U.S. Supreme Court Considers Gay Marriage

Dean wrote: Polymorphia wrote: Dean wrote: Polymorphia wrote: Dean wrote: Was that ridicule of his opinion/belief?... sorry I missed the explicit connections between what he said about sin, homosexuality and **********, his beliefs in christianity and his statement that he was commanded to share the gospel with others. I don't see that Colin's (admittedly sarcastic) comment was ridiculing his belief in his religion.   I never said "secular belief", I said "secular opinion" - I do not equate opinion with belief. You cannot posit religious opinion as a truth in a secular debate - sorry, but that's just the way it is. Sin does not exist outside religious clubs, very very few religious sins are secular crimes (one or two maybe, if you are lucky), very, very few are codified in common or statute law - the argument that this should not be legal because it is a sin is a weak one. I'll just pop my head in for a second. The word "sin," while used often in religious settings, refers to something that is objectively wrong for all people, so by arguing that homosexuality is sin, Alex is saying that it is wrong for all and should not be practiced by any and thus be made illegal. His reasoning certainly takes from his own religious beliefs, but yours take from your lack thereof. You are, against all reason, quarantining a set of beliefs in a subjective bunker only because they involve the metaphysical. The only reason why making homosexual marriage illegal would seem like imposing on the people is not where the argument comes from, but the fact that not everyone agrees on this issue. Making it a protected civil right in the SC citing that homosexuality is not wrong would be imposing in the same way. If the people themselves cannot decide, the issue should not be put in the hands of a few judges, for by making a decision, they would be necessarily misrepresenting and "imposing" on the people. Nope. Sin is purely a religious offence, it has no non-religious meaning or definition. Some sins are secular crimes, (such as murder and theft), but they would be still crimes if religions had never been invented, not all sins are secular crimes just as not all secular crimes are sins. Gluttony is a sin not a crime, using religious swear-words is a sin not a crime, eating blood is a sin not a crime, moaning and grumbling is a sin not a crime (1Cor 10:10), anger is a sin not a crime, tattoos are a sin not a crime, arguing is a sin not a crime (Tim 2:23), astrology is a sin not a crime, cursing the rich is a sin not a crime, wearing the clothes of the opposite sex is a sin not a crime, working on a Sunday is a sin not a crime, divorce is a sin not a crime... the list goes on and so could I, religious people sin all the time, we don't throw them in gaol for it.   Making homosexuality not a crime did not impose on hetrosexuals, removing the prohibition on gay marriage would not impose on hetrosexual marriage. I'm not equating sin with a democratic legal crime. There are plenty of things which could be considered wrong that aren't illegal. I am not arguing that gay marriage should be outlawed. Read my previous post to verify. I am arguing that, even if it is a religious offence, sin refers to something that is objectively wrong for all people. Had religions never been "invented," each society would still have their own conceptions of right and wrong, not-sin and sin. The moral reasoning for each society would differ, but each would have law that would vary with the current moral system. Our society views rape as wrong, but, apparently, the visigoths didn't. The only difference between prohibiting gay marriage citing that it is an offence against God and legalizing it citing that "love is love," is the moral system. By doing the latter, the government would be respecting lack of religion and the moral systems of those who do not believe it is wrong. Simply because the views of those who believe it should be prohibited are associated with a religious institution and that they cite their moral system (like all other people who have an opinion on this issue), does not necessitate falsity. The question is whether or not the government's actions are undue by respecting one moral system over another, not whether or not one moral system applies to all people, because all moral systems do. Sure those things on the list are not secular crimes, but for the reason that they have no direct connection to the law. There are no government records or tax benefits related to food consumption; otherwise, you might have police officers at every restaurant, watching you eat. The government simply has other reasons not to make those sins crimes. Marriage is acknowledged by the law, and by acknowledging both hetero- and homo- sexual marriage, or by acknowledging only one, the government would necessarily be making a moral statement. Removing the prohibition "imposes" on me in the same way that the prohibition "imposes" on you, in that the government is paying respect to one belief system over another. Homosexual marriage would not impose on an individual heterosexual marriage, and if you've read closely, I never said it would. It would, however, impose on the right of those who wish to oppose homosexual marriage. If homosexual marriage were guarded by a civil right, ministers could not refuse to marry two people of the same-sex. By marrying them, a minister who believed homosexuality to be wrong would be violating his own conscience, because the government decided to respect one belief system over another. If the majority (of the people) decided that gay marriage should be allowed, it would be the democratic and constitutional thing to legalize it. I am simply iterating that your argument— that a moral system based on religion and a moral system based on whatever else have different legal standings —is incredibly flawed.   1. DO NOT CENSOR MY POSTS! If you cannot cope with the word "**********" then don't quote the post containing it.   2. Sin is not morality. It is not amoral or immoral to eat pork, it is not amoral or immoral for women to plait their hair, wear gold jewelry and paint their faces with make-up, (the list goes on). Morality is not the property of a religion, sin is.   3. Your right to oppose homosexual marriage is not affected by law, the union can be legal and you can still rightfully oppose it, there is no imposition on you what so ever. However, refusing the homosexual couple the right to marry is imposing on their wishes.   4. No one is forcing a minister/priest/pastor/vicar to marry a homosexual couple - there are existing grounds for them not to marry heterosexual couples so that is not a valid argument. We are not talking about the religious rite of marriage, we are talking about the secular union of a couple as recognised by law, not as recognised by whatever god you worship, ie the legal ceremony as performed by a registrar or Justice of the Peace.   5. The law is not the will of the majority.   6. You have not iterated that my argument is flawed at all.

