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Originally posted by State of Dreaming
very interesting. the new testament clearly states that the old testament, where the passage about homosexuality being a sin is found, should be ignored. christ came from heaven and sacrificed his life to rebuke the sins of the old testament. by believing in the old testament's passage about homosexuality being a sin, you are effectively saying that christ died for nothing. i'm an atheist and i know more about christian theology then this ungrateful morons.
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The NT doesn't really say that. Jesus said he didn't come to abolish the law but to fulfill it (Matthew 5:17). This is taken to mean that the ceremonial law (clean vs. unclean) detailed in the OT for atonement of sins became unnecessary because Christ was seen as the final all-sufficient sacrifice, but it doesn't really have much bearing on the laws that were matters of morality rather than ceremonial.
A better argument is that the Bible's presentation of sexual morality is not static because polygamy was morally accepted by the Israelites (Solomon had something like 700 wives + concubines) whereas today most Christians would see that as an immoral system akin to adultery... and yet it was never condemned by God or deemed a sin that necessitated atonement.
There is some explaining to do on this point. A lot of apologists say that God "frowned upon" polygamy and it was never his "original plan" for marriage (which they'd see as one man + one woman), but God never shied away from condemning anything else he "frowned upon" in the OT so that argument doesn't hold up. Incestuous marriage was also accepted up to a certain point in time, so that's another thing that's changed.
The emphasis on marriage in the OT is definitely centered on the contractual exchange of property and the security of being able to produce heirs rather than on love between two people. Women were pretty much seen as chattel. The fact that most Christians today would agree that it'd be immoral for a father to be able to sell his daughter into marriage for a certain number of goats means that marriage has already been re-defined today from how it was presented in the Bible, not even to speak of the other aforementioned "moral" changes.
The pretense that there has been this eternal and unchanging Biblical standard for moral marriage is totally fallacious.