Permanently Deleted
I mean there is a benefit to convert someone to your sexuality (you fugg’em) but the very sentence I wrought there sounds insane and outlandish I don’t understand how you would go about that.
The mental model you guys are working off of is completely wrong.
Not much direct research has been done, but the impression I get is that a surprising amount of the post-2016 right aren’t lifelong Christians (or even Christians at all even now, belonging to factions such as libertarianism which isn’t tied to religion at all), and aren’t even lifelong conservatives. A lot of them vocally supported Obama in 2008 if they’re that old. the support for gay marriage among Republicans has approached 50%, which is a massive increase over the previous support near 20%. Moreover, you may be surprised to find that not everyone who is concerned about what’s going on is a conservative or a republican either. Protecting children from people who hope to cause them harm is a universal human value, and likely is derived from instincts far before that.
It’s really important to understand the recent history of conservatism, because it’s a rapidly changing landscape. On one hand, you have traditional liberals who are now considered conservative for not rushing headlong enough into the latest thing, and on the other hand you have openly far right factions and they aren’t hiding their open contempt for other factions for not being extreme enough, and they aren’t hiding their opinions on things like women, black people, and jews. In that respect, I see a lot of people working off a playbook that’s out of date and coming to wildly wrong conclusions on a wide variety of topics from that false model. After the Republicans got crushed in 2008 they had to go back to the chalkboard and find new strategies that would work in a new world. People made fun of some of the attempts such as the tea party, but that resulted in a lot of new ideas and new blood coming into the party. Many other conservative parties around the world needed to do the same thing because they faced similar defeats. As a result, around the world parties that were considered completely outside the overton window for being conservative are gaining ground. AFD in Germany, Fratelli d’Italia in Italy, and even the far right populist PPC got more votes than the green party in Canada in the recent election, and in the next election the Conservatives are on track to win a massive majority. This isn’t happening because they’re telling the same stories they were 15 years ago, it’s happening because they’re finding new stories to tell while their left-wing opponents are just quadrupling down on the stories they told 15 years ago that don’t represent a reality in 2024. Conservatism isn’t just Christianity therefore, it’s a much flatter, much wider thing including a lot of the cultural consensus from 15 years ago and a lot of stuff that would be considered literally unspeakable 15 years ago.
If you want to blame someone for making people think they’re trying to make kids gay or trans, you should probably blame all the idiots who were recorded saying they wanted to make kids gay or trans. You should blame people who use the phrase “not so secret gay agenda” positively in describing what they’re doing in their work on kids shows. You should blame the people who put out musical numbers singing “We’ll convert your children!”. As well, you should blame the people who have decided that starting to transition children in schools while explicitly keeping it secret from parents is a hill they want to die on. In some of the cases I’m referring to they claim to be just joking, but it is the contemporary left that drew the line in the sand that if you joke about anything you’re advocating for the most extreme thing you can imagine with respect to that thing. If you care deeply about your kids, and someone is “joking” about doing something you find unspeakable to your kids, why take a chance and why not just believe them?
In the 1970s and 1980s, there was something called the “Satanic Panic”. The police questioned kids about certain things and eventually they got stories from these kids that led to the arrest of dozens of people. The problem at that time is it was all false. One kid claimed the cultists killed and ate and forced him to eat his friend (who was very much alive). Police scoured airports looking for airplanes that could land secretly in a residential neighborhood, fly a child to mexico to be molested, then returned to the same neighborhood in the same day. Another kid spoke of a complex series of tunnels under a town that the cultists used for their satanic rituals, and when it was checked there were no tunnels. In the end, it turned out that all the people accused ended up being innocent, and what we learned from that is that we need to be very careful when trying to figure stuff out from kids because they want to tell us things we want to hear. Today there’s a completely different method of questioning children in criminal cases exactly because we know kids are impressionable and we need to be careful about finding the truth and not just the answers that are convenient to us. In the same way, to be responsible we need to be extremely careful about giving kids drugs or surgery that permanently modify the path of their bodies solely because they tell us they are something.
Compare the way “trans kids” are being treated by politicans and the media, and even if you assume good faith and that it isn’t intentional, it’s impossible to see the behavior as anything but manipulative and dangerous from a completely secular viewpoint. Telling kids that if they assume a certain characteristics that they’re so loved and so wanted and so supported and they’re being mistreated by everyone around them that just doesn’t know how special they are and giving the same message all the time – of course a bunch of kids will go “oh, well if that’s what the important adults want me to be then that’s what I’ll be”.
Now, one important piece of the puzzle with respect to “trans kids” is that someone who questions their sexuality isn’t going to ask anyone to surgically alter their bodies, which would be why that piece of the puzzle is particularly contentious.
