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Perhaps 40 years from now certain posters will have accumulated enough neurons to understand concepts such as contractual law and rational basis. One can only hope.
Some people on this thread REALLY need to learn the difference between advocating and observation (or prediction, as it were).
Well, now you know why it is dangerous to go around baiting people with troll threads laden with sarcasm. Say what you mean and mean what you say, is that so hard? This forum would be way better off if people didn't think they were smarter than the average bear and try to slip side agenda's in under the guise of something else or try to influence the susceptible with irrational and alarmist points of view.
Well, now you know why it is dangerous to go around baiting people with troll threads laden with sarcasm. Say what you mean and mean what you say, is that so hard? This forum would be way better off if people didn't think they were smarter than the average bear and try to slip side agenda's in under the guise of something else or try to influence the susceptible with irrational and alarmist points of view.
H
Troll thread?
What?..because you disagree with a viewpoint it must be a troll thread?
Ask your mommy or daddy how the Internet works and get back to us when your older son.
If you are offended by other viewpoints then why do you even come to this board? You are going to have trouble sleeping at night if you can't deal with the real world as it is and not how you wish it would be.
Tell you what...just list the viewpoints you will allow on this board and I will make sure I don't go against them since you can't handle what you see.
Huh? Repealing discriminatory laws that ban homosexuals from contracting civil marriages with each other has no effect whatsoever on religious or church marriages.
That isn't quite true. In very large part, those gays most desirous of a change in existing marriage laws are religious. They will no more be satisfied with a state certified legal wedding than a straight couple with a similar amount of religious inculcation. Until someone really breaks down for me how and why a Civil Union is different from a Civil Marriage I am not going to really understand the issue. Furthermore, if obtaining civil marriage is not a first step victory to the ultimate goal of forcing religious institutions to perform same sex religious sanctioned marriages then some kind of statement to that effect should be issued by the gay community. If churches knew that they would not come under petition to change their policies there might not be amount of fear and loathing for the idea of civil marriage. But first things first. How is Civil Marriage different from Civil Union. Anyone?
That isn't quite true. In very large part, those gays most desirous of a change in existing marriage laws are religious. They will no more be satisfied with a state certified legal wedding than a straight couple with a similar amount of religious inculcation. Until someone really breaks down for me how and why a Civil Union is different from a Civil Marriage I am not going to really understand the issue. Furthermore, if obtaining civil marriage is not a first step victory to the ultimate goal of forcing religious institutions to perform same sex religious sanctioned marriages then some kind of statement to that effect should be issued by the gay community. If churches knew that they would not come under petition to change their policies there might not be amount of fear and loathing for the idea of civil marriage. But first things first. How is Civil Marriage different from Civil Union. Anyone?
H
Okay. First off, civil marriage and religious marriage are separate, unrelated things. Religious marriage is something set by a church. It can be whatever that particular church (or mosque, or temple, etc) wants it to be consistent with that organization's religious beliefs. A church can only marry one man to one women if it wants. A church can only perform same sex marriages if it wants. A church can marry every member to every other member in a giant polygamous web. A church could conduct marriages between women and desk lamps.
The government cannot dictate to a church what kind of marriage it preforms. That would violate the 1st Amendment of our Constitution. I have never met a single person (gay or straight) who wants to force religious institutions to ordain gay marriages. That would be a disgusting violation of the freedom to practice religion enshrined in our Constitution.
A civil marriage, on the other hand, is a contract within our civil, secular law that confers to the couple contracting it some 1400 joint civil rights. Over the last decade, many states, as well as the Federal Government, have passed laws making it illegal for homosexual couples to contract civil marriages thus denying homosexuals access to these 1400 civil rights. All gay marriage proponents want is equal treatment under the law (another thing guaranteed and enshrined in our Constitution) - we want back access to these 1400 civil rights.
Civil unions (and even full out gay civil marriage) on a state-by-state basis are in no way equivalent to civil marriages. Of the 1400 civil rights of a civil marriage contract, 1100 come from the federal government. DOMA, the defense of marriage act, states that gay couples - no matter if legally married in New York, in a Civil Union in New Jersey, or simply committed partners in Colorado - can ever have the 1100 federal civil rights of marriage.
