Gay Marriage Upheld by USSC in Close Ruling

[Valmy]

And Valmy, the interpretation that Bible is homophobic/anti-gay is not "mine" or "taken out of context" - the fact that millions of Christians across the globe use that interpretation to persecute and discriminate against gays makes your statement a lie.

I never stated that it was taken out of context or that it was yours. What I said was you require a specific interpretation. One that enables you to justify calling out the millions that do not persecute and discriminate against gays as hypocrites and declaring your respect for the true and proud who do.

So this is not exactly what antisemites have done with Talmud, given that Jews do not seem to openly preach what antisemites accuse them of.

Well fair enough.

[Martinus]

Again, Valmy, I don't think that to say Bible is anti-gay or anti-women requires a "specific interpretation".

[frunk]

Wow you are really acting bizarre here. You made a claim that WBC ignores the Bible - I dont see any proof of that. How am I going to argue a negative?

How exactly do you calculate that WBC is the most faithful version of Christianity in the first place?  As far as I can tell they ignore large chunks of the New Testament.

[Valmy]

Again, Valmy, I don't think that to say Bible is anti-gay or anti-women requires a "specific interpretation".

I do. The thing is enormous and has many writers writing over centuries. It is all in the interpretation. And to you it seems one must have an anti-gay and anti-woman interpretation and everybody who does not is morally deficient somehow. I disagree.

[Malthus]

To my mind, the essence of any sort of bigotry tends to be - unjustified, unfair and derogatory generalizations about a group of people.

How that group is defined may be different, and I suppose a case could be made that bigotry directed at a group defined by characteristics that are innate as opposed to characteristics that are chosen is more serious and so worse. But it is similar in kind.

Sometimes I think too much emphasis is put on hatred of bigotry as a matter or morality. Ultimately, bigotry is, basically, a mistake - a sort of mental malfunction, or willful blindness to facts. For whatever reasons, bigotry tends to be the action of believing that 'all X is like Y', and so worthy of distain or hatred, and an unwillingness to accept evidence to the contrary.

I think this isn't as helpful of a definition as it might appear.  What if your generalization is statistically justified but doesn't apply to every single person?  Are you making a mistake?  Are you being unjustified?  Are you being unfair?  Very debatable, especially considering that you were to be perfectly rational, not making a generalization when a generalization with some statistical validity can be made is on average a bigger mistake than making a generalization that doesn't explain all variance. 

Arguments against bigotry that are centered around it being a mistake tend have an extremely high content of sophistry.  Bigotry may have some utility on an individual level, but it's definitely damaging to society as a whole.  That's precisely why bigotry should be viewed as a matter of morality.

I don't agree. This is close to stating that beliefs that are "damaging to society as a whole" ought to be morally sanctioned - whether they are true and provable or not.

Why is that necessary, when the most significant thing about bigotry is that it tends to be provably false?

[Malthus]

To my mind, the essence of any sort of bigotry tends to be - unjustified, unfair and derogatory generalizations about a group of people.

How that group is defined may be different, and I suppose a case could be made that bigotry directed at a group defined by characteristics that are innate as opposed to characteristics that are chosen is more serious and so worse. But it is similar in kind.

Sometimes I think too much emphasis is put on hatred of bigotry as a matter or morality. Ultimately, bigotry is, basically, a mistake - a sort of mental malfunction, or willful blindness to facts. For whatever reasons, bigotry tends to be the action of believing that 'all X is like Y', and so worthy of distain or hatred, and an unwillingness to accept evidence to the contrary.

The thing is, generalisations like this can be justified when talking about people sharing a given ideology (as opposed to sharing innate biological characteristics).

For example, saying that all supporters of Hitler are either antisemitic or wilfully blind and ignoring the nazi ideology's antisemitism is not "bigotry" - it is simply the statement of fact.

Likewise, if you are a Christian and believe that Bible is the word of god, then saying you either support the idiocy in the Bible or you are a hypocrite and ignore the idiocy, is not bigoted - it's simply a statement of fact.

