Why I chose my LGBTQ daughter over the Evangelical Church

[AUDub 11,131]

5 hours ago, TitanTiger said:

I believe this is the first time I've said anything about it and he's been doing it for just shy of two years now.  But today I just decided to call him out on it.  At some point you need to do more than smirk your disapproval and put forth something resembling a considered thought.

First time, second time, still too many. Whatever. You’re overreacting. Let it go. 

[homersapien 11,354]

21 hours ago, PUB78 said:

So, if your son or daughter abandons their  children and souse, goes off with another person, that is okay? You going to love the  sin she/he committed? I sure we would all love our child, but hate what they have done and the damage it has created.

Well, I don't know where that scenario came from, but I would like to think that any child of mine wouldn't feel the need to embark on a life that denies their true sexuality in the first place.

And I don't consider homosexuality a "sin" which factors into that.

 

[SaltyTiger 7,764]

1 hour ago, HVAU said:

So says the Bible, but not everyone believes the Bible is the one true word of God, and so far the only reason to accept it as such presented in this discussion has been because the Bible says so. 

What was the purpose in the video HV?

[DKW 86 7,411]

11 hours ago, HVAU said:

I think we may need to shut the Political boards down lest we all end up eternally damned the subterranean lake of fire.

Touche' Post of the Day Nominee...

[DKW 86 7,411]

50 minutes ago, alexava said:

I feel a certain sense of accomplishment when ichy reacts to my comments.☀️

Ran out of emojis....lmao

[TitanTiger 20,471]

1 hour ago, AUDub said:

First time, second time, still too many. Whatever. You’re overreacting. Let it go. 

I didn't plan on discussing it much longer.  But he deserved to get called on it.  It's childish.

[SaltyTiger 7,764]

7 minutes ago, TitanTiger said:

 It's childish.

I agree....other than one thumbs up I got from ICHY. It was not childish Titan.

ICHY on the peripheral is sorta neat IMO. 

[TitanTiger 20,471]

7 hours ago, SaltyTiger said:

I agree....other than one thumbs up I got from ICHY. It was not childish Titan.

ICHY on the peripheral is sorta neat IMO. 

I prefer him engaging. He was a good poster. I think we tangled a small handful of times on certain things but that was it. 

[Mims44 1,864]

18 hours ago, TitanTiger said:

You know at some point, you should 'put up or shut up'.  This weak sauce where you just give kudos or facepalms but never have to articulate a thoughtful response has run its course.

Does he not post anymore? He's the one and only person I've ever put on "ignore".... Just figured I couldn't see his posts. Just as well though as his horribly misspelled posts were the most headache inducing incoherent crap these boards ever had. 

 

12 hours ago, SaltyTiger said:

I can get on board with you there  HV. I have never been comfortable with or felt anyone should judge another as going to hell.

This x1000!

I've always enjoyed hearing people preach, from multiple religions... but never liked the condemnation I hear from the three major offshoots of religion from Abraham.

[TitanTiger 20,471]

4 minutes ago, Mims44 said:

Does he not post anymore? 

Not since April 2017.

[Mims44 1,864]

Just now, TitanTiger said:

Not since April 2017.

hmmm, I'm usually so cynical.

 

But maybe prayer does work

[channonc 466]

I miss ICHY's posts. He really did contribute a lot here. Wish he would jump back into the fray.

[Proud Tiger 4,261]

1 hour ago, channonc said:

I miss ICHY's posts. He really did contribute a lot here. Wish he would jump back into the fray.

I put him on ignore because of his childish babbling. He joined Homer, Dub, auburnfiftie and one other who I don't think posts here anymore.

[AUDub 11,131]

22 minutes ago, Proud Tiger said:

I put him on ignore because of his childish babbling.

Proud never misses an opportunity to point out when he has somebody on ignore. 

[GiveEmElle 1,559]

This conversation reminds me of one of my favorite scenes from The West Wing.

 

[NolaAuTiger 3,295]

On 1/9/2019 at 4:29 PM, HVAU said:

The books were compiled by various people or people's to serve various  functions, sometimes more historical, sometimes more legal and sometimes specifically spiritual.  Many of the books are represented, at surface level, to have been written by a specific person, which was often not the case.  Often books were written many years after the events which they described by people that were not present.  Dfferent versions of the same books exist as well.

Just which books are accepted as belonging to the sacred canon also varies significantly.  Some of the canonization processes leading to the Christian version of the book Bible been viewed as having political consideration as well as spiritual.

