Muslims promote Sharia law. Why do Christians not promote their law?

Exactly. Under the U.S. Constitution, a homosexual should have the same access to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness just the same as anyone else. His private life in his own home with his partner is no one else's business. But he shouldn't have the right to the public institution of marriage, if the majority sees it as a public burden. I don't think they need a contract for anything - single people don't have a contract.

Yes yes, I was drawn into off topic stuff, and you took off with that without commenting on my comparison of your example of religious oppression and my example of secular oppression. Other slightly different variations of Wedge Document opinions have been posted at EvC dozens of times before. Are you finished now, you have nothing else to say about my message 83? Back in message 35, you said this; Following the question asked by the opening poster of this thread (who starts threads and then abandons them?) I've made the case that a secular government can be more oppressive than a religious one, and no one has shown any evidence to the contrary. I'll be watching if you or anyone else would like to start a thread about "what manner of secular government we would prefer." I'd particularly like to see a description of any secular government in the present day and age that wouldn't have government promoted health and safety as one of its top priorities, with the scientific community heavily influencing its leadership.

The differences between various secular and religious governments are not the real focus of this thread.It is a given that there could be a wide range of variation in each, from extremely oppressive dictatorships or theocracies to benign examples of each. That's not the issue.The issue is the promotion of religious law vs. secular law.Many believers seem to feel that their particular religious beliefs should be followed by everyone else, and that these beliefs should be enforced by law. This is particularly true when members of a specific religion approach a majority of any population.See, for example, what is happening in Malasia:

Malaysia's Islamic party is pressing for more areas of law to be dealt with under an Islamic legal code, causing concerns among religious minorities, despite reassurances they would not be affected.

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There are two Malaysias. One for the Muslim majority - the other for Christians, Hindus, Buddhists and non-Muslims.

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For example, Malays do not have the freedom to choose their religion. It is written in the constitution that all ethnic Malays must, by definition, be Muslim.

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More

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Malaysia's minorities fear Islamic law changes - BBC News

Are you in favor of this kind of nonsense? Because this is what you get when you let religions start enforcing their beliefs using the power of the state.A pox on all your houses!

marc9000 writes: marc - can you describe what the public burden of a homosexual marriage is? In your own words? I'm trying to think of one.Traffic jam due to the wedding? Ooo, lets just get rid of all weddings, then. No - that's not right...Fewer traffic-blocking gay pride parades because the need to assert cultural acceptance has been met a little bit. Wait. Fewer traffic jams, not more...sorry.A drop in the abortion rate from within married couples, because every child a homosexual couple has is most definitely wanted - wanted to the extent that they have to do something they don't want to do to get a child. What if it had turned out that the only way you could have a child biologically was to mate sexually with a homosexual partner? But you still wanted a child bad enough to do it?Oh - sorry - was a drop in abortion rates a public burden? Ooops.More jobs for divorce lawyers? Yeah, that could be bad. That's it. Damn lawyers. See? Now your taking on the American Bar Association. Hmmmmmm.Maybe you can come up with something, because, gosh darnit, I sure can't. Help me out here.

The majority doesn't. And isn't getting married part of the "pursuit of happiness" (see below)? Need, schmeed. That's not the criterion for whether you can make a thing illegal. People don't need donuts or wallpaper or cable television, but that's not a reason to arbitrarily ban things. If people have a right to the pursuit of happiness, as you admit, then unless there's a really compelling reason to ban something which makes someone happy, we shouldn't.

Exactly how is it bad for society? I can't see how it could be. Like those dastardly black and white folks wanting to get married pre 1967 in America or pre 15th Century Britain?Edited by Larni, : No reason given.Edited by Larni, : No reason given.Edited by Larni, : No reason given.

To many people, the "pursuit of happiness" includes marriage - and to the person of their choice, not a government-approved candidate. Marriage is not essentially a "public institution". It's a contract between two people which the government recognizes by affording it certain privileges, e.g. tax breaks.The government has no business interfering in whom you make a contract with. If it can forbid homosexuals from marrying, it can also forbid you from selling your house to a black man. But marriage is a contract. It may have certain social implications as well but the government has no control over that. As far as the government is concerned, it's just a contract between two people. And single people who are cohabiting do indeed have a sort of unwritten contract. That's why it's called a "common law marriage". That's why the law recognizes "palimony".

Marc9000, I hope you understand that this statement illustrates exactly how poor a showing you've made here. Yes there are some particularly bad secular governments that are worse than one particular religious ones. What point does that make? Anyone can easily cite a counter example. Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.

