Our new and appreciated commenter Joe Doakes raised a question that in turn led me to some analytical thinking.
Joe raised the question of responsibility on the part of the Chick-fails guys for the electroshock to the nuts torture of gays just because they funded the organization that did the actual torture.
The problem I have with that is apparently the Chick-Fails guys were specifically supportive with their donations of efforts to 'cure' homosexuality in the mistaken belief that it represents something that is an illness or significant inadequacy. They funded EXACTLY, KNOWINGLY, INTENTIONALLY what was being done, and have continued donating money for that purpose. It was not a case of donating money to a worthy cause where the money is incidentally used for a different purpose or in a different way. I would argue that Exodus International is an UNWORTHY cause, an inherently and fundamentally evil organization with bad intentions and dangerous methods. To claim that funding was only for the good aspects of that organization is like saying you're contributing to only the good aspects of a neo-nazi hate group, or the missionary arm of the Westboro Baptist military funeral picketing church, or the Klu Klux Klan.
There ISN'T any good activity they engage in. They are free to believe in anything they want to believe in - but what they DO is harmful, destructive, and vicious. There is a reason groups get identified as HATE groups -- and that would include those we have in Minnesota, which includes the Annandale-based Bradlee Dean pseudo-ministry which lies about what it does, including misrepresenting itself in soliciting money. REAL churches arguably don't misrepresent themselves or get thrown out of schools, and they don't promote hate propaganda like Dean's claims about homosexual pedophilia. Promoting fear, and extreme disapproval to the extent that attacks by enemies are blamed on them, with lies about that group -- that is what HATE is, that is what HATE looks like. That is the very personification of hatred.
To claim it is a religious belief, to claim you support and believe in the Bible - good for you, IF that is what you really do. But if you only SELECTIVELY do that, if you for example eat shrimp and bacon, if you don't support polygamy rather than monogamy, if you oppose sex trafficking children into sexual slavery or oppose any other kind of slavery, if you don't believe women are unclean during menstruation where they have to leave their homes to spend the period of their period under a separate roof --- then you aren't REALLY all about the Bible as the inerrant word of God. (The Chick-Fail-hey! guys like to boast that they are still married to their first and only wives - good for them, but if they adhere to Leviticus, I doubt that would be true.)
The Chick-Fail-guys adhere to the same hate message as the Hate group in Minnesota - that homosexuals are pedophiles. The evidence that they are NOT is overwhelming, as I've written about here; more than that, it has been well known for some forty years or more.
Joe Doakes gave me what he mistakenly believed was a comparable example to exempt the Cathys from blame. He cited a philanthropist who was helping poor people vote, and in the process gave them cigarettes, which she paid for not with philanthropy corporate funds, but out of her own pocket. The difference in amounts was a $32.50, compared to around $8 million, the difference in time was a one time event where she was present in person, smoking, and shared cigarettes with others - as one might do if the instance arose where someone was eating in front of others who were hungry - in contrast to a period of YEARS.
What is a greater difference in the two examples is that whereas the Cathys who are the corporate bosses of Chick-failure don't personally hook up the electrodes to gay men's scrota and penises, (presumably), they promote the most horrible and inaccurate disparagement of a group of people for simply being born with a different sexual attraction. This is on a par with those who incorrectly used to assert that black people were inferior, flawed, deficient in intellect and ability, and in many instances claimed had a greater criminality of nature simply because of an inherent quality of race.
We now recognize that was a terrible and completely false view of black people, or any other race or ethnicity (and you could add culture to that list, in the way that Mitts on R-money uses it incorrectly). It is more broadly recognized as a form of hatred because of how it wrongly denigrated and degraded a large group of people.
That is the same fault, inaccurately degrading and denigrating a group of people for inherent qualities, that is involved in the criticism of the Cathys and those like them. The reality is that people with same sex orientation are just as honest, intelligent, make just as good parents or spouses, as heterosexual people -- and are NOT pedophiles or otherwise deviant or inferior or criminal human beings. Claiming they are is an wrong about LGBT people as it was wrong to spread lies that encouraged hate and disrespect and disregard towards black people to justify treating them in an unequal, unfair, discriminatory, and highly damaging way.
Connie Milstein who gave cigarettes to a group of poor men having a nicotine craving, was in contrast engaged in helping people who had become marginalized in society engage in voting, become active and positive participants in our society. It is well-documented that when people vote, they feel involved, engaged and empowered as participants in our society. When former - emphasis FORMER - felons vote for example, they are less likely to return to criminal behavior, and more likely to improve their lives including achieving successful employment and stable families, productive members of our society. She treated them with respect, and compassion, and consideration; that is the OPPOSITE of the efforts of the Cathys and their Chick-Fail-hey money.
