Christian teacher arrested for sex in cemetery with 16 year old student

[enso]

I mean, if you want actual trolling:

[PhasmaFelis]

@enso

I’m sure there are perfectly quiet Christians out there that don’t spend their lives bothering other people or trying to pass laws to create a theocracy. I just rarely meet any.

You meet them every day. You just assume that they’re not Christian, because they’re not bothering people.

[PhasmaFelis]

@enso

Give me a break. I’m a regular contributor here. “Sorry” that I went out of bounds of your self-appointed role as moderator and gave an opinion with which you disagree. That must be rough, open discourse and all…

Don’t pretend that I tried to censor you. Open discourse is what we’re both doing right now.

[enso]

@PhasmaFelis

You just assume that they’re not Christian, because they’re not bothering people.

I wonder how I got this horrible opinion of Christians, especially with two uncles that are ministers (one a missionary) and a great-grandmother who was an evangelist that founded that Nazarene denomination. Just happened in a vacumn, no influence from family or popular culture…

I don’t care what the quiet ones are doing. I care about the ones that keep trying to pass laws to, say, ban gay marriage (since I am here in California) with the financial backing of their churches. If they left the rest of us alone, a large and growing chunk of America wouldn’t associate Christianity with hypocrisy and crypto-fascism.

[enso]

@PhasmaFelis

Exactly like I asked you not to.

cough

[PhasmaFelis]

@enso

cough

“Could you please not say that” is not censorship. “You shouldn’t be allowed to say that” is censorship.

@enso

I wonder how I got this horrible opinion of Christians, especially with two uncles that are ministers (one a missionary) and a great-grandmother who was an evangelist that founded that Nazarene denomination. Just happened in a vacumn, no influence from family or popular culture…[/quote]
I’m sorry that happened to you. As I said, plenty of Christians are assholes. It’s right and fair to call them out on their bullshit. It’s not fair to stereotype millions and millions of others based on that.

[quote]I don’t care what the quiet ones are doing. I care about the ones that keep trying to pass laws to, say, ban gay marriage (since I am here in California) with the financial backing of their churches.

Good! You should care, and you should fight against them. Fuck those people. I wish them every failure.

Today, a majority of American Christians support gay marriage. (Catholics rate among the most supportive, which even surprised me.) The ones who don’t are entrenched and well-organized, and the fight against them will not be easily won. But there’s more people on our side than theirs.

[enso]

Your focus on the word “censorship” is goal post moving. I never used any form of that word.

I simply disagreed with your self appointed role of what was acceptable conversation on this thread and your calling out when I didn’t fall in line with your demand.

[enso]

Catholics and Mormons in California were the primary political and financial backers of Prop 8 to ban gay marriage. This was actively encouraged from the pulpit to the point that lawsuits were threatened against the churches and a lot of uncomfortable news stories (for the churches) discussed this.

[zathras]

@GulliverFoyle

Game? I personally think that treating relationships as games is a serious red flag of emotional immaturity. I can see why someone judging American society by its youth pop culture would think the “game” is how we relate to one another sexually. That would be an erroneously simplistic view of the 300 million people who live here. Our shallow cartoonish pop culture is an embarrassment, but it’s not the entirety of who we are.

Sorry, I did not want to imply any judgement (or even any observation) on American culture here. Strike the “part of the game” choice of words, I’ll say “a fact of life” instead. I was just trying to make a point about how some of the bad things we’re trying to protect young people from are also done by young people to other young people, and we probably don’t want to make them a crime.

@GulliverFoyle

I honestly can’t see what would be so controversial about my assertion that we, the US, should do scientific studies to try to determine where the age typically is for our youth, and legislate a national age-of-consent. In what way is this worse than our current mess?

Nothing. I did not want to imply that it was.
But there remains the political/ideological decision of what “risk” to take. As in, do you set the age when 90% are mature enough, or at the age when 50% are mature enough, or would you rather wait for 99%?

@GulliverFoyle

I don’t entirely agree with most of them, and I can see by the fact that you took those to be my positions that I did a royally poor job in expressing my views. That’s not false humility. You’re clearly articulate enough to be capable of comprehending what I wrote, so it follows that I was unclear.

I suspect I’m guilty of not only arguing against what you actually said, but also against perceived cultural biases/differences. I might have read too much between the lines in some cases.

@GulliverFoyle

Thank you for such a thoughtful and considered reply. I’d also like to apologize for a mistake I made earlier. I misread Austria and Australia. Aside from being a very stereotypical American mistake, I didn’t mean to insult your nationality by misstating it.

I thank you as well. I’d love to say more but I was away for the weekend and time is running out.

As for Austria/Australia: That’s a known problem when referring to the country in English (or any of a number of other languages, including Japanese, but not, for example, German, French or Chinese). We won’t be offended unless we’re mistaken for Germans ;-).

@enso

Christian hypocrisy. Most atheists I know don’t lord it over other with their high falutin’ values and sanctimonious “better than thee” attitude.

Atheist here. As an atheist in a reasonably-secularized part of Europe I can confirm that we do lord it over others with our perfectly rational value system that is derived from Enlightenment philosophy and forms the basis of everything that makes living today better than the Middle Ages. At least we sometimes do, in places where we’ve got the numbers to get away with it. Much like most Christians I’ve known. Pretty nice most of the time, but impossible once you get them involved in an us-vs-them religious discussion.