gobear I agree that Christianity is being used as a tool of hate these days, but I think that those objecting to your wide brush are correct. Christians are not a whole. You cannot make meaningful statements about the Christians of America without breaking it down further. Yes, the public proponents and self proclaimed leaders of the faith are absolute hypocrites and rejecters of everything that Christ had to say except for those lines that are most easily used to promote hate. The trouble is that those Christians that are sit on the side of reason and what Christ actually says are not being loud enough and not being energetic enough in a true revival of a faith of love.
Of course as a hand biting atheist it makes my job easy if the only Christians are hateful lunatics. I, like John Stewart, had hoped for a hard job in the near future. Oh well.
Gobear, I understand why you feel the way you do and I hope that your outlook toward Christ and his followers, and even more so the situation that caused it, will change. A lot of Christians are working toward the justice that Christ taught. My own church is likely to split next year over the issue of gay clergy in relationship. The unknown for me is if I will still be in an ELCA that is more accepting or if I will have to leave with my brothers and sisters to join or form a new denomination.
It astonishes me that folks feel the need to ban something they can simply not take part in. How do they get from “I don’t like it so I won’t do it” to “nobody should do it”?
I don’t like a LOT of things that I wouldn’t dream of banning. Like, say, Christianity. Religion in general. Even if there was a political chance of banning religion I feel that would be an utter obscenity against freedom and would NEVER be for such a ban.
It’s too bad the gay marriage opponents don’t feel the same way.
The wonderful thing about democracy is that nothing is ever really permanent. Things can and do change, including social attitudes. Miscegenation was illegal until 1967 when the SCOTUS ruled against it, and as much as we would like gay marriage to happen now, it too will take longer than we have patience for it. This is just the beginning, and I believe that, in time, American society will come to a deeper understanding of love and loving human relationships, just as it started to in 1967.
I am very disappointed in the passage of the amendments, but I am not going to give up, not now, not ever. There is a larger issue that must be addressed, of which gay marriage is a part.
Vlad/Igor, a Christian Episcopalian in Louisville, KY.
That is like saying that Abu Hamza al-Masri (radical Muslim cleric in London whose support of wife beating is actually the least repulsive thing about him) is saying what all Muslims are thinking.
That is incredibly offensive, gobear.
I think the biggest problem of the opposition (in Oregon, at least) to the SSM-banning initiatives was in not understanding the Christian concept of marriage. Most Christians think of marriage as a spiritual and religious contract first, and a legal contract second.
The supporters of the ban tried to confuse the two, making it seem as though ministers would be required to perform SSM in churches if it didn’t pass. They see SSM as a governmental invasion of their religion. Therefore to them the banning of gay marriage is not an attempt to control other people’s lives but a fight to protect their religious and moral freedom.
This is all stuff that most Christian hears at church every Sunday. If the opposition could have only hilighted the difference between a religious marriage and a legal marriage, I think the SSM-ban would have failed. I am a (hetero) Christian, and when I explained SSM to my friends in this way, it seemed to have an impact.
Yeah, Gobear is unjustly stereotyping. And under proper Doper Pit protocol, he should be taken to task for doing so.
But face facts, folks. It was not a pack of atheists who orchestrated the campaign to deprive him and folks like him of their civil rights – it was my co-religionists, who seem IMO to have lost track of Jesus’s message in their efforts to idolize the Bible. He’s pouring out anger and grief at them.
And he’s privileged to do so, in my opinion.
It takes two to tango. I fought alongside him. So did Siege and Baker and RTFirefly, and a dozen others. If he needs to vent – and IMO he does – I can only be insulted if I regard the insult as directed at me.
I know the 'bear. I know he doesn’t mean me. But the fact of the matter is that most of the “Christians” in this country wouldn’t know a Pharisee if one reached out of the mirror and bit them on the nose.
Bud, this is one Christian who refuses to be insulted, and thinks you have a right to be mad – and prays that someday people will wake up and smell the Easter lilies, and start acting like they claim to be.
Untrue gobear. There is a huge diference between faith and dogma.
An atheist defending Christianity. Og, help me! But my (former) same-sex spouse is a devout Christian and she certainly doesn’t promote intolerance.
All too often the messages of the Christian faith are misinterpreted, misused, or exploited by those whose intentions are contrary to intentions of the Word (…am I suppsed to capitalize that?) Rules are made up, amended, reinvented, and (mis)interpreted in order to rationalize institutional prejudices.
You can’t blame all Christians just because so many have been led down a misguided path because a church told them “this is so” or because they are too naive to fully understand messages from a devine source. They assume the church knows better (I mean, you assume they’re experts on the subject, right?) and ans for understanding… Heck, I can barely understand what my co-workers want half the time let alone some divinity.
