading this gives me goosebumps. God Is Great.

There are some arguments, incidentally, that the Greek version of the New Testament generally taken to be the starting point was itself a translation of long-lost Hebrew. The Torah, obviously, was written in Hebrew first, then translated to Greek, then translated again into every language in the world; the creation of the canonical Jewish and Christian texts, however, spanned such a long stretch of time that the cultures and languages surrounding their creation evolved and mutated too. It's one of the many fascinating aspects of studying the literal text of these faiths, along with the fact that there are, not one or two, but numerous overlapping canons for both faiths, which is how you get the division of the Tanakh into the Torah, the Nevi'im, and Ketuvim, all of which overlap with but are distinct from the Christian "Old Testament." The order of the books gets shuffled around, certain pieces are expanded or omitted, certain passages are restructured. The Talmud, meanwhile, introduces the "Oral Torah," which explicates (among other things) the Jewish laws which were memorized and passed along verbally, never written down, until an existential threat decades after the death of Christ led to a decision to finally commit it to paper—an undertaking which itself took literal centuries. God wrote the Bible.

Anyway. Here is where I confess that my understanding of Greek is somewhat limited. I understand it enough to recognize that it is a beautiful language, not phonetically but linguistically; it is also a deeply foreign language, in that it constructs sentences in a far more rigid and less-fluid way than English, or even the romance languages—Latin included—get up to. The relationships between nouns and verbs is extremely precise, in ways that I'm honestly not qualified to explain to you. A rough way I can think to put it might be this: in English, we might say "She ate the pizza," but in Greek, we'd have to say "She ate the pizza-which-was-eaten." And it might even be more precise than that, linking "She" to "ate-by-she" to "pizza-eaten-by-her."

The fact that I can't say specifically how it works is, in its own way, proof that the language does not map readily onto conventional English, which is how the KJV winds up with that lovely phrase: "receiving in themselves that recompence of their error which was meet." That's not a fuck-up, folks! That's as close to accurately recreating the original Greek formation as you can get.

Even the simplest parts of those two lines from Romans have subtleties which must be stripped down in translation. For instance, the phrase "men with men" was originally "ἄρσενες ἐν ἄρσεσιν," and if you look very carefully there, you'll see that the word "men" changes between the two uses:

The second use is dative, indicating recipience: "men with men-who-are-with." Is that a huge loss? Are we, as a people, suffering from the repeated use of the singular "men"? Probably not! But it serves as a demonstration of just how tricky it can be to derive a singular meaning out of a strange and nuanced language. Something, somewhere, will be lost.

(My favorite Biblical example of this, which I've written about before, involves the speech Job gives to God, commonly translated as Job repenting before God and acknowledging God's might. Turns out, that passage can also be translated as a condemnation of God, even a sarcastic and scornful offering of praise. Which changes the context of God's giving Job back his worldly goods: if this happens after Job sucks up to God, it's a story about a self-satisfied deity bullying a man and forcing him to worship anyway, but if it happens after Job holds God in judgment, it literally becomes a gesture of shame on God's part—and a moment where humankind, once created in God's image, looks upon its creator. But, again, I've written entirely too much on that before, and that whole concept was itself stolen from an old friend of mine, who stole it in turn from Jack Miles, so let's take it as a "for instance" and not get too caught up in the specifics.)

I am not, again, a particularly good Greek interpreter. At best, my attempts at translation here should be taken as theories: I am offering them up with humility and more than a little self-consciousness. But there's nothing mystical about my process here—I literally went through these lines, word-by-word, trying to understand its original meaning, its subtler inflections, so I could better understand where its ambiguities were and weren't. My work here is mechanical. And I'm not a particularly gifted mechanic, but the nice thing about working with your hands is that, at the end of the day, you've got a literal machine to work with, a physical construct, and no matter how much you fumble beforehand, eventually something starts to take shape.

