So your point is that the Romans in 500 BC were patriarchs. :rolleyes:
This thread is making me cry. I’m glad I’m alone at work.
Well, no, I think what he’s saying is patriachal societies can lead to “family values” like those of Brutus, who supposedly killed his children.
Why is he an uneducated wanker because you can seem to understand what he’s saying?
That’s correct. So-called family values — which Gobear rightly fears, and so should we all — have a long and rich history, and serve as the rallying cry for rightists who wish to enact their own central planning. Authoritarian fetishes are not limited to the left.
I tried to read that thread once or twice, but each time I just couldn’t make it all the way through. Maybe I’ll try again.
Don’t. You’ve trouble enough in your life. I keep it in my favorites for occaisions like this and the thread in which I invoked it in GD this morning so that people who think there’s nothing wrong and a great deal right in being against homosexuality can see the consequences of their actions. I pray so-called Christians haven’t hounded a young man to his death. However, I’m all to familiar with pain so great it leads that direction. I’m also familiar with Love and Light so great it saves rather than condemns. He who created and is the quintessence of that Light and Love, Jesus Christ, is Whom I serve and will continue to do so, if He wills it.
CJ, no, under the circumstances, Siege.
You think we have it bad: a golden bearded Jesus appeared in visions to Hung Hsiu-Ch’uan in 1843 and the long and the short of it is that around 20,000,000 people ended up fucking dead. Along the way, some people tried to set up a society based on the 10 commandments and somehow ended up with a bunch of harems. So, we don’t have it too bad, considering.
Assuming I’m the “Sol” in question: you’re not going to get much help from me, I’m afraid. After reading through that whole thread, I’m just heartbroken and terribly angry myself. And helpless.
So much of what that OP wrote sounds so familiar to me. And I know the kind of loneliness he describes; it’s overwhelming. You become convinced not only that you’re completely alone, but that you will always be alone, and you deserve it. I was never really to the point of suicide, thankfully, but I could see no point or purpose to my life and absolutely no hope for my future.
And as for the “hopeless” part – I know that I would never have found a way out from the messages of people on an internet message board. I knew I had good, close friends, and I knew that my family loved me. If I had ever come clean with it, on this board for example, every post of support and every offer to pray for me would’ve just come across as hollow. Even if I knew it was sincere and genuine, it would just never be enough. Because I would go home alone and realize that what I really wanted was to be as important to someone else as they were to me. Many people just need to love and to be loved.
Anyone who says “love the sinner, hate the sin” and that homosexuality is forgivable as long as the person remains celibate and never, ever acts on it, just doesn’t understand the Hell that he’s condemning people to.
I would further the recommendation that you try to contact the guy privately Polycarp, because you have a wisdom that comes through in your writing; I just don’t know what you’d say and don’t have much confidence it would help get the man what he really needs (something to fill that loneliness).
I don’t even feel like I’ve gone through a journey and can help him find the way out. Partly because the path for me is definitely not the path for everyone – I’d already had to challenge and adjust my faith and my understanding of religion decades before I even started to think of myself as gay. I couldn’t rely on faith to help me come to terms with it; I had to remind myself that I know what sin is and what it isn’t.
And partly because I’m still not entirely “there” yet. I’m still bothered and angered by the accusations and the stereotypes and the name-calling, and am still frequently finding myself having to reassess my faith, even in response to the most petty and dismissible of attacks. And my bias is showing here, but I’m convinced that the man who started that thread is not going to find what he needs on that message board. He’s only going to find judgement and accusation and constant reminders that he’s sinful and wrong and weak and that there’s only one way for him to find happiness, and that any other way is going to send him to Hell.
The only thing remotely constructive I could say to the guy would be that he’s losing sight of the big picture, in his eagerness to find a cause or a reason for his homosexuality. The other stuff that’s going on in his life isn’t directly related to being gay, nor are they the cause for his being gay. I’ve got a great relationship with my dad, and I’ve had solid friendships with both men and women for as long as I remember, and I still ended up a total homo. Your advice was best, Polycarp – reminding him that his sexual orientation is such a small part of who he is, and worrying about it is just giving it too much importance. It’s just not a big deal. And yeah, it’s easy to be gay and sinful, but it’s not required. You can be a homo and do the right thing (including have sex!) at the same time.