What I see in the larger contrast between the right and the left is the right tears down people, grinds down people, takes money away from the majority - the 99% - unfairly and unequally in their tax and other policies, and oppose all efforts to provide greater opportunity and equality. The left affirms people; the right discriminates against people, lies to disparage and disenfranchise people, and DIS-affirms people.
One builds; the other tears down and injures. The right enfranchises and includes and encourages the participation of the largest possible group of people, to their benefit AND OURS. The right? The right does the opposite; the Chick-fail bosses exemplify that effort.
No wonder mayors and council members reject the Chick-fail-way.
Joe raised the question of responsibility on the part of the Chick-fails guys for the electroshock to the nuts torture of gays just because they funded the organization that did the actual torture.
The problem I have with that is apparently the Chick-Fails guys were specifically supportive with their donations of efforts to 'cure' homosexuality in the mistaken belief that it represents something that is an illness or significant inadequacy. They funded EXACTLY, KNOWINGLY, INTENTIONALLY what was being done, and have continued donating money for that purpose. It was not a case of donating money to a worthy cause where the money is incidentally used for a different purpose or in a different way. I would argue that Exodus International is an UNWORTHY cause, an inherently and fundamentally evil organization with bad intentions and dangerous methods. To claim that funding was only for the good aspects of that organization is like saying you're contributing to only the good aspects of a neo-nazi hate group, or the missionary arm of the Westboro Baptist military funeral picketing church, or the Klu Klux Klan.
There ISN'T any good activity they engage in. They are free to believe in anything they want to believe in - but what they DO is harmful, destructive, and vicious. There is a reason groups get identified as HATE groups -- and that would include those we have in Minnesota, which includes the Annandale-based Bradlee Dean pseudo-ministry which lies about what it does, including misrepresenting itself in soliciting money. REAL churches arguably don't misrepresent themselves or get thrown out of schools, and they don't promote hate propaganda like Dean's claims about homosexual pedophilia. Promoting fear, and extreme disapproval to the extent that attacks by enemies are blamed on them, with lies about that group -- that is what HATE is, that is what HATE looks like. That is the very personification of hatred.
To claim it is a religious belief, to claim you support and believe in the Bible - good for you, IF that is what you really do. But if you only SELECTIVELY do that, if you for example eat shrimp and bacon, if you don't support polygamy rather than monogamy, if you oppose sex trafficking children into sexual slavery or oppose any other kind of slavery, if you don't believe women are unclean during menstruation where they have to leave their homes to spend the period of their period under a separate roof --- then you aren't REALLY all about the Bible as the inerrant word of God. (The Chick-Fail-hey! guys like to boast that they are still married to their first and only wives - good for them, but if they adhere to Leviticus, I doubt that would be true.)
The Chick-Fail-guys adhere to the same hate message as the Hate group in Minnesota - that homosexuals are pedophiles. The evidence that they are NOT is overwhelming, as I've written about here; more than that, it has been well known for some forty years or more.
Joe Doakes gave me what he mistakenly believed was a comparable example to exempt the Cathys from blame. He cited a philanthropist who was helping poor people vote, and in the process gave them cigarettes, which she paid for not with philanthropy corporate funds, but out of her own pocket. The difference in amounts was a $32.50, compared to around $8 million, the difference in time was a one time event where she was present in person, smoking, and shared cigarettes with others - as one might do if the instance arose where someone was eating in front of others who were hungry - in contrast to a period of YEARS.
What is a greater difference in the two examples is that whereas the Cathys who are the corporate bosses of Chick-failure don't personally hook up the electrodes to gay men's scrota and penises, (presumably), they promote the most horrible and inaccurate disparagement of a group of people for simply being born with a different sexual attraction. This is on a par with those who incorrectly used to assert that black people were inferior, flawed, deficient in intellect and ability, and in many instances claimed had a greater criminality of nature simply because of an inherent quality of race.
We now recognize that was a terrible and completely false view of black people, or any other race or ethnicity (and you could add culture to that list, in the way that Mitts on R-money uses it incorrectly). It is more broadly recognized as a form of hatred because of how it wrongly denigrated and degraded a large group of people.
That is the same fault, inaccurately degrading and denigrating a group of people for inherent qualities, that is involved in the criticism of the Cathys and those like them. The reality is that people with same sex orientation are just as honest, intelligent, make just as good parents or spouses, as heterosexual people -- and are NOT pedophiles or otherwise deviant or inferior or criminal human beings. Claiming they are is an wrong about LGBT people as it was wrong to spread lies that encouraged hate and disrespect and disregard towards black people to justify treating them in an unequal, unfair, discriminatory, and highly damaging way.