The rough word-for-word English translation of these passages is, frankly, nonsense. You get something like this:

Even there, you'd have to trust my every single translation of those words, many of which have three or four distinct and contrasting meanings. What are the rules for divining those meanings? How much of that is formal, and how much is purely colloquial, trying to understand various figures of speech, trying to get a feel for what the most "natural" use of a word is?

In English, it is technically possible for me to say, of a couple playing poker, "She handed him his hand, and he clutched his hand in his hand, holding her hand with his other hand, though at one point he let go of her hand to reach for her hand, at which point she slapped his hand away." Imagine not knowing English, and attempting to discern the meaning of each of those "hands." And that's leaving out two-thirds of what "hand" can mean! "Give the factory hand a hand for being so handy and always at hand—though in truth, he does even better work by hand." Now imagine looking at that, having to poke through a dictionary every time you come across a new use of the word "hand," and concluding that gay marriage is a bad thing.

So instead, I'm going to focus on certain words which, across translations of the Bible, feel both pivotal to the meanings of this passage and ambiguous enough that translators fumble for a meaning. And we're going to do this a clause at a time.

Affections: πάθη, which roughly means "what happens to a person." I see it translated a lot as emotions or feelings; at times, it has a negative connotation (misfortune, suffering), but often it's merely neutral.

Vile: ἀτιμίας, which seems to most cleanly map to dishonor or disgrace. But there's also a sense of dishevelment or disrepair. To be poetic (and to bastardize a line from Plato that I like), you might say: "beneath their highest purpose."

So far, so good! God has these people give into their less-dignified emotions. You know, like checking Twitter.

But before we go on, though: the context of this passage within Romans is that Paul has just declared that the righteous way to live life—the highest purpose, the rightest action—is to be guided by faith. To be unrighteous is to invite "the wrath of God," which Paul interprets as God's way of reminding us that God is there. If you want to interpret this a bit more secularly, you could say: there are deep truths about the ways of the world and about how we live in it; if you choose to ignore those truths, you will inevitably be reminded of them, because they will assert themselves, one way or another, more clearly the further you push against them. Or, as Paul says:

Leaving out the word "God," Paul is talking about that which is immortal versus that which is ephemeral. You know, like checking Twitter! But the really important context is here, in verses 24-25:

It's worth pointing out, here, that the Greek word "lusts" here (ἐπιθυμίαις) is not the same as the word used for "passions" in 1:26 (πάθη) or "desire" in 1:27 (ὀρέξει). The word "dishonoring," however, shares a root with the word used for "vile" earlier (ἀτιμάζεσθαι in 1:24 versus ἀτιμίας in 1:26). The word "impurity," meanwhile, can also be substituted with something like "uncleanness" (ἀκαθαρσίαν).

Why do I bring this up? Because, while on the surface this is distinctly a passage about the "dishonoring of bodies," the broader passage isn't about sex: it's about idolatry. There is a distinct throughline that runs to this from the moment when Moses, descending from Sinai with the Ten Commandments, sees the people he's been traveling with worshipping graven images, casting their eyes to the ground rather than up to heaven. Eternity, there, was symbolized by the lines of the mountain converging upon a fixed point, almost an inevitability; idolatry is the act, not only of looking away from that higher place, but of not even realizing that you've stopped looking. It's an act, in other words, of becoming lost. Divorce idolatry from the literal figure of the idol and what remains is merely "extreme admiration, love, or reverence." Any act of intense admiration or love or reverence is idolatrous, technically, unless it is offered up toward that fixed point, that singular convergence, that timeless distillation.

So what the King James Version translates as "vile affections" is literally, precisely, describing emotions which take us "away from honor and grace." Grace, here, meaning a literal attunement with God. There is an entwinement going on here, constructed with the rigidity of Greek logic in a way that's difficult to replicate. It's not that the feeling of lust, of sexual desire, is disgraceful: it's that lust itself is being defined as that which leads us from grace. A sexual feeling which moves us closer to God is, by original definition, not lust—for the same reason that reverence for God is not idolatry.

