Neon Genesis

So yesterday the Religious Rights' argument was that Prop 8 was justified because the right to decide the definition of marriage should be left up to the states to decide. Today the argument seems to have flip flopped and now the Religious Right is arguing that DOMA is justified because it makes more sense to have uniformal laws across all 50 states than for the federal laws to be inconsistent. So which one is it?

Drinking age limits and driving age limits are enforced to keep people from being harmed by irresponsible behavior. Gay marriage has never been proven by anyone to cause any harm to anybody at all so you're using a false equivalency fallacy here Your same line of reasoning could also be used to justify slavery or banning interracial marriage simply if society says it should be banned. Are you suggesting you think homosexuality should be considered criminal behavior?

You had previously complained about my usage of the word homophobic so I used the more neutral term of antigay but apparently you still find that objectionable. Is there any word that would be appropriate to use or are you going to be offended by anything critics of antigay Christians say? If you're going to just be offended by anything I say, just go ahead and lock this thread and I'll find another site to go post at because I can't keep posting under such stifling restrictions and I don't know why you've been becoming increasingly more conservative in your posts, JosephM, when this is supposedly a progressive Christian site.

What extremists are there on the pro-gay side? Why should societies have a right to determine whether they can discriminate against gay people when they wouldn't for any other class of people in society?

What are the "strong points" that the antigay side has made?

So beginning on Tuesday this week, the Supreme Court is supposed to start their examination of the constitutionality of DOMA and Proposition 8. We might not hear the final results until June, but until then what are your thoughts about the cases? Which way do you think they'll be likely to rule? Personally I'm being cautiously optimistic for a narrow ruling with broad implications for the future. I don't expect the Supreme Court to magically legalize gay marriage in all 50 states but I think the best result we could hope for is that they'll rule that Prop 8 and DOMA are unconstitutional but they'll take Obama's position on gay marriage and leave the issue up to the states to decide. But maybe if I keep my expectations low but still optimistic I'll be pleasantly surprised?

As Bill Maher says frequently on his show, whenever an organization's leaders are made up of nothing but men, you're going to run into trouble, whether it's the Catholic church, the GOP, or Wallstreet.

The information cannot be said to be truly available as an option to these women if they are threatened with eternal torture if they voiced support for these different world views. Knowing what you know now about fundamentalist Christianity, would you willingly choose to disregard everything you've learned about it and the bible and willingly convert to fundamentalist Christianity?

But are the women who espouse these views really going along with it willingly if that's the only worldview they've known? For many of these women, a patriarchal society is the only way of life they've known but if women have access to a different way of living and they aren't threatened with hellfire if they choose this other way of life, how many would still choose the complimentarianism way of life?

There are also conservative women who voted against the Violence Against Women bill and oppose abortion rights so I don't think that just because someone is a woman doesn't mean that the idea is no longer sexist. I was disturbed one time during bible class at my church where this one lady who thought it was nonsense to say that a wife and husband had a 50/50 partnership. She described her relationship with her husband as being more like 80/20 and it was her job as the wife to bend her will to the will of her husband.

I was catching up on my backlog of episodes of the Unbelievable podcast which is a Christian debate podcast where every week they have two guests debate a religious topic. Sometimes it's atheists versus theists and sometimes it's theists versus other theists. This episode was on the debate between complimentarinism and egalitarianism. While I admire the lady who was defending the egalitarianism side of the debate for being respectful and kind to the complimentarinism side, I feel like at times she was almost too generous to them. It strikes me as odd that the complimentarinism side spent about half of the debate justifying why their worldview wasn't sexist at all. Yet they never once articulated why women should be banned from preaching to men just because men and women have differences between each other. If the genders were reversed and Christian feminists said men couldn't preach over women because men and women were different, there would be international outrage across all the theological spectrum, but because it's about women, it's acceptable to use differences as a justification for discrimination. Ultimately their only "justification" was that they just quoted other men who happened to agree with them that women should be banned from preaching because they say so. It just seems to me that complimentarinism is just a nicer and gentler form of sexism but at its core it's still sexism.

Short answer: It doesn't really matter why someone is gay or not. If they're not hurting anybody else then there's nothing wrong with being gay.

According to bible scholar Bart D Ehrman, this is an all too common problem when he encounters new students in his classes and it was how he felt when he first started majoring in secular biblical scholarship himself. Ehrman argued the biggest problem is that even though most pastors learn this info from seminary, they don't share this info with their congregations at church and so most people in the pew are unaware of what scholars in the ivory tower have known for decades.

