So-Called "Persecution Against Christians":

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Funny how we're the bullies when it's the law forcing gay marriage on us against our Biblical conscience that is the bully, putting us in the position of refusing specific services to gay weddings

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Since we have seen that it is not Biblical and seems rather more to do with bigotry than conscience it hardly seems to be a problem for Christians.

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Now we can be sued and driven out of business for holding a viewpoint that goes back to Eden and was shared by all cultures until very recenTry

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You can't be sued for holding a viewpoint, as you certainly should know by now. Only for what you do - or refuse to do. So why are you claiming otherwise ?

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You don't get to define what's biblical. We know what's biblical, and our rejection of gay marriage is determined by the Bible.

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As we have seen, that is not true. If you obeyed the Bible you would follow the law and have no problem at all.

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So shoot us. You're working up to that anyway.

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That is one of the lies that "Christians" will use to justify their tyranny. I shall restrict myself to pointing out your evil. Which is exactly why you hate me,and wish to see me beaten or worse.

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What you think you "have seen" is what is not true.

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As usual you think that you get to decre what is true and what is not.

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Marriage is clearly defined in the Bible as a man and a woman, and homosexuality is clearly defined as a sin, not a legitimate "lifestyle."

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Marriage is clearly defined as allowing multiple wives, and concubines, and using the wive's slaves to get children.Equally the Bible also requires Christians to obey the secular law.Also Christians are not required to enter into gay marriages nor are Christians forced to offer any religious support for gay marriage, making it a purely secular matter. And the same goes for pathetic Satanists like you.

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You are not allowed to define another person's reading of the Bible or another's conscience, sorry

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If that is the case, you are required to support the segregationists. It was decided that their reading of the Bible. And the Christian guy who beheaded his friend some years ago. In truth when you can find no clear Biblical support for your position and there IS clear Biblical opposition to your position - and when you openly appeal to bigotry to support your position I see no reason why anybody should have to ignore those facts. Being a liar and a hypocrite does not grant you special privileges.

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In any case you will find that the more Christian businesses are challenged to do something special or personal that validates gay marriage the more Christians will have to refuse and be punished for it.

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Christians are never required to provide anything more than the usual services they provide - and often do provide to sinful weddings without complaint. If they decide that their bigotry is more important than the Bible - an odd position for a true Christian - and break the law then they will suffer the penalties. Just as a "Christian" segregationist or. anti-Semite would.

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sonal that validates gay marriage the more Christians will have to refuse and be punished for it. Your thinking they are wrong carries no more weight than the Catholics thinking the Protestants wrong who refused to accept papal law and chose torture and death instead.

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Since conversion is not required and torture and death are not among the penalties prescribed this is hardly an apt comparison.As I have pointed out a much closer comparison would be with the segregationists - who would break exactly the same laws in enforcing their "Biblical" beliefs. You have no problem seeing them "persecuted" - even though they are as "Christian" as you.

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Sorry. Of course calling us evil will justify whatever your group want to do to us too, just as it justified the RCC.

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That is really rich from someone eager to believe calumnies against political,opponents -and believes that slander justifies hate. Remember that I applaud the ACLU decision to defend the rights of Nazis. I hope we can agree that Nazis are evil.

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And how childish of you to pretend I want to harm you in any way. I'm called to die for my beliefs and bless my enemies.

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You have openly stated that you would like to inflict physical violence on me. You have asserted that if there were a "Red State" secession my opinions would no longer be heard. It doesn't take much imagination to add to that. Certainly it is stronger grounds than anything you have provided.

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Twist and lie, Paul, you're good at it.

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Your addiction to false accusations continues.

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Yes I've felt like punching you on many occasions. That's me personally reacting to a snark, not anything prescribed by my beliefs though you twist things to mean that.

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And there you go lying again.

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The Bible does NOT require us to obey any "secular" law that conflicts with God's law. It is CLEARLY stated that we are to obey GOD AND NOT MAN when there is a conflict.

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Since the verses in question have no such exception and since you cannot find any such conflict you have no valid point.

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I do not have to respect any reading of the Bible than the reading I understand to be the correct one.

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Which - in practice - means that you feel free to reject the Bible in favour of your own prejudices.

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A person's conscience is a personal thing. If I act on it by denying wedding services to gays it is I who will suffer, despite all the stuppidity being said about this here.

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In that case you make no distinction between conscience and bigotry.And I will note that you are in danger only if you offer such services as a business, and only if you you live in a State where gays are a protected class. A segregationist who refuses to offer services to Blacks on grounds of their interpretation of the Bible and their "conscience" is at exactly the same risk under the same laws. Yet you have no complaint about that. Why should we offer you any more support than you would offer them ?

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I am not responsible for the segregationists' opinion

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A clear irrelevance. The point is that their situation very closely parallels yours and by your own arguments you should hold that they should have been permitted to continue their discrimination.

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I disagree with it and they either stick to it and suffer the consequences or realize they are wrong and give it up

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Then you can have no complaint when I state that I disagree with your view and that those who hold it should suffer the consequences if they put that view into action in defiance of the law.

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I'm responsible for my own opinion and MAYBE it will only be a problem if I own a business but I wouldn't even count on that

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Are there some other laws you fear that you might be breaking ?

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There is no reason to keep arguing this.

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indeed, you could act like a Christian and admit your errors.

