Hey Hey! Ho Ho! Christian Candidates Have Got to Go!

St. Augustine wrote in The City of God, that we must love sinners with Christian Charity, “for as long as they live they may come to a better mind.”

I think that would be guided by the Spiritual Works of Mercy: admonish the sinner, bear wrongs patiently, forgive all injuries, teach the ignorant, etc.

No, wait!

It’s time to hit back twice as hard. They bring a knife we bring a gun . . .

I (think I) quoted their failed, divisive president.

They’re not receiving hate for their faith, they’re receiving hate for their hateful comments they’ve made in the past. If Rick Santorum or Michelle Bachmann wish to call gay people ‘immoral’ and ‘unnatural’ and make comments about how they’re all ‘trapped in misery’, then they deserve to be ridiculed and mocked for their hateful, bigoted opinions. You spew hate, you’re gonna get hate back. dwi.

I would try to not stoop to their level because nobody wins when you sink down to using insults or generalizations that attack entire groups, however ultimately I see no issue with people using their freedom of speech, even if they wish to use it to just lob insults. It’s not really constructive or beneficial, but it is ultimately something everyone (including those candidates and responders I disagree with) has a right to do.

Freedom of speech doesn’t however protect your opinions from being criticized, and if one is making hateful comments they must be prepared that some people will take offence to those, and may respond in kind.

The Constitution actually prohibits “religious tests.”

That prohibition is only laid upon the government. Voters are so prohibited.

“Criticism is one thing. When your buddies utilize self-defined realities, truths, and vice/virtues (which are 180 degrees opposed to 5,000 years of civilized life) to censor, to make death threats, libels, lies, slanders that is out of bounds.”

Criticism isn’t the same as censorship. You can’t tell people that they’re bad for choosing to act on urges they were born with, can’t change and that don’t violate anyone else’s rights and expect them to not reject your opinion as hateful and misinformed. As I’ve said in every post I’ve made, calls for violence by people I otherwise agree with are just as wrong as those by people I disagree with.

Society used to tolerate slavery, now we don’t because we recognize that the practice violates people’s basic rights. We used to tolerate arranged marriages, now we don’t because we recognize that that practice also violates people’s basic rights. We used to not allow interracial marriage, but we now do, because we realize that banning it violates people’s basic rights.

Societies grow by questioning and rejecting outdated beliefs, values and practices, which is why many of these ancient ideas are being questioned now. Which isn’t to say they weren’t questioned before, as many ancient societies accepted homosexuality and some even recognized a third-gender.

“Of course, your reality (what do you call the planet on which you exist?) tells you that our beliefs are “ancient religious hatred”. So, you’re right. There is no talk with you.”

Sorry, I’ll continue to call a spade a spade. When people stop using religious faith as justification for bigotry, and for violating others rights by trying to restrict their ability to engage in practices that impact no one but themselves, I’ll no longer have need to treat their beliefs as hatred based on outdated superstition.

You’re right though, you might as well not waste your time trying to tell me I should be more tolerance of your intolerance. I’m not able to doublethink my way into seeing that as reasonable like you clearly have.

“That isn’t the reason. Slavery was done away with in the West largely by abolition movements that were fueled by Christians. Google William Wilberforce for example. The idea that slavery was wrong was based on the Christian concept that all men and women are children of God. Where Christian influence is weak slavery returns. I would point to the slaves of the Gulag in Soviet Russia for example. Most of the things you take for granted as human rights comes down to a basically Christian world view. Other cultures and civilizations have had different ways of looking at the world, and in almost all of them human rights, as defined in the West with its history of Christianity, matter little.”

Slavery was both opposed and supported by groups that were fueled by Christianity in the southern US. Slavery (especially of non-Christians) was supported by many Christian kingdoms in the early middle ages. Christian opposition to slavery in the middle ages was restricted to opposition to slavery of Christians. Prisoners of a Gulag were considered criminals by an authoritarian political party, and while their condition was most certainly slavery, it was morally justified differently than systems that a people consciously accept to be slavery. Christians have most certainly contributed to the concept of liberty in the west, however they’re not the only ones, and they don’t own it and it certainly doesn’t mean enforcing Christian/Biblical morality is a good way to pursue liberty.