What I'm getting at is making the claim that one's sacred text is the one true word of God, even from the divinely inspired perspective, becomes tenuous when the manner in which the canon was compiled is considered.  That tenuous status increases when one considers the other people claiming, just as vehemently, that their book, not the Bible, is the one true word.  

More to the point of the thread, maybe people should back off from their damnation talk, because faith does not covey some provable wisdom of the afterlife.  None have a knowledgeable authority in that subject.

 

What’re your thoughts on the Roman Catholic view of scripture? The whole idea of “sola scriptura” didn’t really even begin to circulate until the 1500s. I take it that’s the theological position you take dispute with or are skeptical about.

[NolaAuTiger 3,295]

On 1/9/2019 at 3:36 PM, Brad_ATX said:

Think what he's getting at is that many evangelicals/Christians (and from other faiths too) don't understand how their religious texts truly came to be in the first place.  Like you, I love the academic side of different religions.  Find it fascinating.  But it's arguable that those pursuits have also pulled me away from having any religious beliefs whatsoever.

Interesting. Thanks for the response.

[HVAU 673]

56 minutes ago, NolaAuTiger said:

What’re your thoughts on the Roman Catholic view of scripture? The whole idea of “sola scriptura” didn’t really even begin to circulate until the 1500s. I take it that’s the theological position you take dispute with or are skeptical about.

I view sola scriptura negatively.  The same with biblical literalism.  Brad, though, has taken my point correctly here.

Like many subjects, you've probably studied to deeper levels than I have.  What are views on some of the perspectives on this thread?

[homersapien 11,354]

Is it really any wonder why Christianity is declining in America?

WWJD? Oppose An Anti-Lynching Bill, Apparently.

When the Senate passed a long-overdue bill that would outlaw lynching in the United States, it seemed like an obvious step in the right direction. And then evangelical Christians stepped in and tried to take us two steps back.

This week Liberty Counsel, an evangelical legal organization known for its political lobbying on behalf of the most conservative of the religious right, put pressure on House lawmakers to remove language from the bill that explicitly includes protections for people on the basis of sexual and gender identity. Seriously.

On the surface, it may look like another religious extremist group lobbying against policy, but a closer inspection reveals the reality undergirding its ideology.

It would seem that Mat Staver, the founder and chairman of Liberty Counsel, and his supporters are trying to prevent LGBTQ people from being protected from lynching as a means to keep them from being protected from discrimination. An anti-lynching law is, according to Staver in an interview he gave to the Christian news siteOneNewsNow, only a baby step to one day passing employment, housing and health care legislation that would offer protections to LGBTQ people. Thus LGBTQ people’s lives become a small sacrifice for the ideological comfort and control of the religious right. He and Liberty Counsel seem to care more about what people do in their sex lives than the violence and inequity that they experience because of their identities.

While Staver says that he is generally opposed to lynching (does he really want credit for that low bar?), he and his organization have made it clear with their opposition that they would rather see LGBTQ people dead without justice than see them alive and acknowledged as fully human. Liberty Counsel, which once advocated for Kim Davis and her refusal to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, uses quotes around language like transgender and gay on its website to invalidate the lived identities of people who obviously exist.

He and his supporters are fighting the culture at large in an attempt to keep the political system from acknowledging the humanity of LGBTQ people. Those Christians essentially use their bigotry as a rock to live under, not recognizing that no matter how many times they refuse to acknowledge the existence, dignity and rights of LGBTQ people, they do exist. They don’t need Christians’ affirmation to suddenly make them real.

Many Christians, often concerned about compromising their sense of what they believe that Jesus would want, have doubled down on their fragile self-image of being holy, pure and sanctified. In their fear of compromising their beliefs about sexuality and gender, they have almost fully compromised one of the core teachings of Jesus: to love God and your neighbor as you love yourself.

These Christians instead choose to play God vying for the position of arbiter of whose life is worthy of protecting. This is antithetical to Christian values of grace, love, kindness, gentleness and caring for those on the margins. In this political environment, it has become clear over and over again that a few lives of people considered unworthy are worth sacrificing for the moral control and power that oppressing them brings to powerful Christians.

We are having a political argument about whether people should be legally protected from lynching. Lynching. Extrajudicial and generally identity-based killings. I am incensed that, in an unsurprising expression of self-righteousness and moral control, self-proclaimed Christians are leading the fight against the measure.  