To explain why this matters, let me go on a quick, brief tangent.

I am not remotely well-versed in Hinduism, but I know that Hinduism is sometimes explicit about its gods serving as mythological functions: each god represents something true and eternal, but its manifestation is metaphorical—albeit a precise enough metaphor that every story about the gods itself contains a truth. Again, I can't say whether this is true throughout all Hinduism or whether it's only true within certain kinds of Hinduism, and you should read everything I say here as skeptically as you possibly can, but I do know that a fascinating quirk of the faith is that some practitioners see no dissonance between their faith and Christianity. They incorporate both Christ and the monotheistic God into their religion, without feeling a need to do away with any of their other gods in the process. And when they read the First Commandment—"Thou shalt have no other god but me"—they see no conflict with the way they practice their religion. Because their gods are not idolatrous. They, too, are manifestations of that same eternal truth: to turn to them is to turn to God, not away.

Similarly, even if you go with the most rigid definition of sexuality imaginable, declaring that the only purpose of sex is procreation, that sex must occur within the covenant of marriage, that marriage as a covenant is itself a proclamation of faith and a union with God, you are acknowledging that sexual desire serves a non-idolatrous function. Not all sex is sinful. Yes, there are extremists who are convinced that even sex within marriage should be kept as pleasureless and dutiful as possible, lest a bit of carnality creep in, but the religious function of sex can't be ignored. And I would argue that to emphasize its biological function is itself a kind of idolatry, in that it puts the material self before the soul, emphasizing the continuation of the human race over humankind's highest duty, which is to lift its eyes towards Sinai. When Paul castigates those who worship "mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things," he makes it clear that to think too much about our own species is to reduce ourselves to the stature of those creeping things. So to think of sex purely as a means to an end itself risks blasphemy: the deeper concern is whether or not sex is an act of worship unto God.

(I will remind you, at this point, that I'm a Jewish atheist who primarily finds his faith in Taoism.)

Now let's move on.

Natural and against nature: φυσικὴν and φύσιν, both pertaining to origin and form: big-N Nature rather than little-n nature. The Platonic ideal–and in Greek, these words are specifically superlative, concerned with the "utmost" rather than with direct comparisons between things. ("Against nature" throws in the word "παρὰ," which simply means "contrary to.")

Use: This is the word, χρῆσιν, that gets translated to "sexual acts" or "sexual relations." But the King James Version gets it most right: its fundamental meaning is simply "use" or "utility." That meaning can extend to "intercourse," but it can also extend to "relationship" or just "intimacy."

Beyond even that, though, there is the possibility that "use" and "intercourse" (or whichever other word you might use) are entwined. In other words, we might not be talking about "the sexual utility of a woman," but about "the purpose of sex," period. The common interpretation, in other words—"Women stopped having sex and then children, in that order"—could be misguided: this passage instead could hold the similar-but-different meaning of: "Women stopped using sex for its highest purpose." I'm inclined to favor this interpretation, not because of any political leaning, but simply because this entire passage is about contrasts between grace and disgrace, God and idolatry, the purity of faith and the confusion of all which is profane.

What is the highest purpose of sex? If you really think it's procreation, then the meaning of this passage doesn't change in the slightest. But if procreation itself is profane and impure, compared to the simple truth of faith in God, then this meaning becomes ambiguous. Rather, it loses its ambiguity: right sex, big-N Natural sex, is sex for God's sake, full-stop. And depending on your relationship with God, depending on the path by which you find your faith, sex might take many different forms indeed.

"Natural" and "use" are once more φυσικὴν and χρῆσιν—identical to the sentence before it. It's almost like we're learning something!

Burned: "ἐξεκαύθησαν," referring to the literal act of something burning (again, the KJV tries to remain pretty damn exact). Arguably something along the lines of "in heat." So far, so hot I mean good.