But Christians, provably, do not all believe the same things - there are many different varieties of Christians.

Obviously, literalist readings of the scriptures are not a characteristic that defines "Christians".

Like other religions, notably Jews, the scriptures are only one source of authority defining what is, and is not, moral. The scriptures tend to be interpreted in light of other authorities. Those interpretations vary from one group of Christian to another (let alone from one Christian to another).

[Eddie Teach]

And I have probably done more Bible reading and studying that you or most so-called Christians, for that matter.

Yeah I bet.

Can you give me an example of stuff WBC ignores?

Well fuck theology boy, you read and study and Bible more than me and all of us hypocritical non-WBC Christians so why don't you tell me?

Wow you are really acting bizarre here. You made a claim that WBC ignores the Bible - I dont see any proof of that. How am I going to argue a negative?

"Let him who is without sin throw the first stone."

[The Minsky Moment]

Wow you are really acting bizarre here. You made a claim that WBC ignores the Bible - I dont see any proof of that. How am I going to argue a negative?

How exactly do you calculate that WBC is the most faithful version of Christianity in the first place?  As far as I can tell they ignore large chunks of the New Testament.

Not to mention that like most Christians they ignore the entire Mosaic law.

I know of no religion that actually follows the Bible literally.

[Martinus]

Well, I suppose you guys are right. Still I think you can be religious, spiritual and Christ-like without actually being a Christian. Is there any Christian church that only accepts the gospels but rejects the Old Testament and wiritings of St. Paul?

[Martinus]

Wow you are really acting bizarre here. You made a claim that WBC ignores the Bible - I dont see any proof of that. How am I going to argue a negative?

How exactly do you calculate that WBC is the most faithful version of Christianity in the first place?  As far as I can tell they ignore large chunks of the New Testament.

Not to mention that like most Christians they ignore the entire Mosaic law.

I know of no religion that actually follows the Bible literally.

Ok but then why do Christians here get so bristly when one mentions that the story of Christ is a myth/allegory more than a historical fact?

Not to mention that most of the Old Testatment is more of a "word puzzle" for numerologists than is it meant to be an actual historical record.

[The Brain]

Great. Now he's going after the begatting.

[The Minsky Moment]

Is there any Christian church that only accepts the gospels but rejects the Old Testament and wiritings of St. Paul?

Probably some neo-gnostics around somewhere.

Not to mention that most of the Old Testatment is more of a "word puzzle" for numerologists 

This is not right - the numerology stuff came later.  You've been hanging around/reading about Kaballists.

[Valmy]

Ok but then why do Christians here get so bristly when one mentions that the story of Christ is a myth/allegory more than a historical fact?

Not sure. I mean the Catholic Church accepts the Big Bang. That makes it sort of hard to claim the Bible is a history book doesn't it? Granted not all Polish Christians are Catholics.

I don't think the Bible was written to be a history text, even the ones written after Thucydides. I have a hard time seeing Romans accepting a story where people had to return to their ancestral homelands to register to pay taxes as a factual representation of Imperial taxation...not to mention this territory was not even a Roman province at the time. So clearly people at the time understood religious texts were supposed to be spiritual and not literal.

[DontSayBanana]

Not really - again, the Bible is a verifiable, objectively existing text, which can be read and interpreted. So if you say you think the Bible is the word of God, it is not a "generalisation" or "bigotry" to expect you to agree with everything the Bible says (it would be different if you said that the Bible is simply a historical text, that has some value still today but by large is outdated and inadequate to modern times).

The beautiful part is you started with a gross oversimplification.  The "Bible" is a collection of texts, not a single cohesive work in and of itself- it's been through translation errors, disagreements between sects regarding which books are to be considered genuine and canonical, and good old-fashioned editorial bias.  Since WBC is ostensibly protestant, are they hypocrites for not also adhering to the 7 extra books found in the Catholic bible?

[Valmy]

The WBC is Calvinism taken to its most absurd extremes. And that is really saying something.