I believe I can show some pretty solid young Earth evidence. So.. you're saying that ANYONE who says the Earth is 6,000 years old no MATTER what... is automatically wrong? Correct?
Not to respond to a question meant for somebody else, but I think that what you're dealing with is more, "I've seen most of the arguments that people tend to put forward for a young earth, and they've all been crap so far, so I'm very skeptical of your claim." Personally, I'm happy to see the new evidence, but history shows that it tends not to be especially good.
At which point does one draw the line that believing in the improbable requires more faith than believing in a sovereign, omnipotent God?
Well, I suppose that if I knew for a fact that the only two explanations were an improbable event or God, I would find it easier to believe in God if that's where the odds were pointing. I don't see how this is the case, though.
I understand the notion behind unbelief but at a certain point, from the outside, it really just looks like grasping at straws to avoid responsibility for one's own sins.
You're not a Christian because you don't have the stomach to sacrifice young girl to Chicomecoatl once every September, are you?
And where did all this matter in the universe come from? I thought that matter could not be either created or destroyed, so did the universe start with all this matter (if so, how?) or did all this matter just appear by magic and then explode causing the "big bang"?
Are you suggesting that the problem "everything has to come from somewhere" is more logically solved by positing an exception to the rule and calling it God? Why not simply do away with the rule, or simply call the exception to the rule "the universe"?
And evolution? I thought entropy says that systems left to their own devices evolve downward, not upward.
The "open minded" scientific community seems to be very closed to hearing out these non-religious scientists.
So far, what have these scientists produced in the way of actual, positive evidence beyond their personal incredulity about natural selection? It's not that they're not being given a fair hearing. They just haven't managed to say anything interesting yet.
I don't think that anybody is questioning whether a mistake was made. The problem is that there's no reason to publicly humiliate the people (read: volunteers) who made it in order to correct it. The point could just as easily have been made without specifically naming anybody.
I know that if I sent out a mass emailed "reminder" to my company about the proper protocol for something and specifically called out somebody from another group in it, the response would be a universal, "What a dick!" I'd be lucky to avoid being taken to the woodshed by my boss for it. That's just not how it's done.
America is by no means innocent, but when you have an extremist group instigate a non conventional war against us I'm not
even going to pretend they have a valid beef with us. Any position these folks have is an untenable need to impose
strict interpretations of Sharia and the obsessive need to wipe out anyone who does not follow their belief.
I don't think that anybody is proposing that we give the terrorists what they want. Some of us are just pointing out that crazy people have a hard time operating when their saner neighbors fundamentally disagree with them. The trick is to address the grievances of the sane people so that when the time comes, they report the people making bombs in the house next door rather than letting it slide and saying, "Well, the Americans have it coming anyway. Why should I get involved?"
The reality is that we're doing such a bad job on that front that people who could be helping us restore law and order actually like us less than the types of people who blow up vegetable markets. How could we possibly have blown it that badly?
You are mistaken, foreign affairs and other issues are heavily intertwined with his "better judgment" pitch. Discredit his judgment and a lot of Democrats suddenly feel Clinton is better positioned to take on McCain.
Well, that may be how it's perceived and how it may work out, but I can't honestly see how any Republican should legitimately get any traction out of pointing out that his opponent is associated with batshit insane religious leaders. It's basically required to get the Republican nomination.
No, you're certainly right about that. I don't see any reason to seek out people with interesting religious beliefs and bother them about them. The issue is that if you're in the business of making testable claims, you really shouldn't get upset if somebody actually tests them. Any religious proposition that also happens to be a claim about the observable world may end up being the subject of some "offensive" science somewhere along the lines, whether it's the the decaying speed of light theory of cosmology or the demon possession theory of disease.
While we're at it, let's drum all of the crazy hate spewing preachers out of politics--including the ones whose boots the Republicans have to lick every election year. I thought that part of Obama's appeal was that he understood the set of people for whom a fringe religious lunatic is part of the standard entourage.
What's interesting about that is how things have changed. It's starting to look like the congressional districts are so badly gerrymandered that it's the representatives who don't have to be responsive to their districts because they're rarely in competitive elections, while the senators sit in unstable seats that they have to defend against meaningful challengers (albeit less regularly). Oops.
