directed primarily at the hypocritical practice of pretending righteousness, or virtue, solely on grounds that one had abstained, or restrained oneself, from certain forbidden actions. This interpretation calls attention to a subjective standard of judgment, not only for sensual experience, but also for any other areas of human activity where conduct is related to volition, to decision, and to knowable principles of individual and social behavior.
According to one public statement of the Master, there were cities which, in the Day of Judgment, would find it even less tolerable than Sodom or Gomorrah. It would be profitable to note what kinds of persons made up such cities. According to the record, they were persons who failed to respond to the proclamation of the Christ and His disciples concerning the spiritual origin and catholicity of human experience, and concerning the substantial reality of spiritual qualities and values-persons who were indifferent to the spiritual need of every human being for integrity of thought, sincerity of motive, depth of principle, an honest, open approach to life, and an interest in the subjective, spiritual qualities of personality and character which combine to form the actuality of individual experience. The Christ was quite capable of such scorn as withered those at whom it was directed. But this scorn was never turned upon the sensualist as such, much as He must have lamented the condition of those whose lives were submerged in sensual appetites. The sole objects of His scorn were those who lived a lie, who pretended to be what they were not, who turned human virtues into a legalistic farce, who cheated, who deceived, who made careers out of hypocrisy and dissimulation. He likened them to whited sepulchres, outwardly immaculate, but containing nothing within but deadness and the stench of decay. If a lie is that which has no real, but only an illusory existence, and if a person's mind and soul become addicted to lies, then it certainly follows that the character, the inner person of the liar is either at an early or an advanced stage of dissolution, decomposition, disappearance into nothingness. The Master preached, among other things, the necessity of facing all experience squarely, and of conforming one's mind, one's understanding, to the real content and truth of this experience, unafraid to accept all the qualities of human life as they are and then, progressively, molding one's own life upon those qualities which possess an immutable spiritual value for the individual.
Because of the fact that the sensual aspects of homosexuality have no social outcome, no stabilizing consequences which involve responsibility and an expanding devotion to others, the homosexual often finds himself in a precarious moral situation. He, or she, must be constantly and deliberately reaching into a greater and greater consciousness of spiritual realities and into higher and higher manifestations of social good, or find himself or herself slipping towards that void of aimless sensuality which turns its victims into something much less than human. Both homosexuals and heterosexuals can be divided into those who are travelling the one road or the other. As concerns the spiritual and moral purposes of the individual, and the relation of his thought and accomplishment to the cultural needs of society, the particular nature of the sexual inclination seems immaterial and irrelevant. That a great
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