our attorney general here in texas sent out a message to all county clerks telling them to wait but the larger population centers did not follow that advice.
Well, dammit - the Supreme Court just ruined my comic book shopping spree! Thanks, Obama!
Thanks Xeni. Our asshat AG doesnât speak for all Texans. Yes, we have a host of hidebound jerkoffs. But Texas is also home to millions who either just had their just civil rights confirmed or who are glad we can now go to our friendsâ weddings.
According to their twitter feed another local comic shop closed for the same reason.
That sign is adorable.
Wait for what? an appeal? to whom?
Apparently enraged parties have three weeks to ask SCOTUS to reconsider. However, after reading the decisions, it seems unlikely any one the justices would change their mind.
Mind you, I think I read this somewhere on Twitter five hours ago, so who knows.
A sign of the times --and not the usual portent of doom kind, but rather the omigoditreallyhappened variety.
More, please.
Dallas County clerk John Warren ignored the order of the Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, and began issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples today. Not only that, but the usual 3 day waiting period was waved, so couples could get married on the same day. Thatâs a good thing, too, because the first couple to get married were 82 and 85 years old!
And for people whoâs only impression of Dallas is from TV shows, the fact is that itâs one of the most gay-friendly cities in the country. Our twice-elected county sheriff is an Hispanic lesbian (and former Secret Service agent), and Dallas is home to the largest predominantly gay church in the nation.
since texas wasnât one of the states involved directly in the case before the court it wouldnât surprise me if teas forced the circuit court over it to rule directly before he were to okay it. heâs also been talking today about the religious liberties of the county clerks and justices of the peace signaling that if any of these are bigoted he will defend them in court. remember that in texas it is legal for employers and landlords to discriminate against people on the basis of sexual orientation so anyone who appears on the various local news shows getting a marriage license is brave indeed in this state.
OMG the hardline anti-gay-marriage freakazoids were RIGHT ALL ALONG.
Clearly these people are lining up at the courthouse to marry their comic book collections.
Floodgates, OPEN!
Gabe and Ken just quit their jobs to follow their dream of owning a comic book store a year ago. They could use all the followers they can get! Two awesome guys.
That oneâs a head-exploder. I still for the life of me canât believe any gay people want to be christians. After all, it does say in the book that gay people are supposed to have rocks thrown at them till theyâre dead. In the bible, jesus himself said the old law is to remain in force, so the only excuse christians have for not killing gay people is because the government would incarcerate them. That, or theyâre actually MUCH BETTER than their religions.
Same goes for black people. I donât get why there are so many black christians when a lot of the justification for slavery was straight out of the bible too. Itâs not like christianity and the bible are separate.
If christians donât want to be judged by the awful shit theyâre told to do in a book they outright affirm is holy and âTrueâ, they ought to re-write their book to match their own morality.
The Bible says a lot of things, and it isnât entirely clear that some of the things that it says havenât been altered in translation. If you dig deeply enough, you can find justification for many horrific things in the Bible, and, yes, some people do spend time looking for such justification. Yet you can also choose to look at the Bible as encouraging the positive.
âWhat commandment is the first of all? Jesus answered, The first is, Hear, O Israel; The Lord our God, the Lord is one: and thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength. The second is this, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. There is none other commandment greater than these.â
I see a âpredominantly gay churchâ as being totally compatible with a lot of Christianity. You canât re-write the Bible, but you can certainly pick and choose which parts are meaningful to you and that you want reflected in your daily life.
This is a true statement. But what sticks in my brain is all the christians who pick and choose who also say things like âthe bible is the only source of âTruthââ or âthe bible is entirely trueâ, or âItâs allegoricalâ. If youâre going to call the book holy, then it better at the very least be self-consistent.
As it stands, the bible is proven to have been written by humans, compiled by humans, and interpreted by humans. There is no evidence of âdivine inspiration.â
Absolutely you can! There are so many different versions of the bible itâd fill the library of a large municipality. Why donât the christians spend some time re-writing the bible to include more human decency, empathy and compassion, and no genocide, slavery, and racism?
