1 18 FOR WE SEE divine retribution revealed from heaven is and falling upon all the godless wickedness of men. In their wickedness they are stifling the truth. 1 19 For all that may be known of God by men lies plain before their eyes; indeed God himself has disclosed it to them. 1 20 His invisible attributes, that is to say his everlasting power and deity, have been visible, ever since the world began, to the eye of reason, in the things he has made. There is therefore no possible defence for their conduct; 1 21 knowing God, they have refused to honour him as God, or to render him thanks. Hence all their thinking has ended in futility, and their misguided minds are plunged in darkness. 1 22 They boast of their wisdom, but they have made fools of themselves, 1 23 exchanging the splendour of immortal God for an image shaped like mortal man, even for images like birds, beasts, and creeping things.
1 24 For this reason God has given them up to the vileness of their own desires, and the consequent degradation of their bodies, 1 25 because they have bartered away the true God for a false one, Or: the truth of God for a lie. and have offered reverence and worship to created things instead of to the Creator, who is blessed for ever; amen.
1 26 In consequence, I say. God has given them up to shameful passions. Their women have exchanged natural intercourse for unnatural, 1 27 and their men in turn, giving up natural relations with women, burn with lust for one another; males behave indecently with males, and are paid in their own persons the fitting wage of such perversion.
1 28 Thus, because they have not seen fit to acknowledge God, he has given them up to their own depraved reason. This leads them to break all rules of conduct. 1 29 They are filled with every kind of injustice, mischief, rapacity, and malice; they are one mass of envy, murder, rivalry, treachery, and malevolence; whisperers 1 30 and scandal-mongers, hateful to God, insolent, arrogant, and boastful; they invent new kinds of mischief, they show no loyalty to parents, 1 31 no conscience, no fidelity to their plighted word; they are without natural affection and without pity. 1 32 They know well enough the just decree of God, that those who behave like this deserve to die, and yet they do it; not only so, they actually applaud such practices.