Neon Genesis

Neon,

 

Problems are deeper than guns and just with school shootings... problems are in a myriad of areas of society including mental areas, judicial areas , prison system, economic including distribution of wealth, education, overpopulated areas, corruption , media, negativity and violence, religion, entertainment options, greed, government, and a host of others that society in general is and must address on an ongoing basis..

 

If you feel unsafe here because of gun homicides one can always choose a state in the US with less gun homicides than Australia , Canada , England or much of Europe. One can choose to move to New Hampshire Vermont, Hawaii, Wyoming, North Dakota, Maine, South Dakota, Iowa or Utah. All have less than 1 per 100,000 capita gun homicides. New Hampshire and Vermont are the lowest rates and have no state restrictive gun laws or bans on assault weapons. Neither does Wyoming, Iowa or Utah. All states mentioned are quite liberal in their state gun laws and only Hawaii has their own assault weapon ban. Perhaps someone could tell me why those states have such a low gun homicide rate per capita compared to those with the highest such as Louisiana, Maryland , Mississippi, California , Nevada, South Carolina and Illinois. It certainly doesn't correlate to an assault weapon ban or severe gun restrictions. BTW, California does have quite a few restrictions and an assault weapon ban

 

Joseph

I feel like all of those other examples you point out are merely distractions that the anti-gun control activists point to whenever a tragedy occurs to avoid having to discuss the inevitability of gun control. Putting aside all those other distractions, it is a simple fact that every other first world nation in the world has some form of comprehension gun control regulation and as a result every other first world nation has significantly less gun-related violence. The U.S. is the only first world nation in the world with such an obsession with guns and they remain the only first world nation in the world with the highest amount of gun-related violence. In this era where we have such a poor economy and Americans suffer from a lack of job availability, it is highly unrealistic to demand everyone who feels unsafe to move to a safer location just to appease the gun lobbyists of Washington who have prevented any sort of meaningful dialog over gun control regulations from being made. On the other hand, if anti-gun control activists really feel like their freedoms are being suppressed by the Obama administration, there are plenty of other countries they can move to where they can have even more freedom to use their guns as they wish. I hear Somalia is a pretty friendly place for anti-government libertarians.

I think we can win by placing stronger emphasis on issues we can be certain about. Like whether or not we support abortion, we can be reasonably certain that transvaginal ultrasound laws are an intrusive and abusive expansion of government oversight and we can emphasize that claiming women have a natural ability to abort a fetus that is the product of rape without medical intervention is pseudoscience nonsense. And we saw these small victories in the last election where we saw several of the most extremist anti-abortion politicians lost to progressive candidates because their views were too extreme even for most Americans.

JosephM, if you don't see a problem with America's gun culture, what are these "real" problems in American society that you see as responsible for school shootings?

I think the point about there not being any important doctrines in Mark 16 is a red herring that's irrelevant to the basic point. Either the bible is inerrant or it isn't. You can't say the bible has no errors and contradictions and then admit there's an error in Mark 16 but it's not important anyway so it's still inerrant. Compare the ending to Mark 16 to the story of Jesus and the woman in adultery which is also not found in the earliest manuscripts of John. That passage doesn't contain any "important" doctrines in it either and yet if that passage isn't in the earliest manuscripts of John, then it means it likely never happened historically and was a later development. If it never happened historically, then the biblical authors can't be said to be inerrant for making up a story about Jesus that never existed in the original version. It's clear by the fact they added it on later that the authors of the bible didn't see themselves as inerrant and saw themselves as free to add onto the texts whatever stories they happened to like or what fit their theological agenda. Christian apologists for centuries defended these passages as historically accurate and most people in the pews still think they're historically true so you can't say they're not important when whether or not they're true would change people's perspective of what did happen in the life of Jesus. Christian apologists have only started using this "not important" line of defense because the evidence of the corruption of the biblical manuscripts has become so obvious that even fundamentalists can't keep denying it.

I still want to know where in the bible it says when a soul enters a fetus. And please no quoting the Psalms.

Let's not beat around the bush here. Any argument for banning gay marriage while at the same supporting heterosexual marriage is based solely on discrimination and bigotry. Any rationalizations to "justify" banning gay marriage whether based on religious or non-religious arguments are lies to make your hatred look prettier, like spraying expensive perfume over feces.

 

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JosephM (as Moderator)

The problem comes with determining what is a "life." To use an analogy, let's say the Mars Rover discovered the existence of alien bacterial life on the planet Mars. Everyone would recognize it as a "life" in the broadest sense of the word and it would be the major scientific discovery of the century but at the same time we would all recognize that an alien bacterial "life" would not be as important as say, discovering alien fish under the ice sheets of Europa.

Can I just chime in and say I really tire of the whole "I'm not a bigot! Some of my best friends are black/gay!" cliche?

JosephM, why are you so terrified at the idea of gays getting married? Do you have some insecurity about your sexual orientation you're not sharing with us?

