Interesting debate going on around Tim Farron at the moment. Farron used to be the leader of the Liberal Democrat party here in the UK but resigned last year claiming that the role compromised his position as a "Christian" (he also didn't do well in the general election). During his tenure he was pressured by the media to state clearly his views on gay people, specifically whether or not gay sex was, in his view, a sin. He refused to answer for a while but eventually was embarrassed into saying that he thought it wasn't.
Now it seems that Mr Farron has changed his mind; he regrets saying that and his real view is that gay sex IS a sin after all. For secular people this kind of flip-flopping exposes the truly muddled heart of evangelical Christian thinking. Farron claims (as most Christians do) that all humans are sinners, apparently we're born that way; as the Hitch used to say, the Christian claim is that "we're born sick and commanded to be well". Like many Christians Farron seems to want this both ways, he wants to claim that the general human condition is a sinful one and yet he also wants to call out particular actions (like gay sex) and say that they're somehow especially sinful. Surely if we're all sinners then everything we do, including straight sex, collecting stamps and eating roast chicken is, by definition, sinful? This is a muddled and judgemental position, it's saying that some people warrant a greater burden than others for sin and that the choice of what actions do or do not incur this extra weight is arbitrary and subjective according to what individuals "believe".
We're left wondering how many different kinds of sin a Christian can believe in at the same time, how they decide which is which and if they feel any compulsion to clarify what these concepts actually mean in the real-world we all inhabit? Until they do, rationalists and secularists aren't going to take them seriously, nor promote them to positions of power.
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