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Marriage for Same-Sex Couples – Wow

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Dude.

In reply to Marriage for Same-Sex Couples – Wow

Biblically speaking, homosexuality is just one result of ‘the Fall’, in which man gave dominion of this planet and all that was created ‘good’ over to the devil. God didn’t create homosexuality. Or any of the other ‘ills’ that befall man.

And please note, peeps, I keep my commentary within the lines of what is supposed to be the Judeo-Christian scripture.

I myself, being as wicked as the next person, pass no judgement on anyone else.

Excepting this particular ‘God made it’ concept which irritates me no end. It’s way outside the scope of scripture.

Honey, the scripture itself is outside the scope of the scripture…

In reply to Dude.

And my beef, specifically, is with statements of the type “God X” where a person (!) declares what a supposed omnipotent (=there can be no [d]evil that is not God’s Will), omniscient (=there can be no effect that was not planned or at least preemptively noticed [combined with omnipotence it turns out to mean omniculpable]) Creator has done X or wishes X or performs X.
A person must be, by definition, either God, or be incapable of proscribing jack shit on behalf of God.
The devil didn’t actually get invented until the Romans and Greeks needed one, as a gnosticist perversion of the until-then-scripture, so, ipso facto the fall, predating this event, cannot have turned anything over to the “devil”, and you will find that the scripture is entirely silent on any such event.

It doesn’t go, “In the beginning was the Devil and the Word…”
That’s why people of the cloth that subscribe to the devil must be Satanists.

If you wonder why I speak to God so irreverently, all of a sudden, it is because I am not speaking to God, but to an interpretation of God as presented by some person. That interpretation is worth the amount of my respect that can be gleaned from my response. Which is, less than most people. If people wield their God as a club over other people, they must be prepared to have that God dragged through the mud, and I am demonstrating how this feels. If people keep their God to themselves, and judge not, lest they themselves be judged, then I leave their Gods in the heavens, pristine as can be.

The moral: Don’t use God as a club unless you hate God and wish to put God in harm’s way. If a gay man wishes to feel that God condemns him (and somehow managed to slip the responsibility), then they’re free to feel that way. But condemning other people for what amounts to self-loathing is not cool, and I don’t feel like standing for it. And of course, if a person feels that God condemns other people, then that person has a big problem, as the relationship between God and another person is NONE OF THEIR BEESWAX!!!

Of course, Mormons believe Satan is the brother of Jesus

In reply to Honey, the scripture itself is outside the scope of the scripture…

According to LDS doctrine, the two oldest sons of God were Jesus and Lucifer. Lucifer was really peeved that dad (God) chose Jesus to be the savior of all mankind, so he convinced one-third of his brothers and sisters to join him in rebellion…. (typical large family dysfunction)

So apparently Jesus has some brothers and sisters….who the heck are they?? Maybe Elvis, Michael Jordan??

Of course LDS doctrine also posits that Jesus is everyone’s older brother (seriously).

Also, angels and devils are the same species, just in different stages of maturity or judgement. Thus demons are just angels ‘with issues’.

According to LDS doctrine, the two oldest sons of God were Jesus and Lucifer. After Lucifer convinced one-third of his brothers and sisters to join him in rebellion and were expelled from Heaven. The other two-thirds became the humans born on earth (so how many Jesus-brothers ARE there, and what are their names?)

Got that?

So in effect Jesus has sisters and brothers on earth…but where the heck are THEY?

I always thought

In reply to Of course, Mormons believe Satan is the brother of Jesus

that LDS had gotten the last two letters switched around 😉 :p

I always had a problem with ‘The Fall’ or ‘Original Sin’

In reply to Dude.

I can’t accept a deity who places a blanket condemnation on all future generations simply for the single action of two of their ancestors, actions those future generations played no part in.

Kinda like ‘One strike and you’re out’

In reply to I always had a problem with ‘The Fall’ or ‘Original Sin’

Of course the issue here is that many bible stories are meant to be allegories, not taken literally, but the original authors did not take the time to point that out.

The joke that starts with ‘two guys go into a bar’ does not need to specify the identity of the two individuals, their presence is there to make a point.

From a practical matter, for example, the concept that there was one original man and woman would be problematic. What if Adam turned out not to like women (or Eve was not in the mood)? Or if Eve got pregnant then got bit by a snake and died, game over. Poof, there goes the human race.

And of course it gets ugly when you consider that the first son and daughter of Adam and Eve would have to marry each other….ewwww.

So too, the whole concept that God created the earth in about a week is problematic, since the measurement of time had not yet been created, so the bible STORY about creation taken literally, cannot be true.

It could be argued that a ‘day’ in God’s time is like 100 million years human-time, but perhaps the author should state that?

Two creation stories

In reply to Kinda like ‘One strike and you’re out’

Genesis starts with two different creation stories, one in which the Creator hights Elohim (usually translated “God”) and one in which he hights Yahweh Elohim (usually translated “the lord God”). If we take them literally, they contradict each other. So whoever put Genesis together obviously did not expect his readers to take them literally. So why should he explain that? The first story is actually a take-off on someone else’s story, and an author does not usually put in notes to say whose leg he is pulling.

