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Put it this way.anywhere the church sent missionaries whether it be Africa, South America, Australian, or the Far East, the story is the same. Promotion of religion to bring about docility in the hope of full subjugation by the conquerers.
the·oc·ra·cy - : government of a state by immediate divine guidance or by officials who are regarded as divinely guided
"Stubborn resistance within the House Black Caucus, a 20-member bloc of African-American lawmakers who have faced a withering lobbying blitz against the plan from black ministers, has helped keep Harris’ legislation in check, with several House members still undecided." My question is this. The ministers are saying that god does not want gay marriage...are they getting this from the same bible, that was used by many to state slavery was ok in early America?
However, you may purchase male or female slaves from among the foreigners who live among you. You may also purchase the children of such resident foreigners, including those who have been born in your land. You may treat them as your property, passing them on to your children as a permanent inheritance. You may treat your slaves like this, but the people of Israel, your relatives, must never be treated this way. (Leviticus 25:44-46 NLT)
When a man sells his daughter as a slave, she will not be freed at the end of six years as the men are. If she does not please the man who bought her, he may allow her to be bought back again. But he is not allowed to sell her to foreigners, since he is the one who broke the contract with her. And if the slave girl's owner arranges for her to marry his son, he may no longer treat her as a slave girl, but he must treat her as his daughter. If he himself marries her and then takes another wife, he may not reduce her food or clothing or fail to sleep with her as his wife. If he fails in any of these three ways, she may leave as a free woman without making any payment. (Exodus 21:7-11 NLT)
Slaves, obey your earthly masters with deep respect and fear. Serve them sincerely as you would serve Christ. (Ephesians 6:5 NLT)
Christians who are slaves should give their masters full respect so that the name of God and his teaching will not be shamed. If your master is a Christian, that is no excuse for being disrespectful. You should work all the harder because you are helping another believer by your efforts. Teach these truths, Timothy, and encourage everyone to obey them. (1 Timothy 6:1-2 NLT)
The servant will be severely punished, for though he knew his duty, he refused to do it. "But people who are not aware that they are doing wrong will be punished only lightly. Much is required from those to whom much is given, and much more is required from those to whom much more is given." (Luke 12:47-48 NLT)
Slavery predates Christianity but the bible accepts its ancient social norms. As you stated, many used the bible to argue in defense of slavery. Many used the bible to argue against slavery too.
Homosexual marriage is viewed by some if not many as an oxymoron. Technically, it does seem to be so. However, words can change meaning and connotation or expand in its definitions and connotations.
Kind of like calling someone an "American" to mean exclusively a United Statesian. So, you can take the word "marriage" which always meant and connoted the privileged social bond of man and woman to expand to mean any two (or more if people wanted) people that "love" each other or invested the state into their sexual lives.
But getting into issues of homosexual marriage is a bit of a philosophical quagmire, and most people so far as I can tell, really don't have that much (if any) historical, philosophical, or theological knowledge on the issue of "marriage" as a concept. Most people seem to assume it's something natural stemming from being born human. Like the need to eat. Or being bipedal.
Few ever ask themselves the question: Why does the state need to be involved in the sexual or romantic lives of its adult citizens?
Civil marriages seem to be just this as opposed to marriages carried out through religious right. The latter, like prayer, predates the former (and so would religious prayer if "secular prayer" ever resulted).
I think political philosophers might recognize the states obligation to be invested in the sexual lives of its adult populations--through marital laws and ceremonies--because they might recognize the family as the basic unit of society.
I know the liberal political philosopher John Rawls did even though he supported homosexual marriage I think. His "Original Position" principle seems to me to be a good conception. He was not against religions keeping or practicing their "comprehensive doctrines" either.
I think gay marriage can be logically accepted by Christians in the United States or the world in the way Christians have come to terms with polygyny in the Islamic world (although, the U.S. Government violently hunted down and crushed the Mormons for this--and why I believe they ended up in Utah). In such away, I don't see why Christian institutions employing gay and lesbian married people can't provide benefits to their spouses, without that being construed approving of gay marriage. But maybe I'm wrong. No Christian institution should be forced to pay for or provide contraception or abortions to women employees. So, maybe my positions are not logically coherent, I dunno.
Anyways, "marriage" for most human history until about the dawn of the 20th Century was not about "love" per se. Ergo, the practice of arraigned marriages, and all the nobilities preoccupation with forming strategic marriages. Because marriage was about heirs. Progeny. More specifically, "legitimate heirs." And that was had through sex.
This is why you won't find Catholic Priests--so far as I know--marrying an 80 year old woman to a 20 year old man predicated upon their "love" for one another. That might happen in a court room with a civil marriage and few people clapping when the groom kisses the bride.
