Meaning what? That they throw His name around a lot? You know the verse about “Lord, Lord.”
Let me introduce you to the concept of ‘skepticism’, Joe. Things aren’t always what they seem, you can’t judge a book by its cover, and all that.
For many of those people, ‘God’ and ‘Jesus’ are just tribal totems, a shorthand for ‘they’re fur the things that all right-thinkin’ people should be fur, and agin all the things that right-thinkin’ people should be agin.’ IOW, just a quick way of identifying who’s politically correct, by their definition of correctness.
If you want to believe that such people are more apt to, say, love their enemies, than people in the north and east, you’re welcome to do so. I’d be skeptical. And by their fruits you shall know them.
Fault does not imply intent. I have sleep apnea. If I refuse to use my CPAP machine one night, then fall asleep at the wheel the next day and plow into another car, killing a mother and two children, the accident is my fault. I certainly didn’t intend to end three lives, but it’s still my fault.
While I wouldn’t call what happened to Daryl murder on the parents’ part, they still bear a significant portion of the blame for creating the situation which led to his death. Even if they’re mourning now (which I’m sure they are), that doesn’t change the fact that it was their attitudes which most likely led to his despair.
For the life of me, I can’t understand why you are so motivated to throw water on anyone’s thread as soon as it says something kind or compassionate about gays or lesbians. I mean, really - would it have killed you as a self-professed follower of Jesus to just express your sympathies and move on? To maybe suffer with the suffering? Comfort those who mourn?
When the pagans, atheists, and wiccans show more compassion than the Christians, doesn’t that bother you just a little???
You and those like you just blow my mind. I simply do not understand your motivations.
Anyway, I just wanted to say that I don’t think that the Christians in the north are less than the Christians in the south, or vice versa. I never said that.
I was just so suprised on how it’s ok with people to have these bill board, unlike in the north. In my experience, and I lived in the north east all my life, it seems to be unacceptable. “don’t want to offend anyone”.
I have a friend in SE Tenn. She is a music teacher and her husband is a coach. She was telling me that her husbands students say a prayer together before every game, and this is on the students own doings. He use to preach in college, so he was very happy to see he students doing this.
One of the main reasons she love it there, besides how beautiful it is, is because of all the Christian fellowship she has.
Also, RTFirefly, I don’t think you should be saying that these signs or people who put the signs up are "not what they seem. Unless, of course, you have talked to them all. There are bad apples everywhere, that doesn’t mean they are all bad.
Mars, is it not good enough that we said that it was ashame that he killed himself. What is it exactly you expect us to do, go into mouring for someone we don’t know, who obviously didn’t care if his death would affect people in a horrible way?
It sucks when anyone dies tragically, but if I took it personally everytime it happened, I would be depressed. That’s no way to live.
Tell me, Mars, aside from where I was asked how I, as a parent, would respond to a similar situation, where in the thread did I even address homosexuality at all? This thread is about a suicide, unsubstantiated accusations against his parents, and for the last few pages, my problem with the latter. Not about if it’s ok for somebody to be gay.
I most certainly did express my sympathies. But move on? Not when there’s something I have to say on the matter.
A little. But not as much as it bothers me that the whole crowd, pagans and Christians alike, was making false accusations of something of that magnitude against grieving parents, for no more reason than that a gay activist leader called them “fundies” and herself made the unfounded accusation.
Talk about pushing an agenda and displaying a lack of compassion. :rolleyes:
well, Joe seems to me that your first responses were of the sort of “I have no sympathy for people who commit suicide”, and then focused on the anger of others for the parents. which is why, naturally, that folks thought you were being less than sympathetic to the young man who died.
and while you’re at it, please the phrase “false allegations” against the parents isn’t accurate either, unless, of course, you’re claiming to have been there, heard them, etc. The allegations against the parents may be unprovable (certainly at this point) but that don’t make 'em false.
