Rover? Huh?

I think respect has to be earned. And I’m not sure how giving people the benefit of the doubt would work. In what situations should it be applied? When should it be applied? Should I suppose that the Knights of Columbus and the MORG really really really love homosexuals and that they are denying them equal protection under the law because of Christian love?

1. ” As for your god not hating, would genocide be the equivalent of hate?”
A short clarification, in that I didn’t say that my God doesn’t hate. The Bible makes several references to the LORD hating, among them the classic “Jacob have I loved, but Esau have I hated.” (Despite this, I WOULD argue that God does not hate, for a number of reasons. It seems reasonable to me that this language is figurative, for one thing, and possibly colored by the human author. Furthermore, hate, as we experience it, is tied in deeply with our emotions; particularly our hormonal reactions such as fight or flight. God didn’t have a body, and didn’t have glands, so he wouldn’t hate like we do. Whether God has emotions in any way we could understand is a question for theologians with far more time than me.) What I did say was that God commands us not to hate, that hate is a sin, and that sin leads to death. Genocide, I can imagine, stems from one of two very sad mindsets: hate, or apathy. Hate, that drives one people to wish to obliterate another completely…their bodies, their cities, their ideas and culture. Or apathy, in which the victimized people are beneath hate; not human, not like us, not even worth thinking about.

2. I’m truly sorry if it is the case that your experience of Christians is such. Perhaps the problem is that it’s not meant to be a slogan, it seems to me, but a lesson. The proper use of the phrase “love the sinner, hate the sin” is not to explain Christian ethics to a non Christian, but to remind Christians of perhaps the hardest obligation of the Gospel, to LOVE…always, unconditionally, no matter who or what or why.

I’m actually a bit off balance by your next part, because I have honestly never heard anyone refer to their sexuality as the deepest part of themselves. Nonetheless, to continue: Some may say that someone’s sexuality is sinful, but it wouldn’t be me. Sexual acts may indeed be sinful, but sexuality is, at worst, flawed or distorted. My point above was that this is nothing exclusive to homosexuals. I’m a married heterosexual man, and my sexuality is flawed as well. I am tempted daily to sexual sin. And it doesn’t stop with the reproductive system. I am tempted to gluttony by the abundance of food I am fortunate to have access to. I am tempted to sloth by the ease of my life. My intellect, too, is flawed, with constant temptation to pride (all too often, the temptation I do not overcome). If I hated everyone with a flawed nature that leads them to sin, I would hate everyone I saw, myself included. And again, I am not attempting to enforce my opinions on anyone. I think I summed up my thoughts on the marriage controversy in my previous post.

3. I don’t have much more to add than that. Your statement was that “love the sinner” is a “smokescreen for discrimination”. I argued that it is not, that it is sincere and well meant. As to legislating discrimination, that has little to do with sin. As far as I know, no one is trying to recriminalize sodomy. From a Christian standpoint, a homosexual marriage isn’t a sin, it’s a fiction. It is an attempt to change the current definition of marriage. The problem with that is, we’ve already changed it! I don’t know what marriage means anymore. It’s not about faithfulness and monogamy, its not about permanence and “to death do us part”, and it is almost totally removed from the bearing and raising of children. So if the government has no opinions on what marriage is, I don’t see why it should use the word at all. All the civil benefits of marriage can be conferred without the institution. The only inconvenience is that Sally and Steve can now accomplish with one legal document might require a few more for them (Or Sally and Sue, or Steve and Mike and Mandy and Rover). I don’t see very many reasons why who you have sex with has anything to do with who makes decisions if you’re in a coma, who gets your stuff when you die, or whose name you can put on your tax form.

In sum, my point has nothing to do with same sex marriage, and more to do with giving some respect, or at least the benefit of the doubt, to people who disagree with you.

1.I understand that it’s your opinion. But there are probably millions, if not billions of people who worship a deity different from yours and would say the same thing. As for your god not hating, would genocide be the equivalent of hate?

2. Yes it’s a tired cliché, without any discernible evidence that those who spout it use it for any purpose other than cover. For example, if you are saying that the deepest level of who I am, my sexuality, is sinful and therefore hateful, you hate me. Moreover, you are enforcing your unverifiable belief, i.e. “[b]ecause we see sin as separation from God, who we think is perfect happiness and love,” on others, regardless of their beliefs.