Liberty Counsel in and of itself isn’t the problem. (It certainly is a problem, just not the problem.) A Christianity that uses the pulpit to teach discriminatory ideologies and Christian superiority is. The group is a case study of what happens when politics and Christianity are so tied that Christians cannot or even refuse to see the people that policies are supposed to represent. Many religious people have consistently used the intersection of their understanding of Scripture and the law to dehumanize.

When Christians get behind any type of movement to further dehumanize entire communities in the name of Jesus — a man who was lynched by a crowd of politically frenzied religious zealots — we must pause. No, pausing is not enough; we must both listen and speak up.

We must listen to the voices of LGBTQ people, many of whom are Christians — to their stories of oppression, pain, joy and historical and present triumph. We must let their stories change those of us who are not marginalized on the basis of gender or sexual orientation and follow in the fight for a more equitable world. I must, as a Christian reject any ideology, law or practice that strips people of their humanity.

Week by week, many Christians in political power seem to try to one-up the bigotry and oppression of their colleagues. It’s the now-proverbial hold-my-beer ideology, with those Christians vying to be the most powerful and, by consequence, the most oppressive and violent. The sad reality is that significant elements of Christianity in the United States are entrenched in political power, on Sundays teaching that Jesus loves everybody but then moralizing people out of the Gospel that they say is free.

If there is ever a question about whether any people should be protected from lynching, we have a problem. If there is a question about whether LGBTQ people are made in the image of the God we claim, we have a problem. Christians must recognize, particularly in the political realm, when we’re failing to hold truly Christlike belief and behavior.

Brandi Miller is a campus minister and justice program director from the Pacific Northwest.

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/opinion-christian-lgbtq-anti-lynching-bill_us_5c3b8bd8e4b01c93e00ae42e

 

 

[NolaAuTiger 3,295]

On 1/11/2019 at 1:26 PM, HVAU said:

I view sola scriptura negatively.  The same with biblical literalism.  Brad, though, has taken my point correctly here.

Like many subjects, you've probably studied to deeper levels than I have.  What are views on some of the perspectives on this thread?

I have recently become more receptive of traditional Roman Catholicism doctrines, which sola scriptura is not.  I certainly esteem scripture, but I also esteem ecclesiastical traditionalism. What views in particular do you have in mind? I am happy to address.

I did not mean that I have a level of study superior to anyone else's, academic or not. Apologies for the insinuation. 

[TitanTiger 20,471]

On 1/14/2019 at 4:25 PM, NolaAuTiger said:

I have recently become more receptive of traditional Roman Catholicism doctrines, which sola scriptura is not.  I certainly esteem scripture, but I also esteem ecclesiastical traditionalism. What views in particular do you have in mind? I am happy to address.

I did not mean that I have a level of study superior to anyone else's, academic or not. Apologies for the insinuation. 

Yeah, of the three "solas" of the Reformation, that one is the most problematic to me.  Because the problem is, you can say "Scripture alone" but that Scripture has to be understood and interpreted.  And while the basics of salvation and such are clear on a cursory read, there are deeper things there that require some time, study, education and so on to really gain understanding - and that's not even counting the illumination of the Holy Spirit.  But when you truly anchor down on sola scriptura  you essentially trade one Pope for billions of popes.  Each person becomes a Pope unto themselves, sending forth on what they think this or that passage means and all claiming they are getting it from the Holy Spirit.

I think a better way of expressing it would be something like prima scriptura.  What I mean by that is is two things.  First, it's that we read the Scriptures not as individuals but as the Church, and not just the Church in our own era, but the witness of the Church over time.  What did the earlier church fathers believe about the doctrines we find in the Bible?  What did they teach about what certain passages meant?  And did this interpretation remain essentially the same through the last 2000 years?  Was it widely taught and believed across the church or just in small, regional sects?  That, I think, gives us a better shot at understanding what the deeper doctrines and teachings are.  We aren't relying on just us, or just our pastor or era to know these things, but the consensus of the body of Christ over the course of the last 2000 years.  Is it 100%?  No.  We're still fallible, have our blind spots due to being people of our time and place, due to our sinfulness, and so on.  Second, what it means is that Scripture is "prime" or first.  It's not "alone," but none of these interpretations we come up with can be obviously contradictory to what the text says. 

Does that make sense?

[homersapien 11,354]

**** the scriptural theories.  Jesus would be ashamed of these self-identified Christians.

 

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/karen-pence-immanuel-christian-school_us_5c3e62c2e4b0922a21d99f58

Karen Pence, wife of Vice President Mike Pence, started at a job this week teaching art at Immanuel Christian School in Northern Virginia. It’s not a school where everyone is welcome.