“Actually most lesbians claim that they choose to be lesbians. The buzz word when homosexual liberation started in the seventies was sexual preference. The idea that people are born to a certain sexual orientation is belied by history and currently has zero scientific basis to support it. There actually is much more scientific evidence that some people may be born with a potential for being unable to control their anger. That does not mean that they cannot be held fully accountable for what may be an inborn impulse”

It’s rather disingenuous to compare an action that only involves two adults consenting and one that violates another’s rights like using violence (even if one has a rage disorder). No one’s suggesting we allow gay people to engage in non-consensual rape with impunity. Given that gay males show predictable, stereotypical changes is the size of certain brain structures, as well as statistically predictable differences in the ratio in lengths of their fingers, there’s pretty strong evidence of homosexuality having a biological component. As homosexual behaviour isn’t and ought not to be criminal, there’s nothing to “hold them accountable for”, they get to carry out their business however they like.

“Actually the idea of homosexuality as we understand it today, where a group practices sex with partners of the same sex for an entire life, would have struck virtually all ancient societies as bizarre. Some Greeks practiced pederasty, but that did not prevent them from marrying and having children. Using boys as catamites has been common throughout Greece and the Middle East, but it was regarded as a vice and not a civil right. ”

I was actually not referring to the Middle East or Greece, but rather the Celts who practised homosexuality between adult men of similar social status.

You are correct in stating that exclusive homosexuality didn’t exist. Men were expected to produce offspring, as long as they did that duty, shagging other women, or men, or children, including slaves and sometimes equals was generally not seen as immoral in many ancient societies. Theidea of male monogamy was foreign to most ancient cultures.

Some of these practices we recognize as immoral (for example, it was accepted that you could rape your wife, or your slaves) however the ones that are, are seen as immoral because they violate the rights of others, not because they are not productive.

“Of course this statement by you is disingenuous. Gay activists seek to change how Western society has viewed sex for 2000 years. Tolerance is not what you seek, but rather to have society give its stamp of approval through gay marriage, the right for gays to adopt, to serve openly in the military, to have gay propaganda taught in schools, etc. Those who dissent are to be silenced.”

Gay people have every right to be seen as normal members of society. They are. People are free to believe sodomy is immoral (or masturbation, or sex while menstruating, or having the lights turned on or whatever else you’d like to describe as immoral), it doesn’t make it so, and it doesn’t entitle anyone to dictate that it can’t be talked about, or that people who engage in it can be discriminated against by the state. There’s no legitimate reason that one minority should be allowed to dictate how we treat another group of people just based on what they do with other consenting adults in the privacy of their own bedrooms.

“Which is why a Catholic blogger on a small blog received over 32000 hits in one day, and comments not merely criticizing her, but mostly simply vilely insulting her. Intimidation and punishment was the order of the day.”

Yes, butthurt people on the internet sometimes over-react. I understand and empathize with their offence though, much like you feel offence for how she was insulted. Mind you, she wasn’t really insulted any worse than a Justin Bieber fan would get on some YouTube videos, the internet is an ugly place. It doesn’t justify the behaviour though.

“Of course this is all bound to ultimately fail. The conditions in the West which led to the current cultural moment will continue to shift and change, but the Church will remain. We have seen the Caesars rise and fall, the invasion of the barbarians, the Crusades, the Protestant Reformation, etc, and nothing has altered our devotion to spreading the teachings of Christ. We will outlast you and prevail over time.”

It’s possible, however the trend throughout the west since the Enlightenment, and especially since WWI has been one of declining religiosity. I hope the Church continues to exist, even as it becomes increasingly irrelevant in law and politics. Theocracy just goes against our values, and right now there’s a very vocal minority that is opposed to imposing laws based on another minority’s religious ideals.

Yes Donald, the trend in religiosity cycles. It was at a low ebb around the time of the Revolutionary War. Beginning in 1803, revivalism ensued. Then the Second Great Awakening. Some cite a third. There is a Catholic writer, Charles Taylor, and one of the things he gets across is that Christianity indeed flourishes immensely in some secular states since the Enlightenment, though not all. The last 300 years have been very religious in some places, e.g. America and England. It jsut depends which country or region of the world you have in mind. In Poland it was liberating, not oppressive, since the people freed themselves from communism which was atheistic yet oppressive. He tries to get across that the Enlightenment meta-narrative (the atheistic one) doesn’t hold up. It’s a false cliche. Religion can be liberating and atheism can be horribly oppressive.