And even if they buy that it’s God’s Will, they are perfectly free to say “tough noogies God, we’re gonna do it our way”. “I’m just following orders” is not an exuse for vile behavior, no matter who give the orders.
They are either lying or deluded for believing nonsense, or evil for following an evil God, then.
Enforcing a law that has no justification but bigotry is bigotry; I don’t really care in that case if the officer in question is a bigot, since it makes no difference.
Without objective proof that God is giving the orders, that’s an outright pathetic excuse. Can I set people on fire and claim God told me to ? Would you support me, or do you only support religion as an excuse when it excuses your particular brand of evil ?
Just out of curiosity, are there any religions/sects/denominations that officially state that anyone not married under their particular rules isn’t really married?
Quite possibly from Paul’s comments in Corinthians. Poorly-supported translations of “arsenokoites” – and another Greek work that I can’t be arsed to google up at the moment – have been variously substituted for “Sodomite”, “homosexual”, etc., etc.
More likely he was talking about some form of prostitution that was peculiar to Greek and/or Corinthian culture – since everything else he mentions in those passages involve commerce/wealth – but there you go.
I’ve never heard that used to justify the Christian view of homosexuality/gay-marriage. The fact that you have to WAG it speaks poorly to the justification in the first place.
And then we all come back to the central point: Why is somebody’s fairy tale poking its wet snout into secular law?
What if he really, truly, believes that God guided previous Popes? In other words, he doesn’t claim a direct messahe from god himself, so his personal prejudices aren’t in play. He does believe that God gave such guidance to previous Popes, and he is now doing nothing but passing it on, reaffirming it.
They don’t think it’s a fairy tale or a metaphor or a teaching parable; it’s the one, the only, the absolute TRUTH ! ! It’s no different than the people who want to legislate pi = 3 because the Bible says so, and the Bible is True.
Then he’s gullible and morally corrupt, given some of the things previous Popes have done.
You can absolutely argue – and, given your… er… outlook, I expect you to argue – that gullibillity is a sine qua non of religious belief. And that’s a defensible position, quite frankly.
And I didn’t; I called the Church leadership bigoted.
In that case, yes. It’s simply not a morally defensible position to take. Unless he is literally being threatened with death, he shouldn’t obey such a bigoted order. It would be like arresting a black person for sitting in the frot of the bus, or a woman for trying to vote, or an Irishman for trying to get a job ( “No Irish Need Apply” ).
Snort. What religion does *not * claim to be the correct one? Even the Church of Bob would, or it wouldn’t *be * a church. But, I hear you say, no it isn’t a church just because it claims “religious sacrament”.
Well, how the hell do you make a distinction? Your claim that *only * your church is “*The * Church” is not, as you imply, a logical premise. It’s simply a demand that everyone adopt the prejudices that certain particular other guys have declared, hypocritically, to be the Word of God while blatantly ignoring it in other contexts in their own scriptures. Why should you expect rationalization to go unscorned, much less unmentioned or unnoticed? Are you reticent to condemn the hypocrisies and rationalizations of *other * sects? Few others here wear those same blinkers.
Hatreds and prejudices are so tenacious in large part because those who hold them really, truly, believe that it’s God’s will. That genuine belief in one’s own righteousness in no way makes the ensuing hatred or prejudice any more acceptable, of course - but is that your position anyway?
So what if he does? Earnestness is not a justification for bigotry. In the past, popes have issued a large number of edicts that we recognize as horribly prejudiced today. If Ratzinger went back and decided that the Popes who had commanded that the Jews be forcibly converted to Christianity were divinely guided, would that be a defence against charges of antisemitism?
Something in the character of the current pope makes him look at the older edicts against homosexuality and see value in them. What is this something, other than a predisposition to agree with the values reflected in those edicts? What is this predisposition, but bigotry?
But this position doesn’t square with the things that the Church actually says about many of its previous doctrines, which are actively repudiated as wrong instead of condoned as “our best understanding at the time”. E.g., the condemnation of Galileo and blaming the Jews for Christ’s execution. The Church doesn’t say that those doctrines were okay under the previous circumstances but are now outdated; it acknowledges them as wrong things that should never have been done in the first place.
So clearly the Church itself recognizes that doctrinal decisions involve voluntary choices, not just always following unambiguous orders to the best of one’s conscientious ability.
I was actually referring to their interpretation in the second instance. Does the Church not recognise, say, the ten commandments as outlining sinful behaviour? I haven’t heard much about not working on sundays, recently. No Papal edicts i’ve seen on that. And that’s even one of the Big Ten; surely if gay issues were more or equal to importance than it, then we’d have eleven?
So let’s take a look at it from the interpretation angle. Their rules come from a combination of the text of the Bible and their own views when interpreting it. Gay sex as a sin is given less or equal to “facetime” than several other sins, if what other Dopers have said on here is correct (i’m sure you’re more familiar with the Bible than me). If this is so, then that the response is so proportionally different suggests that their interpretation comes more from their own views than the text; i’d say that was a logical presumption. If so, your military man analogy is flawed; a better example might be one in which a more vague or unclear rule (say, “All those unfit for battle should not be enlisted”) is adhered to by him refusing to enlist women on those grounds. In which case, it’s pretty reasonable to assume that he himself may hold mysogynistic views; not certain, of course, but a person suggesting such a thing would at the least be in a reasonable position.
In this instance, however, other officers of similar standing do not find the rules to require the discharge. There are other rules, say, that require discharge for drunkeness, which are ignored as not being relevant or practical. The rule itself is not as straighforward as this officer makes out, and there are other rules that can be seen as contradicting this one. Finally, the author of the rule is nowhere to be found to resolve the issue, and the officer claims that he is correct via some deep understanding of the intent of the author. While all the officers agree on the authorship of the rules, some other people have some doubts as to their authenticity.
In that case, the one or several officers who insist on enforcing the rules may claim that they are following orders, but one can wonder if bigotry is at least part of their motivation.
BTW, has any ruling on homosexuality been issued as infallible? Or whatever the proper Latin term is.
IIRC (I have never been Catholic, but I hang out online with a Catholic theologian who talks about this stuff), the only infallible proclamations issued have been about Mary. (The Immaculate Conception and the Assumption? Maybe?)
Bricker, you seem to have convinced yourself that implacably reducing an argument to absurdity aggressively enough to get everyone else to throw up their hands equals “winning” the argument. Actually, all such dishonest debate achieves is a kind of forced forfeit by your opponents. This may work, technically, in a court of law, where the process is essentially amoral, but it kinda stinks, here. By continuing to refuse to engage with people’s actual points, and simply restating your argument again–and again–you’re essentially plugging your ears and chanting, “Is so. Is so. Is so.” Likewise, redefining words (also to the point of absurdity) in order to get your view included under the word in question, you’re being amoral and dishonest.
Being the last man standing doesn’t actually mean you have the best argument; it just means you’re the most persistent arguer. Congratulations.