If he had never had sex, he would be a virgin. You wouldn't know if he was a homo- or hetero- sexual. The only think you could do if you wanted to know is ask him and take his word for it.
I think that you and I are going to keep talking past each other because we fundamentally disagree on the nature of human sexuality. Such is life.
I want to say as an aside, I've finally added you as a friend. It's long over due. We've crossed paths a number of times, and while we generally disagree on most of the things I find worth discussing with random slashdotters, it's always interesting to hear what you're thinking. I'm typically on board with your reasoning, if not your axioms. It usually goes better than this because I'm not usually sleep deprived and highly snarky (read: acting like a dick). It's good to have some control rods in the echo chamber.
Actually, I am for calling a spade a spade and looking at it for what it really is. Your reading into things too much here. And as for the Christian thing, go for it. Sooner or later you will run into some that will kick your ass back. well, unless you specifically hide from those types. But you see, even then what you would be doing to the Christians isn't comparable to anything the gays are going through. It isn't like anyone ever indoctrinated a person into gayness by telling them their eternal soul depended on it.
I suspect that we're talking past each other at this point, given that you seem to think that a person's choice of religion (a choice that people very often reject and change later in life on intellectual grounds alone) is less of a choice than one's sexual orientation. I also assumed that you'd figure I was being facetious about hitting Christians in the face. I actually don't disapprove of Christianity and I don't approve of hitting people in the face over it. I'm pointing out that the "It's your own fault that you chose to do something that I'm punishing you for doing" doesn't really hold water when there's no rational reason for the punishment.
Lol.. You act like nothing else in the world is a viable option if you don't specifically think of it. You tell me how the injustice goes, it seem as if your having a conversation with someone else.
No, moving away from injustice is certainly a viable option. It just doesn't fix the injustice.
You where whining that you married someone and faced injustices. I mentioned you could go somewhere else, it appears you don't understand why it was an injustice so you wouldn't have been part of the cure.
For the record, I've never faced any injustice. It was a thought experiment. My interracial marriage hasn't caused me a lick of trouble, and I'm thankful for that, because people I know from older generations don't have the same story.
I know you don't understand. It will always be difficult for you to understand. BTW, do you have stock in shaving cream companies or something? It that why your pushing the acceptance of gay marriage?
No, I'm pointing out that your criteria for delineating what is OK discrimination and what isn't is arbitrary. As I see it, you're essentially saying, "But you see, in the first case, he wanted to marry a woman, and that's OK. In the second case, he wants to marry a man, and that's not OK." That's not an illustration of your point. It's just stating it in stark biological terms. What I'm saying is, if we do away with the assumption that there's something inherently less correct about homosexual relationships than heterosexual ones, there really aren't any arguments against gay marriage that hold up, much like the analogous arguments against interracial marriage ceased to hold up when we stopped assuming that there was just something fundamentally wrong with it.
And your missing the point. It isn't that you can chose to look elsewhere, it is that the defining factors of the prohibition has to do with anomalies you were born with or decided to act on by a clear and conscious choice.
And there's the place where we fundamentally disagree. You're working on the assumption that such "anomalies" are justification for treating them as a separate case. I'm afraid we'll have to agree to disagree on this one.
Some people are sexually attacked to young boys. Society has said that they can't act on that. When they molest a young boy (or girl) they are prosecuted. Now being a pedophile isn't quite the same as being gay, but according to your logic, we should care about either. If you object to that, you do you draw your line?
Remember when I suggested that your rhetoric was a bit loaded? Here's an example. The implication is that homosexuality is somewhere on a continuum between being "n
First, I'm not anti gay. Second, don't take my ability to look at the logic behind it as so.
So far, you've drawn analogies comparing homosexuality to bestiality, rape, laziness, and moral failing in general. If you stop looking at it as a mistake people make instead of a property of who they are just as your sexuality or mine is, you'll probably come of as less anti-gay. Saying what amounts to, "I don't feel sorry that society kicks you around for being gay any more than I feel sorry that society kicks criminals around" isn't exactly the type of position that reeks of tolerance or looking at the "logic" behind an issue.
