People, please read this... (re: Same sex mariage)

Oh? Sounds like it's just part of our "biological nature", which you just embraced in another thread...

You know, I've never understood the Christian equivocation of non-marital intercourse and disease.I've had pre-marital sex, and marital sex. Those weren't the same people, btw. Guess what? There's nothing about a wedding ring that prevents disease, or the absence of one that creates it.If the HIV person is sorry about anything maybe they should be sorry they had sex with somebody who had HIV, not sorry about having sex. Marrying them wouldn't have cured them.There's a place between marriage and having sex with anybody who asks. It's called "sexual responsibility", and part of it is knowing if your partner has diseases or not. I think it's been made pretty clear that the "gay gene(s)" isn't really elusive - not only can we infer a genetic component from the pattern of heredity, but we can even infer which chromosome it's on. There's no more reason to doubt that homosexuality has a genetic component than there is to doubt that color-blindedness has a genetic component - except that the Bible says one of those is wrong, and says nothing about the other. Actually, it's pretty easy, when you realize that the "sin" model is nothing more than a petty cosmic scorecard. Maybe, but not for homosexuality. Unless the entire city was populated by homosexuals? (Maybe that's why Christians have such a problem with gays? Because they fear that, just as God destroyed Sodom because some of it's people were gay, that they too could risk God's wrath simply by being near a homosexual?)

How does that make any sense? Marriage doesn't cure AIDS. If you have sex with somebody who has AIDS, you'll probably get AIDS. It doesn't matter if you're married to them or not. Marriage is irrelevant to the spread of STDs.

The whole city was gay? How could a whole city be gay? How would such a city survive beyond one generation if nobody's straight? You're mistaken. They didn't want to "know" the men. They wanted to know who the men were!Basically you're assuming that the whole city was gay because they refused to rape Lot's daughters. That's locker-room logic. I can think of a number of reasons to reject a man's offer to allow me to rape his daughters, and none of them mean I'm gay.

It's the married bit that I don't understand. Having sex with only one person (or no people, as well) curbs the spread of STDs, yes.But whether or not you're married to them before, after, or never has nothing to do with the STDs. You get no more diseases from having sex with only ever one person outside of marriage than you do after marriage. Abstaining from sex before marriage has nothing at all to do with disease.[This message has been edited by crashfrog, 09-17-2003]

You can't use the term "sodomite" to refer to homosexuality if we're trying to ascertain whether or not the people of Sodom were homsexuals. That's circular reasoning. After all I could just as easily say that the passage from Deut. doesn't mean "there shall be no homosexual sons of Israel", it means "no son of Israel can be from Sodom."You're trying to say that we know that the people of Sodom were gay because we use the term "sodomite", and that we use the term "sodomite" because the people of Sodom were gay. That's circular reasoning. So yes, please try again.

Yes, clearly the more accurate translation would be "man-whore" or "himbo." (I'm just saying that, as a result of sexist double-standards, there's a lack of good words for overly sexually promiscuous men.)

That would be a straw man. Natural seleciton isn't "the strongest survive." It's "the fittest survive." It isn't suggesting a moral code, it's observing a tautology: we define fitness in terms of those who survive.Concievably there could be a selection pressure for weaker individuals. If that were the case, guess what? The weak would survive and the strong would perish. The weak would be the fittest, because they survived.It can't lead to eugenics, because natural selection isn't a suggestion for action. It's just an observation. You can't say "one's more fit than the other, so I'm going to make sure that the one survives and the other doesn't." If they weren't going to survive on their own then they weren't the fittest. They were less fit. Eugenics is actually counter to natural selection.

Yeah, that's kind of the weird thing, Zealot. You're supporting your points with quotes from the English Bible, and they're pointing out how it's been mistranslated. Then, when they provide the orignal Hebrew, you refute it with more of the English translation! It's a weird vicious circle of nonsense.It's difficult to see how anyone could think that's effective argumentation, even you.

Cornflower?Seriously, don't you have a box of crayons at your house?

Can somebody show me a picture of a cornflower? I've seen lots of corn but none of it had flowers.

Oh. It's not actually a corn-flower, is it? Well, now I know.

Fine, but people like me, or homosexuals for that matter, are going to believe that it's as normal a preference as liking mint ice cream.The larger question is, when it comes to making the rules that we all have to live by - that is to say, laws - why does your opinion trump mine, or the homosexuals themselves? If they want to get married, why do you get to tell them "no"?I'd say a pathological need to make others conform to your own standard of personal behavior is a "sick mentality".

A most appropriate analogy. For the Bible to make sense, you have to look at it with vision obscured.