Lust: "ὀρέξει," also straightforwardly referencing yearning or desire. There's an inflection suggesting "appetite," which I like, because this word, paired with "in heat" above, comes to mean, not just "lustful," but "consumed by lust." Eaten by appetite. Burned alive by their own heat. Again, the pairing are important: this is not merely feeling lustful, it is being obliterated by lust.

That qualification, I promise you, is about to get very important.

One toward another: this is two words, "εἰς" and "ἀλλήλους." The first, curiously, means into, not for: the second means something like "to each other," with the emphasis on reciprocity. Each is literally consumed by the other, suffocating in the other; each one is the flame eating the other one alive. The image, in other words, is of an ouroboros: not just a bodicecodpiece-ripping surrender to abandon, but something more ominous. A loss of self, not to someone above you or even to something demonic, but—horrifyingly—to someone who is themselves completely lost, completely eaten alive. Not a mutual two-way possession, but something that descends to the depths of: becoming nobody for the sake of nobody, dying for the dead, forsaking existence for the nonexistent.

And I have two comments about this passage.

First: it's popular for non-Christian crowds to pooh-pooh the Bible's language, to call it poorly-written, to critique it as a narrative. Almost nobody making this critique has actually read the Bible, of course: they've just seen bits and pieces here and there, in various translations, and found a way to interpret it as bad. Stop that, folks. The Bible is immaculately constructed: language, in a very literal sense, as sculpture. Look at how insanely entwined every clause of every sentence is with every other clause, every other sentence; the effect is almost kaleidoscopic. Every word somehow makes all the words before it more potent. You can be an outright nihilist and still see that the Bible (and the Tanakh and so on) has endured for a reason. You don't need to buy into the religion to find awe in its construction.

But that brings me to the second point.

Why emphasize, in this passage, men turning away from women, men turning towards other men? I think it's because, on some level, the Greek language demands a parallel. The mirror-image nature of these two people devoured by one another requires them to be identically-gendered: that literally yields the device that lets "εἰς ἀλλήλους" turn man against man, the words "man" against "man," in a way where they become one and the same. This is describing onanism: it might as well be referring to someone fucking a mirror. Narcissus staring at his own reflection. Desiring someone in a way that destroys them, because whatever they once were has been replaced by the fact of your desire. (I'm reminded of something Richard Rorty said about Lolita once: that it's a book about Nabokov's fear that genius is sociopathic, that one person's brilliance can wipe someone else out of existence, manifested in pedophiliac "love" that, because of its subject, is solely about the one doing the loving and not at all about the human being loved. The "yearning" Paul describes here is tantamount to murder.)

None of this is possible unless "man" and "man" are identical. That's not a biological fact—it's a linguistic one. Similarly, in a language like Greek, describing love between a man and a woman will always emphasize difference and divide, in a way that makes the very word used for "love" be mechanically about difference: in the word itself is the implication that it exists for someone dissimilar to you. The gender binary, there, has nothing to do with gender, and everything to do with separation or distinction. Similarly, the use of man with man here creates a syntax in which the emphasis is lack of distinction: debasement as an antonym for elevation, like a statue's face wearing away until it's no longer recognizably human.

The precision of Greek allows a handful of words to hold this much significance. But it's also an important context if you're going to read this passage and figure out its meaning. If you don't understand how the Greek language works, how can you possibly understand the book you're reading? And you can dispute my scholarship here—and rightfully so!—but ask yourself: of the many, many, many people who take the Bible as literal truth, as the direct word of God, what fraction of those people know that, when you flip a gender in Greek, you have to physically modify every single word that you write about that gender? How many people dedicate their lives to the Bible without realizing that "man" and "woman," in the original Greek passages, hold a far more literally symbolic significance than the biological or even the masculine-vs-feminine divide suggests? Greek is like a math equation: change one symbol, and you change the entire formula. Which allows for astonishing wordplay, but also means that interpreting the Bible requires you to function as a kind of mathematician.

