So-Called "Persecution Against Christians":

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What you think you "have seen" is what is not true.

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As usual you think that you get to decre what is true and what is not.

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Marriage is clearly defined in the Bible as a man and a woman, and homosexuality is clearly defined as a sin, not a legitimate "lifestyle."

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Marriage is clearly defined as allowing multiple wives, and concubines, and using the wive's slaves to get children.Equally the Bible also requires Christians to obey the secular law.Also Christians are not required to enter into gay marriages nor are Christians forced to offer any religious support for gay marriage, making it a purely secular matter. And the same goes for pathetic Satanists like you.

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You are not allowed to define another person's reading of the Bible or another's conscience, sorry

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If that is the case, you are required to support the segregationists. It was decided that their reading of the Bible. And the Christian guy who beheaded his friend some years ago. In truth when you can find no clear Biblical support for your position and there IS clear Biblical opposition to your position - and when you openly appeal to bigotry to support your position I see no reason why anybody should have to ignore those facts. Being a liar and a hypocrite does not grant you special privileges.

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In any case you will find that the more Christian businesses are challenged to do something special or personal that validates gay marriage the more Christians will have to refuse and be punished for it.

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Christians are never required to provide anything more than the usual services they provide - and often do provide to sinful weddings without complaint. If they decide that their bigotry is more important than the Bible - an odd position for a true Christian - and break the law then they will suffer the penalties. Just as a "Christian" segregationist or. anti-Semite would.

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sonal that validates gay marriage the more Christians will have to refuse and be punished for it. Your thinking they are wrong carries no more weight than the Catholics thinking the Protestants wrong who refused to accept papal law and chose torture and death instead.

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Since conversion is not required and torture and death are not among the penalties prescribed this is hardly an apt comparison.As I have pointed out a much closer comparison would be with the segregationists - who would break exactly the same laws in enforcing their "Biblical" beliefs. You have no problem seeing them "persecuted" - even though they are as "Christian" as you.

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Sorry. Of course calling us evil will justify whatever your group want to do to us too, just as it justified the RCC.

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That is really rich from someone eager to believe calumnies against political,opponents -and believes that slander justifies hate. Remember that I applaud the ACLU decision to defend the rights of Nazis. I hope we can agree that Nazis are evil.

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And how childish of you to pretend I want to harm you in any way. I'm called to die for my beliefs and bless my enemies.

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You have openly stated that you would like to inflict physical violence on me. You have asserted that if there were a "Red State" secession my opinions would no longer be heard. It doesn't take much imagination to add to that. Certainly it is stronger grounds than anything you have provided.

Twist and lie, Paul, you're good at it.Yes I've felt like punching you on many occasions. That's me personally reacting to a snark, not anything prescribed by my beliefs though you twist things to mean that.The Bible does NOT require us to obey any "secular" law that conflicts with God's law. It is CLEARLY stated that we are to obey GOD AND NOT MAN when there is a conflict.I do not have to respect any reading of the Bible than the reading I understand to be the correct one. A person's conscience is a personal thing. If I act on it by denying wedding services to gays it is I who will suffer, despite all the stuppidity being said about this here.This place is a madhouse.

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Twist and lie, Paul, you're good at it.

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Your addiction to false accusations continues.

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Yes I've felt like punching you on many occasions. That's me personally reacting to a snark, not anything prescribed by my beliefs though you twist things to mean that.

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And there you go lying again.

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The Bible does NOT require us to obey any "secular" law that conflicts with God's law. It is CLEARLY stated that we are to obey GOD AND NOT MAN when there is a conflict.

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Since the verses in question have no such exception and since you cannot find any such conflict you have no valid point.

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I do not have to respect any reading of the Bible than the reading I understand to be the correct one.

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Which - in practice - means that you feel free to reject the Bible in favour of your own prejudices.

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A person's conscience is a personal thing. If I act on it by denying wedding services to gays it is I who will suffer, despite all the stuppidity being said about this here.

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In that case you make no distinction between conscience and bigotry.And I will note that you are in danger only if you offer such services as a business, and only if you you live in a State where gays are a protected class. A segregationist who refuses to offer services to Blacks on grounds of their interpretation of the Bible and their "conscience" is at exactly the same risk under the same laws. Yet you have no complaint about that. Why should we offer you any more support than you would offer them ?

