that was very solid stawman work and some sold sophistry as well. 1. I asked if supporting equal rights for gays regarding a civil union but not wanting to call in marriage was evil. You did not address that point. Presumably because you had some sort of irrational axe to grind. A person (like me) can see that gays are just as much people and straight people... but believe the definition for marriage should not change. Its just intolerant of you to suggest that makes a person evil. Some of us were against changing the definition of marriage because once you change it to 2 man or women... there is no logical reason to stop there and not go to polygamy. If you were to study this issue you would understand that one of the reasons the idea of marriage was sanctioned by society is for the protection of children. 2. You pulled another strawman with the legislate vs vote sophistry. I specifically used th word vote and not legislate. You see we get to vote our conscious if we so choose. That is our right protected by the constitution. We vote and then the govt either legislates or executes. Many of us did not like the obama and left imposing the costs of abortifacients on employers. Particularly employers who felt like it was aiding in murder and it was against their conscience. Some people voted for Trump to change that. It looks like he is about to do exactly that. Thank the founders that people get to vote their beliefs and morality in our country. Now... do you state it is wrong for people to vote their conscience and morality... and that sometimes the laws reflect that. Do you wish to reconsider the generalizations you made about the law? Because you are dead ass wrong. You may wish to study the history of law or some jurisprudence. 3. finally the sanctimonious one of this thread... may need a mirror. I find all people have an equal right to vote as they see fit. I would never tell someone their vote is inferior because they believe...... something. 4. its the old cliche Jesus is cool but Christians are not. Makes you fell a bit sanctimonious doesn't it.
Let's be crystal clear here. I never used the word "vote" once, that's your word as Spicy would say. I used the word legislate, as in "don't legislate based on religion". You responded to my comment on legislating to say "why are you saying I can't vote based on my religion". I never said that, and I was as clear as I possibly could be that you can vote based on anything or nothing at all, but you can't legislate based on your religion. What part of that exactly don't you understand? Are you purposely being obtuse, or do you really not grasp this? As for shielding discrimination against gays based on the historical definition of the word "marriage", well I thought I could get you to bring up polygamy and you played right into it! The historical definition of marriage did indeed include polygamy. I've read the bible cover to cover a few times, I see a whole lot of polygamous marriage in there but can you refresh me on the place where polygamy is said to be a sin? (Hint: it's not there). If two guys and a woman want to be married, go for it. If 3 women want to marry one guy, why in the world would I care? I have moral values that say that the type of abusive relationships that young girls are forced into in the various LDS sects is wrong, but my morals are calling the forcing of the polygamy wrong, not polygamy itself among fully consenting adults. Not allowing gay people to marry because you're concerned about an arbitrary definition of the word "marriage" that doesn't even follow your own holy book, what's that all about? I can only assume it's about discrimination, which is pure evil no matter how much you try to spin it as an simple exercise in semantics. Which again is why it was determined unconstitutional, you're on the wrong side of history on this one. Again, nothing you stand for matches what your holy book says Jesus stood for, you're quite the opposite and so meet his definition of evil as well as mine.
1. Don't legislate base on your religion? is sophistry... You would seem to be claiming you can legislate your morality but someone whose morality is informed by a belief in God may not. 2. Additionally your argument is based on sophistry. As I would of course argue thou shall not murder or thou shall not steal are embodied in our laws. You will then attempt to argue those laws are "universal moral values". So anytime religion is legislated you could call it a universal moral value. 3. So then I ask... where did Sodomy laws come from? Of course religious beliefs have been legislated. Where did blue laws come from. Where did the restriction of the sale of liquor on Sunday come from. There are myraid laws based on religious ideas and even religion itself. And many are are not necessarily unconstitutional. And of course religions is allowed to inform the morals of those legislating but... I will leave you with this.... morality is the core of most laws... and the morality of America has been informed by religion since the beginning. https://www.thinkingchristian.net/posts/2013/06/you-cant-not-legislate-morality/ You Can’t Not Legislate Morality By Tom Gilson on Thursday, June 20, 2013 “You can’t legislate morality!” No, you can’t not legislate morality. Not even a little bit. I got thinking about this when Alan Shlemon’s 2012 article, “Should Christians Impose Their Moral Standards on Society?” came up on Twitter yesterday. He said it this way: It’s perfectly acceptable to legislate morality. When you think about it, morals are the only thing you can legislate. For example, we have laws against stealing for one reason: it’s immoral to take someone’s property. So, we take that moral rule and establish it in law. The same is true for laws against murder. The reason they exist is because we think it’s immoral to kill an innocent human being. So, we take that moral rule and make it against the law to break it. By legislating that rule, we are legislating morality. In fact, it’s the moral rule that legitimizes the law’s power to limit freedom. Without a moral grounding, laws would be unjust. They would be the raw use of power to get what someone wants, not to do what’s right. That’s called tyranny. This reminds me of the theological problem of evil, stated in the form, “Does God have a morally sufficient reason to allow evil?” There are strong analogues between the evil addressed in this question and the governmental sanctions involved in legislation. If I break a law, then the law permits someone more powerful than me to take my money, my property, my freedom, my relationships. In some countries and in some times, the law has permitted the authorities to take away my physical