So do you concede this is something else you are absolutely wrong about?You were talking big but now you seem to be ignoring me.I'd like to address the crap you posted about homosexual marriage, but would like to put this to rest before I destroy that argument too.Wintryknight? Really? That is your source? You are making things way to easy.

I don't see a difference. The only way to analyze religious law vs. secular law is to analyze the governments that would apply them. It's never been a problem in the U.S. While there may be some very small religious groups in the U.S. that believe this, they are far too small to be taken seriously. And there's no evidence that they're growing in strength, in fact, there is evidence for just the opposite.In yesterday's Sunday newspaper, I read a column by one E.J. Dionne, a liberal Washington Post columnist. I don't know what his religious affiliation is, and it's not important - I believe the statistics he cites, though I don't trust all those who answer questions in these types of surveys. This column I'm referring to was easy to find on the net;http://www.washingtonpost.com/...369-d1954abcb7e3_story.htmlHe shows some statistics there that should ease your mind as an atheist, and scare you do death if you're a conservative. Just a few highlights;

quote:

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...28 percent of Americans could be classified as religious conservatives, 38 percent as religious moderates and 19 percent as religious progressives. An additional 15 percent were nonreligious.

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Among supporters of the two parties, Republicans were far more cohesive. The analysis found that 56 percent of Republicans were religious conservatives and 33 percent were religious moderates. Only 5 percent were religious progressives and just 6 percent were nonreligious.

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Democrats, by contrast, were all over our analytical map: 28 percent were religious progressives, 13 percent were religious conservatives, 42 percent were religious moderates and 17 percent were nonreligious.

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Among self-identified political liberals, the proportion of nonreligious essentially, the folks sending me those messages was even larger: 31 percent of liberals were nonreligious, 33 percent were religious progressives, 30 percent were religious moderates and 6 percent were religious conservatives.

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Two things are thus true simultaneously: Nonreligious Americans are a very important part of the liberal constituency,yet the majority of liberals have ties to religion

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(hmmm, must be devout Diests)Now here comes the big one;

quote:

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Yet if liberals face obstacles when it comes to faith, conservatives have problems of their own. The most serious? The religious conservatism that is such an important component of the right and the Republican Party is deeply unattractive to the rising generation of voters.

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The "rising generation of voters", students from today's atheist science classes, young voters who grow up with two mommies and no daddies, or two daddies and no mommies. You know I'm not, and you know it's not a threat in the U.S. Are you in favor of the scientific 4th amendment trashing that I described in message 85?

It's pretty well described in the link in my message 85. I don't feel like going into more detail about here, it's too far off topic.

Can't say I agree with that, I've compared Coyote's example of inconvenience of Sunday shopping to my example of a scientific trashing of the fourth amendment, and now it seems that about everyone here now wants to discuss gay marriage. But no one seems to be anxious to do it. Maybe because there are no actual serious threats to liberty by religion in the U.S. and there are plenty of serious threats to liberty in the U.S. by secular science.

That WHAT is something that I'm wrong about? You didn't quote anything from message 77 - the main thing there seemed to be your denial of something you actually said. Yes, someone else performed the fallacy of poisoning the well on that one too. I'd like to have explored his reasoning about that, but if I'd have asked him about it he'd have flown into a rage and denied that he said anything about it.Rather than mocking the source, why don't you read what it actually says?

I was referring to its influence on the constitution of the U.S. and that's when you told me it wasn't a founding document of the U.S. So if you believe it DID, or COULD HAVE had influence, what was your purpose to say that it wasn't a document of the U.S.?

Looking through your post, this is the only point that seems to be within the topic. Your other points relate more to types of, and practices of, secular governments.I think your use of the term "atheist science classes" says a lot about your views, and informs about most of your posts.In reality, there is no such thing as an "atheist science class." There are only science classes. Science, as you clearly know, is based on evidence. If science finds evidence of deities or the "supernatural" it will follow that evidence. The problem for theists is that no such evidence has been found.But from the tone of your posts, you, like the Discovery Institute, would have science replaced by "design theory," as if that were actually a part of science: In other words, this group and a substantial number of similar-minded folks would destroy science in order to force it to kowtow to their unevidenced beliefs!This is what I oppose.Believe what you want, and rub blue mud into your navel on alternate Thursdays if that is what makes you happy, but don't try to force those beliefs on the rest of us.