Gay Marriage as an attack on Christianity

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Preferences for blondes or brunettes are not given special civil rights status

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Because there is no discrimination that needs to be addressed.

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Christians cannot endorse gay marriage because the Bible says marriage is between a man and a woman. That's in Genesis and Jesus quoted it. Otherwise homosexuals may live as they please. But the requirement that Christians honor gay marriage puts us in an untenable position.

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Christians don’t have any problem. The real objection is that you pretend Christians didn’t get your way. There’s nothing Christian about an evil religious tyranny built on lies and hate.

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We really should also worry about the amount of sin a society tolerates ...

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And yet you voted for Trump. Lies, adultery, bigotry - those sins are fine with Christians. It’s just treating gays as equal that you can’t stand.

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Protecting gays from discrimination does not require legalizing gay marriage, and besides that doesn't protect them anyway.

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Legalising gay marriage removed a case of discrimination and struck a blow against many more instances. That’s the real reason Christians oppose it.And you complain enough about prosecution under anti-discrimination laws to know that they do some good. Even if you are only interested in using them as a weapon against gay marriage.

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Your palpable hatred of "Christians" certainly validates the title of this thread

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I hate their evil, not them personally.

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There are other ways discrimination against gays could have been legally dealt with besides gay marriage,

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And Christians were fighting hard against those, too. Legalising gay marriage got around that as well as bring the simplest and quickest - by far - way to address the problem.

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, but gay marriage specifically targets the Law of God and forces Christians to choose between disobeying God or disobeying the law when it requires us to recognize gay marriage.

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Of course that’s no more true than the idea that ending segregation targeted the Law of GodUntil you come up with a passage that says that Christians are expected to prevent gay partners getting insurance benefits or be allowed hospital visitation rights - or to be fair something at least analogous- you haven’t got a case.

According to Calvinist theology we are afflicted with a sin nature that forces us to sin.According to Calvinist theology only those God chooses - a choice we cannot influence in any way whatsoever - will be freed from this sin natureAccording to Calvinist theology our punishment will be infinite.A just God would cure us and punish the person who afflicted us - which would be himself. No just God would inflict infinite punishement for finite crimes - what would be the point. It doesn’t work as deterrence, it goes beyond retribution and no reformation is possible.Calvinism does not propose a just God.

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Calvinism is simply the truest interpretation of what the bible says. The sin nature is implied throughout the Bible and ought to be recognized even in our own personal experience it seems to me.

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That really doesn’t address any of the points I was making.

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As usual you present it in such a way as to deny personal responsibility. We always have a choice at our own level, we can't know anything about God's level except what the Bible tells us, and to let it deprive us of personal choice is a big mistake.

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If we are - intentionally - afflicted with a condition that causes us to choose badly then we can reasonably claim diminished responsibility and hold that the person responsible for our affliction is to blame.

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I feel reassured knowing that whatever happens to me has a just cause even if I don't understand it, and that I can talk to God about it and maybe begin to understand it. The idea that things just happen randomly is not at all reassuring, just makes us pawns of incomprehensible and unpredictable and unrectifiable forces.

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Being the pawn of a monstrous evil hardly sounds better to me. But if that’s what you like go on believing it.

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After this life our destiny is sealed, yes, but during this life we have lots of opportunities for changing in response to affliction, for reformation, for turning away from its cause, which means it does work as deterrence.

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There you go denying predestination again. According to Calvinism our destiny was sealed before we were even born.

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I think what you are missing is that our sins ARE infinite because they are sins against an infinite and holy God.

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God, the ultimate special snowflake, clutching his pearls over the things he made us do. It’s not an attractive picture at all. If God chose to make us all sinners, there is no justice in his taking offence at our sins. Let alone infinite offence.

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Our sins had the "power" to cause the destruction of the whole planet in the Flood of Noah and are building up to the final destruction of the planet.

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According to the Bible, God is doing all that. Not our sins. Not that it would make much difference since God would still be fully responsible even if the latter were true - according to Calvinist theology.

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God takes us very seriously and takes sin extremely seriously. The whole point of the Bible is to teach us about God and how His justice and mercy work.

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Of course given Calvinist theology the logical conclusion is that our sins are just a pretext to create an illusion of justice. But if you think that the point of the Bible is to teach that God is a monster of injustice and cruelty I will leave you to that belief.

I’m not making God into anything. I’m just pointing out the implications of Calvinist theology. If Calvinism makes God out to be a monster that’s none of my doing.

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Of course you are. No Calvinist sees it that way.

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The implications are pretty clear. If I’m wrong you have to show it.

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I understand that you think your logical abilities, not to mention integrity, honesty and so on, are superior to any Calvinist's of course, but it's at least possible that you are wrong.

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I think that most Calvinists don’t think about it, and those that do are prey to cognitive dissonance. But if they have answers, bring them on. Let’s settle this with reason.

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It's entirely your doing. Calvinism does no such thing.

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I have made the case that it does.

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The answer is simply in knowing that God is always righteous, good, just and trustworthy even when His judgments are so severe we can hardly bear the thought of them.

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So basically the answer is doublethink. Insisting that God is righteous, good, just and trustworthy even though your other beliefs say otherwise.

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There's no way to prove any of it to you, you either believe the Bible's testimony to God's perfect justice, goodness and mercy or you don't.

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Of course I’m making no claim about that. I’m just pointing out the implications of Calvinist theology - as I told you. I’m not a Calvinist, and if I were still Christian it’s Calvinism I would throw out.

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Christians will not obey the law because it contradicts God's Law.

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You keep saying that but you never produce a law that you’d actually be disobeying.

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God's justice that you call monstrous is in fact righteous and good and just though fromn our point of view it seems unnecessarily harsh

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That’s hardly an accurate presentation of my points. Try this: Calvinism implicitly claims that God is monstrously unjust - and the harshness is far from the worst thing about it.And until you actually address my reasoning my case stands.

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You judge Him from our human feelings because we are not in a position to see things from His point of view. But scripture tells us His judgments are righteous

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Then either scripture is incorrect or Calvinism is.

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You either believe it or you don't.

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You seem to be trying to do both.

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Let your case stand, I'm fine with that. You are going to stick with it no matter what anyway.

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If you could actually show my case to be wrong I wouldn't stick to it. But since you haven’t even attempted to answer it, it seems pretty clear that you can’t.

You haven’t challenged any of the premises (which are mainly Calvinist theology anyway). I don’t think that there is anything else that is all controversial in there.But if you want to challenge any of them, please go ahead. Just make sure that what you are challenging really is a premise - because you are very likely to get it wrong.

If you want to burn in Hell, that’s your choice.You talk a lot about breaking God’s Law but you haven’t found one you would be breaking.The whole thing is a secular issue and therefore the province of government anyway - at least according to Protestant thought.

If there is no problem with gays in general, why the pushback against insurance cover for gay partners? Even if they had a recognised civil partnership ?If there was ever a compromise to be reached short of gay marriage, things like that killed it. And that’s on the Christians

If you don’t follow what’s going on that is your problem.At least you can stop arguing that a compromise short of recognising gay marriage was possible. It wasn’t.