I object to them comparing what is a choice to the struggles of people who had no choice.
The distinction you're drawing still seems to be, "You can be who you are, just don't act on it." The "Love the sinner, hate the sin" type of thing makes people feel better, but I can't help but wonder how they'd react if I said, "I like you, but I disapprove of you being a Christian. As long as you hide it from me and never actually pray or recognize any religious holidays, I won't punch you in the face. If you don't and you get punched in the face, it's your own fault. I'm giving you a choice here, and you're being very unfair by rejecting it."
Well, you could have moved to france or Europe and escaped the injustices brought about.
Well, we have a solution for injustice right there. Go somewhere less unjust. Or does the logic go, "It's not unjust because you can go somewhere else"?
But anatomically speaking, there is no difference between a white woman and a black woman. They are all pink on the inside.
Anatomically speaking, the average gay male couple probably weighs more and uses more shaving cream than the average heterosexual couple. I have no idea what the relevance of that fact is to anything. You're trying to apply physiology to an inherently emotional issue.
But the defining fact that was out of the norm wasn't that you chose to marry, it was that you chose to marry someone who couldn't change who she was because she was born that way.
I think that you're missing the point of the analogy. The mutable "choice" is who you're attracted to. The immutable nature that prevents societal approval is an arbitrary biological variable: race, sex, etc. In either case, you could "choose" to look elsewhere for a mate that society approves of. In both cases, why the hell should you have to?
Being Gay in contrast, is wholly defined by a choice to mate with the same sex.
No, it's really not. Being gay is wholly defined by being attracted to the same sex. You're referring to behavior. You can change behavior but not orientation. I suspect that if you had to (let's say, you'd go to a gas chamber, or get lynched, or be stoned, or some other far fetched thing), you could be completely celibate for the rest of your life. You would remain a heterosexual. You simply wouldn't be acting on your orientation.
The motivations are completely disconnected with each other. One can choose another path, the other can't. Your wife can't all the sudden decide to become white. But she can all the sudden decide not to have sex with you.
And gays can't all of a sudden decide to be heterosexual, but their consolation prize is that they could choose a life of closeted celibacy, or at best a life that doesn't allow them any semblance of legal recognition as family. The fact that you're equating sexual orientation with some sort of decision making process makes me wonder how you've gone through life, feeling the attractions and emotional bonds that adults can feel, without noticing that it's not likely something that you could change. You're lucky you're in the majority that society approves of.
Well, again, race isn't something a person can control. Being gay is.
Wow, I didn't realize that they were reading my posts way back in the 1950s. Having gay sex is something you can control. I've never seen any compelling evidence that orientation is. "If you just get back in the closet where we put you, you'll be fine." How charitable.
Now, I'm not saying that it is a posative choice to be gay, it isn't like someone wakes up in the moring and thinks pussy or cock. But the entire definition of being gay invovles making a choice to have sex with the same gender which in turn is the choice that defines them.
Why is it that anti-gay people always equate homosexuality with only sex? Have you ever met a committed gay couple? I have, and let me let you in on their secret: They're no different from the rest of us. I don't see any difference between the relationships some of my gay friends have and the relationship my wife and I have, aside from the fact that they're the same sex and theirs isn't legally recognized. It's not all about the choice to have sex. It's who you form a genuine emotional bond with. They can't change that any more than you could settle into a satisfying relationship with somebody of your own sex.
It really isn't the same as discriminating against the color of someone's skin, ethic make up, gender and so on.
No, they don't feel pain like the rest of us. At least we can take comfort in that. I'm sure there's a study to prove it somewhere.
While being gay isn't a bad or harmful thing, it has about as much in common to the struggles of equality over race, gender, age and so on as beastiality does. Each indevidual person has the same rights in this aspect, it is them making the choice not to accept the norm and go into what people have been conditioned to reject.
