Condemn gay marriage, or just gay rape?

It so often boils down to those questions--especially when you are dealing with people who righteously do what God would do if He were in possession of all the facts.

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Dost thou prate, rogue?
-Cassio

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Real things always push back.
-William James

So should the ants worship us?

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Dost thou prate, rogue?
-Cassio

​

Real things always push back.
-William James

Yes.It's in my book.

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Dost thou prate, rogue?
-Cassio

​

Real things always push back.
-William James

The problem is that I think everything you said about marriage is not just nonsense, but pernicious nonsense.Christians who are content to live their own lives from their "vantage point," without forcing their beliefs on others, get my tolerance and respect.Christians who try to press their "vantage point" on everyone as policy and law get all the mockery and opposition I can muster--once you start calling others an abomination, brother, you can't really expect smiles and fellowship in return.Your call for tolerance reeks of hypocrisy.Edited by Omnivorous, : space

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Dost thou prate, rogue?
-Cassio

​

Real things always push back.
-William James

Threats?! Are you delusional as well as deluded?You have no argument but the made-up authority of your god-thug. In case you hadn't noticed, you are losing this debate in the real world: the louder you chant your hateful superstition and bigotry, the faster you lose.You are the threat, Dawnie-boy; I am the cure.

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Dost thou prate, rogue?
-Cassio

​

Real things always push back.
-William James

If that was supposed to be a telling pun, it fell stillborn from your mouth.I stopped appealing for tolerance from Xians long ago--you are largely a broken people, leaning on religious crutches to justify the worst forms of bigotry and discrimination.Eventually, you will go the way of the dodo and human sacrifice; until then, you must simply be resisted, in text, speech and act.As far as I can see, Xians cannot offer genuine tolerance, and thus have no claim on mine.

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Dost thou prate, rogue?
-Cassio

​

Real things always push back.
-William James

Yes, your god, Thug, is running the world's biggest protection racket. I'm not paying. I'm a man, not Man, and able to use reason to see that you bend logic and text into pretzel shapes to justify your bigotry. Why can't Thug speak for himself?I look around at the environmental wasteland of 21st century America, and I see the Judas silver flowing into Christian pockets. What do you see?And you know nothing of my relationship with animals, while I know all I need to know of your mind-numbing hate. The rationale is that we exist, and so we can profitably debate what is moral and what is not. Your god is a steaming pile of too long-unburied superstition. Fictional thugs have no moral ground. No, you just perpetuate the most dehumanizing interpretations: a single instance is a pattern only to a dressmaker, and others who make things from whole cloth. So I'm taking your actions up with you, not with your superstitions. Neither: I'm a mortal man with a functioning brain, able to recognize your attempts to impose your most rancid fantasies on others by claiming the authority of the baby-killing god, Thug.You feel threatened by my tone? How droll--you champion the denial of human worth, and feel threatened by the tone of my protests?I suppose the emperor felt threatened, too, when a child cried out, "Mama, that man wears no clothes!"That's your problem, not mine.By the way, feel free to play with my name as I have with yours--your challenge will be to spell it the same way twice. You claim the expertise to write authoritative exegetical commentary, yet you cannot write a paragraph that could get past my fourth grade teacher.

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Dost thou prate, rogue?
-Cassio

​

Real things always push back.
-William James

I couldn't find where he asked to be buried next to Leah in your quote. He asked to be buried with his fathers.Did I miss something?

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Dost thou prate, rogue?
-Cassio

​

Real things always push back.
-William James

Well, that's where he had already bought his plot--happens all the time.So?Clearly, the relevant fact in the passage is that he wants to be buried in the cave of his fathers. Your delight at me noticing that is nice, but not evidence of your assertion about the passage. What else could he do--have Leah removed?The pattern you see is the pattern of your own beliefs.

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Dost thou prate, rogue?
-Cassio

​

Real things always push back.
-William James

Oh.Is a girl's butthole okay?

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Dost thou prate, rogue?
-Cassio

​

Real things always push back.
-William James

I just quote those to help focus my thoughts; I'm not claiming any contradiction.Well, many folks as they approach death look back over their lives and reconsider. I'll grant you that. Jacob might have done that, too, as you assert in the first quote above. Having buried Leah there, it would be strange if he didn't mention her--but he doesn't start with her, as one might think he would if your reading is accurate. He starts with the cave of his fathers.I don't see the necessity of your conclusions in the second quote. I've had three wives, and I can still wax sentimental about all of them. That has nothing to do with my religious conclusions.Do you believe that every passage in the Bible is charged with theological significance, and that they are knit into a complex pattern in which no one part can be understood without reference to many others? That seems like an awful lot of human apparatus for the word of God, spoken directly to the world.I have read the Bible , though not intently for years, and most of its teaching power came from remarkably simple narratives.It seems to me that once you start down your interpretive path, your personal perspectives will soon impose their own pattern.

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Dost thou prate, rogue?
-Cassio

​

Real things always push back.
-William James

I see.You do know that the latest surveys show that nearly half the heterosexual couples in the U.S. engage in anal sex? Its popularity has steadily increased for decades.But tell me--if God didn't want homosexuality in his pattern, why did God create homosexual people?Why did God create homosexual animals?Why did God create desires in heterosexuals for the very same acts for which you condemn homosexuals?Or do you not believe the created world is part of God's pattern?

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Dost thou prate, rogue?
-Cassio

​

Real things always push back.
-William James

That's a better answer than I'm likely to get from Dawn, who apparently has no answer at all.I don't often dip into the Bible threads for two reasons: one, because it's like punching cotton candy--the other side has tied that poor book up with sticky threads that weave through it like fungal filaments. It isn't allowed to mean what it clearly means unless it agrees with what they already believe. Their arguments groan with the weight of the apparatus they require.Second, the other side somehow believes that a text produced by mortal men can somehow more clearly reveal the word of God than the world he created without any human intermediaries--a sexy world bursting with love in all its splendidly messy forms.Odd, that.I suspect that most literalists take God to be male, making women some castrated, hollowed-out, mutilated form of the masculine.

quote:

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So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.

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I always took this to mean that God created people in his spiritual and intellectual likeness, not that God was male, with a penis, or female, with a vagina, or hermaphroditic with both--though a goddess makes more creative sense, and that last option has a certain egalitarian appeal. I've always wondered if the virgin birth wasn't a lingering remnant of an older, matriarchal deity. We can find female creatures who give birth without help from males, but males alone cannot.If I did believe in God, I would find it the height of absurdity to believe that he cares what two of his spiritual likenesses do with their stuff. After all, what could he do with his, if he had it, that isn't banned by the Bible? The real Book of any Creator would be the unmediated Book of the World, and that is the Book of Love, and there are no chapters on the filth and shame of different flavors, just the celebration of love and respect.Or, in the words of the Mighty Moose, something like that.

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Dost thou prate, rogue?
-Cassio

​

Real things always push back.
-William James

Are those babies in trouble?What the heck was John the Baptist doing?

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Dost thou prate, rogue?
-Cassio

​

Real things always push back.
-William James

One valid response to the OP's bible study question is, who cares what that book says?Modern Christians don't commit genocide against their enemies' babies, don't kill witches, don't wear the clothes Deuteronomy demands, and do eat shellfish.The Bible has no more authority to dictate our social policies than do Mayan glyphs.

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Dost thou prate, rogue?
-Cassio

​

Real things always push back.
-William James