1. I did not censor or alter your post in any way. When I quoted the existing posts, they were already censored. It was not my doing, and I have no problem with the word "bestiality."

2. The idea of religious law, at least, in Christianity, is a moral code. There are certainly context-specific laws; however, the commandment against homosexuality in the Bible, like the commandments against murder, theft, gluttony etc. applies to all people in all contexts. I won't get into the specifics in this thread, but there are many many commandments in the Bible meant to apply to all people. Morality being the "property" of religion, would depend on the moral system being right or wrong. It would not depend on the fact that said moral system was derived from a religion. There is no natural law that states that if it is derived from a religion, it is not morality, unless you are specifically implying that those religious beliefs are false, in which case, that is a discussion for another time.

3-4. The union simply being made legal is not what I'm worried about. It's the union being made a civil right by the Supreme Court, an amendment in our constitution, protected. Parts of Europe have already experienced situations like that one I describe with the minister. Furthermore, imagine a minister refusing to marry two people of a different race. He could easily be sued. If gay marriage is directly equated to interracial marriage, like it has been throughout the whole issue, then the amendment will carry the same repercussions.

5. That all depends on what legal system you're talking about. In a democracy, even a representative one, I would hope that it is the will of the people that defines the law, not lawmakers that have no regard for the people.

Dean wrote: Polymorphia wrote: Dean wrote: Was that ridicule of his opinion/belief?... sorry I missed the explicit connections between what he said about sin, homosexuality and bestiality his beliefs in christianity and his statement that he was commanded to share the gospel with others. I don't see that Colin's (admittedly sarcastic) comment was ridiculing his belief in his religion.   I never said "secular belief", I said "secular opinion" - I do not equate opinion with belief. You cannot posit religious opinion as a truth in a secular debate - sorry, but that's just the way it is. Sin does not exist outside religious clubs, very very few religious sins are secular crimes (one or two maybe, if you are lucky), very, very few are codified in common or statute law - the argument that this should not be legal because it is a sin is a weak one. I'll just pop my head in for a second. The word "sin," while used often in religious settings, refers to something that is objectively wrong for all people, so by arguing that homosexuality is sin, Alex is saying that it is wrong for all and should not be practiced by any and thus be made illegal. His reasoning certainly takes from his own religious beliefs, but yours take from your lack thereof. You are, against all reason, quarantining a set of beliefs in a subjective bunker only because they involve the metaphysical. The only reason why making homosexual marriage illegal would seem like imposing on the people is not where the argument comes from, but the fact that not everyone agrees on this issue. Making it a protected civil right in the SC citing that homosexuality is not wrong would be imposing in the same way. If the people themselves cannot decide, the issue should not be put in the hands of a few judges, for by making a decision, they would be necessarily misrepresenting and "imposing" on the people. Nope. Sin is purely a religious offence, it has no non-religious meaning or definition. Some sins are secular crimes, (such as murder and theft), but they would be still crimes if religions had never been invented, not all sins are secular crimes just as not all secular crimes are sins. Gluttony is a sin not a crime, using religious swear-words is a sin not a crime, eating blood is a sin not a crime, moaning and grumbling is a sin not a crime (1Cor 10:10), anger is a sin not a crime, tattoos are a sin not a crime, arguing is a sin not a crime (Tim 2:23), astrology is a sin not a crime, cursing the rich is a sin not a crime, wearing the clothes of the opposite sex is a sin not a crime, working on a Sunday is a sin not a crime, divorce is a sin not a crime... the list goes on and so could I, religious people sin all the time, we don't throw them in gaol for it.   Making homosexuality not a crime did not impose on hetrosexuals, removing the prohibition on gay marriage would not impose on hetrosexual marriage.

Polymorphia wrote: 1. I did not censor or alter your post in any way. When I quoted the existing posts, they were already censored. It was not my doing, and I have no problem with the word "bestiality."

Then your PC or  home-network must be running some net-nanny software that is censuring the quotes because it certainly isn't the PA auto-censor that is doing it.