His magnum opus, A Theory of Justice (1971), was hailed at the time of its publication as "the most important work in moral philosophy since the end of World War II,"[1] and is now regarded as "one of the primary texts in political philosophy."
Protestant ministers opposing gay marriage and lobbying against it is not theocracy, however.
The United States is a secular country in that it does not have an official branch of Church or Mosque etc... as the state religion. The United States is not an officially atheist government either. That would have been Kremlin and the USSR.
"No taxation without representation" is why churches are tax exempt (except for property taxes etc.) so long as they do not officially endorse political candidates running for office. Part of that is that no church is supposed to allow political candidates to campaign within its actual church during services. However, Protestant Democrats routinely break this rule. And they do it publicly. Democrats routinely seek image backing in the Protestant Churches like Bill Clinton, Obama, and Rev. Al Sharpton.
But lobbying is completely lawful. Just as atheists and gay advocates lobby government. The Protestant Black Church--more especially of the Baptist Church--have traditionally been the political seat of power in the Black-American community.
It is no wonder that you don't recognize the difference between a choice, the behavior (an ACT of doing something) of an immoral marriage... and forcing that immorality upon society, and actually BEING BORN (with ZERO say in the matter) black because one or both of your parents are black.
There is no gay gene. If there was then it might be possible to have it passed from your parents, but that isn't the case like it is with being born black, or any other race.
I would concur. I don't subscribe to the multiple genes as causative of homosexuality (for some reason people leave "bisexual" out of the discussion of heritability) hypothesis either. I also don't subscribe to the hypothesis that there is a prenatal, hormonal cause.
And Identical Twins can turn out where one is gay and the other straight. They basically share the same genotype.
But even if it were genetically heritable or produced by other biological processes in the womb, it still would not likely persuade moral philosophers and moral theologians opposing it, that it's morally okay. No more than crack baby growing up to become a teenage crack smoker.
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There is much evidence that being lesbian or homosexual is more related to your societal upbringing, and that it is a CHOICE, while at the same time there is ZERO evidence that any person is, was or will be born lesbian or homosexual.
Society has always and will always place pressure on people's behavior, insisting they behave legally and morally because this is something each and everyone of us can control about ourselves. None of us can control what race we are born into.
Now see... I wouldn't call it a choice. I don't think there is a choice involved in who one finds themselves immediately attracted too. The process happens to fast. There's no real deliberation.
My own views are that no one is born heterosexual or homosexual or bisexual and that nuanced factors go into how are sexual orientation or sexual identity develops. I also think human sexuality is far more fluid and malleable than what people in the West feel comfortable admitting.
This was done to the native American aborigines too, they were prevented from practicing their beliefs and the damn missionaries went around spreading their message and bible. In California the natives were rounded up and put in missions as workers, if they ran away, they were caught and had a foot removed to prevent them from repeating it. I think it is sick that the church used missionaries to spread their hate in nearly every country, they did it in Africa, South America, Asia and they wonder why so many find them to be evil and hateful. Why must they try to convert everyone to their religion?
There were certainly some abuses among missionaries. There were some particularly cruel people in some of the religious orders that were missionaries to the Amerindians. I'm thinking of the Pueblo Indian uprising as some friar or monk set some Indian on fire.
But with respects to the Jesuits most Amerindians actually respected and loved them. And the Reductions of Latin America were rather remarkable. But the Jesuits were a rather remarkable order. In what is now the United States and Canada the Jesuits took very good care of the Amerindians. This often incited the local white men of the New World to hate the Jesuits (they got them kicked out of Latin America I think). The Jesuits supplied the Amerindians with more meat and gun powder than the white men usually had. In Latin America they even trained them in European warfare, forming the largest Army in Latin America, to fight off and defend themselves against the white slave traders abducting Amerindians under the Jesuits charge. Needless to say, the Jesuits educated the Amerindians too. But more importantly they were unique as an order in that they were taught by their founder to assimilate into the customs and cultures of the people to the lands they went to--where those aspects did not contradict Catholic teaching. And these Jesuits were often known as "Black Robes." Most knowledge about languages and customs of the Amerindians of the Northwest in the United States has been preserved in written history by the Jesuits of the United States.
In Mexico the Amerindians were largely converted by the mestiza image of Our Lady of Guadalupe. And Amerindians in the hundreds and thousands used to follow priests asking them to baptize them into the faith due to the Amerindian that reported the apparition of the Virgin Mary.
