Gay Marriages

So then everyone who has ever acted upon lust is not in Heaven?

And why is it not possible to have a sinless human being?

It seems difficult, to be sure. But not impossible. After all, wasn’t Jesus -

Never mind.

~cheers

I think it might be interesting to start arguing from a position of a person faithful to a different religion. I guess it would quickly become a mess:

After all, all christians are following an outdated way of praising God, and calling the prophet Jesus the son of God is a terrible sin, surely on the day of the Judgement the attending Jesus will not tolerate such a blasphemy.
And of course there is only one god and no such thing as a trinity.
Now, this is the truth as we all know.

I guess some of the christians around here should be rather glad that the atheists and agnostics around do not take up such a stance but try to argue in the way that Renessaince and Enlightenment have tought us.

lust and sin is slightly off topic, but yes Jesus never did sin, but he was hardly a regular human either

Of course Jesus was human. He was a prophet, nothing more, nothing less.

I believe the cleric Enoch never sinned either, and for this, was rewarded by God with the position of Metatron. of course, all that is assuming god exists, which he doesnt.

Again where to begin . . .
I’ll go from last-post first.
Janus1 - Enoch, i don’t believe was a cleric per se, and it never says that he never sinned. Rather he walked closely with God, and so he never “died” but was simply taken to heaven.
F_alk - we both know that Jesus was not simply a prophet. He was either the Son of God, a crazy fool, or a liar. Be true to yourself - you believe he existed, so call it as you see it. He was a crazy fool or a liar in your opinion.
For the whole “lust” thing . . . i’m not certain that wanting to have sex with a woman is a “sin”. Jesus says that someone who commits adultery in his heart is guilty of committing it period. This is to say that if i lust after a married woman (i.e. if i do more than simply say that a married woman is attractive, but rather yearn to have sex with her), then i am guilty of committing adultery with her. Believe it or not, i actually do make a conscious effort to not lust after/fantasize about a woman who is taken. As for the single ones, well, I’m not feeling too bad about my feelings there. We’re expected to want to have sex with women, its the actual commission of this outside of marriage that makes things dicey.
As for homosexuals . . . i think that most rational Christians view it as “love the sinner, hate the sin”.

my mistake CC.
not a cleric, but a prophet and a scribe

www.belinus.co.uk/doorsofpeace/AngelsMetatron.htm
www.circle-of-light.com/Psychic_Readings/metatron.html
www.crystalinks.com/metatron.html

according to these, and other sources, Enoch earned such merit in the eyes of God, that he became the Metatron, a sort of Super Angel (as i understand it, outside of the classical angelic heirarchy). it does not say specifically that he did not sin, however, i would imagine that to earn such merit in the eyes of god, he would have to be almost without sin, if not without sin entirely.

interestingly enough, i became interested in the metatron business from the movie Dogma. the religious lore is actually quite interesting, even though i do not believe it. however, the most interesting bits seem to come predominantly from the Old Testament.

@cystic:

F_alk - we both know that Jesus was not simply a prophet. He was either the Son of God, a crazy fool, or a liar. Be true to yourself - you believe he existed, so call it as you see it. He was a crazy fool or a liar in your opinion.

Well, the latest holy book of three religions that praise the same good clearly calls Jesus a prophet. Thus, logically, i have to take him as such. I do not trust too old books and information when learning ;)
For my personal opinion: I think he actually was some kind of preacher (which IMO in that times often were called prohpets regardless of wether they could tell the future or not) and social reformer. What people made of him after his death is a totally different story.

i think that gay couples are ok but marriage is wrong. I have nothing against anyone but it is just different so techically no i am not for gay marraige but i guess it could be oh and mutharussia–- that was really cool that u made sure about the racial thing!!

I am not gay.

I have gay friends.

If they wish to marry eachother. Fine.

Would it worsen my life in any way? No

Would it lower gas prices? No

Would it stop the war? No

Will God punish this? Who knows? Maybe. Then again maybe he’ll punish people who are too fat. :-?

