One comment about love ...

Many people would probably see me as "hateful", although I disagree. Yes, I disagree that homosexuality is "acceptable". Indeed I see it as "distorted", and that's MY view, but that does not make me hateful. Yes, I believe that the cross of Jesus and the provision of the Holy Spirit are exclusive to a person's salvation, rendering other beliefs other than the Standard of the Christian God as invalid, but that does not mean I am hateful.

I believe in love. But I think the English language has mixed in way too many meanings into that word "love". Does "love" mean selfishness, for instance? When a man says he "loves" a woman more than all else, what does that mean? Does it mean that he would abandon his loser friends and loser life habits in order to meet her needs? Or does it mean that he's really, really horny?

The problem in our society is that when we say we must show "love" to one another, it is to portray that shallow, meaningless love that postmodernists hold to.

"We love you."

"I am a sinner."

"That's okay. We love you. God will forgive you. Go to Him, confess your sins."

"I'm sexually promiscuous."

"That's okay. Everybody is. Nobody's perfect. God will forgive you. We love you."

"I'm gay."

"That's okay. We love you. God will accept and embrace you. You're at home here."

"I'm a murderer."

"God forgives you. We love you."

What's wrong with this picture? It's loving, isn't it?

Isn't it?

Well?

Yes, it is loving. It is the most loving way to present yourself to people. It is gushing, oozing, with love. That is, it is loving if you accept the postmodern definition of "love".

What? Postmodern definition of love? What does that mean?

Postmodernists define love as warm fuzzies. It insists that I'm okay, and I can do whatever I want, as long as you pat me on the back and tell me you love me, so do it already. Love love love. Love love love. I love you. You love me. We're a happy family.

Again, what is wrong with this picture? It's not true love!

1 Corinthians 13 of the Bible has been heralded for centuries as the world's best definition of love. Love is patient and love is kind, yes, and love is not rude, so true. But love is also not self-seeking. Love keeps no record of wrongs, absolutely right, but love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. Love always trusts, yes, you betcha! But it always protects. It always hopes, absolutely. But it always perserveres.

You cannot let a friend fall into self-damaging error and say that you love him if you don't seek to protect him, any more than you can say you love your son or daughter if you see him or her drowning in a pool and you just smile and wave and say, "I love you, I accept you!"

Identifying the errors of others that do damage to themselves and hating what they do is not an issue of judging and outcasting people, but of being so compassionate for them that we want to help them. It is not an issue of fear that we are wrong, but a concern when we know that in fact if we don't do something about what that person is doing, he/she will hurt himself.

Promiscuity, for instance, has led to horrible statistics. 1 in 6 teenagers--younger than our so-called "Mature" age range--has a sexually transmitted disease! That breaks my heart! And I do not think I would be loving toward them if I just sit back and say, hey, do what you want, I don't care, I accept you, it's your life. That's a detestably selfish attitude. True love protects, it gets angry when other people hurt themselves--that anger stemming not from resentment but from concern that people are being led by society to do stupid things to themselves.

Why do I feel the same way about gay people? It's not just about my "belief system". Look at what it's doing to people. People's anuses are bleeding! Men are turning from their wives to pursue other men. Lives are being devastated. People who know only that it "feels good" to pursue their perverted lifestyles are losing touch with society, and then they blame society (and us conservatives) for their frustrations.

I don't drink alcohol because I've seen it tear people apart, so I discourage people from drinking as well. Does that make me a "hater"? No, if I didn't speak up and encourage them to take control of that bottle then their lives could be torn apart. People are losing self-control all the time, all in the name of "liberty" and "tolerance" and so-called "love". I say that's hogwash.

We so-called "conservatives" are not out to bash anyone, but to uphold the standards, because we happen to know that these things we are so against actually do hurt people.

And whether someone says that they love me or accept me or not, I do not sense love if the acts of preservation, and protection, and perserverance, and delighting in Truth, are not maintained.

And yes, I am biased with a Christian worldview. I do believe in Absolute Truth. I do not seek to "correct" others out of selfish fear that I might actually be wrong and cannot handle cognative dissonance. I do have fear, however, that another's error in refusing to consider the loving ways of his/her Creator is going to wreak a LOT of havok in his/her life and in the lives of others.