I married outside my race by choice. I loved the woman I married, and now we're happily attached. These days, that's about par for the course. Not long ago, it would have been outside the norm and people wouldn't have had a lot of pity for me for the consequences I faced. After all, I had the choice to find myself a nice white girl, so what was I bitching about? No reason for my deviant ways to affect the rest of society. My point is that I would not really have been a whiner had I pointed out that such a system is unjust.
No, I made it quite specific what I am complaining about. Being discriminated by a choice isn't the same thing as being discriminated because of something you were born with.
Rock on. Lutherans? Fuck 'em. They made a choice, their religion sucks, and they don't get to get married any more. Their "marriages" are all about filthy Lutheran sex anyway. They can't form real emotional bonds like real people can. If they'd just get back off the fringe, we could stop kicking them around (except in election years when we need a menace to get people to the polls).
Even even if people where born Gay, which most evidence shows they aren't, it is still akin to a decision deciding to drive on the opposite side of the street then societies rules determin we should.
Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. You've been reading too many press releases from Paul Cameron poster sessions. There's no such evidence of that at all.
There is no inherent right to do so and likewise with gays, the defining point is a choice they made. The claim that it makes them happy can be said about anything we need to take a choice to do, doing drugs, driving on the other side of the street, beating up gays and so on. It make someone happy isn't a valid argument to most people. Getting paid for not working would make a lot of people happy, not paying your bill and spending the money on other things make a lot of people happy, but the bottom line is that people know that not
Currently, any gay person has the same rights that everyone else has- that is to marry someone of the opposite sex.
I don't think that they find that argument any more compelling than the older argument that everybody had the equal right to marry somebody of their own race. Demanding interracial marriage was a "new right" in that respect. So what? I suspect that a person denied a marriage license for an interracial marriage these days would probably be viewed as the subject of persecution by most of civilized society.
I don't have a problem with that until it is being compared with real inequalities and injustices like people being beaten or bared from entering building because of the color of their skin or religious faiths. . . It really sickens me to think that someone could actually think that their willingness to marry someone of the same sex is the same as being hung from a tree to warn other like you to not get out of line or to be rounded up and gassed or baked alive in ovens or have all your possessions stripped from you and kept in horrid conditions barely nourished or forced labor all because of a skin color or religious belief. It simply isn't the same thing.
Well, being beaten and or hung from a tree is another complaint that a lot of gays have. Actually, pretty much everything you listed has been on the list for homosexuals as well. The only one that hasn't been legally remedied is marriage (although beating the shit out of them still seems to get a "We disapprove of that... wink, wink" type of reaction in a lot of places), which it has for every other group that faced the same problems. Could that, along with the fact that they're the only group on that list that it's still OK to hate in public, be part of what they're complaining about?
They've gone through the same crap as all of those other groups. The difference is that they're still going through some of it, and there are a lot of voices not too far outside the mainstream who would like to bring more of it back. Try saying that about any other minority.
Among other things, I take it that you've never heard of the Spanish Inquisition. Christianity has used governmental control to tell people how to think whenever it's had the power to do so, at least, until recently.
I was thinking more of ancient history when coming out as a Christian might not have been such a good thing, but yes, that has been a bit of a problem hasn't it? That's why I can't quite figure out why people say, "What's the big deal, you tyrants?" when minority religions point out that the majority religion is abusing its power in government, even when those abuses don't amount to much in practice. The history of it has never been good. Christianity started out under the foot of government, then enjoyed a long period of dominance when it had everybody else under its heel, and has apparently failed to learn any lessons from either period.
One would think that anybody who has been both the abuser and the abused would be all for the notion that maybe we'd all be better off if nobody used the government that way. Some Christian sects appear to recognize this, but there are enough who don't to make the rest of us nervous. Apparently, rather than learning a lesson about how to coexist by keeping religion out of government, they prefer to say, "We're just this close to having unlimited power again. If only it weren't for that darned constitution..." I view a tiny, unimportant violation of the establishment clause with the same contempt I view a tiny, unimportant infringement on the freedom of the press. It's a violation of vitally important principles, and it's not a habit we should get into, even if this particular instance doesn't really have any practical consequences.
I see it as a problem because when these small-minded little petty tyrants sue over something like this, they end up wasting more money on the suit that would have been spent on the display. And, they tend to make more people unhappy because the display's canceled than were bothered by it in the first place.