JosephM, please explain to me how me getting married to another man prevents your wife from reproducing. Please explain this and back up your claims with actual scientific evidence.

George,

 

Equality does not apply to everything. Marriage is not a right. it is a defined privilege reserved by society here at present to a man and woman. What if we had a person who wants to marry an animal? Do we recognize that? How about mutiple partner mixtures? Do we change the definition to whatever sounds like equality as long as it appears to do me no harm? I think not. You don't have to be homophobic to believe that same sex marriage may not be in the best interest of our society.

Joseph

 

Just for the record. My family includes gays whom i love dearly and i wouldn't try to change a thing concerning their identity..

As a gay man, I will say that I find your comparison of my sexuality to the raping of an animal to be highly offensive and bigoted. I don't think it is representative of the third point of the eight points of The Center For Progressive Christianity either.

Please forgive me for butting in, but this conversation presents an interesting question of definition; it seems to me that in this conversation, there are different definitions of "rational" being used. Any syllogism requires premises, arguments and a conclusion. In order to say an argument is irrational, you could disprove a premise or you could find where an argument is flawed. With religious premises, there's a problem with disproving a premise; all the evidence for religious truth-claims is locked inside people's heads. There is no proving or disproving them. To show them as irrational, you'll have to begin with their premises and demonstrate a mistake in their logic. Otherwise, they're not really irrational, merely mistaken, and only that because they've made a commitment to a religious premise that you disagree with.

 

I don't mean to put words in Joseph's mouth, but if I understand his point (and I may not) it is that arguments against same-sex marriage may, in fact, follow logically from the religious premises their proponents have committed to, and if they do, they are rational. If you say they are irrational because your own religious premises are different, then you have to show why your faith commitments are more "rational" than theirs, which sounds to me as though it would lead to the very kind of religious intolerance we find so distasteful in conservative Christianity. If I understand Joseph (and, again, I may not) this is the limb he was speaking of.

 

If you do not accept the premise, then you can't accept a conclusion based on the premise, no matter how rational the process of arriving at it may be. If religious premises are by definition irrational, then why would any of us call ourselves progressive Christians? Our behavior and our positions are based on our own religious premises, else we're merely progressives and not Christians.

No one is saying Robert George's positions are irrational because they are different. Robert George claims to be basing his antigay positions on reason and not religion but if you look at Robert George's claims they are widely inconsistent with his premise that his arguments are purely rational based and not religious based. Robert George is the co-founder of a religious extremist hate group, he co-wrote a homophobic manifesto because he claimed gays were going to martyr Christians who believed in "traditional" marriage, and he falsely accused President Obama of suppressing freedom of religion. Furthermore, none of Robert George's claims about the supposed harm legalizing gay marriage would bring upon society have been embraced by any mainstream non-religious psychiatric organization. The only people who embrace Robert George's views are homophobic religious people who are using his arguments to promote a theocratic agenda. What part of his argument is not based on religion?

JosephM, you presented this man and his study as proof of a rational argument against gay marriage that wasn't based on a religious argument which you say you disagree with at the same time. When we point out examples where Robert George's argument fails in rational thinking and even point out examples of religious bias in his study, you act as if we're just misunderstanding his study and accuse me of setting up a "dividing line," whatever that means. Yet when we ask you to provide examples of what part of Robert George's study you consider to be a rational argument even though you supposedly disagree with it, you refuse to comply with the request and you concede you are unable to name a single mainstream non-religious psychiatric organization that has officially endorsed Robert George's views and claims. As a gay man, I am curious why you as a progressive Christian continue to go to such lengths to defend this man who was a co-founder of one of the most immoral and disgusting extremist religious hate groups in the U.S. yet you won't give an example of a single argument of his that you consider to be rational.

If Robert George's arguments are purely rational and not based in his own religious-fueled bigotry, please point to me to a single mainstream psychiatric or psychological organization that have accepted the claims Robert George makes about how marriage is solely for procreation and that legalizing gay marriage will somehow hurt this definition. Point to me at least one, any one.

It should also be noted that Robert George is the Chairman of the Board of the National Organization for Marriage, which the Southern Poverty Law Center categorized as an extremist hate group. When Robert George co-authored the homophobic Manhattan Declaration, Robert George said the reason for writing it was because of his claims that the Obama administration was going to destroy Christian freedoms and he also claimed Christians who opposed gay marriage were martyrs that were going to be killed by the Obama administration for their beliefs. What part of Robert George reasonable or rational in any way?

I read some of the other article by Robert George and was still not impressed. Like Leroy Huizenga, his argument rests on the whole "God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve!" line of "reasoning", that marriage exists only for the purpose of procreation. This definition of marriage existing only for procreation does not appear anywhere in the U.S. constitution nor does it even appear in the bible. If we look at the New Testament definition of marriage, the bible is actually anti-procreation. Both Jesus and Saint Paul urge their followers to avoid having sexual relationships because they both believed the end of the world would happen within their lifetimes. For Jesus and Saint Paul, marriage was only a last minute resort if they couldn't control their sexual urges but there is nothing said anywhere in the New Testament about the purpose of marriage being for procreation.