Okay, Joe, I have admitted at least three times that I judged the parents harshly on the basis of hearsay evidence, and should have never said that in the first place. But you have shown absolutely no sense of compassion for the child and whatever caused him to take his own life, aside from a throwaway line in one early post, following which you proceeded to castigate me and everybody else who had posted for being upset that parents who were alleged to have told their son that he was no longer their son for being honest to them about his sexuality might have been guilty (if the allegations are true) of something more than a slightly improper word choice in speaking to him. I do not know the full story behind the incident, neither do you, and neither does anyone else. But I’m inclined to take the word of someone who was a friend of the person involved and deemed it reliable enough to state on this board what he was alleged to have said.
“And for the last few pages…”??? Starting with the 27th post on page one of what’s now a six-page thread, this has been nothing but Joe Cool and wife bashing everyone who dares to think that the parents’ attitude could have anything to do with the death of a gay teen, despite the fact that case after case after case of case where gay teenagers have suicided because they were rejected by their family have been reported (and not just by “the gay activists,” by responsible journalists), and people arguing back. I’ve tried to understand your POV and discuss it; I even made a point to wave people off the alleged divorce and remarriage of Jersey, so far as I was able to have any effect.
But thank you, the thread I started to bitch about a tragedy that cost the life of a teenager who most likely was not “grandstanding” but in despair (and yeah, we’ll never know the truth of that, but I’ve dealt with people in clinical depression, I had post-cardiac depression for a while, and you don’t have clue one about treatment for that kind of depression if you think that dealing with it’s a matter of pulling yourself together and going on as we all have to when we have a down spell) – that thread was truly and totally hijacked into another “Joe Cool Defends Himself” thread. Do you somehow figure that “any publicity’s good publicity”? Do you enjoy being the target for people’s ire?
I like you as a person; I’m indebted to you in a number of ways. And I respect your desire to stand up for what you think is right, and don’t think that the idea that you don’t agree with the majority opinion around here is grounds to blow you off and tell you to leave town. Our buddy Uno Mondo perpetrated another one of his drive-bys, and has not yet deigned to return to the thread and answer my questions, which, though I disagree with him, were temperate and asked his opinions on issues he apparently is familiar with. You and Jersey at least stay around and debate, instead of posting a snotty comment and leaving. And that makes you a worthy opponent when we happen to be on opposite sides of an issue, and a valuable ally when we’re on the same side.
Now, a couple of propositions for you to address:
Suppose for the sake of argument that the story as reported on the board is the truth. What should each party – Daryl and parents – have done? Should he have “come out” to them, knowing that that’s the brave and honest thing to do? How should they have reacted?
What should the Christian attitude towards tragedies like this be, and why is the answer you give the correct one?
Why is the word of a college-age Methodist who happens to be gay and an activist for gay rights reporting a friend’s description of his parents “an unfounded assumption”? And how does this differ from your assumption that the parents are “grieving”? (I would, I know you would, and I suspect every other adult reading this thread would – but there’s less evidence that they are grieving than there is that they’re “fundamentalists” by the difference between one third-hand account’s putative validity and a total assumption on the basis of human nature with no evidence, even hearsay.)
In short, this has been an exercise in “Joe Cool Takes On All Comers In a Free-for-All No-Holds-Barred Cage Match,” like many another thread before. If you want these little exercises, drop me an e-mail if you like, and I’ll propose a thread on the topic of your choice for you to have at 'em in.
If not, there’s the little matter of my agenda in starting this – that Christian and non-Christian alike have a vested interest in the fact that gay teens (and young adults, since you were a stickler for the age grouping earlier) are suiciding and that we need to find a way to prevent it. And that a young man who, by your researches, would have been a major benefit to society now lies dead by his own hand.
And I have seen one-half sentence of compassion for him from you and Jersey in the six pages of let’s-argue-about-what-Joe-Cool-wants-to-argue-about that this thread has degenerated into.
You’re probably right in that we prejudged the parents on the basis of hearsay evidence. But that is not the key issue here, and you know it. Be willing to admit that there’s a whole lot more to this story than whether a bunch of people on a message board happened to get more than a little frosty about parents who were alleged to have disowned a son who thereupon killed himself. And that that problem, not the other, is what needs fixing the most.
