For example, in former times women used to sit in the idol temples of Phoenicia, offering as firstfruits to the gods there the earnings of their bodies. They thought that by prostitution they propitiated their goddess and through these things made her favorable to them. Men, denying nature and no longer wishing to be male, fashion themselves as women, thinking that by doing this they please and honor the mother of their so-called gods.
They all live by the most shameful practices and compete with those worse than themselves. As Paul, the holy minister of Christ, said: “Their women exchanged natural relations for those contrary to nature. Likewise the men also, leaving natural relations with women, burned in their desire for one another, men with men committing what is shameful.”
By doing these and similar things, they admit and expose the fact that their so-called gods themselves lived this kind of life. From Zeus they learned the sexual corruption of boys and adultery; from Aphrodite, prostitution; from Rhea, licentiousness; from Ares, murder; and from the others, other things of the same kind—things the laws punish and every self-controlled person rejects.
Is it still reasonable to think that those who do such things are gods, rather than to regard them, because of the licentiousness of their ways, as more irrational than irrational animals? Is it reasonable to think that those who worship them are human beings, rather than to pity them as more irrational than irrational animals and more lifeless than lifeless things? If they had reflected on the mind of their own soul, they would not have fallen headlong into all these things and denied the true God, the Father of Christ.
For example, in former times women used to sit in the idol temples of Phoenicia, offering as firstfruits to the gods there the earnings of their bodies. They thought that by prostitution they propitiated their goddess and through these things made her favorable to them. Men, denying nature and no longer wishing to be male, fashion themselves as women, thinking that by doing this they please and honor the mother of their so-called gods.
They all live by the most shameful practices and compete with those worse than themselves. As Paul, the holy minister of Christ, said: “Their women exchanged natural relations for those contrary to nature. Likewise the men also, leaving natural relations with women, burned in their desire for one another, men with men committing what is shameful.”
By doing these and similar things, they admit and expose the fact that their so-called gods themselves lived this kind of life. From Zeus they learned the sexual corruption of boys and adultery; from Aphrodite, prostitution; from Rhea, licentiousness; from Ares, murder; and from the others, other things of the same kind—things the laws punish and every self-controlled person rejects.
Is it still reasonable to think that those who do such things are gods, rather than to regard them, because of the licentiousness of their ways, as more irrational than irrational animals? Is it reasonable to think that those who worship them are human beings, rather than to pity them as more irrational than irrational animals and more lifeless than lifeless things? If they had reflected on the mind of their own soul, they would not have fallen headlong into all these things and denied the true God, the Father of Christ.