[POLITICS] Religious Discrimination

[Abomination]

Usually it is not "being homosexual" that is a problem according to religion but the act of homosexual sex. Which means, yes, homosexuals could just not have sex to avoid hell. Similar as in many situations heterosexuals are supposed to suppress their sex drive to avoid sinning.
And that is a choice. No one has to have sex.

"You can BE a homosexual, just don't do homosexual things."

Thing is, people having sex outside of marriage is "frowned upon" but is ultimately redeemable. Homosex? Oh, that's going too far.

If someone can be something but never do the things associated with that something then they really can't be that thing.

Did the person say that he wants those people to go to hell or is happy about it ? Usually those lectures are suppossedly about showing people how to not go to hell, because you pity them.

They made no real case, just that homosexuals go to hell. Didn't seem particularly happy or sad about it, but given how they're defending the stance they seem to think the punishment is deserved.

Why would a Christian mention it unless they agree with the premise? Seems like a bit of a sticking point there. You worship an entity that inflicts eternal torment on people because they love people of the same sex. "I wish they weren't homosexual so this thing didn't happen to them" is not really a defence, because you're still okay with them going to hell for being homosexual.

 

[Kwak]

Funny how 'christians' seem to place so much emphasis on how sinful homosexuality is rather than murder and violence or other mistreatment of people.

 

[Baffle]

Can I say we should ban Catholics because I am one? (I am, technically, though I don't think it's written down anywhere. Except here.) I'm not used to being oppressed, so I don't know what the correct form it. Probably B15276-1.

 

[Satinavian]

Usually it is not "being homosexual" that is a problem according to religion but the act of homosexual sex. Which means, yes, homosexuals could just not have sex to avoid hell. Similar as in many situations heterosexuals are supposed to suppress their sex drive to avoid sinning.
And that is a choice. No one has to have sex.

"You can BE a homosexual, just don't do homosexual things."

Thing is, people having sex outside of marriage is "frowned upon" but is ultimately redeemable. Homosex? Oh, that's going too far.

Sex between two unmarried persons might be only frowned upen, but adultary (which includes every sex after a divorce for many denominations) or breaking vows of chastity tend to be regarded as worse then just homosex.

Also i have never heard of a denomination that considers homosex irredeemable. Considering that most of Christianizty is about forgiveness of sins, it is unsurprisingly hard to find anything considered irredeemable. Some denominations hold suicide as such because you don't have time to feel sorry afterwards, but even that is not a universal stance.

If someone can be something but never do the things associated with that something then they really can't be that thing.

Someone who doesn't have sex does not lose his or her sexuality for it. Quite a lot of people don't actually have sex.

Why would a Christian mention it unless they agree with the premise? Seems like a bit of a sticking point there. You worship an entity that inflicts eternal torment on people because they love people of the same sex. "I wish they weren't homosexual so this thing didn't happen to them" is not really a defence, because you're still okay with them going to hell for being homosexual.

The thing about faith is that it provides an ultimate moral authority by definition. You don't have to agree with it as a believer, but that only means that you are too stupid to see the bigger picture.
It is not as each religious person actually likes all the rules, commandments and other requirements. But they are still required to follow them.

Luckyly in the case of homosexuality and Christianity that just means that you are not suppossed to have homosex yourself. There is certainly no requirment to be mean to other homosexuals.

Funny how 'christians' seem to place so much emphasis on how sinful homosexuality is rather than murder and violence or other mistreatment of people.

There is not really much support from sripture for such behavior. There is nothing in the ten commandments about homosexuality. There is nothing from Jesus about it. Pretty much every hierarchy of sins based on scripture would rank homosex pretty low in importance.

I would assume that any person emphasizing the sinfulness of homosexuals beyond that of all those numerous other sins is really only a homophobe biggot abusing religion to discriminate people he personally doesn't like. But i might admit that there are whole denominations which seem to be founded by homophobe biggots who cherrypicked in the bible.

