im well versed in Christianity, having been a Christian all of my life. i maintain my faith by trusting that god is the arbiter of sin, not by egotistically thinking i can weigh one sin versus another.

you i assume like many christains i know look at the world and think "well that doesnt make sense, but it only needs to make sense to god". ive never been able to faithfully rectify the idea that there's a sense to the world that only god can make sense of in some inverse logic we don't and can't get. perhaps that's reality, it doesnt really make a difference for me. i strive to live a life free of sin, and atone for the sins i do commit. so the end result is the same. i can go on thinking murder is a worse sin, and you can go on thinking its the same as stealing a candy bar. it doesnt change anything for us personally.

im well aware that many of the ideas i have aren't in line with scripture, not dogma. as im aware that different versions of the scrips and different dogmas aren't in line with each other. some christains believe the devil walks on earth and has never been to hell, others believe he's the king of hell, some seem to think he can go back and forth. grappling with the implications of that was what started my first crisis of faith. now i find its easier to have ideas im willing to let go of rather than beliefs i cant alter unless they break.

if you believe like i do that god makes people gay then why is it a sin? god just makes some people who are destined to sin by their very nature? perhaps but id prefer not to think that. given historical context its obvious why gay people have always been persecuted, and the scripture itself in its hundreds of revisions isn't beyond taint. any biblical scholar can tell you that.

You keep saying you're well versed but honestly are ignorant of some really fundamental dogma. Obviously murder and stealing a candy bar are not the same, but in the eyes of God, as it's written in the Bible, both are sins and the wages of sins are death, hence the need for Jesus even if you just stole a candy bar.

God doesn't make people gay, nor does he make people lie or cheat on their wives or any other sin. It's our sinful nature that gravitates towards sin.

I do enjoy thinking about things.

Nobody has said whether they'd approve or deny the examples though.

This post was edited by Handcuffs on Apr 25 2024 10:18am

source: because you say so.

you literally read my post and decided i needed a stage 1 Christianity lesson on the concept of jesus absolving sin. pretty laughable tbh.

I think it's a very controversial subject, both with respect to the inevitability of abuse and the ethics of turning women (almost certainly poor) into factories for children.

To your original question, society has a vested interest in championing stable and conventional families. We're seeing the effects of demographic decline play out in real time in the Russo-Ukrainian war. In your first scenario, it's irrelevant as to whether they intend to have children, the state's interest is in reinforcing the norm.

So then it is not about the increase of children that is the state's primary tenant upon which the right to marry exists, but more about "reinforcing the norm"? I wish more people would just acknowledge that rather than presenting this limp claim about having children.

This is WHOLLY MY OPINION.

Deep down, when this all started, the big issue was that it tainted what people defined as "Marriage". And this is coming from the stand point of an American who was born in the late 1970's. So I'm old...

Straight people were stupid and made claims like that society wasn't allowed to recognize common bond laws between same sex people, etc. No shared health insurance, no shared beneficiaries, no filing jointly on taxes, yada.....

But it didn't stop there. The shared stuff could have been worked out and it was. BUT the homosexual community insisted on calling it marriage. The religious community didn't want, in their opinion, the sanctity of marriage tarnished. So then it became a bigger issue that moved beyond the "icky" part VERY QUICKLY. Homosexuality is not new, is it? Yeah, no... Don't really think it was just "icky". Besides, TD Jakes was at Diddy's parties. Sex is sex, Christians like to do it, too, just with their spouse, which usually is the opposite sex.

Gay people wanted the same rights as married couples (deservedly so in my opinion), and that could have been solved easy enough, but when it became an insistence on also taking and using (and to the right, degrading) the term "Marriage" is when the real fight started and it quickly became a political, convoluted, identity driven system. The left takes them all, the right pisses them all off.

No one for the middle man anymore...

Well, it's the hope that by reinforcing traditional, stable family structures you will get more of them, and that because children are overwhelmingly a byproduct of those relationships, by promoting the former you will get more of the latter.

Hypotheticals are tough to take a firm stand on... especially the ones you've come up with. :-)

I mean you're trying to bucket sins into real sins and small sins categories, with the whole point in doing so is basically saying some things are okay because they're not 'real' sins. Homosexuality, stealing a candy bar, whatever else. That's not biblical dogma, that's actually counter to what Christ centered Christianity is about. If we only commit some of these 'small' sins then that invalidates the need for a Savior, and the whole faith is meaningless. This isn't my opinion but foundational to the Christian faith. They're sins, period.

But tbh, I don't blame you, a lot of Christians today are basically buffet Christians. Pick and choose parts of the Bible they like and discard the rest. Then there's a good portion that are Christian in name only, that will maybe go to church on Christmas or Easter, and think that somehow makes them a Christian. I don't say this to condemn you, that's not my place, you do you and I have more than enough sins to not be condemning you of anything. But either the Bible is correct about all sins leading to death including homosexuality which is clearly outlined as a sin or it's not. There's no middle ground, these are mutually exclusive things.

This post was edited by ofthevoid on Apr 25 2024 03:37pm