Humans are imperfect. Humans are arrogant. As dumbass humans, we like to be reassured that our choices are the right ones. So we tend to interpret devine words (laws, or any rules for that matter) in a way that justifies our agendas – and some of those may not actually be faithful to the spirit of scripture. Until humans can develop a bit more, well, humanity they’ll continue to fuck things up like that under the mistaken notion that it is “God’s will.”
A specific church may promote intolerance (oh, the perils of having anything run by a committee). The faith does not.
Sniffs_Markers, my same sex spouse (now ex, alas) is a very, VERY devout Christian. I’m virtually an atheist (but have strong agnostic leanings). There was never any conflict with her faith or beliefs. I have no qualms with her faith, I have no qulams with Christianity. However, I do have bone to pick with a lot of its institutions run by imperfect humans.
Some people call themselves folowers of a religion that preaches love and salvation and use it to spread hate and exclusion. And if it’s acceptable for you to lump all of that religion’s followers together, to make a blanket dismissal of that religion based on the words of those people, even though you have seen countless times on this very message board that there are those who follow the religion and do understand what it stands for, then you haven’t yet grasped the concept of tolerance and understanding.
I saw coverage of a pride parade just a couple of months ago. Based on that, I could say that promiscuous sex and hedonism are what homosexuals stand for, not love, or equality, or pride in a person’s accomplishments no matter what his differences may be. I could say that, and I could go on fostering that bigoted opinion, and I could go on treating other people as lesser, and I could perpetuate the hate and mistrust.
Or, I could open my eyes and ears and make an effort to understand what people are saying, what people really are, instead of instantly dismissing them. It’s not going to be until all people are ready to do that, that there’s going to be any change.
Forgive me, Poly, but that’s just plain dumb. Gobear has been going around screaming that the Pubbies and the Bushites — homophobes all, of course — are responsible for gay marriage being banned. That’s just plain factually incorrect. Bush won by a squeaker: 51%. The gay marriage bans were landslide votes against. There is no one-to-one correspondence of gay marriage ban vote to Republican vote. In fact, Blacks, as a group, are more opposed to gay marriage than anyone else is. Now, as the day moves on, he’s blaming Christians, and says that they hate him. (Nevermind that some Islamic nations would execute him even for raising the topic.) Again, he’s astray of the facts. Exit polls show that many of those who voted against gay marriage favor civil unions. They just don’t want to redefine a longstanding term. It seems to me that if Gobear has cause to be pissed, so do the people he is now demonizing. He and his leaders have miserably mucked up a simple public relations campaign, and now he blames everyone but himself and his leaders.
While gobear is obviously firing shotgun blasts because he’s hurt - and I have to tell you, I’d be the same way - I do have a question:
**
Where were all the tolerant Christians on election day?**
These measures did not pass by a small margin. The voting patterns were not like 52-48. Most passed OVERWHELMINGLY. The inescapable fact is that the vast majority of Christians who saw fit to vote on the measure voted with fear and hatred guilding their choice, rather than love and the teachings of Christ.
If there are many Christians who opposed these odious referenda, they did roughly jack shit on November 2. They sure as hell could not be found in any significant number at the voting booths.
When some jackass comes onto SDMB saying “all muzlims are terrorists” we shout him down because the fact is that the overwhelmingly majority of Muslims are NOT terrorists. But the results of these referenda suggest thatthe overwhelming majority of Christians who voted on them DO hate gay people. Which means that the overwhelming majority of Christians in those states either hate gay people or couldn’t be bothered to vote. Well, shame on the ones who voted for hate, shame on the ones who didn’t vote, and shame on the ones who just kept their mouths shut. Those three groups represent about 95% of the overall set.
Yeah. Mrs. Chatelaine and I got a big old heaping tablespoon of Christian love yesterday, as the Ohio ban passed with flying colors. Mrs. Chatelaine just left for work after crying for two hours because she wants an answer on why people hate us so much. My answer? Because they’re fucking trolls who need to hop right back into the abortion bucket from where they crawled.
Somehow I feel it was a cold comfort to her.
To the non-gay folk who voted against these hateful bans, I thank you deeply for trying. To those who voted to ban SSM? I hope whatever relationship you ever have unravels at the seams, leaving you a mental and emotional wreck with scars that will last a lifetime.
There. Now I’ve threatened your marriage, you fucking Cro-Magnons.
Sigh. Being a cynic sucks ass, but at least I’m not in tears over these jackholes. I didn’t expect any better.
I’m not gay, nor do I have any friends or family who are, but I have to say that the numerous gay-marriage-bans passed scares me more than four more years of GeeDubya Bush in office. Has the United States of America really fallen this far from its ideals?
I suppose I could just be grateful that at least women and minorities got their rights earlier. But to officially pimp-smack homosexuals like this just goes against everything I believe my nation stands for.
“Look at how those gay people were dressed, they were asking for it!”
Shit, I read things like this and steam starts coming out of my ears. Fortunately RickJay has already said much of what I would like to say, and more coherently than I could at this time.