 

[Kwak]

There is not really much support from sripture for such behavior. There is nothing in the ten commandments about homosexuality. There is nothing from Jesus about it. Pretty much every hierarchy of sins based on scripture would rank homosex pretty low in importance.

I would assume that any person emphasizing the sinfulness of homosexuals beyond that of all those numerous other sins is really only a homophobe biggot abusing religion to discriminate people he personally doesn't like. But i might admit that there are whole denominations which seem to be founded by homophobe biggots who cherrypicked in the bible.

Exactly. Christians should by definition be ALL about the NEW testament, but they love to pick through the Torah, despite Christ preaching rejection of all those old laws as stuffy hypocrisy, to find the dogmatic laws that most appeal to their personal sense of spitefulness.
They're just small-minded pricks and that should never be some legally-protected right.

 

[Dreiko_v1legacy]

Religion needs no government protecting because it has god on its side and even if you suffer in life you will be rewarded if you hold true to your faith so just take all the unfair treatment in stride and be a good little believer.

What does a little discrimination matter when eternity in some form of paradise is awaiting you once you die.

If anything, you should take pity on those who are mistreating you cause they're dooming themselves by not being a member of your religion. Let them at least have fun in this world.

If you do believe in your religion all this should be common sense so I don't see why anyone would want religious protection. And if you don't believe in your religion enough to endure suffering and discrimination, well...why the hell should the government protect a filthy unbeliever with religious protection laws simply because you purport to be a member of a faith?


You see, I'm a fundamentalist agnostic. I don't believe in religion but I am fundamentalist about the lore of at least Orthodox Christianity that I grew up in so I can still discern whether someone is adhering to the teachings or not, irrespective of the degree of truth to be found therein and my assessment of all of it as a fairy-tale. I'm not the one who claims to believe in it but if you do then I'll hold you to your claim.

There is not really much support from sripture for such behavior. There is nothing in the ten commandments about homosexuality. There is nothing from Jesus about it. Pretty much every hierarchy of sins based on scripture would rank homosex pretty low in importance.

I would assume that any person emphasizing the sinfulness of homosexuals beyond that of all those numerous other sins is really only a homophobe biggot abusing religion to discriminate people he personally doesn't like. But i might admit that there are whole denominations which seem to be founded by homophobe biggots who cherrypicked in the bible.

Exactly. Christians should by definition be ALL about the NEW testament, but they love to pick through the Torah, despite Christ preaching rejection of all those old laws as stuffy hypocrisy, to find the dogmatic laws that most appeal to their personal sense of spitefulness.
They're just small-minded pricks and that should never be some legally-protected right.

That's Greek orthodox Christians you're thinking of. The rejection of the old testament is a huge part of Orthodox Christianity but later sects strayed from that path. I grew up in that stuff so it is very odd to me how people in the US quote the old testament and the new one interchangeably and attribute equal significance to things from either yet still think themselves Christian, indeed, but by then I was agnostic so it probably didn't have much of an impact.


Oh and those people who talk in tongues and charm snakes and whatnot, what the hell is up with them?


Oh and it's also odd how the bible has been translated through multiple languages but in the US and in other countries they don't actually teach priests ancient Greek to have them read the actual "words of god" that the bible was originally written in but rely on a translation that changes a lot of nuance and meaning as well as contains other issues that stem from things that are in ancient Greek but are untranslatable to English. I'd imagine the literal words of god would be worth learning a language over lol. I still remember this guy in college professing how English was "god's language" and then being very confused when I explained to him that English didn't exist when the bible was written and that he had never actually read the original book lol.

 

[Satinavian]

If you do believe in your religion all this should be common sense so I don't see why anyone would want religious protection. And if you don't believe in your religion enough to endure suffering and discrimination, well...why the hell should the government protect a filthy unbeliever with religious protection laws simply because you purport to be a member of a faith?

