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Location: In a little house on the prairie - literally
10,202 posts, read 7,926,708 times
Reputation: 4561
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Quote:
Originally Posted by bryan85
On a more serious note, I have recently changed my opinion regarding how God sees homosexuals. I used to think they were all doomed to hell. Now, He has helped to see them from a different perspective. I myself have not stopped sinning (although I do believe I sin less, to a lesser degree, and have a much stronger desire not to sin) since I gave my life to Jesus Christ, but I do not doubt my salvation. I don't believe any sin dooms someone to hell (including homosexuality), except not believing. I'll leave the Judging part to Christ as to who gets in and who doesn't. I believe a strong desire to repent factors in, but again, I cannot know His mind.
You missed my point.
Zoroastrian's deity IS Mazda. They were arguably the first monotheist religion. Darius was a Zoroastrian, and much of the Jewish, and by extension, the Christian religion came from them.
Location: In a little house on the prairie - literally
10,202 posts, read 7,926,708 times
Reputation: 4561
Quote:
Originally Posted by Vizio
Yet, you continue to argue as if you're a Constitutional expert! The fact is, the 14th Amendment does not create this mythical separation of church and state that has never existed. The 1st Amendment didn't create it, and it is found nowhere in Scripture. Allowing Bibles to be handed out does not take anyone's rights away, nor does it create any kind of state religion.
Tell that to all the judges who have sat on that court, oh, since about 1947 when the first ruling came down. BTW, both liberal and conservative courts agreed.
I've never seen anyone write a post to you that ONLY attacked you -- and your definition of "attack" or ad hominem is quite a bit different than for the rest of us.
Of course you haven't. That's the frustrating wall of delusion when dealing with your type. You believe you can do no wrong, NEVER be wrong, and you are the measuring stick of goodness and kindness even while being extremely rude, bitter and insulting in your tone and rhetoric. I've been told I bleat like a sheep, I'm a whiner, I'm stupid and even some awful false suggestions that I commit crimes. In my world, that is a personal attack. If you keep using my name in the conversation, that's making it personal.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Shirina
Plus, an attack on your faith, your God, and your religion is not an attack on you. Unfortunately, most fundamentalists and evangelicals seem unable to make that distinction.
Telling me I need reading comprehension is not an attack on my faith. It's an attack on me. See post #282
9/13 of the original states had official state religions. Why would they choose to limit state religion?
State religions are an instrument of fascism. The colonial religious rules were barbaric and oppressive (because religion ALWAYS ends up barbaric and oppressive when allowed to make the rules). Everything from laughing or kissing your wife on Sunday to attending a show at the theater was outlawed. Men could literally put a muzzle on their wives if they believed the wives were nagging them. Members of other faiths, especially the Quakers, were literally dragged out of their living rooms and lynched in the town square ....
The Founders didn't want that kind of brutality to continue under the government of the new United States. In fact, the separation of church and state was one of the quintessential differences between the American government and all of the European governments.
The Founders wanted people to be able to worship as they chose and not be forced, coerced, pressured, or pushed into a religion they didn't believe in. They certainly did not want each state to have an official religion thus resulting in non-members being persecuted, oppressed, arrested, and even executed in the same way they were in Europe. It was an active goal of the Founders to ensure there were no inquisitions in the United States, no laws that forced a person to adhere to someone else's religion (which is where the freedom FROM religion comes into play).
I know the less aware and less politically savvy Christians like to holler about how a separation of church and state was never implicitly written into the Constitution. And they're right. I guess the Founders thought that people in the 21st Century would be intelligent enough to read between the lines and not be so literal.
The Founders knew their history. They, like me, knew all too well that whenever religion is handed the reigns of power, the people suffer. Religious rule has ALWAYS, each and every time, invariably and inevitably, created a barbarous, callous, and hateful regime where life is cheap and punishments even for the most trivial and banal things were harsh.
Perhaps even more importantly, allowing each individual state to elevate one particular religion above all others would have been a disaster in terms of keeping the United States united. States like Massachusetts would have been Puritan, Pennsylvania would have been Quaker, Maryland would have been Catholic, etc. I would have given it around a century before states began going to war with each other over their religious differences -- especially when a Pennsylvanian Quaker ends up being executed by a Puritan court in Massachusetts, and incidents such as those.
Giving each state the kind of latitude necessary to create a state religion would almost certainly cause the demise of this country -- which would have eventually allowed some other nation to come along and make the 13 British colonies someone else's colonies. I'm sure Spain would have loved to add those territories to its already large North American holdings.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Vizio
Despite the SCOTUS making new law on the issue, the founding fathers never intended for that to be law. It's quite simple. You've been explained that, as well.
It's only simple because you want it to be simple. Except it's not. And just because you've "explained" it doesn't mean your explanation was in any way correct.
Of course you haven't. That's the frustrating wall of delusion when dealing with your type. You believe you can do no wrong, NEVER be wrong, and you are the measuring stick of goodness and kindness even while being extremely rude, bitter and insulting in your tone and rhetoric. I've been told I bleat like a sheep, I'm a whiner, I'm stupid and even some awful false suggestions that I commit crimes. In my world, that is a personal attack. If you keep using my name in the conversation, that's making it personal.