I agree that a lawsuit isn't the best solution. The best solution would be for local governments to just do their jobs and stop overstepping their authority by spending taxpayer money on religious idolatry. The thing that amazes me the most is that the people who typically support this kind of government behavior are the first to stand up and say, "That's not the government's job" or "The government doesn't have the authority to use my hard earned tax dollars on that" on other subjects. I can only suspect that such logic doesn't apply when it's their religious quirks being pandered to. I have no doubt that a harmless Wiccan display would be right out of the question for them.
We both agree that things like Nativity Scenes are harmless; and if so, who really cares if they're there if it makes enough people feel good?
I don't think that we agree on that at all. I think that nativity scenes are a clear endorsement of one sect over others and an abuse of government authority over public resources. I understand where the lawsuits are coming from. I just don't think that it's enough of an abuse for me to get up and sue over it. If the fish get any bigger, I'll fry them. Until then, it's people who get a little too worked up over matters of principle doing battle with people who clearly don't understand the function of government in a pluralistic society. My response to it will simply be to point out that the government in question is misusing government resources and that they're acting like asses.
To me, at least, things like this sound like the plaintiffs are saying, "It's not part of my religion, therefore you can't do it even though it's part of yours."
You're missing a key part of it. The correct phrase would be, "It's not part of my religion, therefore you can't compel me to pay for it or use government authority to endorse it over my religion." They can put up all the nativity scenes they want, just not as part of a government function.
For a religion that survived the Romans and has become the dominant religious force in the western world by eschewing government control over private free expression, Christianity certainly seems to need a lot of taxpayer-funded affirmations. I just can't fathom how a religious sect that dominates every branch of the government from local to federal can feel so persecuted at the same time.
The big problem is that it's easy to go too far in separating the two. Every year, people sue to prevent local governments from allowing Nativity Scenes on public property simply because that's not part of their religion. It's not part of mine, either, but I don't care if they have them or not, as long as I'm not required to look at them.
I'm not clear on how exactly that's a "big" problem. It's not part of my religion, and I'm slightly irked by the idea that people use my tax dollars to allow the religious majority to pat itself on the back by putting up its religious idols. It's not important enough to me that I'd sue over it. I see that as a waste of time. Any lawsuit would be merely on principle, but I can understand where the complainants are coming from. It's simply a degree of severity when comparing it to taxing you and giving the cash to the Catholic Church.
Sure, some of the lawsuits are silly, but how does offending people by not letting them use my money to get religious kicks more of a "big problem" than offending people like me by spending my money on religious displays? I'll regard it as a "big problem" when they start suing people over private practice of religion. Until then, it's just a matter of some people being inconsiderate enough to use government funds to give handjobs to religious supporters and another set of people being perhaps a little too annoyed by that rude behavior.
What I don't understand is when people use this sort of thing to show that the ACLU is some sort of major problem. On one hand, you have cases where they protect freedom of speech, freedom of worship, and due process for people who might not otherwise get them. On the other hand, they occasionally prevent people from using taxpayer money to put religious trinkets and baubles all over government facilities. I'm just not seeing how the ACLU is a problem in the overall balance of things.
Those companies that complied with the request for information did so because it was not an unreasonable request for a Government to make in a time of war. And specifically who was harmed?
Anybody who had their privacy illegally violated.
Who was improperly charged as a result of the requested info?
Nobody, as far as we know.
We do know that info gathered in this fashion has helped prevent attacks and tracked terrorists. At least we are getting something for this trade off.
How, exactly do you know that? Because somebody who has a huge incentive to lie to you and no reason to believe that he'll be caught in that lie said so?
It's the key question, and I think that it's important to point that out to people who claim that as long as the federal government isn't establishing The First Church of the United States, then anything goes. I strongly believe that's not at all the case.
That clause was written because the people writing it knew that when governments favored one religion over others, serious strife inevitably followed. Depending on who you asked at the time, that may have generally meant preferring one form of Christianity over the others, but taking such a narrow view of it in a religiously diverse society two centuries later would rob the amendment of its ability to perform the task it was meant to perform: to keep the government from sowing the seeds of its own destruction by allying itself with one religious faction or another.