‘hights’?

In reply to Two creation stories

Sorry, all I get are suggestions that I’ve misspelled ‘heights’.

Perhaps you need a paper dictionary

In reply to ‘hights’?

In my office I find Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary (1973) and in it I find the adjective meaning “being called”. The adjective comes from a verb, as in “This grisly beast, which Lion hight by name, The trusty Thisby, coming first by night, Did scare away, or rather did affright” in Shakespeare: A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I admit that the verb is a bit out of fashion, but Poul Anderson uses it in stories set in the far future. The verb is cognate with German heissen and Dutch heten.

Thanks.

In reply to Perhaps you need a paper dictionary

With that cleared up, why is referring to a creator as ‘God’ in one story and ‘lord God’ in another contradictory? Is one not a shorter form of the other?

The sticking point

In reply to Kinda like ‘One strike and you’re out’

is with the vocal percentage who insists that their religious texts be interpreted literally. You know, that “The Bible says it, I believe it, that settles it!” crowd, not that they’re unique or exclusive to Christianity.

In the original version of the Flood story, there were two deities active

In reply to The sticking point

One was the crazy-as-fluck raging moron (Ellil, who later became El(i), Yahweh; the “one god” of judaeism) who decided to kill off humanity to get some quiet (hangovers, much?) – and the other one was the tricky one who instructed “the old man” (Noah, Utnapishtim, et al.) to build a boat (it’s called an ark, which means a box, and in the original story it’s actually a huge cube) to tide even a part of humanity over until the other guy’s hangovers peter out. And Ellil is very ashamed after it’s over and promises never to kill off all the humans again. So much for the Rapture, eh?

Of course, in the original there are other gods, such as Bhaal, son of El(lil), who later suffered some severe parental persecution.

Ahhh…Noah’s floating cube

In reply to In the original version of the Flood story, there were two deities active

Logically, putting a whole bunch of animals (especially carnivores and their prey) together in a big boat, or cube, would NOT end well.

The other issue is that in terms of hardware and so forth, there were no water pumps at that time, so if you built this football-field sized boat, and then got torrential rains, there are two issues:

1) the whole thing would sink into the mud, and

2) Unless you built a covered football-field sized boat, how would you deal with the tens of thousands of gallons of rainwater?

Consider too how much labor and materials it would take to build. Back then there were not even the equivalent of a two-man crosscut saw, so felling even a single tree would take days, not to mention the theoretical 10-15K trees required to build a wooden boat.

We’re talking cutting down like 10K trees with a stone axe, then cutting the trees into planks, and we assume using wooden pegs and/or rope to lash all this wood together, with something like pine pitch added for waterproofing.

The original is also much more clearly a fairytale/mystery tale…

In reply to Ahhh…Noah’s floating cube

As would ours be, had not the Greeks mangled the Hebrew version so terribly. I hear the Hebrew bible is full of puns and gags, alongside the juicy parts.

Leave it to Greeks to take the fun out of everything, eh?

The consequences of the Fall

In reply to I always had a problem with ‘The Fall’ or ‘Original Sin’

may in fact be genetic – at least I look at it this way. :0

Adam and Eve were cut off from the ‘Tree of LIfe’ in order that evil does not last forever. Enter death, disease, all the evils that ‘Life’ is not. Eternal evil, or death? If, in fact, eternity is, and we, in fact, are eternal, I gotta choose temporary death. If we’re not, I got no choice but to die anyway. 😐

Our understanding being limited by our perception, I try to keep an open thought process about this kinda stuff.

It says as much

In reply to The consequences of the Fall

in that genetic means hereditary, as precisely inherited.
But there’s no mention of any such things, really. There is the fruit that grants knowledge of good and evil, which is allowed for all the animals, but not for the ones made in God’s image. And God put them there, knowing full well that they would eat of it, and knowing how much of a nuisance they would be (knowing good from evil makes people preachy, apparently), he pre-designed this bogus ban, so that he could get rid of the embarrassing results of his self-affection.
Say it doesn’t make sense! He knew what would happen, but still felt like squeezing out a few simulacrum, then let them break a rule so he could flush them without feeling bad about it :^0

We are what we eat,

In reply to It says as much

are we not?

A tree the fruit of which makes its eater evil?

In reply to We are what we eat,

God should have kept that one on a high shelf, methinks. Rather big parenting fail.

All that was said of the tree is that it gives knowledge to discern good from evil, so that sounds more like it gives us a choice, or free will, even.

I am more partial to think that Adam and Eve immediately began criticizing creation, seeing things as either good or evil, and demanding more of the good and less of the evil. -Covering up their nekkidness can be seen as finding fault with the form of God, in whose image they were wrought.

They might have even doubted a God that created Evil to begin with. And the answer was “Get outta mah house, ya ingrates!”.

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