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You've all decided Christians may not hold the opinions we hold, we're today's Jews, so you will punish us for your opinion no matter what

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That is simply a lie you tell to justify your hypocrisy and bigotry. I have not suggested that you be punished for your opinion unless you count being laughed at for your pathetic attempts to pretend to be a Christian.

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Why you bother to argue with something so obvious I don't really geT

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That I argue against an obvious lie should hardly be surprising. The only surprise - at least to those who have not had long experience of you - is that you could think that you could get away with it.

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I guess you just don't like to think you are in the wrong and are punishing us the way the Nazis did the Jews, so you have to keep demonizing us just as the Nazis did the Jews and make it our fault by hook or by crook. So what else is new?

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Since it is quite obvious that I am not in the wrong - while you have to resort to misrepresenting the Bible and appealing to double standards - I have no need to pretend. Rather you are resorting to your nasty lies because YOU need to obscure the fact that you are in the wrong. And that really is obvious.

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I disagree that there is any comparison between race and homosexuality so I reject your comparison with segregationists.

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Even if that were true - and I would disagree - there is certainly a valid comparison. Firstly, as I have pointed out the exact same laws are involved, with the exact same penalties prescribed. In both cases you rely on Biblical "interpretations" which seem to be clearly incorrect to justify your behaviour. If I cannot judge your "interpretation", then how can it be that I can judge the segregationist's "interpretation" ?This is not a new point Faith. It has been made time and again, and your only response is that you believe that the discrimination you desire is "right". No doubt the segregationists believed that the discrimination they desired was "right" so the only difference comes down to your personal opinion. Indeed they would even deny that they were bigots, arguing that they wanted only to keep the races separate and that any ill-effects were incidental. You don't even gave that excuse.If you can offer no valid reason why you should not be treated as the segregationists were - a treatment you fully endorse - then you are a hypocrite plain and simple. Especially as that endorsement would make you every bit as much a "Nazi" as anyone here. (Perhaps more so since the Nazis persecuted homosexuals in the same way as they persecuted Jews)

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It is really not hard to make the case that segregation is not biblical.

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Nor is it hard to show that your position is not Biblical. It has been done. Not that that is even relevant to the law.

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In any case homosexuality is nothing like race. I have no desire to hurt homosexuals, I think they have many hard things to deal with in their lives, but the Bible clearly identifies homosexual acts as sin so there is no way an honest Christian can call it normal, and certainly no way homosexual marriage can be treated as legitimate

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If you were talking about Church weddings I would agree that your Church has every right to refuse to hold marriage ceremonies for gay couples - or to refuse to remarry divorcees for that matter.But I see no reason why a Christian would have to deny a gay couple the legal benefits of marriage, and you have not offered one. Surely that is a purely secular matter that is rightly deferred to the secular authorities - at least by Christian teaching.

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Also as long as Christians aren't required to treat gay marriage as valid there is no problem, but this is exactly where the problem arises. So as long as this is required of us in any context whatever, we will refuse to comply and be punished for it.

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In other words your entire complaint against gay marriage is that it deprives you of the "right" to discriminate against gays. Hardly a noble cause.

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No other sexual sin, and there are lots of them, is called by that term.

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All the sins in Leviticus 18 are called abominations in Leviticus 18:27 and 18:29Is reading even one whole chapter of the Bible beyond you ?

Talk about empty nit-picking. As I said, all the sins in Leviticus 18 are described as abominations in 18:27 and 18:29. The placement of the description in the chapter hardly changes the fact that they are all described as abominations in that chapter.

I have reread it - including the part you added. You are still engaged in pointless and meaningless nit-picking over Leviticus 18. It is hardly "singling" out male homosexuality to use a term which is applied to everything in the chapter.

I would think that if male homosexuality - which is all Leviticus 18:22 addresses - were considered to be worse that the others then it would be made rather more clear.
Simply using a term which is applied to all the others as well does not do a very clear job of singling it out.Romans, anyway, describes a curse sent by God as a punishment for idolatry. And encouraging an especially bad sin seems an odd sort of punishment for God to send.

Well, if you want to give God responsibility for - at least some - sins - go right ahead.

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EvC takes the cake when it comes to treating other opinions as evil trash, never extending a moment's benefit of the doubt, a moment's grace.

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Presumably you mean your habit of calling people Nazis ? Really, Faith, your hypocrisy has been more than adequately proven, we need no further examples.

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You'd think, if you were a sane reasonable person (which is asking too much of you all on this thread) that the religion that built and civilized and in fact liberalized western civilization and drew it out of the Dark Ages of barbarism and superstition, would have earned a teeny bit of respect.

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If Christianity deserves respect maybe you should show it some, instead of using it as a pretext for your bigotry. And let us note that you are certainly being far less than reasonable, even if I make no judgement on your sanity.

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Ya know, just enough to stop and wonder if your first evil trash thoughts just might possibly be in error, like seriously out of context, and that the people who have followed its teachings for two thousand years just might not share your kneejerk culture-bound take on it.

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Given the fact that you have failed to make a Biblical case for your claim and been caught misrepresenting the Bible more than once in this thread alone maybe you should consider the possibility that prejudice is an unreliable guide. And as somebody who claims to be a Protestant who follows Sola Scriptura surely you should believe that the Bible outweighs tradition - so why are you now appealing to tradition to override the Bible ? Think about that.