If you're on board with that interpretation, it's easy to see how the amendment has quite a bit more reach than simply outlawing an official church. Any endorsement, be it a direct one or an indirect one, can arguably fall into the realm of the establishment clause. I don't understand why peoples' heads start exploding when somebody brings it up (e.g. "The ACLU is persecuting me because they won't let me use other people's tax dollars to promote my particular religious quirks! They're anti-Christian!")
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You're not a Christian because you don't have the stomach to sacrifice young girl to Chicomecoatl once every September, are you?
You are mistaken.
I don't think that anybody is questioning whether a mistake was made. The problem is that there's no reason to publicly humiliate the people (read: volunteers) who made it in order to correct it. The point could just as easily have been made without specifically naming anybody.
I know that if I sent out a mass emailed "reminder" to my company about the proper protocol for something and specifically called out somebody from another group in it, the response would be a universal, "What a dick!" I'd be lucky to avoid being taken to the woodshed by my boss for it. That's just not how it's done.
The reality is that we're doing such a bad job on that front that people who could be helping us restore law and order actually like us less than the types of people who blow up vegetable markets. How could we possibly have blown it that badly?
Have you tried all of the policy papers that every political candidate has on his or her web site?
No, you're certainly right about that. I don't see any reason to seek out people with interesting religious beliefs and bother them about them. The issue is that if you're in the business of making testable claims, you really shouldn't get upset if somebody actually tests them. Any religious proposition that also happens to be a claim about the observable world may end up being the subject of some "offensive" science somewhere along the lines, whether it's the the decaying speed of light theory of cosmology or the demon possession theory of disease.
While we're at it, let's drum all of the crazy hate spewing preachers out of politics--including the ones whose boots the Republicans have to lick every election year. I thought that part of Obama's appeal was that he understood the set of people for whom a fringe religious lunatic is part of the standard entourage.
What's interesting about that is how things have changed. It's starting to look like the congressional districts are so badly gerrymandered that it's the representatives who don't have to be responsive to their districts because they're rarely in competitive elections, while the senators sit in unstable seats that they have to defend against meaningful challengers (albeit less regularly). Oops.
I want to say as an aside, I've finally added you as a friend. It's long over due. We've crossed paths a number of times, and while we generally disagree on most of the things I find worth discussing with random slashdotters, it's always interesting to hear what you're thinking. I'm typically on board with your reasoning, if not your axioms. It usually goes better than this because I'm not usually sleep deprived and highly snarky (read: acting like a dick). It's good to have some control rods in the echo chamber.
Cheers.
I suspect that we're talking past each other at this point, given that you seem to think that a person's choice of religion (a choice that people very often reject and change later in life on intellectual grounds alone) is less of a choice than one's sexual orientation. I also assumed that you'd figure I was being facetious about hitting Christians in the face. I actually don't disapprove of Christianity and I don't approve of hitting people in the face over it. I'm pointing out that the "It's your own fault that you chose to do something that I'm punishing you for doing" doesn't really hold water when there's no rational reason for the punishment.
No, moving away from injustice is certainly a viable option. It just doesn't fix the injustice.
For the record, I've never faced any injustice. It was a thought experiment. My interracial marriage hasn't caused me a lick of trouble, and I'm thankful for that, because people I know from older generations don't have the same story.
No, I'm pointing out that your criteria for delineating what is OK discrimination and what isn't is arbitrary. As I see it, you're essentially saying, "But you see, in the first case, he wanted to marry a woman, and that's OK. In the second case, he wants to marry a man, and that's not OK." That's not an illustration of your point. It's just stating it in stark biological terms. What I'm saying is, if we do away with the assumption that there's something inherently less correct about homosexual relationships than heterosexual ones, there really aren't any arguments against gay marriage that hold up, much like the analogous arguments against interracial marriage ceased to hold up when we stopped assuming that there was just something fundamentally wrong with it.