If you’re not gay. Don’t marry your same sex.

If you are gay. Marry your same sex.

IMO this has nothing to do with religion and everything to do with prejudice. As for the God factor, we will all answer for something :wink:

@stuka:

I am not gay.

I have gay friends.

If they wish to marry eachother. Fine.

Would it worsen my life in any way? No

Would it lower gas prices? No

Would it stop the war? No

Will God punish this? Who knows? Maybe. Then again maybe he’ll punish people who are too fat. :-?

If you’re not gay. Don’t marry your same sex.

If you are gay. Marry your same sex.

IMO this has nothing to do with religion and everything to do with prejudice. As for the God factor, we will all answer for something :wink:

Will it take away from the seriousness and respect that comes with the historical tradition of marriage? Absolutely.

@Deviant:Scripter:

Will it take away from the seriousness and respect that comes with the historical tradition of marriage? Absolutely.

How will it take away from the seriousness and respect? I don’t understand :-?
If you mean by the way gays and lesbians could now have an equal share of seriousness and respect, then, there you have the ‘predjudice factor’ of my arguement.
Here’s another example which is similar to your reply. One could say that blacks take away from the seriousness and respect that comes with the right to vote. That was one arguement from the southern white communities during the early 1960’s. Would you say that they are correct?
Well if you aren’t a racist (which I am not saying you are), you wouldn’t see truth and fairness in this.

With a divorce rate reaching (or even surpassing) 50% in the US, i’d say heterosexuals have ‘taken away from the seriousness and respect that comes with the historical tradition of marriage’ well enough on their own.

~cheers

“seriousness and respect”?

yea, ok. one word… Vegas
further than that, marriage is not some anceint and sacred tradition. for a long time, people married based on whoever provided the best dowry. some still do that. how is that serious and respectful?

gay marriages will not take away from seriousness and respect at all. its simply allowing them the same rights as heterosexuals. I think your opinion on this matter is extremely bigotted.

@K-Ration:

With a divorce rate reaching (or even surpassing) 50% in the US, i’d say heterosexuals have ‘taken away from the seriousness and respect that comes with the historical tradition of marriage’ well enough on their own.

~cheers

so maybe if it’s that bad we should abolish it? :wink:

The following is the majority of an essay I have been writing in bits and pieces over the last few weeks on this very topic.

You know, I have heard several people, gay and straight, mention what they thought America’s founding fathers might have said on this topic. I think there’s a simple reason that no specific condemnation or endorsement of same sex marriage was ever made in any of the formative American documents, and that’s because the founding fathers never imagined anyone would conceive of it. I have no doubt that if you could conjure up the departed spirits of Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson and ask them their position on this, I think they would be aghast that we would even consider tolerating such unions, much less legally endorsing them. I’m sure many will despise and hate me for that remark (it wouldn’t be the first time) but I think it’s pretty obvious.

I’ve noticed a trend in America as I have become more politically aware over the last few years, and that is that freedom of religion is often mistaken of freedom from religion. People want to totally separate church and state from one another, but you cannot separate religion from America, for it constitutes the very fabric of the nation. That being said, America has surely deviated from basic Christian principles (though shalt not kill, but abortion and capital punishment are surely killing). I will be the first to say that over the course of many centuries various groups have used “holiness” and righteousness" and supposedly the “will of God” to justify many atrocities: The Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, and the Holocaust, to name a few. If the way that mortal men interpret and structure Christianity wasn’t horribly flawed in some ways, people wouldn’t have broken away from the oppressive Catholic church in the sixteenth century, Martin Luther would have never nailed his 95 theses to the door of the church in Whittenberg, and the Protestant reformation would never have been necessary. The fact that Jesus Christ had all these wonderful ideas about peace and loving thy neighbor, yet people spent centuries killing each other trying to decide exactly how he said it, shows how truly flawed man’s interpretation of religion can be. However, the core ideas of Christianity, of good moral behavior, peace, and loving thy fellow man, are those that can encourage people to be better than they are. A much wiser man than I, whose name I have sadly forgotten, once said “I tend to judge the merits of a religion by the behavior of those who profess to adhere to it”, and I certainly know that my beliefs have made me a much better person than I otherwise might have been. Frankly, I think this country would, given the horrible rates of cruel & violent crimes, corruption, and immorality, be a lot better off if everyone was a little bit more religious, or at least held truer to the most basic tenets of Christianity. It’s not that I want people to share my theological inclinations or even always agree with me, but I think it would simply make people more good and moral, and thus make life better for us all. My opinion aside, a very important thing to consider is that one certainly doesn’t have to be a religious person to be a good person, and I am more concerned with helping people be better people than getting everybody to march to the same drumbeat.