Connie Milstein who gave cigarettes to a group of poor men having a nicotine craving, was in contrast engaged in helping people who had become marginalized in society engage in voting, become active and positive participants in our society. It is well-documented that when people vote, they feel involved, engaged and empowered as participants in our society. When former - emphasis FORMER - felons vote for example, they are less likely to return to criminal behavior, and more likely to improve their lives including achieving successful employment and stable families, productive members of our society. She treated them with respect, and compassion, and consideration; that is the OPPOSITE of the efforts of the Cathys and their Chick-Fail-hey money.
What I see in the larger contrast between the right and the left is the right tears down people, grinds down people, takes money away from the majority - the 99% - unfairly and unequally in their tax and other policies, and oppose all efforts to provide greater opportunity and equality. The left affirms people; the right discriminates against people, lies to disparage and disenfranchise people, and DIS-affirms people.
One builds; the other tears down and injures. The right enfranchises and includes and encourages the participation of the largest possible group of people, to their benefit AND OURS. The right? The right does the opposite; the Chick-fail bosses exemplify that effort.
No wonder mayors and council members reject the Chick-fail-way.
When did you become the sole judge of the validity of other people's religions and the sincerity of their beliefs?
ReplyDeleteI thought only God had that privilege. Unless you think . . . .
We can all judge when others try to pass off inconsistency and dishonesty and hate as religion Joe.
ReplyDeleteThey convict themselves; it has precious little to do with God, and I don't think the rest of us should pretend otherwise. I'm not assuming to myself any special authority other than calling them what they are - not what they'd like to pretend to be.
I've seen for example the misrepresentations made by Bradlee Dean and his organization to get people to make donations. Why do you want to support dishonesty Joe? Or hate?
If you want to claim you are adhering to the Bible - DO THAT. But don't pretend the rest of us haven't read the same Bible, and know what's in it.
Or would you like to get into a little theological wrangle here about the content of Leviticus or any other part of the Bible?
If you say it is what you believe - fine; but then stick to that. If you don't believe it, then say so, and stick to what you do believe.
But don't pretend one and then do the other.
You astonish me. Your understanding of religions far exceeds mine.
ReplyDeleteI have been pondering it for half a day and still cannot come up with a single major religion that enforces every stricture in the Bible. I'm familiar with two kinds of Catholics, four syods of Lutherans, some Baptists and you're right - they've all fallen lax. And that's not to mention how any major religion not based on the Bible treats homosexuality.
Using your standard, every major religion I can think of is False and its followers are Wicked.
I give up - which one is the One True Faith that you know but nobody else does?
And where can I learn more about it locally?
Leaving aside religious-based concerns, I note that homosexuality is not listed as a mental illness - anymore. Taxpayer funded partial-birth abortion is a Constitutional right - now. Involuntary committment of mental patients is illegal - now. Divorce liberates parents and is a good thing - now.
ReplyDeleteThese changes occured by fiat in the turbulent time marked by Anti-Vietnam protests, expanded drug use and upheavals in social mores.
Could these changes be less based on science or truth and simply reflect an anti-authority shift in the prevailing social mood?
Will a later, less affluent generation deplore our faddish preoccupation with individual personal rights at the expense of ordered society?
.
Your lack of fact amazes me.
ReplyDeleteThere is NO taxpayer funded partial birth abortion, or any other form of partial birth abortion.
Those changes occurred by liberal people looking for sane solutions to injustices supported by conservatives, and you left out they overturned segregation and anti-miscegenation and Jim Crow laws, and in particular they overturned a lot of the methods used to stop people from voting that the right is trying to re-institute.
Upheavals in social mores? You mean because people were more open about having sex, which they had been doing all along, as the various Kinsey studies showed?
These changes were all based on some establisment of science, buttressed by advances in philosophy and ethics. Viet Nam was a bad war, in which the government lied to us, and where people who were not allowed the vote (until near the end) were drafted to fight against their wishes. It resulted in the voting age being lowered to 18.
We still have an ordered society; it is the right, notably the chaos-loving libertarians and the tea party that oppose an ordered society. They are the ones against government, against regulation, against safe food, clean air and water, or sane energy programs.
They are the evolution denying and climate change/anthropogenic deniers, the right are the ones who deny science, and therefore try to legislate against truth.
The trends world wide and for the past several hundred years are in a very clear direction; we can recognize what that progress is and why and how it is taking place, or we can go with conservatives and try to delay it.
There is no legitimate reason to classify homosexuality as a mental illness; there never was. It was a religious-based prejudice, nothing more. It permeated a whole range of sciences, including those which prevented scientists from reporting their observations of same sex attraction among a large number of animal species. That is truth and fact.
Joe Doakes wrote:
ReplyDeleteJoe DoakesAugust 5, 2012 8:37 AM
You astonish me. Your understanding of religions far exceeds mine.
