Well OK I could see your point, he is just wishing that they self restrict their own freedom of speach. It doesn’t negate the hatred and bigotry of Der Trihs in the OP however.
I’m not necessarily down with Der Trihs’s OP (mostly because my first reaction to a rant about Pope Palpatine dissing gays would be “Is the Pope Catholic?”), but I’m really tired of this particular criticism. Maybe when the majority of the members who post here come from a country in which Muslims are the overwhelming majority and a very small but very vocal subset of those Muslims is attempting to dictate what everyone is allowed to do or not do we will achieve parity between harping about Christians and harping about Muslims on these subjects. Until then, it’s going to be the annoying Christian harpies who are going to get the lion’s share of the attention here. The same way that it’s American government-approved human rights abuses that get the lion’s share of attention here, rather than Uzbekistan’s. It’s not that we love the Uzbeki government THIS much but that we are both more affected by and more able to influence the American government’s actions.
No, you can’t. That’ just Christian rhetoric designed to let them spew hatred toward gays ( and others ), while pretending that they don’t hate most of humanity.
Hating someone for choosing to be a bigot is not the same as hating someone for being born with a taste for their own gender; something that harms no one, unlike Christian homophobia.
Oh, please. I said I wanted them to shut up, not that I wanted to send in the Marines to shut them up.
It should; the past was barbaric.
What jayjay said.
Not to mention, many of it’s tenet’s are bigoted, and therefore should be opposed.
And that’s because if someone’s trying to use their religion as an excuse to fuck with me, 99 times out of 100 it’s going to be a Christian who’s doing it. If the majority of the posters on this board lived in Saudi Arabia, or Iran, or Egypt, you’d see more threads about intolerant Muslims. But most of us live in the US, or Canada, or Western Europe, where the vast majority of people who use religion to excuse their bigotry are going to be Christians.
And for the record, no, that’s not the same thing as “disagreeing with their tenets.” Jesus was not the Son of God, but people who think that he was aren’t bigots. Believing that God exsists in the first place doesn’t make anyone a bigot, no matter how much I disagree with it. Believing that homosexuality is a sin? Makes you a bigot. Doesn’t matter what excuse you try to hang it on, bigotry is bigotry. And it is in no way a requisite part of their faith. Take a random sampling of Christians, and you’ll find a large number of them who have no problem with homosexuality. You won’t find a single one who doesn’t believe that Jesus was their savior. People choose their faith, and they choose how to express that faith. A Christian who believes that homosexuality is a sin has chosen to adopt that belief in no lesser a manner than another bigot has chosen to believe that blacks are “mud people,” or that Jews conspire to control the world. Pointing at the Bible and saying, “He told me to believe it!” doesn’t ennoble the idea. If anything, it denigrates the entire concept of God.
I will agree, however, that Der Trihs is no better than the folks he likes to rail against, and anyone who cares to look will see that this is far from the first time I’ve called him on it. It just so happens that for once, he was right about something. The pope is a nasty little bigot, and he needs to keep his religious prejudices insides the Vatican, and out of the legislature.
So then this is nothing new, it’s just the same old, same old.
As to quote a SD member, he couldn’t of put it so eloquently;
Well, considering the much greater virulence of “orthodox” Islam against gays, one would assume that those truly for gay rights would target Islam first. That they instead attack a relatively moderate orthodox religion indicates that they have another agenda (namely, attacking the values of the American right), and clothing it as simple pro-gay sentiment is disingenouous.
It is as though a friend owed you $100, while an enemy owed you $10. If, when neither pays up, you harp on and on about that $10 while ignoring the debt owed by your friend, one would suspect that your animosity towards the enemy is your true motivating factor, not recovering the money.
Don’t be stupid. Christianity gets criticized more for its homophobic policies because those homophobic policies are directly effecting the people who are complaining. If I bitch about taxes being too high in the US, but not about taxes being too high in Sweden, it’s not because I have some other, non-tax-based agenda. It’s because I don’t have to pay taxes in Sweden in the first place.
Your analogy would work better if it were the friend who owed you the $10, and the enemy who owed you the $100, and you keep harping about the $10 because you expect your friend to have the decency to pay it back some time.
Or maybe, just maybe, it could be the case that Papal statements affect them and their society much more than whatever random Ayatollahs say.
Naah. Too implausible.
The whole problem with this silliness is that it presumes that what the press publicizes and Der Trihs decries as “the evils of Christianity” is the whole package of what all Christians and their Founder are saying.
Many of us are inclined not to denounce gay people and their lives for being sinful, not because we are inclined to “modernize and secularize religion” or are “picking and choosing from Scripture” (both classic canards levelled at us) but rather because Jesus Christ’s principal teachings and commandments require us to treat gay people as our equals, no more sinful (and no less) than we ourselves are, and any fustiliation founded in the Old Testament, various standard readings of Paul’s letters, etc., that are not in accord with what He taught are clearly being misapplied. If being a Christian is being a follower of Jesus Christ, and doing what He commanded, then people who profess Christianity but act in manners other than what Jesus commanded are not doing their Christian duty. Whether their name be Ratziger, Dobson, Falwell, Wildmon, Robertson, Virtue, or whatever.
Yea right, you want to see ugly hate read YOUR text - it is ugly, very ugly and hateful, wishing people of a belief system rot. You do know that you can be against the notion of gay mariage and not hate gay people. Further you have not provided a cite of anything that shows any Christain hatred towards gays (no less the pope), but only you have shown a lot of hate you have towards them.
You have NOT proven that the pope is a bigot, but you hate him because you beleive him to be one.
You have NOT proven that the pope hates homesexuals at all
I gave you that point, you are just a hateful bigot, not a hateful bigot who also wished to deny someone their rights due to their religious beliefs.
As I may have said before, I’m still trying to come up with a non-hateful way of reading “intrinsic moral evil,” but I’m not coming up with anything.
Please give me the total phrase, is this talking about the homosexual act, or the people who parctice it? Context please.
And seriously, if you think there’s some great difference between calling gay people an intrinsic moral evil and calling gay sex an intrinsic moral evil, then, well, you’re a fucking idiot.
You have got to be fucking kidding me.
I’ve been searching this thread and the link for the phrase “intrinsic moral evil” but I haven’t been able to find it. Can you help me out? Where are you quoting it from?
thanks Otto From what you cite I get:
So far sounds pretty caring about the homosexual person.
The intrinsic moral evil is now obviously the sin of the homosexual act, The ‘lying with a man as you would a woman is a no-no’ part of the Bible. OK I think we all know this, Christian teaching is that the act of homosexuality is a sin and tendency to sin (any sin) is a disorder. But we are all sinners, we all have tendencies towards intrinsic moral evil, this does not make us worthy of hate.
I could go on here, and did, but it gets too far off the OP, so I took it out. The way I read it is yes the act of homosexuality is a sin, we will support people who have this tendency try to resist the temptation to act on it.
This sounds very much like the Church’s policy of hate the sin, love the sinner. You may disagree with their view of ‘love’, but it is certainly not hate.
Well said.
I’m sorry, I know you mean well, but this is just evil. Inspiring guilt in innocents over a preference that harms no-one, attempting to get them to ignore and suppress that preference, while pretending to do good… it’s just evil.
Priceguy I can accept your statement, and to some degree agree with it, but it is not hateful, and that’s the issue here.