 

Throughout history, marriage was only a legal contract for men to keep track of their heritage. In the Old Testament laws, if a woman is raped by a man, the man only had to pay a fee to the father and then the woman could be forced to marry her rapist. This is because the woman wasn't considered a compatible partner for the sole purpose of making babies but she was nothing more than the property of a man. If we take Robert George's arguments towards their "logical" conclusion, then all infertile heterosexual couples should be banned from getting married because they can't procreate and married heterosexual couples who choose to adopt or use artificial means of reproduction aren't "real" families either. But those are all A-ok for Robert George as long as they're "straight" and not icky gays. The argument from procreation wasn't convincing to the judges in the Proposition 8 trial and it won't be convincing to anyone else other than people who already agree with Robert George's homophobic biases.

 

You should read this detailed response to the fallacies and flaws of Robert George's arguments: http://www.boxturtle...reply-to-george

George,

 

You certainly won't get one from me but i do think the arguments in the long article are rational. Rational doesn't mean we agree. I believe the writer has used his full possession of reasoning to come to the conclusions he has and those reasons, in my view, are not without some merit or sense of soundness. Disagreement with his meticulous reasoning doesn't make it irrational. Because your view differs does not make you rational and him (Girgis, Sherif , Princeton University Department of Philosophy) irrational. That was my only point. You sound to me pretty closed (even perhaps pretty emotional on the issue) without reading his entire essay. But i could be mistaken as i sometimes am, so i will just drop it.

Joseph

I read the article by Leroy Huiizenga that JosephM posted and as far as I could tell, it was just the same 'ol "God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve!" slogan homophobes had been using since the 1970s, just dressed up in big fancy sounding pseudophilosophical language to make him sound more thought provoking than he actually is. In Philosophy, such people are called Sophists.

While i support the ability to grant to same-sex couples the dignity and sanction of many of the benefits of officially recognized marriages , i also support the right of a society/nation to determine its own rules of acceptance of what it deems appropriate and best for its evolution even if that disagrees with my personal views .

Joseph

 

George,

Rational is subjective. IMO, you go out on a limb saying NONE of the arguments against are even rational.

Do you think bans on interracial marriage are subjective beliefs that individual nations should be allowed to decide on whether or not to ban? Would you have supported the U.S.'s "right" to ban interracial marriage if they had decided to continue the ban rather than overturn it?

I think it is not fruitful to look for rules about the universe or humanity or proofs regarding God or the nature of God in the Bible. The Bible points us to the questions that humans have been talking about for millenia. I believe there is a positive arc toward respect for the life and dignity of all in the universe, but today's answers are to be discovered in a conversation not in quoting Scripture.

 

Dutch

I've asked pro-life Christians before why they think it's acceptable for God to kill all the first born infants of Egypt but it's unacceptable for a woman to abort a fetus and the only justification they gave was that because God said so. So apparently the issue seems to be less with whether a fetus is a baby or not but whether God approves of the killing of a baby or not.

Whenever I hear homophobic Christians rail about the santicty of marriage, I always think of this:

What if the mother isn't in a condition to make a reasonable decision (unconscious, coma, etc) or her decision making powers are otherwise not up to standard (brain damage, perhaps serious autism, mental health issues etc)?

Then whoever is next of kin or if she had specified someone else to take care of the issues in emergencies like that should make the decision. This is why you should plan these issues out in advance like through a living will.

It would depend on a number of factors, like how likely it is the mother would survive versus how likely the child would survive but ultimately I think the decision should be left up to the mother to make.

• In Luke, Elizabeth's baby 'leapt' in the womb when she met Mary pregnant with Jesus, thus used to argue for the consciousness of the fetus.
  
• Job 3:16 "Or why was I not as a hidden stillborn child, as infants who never see the light?", thus indicating that a fetus is simply an unborn infant.
  
• Jeremiah 1:5 "Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee; and before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee, and I ordained thee a prophet unto the nations." I guess read to indicate that if God's 'knows' somebody even before they are physically conceived, then they mean something to God even as a fetus.
  
• In Genesis 25:21,22, Rebekah conceived twins, and "the children struggled together within her." Indicating a consciousness and humanity about them I guess.
  

 

The passage in Jeremiah at best only describes God's omniscient powers but none of the other verses describe at what point the soul enters a fetus Taking the bible at its literal face value, there are far more passages where God approves of killing children already born than verses where God condemns abortion of an unconscious fetus.

I support the right to have an abortion until the point it becomes a late term abortion though even with late term abortions, it depends on the situation and motivations behind having the late term abortion.

I'm using the NRSV bible and this is from Numbers 5:11-21.