How can you possibly believe that the Bible contains the word of God, then commit the blasphemy of refusing to learn God's own tongue? How is it not infinitely damning to choose, day by day, to read the Bible in English, knowing that you've forsaken ninety percent of its beauty and ninety-nine percent of its truth? How can you claim to love Jesus and not fear, every day, for your soul, or for the possibility that you are actively denying your own path to salvation? Flip through the passages of the English Bible all you want; try to glean your distorted meanings from its pathetic indistinctness. You aren't worshipping God—you're worshipping yourself and calling it God. You are who Paul is writing about here. Read the Bible in English, and you are almost certainly going to burn in Hell.
 
I mean, unless you're Jewish, like me. In which case Hell doesn't exist. Then all you've got to watch out for are the floods.

Let's bring this passage to an end, shall we? But I'll warn you: this last bit will take us a while to unpack.

Working, receiving, recompense, meet: I'm bundling these words together because the King James Version kinda fumbles here—was that not obvious from the awkwardness of the syntax? But it's tricky, because each of these words seems to echo and reinforce the others; I'm almost certainly missing the deeper function of the syntax, but I'll do my best with what I've got.

First, there's the word "κατεργαζόμενοι," which the KJV turns into "working" but which I saw translated as "working out" elsewhere. The best definition I found is something like: "to, by working on something, bring something else about." Another decent substitute might be achieve: I have acted, and this is what my action has wrought. So to "work that which is unseemly," the KJV is using "work" in the punning sense of "works:" these men aren't doing something unseemly, they are accomplishing something unseemly. There is a mechanical suggestion that means and end are perfectly entwined.

"ἀντιμισθίαν," or "recompense," comes next in the sentence. "Exchange," "consequence," or "punishment" would likely equally fit. But again, there's a sense of action-reaction, means and end all at once.

"Receiving" is a translation of "ἀπολαμβάνοντες," which holds an additional meaning of: "taking back." You put something out into the world; now, it returns to you, and if its form seems to have changed for the worse, it is only the revelation of what was always there. In the moment you act, you have already given birth to what comes next.

"Meet," meanwhile, comes from the word "ἔδει," which might mean "fitting" or "proper," but can more precisely mean "needed" or even "necessary." I'm even inclined to think of the word must. But "meet" is, in its way, a very poetic translation. Because that's what this passage describes: the meeting of behavior and comeuppance. And the meeting is not one followed by the other: it is the idea that there is no separation between the two to begin with.

When Paul writes about the wrath of God, punishing idolatry, you could go with the common interpretation, which is that, if you sin, God will punish you—and you'd be wrong. The point is not that God will punish you for blaspheming: it is that blaspheming is punishment. There is no separation, here, between action and reaction. The moment you sin is the moment of wrath. You both invite the punishment and are its deliverer. It is yet another mirror image: the moment you stray from God is the moment you are punished, because to stray from God is punishment itself.

Why is sin bad? Because it strays. What is the punishment of sin? To stray. Sin and God are inseparable, for sin is defined by the God from which it strays. Therefore, desire becomes lust and therefore a sin when it turns its face from God—and the punishment for lust, God's "wrath," is that you shall see God no longer.

There is parallel here to Greek tragedy, in which both the act which deserves punishment and the punishment itself are pre-scripted; there is no escaping Fate, because there is no reality beyond this one here, in which Fate exists almost as a natural law. To exist at all is to be bound with Fate. Likewise, to exist in Paul's conception is to live in a world defined by God, the way a mountain's shape is defined by the point at its peak. God doesn't need to punish you for turning your back on God's existence. Your punishment will simply be that God continues to exist. You, who will suffer for your lack of God's grace, are being punished solely because you have chosen to reject that grace in the first place. You could end your punishment at any time—but if you are damned, your damnation will take the form of your forgetting that simple truth, and forgetting God with it.

It all bleeds back into that theme of idolatry as a kind of indistinctness, a kind of wearing-away. If God is order, just as Nature is form, then to spurn God is to lose truth itself, and to lose form, and to live the profane life in which all idols blend together, because all are meaningless.

But there's another parallel here, and it's about to get very important.