Because a gouvernment and its laws can only exist in a meaningful way if the citizens support it. So a gouvernment is well advised to make it possible and easy to follow all religions a meaningful part of the population adheres to.
If you have religious people choose between their religion and their gouvernment/the law, they will choose the former because that is where they believe the moral authority is. And that is the last thing any gouvernment wants.

That's Greek orthodox Christians you're thinking of. The rejection of the old testament is a huge part of Orthodox Christianity but later sects strayed from that path. I grew up in that stuff so it is very odd to me how people in the US quote the old testament and the new one interchangeably and attribute equal significance to things from either yet still think themselves Christian, indeed, but by then I was agnostic so it probably didn't have much of an impact.

Not only the orthodox denominations. The Catholics do the same, the Lutherans do the same, iirc the Anglicans do the same etc . It is mostly the sects with "Only the bible counts and every layman should read and interpret it himself" that end up with equal importance of old and new testament. Mainly by virtue of them being both in the same book and reading it without context.
And somehow most of those sects seem to be US based. Mainly because Europe sent its religious weirdos and troublemakers there for centuries.

But even if you hold old and new testament for equally important, you have to do quite a bit of cherrypicking to make homosex into something important. So that is no excuse.

 

[Dreiko_v1legacy]

If you do believe in your religion all this should be common sense so I don't see why anyone would want religious protection. And if you don't believe in your religion enough to endure suffering and discrimination, well...why the hell should the government protect a filthy unbeliever with religious protection laws simply because you purport to be a member of a faith?

Because a gouvernment and its laws can only exist in a meaningful way if the citizens support it. So a gouvernment is well advised to make it possible and easy to follow all religions a meaningful part of the population adheres to.
If you have religious people choose between their religion and their gouvernment/the law, they will choose the former because that is where they believe the moral authority is. And that is the last thing any gouvernment wants.

I fail to see how a government is making you choose by not offering you special protection it doesn't afford someone else. As long nobody gets special treatment or special protections then there's no choosing. You just don't get to be extra special because of your religion. Nobody in the government is making you stop be religious or persecuting you. They're just not making special rules just for you.

Saying you will only support a government if it treats everyone of your religion as a higher class of citizen is undemocratic and insane. It should not be the law in any free country.


We don't do that for any other thing people choose to be into. Should we have laws for specifically gamers or star wars fans or harry potter readers too? What draws the line? Cause some of those things have a lot more followings than some religions do in a lot of countries. (there's definitely more star wars fans than, say, Buddhists in the USA for example)

 

[Fieldy409_v1legacy]

There is not really much support from sripture for such behavior. There is nothing in the ten commandments about homosexuality. There is nothing from Jesus about it. Pretty much every hierarchy of sins based on scripture would rank homosex pretty low in importance.

I would assume that any person emphasizing the sinfulness of homosexuals beyond that of all those numerous other sins is really only a homophobe biggot abusing religion to discriminate people he personally doesn't like. But i might admit that there are whole denominations which seem to be founded by homophobe biggots who cherrypicked in the bible.

Exactly. Christians should by definition be ALL about the NEW testament, but they love to pick through the Torah, despite Christ preaching rejection of all those old laws as stuffy hypocrisy, to find the dogmatic laws that most appeal to their personal sense of spitefulness.
They're just small-minded pricks and that should never be some legally-protected right.

No, Jesus was very specific in that he was not trying to overturn the 'old laws'(and religion was the law) but to simply add to them. He has a few verses saying so if you look it up. Nothing in the new testament says the old testament doesn't count anymore except arguably the part where God says it is now okay to eat all the animals of the Earth in a vision to Paul, something along the lines of "How can anything God created be unclean?" If I recall correctly.

 

[Smithnikov_v1legacy]

Also i have never heard of a denomination that considers homosex irredeemable.

Google "Make America Straight Again" conference and the people who run it. There's your sect.