The image of a peaceful Amerindian as what's termed in art history as "the noble savage," that was slaughtered by missionaries is largely a work of fiction and myth. For one thing, while there were some extraordinarily peaceful Amerindian nations like the Pueblo, some of the Amerindian nations like the Comanche were by European (and our current) standards, barbaric. I'm talking about roasting women's infants in front of them, raping the women, killing them possibly, and almost always ritually torturing the men while they dance and sing jubilantly around the screaming tortured victim. And they conducted raids and war like this against other enemy Indian nations--ever before Europeans step foot on their continent.
I would concur. I don't subscribe to the multiple genes as causative of homosexuality (for some reason people leave "bisexual" out of the discussion of heritability) hypothesis either. I also don't subscribe to the hypothesis that there is a prenatal, hormonal cause.
And Identical Twins can turn out where one is gay and the other straight. They basically share the same genotype.
But even if it were genetically heritable or produced by other biological processes in the womb, it still would not likely persuade moral philosophers and moral theologians opposing it, that it's morally okay. No more than crack baby growing up to become a teenage crack smoker.
Now see... I wouldn't call it a choice. I don't think there is a choice involved in who one finds themselves immediately attracted too. The process happens to fast. There's no real deliberation.
My own views are that no one is born heterosexual or homosexual or bisexual and that nuanced factors go into how are sexual orientation or sexual identity develops. I also think human sexuality is far more fluid and malleable than what people in the West feel comfortable admitting.
You might be interested in some of the more recent research:
There is much evidence that being lesbian or homosexual is more related to your societal upbringing, and that it is a CHOICE, while at the same time there is ZERO evidence that any person is, was or will be born lesbian or homosexual.
I know of a family with 4 children. 3 of them turned out to be homosexuals. So why did the only heterosexual child choose not to be a homosexual?
If there was even a single ounce of truth to what you just said, people who hold views similar to mine would be demanding everyone else change their views. As it is, you are a damn LIAR because it is the Gay Agenda crowd who is trying to change society's views and rules on marriage.
Your not even smart enough to recognize how blatantly ignorant and devoid of any honesty your statement above was.
No... It is I who pities you. Let me know when you can be honest about who is trying to force their views upon society. Until then... I am done with you.
But no one is trying to force you to become a homosexual and marry a homosexual. Have you never heard of live and let live? How do two homosexuals legally marrying keep you from living your life?
I'm aware of it, I was in a class in college covering some of it.
You'll find biologist that will bulk at the notion homosexuality is genetically heritable (they don't make much media attention though). Genes themselves have come under some definitional scrutiny by scientists in the life sciences--Richard Dawkins no less wants to redefine genes. The things is that genes are now thought to play a lesser role in determining many of our characteristics than we once thought. In part, because their are genes than what scientists once guessed at.
It was once believed there were on the order of 100,000 genes that made up the human genome, one each for every kind of protein in the body. But there are only about 25,000 genes in the human genome. Meaning, a single gene can code for multiple proteins. Proteome is increasingly becoming a field of research kind of like the field of research of the human genome. But most of that is over my head.
What I can figure out is that studies with their conclusions about homosexuality being heritable etc., draw inferences from statistical data. They do that with brain imagery scans from homosexuals and heterosexuals (but chemical responses in the brain with respects to a sexual attraction is kind of like the puzzel: which came first, the chicken or the egg?). The statistical data itself pretty much rules out having Gene X will for certain, cause Y sexual orientation. And for it to be heritable through genes it needs to be contingent on one or more specific genes.
Basically, it's like hypothesizing more black people are biologically prone to crime than white people. Then looking at melanocyte cells and finding a statistical correlation between black people and incarceration. From that one accepts their hypothesis rather than rejecting it. And science is not immune to people already drawing their conclusions before setting pen to their hypothesis, especially in areas of research dealing with the social and politically charged dynamics of sex.
(A word on inferences and predictability: science seeks not only to offer rational explanations but to make predictions [ergo, biological/genetic determinism], and in doing so those that opposed Galileo weren't entirely wrong, as their model offered mathematical predictions for the movements of celestial bodies and provided a rational explanation [aside from Galileo being wrong about the earth's sun being the center of the universe], and the majority of scientist at the time were in disagree with the two staunch Catholics known as Galileo and Copernicus---but these two Catholics went against orthodox science in methods of investigation, in hypothesis forming, and created a paradigm shift.)
The proteome is the entire set of proteins expressed by a genome, cell, tissue or organism at a certain time. More specifically, it is the set of expressed proteins in a given type of cell or organism, at a given time, under defined conditions. The term is a portmanteau of proteins and genome.
The term has been applied to several different types of biological systems. A cellular proteome is the collection of proteins found in a particular cell type under a particular set of environmental conditions such as exposure to hormone stimulation. It can also be useful to consider an organism's complete proteome, which can be conceptualized as the complete set of proteins from all of the various cellular proteomes. This is very roughly the protein equivalent of the genome.
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