I watched the pastor's video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6USKFVcUY0M and fail to see where anyone's "rights" were violated or warred against. He was clarifying for any who might be confused or seek to misrepresent the church's position that it was simply a shared understanding of a biblical standard to which their church wanted to adhere in its membership. He did not name-call or malign anyone who doesn't share that understanding or choose to follow those standards.
By contrast, a very small minority of the population who say they are "trans" have become the excuse for crashing women's sports compromising safety for females in restrooms, and demanding control of other things in the public sector.
I'm not angry or wanting to restrict anyone's basic rights, but isn't it evident that there are groups---not particularly religious ones---that not only want to state their own particular value system, which any group should be free to do, but force its acceptance and accommodation on the whole of society and call people "____phobic" and malign them if they don't endorse that value system and allow them to control the discourse?
I am not seeing frequent demonstrations by mainstream Christians marching and trying to force their belief system or practices on others as we see people doing for the LGBTQ community. It's evident they aren't wanting equal rights, but preferential treatment and domination of the conversation in schools and in society at large. Not agreeing with them does not constitute fighting against them. But they fight all who disagree as though they themselves are being attacked because they aren't allowed to control everything. The phrase, "Can't we just get along?" is not a goal of peacefulness that many of these people are pursuing.
We're going through a period of rapid succession, and we should expect reaction and resistance. I believe that our sexual epistemology is pretty wide of what the human organism is selected for or capable of. The Jacksonville Baptists and I are going to have to agree to dosagree.
And that is what I consider a mature viewpoint. It is high hubris and damaging to civil peace when we insist we are the ones who hold the truth everyone else should hold to. Jesus said, "I am the Way, the Truth and the Life." We are all free to believe that and live by it or choose not to. But as one who does, I understand that statement means neither myself nor anyone else is the embodiment of truth and we can all benefit by sharing our understandings amicably with each other, and much of the outcome of our lives will be determined by choices we make in that regard.
We can't get away from being tautological. There's finally a point at which we hold our breaths and say, "I need to operate in this world, and I think it's reasonable to assume this." Which is not to say that anything you want to believe is okay. Sacred cannibalism, say, or the doctrine of the Immaculate conception, which violates the tautology in which it exists.
Also, most people, I'm beginning to realize, aren't very deep, and in defending themselves, are happy to trample other people's rights. I think this is true of both trans-rights advocates, and anti-trans activists.
There isn't an equivalence, though. The analogy is the reverse racism argument. The victim of Jim Crow who doesn't like white people, and the white person, who feels economically threatened by the additional black numbers looking for a place in the economy, are not the same. Non-Christian hedonists, or folks with deviant sexual preferences, or people who are moved for whatever reasons to want to present themselves as different from the gender that you see, are just people trying to be themselves. Maybe those who object to that are not all bad, but they do exist in a milieu that does threaten explicitly to make this country a conservative and simple-minded theocracy.
As for children getting puberty blockers, etc., my impulse is to say that that probably has happened, but not a whole lot. I have an old girlfriend, raising a family with somebody else. I've heard from mutual friends that one of her brood is thinking of herself as male. We're friendly, but not close. Maybe I should get in touch.
It seems as if there are a lot of people in the world who are gullible enough to believe and do anything a charismatic person will tell them. Look at Stalin, Hitler, etc., and how many had to die as a result. Using god as your go-to support for your hatred is the biggest form of blasphemy. Lao Tzu said it best: The Tao (god) that can be named is not the Tao (god)."
We are all standing on a stepladder with different perspectives. People think that their rung is the only correct perspective. When a person steps onto the next rung, the perspective changes. Our view of metaphors also changes. As Joseph Campbell wrote: "It made me reflect that half the people in the world think that the metaphors of their religious traditions, for example, are facts. And the other half contends that they are not facts at all. As a result we have people who consider themselves believers because they accept metaphors as facts, and we have others who classify themselves as atheists because they think religious metaphors are lies." (Campbell, Joseph. Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor.) When one moves onto the mystical rung, one realizes that one can only speak about the unknown in metaphors. "That is why, to appreciate the language of religion, which is metaphorical, one must constantly distinguish the denotation, or concrete fact, from the connotation, or transcendent message." (Campbell, Joseph. Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor.)
The only non-Euclidean geometry I know anything about is Fuller's Synergetics. Now, there was one anti-Euclidean. But the ratios would stay the same in radians, or some other angular measuring scheme.
Yes. My wife has a book from the Jesus Project. In one passage, it says something like "It's as though there are people who read Aesop and are convinced that animals used to be able to talk."
Things are changing pretty quickly, and a lot of people are probably feeling whipsawed. I'm sorry for them, but I doubt that God gives a molting angel's feather about who puts what where. Anybody who's got kids or grandkids should watch Disney's Strange World. No sex, except for some heterosexual interracial smooching...But the kid, who's key to making things right, has a crush on another boy, and nobody batts an eye.
I watched the pastor's video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6USKFVcUY0M and fail to see where anyone's "rights" were violated or warred against. He was clarifying for any who might be confused or seek to misrepresent the church's position that it was simply a shared understanding of a biblical standard to which their church wanted to adhere in its membership. He did not name-call or malign anyone who doesn't share that understanding or choose to follow those standards.
By contrast, a very small minority of the population who say they are "trans" have become the excuse for crashing women's sports compromising safety for females in restrooms, and demanding control of other things in the public sector.
I'm not angry or wanting to restrict anyone's basic rights, but isn't it evident that there are groups---not particularly religious ones---that not only want to state their own particular value system, which any group should be free to do, but force its acceptance and accommodation on the whole of society and call people "____phobic" and malign them if they don't endorse that value system and allow them to control the discourse?
I am not seeing frequent demonstrations by mainstream Christians marching and trying to force their belief system or practices on others as we see people doing for the LGBTQ community. It's evident they aren't wanting equal rights, but preferential treatment and domination of the conversation in schools and in society at large. Not agreeing with them does not constitute fighting against them. But they fight all who disagree as though they themselves are being attacked because they aren't allowed to control everything. The phrase, "Can't we just get along?" is not a goal of peacefulness that many of these people are pursuing.
We're going through a period of rapid succession, and we should expect reaction and resistance. I believe that our sexual epistemology is pretty wide of what the human organism is selected for or capable of. The Jacksonville Baptists and I are going to have to agree to dosagree.
It seems as if there are a lot of people in the world who are gullible enough to believe and do anything a charismatic person will tell them. Look at Stalin, Hitler, etc., and how many had to die as a result. Using god as your go-to support for your hatred is the biggest form of blasphemy. Lao Tzu said it best: The Tao (god) that can be named is not the Tao (god)."
Things are changing pretty quickly, and a lot of people are probably feeling whipsawed. I'm sorry for them, but I doubt that God gives a molting angel's feather about who puts what where. Anybody who's got kids or grandkids should watch Disney's Strange World. No sex, except for some heterosexual interracial smooching...But the kid, who's key to making things right, has a crush on another boy, and nobody batts an eye.