Well frankly since your an atheist and I’m a Christian your views dont affect me. Why? Because being a Christian means I have chosen to follow a certain set of beliefs. Most of those are outlived in the 10 commandments like to not commit adultery and to not steal. But another is that a man should be married to just one wife and that clearly is to be a woman. And while its not totally clear, I feel drinking, smoking, drug use, and swearing is not a good witness so I refrain from it (except the occasional drink or cigar now and then).
Now that is INSIDE MY faith.
OUTSIDE my faith is a different story. As a US citizen I have to follow our governments rules and they say gay marriage is ok so if I say worked as a marriage license clerk I would have to give those now to gay couples. Also I feel that personally, gays are citizens too and should be allowed to marry.
Huh. So what would you say if one of your immediate family (son or daughter) turned out to be gay? Would you send them off for “faith healing” because it’s a “lifestyle choice” and not due to an error in the construction of their brain? (certain gay rights advocates might object to me calling it an error, but I think it is closer to the truth than calling it an adaptation) Do you even believe it is possible to be born gay, or do you think God just won’t permit this kind of oddity in good Christians?
That’s where this starts to become a real problem. If you’re so irrational that you actually believe there is a supreme being who is applying those specific rules, and not the rules of some other religion or rules you can’t understand or there isn’t a supreme being (all realistic possibilities if you are not an idiot), you can’t make good decisions.
Yes, especially as the membership in the US has grown from 71 million in 2000 to 79 million in 2014, and worldwide from 1.045 billion to 1.229 billion in the same time period.
I take issue with something in nearly everything you post. But it’s only fair if I also point out something reasonable I think you say. If more Christians had the attitude you espouse here, this country would be a lot better off.
I appreciate your feedback and POV, and this is the sort of attitude that I feel is common among the church leadership including the pastor. I will say that, for my wife at least, this just isn’t good enough. It’s basically saying that if you’re a homosexual you can’t be a part of the church, and she doesn’t see why people should have to choose between the two. From my perspective, it means that if you’re a homosexual and you’re part of the church against your will (e.g., a teenager), then you’re surrounded by people who are telling you that you’re essentially broken. Which is incredibly hurtful and is the point that I think Habeed was trying to make about someone in your immediate family.
Nicely written letter, but I think it is probably wasted effort.
A pastor is an official whose prime purpose is to communicate the doctrine of the religion, wrapping the doctrine within their composed sermons to make it more understandable to the parishoners. It is their job to convince you that the doctrine is “correct” and you are to have faith in it. If the doctrine says gay=bad, then there is nothing anyone can say that could or should sway him.
If you and your wife are personally conflicted with the doctrine then you can either grit your teeth and stay, or weigh the measured risk of retaining your chances of getting into heaven under a different church with different doctrine.
My wife is not an atheist, she’s a member of the church and she wants it to change. That doesn’t seem unreasonable to me. As for me, the church is free to listen to me or not, but I was the one asked to sit down over breakfast, not the other way around, so apparently they’re willing to listen.
Does that help? I’m not sure what to make of your analogy. If one of the baseball players wants to change the baseball team’s rules, that seems reasonable. If they bring in their football player friend to help make their case and the baseball team agrees to hear him out… what’s wrong with that?
I agree. My church, also, agrees. My denomination (ELCA), also, agrees. However, it was indeed a process. And it was difficult. However, it bore fruit. In the same way that I wish your wife’s process with her church bears fruit. But I completely agree with her.
Though to be fair, if you are a Christian, you believe that we all are essentially broken. I understand the point you are making (and I don’t think there is anything sinful or extra-broken about being gay or participating in homosexual sex), but I just wanted to point that out.
Yeah, this makes the vocabulary hard and I’m still not quite sure how to work it out. If I say, “Don’t tell gay people that they’re sinners” they can just say, “But we’re all sinners.” I can add “… just for being born a certain way,” but even that has the same problem. I’m open to suggestions.
He’s got a point. Not just changing church doctrine, but even getting a single pastor to flex a little. This would be like going to a KFC and asking it to serve big macs. It’s not that the KFC doesn’t have a kitchen, or that some of the KFC employees might have worked at Mcdonald’s before and know how to make them. Or even that the KFC manager doesn’t like big macs. It’s that if the manager starts serving them, he personally will be punished and the restaurant itself may be penalized.
Similarly, if a religion says down with the gays, an individual preacher has to stick to the party line in public if he wants to keep his job. Maybe in private he can be more sympathetic to gays but he still has to stick to church doctrine.
AFAIK there’s no party line to stick to, this is a non-denominational church. There are a few similar churches in the area, and I guess they get together every once in a while to go in together on purchasing supplies and lesson plans so to speak, but that’s a voluntary arrangement. To the best of my knowledge this particular pastor is beholden to no doctrine.
This was my thought as well. I’m not saying that an atheist opinion is absolutely wrong in all respects and should be discarded out of hand, but it should in the context of influencing Christian theology. If I am a minister and am struggling with a particular point of church doctrine, why would I consider the opinion of someone who thinks that everything I believe in, the whole foundation of it, is a bunch of horseshit entirely?
I might even use that as a negative barometer of where I should be on my opinion. Again, not that I think atheists are “bad” but that they come from such a fundamentally opposite line of thought from my own and to the doctrine that I am promoting, that such a foundation is so clearly against what I am teaching and I should not take their opinions as sound advice.
It would be like asking the supreme ISIS leader his thoughts on a proposed sales tax increase. His views on U.S. society in general are so foreign to our society so any opinion he has on particular issues are skewed and flawed from the outset. Any conclusion he has reached on a particular issue flows from this and adds no valuable input on the sales tax.