Well, I got the phone call. I report for duty on Thursday, tabling for Project 10 at the Health Fair at my old college
And I’ve added a substantial amount of the collected results of these threads to the Queer page on my website. You can see it at http://www.metrodemontreal.com/matt/gay/ .
From matt_mcl’s excellent website, I came across the following link to the White Ribbon Campaign.
Here’s a small excerpt. Hopefully this will enlighten some of you to the enormous problems facing gay teens.
I hope you will take the time to read some of Matt’s writings, as well as the other information presented on the White Ribbon website. Perhaps if you understand a bit better the difficulties gay teens face, you will see how much saying “gay=sin” actually contributes to their pain and suffering.
I got and accepted your point a while back. Sorry I didn’t acknowledge it sooner.
Well, not much I can say to this. I’m sorry the kid is dead, but I have trouble working up tears over the death of somebody I’ve never met and never even heard of. Do you, Poly, weep daily over the obituary page and the news? If not, why do you expect it of me? But even so, I most certainly did express my sorrow that he died, and even wrote him a short, informal epitaph - which, predictably, was unkindly attacked and called insincere, by my brother in Christ RTFirefly. You yourself asked me for a cite on my words of kindness.
You accept andygirl’s word on the matter, and I don’t. That’s fine. I don’t accept that her chain of information is reliable enough to make such an accusation against Daryl’s parents. I admit that her scenario happens enough that it’s a possibility to be reasonably considered, but I submit that it’s also common enough to be a reasonable possibility for young people to flip out, blow things out of proportion, and react to their mental picture of what happened rather than reality. And given two (IMO) equally reasonable possibilities, I opt for the one that doesn’t make a grave and obscene accusation against his survivors.
Again, even assuming that andygirl’s story is true, I don’t believe that the parents hated him, or would have necessarily turned their backs on him for real. More likely, ANY parent (I’m not discussing theology or what a “real christian” would act like) might overreact and say hurtful things in a moment of shock that they would later regret and apologize for. Surely, with all the worldly experience in this thread, among all you who have worked with depressed people, done this and that, etc, some of you must have witnessed a parent simply reacting rather than giving a measured response, right? Or have all the people you’ve encountered sincerely hated their children?
All I’m saying is that grieving people deserve the benefit of the doubt, when there is reasonable doubt.
But that’s the thing - we aren’t discussing case after case. We are discussing this particular case. If you want to generalize, and start a thread titled “Christian parents should not hate and disown their homosexual children”, I’ll happily post my agreement with you. But we are talking about a specific case, and in this case, I don’t see sufficient evidence (she said that a friend said that Daryl said that his parents said) to automatically heap this case in with the rest.
And we both appreciate your ending that hijack. Thank you.
To be honest, I was shocked at first at the way the thread turned out. I thought that once I had pointed out the obvious, “don’t say that kind of thing without evidence to a family that just lost their child,” people would see that it’s just basic human compassion, common sense and fairness, and we’d go on. But predictably, the gay militia took offense to the suggestion that Christian parents might not have hated their son, and the discussion was derailed, apparently, by my mere presence in it. I suppose I should have known better and been prepared for the backlash. That wouldn’t have changed my position or my determination to defend it, but it would have meant that I wasn’t reeling and feeling that I had to defend myself.
Thank you. The feeling is mutual.
My hands are starting to cramp up, so I’m taking a break now. But rest assured I will submit a response to the rest of your post tonight.
No one SAID the parents hated their son, Joe. We said they didn’t understand.
Polycarp, that was beautiful-but I’m afraid, sadly, predictably, it was lost on Joe. Isn’t there a Bible verse that goes, “There are none so blind as those who refuse to see?”
I thought it may be helpful for you to see the compassion you displayed when first entering this thread. Yep, you can just feel the compassion for the man who died, can’t you.
and I found it ironic, too that on the same post where you chastized andy et al for making assumptions about people you didn’t know, events you didn’t witness, that you felt perfectly fine making the diagnosis that the young man in question was “obviously suffering from some sort of mental disorder” and was “so unable to cope with the real world” Both may be true in cases of suicide, but are hardly a given.
:eek: