I need a little educational enlightenment from my favorite RFM people. :)

Please, facts only, not opinion or speculation.

Luke 7 the Parable of the Roman Military Leader and Jesus healing possible his gay lover. First, do we know if this was a homosexual relationship.

Second, was Jesus advocating same gender partnerships?

Third, if possible, please provide possible contradictions of where homosexuality was condemn in either old or new testament.

Thank you in advance you awesome free thinkers!

Facts Only?

Factually, there is no reason to give the account any credence.

An anonymous author, who was not present, writing many decades after the fact tells a story. That's all this is.

We do not factually know anything about this military leader, his relationships or who he might have advocated for.

We do not factually know Jesus attitude on anything.

As a topic, homosexuality is front=loaded with the biases an individual brings to the discussion.

What I want to see is Left-handed people condemned for showing their support for Satan!!

I'm left-handed. When I was three, my siblings dressed me as Satan for Halloween. The godly people of Laie refused to give me candy.

Does this meet your criteria, EOD?

My ghawd!!

The mind reels at the thought of a surgeon trying to lay hands on his one of a kind left-handed scalpel at a crucial juncture of an operation!

I probably should have gone into plastic surgery. Over 60% of plastic surgeons (in the U.S. and Canada, anyway) are lefties. We're actually over-represented relative to our representation in the population as a whole in both medicine and surgery. (We're also over-represented in numerous less-desirable categories, not that everyone necessarily desires physicians and surgeons, either.) For whatever reason, lefties tend to be somewhat above or below average and not to hover near the mean.

Where surgery is concerned, it stands to reason that left-hand dominance might be an advantage, as the right-handed orientation of the world forces lefties to do more with our non-dominant hands than is demanded of righties. Because surgeons use both hands, though in considerably different capacities, lefties enter the field already having been in training for the dexterity aspect for a long time.

Edited to add the U.S./Canada detail



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/21/2021 09:26PM by scmd1.

When I studied studio art in college, we were encouraged to work with both hands while drawing or painting. I am right hand dominant, but at the time I was more proficient with my left hand, albeit much slower.

Interesting.

When I was 13, I had a serious injury to my right wrist that initially paralyzed my hand. Over a period of months, I eventually regained most (but not all) of the function in my right hand. I still do many things left handed, but I was never able to write legibly with my left hand.

One of my cousins was born left-handed. He was his mother's first child, and she was rather clueless where babies and young children were concerned, wasn't the sort who read books about the proper care of young children (he's in his mid-thirties now, so there were already lots of books available; it wasn't just Dr. Spock anymore) and didn't live near relatives who might have let her know there was a problem. She probably wouldn't have listened, anyway.

At eighteen months or so, he had a tantrum in public. His mother held onto his left hand with her right hand and kept walking. He probably didn't use his dominant left hand much for quite some time,but his oblivious mother didn't notice. I don't remember who or what it was that finally caused her to notice the problem,but it was supposedly a matter of months before it was addressed medically.

Meanwhile he developed considerable skill with his right hand. He grew up doing different things with each hand. he was an athlete, and it didn't always make sense which hand he usedfor which activity. He was a tennis player with a two-handed backhand (which has been pretty common even among males for decades) playing right handed, but he batted right in baseball even though a right-handed two-handed backhanded is highly similar to a left-handed baseball swing, and considering that it's usually an advantage to bat lefty.

He wasn't yet writing when his arm was injured. When he started writing, he wrote with his left hand until he reached the center of the page, then switched the pencil to his right hand to finish the line, then switched back to his left hand, etc. This was during the "whole language" era in education. His teacher bought into a particular school of thought of whole language that advocated NOT formally and explicitly teaching handwriting, but just telling the students "make your letters look as much like mine as you can," or something similar. She either didn't notice my cousin switching hands with the pencil in the middle of every page or didn't care. An old lady who lived next door to his family was a sensory-motor specialist of some sort and happened to stop by one day when he was doing his homework and came totally unglued over it. She said he could write with either hand and it didn't matter which one, but he needed to pick one hand and to write with it. She was especially concerned with the switching hands in the middle of the page, as he wasn't learning to cross the midline, which was going to cause all sorts of developmental motor issues.

He chose to write lefty, but a couple of years later he had a nasty left arm fracture and was in a cast for a couple of months. He took up writing with his right hand again out of necessity. Once he regained use of his left hand, he used both to write, though not switching hands in the middle of each line. The weird aspect is that even apart from the usual differences inherent in the writing of a lefty and a rightie, his left-handed penmanship is totally different than is his right-handed penmanship. It's as though it was written by two different people.

He could write in English with his left hand, while writing in Arabic with his right hand and meet in the middle of his form book!!

My cousin is unfortunately pretty far to the left of the mean, intellectually speaking. He's a gifted athlete with considerable strength,speed, and coordination,but a little weak with regard to gray matter. He's probably lucky to be writing in any one language.

Wait--you and EOD are related?

You should see him in a synchronized swimming routine!

That is something I would pay to see.

It is something I would pay to make someone else see.

scmd1 Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> That is something I would pay to see.


I read that at first as "that is something I would pee to say."


I'm trying to decide now which one makes more sense...

    When do you think it started?

    Was it always for the same reason(s)?

I started teaching during the Whole Language era, when phonics, phonics-based spelling, grammar, and cursive handwriting were all verboten. I taught all of that as I though best, and didn't last too long at my first job. I was so relieved when phonics instruction came back into fashion.

I have always loved to teach cursive handwriting. Children take great satisfaction in doing it well, and they also find it soothing. It's a great way to calm a class down when they came in from recess.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/22/2021 05:02PM by summer.

I don't know as much about it as either my mom or my wife do, but they both tell me of the various benefits of learning cursive, including functional specialization, improved neural connections/increased synapses, better spelling, etc. I think it's crazy that it's no longer in the curriculum in many school districts. The idea that kids usually can't read cursive if they cannot write it would be sufficient reason alone to keep it in the curriculum.

It's possible that back in the day, too much time was being devoted to explicit penmanship practice in grades as high as sixth and seventh. By then, students should have been doing enough real writing that they could have been reminded that they would be graded on penmanship in all writing assignments. Then neither time nor paper would have been wasted on specific handwriting assignments. Still, that was certainly no reason to discontinue teaching cursive.

Whole language was going full-steam in about half the schools in my location in California when I was there from second through fifth grades. I was already reading and writing reasonably well by then, so it really didn't matter for me.

Both my mom's and Jillian's take on whole language was that whole language provided an awesome structure for kindergarten as long as the teacher went against the grain far enough to explicitly teach letters, sounds, and correct letter formation. If a child actually learned to read holistically, great. If not, the child would benefit from a much more systematic approach to reading instruction in first grade. My opinion is that the assumption needs to be that a child WILL read by first grade [in the U.S./Canada] unless there is an identified problem for which a plan and timetable for remediation have been set. I sat in on a "Back-to-School Night" presentation in which a first grade teacher said, "If your child hears the rhythm of the language, he or she will read this year. If not, he or she won't." Sorry, ma'am. It's assumed that you may have students who are learning disabled or have even more severe special needs of various types, but you don't get to write off whatever percentage of the class you believe is not hearing the rhythm of the language. I didn't take the teacher on because it would not have been appropriate in that setting. I did express my concerns to the principal and to the superintendent, both of whom were present for the event but not in that particular classroom.

Individual learning styles are so unique that some students will thrive under any style of reading and writing instruction, while others really need a specific form of instruction, and still others will struggle regardless of the system used. A few of my nieces and probably my daughter would have learned to read, write, and spell if their schooling had consisted of locking them in closets for six hours a day with flashlights and books. One of my nephews, I'm convinced, would be classified as "learning disabled" had his mother not ordered the Orton-Gillingham materials she used in her teaching days to tutor him almost every day from the day he turned six in kindergarten until the end of first grade. He's now in an oncology residency, so odds are that he doesn't have any significant learning problems, but his school's reading program was in such disarray that fewer than than half the students were exiting first grade with anything close to grade-level proficiency in literacy skills. This was in an affluent school. His mother thought it was better to address his issues before he was referred for either Reading Recovery or special education rather than waiting for the fallout.

IMO most students benefit from learning phonics skills. A small minority are whole word readers. Orton-Gillingham is great for kids who have learning disabilities or who otherwise "learn differently." As you note, pretty much anything will work with very bright students.

Reading acquisition is also dependent on a child's development. Up to one year behind is within a normal developmental range, and normally can be caught up in second or third grade with a good curriculum and competent instruction. When you get to more than one year behind grade level, that's where it starts to be worrisome.

Low income kids suffer from parents who may be disinterested in education, a lack of books and other reading materials, lack of experiences like local travel, events, trips to museums, etc., and/or parents who don't talk to them much, or work with them on the basics (naming colors, shapes, counting things, etc.) All of those have an impact on learning. Teachers can't work in a vacuum.

My sister-in-law said she did a minimum of the multi-sensory techniques of Orton-Gillingham because she didn't have a reason to believe the kid was actually learning disabled; he just needed to be taught the phonemes and rules/generalizations. She mainly wanted the flashcards so she didn't have to create them herself (the six-year-old who needed tutoring was the oldest of four kids at that time) and had a 60% off deal that the company sent out as a promotion to people who had signed up and taken their training in the past. She said she used their scope and sequence, which probably anyone who has taught early grades could have recreated, anyway.

My sister-in-law said she would have slightly preferred Project Read (which is, my wife says, Orton-Gillingham based, and has a little more kid appeal) except that the Orton-Gillngham flash cards in the packet she ordered were pre-printed and pre-cut.

P.S. Edited to Add: the teacher whose "Back to School Night" presentation I attended wasn't one who would hav benefited by teaching in a vacuum. (At some other schools in our district, the same could not be said for the teachers.) At the school in question, boundaries were drawn up quite some time ago to insulate children of the wealthy from the riffraff. I'm not sure exactly how they got away with it. Even among high income families, obviously not every child in the school will come to school prepared to learn each day, and learning disabilities happen among the wealthy, too, but this lady had no idea as to everything teachers are required to do in the real world.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 03/23/2021 02:03PM by scmd1.

A lot of lefties in the field of archaeology too. And redheads. A far higher percentage than in the general population.

OMG, Richard, you're right! My borther is a professional archeologist - and left-handed... My father, a qualified but amateur archeologist - left-handed. 2 out of 2 is a valid level of proof for the Internet ;-)

Richard the Bad Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> A lot of lefties in the field of archaeology too.

Uh oh. Now Jordan's going to be after you. . .

Here are Bible references I have found:

Homosexuality is forbidden; its punishment is to be "cut
off" or killed (Lev 18:22, 20:13, Deut 23:17, 1 Cor 6:9).
Permitting homosexuality is a worse sin than permitting rape of a
woman (Gen 19:1-8, Judg 19:22-29).
"Effeminate" men cannot be saved (1 Cor 6:9).
David loved Jonathan: "very pleasant hast thou been unto me; thy
love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women" (2 Sam
1:26, 1 Sam 20:3, 11, 17, 23, 26, 30, 41-42). Jonathan
gives David all his clothes (1 Sam 18:1-4).

I don't see any evidence that the ailing man in Luke 7 was homosexual. He is referred to as a servant, and it would have been entirely normal for a Roman Centurion, who was a military officer, to have at least one servant. The Centurion would have had a "century" (100) people under his command, of whom about 80 would have been Legionnaires and approximately 20 of them servants.

From Wiki:

"Matthew's Gospel and Luke's Gospel[17] relate an incident in which a servant of a centurion based in Capernaum was ill. In the Gospel of Luke, the centurion concerned had a good relationship with the elders of the local Jewish population and had funded the development of the synagogue in Capernaum, and when he heard that Jesus was in the locality, he asked the Jewish elders to request healing for his servant."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centurion

This is supporting evidence that Jesus was never really interested in healing non-Jews (he did that only reluctantly.) He healed the servant only because the local Jewish elders asked him to, and made a case for the servant. IMO Jesus had a mission, and it was never in support of the gentiles.

From what I understand reading the New Testament, Jesus didn’t condemn anyone except for one group and one person.
He condemned the Scribes and Pharisees and compared them to sepulchers “ full of dead men’s bones”.

As for King Herod the Great, he wasn’t so great; Jesus wouldn’t even give him the time of day.

I have seen Jesus Christ Superstar enough times that I must contradict you concerning King Herod the Great. He was phenomenal. :)

Searching for fact in the epitome of ambiguity? Good luck. Perhaps praying for the correct interpretation would be of help. Add fasting for extra accuracy could help.

I'm with Dogblogger. You won't convince anyone that their particular biblical interpretation isn't the correct one.

My interpretation of Jesus and his John the Beloved? I'm biased and like to go literal with the word beloved in this instance.

I mean John the Beloved was always leaning on Jesus' breast or on his bosom? Nobody else was. What was up with that? John 13:23


But if you are reading the Bible with the preconceived notion that homosexuality is a sin, then there must be another explanation and any other explanation at all will do.


Now, if you could just find a copy of the Bible that was written concurrently with Jesus life and not subject to copy after copy and translation after translation, then you might have something.

Whooops. Wrong spot for this one meant for onthedownlow.

It's a great song, anyway.