I am not responsible for the segregationists' opinion. I disagree with it and they either stick to it and suffer the consequences or realize they are wrong and give it up. I'm responsible for my own opinion and MAYBE it will only be a problem if I own a business but I wouldn't even count on that.There is no reason to keep arguing this. You've all decided Christians may not hold the opinions we hold, we're today's Jews, so you will punish us for your opinion no matter what. Why you bother to argue with something so obvious I don't really get. I guess you just don't like to think you are in the wrong and are punishing us the way the Nazis did the Jews, so you have to keep demonizing us just as the Nazis did the Jews and make it our fault by hook or by crook. So what else is new?

You know this is not true, so why do you continue to say it? You know you can hold the most disgusting opinion known to mankind and no official can do a thing about it. Why are you continually and persistently lying to yourself? Does it make you feel good to feel persecuted? Does it strengthen your beliefs? Don't you think this analogy is a little overblown? Where are the gas ovens? It's obviously a great disappointment to you that your nasty beliefs are NOT persecuted, so much so that you have to imagine it. The masochism and narcissism of extreme belief systems has always been a clear indicator of delusion.

No! That has nothing whatsoever to do with what I was saying!First, the virus analogy was just that, an analogy. And what I had observed about the fundamentalist community as a whole was that at first they were extremely virulent with so much constant hard-sell proselytizing that they have alienated most of the population from ever considering their religion and even predisposed most of the population to be hostile to them (hence the hostility towards religious bullies, which is what proselytizers tend to be). But then as time went by (remember, the End Times were at hand!) and the world continued on and they started having kids and jobs and mortgages and grandkids, etc, they settled down to having a life. So now the evangelical fervor is no longer there, though a lot of the hostility towards their earlier bullying is still there. Try to look objectively at what proselytizing is and does. Your target (or mark or patsy) has certain beliefs. Your goal is to get him to believe in what you believe. That means that you must destroy his prior beliefs in order to replace them with your beliefs. Could you possibly ever think up any human activity that could be more intrinsically offensive as to purposefully and with great planning aforethought attack someone else's religious beliefs with the explicit purpose to destroy them? OK, mass murder, torture, genocide do come to mind. So then proselytizing is only slightly less horrific than they are.So it's not just simply that nobody wants to hear what you believe, but rather they do not want you to directly attack their own beliefs with the intent of destroying those beliefs.Oh, but the evangelicals are "in their spiritual infancy." First, please do not call them that. Because "they" are not one single group. "They" are many different and separate religious groups who see almost as much difference between each other than they do with you "non-Christian" Catholics. I remember one telling quote of British philosopher and freethinker Bertrand Russell (from memory):

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When a Catholic becomes a Freethinker, he becomes an atheist. When a Protestant becomes a Freethinker, he simply forms a new religion.

