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Gay Religion; GAY
Topic Started: 30 Nov 2009, 09:21 AM (8,279 Views)
Midst Of Vampy
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Barabbas
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I admit that I'm wrong a lot, but no body can tell me that what I believe in is wrong. I like to listen to other people's side of the story.
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Luemas
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DELICIOUS!
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Well, actually we can, that just doesn't make us right.
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I think I'm Crazzzy. I think your crazy. I think your crazzzy... probably.
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Midst Of Vampy
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Barabbas
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hmm, I hate when you get so true like that! It makes your sis look bad!;)
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Concolor
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Barabbas
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Points to Lue on that one :)

(Don't worry Vampira, you've gotten loads of points earlier)
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Reason, compassion and love comes first. Everything else is secondary. Except for Skittles. - And emperor Cheezy! Posted Image
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conradw
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Quote:
 
The question I asked was designed to point out that, without God, there's no basis for any kind of morality. But since you believe in God, the point is irrelevant.
See in spite of what you said I STILL disagree with you. Morality doesn't need to be objective to be morality. Thankfully being based on God doesn't make it moral either (just look at the Westboro Baptist Church).

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We save lives because Christ saved ours. God keeps us from death every second by his presence (in spite of the fact that we DO deserve it--it's not a question of him thinking it). We're thus not acting contrary to his will, we're acing in accordance with it.
So its more Christian to save lives than end lives - that's good to hear. Its more Christian to forgive sins than to punish them. I agree with these noble sentiments - hence I see no difficulty calling myself a follower of Christ. The problem is, by being wrathful, vengeful and misanthropic, God seems very different to Christ.

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You're misunderstanding the point. I did not say that the death of the natives was good or right--I agreed with you that they were evil. Did you miss that memo? The conquistadors were evil because they played God in deciding who was fit to live and who was not. They tried to judge by God's standards, but they failed because they're human and they misunderstood God's standards. Among other things, they misunderstood that they too deserved to die and thus were in the same position as the "savages" under their heel.
What's to misunderstand - if God thinks they deserve death, then it follows that they deserved death and they got what they deserved.
The Conquistadors were wrong to try and say what God wants - sure (but I would say that the Israelites did the same thing). But in the end they did do, according to you, what God reckons they deserve (just as Enver Pasha did to the Amenians, and the Israelites did to the Canaanites) - which, if we take God as our basis of morality, must be good.
But what is the difference between the conquistadors, and all the other mass-murderers of history playing God and deciding that people don't deserve life and you telling me that. Ultimately, you're agreeing with the murderers that their victims don't deserve life, and you're committing the same sin of putting words in God's mouth. It doesn't make a difference whether you believe you deserve death yourself - it only the difference between a sado-masochist rather than just a sadist.

Is it not simpler to say: Genocide is wrong, and not even God thinks its right. Men commit Genocide thinking God is on their side, but they're wrong. And as for what you said about the Conquistadors being devout - I might not use the word devout, but I would agree they weren't behaving as Christians ought.

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Okaaaaayyy... but you haven't actually explained WHY God creating us DOESN'T give him rights to our lives. Do we have tantamount importance to God? Is there some higher law that compels God to treat us as equals or to leave us free? We keep animals in servitude. We keep creations in servitude. The only case in which slavery is frowned upon is among equals. Humans cannot enslave other humans. Are humans equal to God?

I've said before. You don't own your children. God says we are his Children. That higher law would be God's own law to love one another the way you love yourself and the same way God loves you. Or are you going to tell me that God is a hypocrite to?
There is such a think as a benevolent dictator, but they're usually the ones that allow the most freedom and respect the rights of their people (I think of Sultan Qaboos of Oman here). But if you think that there is a good form of Slavery you're going to have to do a lot more than state it to convince me.
As for otherthrowing a beneficial regime - well, Rhodesia was pretty well off when it was ruled by Whites and Blacks were marginalised. What's happened in Zimbabwe since is absolutely appallingly bad. But does that mean the "beneficial regime" didn't need to be overthrown? no. It needed to be overthrown. But would it be better if it had been overthrown with someone who cared about freedom, human rights, equality under the law, etc rather than what they got? certainly.

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You think there's a way to avoid being a slave?
It is possible to not want to be a slave. While we are all influenced by our surroundings, we have a responsibility to others and ourselves to respect their freedom and respect our own. As for being made to be a slave - we do have opioid receptors and a nervous system that respond to drugs of addiction, I think you can make a pretty strong case that if we were made for slavery, it was slavery to drugs.


And in your last few paragraphs the true difference between your opinion and mine is demonstrated. You believe the world is getting worse, I believe its getting better. Today is better than Yesterday, and Tomorrow will be only better. Why can I say this? well look at history, it mostly been that way. As bad as crime is today, its certainly better than it was in 1920's Chicago, and it is head, shoulders, chest and waist above the medieval period.
I'll explain all of those bad things very simply. At the time, they were seen as actually good things. It is because today we empathise with those victims of tragedy that we see them as crimes. We Our ability to empathise has only grown more broadly and more intense. Our neighbour is not just the person who lives next door, and not just the Samaritan, but also the person who you will never meet living on the other side of the world.
The world is in a mess because of a tragedy of the commons - people work in their own short term self interest at the expense of the long term collective good. The more we work to change this (through education, through charity, through social welfare, foreign aid, communication, inclusion, dialogue and cooperation) the better off we will all be. If you think that it God that motivates us to work to the betterment of all, then I would agree with you - although I suppose in some people its less overt than others. I see this happening around me all the time.
Edited by conradw, 6 May 2010, 09:21 AM.
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why thats lovely that your an optomist and all that.....i think you sound deluded....
the world is dying and everything in it.
how can u say better? humanity has fundamental problems- its Carnel

the Carnel man who just stumbles along here makes some progress there.... i mean using your reasoning wouldnt humanity have gotten its act together by now ?

so carnal man doesnt need the God of the Bible you reckon? :blink:
so u follow Jesus and not God ? so u dont beleive in the Trinity? what about the Holyspirit?
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Concolor
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Barabbas
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@ARAZEC: So in your opinion nothing has improved over the ages?

