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I used to thought that D&D was terrible when talking about Islam but now I'm realizing you people just have a problem with discussing religion in general. Here's a religious phenomenon right in your backyards and you're still astonishingly bad at understanding it. Religion is not something you slap on to your otherwise completely secular life. It's neither a simple cover for justifying your cynical aims, nor a brain parasite causing you to do things by itself. It's a totalizing worldview that informs everything you experience. It's impossible to separate someone's ethics from their religion, and trying to find which one is in charge is a futile exercise. HappyHippo is entirely correct. These people are of course very religious, and they have religious motives. Their religion btw, is intimately connected with their identity of being white American conservatives. And this particular brand of Christianity cares a lot about sexual deviancy for certain historical and social reasons. The fact that you can't find anything in the scripture that would justify such an extreme and hateful stance doesn't matter because a) a very small portion of religious people have a sophisticated and broad understanding of scripture, and b) this is the religion they learned in their upbringing and daily practice anyway.
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Apr 12, 2016 03:08
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Popular Thug Drink posted:we don't know if god actually hates fags though. god has been pretty vague on the subject. we do know for a fact that fred phelps hated fags, an idea he worked very hard to impress into his family and community I'm confused. Are you trying uphold orthodoxy, or trying to understand WBC's motives?
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Apr 12, 2016 03:10
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Brainiac Five posted:Actually, though, this particular brand of Christianity generates a number of liberal Christians, just like every Christian denomination has. In order to narrow the brand down to one that is almost-universally homophobic, you need to use qualifiers like "conservative" which exist outside of the religious sphere, rendering this totalitarian notion of religion to be a clear absurdity. I wasn't talking about a specific denomination, just people who would consider themselves to be the Religious Right, which is a big incestuous family, denomination-wise.
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Apr 12, 2016 03:25
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Popular Thug Drink posted:do you have some basis by which we can distinguish between culture, religion, and politics, if we can't go by biblical teachings as a meaningful metric for what is/is not christian? Like the very idea of taking the Bible as the chief metric for what is/is not Christian is a divisive issue that has a cultural and political basis! Most liturgical Christians would vehemently disagree with you on this point. Because you just threw out a wide array of millenia-old traditions that have been consciously shaped by local cultures, politics and accidents of history. Instead, why don't you just trust people and take them at their word when they say they are Christian, and are acting according to their spiritual beliefs?
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Apr 12, 2016 18:19
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Popular Thug Drink posted:that's such a broad acceptance of human behavior as to be useless to describe human behavior and motivations for that behavior. it's a neat concept to think about i guess if people wash their car or mow the lawn religiously, but it's a totally vacant basis by which to examine why people hold the attitudes that they do It's supposed to be a starting point for analysis, not the answer to everything. From there you examine where these religious beliefs are coming from, and why people believe in them. The contents of those religious beliefs are not wholly independent from history, but they are also not irrelevant. They mean something. quote:gay sex is also not a sin against god. this means that religion is both for and against gay sex. we can determine therefore that people are approving and disapproving of gay sex because of religion, which demonstrates that both bigotry and acceptance are motivated by religion. in conclusion, we can state that religious people can either support gay sex or oppose it Yes, congrats. You acknowledged religious beliefs differ even among people who share the same religious identity. What a concept! Although, may I remind you that vast majority of Christians, including the biggest churches, both historically and today, believe gay sex is a sin? Now why is this the case? Does this have something to do with influential Church Father's attitude to non-reproductive sex? Is it because it challenges some crucial standpoints Christian tradition had over sexual relationships and gender roles? Nah, it's probably nothing. They are all just bigots.
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Apr 12, 2016 18:44
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SSNeoman posted:Because when people are being anti-gay and are justifying it using the Bible, they are doing it because it gives them authority. They are being disingenuous, using scripture to perpetuate the narrative their local culture imprinted on them. OR they are doing it because they are genuinely, really, honestly scared to poo poo that God is going to punish them and their country for their acceptance of LGBT people. And yeah, maybe it also gives them a smug sense of moral superiority, and a psychological relief from their many failures for not living up to extremely high standards Jesus put on them. That works too.
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Apr 12, 2016 18:58
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Popular Thug Drink posted:like i keep saying, if there's no way to decouple religious justifications for political stances versus religious stances then there's not much point to talking about religion except to express your disapproval with religion  What? Why? Why can't we do both and accept people are complex beings with complex reasons for their political opinions, with religious beliefs being one of them? And why does this require disapproval of religion? Would you be of the same opinion if religious justifications were used for "progressive" causes?quote:there's a big difference between thinking something is a sin and thinking something is a sin so you support harrasing and discriminatory legislation in the political sphere. if we can't examine why some religious people have the same attitudes as the bigots but themselves are more accepting then this further erodes the idea that religious tenets must somehow be at fault Once again you are assuming just because religious beliefs vary over cultures and individuals then all religion must be wholly empty of meaning and just a tool people dress up their cultural preferences. That's not how it works; this poo poo matters to people. Some anti-LGBT Christians literally believe God punishes nations for tolerating sodomy, fire and brimstone style. Where did that idea even come from? Well, that's a complicated story that involves some foundational Christian beliefs that goes back hundreds of years, as well as social and cultural transformations that happened in America in the last few decades, or hell, even the last several years.
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Apr 12, 2016 19:17
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Popular Thug Drink posted:you can do whatever you want man, it's a free internet. all i'm saying is that if you have no method to distinguish between religious, religiously inspired, political-as-religious, religious traditions with little religious intent behind them, and so on when it comes to determining the relative bigotry quanta inherent in some mix of religious or not religious or sorta religious behavior then you're not really beholden to any sort of actual interesting rational analysis and you might as well just go yell at an empty church I'm not interested in comparing bigotry-midichlorians of self-described religious people. Rather I'm interested in why people do political acts that they describe as religiously motivated, and surprisingly enough, it turns out there are specific religious doctrines and traditions behind them. No amount of playing demarcation game with politics, culture, norms and religion will change the fact that the anti-LGBT Christians in America have pretty specific religious justifications they derived from long-standing Christian teachings. I don't see how understanding those teachings is a waste of time if you care about the issue. Popular Thug Drink posted:
The thing is, you haven't proposed a good reason for me to not believe when people say they do X because of Y religious reasons. You keep saying religious justifications are empty signifiers hiding and carrying "bigotry" from person to person. Fine. But then why do we still have religion at all? If bigotry comes from something that has nothing to do with religion, why do these people feel compelled to express their bigotry in religious terms, with arguments backed by (however flimsily) scripture and tradition? Is it just because it gives them spiritual authority to push their cynical political agenda? Then how do you think religion grants this authority in the first place? Who still believes in Jesus anyway?
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Apr 12, 2016 22:30
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