 

[Kwak]

No, Jesus was very specific in that he was not trying to overturn the 'old laws'(and religion was the law) but to simply add to them. He has a few verses saying so if you look it up. Nothing in the new testament says the old testament doesn't count anymore except arguably the part where God says it is now okay to eat all the animals of the Earth in a vision to Paul, something along the lines of "How can anything God created be unclean?" If I recall correctly.

Then what was 'he who is without sin' and 'judge not lest', and hanging out with prostitutes about?

 

[Dreiko_v1legacy]

Jesus definitely undid the whole "eye for an eye" stuff, that's the whole point of his coming.

 

[Jarrito3002]

What makes funnier is if I remember this guy said some similar shit earlier but the team did not fire him and just apologized and said he would not do it again. Then he does it again and this time with some extra sauce to it. This is all his fault freedom of religion can go jump on a pike. That best is that if go on a long rant about all these people going a to hell there is a good chance you are also guilty of one of those things but the cognitive dissonance is strong as hell.

Either way New Zealand is going to murk everyone as per usual if not probably France and I will enjoy my world cup rugby.

 

[Fieldy409_v1legacy]

Then what was 'he who is without sin' and 'judge not lest', and hanging out with prostitutes about?

The pharisees asked him why he hung out with prostitutes and he basically said he was evangelising I guess, he said that he was hanging out with them because 'doctors don't go to healthy people' so I guess the argument there is that he's trying to make them not sinners. He was probably just enjoying partying it up, you can tell he loved a good feast and drink when people would take him into their houses. Who knows, maybe Jesus was a party animal lol.

And the other stuff? Maybe it doesn't make sense but it's religion and they had a lot of canon to deal with. We can't even keep 50 years of Doctor Who canon without contradictions imagine the canon issues with thousands or hundreds of years of random assorted religious texts. I looked this one up, see Matthew 5:17

"17 ?Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. 18 For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished. 19 Therefore anyone who sets aside one of the least of these commands and teaches others accordingly will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever practices and teaches these commands will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. 20 For I tell you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven."

So maybe we can consider Jesus to have intended to iterate but keep the old laws. Since Jesus has no recordings of him either being for or against homosexuals, all we have to go on is that what the said the old testament still counts, and it says that homosexuality is an abomination and why the cities were burned in the story of Sodom and Gomorrah without Jesus to contradict unfortunately. The story of Sodom and Gomorrah is fucking crazy though, Lot was willing to give his daughters to be gang raped by a horny mob that wanted to bang angels, and he was supposed to be the only good man in the city.

As an aside, My pet theory is Sodom and Gomorrah probably got destroyed in some sort of volcanic eruption or something in real life, and to figure out why 'God' destroyed them they looked at what was different about them and they probably had big gay communities the way gay people tend to go to places like Sydney now so they aren't just the only gay in the village. Who knows maybe if that shit hadn't happened thousands of years of persucution of gays wouldn't have occured, That'd be one to trying out if I had a time machine lol.

 

[Satinavian]

No, Jesus was very specific in that he was not trying to overturn the 'old laws'(and religion was the law) but to simply add to them. He has a few verses saying so if you look it up. Nothing in the new testament says the old testament doesn't count anymore except arguably the part where God says it is now okay to eat all the animals of the Earth in a vision to Paul, something along the lines of "How can anything God created be unclean?" If I recall correctly.

Yes, it was all about "all those rules and even harsher ones still exist and no mortal can actually follow all of them and earn a place in heaven that is why you need me to get saved despite your sins."

Also this does not make the old testament equally important. Instead this instance from the new testament is one of the reasons the old one is included in the bible at all.

 

[Dreiko_v1legacy]

Btw the whole hell thing is doubly ignorant if you're talking Christianity. You just need to earnestly repent in your heart and you go to heaven. There's this tale that Judas hung himself from a tree after betraying Jesus but the branch broke as a mercy of god and he fell to his death which isn't suicide and if he repented as he was falling he too can even be saved. So of course all the gays and "fornicators" can also avoid hell with just a simple earnest repenting a millisecond before they die.