Nevertheless, it has been my experience that whenever anything religious is put in any public context, everyone acts as if they were so traumatized by it. If you don’t want to get involved in any religious ceremonies, then just bloody walk away. I have never in my life felt that I was in a situation where I was forced to be involved in any religious context. I was watching Tough Crowd with Collin Quinn on Comedy Central a week or so ago, and one of the guest comedians said something to the effect of “the only group you can really make fun of anymore are religious people.” I hadn’t really thought of that in those words, but it’s more true than I’d rather like to think about. The fact is that this country and many of its most basic laws and codes were based of off Christian ethics, and no other factor in the history of recorded time has influenced human beliefs and morals more than religious teaching. To act as if it’s absurd for religion to affect people’s thinking about gay marriage, abortion, capital punishment, and any of a number of other issues is absurd in and of itself. The legal institution of marriage in the modern world (modern being probably within the last millenium), with all its benefits and restrictions, was derived from the religious institution of it, and the Christian stance on this issue is crystal clear. Long ago, marriage was simply an institution in the eyes of God, and very, very sacred. At some point, and I honestly don’t know when, the government of America, as many other countries have, made it a social and legal institution with benefits (tax breaks) and restrictions (only one husband/wife at a time, of course). I will be the first person to say that many, many heterosexuals have made a mockery of what I consider still a sacred covenant, by marrying for money, prestige, guilt, revenge, lust, or any other of the many wrong reasons people get married for, as opposed to just marrying for love (what a concept). That being said, does it necessarily mean that the American people and the government should tarnish this ancient institution even further?

America has devolved to the point where everything under the sun is tolerated, except for ANYTHING that smacks of intolerance. It seems that as soon as someone disapproves of anything, they are branded with the mark of sexism, racism, homophobia, anti-semitism, and with every other discriminatory, recriminatory label in the English language. The fact that the horribly biased media is so unfailingly liberal makes it so that, in the case of this topic, they constantly disemminate the view that homosexuality is perfectly fine and not at all bad in any way. The fact that homosexuality has become a subculture all its own proves this. Also, homosexuals complain about the bias that they receive in this country, but if they don’t bloody like it they can go to the Middle East where they kill gay people in brutal ways. All things considered, they have it pretty well here. Further, "they* (being the media) endorse the opinion that anybody who has a problem with homosexuality is a horrible, hateful, intolerant, mean-spirited person, and thus they scare the general populace of the country into agreeing with them or at least hiding their beliefs if they have the nerve to have moral, ethical, or religious distastes towards homosexuality. Last time I checked, and granted I haven’t been in this country as long as many of you, there was still a “free speech” clause in the rulebooks somewhere, and unless I’m mistaken greatly that means that it not only allows people to endorse anything they want, but it also allows people to decry anything they want as well. The moral here is that freedom of speech is bilateral, and it’s an insult to put down intelligent, reasonable people simply because they disagree with you. But since the media is so utterly left-wing, that is the state of the matter, and it goes against the most defining principles of this nation.

