Zeal, I'm not in the mood for semantics. My point here is that there are people on this thread that are quick to throw out their "irrefutable" facts and "rock-solid" logic. And yet, they make obviously biased statement with little to no facts to back it up.

And again, you keep saying "Well if you just say....." Yeah well, the point is, nobody has "just" said anything. Since Christians are not the in crowd in these parts we always have to explain, re-explain, and justify our every post. Paul 3 even said as much.

Bottom line, some people simply want to have an issue with Christianity because they don't like parts of what it says. Just be upfront and say that, I'm greatly irritated by the quick and fallacious use of the victim card.

Oi, Starship, we've been here before, remember? If you look 7 posts above your one you can see me calling out Paul on his strawmaning of you. So please don't go acting like you are the only one calling people out on this crap. Hell most of my posts in this thread consist of me dropping in specifically to call people out on applying double standards when debating with you.

However Zeal makes a good point. When you say something is a sin, you need to classify what you mean by a sin. For a lot of people, something being a sin means that if you do it you are condemned to hell for all eternity. Even if you've made the classification in the past (which I believe you have), it's still best for you to include it each time.

edited 6th Jun '12 1:54:42 PM by Silasw

This has been an interesting and long discussion, but at this point, we're just going in circles over the same derails. I'm putting this on a lock for now.

This thread is being unlocked to collect all the religious derails from gay rights threads. All off topic religious matters about homosexuality belong here. Keep things on topic.

Well, as has been observed elsewhere, younger church people tend to be more accepting of homosexual people than their older counterparts. But it's the older people who have the benefit of position, tradition and experience on their side.

So my question then becomes, if acceptance of homosexual people is important to young people, and that position is in opposition to their own religious leadership, what is the point of identifying with that religion when there is such disagreement with the leadership?

For my part, even if I believed Christianity's supernatural claimss about God and Jesus and whatnot, I still couldn't be a Christian because I will not condemn homosexual people for being who they are.

There's an article here, that's probably relevant.

I've held back from posting it in the other thread.

edited 4th Jul '12 3:30:58 PM by DrunkGirlfriend

Eh. I understand being Christian or whatever may be important to you. The real issue I think is, why be a member of a homophobic church? You don't have to change your beliefs, you don't even have to change what you call yourself but why associate with homophobes when you don't have to? Why not join a church that is tolerant of all people and their lifeways?

If you're speaking to me, I'm an atheist ex-Christian. I was driven away for various reasons, stayed away because I didn't agree with Christian politics, and later came to realize that all religious supernatural claims were BS. I only bring up Christianity because it's my own past and the prevailing religion where I live.

I've looked into Unitarian Universalism and have a lot of respect and common ground with them, though.

edited 4th Jul '12 3:36:38 PM by Lawyerdude

Like I brought up earlier, people leaving the church over gay rights is the exact opposite of what we need. It's like when good politicians resign in protest; all it does is concentrate douchebags even more and remove pressure to change.

edited 4th Jul '12 3:51:01 PM by Pykrete

Churches need warm bodies and money. If the people leave, the churches lose their power. Personally, I think that nothing but good will come from young people leaving church.

Heck, churches were torn apart because of slavery and racism. If you don't want to be part of a church that upholds a bigoted belief, then get the hell out, I say.

Even if I believed the supernatural claims, even if I supported everything else they did, I would never, ever belong to a church that supported racism or homophobia. Never.

edited 4th Jul '12 3:55:14 PM by Lawyerdude

Yes, and the douchebags can have their own church. Why should you associate with them? Is that the kind of environment people want? All I'm saying is, leave homophobic churches. Join progressive ones. That way they'll lose the power they have, and you can a more tolerant, safer place for people. Them losing membership will not make them more powerful.

Slavery...didn't really do much to mainline churches. Like, abolition was a primarily Baptist and Methodist movement, but they'd already long since split from the Church of England over other issues. Catholicism argued about it but didn't really get anywhere useful until after it was over, save for some edicts that Spain promptly ignored because $$$. Presbyterians split briefly, but IIRC they reunited later. The Methodists reunited immediately after the war. The faction lines were mostly along sect lines that were already there.

And yeah, losing a very specific kind of membership does make them more powerful. It polarizes the group and makes them a lockstep entity. If they were already large enough, it concentrates influence instead of dissolving it as a fringe sect. And then you get Pentecostals.

edited 4th Jul '12 4:12:32 PM by Pykrete

Baptist and Methodist churches split from each other. The Southern Baptist Convention was founded specifically to support the practice of slavery. They changed their minds in 1995 and apologized for that so that they could concentrate on gay-bashing. In fact, they've recently elected a vehemently anti-gay African-American as their President.

You don't see people leaving Boy Scouts in protest over their refusal to keep gay members. (BTW, the Girl Scouts have rocked on that score.)

The main reason being that people still see it as being a worth organization. You can't really change a church by refusing to be a part of it. Staying means you can change it. There's a value to sticking around that I don't think a lot of people see or understand very well. (Not to mention that in regards to the church this often involves cutting yourself all from neighbors, friends, and family you've known for years and just can't do without. Social ties can be like that.)

And eventually the current crop of youth will end up being the ones in power. So. *shrug* Matter of time, really, till the homophobic churches get marginalized like the KKK.

edited 4th Jul '12 4:16:13 PM by AceofSpades

When has that ever happened? When has a church ever changed its position on an issue like that due to inside pressure? Near as I've been able to tell, churches have been followers, never leaders, of social progress. The United States Supreme Court was racially desegregated before most Christian churches were.