Oh and also the whole Dante's inferno style hell, that's also a Catholic invention. In the Orthodox text there's not really "hell" as much as something closer to what we think of as purgatory that you stay in to purify yourself of your sins so you can go to heaven. Everyone goes to heaven, some just have to sit in a depressing place for a while depending on the weight of their sins and once their conscience clears they too go to heaven like everyone else.

Doesn't that sound a lot more like the way the world would work if god loved you? Cause that's what's in the original language text of the bible and the orthodox faith. All those scary devils and rape-winds (not sure which level of hell the one that you get raped by wind but there's definitely one of them, I wonder if that la blue girl scene was inspired by this) and what have you are later additions to Christianity aimed at controlling the masses through fear.

 

[Satinavian]

Oh and also the whole Dante's inferno style hell, that's also a Catholic invention. In the Orthodox text there's not really "hell" as much as something closer to what we think of as purgatory that you stay in to purify yourself of your sins so you can go to heaven. Everyone goes to heaven, some just have to sit in a depressing place for a while depending on the weight of their sins and once their conscience clears they too go to heaven like everyone else.

Both hell and purgatory and basically everything that happens to people who don't go to heaven is kinda unclear based oin the bible alone.

Which is why there has been a lot of "filling the gaps" and consulting less than canonic sources on it. That includes various "visions". And because people like those edgy descriptions we have elaborate ones - but they hardly ever were actual church doctrine anywhere, not even in the catholic church. Since Thomas of Aquin the official Catholic position is that all deeper knowledge about the nature of hell is pure speculation.

The bible does mention Gehenna as a place of punishment somewhat associated with fire. But even the fire is not affirmed to be meant literally.

 

[Silvanus]

Then what was 'he who is without sin' and 'judge not lest', and hanging out with prostitutes about?

Contradictions. It's a very self-contradicting book.

 

[Abomination]

Btw the whole hell thing is doubly ignorant if you're talking Christianity. You just need to earnestly repent in your heart and you go to heaven. There's this tale that Judas hung himself from a tree after betraying Jesus but the branch broke as a mercy of god and he fell to his death which isn't suicide and if he repented as he was falling he too can even be saved. So of course all the gays and "fornicators" can also avoid hell with just a simple earnest repenting a millisecond before they die.


Oh and also the whole Dante's inferno style hell, that's also a Catholic invention. In the Orthodox text there's not really "hell" as much as something closer to what we think of as purgatory that you stay in to purify yourself of your sins so you can go to heaven. Everyone goes to heaven, some just have to sit in a depressing place for a while depending on the weight of their sins and once their conscience clears they too go to heaven like everyone else.

Doesn't that sound a lot more like the way the world would work if god loved you? Cause that's what's in the original language text of the bible and the orthodox faith. All those scary devils and rape-winds (not sure which level of hell the one that you get raped by wind but there's definitely one of them, I wonder if that la blue girl scene was inspired by this) and what have you are later additions to Christianity aimed at controlling the masses through fear.

In context, though, the person in the article believes in the "eternal torment and damnation" version of hell. How theologically accurate they are is irrelevant, they are still spouting hate speech based on what they believe.

 

[Satinavian]

In context, though, the person in the article believes in the "eternal torment and damnation" version of hell. How theologically accurate they are is irrelevant, they are still spouting hate speech based on what they believe.

The statement still does not include that the speaker wishes them to go to hell or is happy with that. And it also does not include any encouragement to treat them bad in this life.

So while the speaker is probably wrong theologically (can't be sure without knowing his particular sect, but getting "drunks go to hell" out of the bible is questionable at least. But some protestants are strange). And i would guess that he is a homophobe bigot considering there are so many other sins more important to choose from. But it is not hate speech.