Radical Clerics, Christian Morals, and Homosexuality

I would take the opposite view - that churches shouldn't be involved in marriage at all. They can perform whatever cermeonies they like and call them whatever they like but there should be no legal implications. The legal state of "marriage" should be the business of the people through their government.

If "God's word" is hate speech, then I for one have no problem with passing laws against "God's word".

Personally, I couldn't care less if (homo)sexuality is a choice or a hard-coded impossible-to-resist genetic compulsion. Somebody else's choice is none of your business or mine. If it is a "sin", then that's between them and God and you and I can keep out of it. "God's word", as I recall, has something to say about "mixed marriages" too.

The problem is that we have a lot of laws with the word "marriage" in them. Changing the name of government-sanctioned contracts to "union" would require rewording a lot of laws.Which is why I suggest that only the government-sanctioned marriages should be recognized as legal marriages. If churches want to call something "marriage", that's fine but it should have no legal standing whatsoever. The solution to that problem, in my opinion, is for the government to handle the legal and for religion to handle the religious. No religious ceremony needs to be illegal if it carries no legal weight in the first place.

Whether or not they are technically "lies", there is a fundamental dishonesty in creationist thinking (which often extends to other areas such as this topic). No creationist would claim that the leaves in every yard came from one gigantic tree, yet they claim that widespread flood evidence came from one gigantic flood. The logic that they use in their Christian apologetics is completely different from the logic that they use in real life. At best, they're being dishonest with themselves.

end Of course there are. Its all gray. There may be light gray at one end of the spectrum and dark gray at the other but you yourself agree that things like morality are relative, don't you? It's not only lazy thinking to focus on only the ends of the spectrum; it's dishonest.

You're still creating a false dichotomy. There is a whole spectrum of belief from "Jesus is alive and above you" to "Jesus is alive and beside you" to "Jesus was alive but now that part of his mission is finished" and so on, all the way down to "Jesus is a human construct and a man-made religion". Some cliques do think in terms of "us" and "everybody else" but it's silly to pretend that everybody who disagrees with you does so for the same reasons. There are a thousand reasons why you're wrong.

Some segments of our society suggest that homosexual behviour is not appropriate. Other segments suggest that bigotry is not appropriate behaviour.Which suggestion takes precedence?If you want to reconcile society with itself, I suppose it's easier to redefine bogotry than homosexulaity.

Apparently, outside the church is a better place to become loving.