And there's the place where we fundamentally disagree. You're working on the assumption that such "anomalies" are justification for treating them as a separate case. I'm afraid we'll have to agree to disagree on this one.
Remember when I suggested that your rhetoric was a bit loaded? Here's an example. The implication is that homosexuality is somewhere on a continuum between being "n
So far, you've drawn analogies comparing homosexuality to bestiality, rape, laziness, and moral failing in general. If you stop looking at it as a mistake people make instead of a property of who they are just as your sexuality or mine is, you'll probably come of as less anti-gay. Saying what amounts to, "I don't feel sorry that society kicks you around for being gay any more than I feel sorry that society kicks criminals around" isn't exactly the type of position that reeks of tolerance or looking at the "logic" behind an issue.
The distinction you're drawing still seems to be, "You can be who you are, just don't act on it." The "Love the sinner, hate the sin" type of thing makes people feel better, but I can't help but wonder how they'd react if I said, "I like you, but I disapprove of you being a Christian. As long as you hide it from me and never actually pray or recognize any religious holidays, I won't punch you in the face. If you don't and you get punched in the face, it's your own fault. I'm giving you a choice here, and you're being very unfair by rejecting it."
Well, we have a solution for injustice right there. Go somewhere less unjust. Or does the logic go, "It's not unjust because you can go somewhere else"?
Anatomically speaking, the average gay male couple probably weighs more and uses more shaving cream than the average heterosexual couple. I have no idea what the relevance of that fact is to anything. You're trying to apply physiology to an inherently emotional issue.
I think that you're missing the point of the analogy. The mutable "choice" is who you're attracted to. The immutable nature that prevents societal approval is an arbitrary biological variable: race, sex, etc. In either case, you could "choose" to look elsewhere for a mate that society approves of. In both cases, why the hell should you have to?
No, it's really not. Being gay is wholly defined by being attracted to the same sex. You're referring to behavior. You can change behavior but not orientation. I suspect that if you had to (let's say, you'd go to a gas chamber, or get lynched, or be stoned, or some other far fetched thing), you could be completely celibate for the rest of your life. You would remain a heterosexual. You simply wouldn't be acting on your orientation.
And gays can't all of a sudden decide to be heterosexual, but their consolation prize is that they could choose a life of closeted celibacy, or at best a life that doesn't allow them any semblance of legal recognition as family. The fact that you're equating sexual orientation with some sort of decision making process makes me wonder how you've gone through life, feeling the attractions and emotional bonds that adults can feel, without noticing that it's not likely something that you could change. You're lucky you're in the majority that society approves of.
Wow, I didn't realize that they were reading my posts way back in the 1950s. Having gay sex is something you can control. I've never seen any compelling evidence that orientation is. "If you just get back in the closet where we put you, you'll be fine." How charitable.
Why is it that anti-gay people always equate homosexuality with only sex? Have you ever met a committed gay couple? I have, and let me let you in on their secret: They're no different from the rest of us. I don't see any difference between the relationships some of my gay friends have and the relationship my wife and I have, aside from the fact that they're the same sex and theirs isn't legally recognized. It's not all about the choice to have sex. It's who you form a genuine emotional bond with. They can't change that any more than you could settle into a satisfying relationship with somebody of your own sex.
No, they don't feel pain like the rest of us. At least we can take comfort in that. I'm sure there's a study to prove it somewhere.
I married outside my race by choice. I loved the woman I married, and now we're happily attached. These days, that's about par for the course. Not long ago, it would have been outside the norm and people wouldn't have had a lot of pity for me for the consequences I faced. After all, I had the choice to find myself a nice white girl, so what was I bitching about? No reason for my deviant ways to affect the rest of society. My point is that I would not really have been a whiner had I pointed out that such a system is unjust.
Rock on. Lutherans? Fuck 'em. They made a choice, their religion sucks, and they don't get to get married any more. Their "marriages" are all about filthy Lutheran sex anyway. They can't form real emotional bonds like real people can. If they'd just get back off the fringe, we could stop kicking them around (except in election years when we need a menace to get people to the polls).
Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. You've been reading too many press releases from Paul Cameron poster sessions. There's no such evidence of that at all.
