Yeah, the seats at the back of the bus are just as good as those at the front, right?
From someone who openly posts about considering gay marriage second class, I’m sure it wouldn’t. Feel free to continue bragging about the morality of your church which rejects the innate nature of (what you believe) to be your god’s children.
Ever since the apostrophe got caught engaging in a bit of sinful perversion with the left single curlyquote, it has not been welcome at Urbanredneck’s church.
Just a reminder
A lot of Christians support gay marriage and a lot of Christian churches perform them. Within the last few weeks, the Episcopal Church and the Presbyterian Church (USA) have voted to make the sacrament of marriage available to all couples and are updating their language to reflect this. There are large swaths of other Protestant denominations that will perform same sex marriages and ordain clergy in same-sex relationships.
I have a childhood friend ( the daughter of a family friend, actually ) who is an ordained southern Baptist minister. She also runs a faith-based counseling service. I was a little skeptical when I heard this and I was wondering if she was involved in some sort of reparative therapy but she recently appeared on my Facebook feed with a rainbow over her face – apparently her church is part of a group of Baptist churches that supports SSM and apparently she’s performed many of them.
I’m just mentioning this because some of my best friends are Christians (:)) and all the anti-SSM views attributed to “Christians” do not reflect their POV or the POV of their churches at all. Catholics and Evangelicals, maybe …but not Christians in general.
/agree
I view homosexuality like pre-marital sex. Sure, a priest is going to tell you that its a sin but good luck trying to stop it.
Being of such high moral standing, Urbanredneck’s church tolerates only straight quotes.
Matthew 5:17-19 says otherwise.
17 Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil.
18 For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled.
19 Whosoever therefore shall break one of these least commandments, and shall teach men so, he shall be called the least in the kingdom of heaven: but whosoever shall do and teach them, the same shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven.
I don’t see an out for shrimp or mixed-fibre clothing, or even that women don’t have to do everything their dad tells them, even if he tells them to marry someone who raped them.
Really, I don’t think anyone wants to go down the road of dueling Bible verses. Many of us here are unbelievers and have had this conversation many, many times.
I just realized that there is an entirely different way God actually made mistakes making humans.
He created some entirely without the “religious gene”!
Whoops! 
I must have written that before the coffee kicked in. I was going for, the objection is not to the thing they disapprove of but to the ostentatious display of that thing.
Just to clarify, she may be a southern Baptist minister, but she’s not a Southern Baptist minister.
Lucky for us we’re all Straight Dopes.
You will probably get no traction with that citation. Matthew, writing for a Jewish audience, was referring to the various Jewish covenants. Those covenants had no bearing on the people whom Paul persuaded to join up from among the gentiles who had no such covenental agreements.
So who’s the boss, Jesus or Paul?
Well, Paul, kinda. The exigetical argument is that Jesus’ words in Matthew were addressed to Jews, Paul’s to post-Judaic Christians. :shrug:
“Covenant” implies contractual obligations on each side of the agreement, and I agree that those contractual obligations were exclusive to Jews. But in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus wasn’t talking about contractual obligations; he was talking about morality and ethics. If his promises of eternal life apply to everyone, and not just his immediate Jewish audience, then I don’t see why his expositions on morals and ethics wouldn’t also apply to everyone, and they should most certainly apply to people who claim to worship him as their Lord and Savior.
As a quick analogy, if I tell my kids that if they do their chores and get good grades, I’ll give them a $5/week allowance, then obviously I’m not going to pay other people’s kids the five bucks, but just as obviously, I think that’s how all kids should behave.
As you were responding to my post, I am very much well aware that anti-gay bigotry isn’t universal among all Christians. However, those such as Urbanredneck who publicly espouse such views should be called out. Homosexuality should not be considered a sin, not in this day and age. We have gain a large degree of knowledge over the last 3,000 years, and our views of morality should reflect that.
Too bad Jesus thought that speaking out against bigotry was too obvious. I’m no Bible scholar, I daydreamed through 12 years of catholic school. Maybe there are debatable verses that speak out against bigotry. If Jesus ever said straight up: “Don’t be a bigot, it exemplifies hate and not love.”, that would just be one more teaching that was available to be ignored if it wrinkled one’s christian feathers.
Jeez, we have enough trouble persuading many Christians that our views of science should reflect that.
You can apply whatever interpretation you wish to the passage.
My point was that given the background of the Gospel of Matthew, people who are aware of how the author shaped his testimony are less likely to find the argument that GrumpyBunny posted persuasive.
I stand corrected.