Oh hell no, I don’t want them to get into that kind of legislation, either.
Just a little bit of self-awareness and humility would be a nice change, a little attention to Matthew 7:3-5.
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As I said:
I’m talking about degrees of damage, here. I’m white: If someone calls me a racial slur, it has literally no meaning in a concrete sense. Yeah, I get pissed off because they are being aggressive towards me. How I react is a measure of my convictions and composure. And I get pissed off because racism is ugly. How I react, again, is a measure of my convictions and composure. But there’s a limit to how much it can ruin my day (asterisk), because it simply doesn’t apply. It’s like a punch that lands in a parallel universe.
Look, I was raised as a Christian up until my teens. The sect in question is pretty far removed from the strain of belief we are discussing here, but it does – however vaguely – accept some sort of afterlife and – even more vaguely, if at all – the idea that one’s actions during life impacted one’s eventual placement. Whenever someone told me, during that phase, that they were “praying for me” (in the judge-y sense) or that I was going to hell, my internal response was:
Oh, what the fuck, that’s rude.
Hey, if those things matter, I’m pretty sure this asshole doesn’t make the final call.
Ha ha, ha ha, whatever, dude.
And again, that’s as a (then) Christian, not someone who knows emphatically that Christianity is all bullshit.
(asterisk) How much that sort of thing ruins my day hangs infinitely more on how I comport myself in response to the attack, than on the existence of the attack itself.
Well just the argument for holy/christian/etc are all dumb, as it is a legal contract, period. And in Roman times your spouse was just the person you married not necessarily the person you regularly banged with.
With all the other traditions that we have nullified over the years, being able to sell your daughter into marriage, being able to legally beat your wife, and until our lifetimes legally rape your spouse, heck the radical idea marrying for love as an idea is only a recent thing 4 or 5 generations now. So yeah arguing from ‘tradition’ fuck tradition.
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Okay. Thanks. I’m pretty sure this was worth your effort, since my basic point was that these fears are unfounded and absurd.
So far, I’m two-for-three in terms of people misreading/partially reading my comments for this thread.
Anyone wanna make it a hat trick, and prove to me that’s not a GIF, or something?
That was Heliogabalus. He also changed the state religion to a sun-worship cult, appointed men to high office based on the size of their dicks, was despised by practically everyone and was assassinated in short order. Just because an emperor did it doesn’t mean it was considered acceptable.
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He was a litholater that worshiped a clearly non-apollonian Syriac solar god, which would have really pissed off the elites at the temples of Apollo. He did such a good job at pissing off Rome that he was given enough damnatio memoriae that he remains semi-obscure, but hoarded coins can’t be banned.
Utterly fascinating historical figure.
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Because today in New York, Chicago and San Francisco they’re having marriage parades?
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Very well put. It’s like a form of opt-in oppression, or something.
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That’s not even a hypothetical situation, because if it was, then churches would have already been required to marry people of other faiths. Does not happen, will not happen. The actual, real-world situation is county judges and clerks being “forced” to register same-sex marriages, but as I said, the state employee’s religion isn’t relevant - they’ve been marrying Muslims and atheists, etc., so issuing licenses for gays isn’t any different. Some Southern states are now saying they’re going to stop issuing marriage licenses entirely - clerks and judges wouldn’t do licenses, non-government notaries would. Which wouldn’t change anything, it would just require the notaries to register religions of all faiths, thus moving the non-issue over to them. The “religious freedom” argument is just bunk - what they want is the freedom to dictate everyone else’s behavior according to their own religion.
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There’s evidence the Christian church was doing same-sex unions for about 15 centuries from Greece to Ireland. It started going out of favor in the 15th century, but the last union was performed sometime in the 18th century, apparently. So if we’re going with the “US marriages are based on Christian tradition,” then yeah, gay marriage has always been traditional, or at least as much as anything is traditional…
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Why would you assume that’s what I’m assuming?
Seriously, there is this tendency to make any defensive response to the most unpleasant religious folks a strawman for a presumed attack on something you (general you) personally identify with, and it’s really frustrating.
Do you not understand that the response “I’ll pray for you” when some says or does something that isn’t ideologically acceptable to the judgemental person is a passive-aggressive insult?
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I had a friend when I was growing up that would trick me into taking communion (no, seriously), then hop around giddily explaining I was going to hell.
Before I got married several soon to be in-laws expressed a desire to stop the wedding since, “I looked jewish”.
But I also drank whiskey with the minister that officiated at our Catholic wedding, and he was a boss.
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Sorry to break your streak… but… based on the NBC logo, and the Horton Town Square plaque we’re looking at someone in the venerable day time soap Days of our Lives in a moment of emotional turmoil.
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…when “some” atheists…
I hope that is what you meant, because groups are made up of individuals. While there is a common belief at the center of things, the way individuals choose to apply that in their daily lives is as varied and plentiful as the number of people who make up the group.
If you aren’t a member of the congregation there is no obligation to rent the space. Also, renting churches isn’t subject to faur housing laws.
But if you stupidly say you a denying due to a protected class get ready for a civil suit.
Of course, it’s not something they’re thinking - it’s something they’re feeling because they’ve accepted a lot of cultural baggage. And the person who can succeed in explaining that to them, I would nominate for President of Everything.
You’re gonna have your liver eaten by an eagle every day for a million years.
Was that a nice thing for me to say to you? (Obviously I don’t mean it, I think you’re actually a hoopy frood)
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Depends entirely on why you’re praying for them. If you say “I’m an atheist” and I say “Oh no, I will pray that you see the light so you don’t burn in Hell,” that’s obviously offensive. (And looking back I seem to disagree with Grumblebum here.) But if you say “My wife was hit by a car and she’s in critical condition,” and I say “Oh no, I’ll say a prayer for her recovery,” that seems to me no more offensive than saying “I hope she recovers” or wishing her good vibes or whatever.
And I have seen folks argue that even stopping there isn’t enough, that someone who says nothing but privately prays for your wife’s recovery is being offensive and forcing their religious values on you and etc., and I really don’t get that. There are a lot of different possibilities here.
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“I’ll pray for you.” is best met with a polite “Thank you. I’ll think for you.”
Drives 'em nuts.
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