(Part 2 to follow)

(continued from previous post)

The thing that separates homosexuals from all the other “major minorities” is simple, in my eyes. Being black, female, Asian, Hispanic, short, tall, or what have you is a more or less immutable physical condition. If you harm or insult a coloured person merely because he’s black, then you are basically hating someone merely for having a lot of extra skin pigment, at least in relation to pale Anglicans like myself. Homosexuality is different because it is defined by a behavior, not a set of physical characteristics. Many gay men look and act very effeminate, and many lesbians look and act very masculine, but many others do not. Many people believe that there is a genetic/biophysiological component to homosexuality, and I don’t doubt that. I think there has to be for such a perversion of human nature to occur. If you saw me in a public place “making out” with another man, you would almost certainly think I was gay, but if you heard me speaking in “ebonics” I rather doubt you would think I was black (I’ve done it, and with my accent, most people laugh their bloody asses off). There is a common saying in Christian circles, and that is “Love the sinner, hate the sin.” What that means to me is that you dislike behaviors, not people. Homosexuality is a behavior, and thus, if people don’t like it or think it’s wrong, then it is their prerogative to denounce that behavior and avoid it if they so choose. I do not feel that this gives people the right to abuse, verbally or physically, gay people or gay “sympathizers”, because we are all Gods’ children and I feel safe in saying he wouldn’t want us to do that. But if people have a problem with other people’s behavior, then they should be allowed to avoid that person if they would rather not associate with someone they feel is doing something wrong or immoral. People should be allowed to believe what they believe, and not be torn to pieces when they believe things contrary to the general opinion of the power classes and those that are most visible (celebrities) and the groups that distribute and control the spread of information (the media) and, concurrently, “public” opinion.

All that being said, this is the part where I piss everyone off big time. Brace yourselves. I am a devout (and obviously verbose) Protestant, and I feel homosexuality is a sin, and is unnatural. Despite this, I do not go around insulting, belittling, or harming gay people, because, though I would never speak for the Almighty, I doubt that God would want me to act that way towards my fellow man. However, there is a difference between tolerance and acceptance, and while I tolerate the often very public and graphic exposure of homosexuals and their behavior in this world, I will never accept it. I will state clearly that I think that the Bible is a convoluted and confusing book oftentimes, but its stance on homosexuality is quite clear indeed. Even trying to say the phrase “gay marriage” makes the bile rise in my throat. One of the things that further convinced me of my opinion of homosexuality happened several weeks ago. I was channel surfing and caught for just a few seconds a lesbian “wedding” in progress. Seeing these two young women looking at each other in that certain way, standing next to a supposed “priest” made my entire body go almost numb with a feeling that I can only describe as a profound “wrongness”; I quite literally felt physically ill. Anything that causes me such an immutably negative, gut-wrenching, visceral reaction is simply wrong. Some value judgements are made not with the mind, but with the heart and soul. Despite the fact that they often seem as different as day and night, women and men were meant to be together, though their unions are often far from perfect. By some mystical, mysterious, confusing, wonderful connection, time and time again men and women come together, fall in love, make love, and produce children to perpetuate the species. If you look at every animal species in the world that shows sexual dichotomy (two distinct genders), those two genders somehow find each other, mate, and carry on their bloodlines. Yes, I know species other than humans show homosexual behavior, but I don’t care. This is the simple law of nature, and homosexuality is a perversion of this natural order. In my eyes, homosexuality is no better or worse than pedophilia (sexual desire for young children), necrophilia (sexual desire towards corpses), bestiality (sexual desire towards animals), or dendrophilia (sexual desire towards trees). It is an unnatural desire towards a creature that nature never intended someone to be attracted to. Yes, most gay people probably have some sort of biological disposition towards members of the same gender, but we are all custodians of our own behavior, and we have to accept that there may be consequences to our actions, even consequences beyond this life, perhaps. That being said, why is it that homosexuality is largely accepted, but these other philias are not… Why would people who wouldn’t bat an eye at seeing a same-sex couple getting affectionate would vomit if they saw someone having sexual relations with an animal or corpse? Well, I would assume it’s because it’s between two consenting people, but that leads me to ask that if a sheep could talk and consent to having sex with a grown man, does that make it okay then? Most would say no. I think the bigger reason that so many people don’t object to homosexuality is because, over a great period of time, homosexuals and the media have slowly spoon-fed the existance and appectance of homosexuality into society, and in combination with the overwhelming liberalism and permissiveness of modern America, people have eventually come to accept it to a great degree. Fifty years ago, the mention of such things would make people absolutely aghast with horror. The fact that this “lifestyle” is now widely accepted proves my sad theory that there is nothing in this world so bizarre, odd, perverse, and backwards that you can’t get people to go for it if you market it properly. But as to the theory that many accept homosexuality because it’s between two consenting people… just because two people mutually agree to do something doesn’t make it acceptable; if two men in this modern age wanted to fight each other to the death with axes because they had a score to settle, the authorities wouldn’t stand aside and allow it to happen, if they knew about it. The way homosexuals act so offended whenever they encounter any opposition or distaste towards their behavior is just ridiculous beyond telling. To do something so counterpoint to human nature and not to expect any criticism or negativity towards it is arrogant beyond words. While heterosexuals are certainly not doing what used to be a sacred institution any great flattery in the last few decades, to have the state sponsor perverse unions of man-man and woman-woman is truly a sign of the rapid decay of American society. Frankly, American social movements and evolution are ridiculous anyway; it could say in the Declaration of Independance and/or the Constitution in very clear language “Marriage is an institution only for a man and a woman, and if this were ever not to be so then the entire country would be sucked under the ocean by a gigantic whirlpool” and eventually people would still insist that gays should be allowed to marry. The timing of this movement is simply because America has mostly departed from its more pious days, and since nothing specifically is written anywhere denying people this right, and the American philosophy in general seems to be “Don’t restrict anyone from doing anything”, the time was ripe for such a movement. To not only condone but to actually endorse unnatural acts is so inherently wrong that it makes me very, very sad. I fear for the future.