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To a Catholic, if you disagree with official doctrine then you become a heretic, which is just as good as an atheist. But for a Protestant, if you disagree with official doctrine then you simply create your own doctrine and your own church -- that is, after all, the Protestant tradition. As ex-hyper-fundamentalist Ed Babinski depicted it in 1986: I have personally encountered individuals of these "fundamentalist/evangelical/conservative Christian" sects who object most vehemently to being labeled as one of those others. Even though we outsiders see them as the same thing, indistinguishable from the others, amongst themselves they draw extremely sharp distinctions between each other.So this isn't just one simple and simplistic group that we are talking about. Though, yes, there are some diagnostic similarities. And a bit of a history. Fundamentalism can trace its official roots back to the Niagara Conferences at the turn of the century (ie, around 1900). For a long time, they had segregated themselves into their own communities, having their own schools and their own Bible colleges, etc. Basically, they did all that they could to keep themselves separate from the rest of society. Another aspect of their subculture was a life-long study of Scripture (this will become very important).Their numbers were always small, but that was about to change. Across the street from my junior high school in Santa Ana was a Four-Square church. All any of us knew about it was "They believe really strange stuff!" Half a decade later, one of their members, Chuck Smith, split off and founded his own small church on the outskirts of Santa Ana and Costa Mesa (ironically in a region that half a century before that was known as "Gospel Swamp").Then the Jesus Freak Movement of circa 1970 hit in which hippies burned out on drugs instead became "hooked on Jesus" (a ubiquitous bumper sticker of the time). Overnight, the membership of these fundamentalist churches exploded.A member of this forum, I forget who, once explained what happened next with their theology. Now, originally you had to study Scripture all your life in order to understand it and there was a comprehensive study plan in place to support that. But now you had the vast majority of your congregation sitting there with no experience in studying Scripture. Empty vessels. How do you fill them? According to that forum member, that is when the life-long comprehensive study plan went flying out the window. Instead, the churches came up with sound-bites. The traditional Baptist view (many of these churches came from a Baptist tradition) was that they agreed to disagree because your life-long study informed what you believed. Now with these newcomers, the church had to dictate to them what they needed to believe, then cherry-pick passages to feed to them and instruct them into how to interpret those passages correctly -- even Faith has told us how you need to be properly instructed in how to interpret the Bible. Thus those churches became close-mindedly dogmatic. Yes, I would strongly agree that their theology is immature. They simply have not thought about it anywhere near enough. And they will fight you tooth-and-nail if you try to discuss it with them. What??? Their theology is immature. They want to make their immature theology the Law of the Land. An 8-year-old is immature. So we don't want to "put too much pressure on them and have them cave in" by not allowing him to drive an 18-wheeler cross-country? Or to have a regular driver's license?I'm sorry, but whatever are you thinking? What the hell are you talking about? What atheist would actually say that? I believe that this is the appropriate place for me to tell you, "Fuck you!", for saying something so absolutely idiotic.I have been an atheist for more than half a century now. My attitude about you theists is, even though I do not agree with your beliefs, you are free to believe whatever you want to. Furthermore, I will protect and defend your right to believe whatever you want to believe. In fact, I have done so through 35 years of honorable military service. IOW, in response to your statement, I respond with, "Fuck you! You have no idea what you are talking about!"Personal belief is one thing. Trying to get that personal belief instituted as a public law that will affect everybody, especially those who do not share that belief, well, that is an entirely different matter altogether. And that is especially the problem when dealing with "evangelicals". Uh, no. Not even close. We are dealing with adults. And with voting blocks. When you deal with a toddler, when he gets out of line you can simply pick him up and put him in his place. Exactly the same as with a misbehaving Chihuahua. You cannot do that with the "evangelical community." They are taking legal action against you and the rest of society, so you need to use legal action against them. That is so obvious, why didn't you ever realize it?

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I am not responsible for the segregationists' opinion

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A clear irrelevance. The point is that their situation very closely parallels yours and by your own arguments you should hold that they should have been permitted to continue their discrimination.

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I disagree with it and they either stick to it and suffer the consequences or realize they are wrong and give it up

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Then you can have no complaint when I state that I disagree with your view and that those who hold it should suffer the consequences if they put that view into action in defiance of the law.

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I'm responsible for my own opinion and MAYBE it will only be a problem if I own a business but I wouldn't even count on that

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Are there some other laws you fear that you might be breaking ?

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There is no reason to keep arguing this.

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indeed, you could act like a Christian and admit your errors.

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You've all decided Christians may not hold the opinions we hold, we're today's Jews, so you will punish us for your opinion no matter what

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That is simply a lie you tell to justify your hypocrisy and bigotry. I have not suggested that you be punished for your opinion unless you count being laughed at for your pathetic attempts to pretend to be a Christian.

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Why you bother to argue with something so obvious I don't really geT

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That I argue against an obvious lie should hardly be surprising. The only surprise - at least to those who have not had long experience of you - is that you could think that you could get away with it.

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I guess you just don't like to think you are in the wrong and are punishing us the way the Nazis did the Jews, so you have to keep demonizing us just as the Nazis did the Jews and make it our fault by hook or by crook. So what else is new?

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Since it is quite obvious that I am not in the wrong - while you have to resort to misrepresenting the Bible and appealing to double standards - I have no need to pretend. Rather you are resorting to your nasty lies because YOU need to obscure the fact that you are in the wrong. And that really is obvious.

Which is why we ridicule you for it. Sure, I could just 'take' being bullied but I find that just invites more bullying. So I'm more or less obliged to make the effort to fight it. Well sure. It takes courage to stand up to laws against murder too, but the murderer who goes to prison suffers less than their victims and their victims families. Likewise, being sued and going out of business is better than losing your family and your home and your job and your life. So no, the homosexual community has suffered more from the bullies than the bullies have faced legal consequences for their bullying. I don't need or want your validation and people are being sued for failing to validate things. A few people are being sued for refusing operating a public business that refuses to provide services to certain bullied people. If I live in a community of 70% Christians there is a 70% chance any one of the service providers for a gay marriage is a Christian. I don't ask, but if I have a flower arranger, a photographer, a cake maker and a caterer and...all the other services typically required for a wedding - the chances are that one of them will be Christian. Asking homosexuals to go out of their way to avoid Christians is pushing an unfair burden onto a group that is already suffering under unfair burdens. This would be bullying. I can't and don't want to deny you medical care, housing public services and employment. I just want you to suffer consequences if you do it to me. Caused the pain. That's why they have standing to sue. Because the actions we are suing you for are harmful. I'll sue them if they refuse me service too. But there are less of them, so it's less likely anyone will run into this problem.

