Organized Religion & personal Spirituality

Who do you believe is "promoting homosexuality"? Since the scientific consensus is that sexual orientation is determined at birth, and certainly not by choice, what would be the point in "promoting" it?That would be like promoting "being black" or "being a woman." I mean, we should certainly support people who are those things, but there's not much point in promoting something you have no choice in being, is there?

Forbidden by whom? And for what reason? Who gets hurt by two women having sex? Surely you're not saying that two women having sex with each other is as bad an act as murder, which results in the end of a human life?That's pretty dumb.

Its certainly a restriction of your freedom to disagree with what it means to "faithfully follow the teachings."I guess I don't understand. Are you just playing the devil's advocate, or actually advocating for Muslim theocracy?

How is that different? I mean, if you were going to make a law that said "you have to do these things that this religion states", and that religion was based on the Quran, wouldn't this be exactly what you would wind up with? A set of laws that mandated behaviors that the Quran teaches?What you're describing is literally what it would mean to have a government mandate a certain religion. Well, no, it's not. If it was about how you wished to live, you would just live that way, and you wouldn't need laws mandating it.What this is about is how you wish others to live. Lets call a spade a spade, ok?This message has been edited by crashfrog, 04-10-2005 11:39 AM

How can you have a government that doesn't derive its authority from the people? I mean, that's universal. All governments, even dictatorships, derive their authority from the consent of the governed; they have to, because the governed outnumber the government.How can you propose to derive authority from a book? That simply doesn't work. So if we're going to derive authority from the people, which is impossible to avoid, why not do so transparently, through democracy? Again with the homosexuals. Obsess, much? What exactly to gay people have to do with the topic? I would think that it would be blindingly, stunningly obvious that an Islamic state is only good for a situation where everybody agrees, and not only that, agrees on what the Quran actually says. Clearly that's not the case in your, or anyone's religion.Theocracy simply doesn't work unless everybody agrees on the religion and on the legitimacy of the system, and that's an impossible situation to achieve.

That's not gay, though. Being born gay means being born sexually attracted to, and only to, members of your own sex.Maybe you hadn't noticed lately, but here in America, we hate gays. We tell them, over and over again, that what they're doing is wrong.Yet, somehow we still have gay people. Clearly its not a matter of "encouraging" behavior, because about 2.8% of the population persists in behaviors that they've been repeatedly and violently - even fatally - discouraged from doing.

Struggle? No, not at all. We discuss them, because we all have different ideas about morals, but there's no struggle, because we developed a system of government that respects the individual's right to develop their own moral compass.Critical to that is the separation of church and state, because it takes the government out of the business of morality and puts it in the business of governance. From the same place you get them. No, not the Bible or the Quran, I mean the place that your morals really come from - your community's need to have people living in the same place not kill or harm each other.Everybody's morals come from that need. Everybody's. You don't need a god to know right from wrong. I doubt it. The American people are moral. Therefore our government needs not be in the moral business.

Oh, you didn't get that memo? "Hate gays."