QUOTE (Jordan @ Mar 10 2004, 03:25 AM)
Liberals would never accept my beliefs, therefore I should label them "intolerant".
This is logically unsound. There are beliefes that cannot be held within the tenets of liberalism. For example, you cannot say "I accept that all people must be free, and therefore I should be free to hurt people, if that's what I want to do." The old adage "I do not agree with what you say but I wil defend to the death your right to say it" holds for liberalism, and it doesn't hold that just because you like to SAY that gay people should have restricted human rights, your rights are being limited if you can't actually try to make laws and constitutional ammendments to ENFORCE your beliefs. Liberalism is NOT about letting everyone do as they please. And I know you know better, but I'm not about to assume you are just playing Devil's Advocate.
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You obviously don't take the apostles to be credible sources. And since it was them who wrote what christ said in the gospels ...
No they didn't. there is no Apostle Mark, or Apostle Luke, and it's pretty ambiguous who Matthew was. Everyone agrees that whoever wrote John wrote it around AD 100. Add to which in the case of John it almost certainly compiled from numerous sources, many of them not even vaguely Christian.
The history of the gospels is pretty interesting, and it's long, but the first thing you should know is that these books didn't have names attached to them. The names were added later, by those who complied them. You might like to note that the poeple who compiled the books of the "New Testament" were Catholics.
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You would then hash up how dinosaurs are missing in scriptoral passages, and how if God really is God, then why do good people die.
I would never say those things. Those are stupid arguments. The next time you're having a discussion with someone about religion and they bring up one of those arguments, you tell them I said they're a fucking idiot.
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I don't know how you people view me, if you find me "intolerant" and "ignorant" ...
I see you as a kid in his early 20s who has a lot of opinions but who doesn't have the life experience or the book-learnin' to back them up. I can "see" that the majority of the opinions you hold most strongly have come to you in sermons and from a single source, the Bible. I see too that you have a very religious opinion of this Bible, that you are unwilling to view it as a human book and therefore will never read in in the apporopriate context. You see it, for instance, as a single work with many chapters, rather than a compilation of different and often contradictory textx from various periods oer 3000 years. I see that your idea of what the Bible is saying has come to in many cases not directly but from what people have told you about the Bible (the best example is the need to "research" the question of whether Jesus ever said anything about homosexuals. If this is your belief as a Christian, shouldn't you already have a reason for believing it?). I see that your impressions of the world and of humans is limited by the religious cage you live in. So I put you somewhere between "Ignorant" and "Innocent."
Case in point:
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The "experimentation" of sex with multiple partners is the cause of alot of pain in this world. I don't see how you could see this as healthy practice.
I don't know what preacher sold you that crack, but a good many single moms out there wish they'd gone to school and tried out different experiences and partners before marrying their high school sweetheart and divorcing him five years later. Having numerous relationships can round you out as a person; if you're lucky enough to fall madly in live with the first person you ever date, then God bless you. But loads of people are sold that nonsense about unhappiness and pain, and so they won't end relationships that they are unhappy in, often until it is too late.
The persecution complex you have, the feeling that you are a loner, or that you are not tolerated for your beliefs, certainly stems from the difference between your beliefs and those of the people around you. More to the point, though, they stem from your willingness to express them. It is as though you wish to create a logical argument for them. I bet $100 (Canadian) that if you were to met a few nice people at a barn dance, or a hay ride, or whatever the fuck you kids do these days, and you were all having fun, and you decided to break a silent moment with "So you know God said we shouldn't cotton a' them faggits," then at the very least, the women would find you an uncomfortable guy to be around. It's because they wouldn't know what to say to you. Not everyone is as preachy as Supes and I, but most people can't make much sense out of Paul's admonition that we should hate fags (Paul says it, but not Jesus. Not ever).
I don't know what to say. I'd like you to broaden your horizons, and maybe you'd be a little happier, but I don't want you to feel it's necessary to stop believing in Jesus. I wish you could see the two roads do converge, and that you not so much following Jesus as you are following the teachings of Falwell and Meese (I am showing my age here). I think you could do to study the Bible a bit, and the history of the books and the writers. You have a great library there, and the VST has an ever greater one, if you're after that topic. Your library card is good at VST; you should check it out sometime. In the meantime don't assume that gays are being punished with AIDS, or that young people who enjoy healthy and fulfilling short-term relationships full of love and communication are necessarily less happy than people who marry right out of high school. The long and the short of it is that you shouldn't hate the liberalism of schools. The whole idea of university is to arrive and to say "show me." If you go in unwiling to take on any new ideas or experiences, you're not going to learn anything. I'm not saying that you have to take on any specific set of beliefs, but the basic requirement of open-mindedness is the understanding that other people will be trying things out for themselves and that you shouldn't be too uncomfortable about that.
This post has been edited by civilian_number_two: 11 March 2004 - 03:07 AM
"I had a lot of different ideas. At one point, Luke, Leia and Ben were all going to be little people, and we did screen tests to see if we could do that." -George Lucas, in STAR WARS: the Annotated Screenplays (p197).