You see, all of this ties all the way back to the book of Genesis—the genuine beginning. Genesis 1:2 describes the earth before God as "formless and empty;" God's acts of creation are acts of distinction, dividing dark from light, earth from water from sky, ending in the creation of two individuals, a man and a woman. Each is separate from the other; neither is aware of themselves as separate until they are tempted, by the serpent, to eat the fruit that births the original sin. (And what happens to the serpent? He is punished to "crawl on his belly," becoming the lowliest and basest of all the "creeping things" which Paul, in Romans 1:23, condemns as the lowliest of the low.)

*Why* does that matter? Just you wait and see.

(I *did *warn you that we'd be a minute.)

Two more words to untangle, but these are both doozies.

Error: This, one of two words that specifically indicates wrongness of action, comes from "πλάνης," which literally means wandering. Isn't that so perfect? Everything I just said, about how sin and punishment are both a kind of straying from God, is wrapped up perfectly in this word. Because, of course, to "err" is to steer off path—or, if you want to throw in another layer of literal/figurative entwinement, to err is to deviate. Deviance itself is a kind of straying; lust is deviance because it strays; the consequence of either is simply to have strayed.

The English language, by its nature, perverts the meaning of this passage, because it can't capture the neatness of these parallels. It establishes distinctions between words that shouldn't be there, creating illusory oppositions, suggesting tensions where it ought to be establishing unity. In the Greek, there is a playfulness to how every new term established reiterates what has already been said, sticking to the core concept but adding new inflections, fleshing out every facet, every dimension, to this idea. You read Romans in English and take away that it's about men having sex with other men, then extrapolate that sex must only be between a man and a woman, and therefore must only be for procreation, and then you misinterpret the "wrath" of God and—especially if you draw wrongful parallels between this and the way-earlier story of Sodom and Gomorrah—come away thinking that the moral is: God will punish civilizations that think gay sex is okay. When really the passage more-or-less just says: It is foolish to put God before sex. Put sex before God.

Romans 1:28-32 describe the punishment that befits those who forget this. Are you ready? Their punishment is to become "gossips, slanderers, insolent, haughty, boastful, disobedient to parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless." The punishment for forgetting God is that life just kind of sucks! You know, like when you check Twitter.

All this ensues from misplaced priorities. God doesn't need to punish you for any of this. If you're being told to remember what matters in life, that's for your sake, not for God's.

Hence the last word that I want to translate here—the single most judgmental word in this passage.

Unseemly: originally "ἀσχημοσύνην." Curiously, this is more often translated as "shameful," which has the tut-tutting connotations folks associate with the most irritating kinds of Christian, than it gets translated as indecent, which also works. And why would I want to split that hair? Because this is using the same language that's used to describe Adam and Eve, the moment they first realize they are naked. Indecent, biblically, is directly associated with consciousness: the birth of homo sapiens is the moment that Eve and Adam begin to think of themselves as improper, indecent, exposed. Indecency—rather, our capacity to recognize it—is the very first consequence of sin: the mark of original sin is literally the capacity to feel shame.

(Sure enough, "ἀσχημοσύνην" can also be translated as "nakedness" itself.)

What, according to Romans 1:27, is the terrible sin afoot here? It has nothing to do with sex, and everything to do with dissolution of consciousness: abandonment, in other words, of that which makes us human. Abandonment of the self, of the soul. Sex becomes sinful when, in the process of acting on our lusts, we abnegate ourselves, letting go of who we really are.

Ironically, you could say that Romans is condemning orgies, in a sense. But the orgy it's condemning isn't the modern conception of the word ("group sex"). It's the religious ritual of orgy, the Dionysian rite, in which worshippers combined music and wine and sex in the pursuit of ekstasis, or ego death. Ecstasy (which, in the original Greek, translates to "outside of oneself") was the release from mind and body: the release from self itself. This is the capital-N Nature of those "indecent" acts: not indecency itself but the inability to perceive indecency. Dissolution of consciousness. The all-consuming ouroboros of desire. The conflagration of the self.