So the NRA won't accept any sort of gun control law as legitimate and instead blames fictional violent video games as responsible for school shootings, but then they turn around and release a violent video game themselves. Can we say hypocrisy? : http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2013/01/14/1441701/newtown-nra-shooting-game/

The nation of Australia had a gun buy back program where you would turn in your gun in exchange for free money and it's my understanding that it was widely successful over there. LA has also started a gun buy back program recently.

Jonnyb, I would start with Bart Ehrman's Jesus Interrupted. It's a good introduction to secular New Testament scholarship and it's written for a mainstream audience in mind so it's a fairly easy read while still having a lot of facts on a subject that doesn't get talked about a lot in churches. In addition to Ehrman, my favorite religious authors are Karen Armstrong, John Shelby Spong, Elaine Pagels, Marcus Borg, John Dominic Crossan, and I've enjoyed what little I've read of Burton Mack. I've also recently been reading The Kingdom of God is Within You by Leo Tolstoy. It's a very old book but the issues discussed are still very much relevant to our modern day conflicts and definitely worth reading.

I think the label the site uses is non-theistic.

One thing to keep into account is that the gospel of John was written during the time the early Christians were being kicked out of the synagogues and were trying to create their own communities and separate themselves from Judaism. You can see the progression of this separation from Judaism all throughout the gospels. in Mark's gospel, the earliest of the gospel accounts, Jesus makes very explicitly inclusive statements like that anyone who is not opposed to Jesus is for him. Matthew's gospel reverses the saying to make Jesus sound more exclusive, John has Jesus saying all the Jews are children of the devil, and the final culmination of this exclusivity is in the book of Revelation which portrays Jesus in a very bloodthirsty militaristic style. It must be kept in mind that the gospels should always be read not as a new religion condemning all other religions but as a theological debate between different groups of Judaism trying to find new ways of being Jewish in a post-second temple world.

In the OT, the afterlife is Sheol, which literally means the grave, and was a place of darkness everybody went to when they died regardless of their moral actions or religious beliefs. Contrary to their portrayal in the gospels, the Sadducees were actually regarded as being very literalistic and strident in their interpretation of the law and it was the Pharisees who were considered more liberal in their practices and beliefs, according to the writings of Josephus. The later Jewish belief in the afterlife came from exposure to the dualistic beliefs of Zoroastrianism which also heavily influenced Christianity. Even in the gospels when Jesus has his famous confrontation with the Sadducees, Jesus at best gives a vague non-answer response to their questions about the afterlife, implying the debate wasn't settled at that point.

I think they have a category for secular humanism.

Mark's Jesus seems to be much more relaxed about following the law than Matthew's Jesus is. There's that whole chapter where the Pharisees confront Jesus and the apostles about harvesting wheat on the Sabbath and Jesus makes the comment about how humanity was made for the Sabbath and not the other way around.

According to Wikipedia, they seem to have given the Sermon on the Mount itself high ratings of authenticity but Matthew 5:17 doesn't seem to be on the list: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus_Seminar#Authentic_sayings.2C_as_determined_by_the_seminar

Matthew's gospel is the most pro-Jewish of the gospels with John being the least pro-Jewish. You can tell this by how frequently Matthew always cites Jewish prophecy to prove Jesus is the messiah throughout the gospel. When Jesus gave the commandments on the Sermon on the Mount, he didn't supersede the old law like Protestants have traditionally interpreted it, rather Jesus made the laws tougher to follow. You can see this in Jesus' contrast in the example of marriage where Jesus says Moses allowed divorce in the case of adultery but Jesus says don't even lust in your heart, let alone think about getting a divorce. Moses interpreted the law in terms of crime and punishment whereas Matthew's Jesus says don't even think about breaking the law to begin with. Having said that, I think Paul's grace-centered version of Christianity is just as legitimate of a form of Christianity as Matthew's Jewish Christianity is as both Matthew and Paul are writing about their beliefs of what they think Jesus would have said as much as they are including historical quotes from Jesus. I don't think we can know for certain what the historical Jesus would have thought about Gentiles following the law because that controversy didn't appear until after his death and everyone writing accounts about Jesus are writing in the context of decades after his death in their own times and culture.

Matthew's gospel is believed by most bible scholars to have been written for a Jewish Christian community. In early Christianity, there was a debate among the early Christians as to whether or not Christians should still follow the old law. The Gentile church of Saint Paul thought Gentiles shouldn't have to follow the old law and were under the grace of Jesus. Matthew's gospel represents the positions of a Jewish Christian community which likely held that Christians should still follow the old law. What must be understood is that the gospels represents the religious beliefs of the communities they were written for as much as they contain historical sayings of Jesus.

So is his argument that the ACLU's defense of absolute free speech at all cost causes violence or something? It sounds like he's trying to make a false equivalency argument but he never expands on what his point is.