If we pretend that the Bible is a historical source, the world used to be so bad that God had to kill everything with a flood!
He routinely had to rain fire from the heavens and eradicate entire societies because they were so horrible. The old testament is full of stories of lepracy, wars, plagues, and TWO separate incidents where the protagonist is chased by a mob that wants to sodomize him!

I dare say this is a rare sight in even the slummiest streets of Oslo.
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Reason, compassion and love comes first. Everything else is secondary. Except for Skittles. - And emperor Cheezy! Posted Image
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Afalstein
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Nothing has improved. We've discovered quicker and more efficient ways of killing people, faster methods of destroying the atmosphere, and easier procedures for us to avoid human interaction.

Sure, the days of the bootlegging gangsters are over. Now we have the drug runners instead. Much better. We no longer have the Holocaust. Instead, we have genocide across Africa and Eastern Asia. Genocide which the rest of the world knows about and just kinda watches. There are no more public executions, there are only quiet, hidden ones or (better still) ones were the victim is locked away from the world for the rest of his natural life. We no longer watch people battle to death in the arena, but we DO watch (fictional) videos of them being tortured to death. If you're into it, you can even watch the real thing by looking at terrorist execution videos online. Mankind may be smarter and healthier, but he is in no way "better."

Education fixes nothing in the system. The French Reign of Terror was carried out by men of the enlightenment. The Nazis of the Holocaust were highly educated and cultured men. Even trying to teach morality is a lost cause--how much has been spent on sex education, and how much of an effect has it had? An even better question, perhaps, has education actually decreased evil and not just crime? Or either?

No one except the Nazis thought the Holocaust was a good thing. The conquistadors were decried by Protestants and Catholics alike at the time. Slavery was protested everywhere, even in some portions of the South. The Armenians were mourned by most of the West. People had plenty of empathy back in the day, and they went ahead and DID things about it? These days? Aw, that's too bad, let's watch a movie about it and maybe send them some cash.

The moderns are not the first to empathize with others, if anything, we're the least empathetic of all. We sue other people for pulling us out of burning cars, we fire employees for trying to stop criminals, we call people discriminatory if they look at us the wrong way. Heck, we have LAWS now to stop people from helping others for fear they might do so "improperly."

Things are not getting better. "The War to End All Wars" just led to a bigger one. Things are at least as bad as they were 200 years ago, and in many ways a good deal worse.
Edited by Afalstein, 6 May 2010, 12:41 PM.
"Evil Triumphs when Good men do nothing."
-Edmund Burke
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Concolor
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Barabbas
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I can't say that I share the same experience of the world. Quite the contrary. 200 years ago, we would not have learned about the disaster in Haiti until months, or even years after it had happened (that includes all of us not from Haiti). We would never have sent money, or went there to aid, or helped them rebuild their society.

The only reason modern people may sometimes seem more uncaring is because when people in the old days helped 2 out of the 100 people they knew about that needed help, they were helping 2 %. When we today are helping 1 500 out of the 150 million that are in need, we're (these numbers are entirely fictional), we're barely helping a thousandth (permille) of the people we see in need. But we are helping a lot more than we used to. The suffering of the world has not increased, but our knowledge about it- and therefore experience of it has.
Life is beautiful, love heals, people come through.

Reason, compassion and love comes first. Everything else is secondary. Except for Skittles. - And emperor Cheezy! Posted Image
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Afalstein
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Our knowledge may have expanded, but our empathy has not. People know about the Haiti disaster, but the majority of them don't do anything. Some volunteer, some give money, but most just agree its horrible and move on with their lives. Some even stop by the island on their cruise to see the sights. If anything, they whine to the government on how it should use its money to help with the relief effort. People know more about disasters in the world then they used to, but they don't do anything more about it. Less, even. Governments may help out for reasons of political expediency, but there's a difference between giving someone else's money and giving your own money to a cause.

And experience? Doubtful. Most people on this forum have never, I imagine, experienced any kind of real suffering in the world. People may SEE or HEAR of such suffering, but experience? Not really. To most people, such suffering is an interesting sound bite on the daily news.
"Evil Triumphs when Good men do nothing."
-Edmund Burke
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Midst Of Vampy
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Barabbas
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Concolor
5 May 2010, 11:08 PM
Points to Lue on that one :)

(Don't worry Vampira, you've gotten loads of points earlier)
Yay! I've got points!(<--- Must be read in a "You've got mail" Voice)
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conradw
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@Arazec. I do believe in the trinity. My point was that that about the difference Afalstein seems to suggest.

@Afalstein. 200 years ago, Haiti would not only have to deal with the destruction, but also diseases like smallpox, polio and diphtheria.
You say that people don't care, and care less than they used to. I saw the response to Haiti, and yes more people felt it was a tragedy than actually did anything about it. I put it to you that 200 years ago we wouldn't even think of it as a tragedy. Apart from a minority, most people would have no sympathy for a nation perceived as rebellious arrogant negroes.
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Midst Of Vampy
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Barabbas
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uh, why are we talking about these things? This topic clearly says, "Gay Religion" So people need to go to a different topic if you are going to discuss other things.
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conradw
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Oh Vampira - this is the way things go on this message board. If conversations didn't go off-piste here, it wouldn't be the forum we all know and love.
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Midst Of Vampy
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Barabbas
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XD, that's actually so true.
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