Yeah, I've been in the Boy Scouts. It sucks. And seriously, the law needs to crack down them. It may be a 'private' organization, but kids go there. It's simply not acceptable.

As an Eagle Scout, I never witnessed any anti-gay bigotry in my troop.

There was some big to do... in California? I can't remember, the hullabaloo over not allowing a gay boy to be in a troop was sometime last year and I've forgotten most of the details. The main committee or whatever it was made some statement that really pissed a lot of people off. I'll admit that I never saw it either in my brother's troop, but I put that to it simply never once coming up with any of the boys, and given that I live in Texas I think it would have been an issue. Meanwhile, Girls Scouts have publicly made it known that they'll continue to support girls of all orientations.

As for the religious thing: I will compare this to America itself: No one can change this country for the better by leaving it forever. The political system can't change without politicians that support that change and push it through. Now, leaving a religion obviously isn't quite the same thing, but I think the same principles are at work. You can't reform something you love by refusing to be a part of it. You need change at all levels, really, for anything to get done.

Also, please read my thing about family ties and such. These are also factors. A lot of people just can't imagine doing that because family is important.

Sure, countries can pass better laws and reformations, depending on a lot of factors. But I have never met a religious person who changed his or her beliefs about anything and remained a follower of that religion. If you believe that God has ordained what you believe to be true, how can you change? When I came to realize that my religiously-based anti-gay beliefs were irrational, harmful and downright stupid, I had no choice but to abandon that religion entirely. After all, if one dogma of your church is false, then why wouldn't any other dogma be false as well?

I happen to be fortunate, in that even though I left my family's church, my family is willing to look beyond that and continue their support and association with me, despite the fact that I left their church. It's not very Christian of them, but it's very good, compassionate and decent of them.

edited 4th Jul '12 4:40:26 PM by Lawyerdude

Religion is so much more than homophobia. The subject of homosexuality and its sinfulness or lack therof almost never comes up in my local parish. I can recall only one time that it did , and it that case one of the members of our youth group challenged our priest to explain it.

It is simply not a big deal to us. The church's position on gay rights is only one tiny facet of the church as a whole. Why would I swap churches over one tiny detail?

Once again, I'll reiterate what Starship said: That argument will be valid on the day that you start leaving your country (or even your state) in protest against your governments' position on gay rights. Just pack up and move, why would you want to associate yourself with bigots when there are so many non-bigoted countries out there you could go off and join? It's not like it would inconvenience you much, the cultural differences between them are minimal.

I've explained in great detail elsewhere that national identity and religious identity are so different that it's hardly fair to draw comparisions between one and the other. The President does not speak for me on all things, nor does he claim to. National citizenship is greater than the transient occupants of the political offices. A church's beliefs are exactly what the leaders say at any moment. Whatever the leadership of a church says about any particular issue is the official position of that church. If I don't like my country's laws, I can vote, I can lobby, I can speak out. If I don't like a church's position, it's take it or leave it. Show me a church where people are free to disagre. Show it to me.

It sounds like there's no such thing as a deal-breaker for religious people. If the Pope tomorrow called for the extermination of unbelievers, would all the Catholics in the world follow him?

Not all families are like that, Lawyer. And also some people are simply afraid their families aren't like that and decide not to mention it. I haven't been a part of an official church myself for years due high school drama (kids were dicks) and laziness, but I'm simply listing reasons that I think people would do this. (For not being a particularly religious person, my mom oddly took me and my brother every Sunday when we were young. Then she ended up having to teach some of those kids and stopped going herself to avoid drama. Kids like to throw clay in her class sometimes.) And Mom continued to go all those years and her brother is gay as springtime. This doesn't seemed to have caused much strain in their relationship. *shrug* I've never asked about that though so I can only speculate.

It just seems to me that supporting gay rights isn't mutually exclusive to attending a particular church. You can attend and not be one hundred percent in agreement. We vote for politicians we're not in one hundred agreement with. And far as rights go, I think what we vote for counts more in that regard than the church we attend. It's not like the preachers are holding guns to our heads in the voting booths. And a lot of people want to try and reform from the inside out. Or simply segregate the issues they don't agree with from the other stuff.

I'll say that my church never seemed to talk about this particular issue. It's still a small church (the building is in my neighborhood and it is a very small building), so I'm personally unfamiliar with the large demagoguery or whatever that some people experience. (Also if there was any real hate in that church I doubt Mom would have let us attend in the first place. She doesn't put up with fools easily.)

Edit; NO. Considering the disagreement over birth control with most Catholic women using it I don't see how you could actually expect most Catholics to commit murder on the Pope's say so. So yes, there is obvious room for disagreement. Hell, you've got nuns disagreeing with the Pope and doing their own thing! And the bishops and such being publicly censured for trying to censure the nuns.

edited 4th Jul '12 4:54:20 PM by AceofSpades

I don't remember the church I grew up in saying a lot about the gay issue, but I don't remember a single sermon preaching against gay-bashing. I also remember the ordinary people at that church expressing anti-gay beliefs. As far as I am aware, the dominant Christian position is that homosexuality is incompatible with Christianity.

OK, so if Pope Ratzinger tomorrow said that it was the holy duty of all Catholics to hunt down and kill all the gays, how many people would quit the church? It sounds to me like almost nobody would.

edited 4th Jul '12 4:58:20 PM by Lawyerdude

I am quite displeased by your assumption that a Pope would do such a thing.

It's a hypothetical. And Popes have done such things in the past. Look up the Cathars.