This is the sum judgment of Romans 1:26-27, which has been used to justify more human suffering than any two lines of any book—no matter how sublime—ever should. What are the words it uses to articulate its condemnation? Disgraceful: apart from God's grace. Indecent: unconscious. Error: a straying, again from God.

"When sex makes people stray from God, those people stray from God." Nothing is said about sex that doesn't make people stray from God. Nothing in particular is said about what kinds of sex cause people to stray from God: there is a reference to the "highest function" of sex, but, again, the highest function of sex is "to come closer to God." 

The rest, as far as I can tell, is just conjugation. 

The structure of this passage describes five things occurring, in order:

You could take that last one to its logical conclusion, as Romans more-than-hints at, and point out that the endpoint of "losing your humanity" is death. At which point, sex becomes a murder and a suicide all at once. But when Paul says that those who sin will perish, he's not saying that God will murder them or that good Christians ought to murder them: he's saying that neither God nor Christians will have to, because this sin itself will, taken to its extremity, prove murderous.

Isn't that so much neater and more devious than the kind of sin which involves casting out the unrighteous, or promising them an afterlife worse than death? Isn't this vastly more poetic and brilliant and flat-out terrifying than a vision of a God who established arbitrary laws, and now whittles away the endless hours of eternity ruthlessly punishing people who deviate from this game? In this version of Romans, nobody needs to be cast out, for they will cast themselves out; there is no need to imagine Hell, because Hell is already here. Sin, by its own nature, proves itself to be sin. Similarly, God is revealed, not in arbitrary ways, but through clarity itself, an ebbing of confusion, a draining-away of distraction, immortality not in that God will live to be infinity years old but in the sense that the quiet place in which we are free to feel joy and love, the quietness that seems to grow stiller when we fill it with everything that brings us pleasure without chaos, everyone we've ever loved... well, that beautiful quiet will always endure, so long as there are people left alive to find it, and arguably even after the last conscious being leaves the universe, turns off the lights, and slams the door.

Why, once you have known that peace and quiet, that ease and that swelling of love, would you ever want to live in a world of petty miseries, meaningless dramas, and the kinds of sex that give you nothing meaningful beyond a brief lull in your endless hungers? Who on earth would choose the meanest and most vicious ways of living once they were offered something, anything, more?

That is the message of Romans. That is the contrast drawn between the world of God and the world of sin. It doesn't need to tell you the difference between sin and salvation, or proscribe which kinds of penetration are and aren't acceptable. The point is that you don't need to be told, because you already know. Pull yourself away from all the distractions, all the things which cause you suffering, and you will find that you know God already. We are all capable of lifting our gaze from the churning ephemera that lies before us, and gazing instead at the ever-present mountaintop.

You can find this beautiful even if you don't believe in a literal God, which I don't. Or you can look at this and find the obvious parallels between this and Buddhism's message of noticing how desire, when it controls us, leads to suffering, in part by distracting us from ourselves. You can appreciate this as a work of poetry, provided you do away with the wretched translations, or you can simply marvel at how well-crafted it is as a piece of symbolic logic. The way that every word simultaneously lends new meaning to all the other words while also softening those words, taking what could be seen as harsh or stinging judgment and instead bringing them new gentleness, a universality that rises above any specific flavor of stinginess or intolerance. The way in which this is written is more than merely beautiful: it is a demonstration, serving in a sense as its own proof-of-concept. It is the light which reveals the light—and the more startlingly its clarity emerges, the more its message about that which obscures or distracts or eats us all alive is free to resonate.

It's ironic, then, that Romans is obscured by its own language—yet another culture ruined by the Brits. And it's doubly ironic that all this concerns a passage literally called Romans, condemning the civilization that not only fiercely oppressed the early Christians but more-or-less pilfered the ruins of Greek civilization, stealing their gods and making them worse. Romans, prophetically, describes Romans—and unknowingly articulates the Christian culture that, in its rigid adherence to words written in a language ill-suited to handle the liberating rigidity of the language those words were translated from, has managed to take a paean to liberation from evil and reinterpret it as a carrier of evil, impregnating it with the very festering pestilence that it was written to dispel.