health. Sometimes it sanctions lawbreakers being put to death. All of that is the world of evil, in microcosm. Yet we consider it good. We disagree over details: this law or that law, this punishment or that. Still, no one but anarchists would deny that the government should have the power to enforce laws by punishing wrongdoers. Maybe that word didn’t catch your eye; it should have. It speaks of “wrong”—a morally inflected word if ever there was one. And how is “wrong” defined? In ethical theory that can be tough, but in this case it’s easy: it’s wrong to break the law. Still that doesn’t remove it from the realm of morality, for as Alan Shlemon pointed out, if government imposes sanctions without moral justification, then it’s acting tyrannically. And so every law implies a moral calculus: “It’s more wrong for you to commit premeditated murder than it is for the state to deny your freedom for the rest of your life.” Apart from that moral reckoning there could be no justice. So far I’ve only been speaking of laws with punishments for law-breakers. The same goes for taxes, which the government can justly exact from us only if the money is put to good use. It goes for other restrictions as well: environmental standards, OSHA standards (occupational safety and health, for non-US readers), restaurant health requirements, building codes, licensing requirements, and so on: every one of these is a restriction on personal property and or freedom. Without sufficient moral reason, these too would be tyranny. We accept these things from our governments to the extent that we think that they are right and just, or else to the extent that we are forced to accept them against our will. So there is either moral agreement or there is subjection to power. These are the two choices. We can legislate morally, which is to say that we can legislate according to morality, which is (further) to say that we can legislate what we think is morality; which ends up at we can legislate morality. There isn’t anything else we could legislate but that. Not unless you believe every act of government is an act of tyranny, which I do not, and I doubt you do either.
First off I'm glad to see you abandon the "sophistry" of your argument that discriminating against an entire class of people over the definition of the word "marriage" is at all justifiable. Good to see you've grown just a little. Speaking of words, let's talk about what seems to be your favorite word, sophistry. I can only assume it doesn't mean what you think it means by the way you use it. The actual definition is Sophistry-The use of fallacious arguments, especially with the intention of deceiving. Sophistry is purposely conflating "voting" with "legislating", another unproductive line of reasoning I see you've wisely abandoned. Sophistry is claiming that discriminating against gay people isn't bad or harmful, it's just your intense love for this one English word, "marriage", and your definition of it, that drives you to deny rights to a whole group of people. See how I use the word sophistry, then show how you are engaging in "fallacious arguments with the intention of deceiving"? See how your arguments were indeed fallacious and intended to deceive? Obviously you do since you've abandoned them and shifted to other arguments, which sadly are also fallacious. So again, if you have even a cursory understanding of U.S. con law you understand that no law that restricts the rights of Americans to do something based solely on a religious edict is constitutional. In fact yes, we've decided that if the only justification you have for restricting someone's rights are your beliefs based on what an imaginary person wrote in a book, you don't get to do that. In many cases there are secular justifications for religious moral values so we end up with a law that is consistent with a religious value but not derived from it. Is the only reason you don't murder and rape because of your religious based morals? Of course not, that would make you and all other religious people sociopaths! So you implicitly agree there is a secular moral reason that backs the laws against murder and rape. There is no secular value that backs discriminating against someone who is gay, that's just your interpretation (and I'd argue a faulty one at that, WWJD?) based on your religion, which is what makes is impermissible to legislate on, as confirmed by SCOTUS. You brought up blue laws, which are actually a great example of my point. Read McGowan v. Maryland, which determined that blue laws were permissible to the extent that they were based "in terms of their secular benefit to workers", not religious belief. Just like murder, they determined that although there is a religious prohibition that would lead you to a blue law, there is a secular reason as well therefore it is permissible. I have no idea why you brought up sodemy laws as anyone with even a passing familiarity with con law knows Lawrence v. Texas which ruled those laws were unconstitutional, precisely because they were based solely on religious belief. As a side note to that, anyone who thinks restricting how I can have sex with my wife in the privacy of my bedroom based on their religious beliefs is permissible is absolutely a sanctimonious prick! And once again I return to the title of this thread. The Jesus in your book acted in anger the way fundamentalist christians act only twice in my reading of the new testament. Once against the money changers in the temple and the still inexplicable to me rage against the fig tree. He did spend a lot of time talking about pharisees and their parsing of words. We're here on a finance forum and you're parsing words about "marriage".......
Thanks, although that one is really reaching! I always thought it was showing he suffered human emotions, if I could justify it as meaning anything.
If Jesus were alive to even understand what "neo-nazis" are and what they are about, he'd be smoking a bowl of serious hydro and chillaxin' on ...and He'd be like, "WTF dude, just calm down. All this silliness. My message was about being peaceful, not warful." And then he would poof in a cloud of illogic, because he never actually existed. Any one single good writer can come up with a nonsensical piece of prose about "peace on earth" and "goodwill to all". Is everyone that gullible that they actually have hope that life is anything more than the present moment, which is the "now"? There is no past, there is no future. "Now" is all we will ever have, forever. Chew on that. You ain't gonna' fly up to a perceived heaven. You ain't going to a perceived hell. You're just gonna' stop existing when you die, the same way you never existed until you were born. This is it man.