Simple question?

Quote: FrGamble

Actually, when a woman in her cycle is ready to conceive there are human pheromones that are released. She is more interested in sex at that time and studies have shown that men can tell.

You know that without either the benefits of empirical and theoretical science nor advanced tools, the ancients knew the role of semen in reproduction. If what you claim were true, they'd have noticed it, as it would have been easier to notice. We'd have no need for contraceptives like the pill, IUDs or Norplant, because women would know when to abstain or to use a barrier contraceptive.

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I have said many times that civil rights that married couples receive can be extended to homosexual unions.

How magnanimous of you.

Now, why is it when such rights were extended, your reaction was to mourn such extension?

Quote: Dalex64

Ok, focusing on the first four verses of 1 Corinthians 7


Verse 1 you have told me is clearly just an opinion.

What about the other 3? Also opinion?
Or is it just opinion where it contradicts other parts of the bible, so you have to select one of them as opinion?

For instance, "wife submit to your husband" by itself is in the bible alone more than it is paired with statements about the husband not having authority over his body and yielding it to his wife.

This is either a contradiction, or a case of "filling in the blanks" as you see fit in the other verses by lifting, in this case from an opinion piece, and inserting them into a lesson elsewhere.

The whole point of all this is to point out the contradictions and inconsistencies in the bible, and the editorial decisions and opinions about interpretation that are made by people centuries later to try to "fix" it or cast it to the rules of society that they now want to live by.

Your welcome to try and do that and point these things out, you are not going to find anything that hasn't been discussed for hundreds and hundreds of years. You also are not choosing a very good passage to do what you want to do. I can help you if you want.

Quote: Face

Yes, that is worth going to war over.

Amazing post, Face.

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"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."

Ironically, this was written by a Christian apologist. So either at least some of them are aware of the problem, or they can't see the beam in their eye.

Quote: FrGamble

I am very much overweight and chew tobacco. The people that love me the most tell me I need to be careful and watch what I eat and give up the habit. The people that don't care about me don't say anything.

There are those here who've tried to help you out of celibacy. I'm trying to save you from psychological dependence on imaginary beings and outdated prejudices and practices. Yet you don't seem to appreciate any of this.

Look, I'm impervious to the poisonous ideas of Christianity. But for some reason many in the LGBT community still pursue that religion.

What do you suppose happens when they hear it preached that: their marriages are not recognized by the church they try to belong to, and shouldn't even be legal in the civil realm. That their intimate relations are "unnatural" and should be avoided. That they should accept the body "god" gave them. That they should not try to adopt children, because they cannot be ideal parents.

All the while, mind you, seeing how none of this applies to "normal" straight, cisgender people, who are pretty much free to do as they please and, in contrast, have a privileged position in their congregation.

Do you honestly think they feel love and acceptance?

I took that and worse from Judaism for years. I wish I could say I recognized it immediately for what it was and dropped it like a hot potato. But that was not the case. And I wasn't mired in a soul-crushing ultra-orthodox congregation. Oh, no. My parents belonged (and still do) to a more liberal brand fro some reason called "conservative Judaism." Even that was too horrible and oppressive to take, but even the regular orthodox are quite permissive as compared to most Christians. I think the math is kindergarten-simple from this point.

To be fair, many Jewish communities and Christian splinters have really accepted LGBT people without qualification and without special discriminatory and unfair strictures placed on them. I count them as a positive development which your outmoded and authoritarian church should learn from.

Quote: FrGamble

Maybe a firm recommitment to religious freedom would be the peace treaty we are all seeking.

Whenever a Christian says "religious freedom," he means "Christian supremacy."

Proof:

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Allow the Little Sisters to not provide contraception to their employees

The problem here goes further than a line item in a law, to the law itself. As long as such laws exist, however, they cannot play favorites and exceptions, and they especially shouldn't for religious reasons. Religions are unregulated. Any corporation or individual could institute a religion that's morally opposed to any law. Allow such exceptions and you'll see it happening all over the place.