That has real consequences in the lives of gay people. If my straight friend Sally meets, falls in love with, and marries a Frenchman, he gets to come to the US to live and work under a spousal immigration visa. If a gay New Yorker marries, or a gay man from New Jersey civil unions a Frenchman, he will be deported if found in the US. If a straight Iowan business owner employs his wife, he does not have to pay unemployment insurance tax on her wages. If a gay business owner employs his husband, he does have to pay that tax. If two married guys from Vermont, one gay and one straight, join the military, the straight guy's wife can live on base and shop at the base commissary whereas the gay guy's husband cannot.
Gay's fight for same sex marriage has nothing to do with religion. It's a fight for our civil rights - a fight to be treated equally under the law - a fight to end legal discrimination and being treated as second class citizens.
If two married guys from Vermont, one gay and one straight, join the military, the straight guy's wife can live on base and shop at the base commissary whereas the gay guy's husband cannot.
That's because a marriage cannot consist of two husbands. Or two wives. Affording people some sort of accomodation within strict legal bounds owing to their unusual relationship is one thing. Redifining terms willy-nilly to satisfy some sort of absurd and perverse political agenda is quite different.
How would you like it if hammers were henceforth to be called nails and nails were to be hammers, and that it became legally required to permit carpenters to hold the nail between their fingers and strike down onto the hammerhead, since the carpenter plaintiffs were, after all, born that way, needing to engage in painful, issueless behavior? The masochists in the home-building community might be thrilled, but the rest of us would be both inconvenienced by construction delays and penalzied by being required to cover the added medical costs of mangled fingers and disabled workers.
Some civil rights included in this controversy are not rights, at all, but rather wishes. For a man simultaneously wish to be be and to have a husband exceeds both common sense and a proper application of civil concern and concomitant legal remedies. That the nation has moved as far as it has down this road to lunacy is an indicator of its growing irrelevance as a serious society, and is not some sort of progressive evolution -- not, that is, unless one is willing to consider metastasis evolutionary.
I've seen a lot of discussion in the last year or two about multi-verses, and what is at the end of our universe. What makes your view any more correct?
My view is essentially unrelated to those discussions. It is based entirely on the premises of the cosmological argument, except unlike the cosmological argument I do not abandon those premises and directly contradict them to reach a predetermined conclusion. I allow the evidence and the reasoning to drive the conclusion, not prejudice.
They are in fact the same conclusions you yourself have repeatedly reached... right before you contradict yourself and abandon the logic that led to them. They are the conclusion of an infinite regress... the only logical conclusion that is possible to reach if the laws of causality and conservation are true.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Calvinist
So the big bang didn't happen? There are a lot of people that would disagree.
The Big Bang did happen. But as I have told you dozens of times before (always causing you to run away) the Big Bang is not the point at which the universe began. It is the point at which the universe became like it is now.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Calvinist
He is an intelligent being that exists outside of the universe. He is bigger than the universe, so is not a part of the universe.
And that is why your explanation is inferior. Not only is it incapable of being reasoned to, it requires the ad hoc assertion of an entire class of entity for which there is no evidence whatsoever. An eternal universe requires no such fantastic flights of fancy. We don't have to enter the realm of fiction for it to solve the problems of cosmology.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Calvinist
I'm not running. I can't help it if you post when I'm not around. Perhaps you should wait until I'm here. Or maybe don't claim victory when you don't win? That might be good.
Oh I do not accuse you of running because you don't post right away. I accuse you of running because you continue to post without ever addressing the argument. Instead you pretend the argument was never made, and then you simply reassert the same stale positions that have already been refuted.
You will ask again questions that have been answered scores of times (as you did in this post). And then you will ultimately run away.
The views on morality will "evolve" and "progress" to the point where it will be wrong to deny the love of two people, one of whom will be a child. :
100 years ago it was commonplace. And you do need to consider that biologically most girls are able to bear young at 12-13. Not that I'm endorsing such a thing, I am explicitly not, but standards change.
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