Edited by Dean - April 06 2013 at 18:04

From reading this thread it would seem as if gay marriage was going to be legalized in the entire world based on the US supreme court's decision.

rogerthat wrote: ^^^  So what about the truth claim part, which both I and Exitthelemming asked about?  Do you really believe that a statement like "the world was created in seven days" is a truth claim?  Because it's a pretty outrageous one, if so, as scientific evidence has already disproved it.  Whether or not you completely accept the findings of biology, the world was not created in the manner so described in religious mythology in such a short span of time.  Fossils of dinosaurs and the earliest ones of man date millions of years apart.  What more proof is required to demonstrate that above statement would only be a wholly fallacious truth claim or objective statement if accepted as one?  That's part A.  Part B is Alex pretty clearly IMPOSED his moral code derived from HIS religious beliefs on the other thread participants.  Here is the relevant quote.  I am not going to bother with the quote parantheses here, so bear with me there: "No, I think the concern was on sexual immorality period... Whether that be hetero, homo, bestiality, lust in general, porn, etc." He has pretty clearly equated homosexual orientation with bestiality.  They may both be sins according to the Bible (and as I am not a Christian, I will take his word on that) but as of today, people who are not comfortable with homosexuals consider it more of an awkward or abnormal kind of behaviour than cruelty.   It is no longer a crime to be a homosexuals but it is a crime to violate a woman.   That is the fundamental difference between the idea of wrong or immoral as derived from religion and what is illegal according to law.   So there is a difference between expressing a personal opinion on such a topic based on one's own moral compass and simply imposing religious beliefs on the rest.  You were careful to state that you would not want your religious beliefs to take the form of law to be imposed on people but he was not.  Far from claiming an objective truth, he is simply imposing prejudices under the guise of religious belief.

"The world was created in seven days" is very much a truth claim.  The fact that something is not actually true does not mean that someone cannot claim it to be true.  The point I'm trying to make is not that Christianity is true (although I certainly believe it is) but that a religious truth claim is inherently objective, not subjective.  It is not a feeling, it is not a private matter; it is either true or false in the real world, and anyone can make a rational argument for or against it's veracity.

In the case of your example, you can provide evidence to prove that the universe was not created in seven days.  Because it is an objective statement, you can apply reasoning to it to prove it false.  You can't do the same thing to a subjective statement. 

I do not consider Alex's statements to be imposing anything on anyone.  He would be imposing his opinions on others if he threatened some kind of action against them if they disagreed.  He is merely stating an opinion about how he thinks Christian morality should be imposed on others.  You may disagree just as much with the sentiment involved in both, but ideas should be fought with other ideas.  Not with ridicule or dismissal.

Ambient Hurricanes wrote: "The world was created in seven days" is very much a truth claim.  The fact that something is not actually true does not mean that someone cannot claim it to be true.  The point I'm trying to make is not that Christianity is true (although I certainly believe it is) but that a religious truth claim is inherently objective, not subjective.  It is not a feeling, it is not a private matter; it is either true or false in the real world, and anyone can make a rational argument for or against it's veracity. In the case of your example, you can provide evidence to prove that the universe was not created in seven days.  Because it is an objective statement, you can apply reasoning to it to prove it false.  You can't do the same thing to a subjective statement.  I do not consider Alex's statements to be imposing anything on anyone.  He would be imposing his opinions on others if he threatened some kind of action against them if they disagreed.  He is merely stating an opinion about how he thinks Christian morality should be imposed on others.  You may disagree just as much with the sentiment involved in both, but ideas should be fought with other ideas.  Not with ridicule or dismissal.

Hmmm... I believe you are twisting definitions to bolster your claim. I'm quite sure I know the definitions of both "objective" and "subjective", and in the words of Inigo Montoya, "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."

To be "objective" means that one is not influenced by personal opinion, beliefs or feelings when considering facts, and that said facts are viewed impartially without the jaundiced eye of prejudice; ergo, a "religious truth claim" is not "objective" in the least.

A "religious truth claim" such as "the world was created in seven days" is highly subjective, and is based on a belief or opinion without verifiable evidence or scientific scrutiny to warrant acknowledgement of its factual claim.

"Religious truth" is a matter of faith, not objectivity or scientific research. It is not based on "proof" because there is no proof, there is only belief and opinion. That is why when one trusts completely in something they cannot see, touch or smell it is referred to as "blind faith".

Somehow I doubt U.S. civil law decisions have much impact in most other countries, but I could be wrong.








Edited by Atavachron - April 07 2013 at 01:55

Atavachron wrote: Somehow I doubt U.S. civil law decisions have much impact in most other countries, but I could be wrong.

Well yes, anti-smoking is a hot and very Californi-esque issue, and surely the US does not lead the way in gay union (whoops, I mean marriage) or other human-enlightened legislation which I guess is why it feels like this one will have a minor influence--  them Europeans and Americans is crazy.

you mean slow relative to its constitution and Bill of Rights