I suspect my KNOWLEDGE of religion is greater, including not just Christianity, but comparative religions, their textx, traditions, and may have visited more of their sacred sites
I have been pondering it for half a day and still cannot come up with a single major religion that enforces every stricture in the Bible.
You're right - there are no Budhist sects, or Hindu sects, or other major world religions that enforce every stricture of the Bible.
If you mean you can't think of any major variations of Christianity that enforce every stricture of the Bible, you would be correct. However by their own definitions and claims of being Bible based, to the degree they do not adhere to the Bible, they themselves are inconsistent with their proclaimed faith.
For example, there is no prohibition to abortion in the Bible, there is no support FOR monagamous marriage. The Bible is strictly in favor of polygamy.
What our more common versions of Christianity support are simply the customs, as they have changed and evolved, of western culture - and that is NOT the same thing as religion.
That has, btw, in the past included an acceptance in some forms of Christianity - including Roman Catholicism - of same sex marriages. There is even an historic liturgy written just for it.
So what we call religion often isn't religious at all - notably the RC celibacy rule that grew out of the RC church trying to find a way to prevent church property from being inherited by the offspring of their married clergy.
It is important to know which items are based on relgious texts and legitimate religious practice, and which is bullshit that is just what someone wanted for some non-spiritual reason.
When someone wants lean over-heavy on the authority of the Bible, if 1. they don't know what's in the Bible and what is not, and 2. if they only pick out something to use to hurt other people, but ignore the rest, particularly when something is not repeatedly supported by scripture - it should be rejected, and the claim of the basis for it in the Bible should be rejected as well.
I would put the assessment of masturbation by the RC in the same category. It is not a sin, and their claims for it being so are based on a refusal of a Biblical figure to engage in levirate marriage, because of coitus interruptus, not marriage. (That would be Onan, Genesis 38:9, part of the pentateuch, Torah, and core foundation of Islam, if you're interested).
Just because someone slaps the word religion on something doesn't mean it deserves respect. Often it deserves the opposite, as was the case with slavery, which slave owner and slave traders justified with the Bible.
Are we speaking of the same 'major' religions, btw? Because different versions of Christianity don't usually count as separate major religions.
ReplyDeleteJust for purposes of common ground with our terms here.
I'm familiar with two kinds of Catholics, four syods of Lutherans, some Baptists and you're right - they've all fallen lax. And that's not to mention how any major religion not based on the Bible treats homosexuality.
I'm familiar with some 30 forms of Christianity. So? Many of those do accept homosexuality, including among their clergy, and the trend is increasingly in that direction.
So? Religion is not the last word on when someting is correct or right, or even good or not. If you take a good look at history, including forced and arranged marriages and child marriage JUST WITHIN CHRISTIANITY, those things are now widely recognized as bad, including in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and international law, as well as our own domestic law. But at one time, it was supported and enforced by RELIGION, notably Christianity.
Using your standard, every major religion I can think of is False and its followers are Wicked. That might very well be true; however all that serves to demonstrate is not the problems inherent in religion being imperfect - which is what you are actually stating, and what I would assert. Instead you try to exaggerate instead of portraying my position more accurately.
It underlines why we should NOT use any specific religion as the basis for our LAWs, because it is not a good model.
Ethical and civil / legal precedent is a better basis for formulating law, and has many of the same virtues and advantages without the prejudices and harmful aspects.
The civil basis for marriage being recognized as it is has to do with issues of social and cultural stability - in which same sex marriages has the same social benefits as heterosexual marriage, including children raised by two same sex parents dong just as well as children raised by two married opposite sex parents. Ditto stable property ownership, etc. On THAT basis - that it provides the same social and cultural benefits as heterosexual marraige and a better equality of treatment for people - we should allow it.
If you want to follow a religion that doesn't accept it - don't engage in same sex marriage, and you're free to believe whatever you want - just not to force it on other people who don't share your religion. Get it?
I give up - which one is the One True Faith that you know but nobody else does?
And where can I learn more about it locally?
I'm not the one pushing religion here, or claiming one true superfaith; you are. That is your own personal quest, but you seem to have a lot to learn. I'm asserting that if you claim something to be true because it is dictated by the Bible, you better be consistent - and it should actually BE IN THE BIBLE.
You seem to also be a little weak on the relative aspects in Christianity of the old and new testament. The core of Christianity relies on a number of things in the new testament REPLACING portions of religious tradition mandated by the old testament, notably the requirements of Leviticus.
Care to discuss anything of greater theological interest Joe? Say, something like the origins of the Cult of the Virgin, from the meeting of the Council of Ephesus in 431, as it developed as a cultural factor in the Middle ages? Or maybe some of the more obscure creeds, like the Athanasian or Chalcedonian?