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and allow Catholic adoption agencies to try to place children first and foremost in homes with both a mom and dad

1) they are already allowed to do this, and to discriminate for any other reason to their heart's content, if they don't take public money.

2) You don't mean "first and foremost," you mean "exclusively." You can prove me wrong by pointing out the numbers of gay couple who were helped by a Catholic adoption agency.

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and allow me to in Church only witness the marriages of heterosexual couples.

You need a special law to allow you to do what you're already free to do? And I'm not supposed to suspect an ulterior motive for this?

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The Church of course should also not try to use or influence secular enforcement of religious teachings upon people who do not believe or are not members of the Church.

If you believed this, you'd defend marriage equality instead of trying to downgrade same sex unions to an unequal status.

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If we were free to live what we believe without being labeled using disgusting labels I imagine evangelization would not be done by words but rather by how we live our lives.

You are oppressed because you're not immune from criticism? What would you like, anti-blasphemy laws? Should I be fined for using the name Jehovah? For putting the term "God" between "scare quotes"?

Quote: rxwine

It's pretty good, but imagine if they had come up with "Live and let live."

That's a good, rough first approximation to ethics as relates to dealing with other people. Most people will even implicitly apply it correctly without any further thought. And it's certainly better than "do unto others as you would have them do unto you."

That one is the cause of much misery and oppression. I can boil down its common results to another catch-phrase: "We had to destroy the village in order to save it."

I'll use just one illustration:

Emperor Justinian famously survived a massive revolt in his own capital (the Nica riots) by employing rather brutal means. He's remembered also because he built the Hagia Sophia church, and he also ordered a compendium of all of Roman law, the Corpus Juris Civilis, which was a cornerstone of Western law for a very long time.

One of his lesser known acts was to order all Jews in the Byzantine empire to use the Septuagint in their liturgy. What is the Septuagint? It's a Greek translation of the Bible (more precisely the Old Testament) from the traditional Hebrew. It's called Septuagint because it took, allegedly, 70 rabbis to do this massive work.

Now, why would Justinian care what language Jews used in their prayers? Because he thought by making them use Greek rather than Hebrew, they'd more easily come around to Christianity.

So here's this man doing unto others. More specifically, he's forbidding loyal citizens of the Empire from choosing how to practice their religion, and inducing them to ultimately betray their faith for another one.

This is not quite as brutal as ordering troops into a closed stadium to massacre the rioters gathered there, but the purpose and intent is as bad.

To be sure he could have done worse. And given what Jews suffered under "Christian love" for the following 1600 years, Justinian's actions were so mild as to hardly be worth notice. But in the time and context, they were pretty bad.

Quote: Dalex64

Verse 1 you have told me is clearly just an opinion.

Are you purposely trying to be confusing? You write this line as if I said that explicitly verse 1 is 'just opinion'. You also seem to be suggesting that 'just an opinion' of one of the greatest apostles and the best evangelist the Church has ever known should be just dismissed as unimportant.

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What about the other 3? Also opinion?

I think reading just a verse or two further will answer your questions for you. In verse 6 and 7 he says, "I say this by way of concession, not of command. I wish that all were as I myself am. But each has his own special gift from God, one of one kind and one of another."

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For instance, "wife submit to your husband" by itself is in the bible alone more than it is paired with statements about the husband not having authority over his body and yielding it to his wife.

Absolutely not true. Every time Paul speaks of wives he also talks about the duties of a husband. He is always harder on the husband by the way.

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This is either a contradiction, or a case of "filling in the blanks" as you see fit in the other verses by lifting, in this case from an opinion piece, and inserting them into a lesson elsewhere.

Or it is a case of someone who really doesn't know Scripture and trying very hard to force certain passages to say and prove what they desperately want to show.