I love the Bible. I love it no matter what it says, even if it says to kill people, or to take away rights from those who deserve it.

Your views are perfectly fine for you to believe. They just don't happen to be everyones views. The big ol problem with your folk is when you try to get others to abide by your standards.

It'd all be so much easier if you kept your standards to yourself.

I'm sure glad it says NOT to kill people, "for people are created in the image of God".

Not counting the various stories of mass murder in the name of King something-or-other.

or how about where God floods the world to get rid of humanity and start over? That's a lot of dead people.

Armageddon? Lots of dead people.

Oh! Sodom and Gomorrah. God killed a lot of people there.

If we're created in the image of God, where's my Smoting Stick?

LF

The fear of God is the beginning of knowledge, but fools despise wisdom and discipline.

Again, I would be unloving if I kept them to myself. If I was in a crowded room full of people with poisoned wine, I do not care if I was the only person in the room who believed me if I said "You people are hurting yourselves! Don't drink the wine!", I would be selfish, if not hateful, if I simply complied and closed my mouth upon hearing people saying, "Be quiet, keep your bogus opinions to yourself, you don't have to drink the wine if you think it's poisoned."

Please do give some examples.

I'd answer that but this is a PG forum.

Religion has this nifty way of stealing words and changing their meanings. Love is a perfect example. God is a cruel and intolerant bigot, but he loves you. He thinks you're a worthless sinner who needs salvation, but he loves you. He teaches you to fear people not like you, but he loves them too. Religion steals your self worth and replaces it with dependance on the approval of a specific caste. Morality is another good one. The word morality has no inherant religious meaning but you'd never know it by the way religion claims to be its sole proprietor. It's exactly this bait and switch that makes religion so effective at indoctrinating people. You lose the ability to recognize the true meanings of things. Black is white. Hate is love. Fear is power. Failure is victory. I'll define love for myself, thanks very much.

And what does this example have to do with telling other people how to live? It doesn't really. In point of fact (and one I expect to be ignored) merely speaking your mind I have no problem with. Easy to ignore someone who, in my opinion, has flawed views, harder indeed to ignore someone who, for example, tries to have those views forced on others, say through laws and what-not.

You know...

I shouldn't even respond to this. This entire thread is going to devolve into a flamewar in minutes, I suspect.

Yet, for some unknown, morbid reason, I'm going to.

It's like those studies that every political hot-button group eventually commisions to prove that whatever it is they hate causes cancer.

Then we find out that their results are obtained by pumping the (equivilant to a human) 50 gallon barrel of it a day into a rat for a year and seeing what happens.

Anything will destroy people. Drugs. Drinking. Love. Faith. You name it. Anything can, has, is, and will destroy people. To those to whom a thing has not destroyed, they of course will see everything else as being the problem. I come from a fairly strongly religious background, on pretty much every root and limb of my family tree. I myself am religious, as a matter of fact, though it's no particular buisness of yours what faith. I've seen faith destroy people, families, friendships, and even communities before, as surely as you believe homosexuality or drinking can. So understand that people are going to be rather sensative when you point the finger at them and say their particular choice of lifestyle is the destructive one, when they could very likely see the same thing in you.

And I've seen drinking destroy families too, and yet I drink. I don't need other people to tell me not to drink; thats my own buisness. If you wanted to show a person love, you would encourage them to find the answer for themself, not to assume that you have the right answer. I enjoy beer, I enjoy wine, I enjoy scotch... I enjoy most drinks, as a matter of fact, sans vodka, or anything else that might be out there that I could confusing with rubbing alchohol. For me the answer is not to deprive myself of something that I enjoy, but to ensure that it doesnt destroy me. So I practice moderation when I drink. I rarely get drunk, and when I do, I ensure that nobody is going to be harmed by it.

If you try to tell a person to stop anything that can be destructive... well, your going to more or less have a paradox, because *everything* is destructive. We each choose which destructive things that we feel we must enbrace, and try to manage them as best we can. Some people fail. This is inevitable. The loving thing to do is help these people first, to keep them from being destroyed, and then, and only then, to worry about what you personally think about their choices in life. And if they aren't being destroyed? Well it's really none of your concern.