Agreed, it’s a standard response. It’s just not persuasive.

3. If it’s not discriminatory why the effort to legislate discrimination against one disfavored group?

Don’t mean to intrude too much in an old thread, but…

Point the first: Our God doesn’t tell us to hate. Our God tells us to “Love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you.” (As an addendum, we don’t have the choice to “get another god”. This statement seems to assume that any god is a human creation, and thus, if I don’t like the god I see, I can just conjure up a new one. Since I an thoroughly convinced that is a false premise, I cannot in good conscience find a new God. It would be hypocrisy on my part. End sidetracking.) Are there, in fact, Christians guilty of hate towards homosexuals? Possibly. (Secondary veering off topic. When people use the word hate nowadays, I have an Inigo Montoya moment. “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.” End.) Are there Christians who are guilty of lack of charity to homosexuals? Absolutely.

Point the second: “Love the sinner, hate the sin” is not BS. It’s a standard Christian response to the omnipresence of sin in the world. Why hate sin? Because we see sin as separation from God, who we think is perfect happiness and love. Hating sin because we think it’s killing people slowly is like hating anything else that is slowly, insidiously poisoning people, be it pollutants in the air, hormones in the food, or mercury in the water. (Whether we are right or not as to whether something is a genuine poison is, of course, a matter for lively and legitimate debate. What is counterproductive to real dialogue and understanding, though, is to assume some disingenuous motive on the part of Christians, when a cursory knowledge of Christian theology will show a sincere-even if you argue it is wrongheaded-motive.) Why love the sinner, then? Because we’re all sinners. Continuing my analogy of sin as an environmental toxin, each and every one of us has it flowing through our bloodstream, whether we like it or not. Sure, you can try to drink bottled water, or eat only cultivated yeast products grown in your massive underground vats (“Yeastburgers again???”), but it’s still in you, and it’s just as deadly to you as it is to the guy next door grilling hormone laden beef until the proteins become mild carcinogens. Love the sinner because YOU are the sinner. “You are the man!” as Nathan said to David. Again, Christians fall short on this necessary love (The greatest of all things that last, as the Bible says.) daily. See above for the reason.

Point the third: the above tired adage is not a means of discrimination, or shouldn’t be, since, as I said, it applies to everyone. Your thrust, I think, though, is that our hatred of sinful sexual acts leads some Christians to seek political solutions to the question of homosexual marriage and other aspects of the question. But whether something is sinful is a moot question for government. Personally, I’m starting to think that government has no business dealing with marriage at all. Marriage serves two purposes, it seems: validating a relationship between two people, and securing various rights and privileges in relationship to one another. Part one is your Mommy’s job, not Uncle Sam’s. Part two does not necessarily have anything to do with the nature of your relationship, except that those rights have historically been encompassed in the rights of married couples. There’s no reason there can’t be a simple document to secure various inheritance and decision making rights between people, regardless of whether or not they’re having sex.

& rAmen to EBrown @18—the only arguments are based in religion…and not well thought out. I do find Matt’s comment to be telling : “our children will be[…] forced to accept” that homosexuality is okay. I’m preparing a post that advances just that proposition: gay people don’t want their church to apologize to them, they only want the church to, going forward, be a place of acceptance for future gay children.

If your god wants you to hate other people, get another god. And please don’t tell me that “hate the sin, love the sinner” bs. It’s just a smokescreen for discrimination.

I find that etiquette for conversations between people IRL work well for online threads as well. If we were all having this conversation at a cocktail party, and someone inserted themselves this way, we would all kind of stare at this strange person until they slunk away.

http://www.rhrealitycheck.org/blog/2009/02/20/privacy-sounds-good-proprop-8-forces-now

Thought you all might find it interesting.

The positive side of prop 8 is that it passed by a much smaller margin than prop 22 did in 2000. More money was donated by mormons to prop 8 than total donations for prop 22 and it won by a much smaller margin.

It is a sad that we lost on this proposition, but it will be back and momentum is on our side…

Also, on the list of large donations, they’ve taken out the last names of all the Mormons and just used first name, last initial. Of course if they’re not Mormon, their entire name is there…. sounds fishy to me.