Quote: Nareed

You know that without either the benefits of empirical and theoretical science nor advanced tools, the ancients knew the role of semen in reproduction. If what you claim were true, they'd have noticed it, as it would have been easier to notice. We'd have no need for contraceptives like the pill, IUDs or Norplant, because women would know when to abstain or to use a barrier contraceptive.

Oh, how I wish for the sake of women's health and dignity we did indeed have no need for the pill, IUDs or Norplant. Actually even without the formal "releaser" pheromones that many animals have we still don't need any of the above things. Nevertheless it is pretty clear that as humans we do have "primer pheromones". Here is a good article to read up on it: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/pheromones-sex-lives/

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How magnanimous of you.

Now, why is it when such rights were extended, your reaction was to mourn such extension?

Check the tape I did no such thing.

Quote: Nareed

There are those here who've tried to help you out of celibacy. I'm trying to save you from psychological dependence on imaginary beings and outdated prejudices and practices. Yet you don't seem to appreciate any of this.

I appreciate it about as much as you appreciate what I am trying to do.

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What do you suppose happens when they hear it preached that: their marriages are not recognized by the church they try to belong to, and shouldn't even be legal in the civil realm.

I think they recognize that their relationship is not the same as heterosexual marriages and that the Church supports them in their unique, loving, and committed homosexual relationships by not pretending they are marriages. One way is by allowing such unions to have the same civil rights as those who are married.

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That their intimate relations are "unnatural" and should be avoided.

They see this in the same way that they see those who are not married struggle with intimate relations. The Church recognizes their real hardships, does not condemn, forgives, and asks for God's grace. For those homosexual or heterosexual couples who live chastely they experience a freedom and deep love that often the premature or strong sexual desires were covering over and not allowing to be expressed. Warning, I have had many couples who in living chaste lives realized that the sex was masking real reasons why they should not be together and they made the right decision to split up, something they might not have discovered if they hadn't controlled their sexual urges.

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That they should accept the body "god" gave them.

I'm not quite sure what you are getting at here.

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That they should not try to adopt children, because they cannot be ideal parents.

While two men or two women can be wonderful parents, I think you would agree that they are not the ideal parents which would be the natural mother and father all things being equal.

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All the while, mind you, seeing how none of this applies to "normal" straight, cisgender people, who are pretty much free to do as they please and, in contrast, have a privileged position in their congregation.

Sorry I just don't see how you get this.

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Do you honestly think they feel love and acceptance?

I know from first hand experience that it is very possible if you have a good pastoral leader and a well formed congregation to feel great love and acceptance.

Quote: Nareed

The problem here goes further than a line item in a law, to the law itself. As long as such laws exist, however, they cannot play favorites and exceptions, and they especially shouldn't for religious reasons. Religions are unregulated. Any corporation or individual could institute a religion that's morally opposed to any law. Allow such exceptions and you'll see it happening all over the place.

The challenges to our first and foundational freedom are quite new and I don't know examples in our history when these concerns of yours materialized. This sounds a little like fear mongering to me.

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1) they are already allowed to do this, and to discriminate for any other reason to their heart's content, if they don't take public money.

They are not discriminating and also the public funds are freely given to help the government do something it cannot do as well such as helping these children in need find homes. Why if these Church groups are helping the government and the public they should at the same time have their hands tied in regards to how they do it is a little unfair.

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2) You don't mean "first and foremost," you mean "exclusively." You can prove me wrong by pointing out the numbers of gay couple who were helped by a Catholic adoption agency.

No I mean what I said. Do you have any idea how many couples of a man and woman desire to adopt children?

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If you believed this, you'd defend marriage equality instead of trying to downgrade same sex unions to an unequal status.

Would you stop saying this, it is getting old and it is just as much untrue as when you first said it. I do not want to downgrade same sex unions, I want to give them equal status under the law. Your arguments seem to come down to trying to paint my motivations with your big brush and using possible things that have never happened to scare us into thinking your way.

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You are oppressed because you're not immune from criticism?

I am more than fine with criticism as I hope you would be too.