Odd that the Catholics generally bother doing it but Protestants prefer don't ask, don't tell policies. Almost like they want us to be silent. Why silence us? Sorry, but if you do this, you'll get sued. The victims of your bullying suffer more. I don't want to and I am not so doing. Suing someone for breaching business regulations is not persecution, denying someone service is persecution. I'll take a small measure of justice, but it's not really possible or desired to get even.

Jesus sat down with publicans and sinners. The Pharisees of the day condemned Him for it just as you Pharisees of today would condemn Him for it.If Jesus was invited to a same-sex marriage, He would turn the water into wine.

Could we please get this simple point straight? You ought to know from the context that I'm not saying you are disallowing my verbal statement of my opinions (although with the excoriating responses I get, including from you in this post, in a sense that's not even true), but in context when I'm saying I'm to be punished for my opinions it's for my obligation to act upon them when put to the test. The context is and has always been the situation where a Christian is asked to do something that their conscience judges as a violation of God's law, in which case we must refuse to do it.I think you all need to be called on your hatred of Christian beliefs and I don't think the Nazi example is too far-fetched for that, no. You've got us categorized with evil people who should hardly be allowed to exist, so where is there to go from that point?And I guess I need to point out that the Christian belief I'm talking about is quite standard. I share it with the five business owners I know of (Ithere are probably more by now) who have been put in the position of having to refuse a special order for a gay wedding. We all independently understand the Bible to forbid us from doing that. You all keep trying to isolate me as some kind of exception, but I'm arguing for those who have already suffered for the same beliefs I share with them. There are Christians who don't have those beliefs, some of them here at EvC, but that doesn't change the fact that these beliefs ARE quite standard for Christian evangelicals.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

I disagree that there is any comparison between race and homosexuality so I reject your comparison with segregationists. It is really not hard to make the case that segregation is not biblical. They are taking an Old Testament position that applied only to the Israeltes, which had absolutely no racial connotations anyway, and misapplying it to Christianity. The Bible is very clear that all human beings are descended from one set of parents (and applying principles of genetics to that, we can understand that races are the natural genetic result of becoming isolated into tribal families.) The Israelites were to keep themselves separate from other CULTURES that practiced religions contrary to the doctrines the Israelites were to follow. It had nothing to do with race, it was all about idolatrous rituals, human sacrifice, animal gods and other such things forbidden to the Jews. Nevertheless members of other cultures who wanted to live like the Israelites and follow their laws were welcome. The segregationists really have no leg to stand on theologically.In any case homosexuality is nothing like race. I have no desire to hurt homosexuals, I think they have many hard things to deal with in their lives, but the Bible clearly identifies homosexual acts as sin so there is no way an honest Christian can call it normal, and certainly no way homosexual marriage can be treated as legitimate. Some gays actually agree with this as a matter of fact. Also as long as Christians aren't required to treat gay marriage as valid there is no problem, but this is exactly where the problem arises. So as long as this is required of us in any context whatever, we will refuse to comply and therefore be punished for it.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

It's important Faith. Very important. Because in fact none of these laws affect you at all do they? In fact, they affect virtually no Christians at all. Whereas laws against what your opinions are, what religion you profess and what you say, would affect you. Which is why the next thing you say is utter bollocks..... And yet, when pulled up on it you still think there's a comparison So you're sat there at home in front of your PC able to think and say anything without any concern whatsoever that the FBI will turn up, arrest you for simply being a religious idiot, put you in a work camp in Alaska and pile your emaciated, naked body into a mass grave in the woods when you're no longer any use for their 'medical research'. And you think that there's some comparison to Nazi Germany? What??Barking mad.

I meant that it would be easier for us Christians not to fight it, but just go along to get along. Resisting the law costs us.Of course if YOU insist on fighting us on the basis of the new law, suing us etc., it will also be the Christians who suffer. I gather this IS what you want so I'm right that you seek to punish us for your suffering due to God's law. Those who share the biblical view I'm talking about will not give in so you can sue us and drive us out of business to your heart's content.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

I guess I COULD wait until the gestapo come to my door before saying anything, but it's always best to object to an unjust law before it comes to that.