So a dude (who probably is just a composite of many different fictional characters and perhaps some real people) said âlove this fictional character who doesnât actually have any power to the exclusion of anything else. Also be cool to people you know, since, yâknow if youâre a dick to your neighbors, theyâll make your life hard.â
The first part is poppycock. Youâll have to prove both that a god exists and is worthy of worship before I do that. The second part is common sense in the vein of pro-social behavior. You donât need the bible to tell you to be kind to your neighbors, and not to be dicks to them. Itâs obvious that if youâre a dick to the people you interact with all the time, youâll be worse off.
The Bible is commonly believed to be the inspired Word of God. The reality is that, even if we were to grant that as true, it was transcribed on paper by fallible humans, copied through the ages by other fallible humans, and translated into other languages by even more fallible humans. It is one of the longest running games of Chinese Whispers in the world. It is entirely fair to assume that the way it has ended up is not necessarily consistent with how it started, and that opportunistic types along the way may have made changes to the text. Yet it is what we have.
Still, that is a very different thing from just authoring a âmodern bible.â Whoâs going to be the ghostwriter for God? How are you going to convince people that your human-ghostwritten bible is something they should prefer over what has been handed down through the ages as the inspired Word of God? What if your human-ghostwriter happens to be a bigot, and decides that the first commandment should be âkill all the __________â?
One of the things that at least somewhat deters random edits to the Bible is that it is considered a holy book, and that it represents the Word of God. Suggesting that a new one be written opens the door to all sorts of new crazy, as we might well find that the homophobics create a book whose first commandment is âkill the gaysâ, the bigots create a book whose first commandment is âkill the non-whitesâ, the misogynists create their own special rules, etc., and then we have a whole new set of problems.
Nobody requires you to believe anything.
However, some people do find that their religion helps them find meaning in their lives, and helps them find their moral compass. If it helps them, then it probably isnât a bad thing.
What reason is there to believe that? There are many written works. Why is the bible, or the qurâan or the bhagavad gita considered holy, when the writings of, for instance John Lock, Bertrand Russel, or Charles Darwin are considered profane, uninspired work? The only thing that sets these âholy booksâ apart from other works of literature are their qualities of being pretty old (but not all that old compared with all of written language), and that they have âdivine authorityâ. For crying out loud, the first few stories in the bible are all parables with the âmoralâ that âknowledge is evil and fucks everything up. So be stupid and do as youâre told. Otherwise Iâll crush you with my colossal god-penisâ.
If Harry Potter were written a few thousand years ago, and explicitly said within the text âThis is real and Harry is your godâ, then all the credulous rubes from back then would have passed that myth down through the generations, along with the same dumb illogical rationalizations for why Harry doesnât save us from poverty or hunger or nuclear war today. The wizard works in mysterious ways.
It is what we have. But itâs not evidently true as a whole, or worthwhile in its instruction, and it gives millions, if not billions of people an excuse to outsource their own moral reasoning to the commandments of mostly illiterate, minimally educated desert dwelling bronze age nomads who had little to no understanding of the universe. They were utterly ignorant of the larger world around them, or of the impact their sordid little books would have for generations to come. Their supposition and bullshittery holds back human progress to this day, by claiming that basic human instinct and imperatives are evil, while the arbitrary dictates of a bunch of genocidal bigots are whatâs really holy.
The bible as we know it today was compiled by gang of geriatric pedophiles who burnt the mentally ill and those who couldnât defend themselves at the stake. And before that, there was a âmodern bibleâ written by people, from scratch using their own judgements and philosophies. Whatâs holy about that?
Then it wouldnât be any different from the currently available bible, for instance the Amalakite Genocide, along with numerous others. Itâs hard to do worse than smiting a whole civilization by the edge of the sword and leaving nothing that breathes alive including them men, women, children, livestock, pets, and any bug big enough to draw attention.