Okay, well, I admit that some extremists have been extremely cruel and hateful toward homosexuals. However, besides all the MTV promotion of anti-homophobia, I myself have experienced a number of situations where people despised me because I admitted that I find homosexuality to be a path people walk down rather than something people are born with, and that I try to avoid close friendships with gay men. People think me to be hateful and disrespectful.

But I admit that the comment I made which you quoted was a bit exaggerated.

I do agree, Jellin, that laws go a little overboard. We have no right MAKING people conform to our ethical standards. I am a "right libertarian", meaning that I am conservative and I feel I should have the right to tell people (but not MAKE people) how I think they should live, if indeed they care to listen, but I disagree with far right republicans shoving rules and regulations down people's throats.

MTV promotes anti-homophobia!? When did this happen? Its quite hard to believe that a fairly-popular radio-television program actually *likes* homosexuals, when 50% of the American population still thinks of homosexuals as unacceptable.

A well-worded quote from someone who does not likely even know the god he speaks of, but for some complaining hearsay.

You cannot know what does not exist. I'm all too familiar with the ideology however.

Er, and you know him (God) personally? You've spoken to him?

If so, might I suggest heavy medication or counseling. People aren't supposed to hear voices in their head, except their own thinking voice.

LF

Hmm I don't know what MTV is up to these days, but three or four years ago they kept playing an hour long show with a bunch of homosexual girls, talking about how cruelly they'd been treated. I thought it was extremely rude and harsh toward conservatives, throwing all who disagree with the "homosexual lifestyle" in the same boat of total jerks who kick and beat up and yell at and harass and cuss at and abuse homosexuals.

It's about as bogus a tactic as saying "homosexual marriage is just fine, look at how many heterosexual families are being torn apart..." Good grief, ALL of that is bad. (OT: That's why I say, screw the marriage licenses, the State has NO RIGHT issuing licenses, or permissions, for marriage. If people want to marry, let them open up the Bible and see what it means, and then get their "license" from God, not the State. Phooey.)

Ahhh I see, so only Christians should be qualified for tax benefits or to speak on behalf of their partner in matters of medical emergency? What happens when Bhuddists marry? Should they have to convert to Christianity first? Should atheists be allowed to marry?

Being as you disqualify yourself from discussing ethics with me (being theist), I won't further debate things with you, except to say that tax benefits are irrelevant to this discussion, and I also don't believe that they--nor the taxes in question--are appropriate, in any society.

I'm disqualified from a discussion of ethics because I'm an atheist?

I agree with Jon on these points:

Laws binding the population to a certain view should be nullifyed. However, people should be able to freely express their opinions. Laws granting privelages to certain people (for example, married couples) should also be nullifyed, or expanded to include the entirety of the population.

Here's my point:
Homosexuals want marrage privelages to get the same legal benefets as married heterosexual couples get. The only reason this is happening is that THESE BENEFETS EXIST. If the government, to begin with, totally seperated itself from religion from the start, this problem would have never materialized.

I took a course called Theory of Knowledge. I graduated that year and came out realizing that without a belief in God, all things are merely relative. So whether you murder one person or 5,000,000 people, it's no different than chopping down trees. There is no real meaning in life, and their lives were meaningless, too. And if we are to care for one another, we should also never chop down trees, or kill insects. ("Save the whales!"

So yes, without a standard of Absolute Truth, you disqualify yourself from discussing ethics with me ... not from discussing ethics in general, but I will always view ethics from the lens of having an interested Creator who cares about my best interests, as well as the best interests of everyone else, while never compromising the interests of His own sovereign Self.

No offense, Jon, but hogswash.

Even if I wasn't religious, I wouldn't need the bible to tell me not to kill people. Most of the 10 commandments can easily be arived at by asking one simple question: "Would I like it if people did this to me?".

Cris isn't able to discuss ethics because of his beliefs? See, this right here is where the deep christians beleifs cross the line. You want to be able to state your views to all, but then you deny that dissenters with those beliefs have any valid beliefs themselves.

And you wonder why people get annoyed with that?