lovesilentdeath

What educated sane person would care about an old book on Hebrew history, which is what it is, just like Homer and Hesiod, which is much closer to our culture. When I took western history in college, it began with a short on Mesopotamia and Egypt, then on to the Greek and Romans. Nothing on the Hebrews; where do people get this nonsense?

lovesilentdeath

Russellonius,
great post, much of the history on Persia is found in history books, none worshiped. Then why assume what they did was wrong, this is applying one standard to all.

Petergdi

"Onanism" as a term for masturbation seems to originate in 18th century medical writing. There was a surprisingly respected medical hypothesis (to some extent taken seriously up to the early 20th century - see the article on Neuropathology in the 1911 Britannica) that excessive emission of semen was a contributing cause to insanity. The sex-education material I grew up with claimed this was a "old-wives'" tale. This is wrong - it was an old doctors' hypothesis. But the people who wrote sex-education books did not want to admit to children that the medical profession could be to blame.

The religious objections to masturbation didn't come from any supposed connection to Onan, but from the idea that it was a sexual act for a wrong purpose.

Peter.

Russellonius

We do. That's the theme of this section.

Someone is sure to notice my math error.

1000 Solomon
-625 Josiah
_375_ years during which a sacred male prostitution ring was run by the priestly descendants of...was it the guy who got the Law direct from God? No, his brother.

90% of the Period of Kings.

People don't need the prompting of a religious professional to make life difficult for sexual and gender minorities. And the Bible bigots are so obviously being selective of which OT laws they want to enforce - just that one. That's why I never cared that much about studying homosexuality in the Bible.

On the other hand, a culture that values heterosexual procreation - Judeo-Christians - is likely to have a demographic advantage over a culture that values the virtues of homosexuality - Greeks and Romans. So it's significant to the question in that way.