In a “parent agreement” posted online, the school says it will refuse admission to students who participate in or condone homosexual activity, HuffPost learned through an investigation into discriminatory admissions policies. The 2018 employment application also makes candidates sign a pledge not to engage in homosexual activity or violate the “unique roles of male and female.” 

[TitanTiger 20,471]

1 hour ago, homersapien said:

**** the scriptural theories.  Jesus would be ashamed of these self-identified Christians.

 

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/karen-pence-immanuel-christian-school_us_5c3e62c2e4b0922a21d99f58

Karen Pence, wife of Vice President Mike Pence, started at a job this week teaching art at Immanuel Christian School in Northern Virginia. It’s not a school where everyone is welcome.

In a “parent agreement” posted online, the school says it will refuse admission to students who participate in or condone homosexual activity, HuffPost learned through an investigation into discriminatory admissions policies. The 2018 employment application also makes candidates sign a pledge not to engage in homosexual activity or violate the “unique roles of male and female.” 

 

Seriously though, the HuffPo thing reads like they just singled out homosexuals.  The actual agreement is broader than that and says this:
 

1. I understand the biblical role of Immanuel Christian School is to partner with families to encourage students to be imitators of Christ. This necessarily involves the school’s understanding and belief regarding biblical morality and standards of conduct. I understand that the school reserves the right, within its sole discretion, to refuse admission to an applicant or to discontinue enrollment of a student if the atmosphere or conduct within a particular home, the activities of a parent or guardian, or the activities of the student are counter to, or are in opposition to, the biblical lifestyle the school teaches. This includes, but is not limited to contumacious (i.e. openly rebellious) behavior, divisive conduct, and participating in, supporting, or condoning sexual immorality, homosexual activity or bi-sexual activity, promoting such practices, or being unable to support the moral principles of the school. (Lev. 20:13 and Romans 1:27.) I acknowledge the importance of a family culture based on biblical principles and embrace biblical family values such as a healthy marriage between one man and one woman. My role as spiritual mentor to my children will be taken seriously.

Now you don't have to like Christian teaching on sexual morality, but they aren't just being mean to the homos here.  They include all sorts of sexual immorality which means straights are expected to live by this too.  And they don't just harp on sex, they discuss other matters as well.

[homersapien 11,354]

3 hours ago, TitanTiger said:

Seriously though, the HuffPo thing reads like they just singled out homosexuals.  The actual agreement is broader than that and says this:
 

1. I understand the biblical role of Immanuel Christian School is to partner with families to encourage students to be imitators of Christ. This necessarily involves the school’s understanding and belief regarding biblical morality and standards of conduct. I understand that the school reserves the right, within its sole discretion, to refuse admission to an applicant or to discontinue enrollment of a student if the atmosphere or conduct within a particular home, the activities of a parent or guardian, or the activities of the student are counter to, or are in opposition to, the biblical lifestyle the school teaches. This includes, but is not limited to contumacious (i.e. openly rebellious) behavior, divisive conduct, and participating in, supporting, or condoning sexual immorality, homosexual activity or bi-sexual activity, promoting such practices, or being unable to support the moral principles of the school. (Lev. 20:13 and Romans 1:27.) I acknowledge the importance of a family culture based on biblical principles and embrace biblical family values such as a healthy marriage between one man and one woman. My role as spiritual mentor to my children will be taken seriously.

Now you don't have to like Christian teaching on sexual morality, but they aren't just being mean to the homos here.  They include all sorts of sexual immorality which means straights are expected to live by this too.  And they don't just harp on sex, they discuss other matters as well.

My point was they are being "mean" to "homos" regardless of what other restrictions they are imposing.

IMO, this is a classical case of choosing biblical-based authoritarian perspectives over what Jesus actually represented. 

[TitanTiger 20,471]

13 hours ago, homersapien said:

My point was they are being "mean" to "homos" regardless of what other restrictions they are imposing.

IMO, this is a classical case of choosing biblical-based authoritarian perspectives over what Jesus actually represented. 

It's nothing of the sort.  Jesus affirmed the sexual ethic of the Old Testament, not loosened it.  If anyone thing he made it tighter- such as His statements on lusting in one's heart being on the level of adultery.  Or saying that even though Moses, because of the hardness of the people's hearts, allowed a man to divorce his wife simply by issuing a certificate of divorce, whereas Jesus said from the beginning it was not like that and that divorcing your spouse other than for adultery was wrong.

This hippie 60s free love Jesus might make people of the Sexual Revolution feel nice, but He bears little resemblance to the actual Jesus.