And for the record, I’m sure as hell glad that nobody responded to my loneliness and self-loathing and depression by quoting an article by a fucking “ex-gay” minister who did nothing but call me weak and selfish. I used to think I understood what “evil” is, but that was before I’d seen the writings of those people.
That’s exactly right. Love (agape) is the facilitation of goodness, and goodness is the only aesthetic that edifies. If two men are edified by sucking one another’s penises, then their blow jobs are Godly acts.
Poly, is there any way to let him know about the SDMB? You said he’s from Pittsburgh-we’d be honored to have another Pitt Doper among us!
Err, your sentiment, as I understand it, is a good one, but I can’t think of a worse way to put it.
Are you claiming that you would have understood what the wanker was saying, based simply on the satatement “One can’t help but think of Junius Brutus.” :dubious:
If he’d said instead, “Family values equals patriarchy, dude. Patriarchy is bad. Patriarchy has led to bad consequences in the past.”, anyone could have responded: “Well duh. And what the fuck does that have to do with the OP?”. :rolleyes:
I pit those that hate in the name of God all the time. “God hates fags” may be the worst of it but “love the sinner, hate the sin” is often no better. Trying to “fix” people who were never broken and putting them in a life of misery is hateful, just patronizingly so.
Christ said the next to loving God with all your heart the most important commandment is to love your neighbor as yourself. I’m thankfurl to have found a church home that believes that and fights for that cause. I’m not as eloquent as Polycarp but we’re on the page I think. My own denominatoin, ELCA, is still deciding issues and in 2005 a vote will come up to decide if gay and lesbian clergy will have to remain celibate. I expect it will cause a split in the denomination no matter which way it goes.
It happened in the 19th Century with some denominations over slavery. If it happens to the Lutherans in the 21st over homosexuality, then in the 22nd there will be one Lutheran sect who will end up apologizing for their inhuman stance, much as the Southern Baptists did a few years ago.
Why, no, Desmostylus, I have to say I had no fucking idea what he was saying when he said “One can’t help but think of Junius Brutus.” And if you had “Stop posting obscure and unexplained references you over educated wanker” I would have been right with you. But I don’t get the poorly educated reference…simply because you didn’t see what he was saying.
Beyond that, my post was in response to your post after he made a link that explained what he was talking about. When you still didn’t seem to understand it.
And for the record, I think his point (which you finally got 
) was related, if not directly to the OP, to the way the conversation in the thread was going.
I’m not sure why, but I keep mis-reading this thread title as “Hats in the name of Jesus.”
Funny…I was thinking wha a great way to put it.
Hell, I was thinking of asking if I could use it for a sig :).
Thanks for the offer. I might take you up on it sometime.
I’m guessing it’s 'cause you need more sleep.
I’ve thought before about starting a thread asking all of the gay people here if, had it been possible, would they choose to have been born straight. It would make life easier. Then I realized how bad it would be if you asked black people if they would have chosen to be white, and decided the question was unhelpful.
I think Christians should heed this more:
[donald rumsfeld]
We have to live with the world we have, not the one we wish we had
[/dr]
They’re going to have to get used to a world in which homosexuality is natural and that what they had thought before about the bible was wrong.
It is indeed unfortunate that church politicians have tied sin (the obstruction of goodness) to actions. They have done this so that they can control the behavior of men, and thereby gain power and fortune. But sin is not an action. Sin is born in the heart. A deed reveals nothing about the underlying motive. If you see someone feeding a homeless man, you might think ‘What a wonderful thing to do’, not knowing that all the while, his intention is to lure the man into his car so he can take him off to be raped and murdered. As Jesus teaches, a healthy tree produces healthy fruit, and a sick tree produces sick fruit. A man with a loving heart cannot commit sin because sin cannot come out of him. A man with a sinful heart cannot do a good deed because goodness isn’t there. Actions are the result of decisions by the brain. Morality is a result of decisions by the heart.