I am wary of so-called tradition. People who would have us "return to tradition," as they put it, aren't just asking us to revert to a past society, whose ignorances and atrocities they ignore. It's more pernicious than that. Because none of us remember the deep past, and because the past we do remember is so limited and flawed, the past itself is a kind of myth, one which we have to write before we can "return" to it. Biblical literalism is all the rage these days—but just which Bible would these literalists have us return to? Do they want us going all the way back to the ancient days of 1998, where men "suffered in their bodies for all the twisted things they did"? Back to the years of King James, with its spidery and difficult sentences, sentences that still fail to hold the fullness which they sought, in vain, to grasp? Maybe they would have us turn to some Instagram-friendly pastor, condensing works which people in my faith once spent lifetimes memorizing word-for-word and teaching their students, who would teach their students in turn, on and on, consuming lifetimes over the course of centuries just to keep a vast work of faith alive, down to mere Buzzfeed-worthy bullet points, about as accurately regurgitated as Instagram posts about astrology or ADHD.

I am happy with my relative lack of tradition, and with the freedom I have to pursue deeper meaning down whatever alleys seem worth searching through. I love the mutt we call the English language, and the way it's not rooted in binary conceptions of gender, freeing me to write without considering the maleness or the femaleness of each and every word. And, while I am not gay, I relish the freedom to pursue love however I find it, and to discover the holiness and sacredness (if you want to call it that) of every person who brings purpose to my life—and I want nothing more than for other people to find similar joy, though mostly that consists of hoping they can find what they're looking for, and hoping they have enough faith in themselves to believe it when they see it.

At the same time, however, I am drawn helplessly to that which seems eternal, that which feels infinite, those ancient things which feel almost impossible—not tradition, even, but that which gave rise to tradition in the first place. And at times, I find myself wondering what came before our so-called tradition: what wellsprings we lifted our flimsy pretenses at "eternity" from, what existed before we introduced flaws and toxins and impurities, distracting ourselves and each other from what mattered in the first place, all while failing to realize that the "truth" we think we're looking at is not as whole a truth as it seems.

Which is how, I suppose, I found myself curious about an infamous Bible passage on a slow and rainy day, and decided to peek under its hood, and found—to my surprise—not just a less politicized piece of writing but an astonishingly beautiful one, beautiful in such strange ways that it took me hours to sift through just a handful of words, learning what words might do that I had never thought to do with them, piecing together something that, in its ancient remove from life as I know it, felt almost alien, bewildering in its logic, yet absolutely ingenious—and far more gentle and humane than I, having read the same in another language and blithely assumed I'd caught its essential drift, was remotely ready for.

How frustrating, to find that something all-pervasive and terrible and hostile is in fact rooted in something so astonishing that it justifies having stuck around for all these years. And how ironic, that we take a verse about looking for sacredness and away from blasphemy, and promptly blaspheme all over it. Blaspheme all over its dirty filthy slutty fucking face. Like the hypocritical ἀσχημοσύνηνs we are.

(Did I declense that right? Is ἀσχημοσύνην even a noun? Good God, ye speakers of ancient Greek in the audience, please don't tell me. I'm feeling plenty naked and indecent and ashamed attempting this without your kindly help.)





Disclaimer: I am, like I said, wildly unqualified to attempt anything of this sort. Please take whatever I say about Christianity and/or the Greek language with a grain of salt; my hope is that you'll enjoy my sloppy enthusiasm for what it is, but "sloppy enthusiasm" is definitely what's going on here. And while I did my best to write this without offending people of any particular sexuality or faith, I very well might have put my foot in my mouth or said something gross without realizing it; I sincerely apologize if that is the case, and promise that it wasn't intentional.