I realize this post was incredibly long winded, and is going to upset a lot of people. I have way too much free time, and am perhaps too opinionated and even self-righteous for my own good, but ever since the gay marriage thing came very much into the public eye a few months ago, I have thought about it a lot, and it never ceases to trouble me. The reason for my long post is just that; many weeks and lots of thought gave me ample time to put my feelings into words. I realize many people are going to read this post (if they have the patience) and say horrible things about me, and I really don’t care. I chose not to mince words even in the slightest, because you can lie to other people for a long time, if you wish, but you cannot truly lie to yourself. I have had to hide my true feelings on this issue for a long time, for fear of reprisals by people who don’t agree with me and with my firm belief of letting people form and have their own opinions. This isn’t the forum I would have thought to use as a sort of soap box, but when I saw the thread on the boards, I couldn’t hold back any longer. I am glad I had the opportunity to finally “let it all out” on this forum, and I hope that my ranting, such as it is, will encourage people to think and discuss while preserving my anonymity. It is not that I am ashamed or afraid of my beliefs, but I realize that there are many people who would seek to do me harm were I to express these admittedly strong and controversial beliefs in a more truly public forum. I am not really trying to change anybody’s mind, but I felt the need to unburden myself, and what I am truly hoping to do is to show people that freedom of speech HAS to be universal; people have to be just as free to denounce something as they are to endorse it. I am almost as offended by the media’s policy of belittling and demeaning people who disagree with them as the fact that the legalization of same-sex realtionships is even being considered. I chose to use bold, shocking, and daring language so that perhaps it would startle people into greater self-awareness. If I can get even a handful of people to stop and think about this and other difficult issues in a society where people are often too busy to be introspective, then I feel I’ve done a little good for us all.

To all those who take the time to read this, thank you and God bless I’m going to go put on my asbestos knickers; let the flames begin.

Geoff