Gay Marriage as an attack on Christianity

All the business owners we are discussing and millions of others who agree with them, disagree with you about that. A Christian should realize that what God said about marriage in Genesis 2:24 applies to the whole human race, all the progeny of Adam and Eve who are there married according to God's word. Marriage laws across the world generally follow the basic pattern more or less anyway, because every culture and every human being still retains some memory of the true God. And a Christian ought to know this.; What we are talking about in this thread is the conscience of a Christian about God's law about marriage, not about any secular law or any individual's marriage. And nobody is stopping them. Some bakers might have a problem with it, I don't know. But remember please that we are not talking about personal sins, not adultery or homosexual acts or any of it, the subject is respect for God's law of marriage. Gay marriage is a violation of the marriage ordinance itself. Adultery, although sin, does not challenge the marriage ordinance.

I've tried different ways on this thread to get across why making a wedding cake for a gay wedding puts the baker in the position of treating gay marriage as legitimate, and if none of it is convincing to you all that is left is pointing out that this is a matter of a Christian's conscience, it happens to be shared by a LOT of Christians, and a person's conscience is not subject to bartering. Agreement on that is not possible, so if we want both parties to be happy we have to go about it some other way. We happen to be talking about homosexuals here. But maybe even a hardened Leftist, Marxist feminist, evolutionist or anti-Christian political conservative could be reached. You never know. It's generally one person at a time, one step at a time.

But it doesn't matter if it's "religiously legitimate" or something else, that's not the point. The point is that a Christian understands that God gave us marriage, God defines marriage, it applies to all human beings in all times, it's a Law, like the laws of the Ten Commandments except it's called a "Creation Ordinance." The only other Creation Ordinance I know of for sure is the requirement that women cover our heads in the worship service --, which derives from the fact that Adam was created first and then Eve created out of his body --which unfortunately is disobeyed by most churches these days. (In fact when a law or a creation ordinance is disobeyed there are repercussions -- if one is rejected others are more easily rejected and it may be that all these situations with gay marriage are one of the repercussions. There are lots of preachers out there admonishing the Church about various kinds of sins and disobedience in the churches, but nobody ever mentions the head covering disobedience. Except me in my blog, which of course hasn't had any effect that I know of. Now that I think of it I should probably do another post on it.}ANYWAY. Christians do understand that Genesis 2:24 is God's Creation Ordinance/Law of Marriage that defines marriage for all people in all times. It IS marriage, there are no other forms of it, just human deviations from it. ABE: We can't control the deviations, but we are bound to obey our understanding of God's creation and definition of marriage.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

As long as people keep making this kind of "objective" argument, the only answer left is that all those business owners and some millions of others say you're wrong, and the businesspeople are the ones who said so with their actions and got punished for it. So your way of reading the Bible is quite irrelevant to the situation.Also, the people who acted on it may not even have a theology about the marriage ordinance, they might not even be able to say where it is in the Bible, they just know what God said about marriage and that Jesus repeated it and that is the definition of God-given marriage for them which they won't violate. In other words this is something Christians just "know" and millions agree on it independently and consistently. It's odd any Christian has any other idea about it.

I don't see where you are getting that. All that's been said is that Christians can't obey a particular secular law and therefore get punished for it.

Gay marriage changes the definition of marriage; as far as I can see adultery or any other sin does not.

Jesus defined the Sabbath as made for man, and said He Himself is the Lord of the Sabbath, the idea being that He has the power to define it, and it was meant to be a blessing and not a burden.The only changes Jesus made to the moral law were to reveal their stricter meaning than the ancient Israelites understood, far from loosening them. Even lust in the heart is to be understood as adultery,and hared in the heart is to be understood as murder There is no way gay marriage is justified in anything Jesus said.

Most secular laws don't conflict with God's law in such a way as to put a Christian in a dilemma, but the law legitimizing gay marriage does. God is God, no secular law can be above His in the mind of a Christian. And Roman law said that everybody had to worship Caesar.

I have to protest as usual that you are misrepresenting the situation again: The baker is not objecting to "someone," he's objecting to an illegitimate definition of marriage. Even Peter Tatchell, the gay activist in the UK who wrote the Guardian opinion piece, argued that there was no discrimination against persons by the Christian bakery, but against an "idea," the idea of gay marriage. In the American cases, the request for a wedding cake was refused not because the customers were gay but because of the service asked for. There is no evidence that their sexuality was the reason the order was declined. No other order would have been declined, just the order that legitimizes gay marriage. As NCE was apparently trying to say, the bakers should not be compelled to supply a service that legitimizes a concept to which they conscientiously object. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

IN this case yes. Times have changed, The Messiah has come. He is Lord of the Sabbath. He IS God, He can change His own Word.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

I hate to disillusion you, it seems to matter so much to you, but I became a Christian out of a totally liberal-atheist background with a strong conviction that the world was going to Hell because of the irrational religions that had descended on America in the 70s. The thing is, Christianity is TRUE and when it hit me it was like a lightening bolt, it transformed me completely. As I got deeper into it I also fought it for some time as I saw the truth closing in on me: "Oh no am I really going to have to accept all this?" Yep, in the end I did.I know you can just say, oh well, so some educated people are fundamentally irrational or something like that. Well, with that bias you aren't very likely to be convinced.But CSLewis is one who became a Christian as a Professor at -- Oxford (?) -- and described himself as coming to belief "kicking and screaming."The story of Rosaria Butterfield is very interesting in this regard. She was a lesbian professor of English literature at a university. She wrote or said something against Christian belief and a pastor contacted her about it, invited her to his home to discuss it, and over a few years of such discussions and friendship developing with him and his wife she began to realize it was true and she wanted it for herself. Her first book about it was "Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert."ABE: Later: I'm reading the book, she is pondering how to describe her conversion without making it sound like an alien abduction or a train wreck. /ABEThere are lots of us "unlikely converts" around.More education obviously can't be the cure you think it is.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

I don't know what an Eid cake is or enough about halal etc to have any idea whether it would be a matter of conscience or not.

I don't see a problem of conscience with any of that.

I'm aware of the context, but since I think that case and the American cases are basically the same for Christian conscience I think he might agree with me. If not, then I'll still have my own opinion that they are the same thing.

For some reason it doesn't hit me as a matter of conscience though. Maybe something like that teaching about eating meat sacrificed to idols -- it's meaningless because idols are nothing. Ramadan is nothing, Mohammed was a deceived person. Something like that. If I think of a clearer way of saying it I will, but at the moment in my mind it's nothing more than a food recipe.Whereas gay marriage is a violation of God's marriage ordinance.Second thought: However, as in the passage about meat sacrificed to idols, if my making food for such a festival was a matter of conscience for somebody else I would have to say no to it.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.