Three dimensions do not squish into two.

Someone directed me to Eugene today, and I'm always turribly jealous when someone says something that I am thinking about, but says it much more eloquently. It's hurting me physically to cut this into bite-size teaser chunks. So just click the link. NOW!

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I think this also goes a long way toward explaining just what's so dangerous about pornography. Pornography reduces human beings to two-dimensional images on a page (or monitor) that exist solely to titillate the viewer. They have no life of their own, no real personality, no soul - and it's very easy to begin viewing the people around us in those same lifeless, self-serving terms.

In fact, many sincere Christians have fallen into a similar trap. In their zeal to apply the Bible to their lives, they've focused on what they can extract from its passages to the exclusion of all else. We spend our days reading books, listening to sermons and 'studying to find ourselves approved,' and we reach all of our conclusions about life based on Greek word conjugations before we ever set foot out the door.

In doing so, we have reduced the world around us to two dimensions, as we filter everything in it through the lens of our preconceived conclusions.
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And thus we see the failure of the church when it comes to dealing with the issue of homosexuality. The actual lives and experiences of gay individuals are completely irrelevant, since we have already reached all of our conclusions about them based on word studies and cross-references. As with every other life situation, it becomes unnecessary to consider the effects that our doctrines actually have in real life, since our theologians have already determined them to be true.
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But are they really the ones at fault? What happens when you try to fit a three-dimensional object into a two-dimensional space? You smash it. You distort it. You crush the very life out of it. How much more, then, do we become bringers of death when we try to impose two-dimensional ethics onto the three-dimensional people around us?
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