Note I addressed this post to Christians. It is about a conflict I see between Christian ethics/morals and modernist ones that allow homosexuality to be accepted. Some people wear little red hats, too. This statement would also not be relevant to a thread such as this.
ShamMol said:
Just addressing Christians...how bout the perspective of a past Catholic, will that do?
In a sense I posted that incorrectly. This is indeed an open forum for any to enter the debate. However a non-Christian telling me that many people don't believe in Christianity seems a bit absurd. However, welcome to this thread.
ShamMol said:
It is relevant in a thread like this because Christians have to reconcile the fact that not everyone agrees with them and that they may have to change their less hard-thought ideas in order to conform to the norms of society and decency.
Are you saying Christians aren't hard-thinking? Or, not decent?
ShamMol said:
There are many errors in interpretation, there is the fact it was written 300 years after the fact, etc, etc.
This is incorrect. You mistake the date of compilation of the anthology of Christian writings, which is the Bible, and the writing of those works themselves. It is akin to me saying that an anthology of Shakespeare's works (printed in 1982) means that some of his works are only 23 years old. Had you noticed the non-partisan web-site
www.earlychristianwritings.com and visited it, you would see considered dates given for the composition of various books.
ShamMol said:
They aren't standard stock responses, they are what a lot of people feel.
What people feel and what 'is' are sometimes different'
ShamMol said:
There is the fact that it is proven that genesis is just plain wrong, Adam and eve is wrong, want a list?
What has been proven wrong about Genesis? Without going too far off-topic, which evolutionary theory do you believe in? What has been proved by evolution is 'that it happened'.
There's not even one form of 'science'.
there's Nazi Science
Marxist Science
Feminist Science
Capitalist Science
various Nationalist Sciences
Finnish nationalist science! (see
http://www.hf-fak.uib.no/smi/paj/isotalo.html)
Indian (see
http://www.ljudmila.org/nettime/zkp4/08.htm)
Chinese
various attempts at religious-Sciences
Pythaogrean Science
Christian (Creationist) Science
Islamic Science
(some of these are pseudo sciences, depending upon your a priori understandings of normative science)
Each one of these will use science to further their own ends, and they will each 'succeed' because they can all find the evidences to back them up.
The Chinese are quick to show the prominent role China played in our evolution. There is evidence that we evolved in Africa, or that we evolved elsewhere.
http://www.chineseprehistory.org/beard.htm suggests that man arose in China, not Africa!* (or rather an ancestor of man arose there)
http://www.chineseprehistory.org//index.htm is the introduction to this site. It is evidence of the nature of evidence, wholly subjective; that Chinese nationalism is behind these particular pieces of 'scientific evidence.' This increases the over-all number of different forms of science there are.
“In Marxism, groups are more important than individuals. Capitalists view nature as competitive, whereas these Marxist critics tend to view it as being much more cooperative.”
http://www.stephenjaygould.org/reviews/hull_sociobiology.html
Darwin's own views on evolution were dominated by his own Victorian social attitudes, thus:
Darwin postulated that females are ''coy,'' mating rarely and choosing their mates carefully, presumably betting their odds on the males with the best genes to contribute to their offspring. For their part, males are ''ardent'' and promiscuous, and fight amongst themselves for female partners. Later theories added that males are promiscuous because they have less to lose by making babies - unlike eggs, sperm are plentiful and small. Plus, females usually do most of the work to raise the offspring”
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2003-02/su-sag021003.php
See also
http://www.stanford.edu/dept/news/report/news/2003/february19/aaassocialselection219.html
“In the mid-nineteenth century, social Darwinists invoked evolutionary biology to argue that a woman was a man whose evolution - both physical and mental - had been arrested in a primitive stage. In this same period, doctors used their authority as scientists to discourage women's attempts to gain access to higher education. Women's intellectual development, it was argued, would proceed only at great cost to reproductive development. As the brain developed, so the logic went, the ovaries shrivel. In the twentieth century, scientists have given modern dress to these prejudices. Arguments for women's different (and inferior) nature have been based on hormonal research, brain lateralization, and sociobiology.?
Londa Schiebinger, “History and Philosophy”, in Sex and Scientific Inquiry, eds. Sandra Harding and Jean F. O'Barr, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 26-27.
Quoted at:
http://www.dean.sbc.edu/bart.html
It is simply a matter of faith for you to assume that there's only one 'evolution' and that it is un-sullied by the biases of the all too human scientists involved.
However, this will I'm sure, lead to too many distractions from the topic at hand.
Further, you line of reasoning is dubious again for another reason. The Bible teaches against murder. By your standard of belief laws on 'murder' can equally be thrown out too?
ShamMol said:
He brings up a valid point of some bibles who teach differently and why we as lay people don't study them. They wouldn't be our normal teaching, just supplemental material. Is that irrational?
If I have a Bible, and my church has kept it for 1,700 years and some time later someone re-works the Bible (even though my version still exists), the very fact that there is a different version from mine does not prove my version is in error.
Montalban said:
And this too is not only irrelevant to the thread but totally superfluous to an attempt to address myself and my beliefs; as I am not a western Christian.
ShamMol said:
You miss the point. He raises some objections based on what he believes the Catholic Church has done, automatically assuming that this church is itself normative, and representative of all Christianity. My Church's traditions go back to Jesus. It is a similar argument to the one made about the 'versions' of the Bible above. My church goes back to the time of Pentecost...33AD. That other versions of Christianity have arisen subsequent to then does not negate my church's teachings. Thus when I say we've always taught that homosexuality is wrong it make no relevance to point out some hundreds of years later another church arose and 'may have' suppressed some teachings. (I say 'may have' because he's still not substantiated the claim; neither have you).
end part 1