Well, being beaten and or hung from a tree is another complaint that a lot of gays have. Actually, pretty much everything you listed has been on the list for homosexuals as well. The only one that hasn't been legally remedied is marriage (although beating the shit out of them still seems to get a "We disapprove of that... wink, wink" type of reaction in a lot of places), which it has for every other group that faced the same problems. Could that, along with the fact that they're the only group on that list that it's still OK to hate in public, be part of what they're complaining about?
They've gone through the same crap as all of those other groups. The difference is that they're still going through some of it, and there are a lot of voices not too far outside the mainstream who would like to bring more of it back. Try saying that about any other minority.
One would think that anybody who has been both the abuser and the abused would be all for the notion that maybe we'd all be better off if nobody used the government that way. Some Christian sects appear to recognize this, but there are enough who don't to make the rest of us nervous. Apparently, rather than learning a lesson about how to coexist by keeping religion out of government, they prefer to say, "We're just this close to having unlimited power again. If only it weren't for that darned constitution..." I view a tiny, unimportant violation of the establishment clause with the same contempt I view a tiny, unimportant infringement on the freedom of the press. It's a violation of vitally important principles, and it's not a habit we should get into, even if this particular instance doesn't really have any practical consequences.
I don't think that we agree on that at all. I think that nativity scenes are a clear endorsement of one sect over others and an abuse of government authority over public resources. I understand where the lawsuits are coming from. I just don't think that it's enough of an abuse for me to get up and sue over it. If the fish get any bigger, I'll fry them. Until then, it's people who get a little too worked up over matters of principle doing battle with people who clearly don't understand the function of government in a pluralistic society. My response to it will simply be to point out that the government in question is misusing government resources and that they're acting like asses.
You're missing a key part of it. The correct phrase would be, "It's not part of my religion, therefore you can't compel me to pay for it or use government authority to endorse it over my religion." They can put up all the nativity scenes they want, just not as part of a government function.
For a religion that survived the Romans and has become the dominant religious force in the western world by eschewing government control over private free expression, Christianity certainly seems to need a lot of taxpayer-funded affirmations. I just can't fathom how a religious sect that dominates every branch of the government from local to federal can feel so persecuted at the same time.
Sure, some of the lawsuits are silly, but how does offending people by not letting them use my money to get religious kicks more of a "big problem" than offending people like me by spending my money on religious displays? I'll regard it as a "big problem" when they start suing people over private practice of religion. Until then, it's just a matter of some people being inconsiderate enough to use government funds to give handjobs to religious supporters and another set of people being perhaps a little too annoyed by that rude behavior.
What I don't understand is when people use this sort of thing to show that the ACLU is some sort of major problem. On one hand, you have cases where they protect freedom of speech, freedom of worship, and due process for people who might not otherwise get them. On the other hand, they occasionally prevent people from using taxpayer money to put religious trinkets and baubles all over government facilities. I'm just not seeing how the ACLU is a problem in the overall balance of things.
Nobody, as far as we know.
How, exactly do you know that? Because somebody who has a huge incentive to lie to you and no reason to believe that he'll be caught in that lie said so?
A surprisingly common one, given how many keys are on a keyboard.
It's the key question, and I think that it's important to point that out to people who claim that as long as the federal government isn't establishing The First Church of the United States, then anything goes. I strongly believe that's not at all the case.
That clause was written because the people writing it knew that when governments favored one religion over others, serious strife inevitably followed. Depending on who you asked at the time, that may have generally meant preferring one form of Christianity over the others, but taking such a narrow view of it in a religiously diverse society two centuries later would rob the amendment of its ability to perform the task it was meant to perform: to keep the government from sowing the seeds of its own destruction by allying itself with one religious faction or another.
If you're on board with that interpretation, it's easy to see how the amendment has quite a bit more reach than simply outlawing an official church. Any endorsement, be it a direct one or an indirect one, can arguably fall into the realm of the establishment clause. I don't understand why peoples' heads start exploding when somebody brings it up (e.g. "The ACLU is persecuting me because they won't let me use other people's tax dollars to promote my particular religious quirks! They're anti-Christian!")