Telling me I need reading comprehension is not an attack on my faith. It's an attack on me.
Well, when you seem to lack any and all reading comprehension, and reply to something the person never said, then you will get called out for it.
So Jeffery, what about the post below? Are you unable or unwilling to respond?
Quote:
Originally Posted by southernbored
You need to work on your reading comprehension. The point was, most people who are religious were raised that way. Why do you think religion tends to follow regions? Why is the Middle East mostly Muslim? Why is the US and Europe mostly Christian? You need to take your blinders off Jeff. You also need to learn how to read and comprehend what someone is saying. Here is what I said, to refresh your memory.
"Something tells me that the number of Christians would go down dramatically if you exclude Christians who were born and raised in Christian majority countries and taught the ideology from birth"
Do you not see the difference in what I posted, and what you replied to? You said, "Something tells me that 1.6 billion number would go down drastically if you exclude Muslims who were born and raised in Muslim countries and taught the ideology from birth"
I simply showed that this would be the case with any religion.
Why the need to constantly change the goal posts Jeff? Because you realize how ridiculous what you said was, and now you are trying to back out of it?
The Founders wanted people to be able to worship as they chose and not be forced, coerced, pressured, or pushed into a religion they didn't believe in.
What I have a hard time understanding is why fundies WANT this? Jesus was pretty clear in their bible that he did not just want lip service, he wanted hearts. What is the point of forcing people into one's religion?
Well, when you seem to lack any and all reading comprehension, and reply to something the person never said, then you will get called out for it.
Umm no, you just need to drop your counter argument and move on. Telling me that you think I'm stupid serves zero purpose in the discussion beyond pathetic attempt to try and come off as superior.
If you truly believed this, you wouldn't waste your time debating me.
For someone so firmly opposed to Christian conceptions of your perspective you seem quick to let Christians define things for you. Ven. S. Dhammika makes clear what is wrong with allowing Christians (including Noah Webster) to define what "worship" means:
Quote:
There are different types of worship. When someone worships a god, they praise him or her, making offerings and ask for favours, believing that the god will hear their praise, receive their offerings and answer their prayers. Buddhists do not indulge in this kind of worship. The other kind of worship is when we show respect to someone or something we admire. ... This is the nature of Buddhist worship.
When you rip away the Dominionist obfuscation, worship is simply the practice of acknowledging something of ultimate value. Buddhists like Ven. Dhammika worship the teachings of his religious tradition (the teachings, not the teacher, mind you). Pantheists worship the entirety of existence and reality, clearly something that no one can legitimately claim has no value. One would be hard-pressed to defend the claim that Quaker worship even remotely resembles traditional Christian worship. There are even theist and non-theist Quakers that worship together, without convolution, so clearly they're not worshiping a deity.
This is just one of many examples of how perversely Dominionism has affected non-Christians, atheists and other non-theists, and even anti-theists against their will: The domination has imprinted the language itself in a prejudicial manner, biased against non-Christians and especially non-theists, pantheists and those who abide by several other non-mainstream theologies. Words like God-fearing, Godly, and such are synonyms for "good" in such an insidious manner that the ability of non-theists to communicate the parity of their character with that of Christians is unjustly crippled. This imprint cannot effectively be brushed aside with bombastic rejection of Christian claims to the contrary. What is necessary is for non-Christians to claim equal ownership over the language. Rejecting Christian imprinting is how such a large percentage of the members of my religion are atheists.
However, rejection of Dominionist imprinting is just one piece of the puzzle. Similar sophistication of the understanding of how theology serves the human condition explains how, for example, a Reform Jewish congregation in Minnesota called a lesbian to serve as its Rabbi in 1985, despite how archaic conceptions of Judaism would allow no such thing, not just because she was gay but even because she was a woman.
In the end, the point is that non-Christians who care about their own religious freedom need to think more deeply about how Dominionism has and continues to constrain them. Non-Christians and liberal Christians in American all progress through a stage during which we casually and seemingly categorically reject Dominionism. However, as with all first stages, it is naturally somewhat cavalier and not very deep. It is surely everyone's personal choice whether their rejection of Dominionism will remain superficial or instead whether they will do the work necessary to free themselves of the deeper, more insidious layers of the taint.
What I have a hard time understanding is why fundies WANT this? Jesus was pretty clear in their bible that he did not just want lip service, he wanted hearts. What is the point of forcing people into one's religion?
The founders certainly didn't want us to be forced, pressured and coerced into secularism which is exactly what atheists want. Atheists don't want equal respect for all religions. They want religion destroyed and buried.
This isn't about preventing a hotel from promoting Christianity. It's about a very small minority that harbors such hatred for the Word of God that they want it abolished from sight. My original argument stands. A physical book in a hotel drawer has ZERO affect on your life. OTOH it can and has prevented people from committing suicide.
Umm no, you just need to drop your counter argument and move on. Telling me that you think I'm stupid serves zero purpose in the discussion beyond pathetic attempt to try and come off as superior.
If you truly believed this, you wouldn't waste your time debating me.
You just did it again! I never said you were stupid Jeff. You just need to pay more attention to what is posted.
I will just assume that you have no answer, and are unwilling to admit you are wrong about anything, so yea, go ahead and move on. We wouldn't want to make you look any worse.
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