Different studies of kids trans kids showed that between 60 and over 90% of kids who expressed confusion about their gender identity ended up the gender identity of their birth after 18 without treatment. If nothing else, that should raise serious questions about whether treatment of any kind before the age of 18 is ethical, considering you could potentially end up causing needless harm to 9 kids for every 1 kid you help. There is certainly a lot of research disputing these findings, and in fact the number of articles saying “nuh uh” absolutely dwarfs the actual claims, but as a politically charged issue there’s an obvious concern about politically induced bias here, which makes me want to believe the older studies from before this was such a front and center topic. You can disagree, but I’m sure my skepticism of “new study shows everything political movement claims is true” is not so unreasonable. If I’m not going to believe creationists when they spit out a flood of studies ‘proving’ the world is only 8000 years old, why would I believe trans youth ideologues when they spit out a flood of studies seemingly solely in response to being challenged politically?
There has been an explosion in the number of kids identifying as trans. Now, it could be that we’re just living in the gayest, transest time in the history of the world, but when we’re dealing with numbers increasing by many orders of magnitude, it’s equally possible that there’s an element of social contaigen. Some people might claim that social contaigen is absurd and wouldn’t cause people to do something as extreme as this. The thing is, it is uncontroversial that there is an element of social contaigen in cutting, anorexia and suicide which are both purely harmful, and recreational drug use which can be quite harmful.
Given the basis of the Hippocratic oath, medicine should be politically Conservative but practically conservative and be very careful about implementing new treatments, particularly on a very large scale, particularly when the effects of those treatments are so overwhelmingly dire. Fundamentally modifying and fundamentally damaging sex organs and primary and secondary sexual characteristics is something we have to be very careful about doing and nobody should be jumping for joy at the idea that it’s something that we have to do, in the same way that no one should be jumping for joy at the idea that they should need an organ transplant.
Another important thing to remember is that there is a solid history in the 20th century of medical ideologies or technologies that become wildly popular and end up proving to be somewhat evil. Tommy Douglas, the founder of Canadian healthcare, was a vocal proponent of eugenics. The prefrontal lobotomy eventually ended up coming to be considered an example of barbarism but when it was first invented was considered a miracle cure. Prior to the 20th century, cocaine was considered so fantastic that Sigmund Freud himself wrote a book called on cocaine which was about how much he thought cocaine was a beneficial drug. All of these are cautionary tales about simply accepting the current orthodoxy on a current medical treatment.
You’ll note that none of these are religious arguments. You don’t need to believe in any God to look at the above. You can be a hard atheist and look at the facts above and be concerned because you don’t want people hurting your kids for their political ideology. If you think that it’s solely due to christianity that someone would look at the above and be concerned then you’re fundamentally misunderstanding people around you.
Now to give everything a broad view, just because something ends up being bad in the way that it’s implemented doesn’t necessarily mean that it is entirely bad. Eugenics taken to it it’s extremes horrible and immoral, but some individuals with major genetic diseases choose independently not to have kids because of the risks involved. Prefrontal lobotomies as a carry-all for anything that could heal you is obviously absolutely horrific and terrible, but it is still very occasionally used for very specific situations. I believe that even cocaine has legitimate medical applications, and if it doesn’t then certainly it’s cousin opiates or something that are quite dangerous and should not be thrown around thoughtlessly but have incredible levels of therapeutic benefit. I would even go so far as to say that there may be situations where very early intervention in transgender cases could be tremendously beneficial, but I think that the data is clearly showing you have to be very careful and being a political topic the way it is I don’t think it’s being treated very carefully.
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/fact-sheet/changing-attitudes-on-gay-marriage/
[2] https://ballotpedia.org/Pivot_Counties:_The_counties_that_voted_Obama-Obama-Trump_from_2008-2016
[6] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/22/us/gender-identity-students-parents.html
[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satanic_panic
[8] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/31/us/satanic-panic.html
[9] https://www.snopes.com/news/2017/06/23/satanic-panic/
[10] https://twitter.com/theJagmeetSingh/status/1753190259343708432
[12] http://www.sexologytoday.org/2016/01/do-trans-kids-stay-trans-when-they-grow_99.html
[13] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21216800/
[14] https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/958742?form=fpf
[15] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK207262/
[16] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0004867413502092
[17] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23387399/
[18] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3926100/
[19] https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/hippocratic-oath-today/
[20] https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/tommy-douglas-and-eugenics
[21] https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-55854145
[22] https://www.vice.com/en/article/payngv/how-cocaine-influenced-the-work-of-sigmund-freud
I love how you basically state “here’s what I believe!” and then try to deflect all criticism by saying you don’t trust medical studies from the past 30 years.
If you are not receptive to new information, it seems to me that is the definition of blind belief and brainwashing.
Meh, you can’t disregard the current medical and scientific consensus because it may turn out to be wrong in the future. This is the same thing the pro-fossil-fuel and tobacco organizations used to do. You work with the best information you’ve got.
Even if gayness and trans-ness was a social contagion (I don’t think it is), what would be wrong with that? The argument seems to be implying that being gay or trans is bad.
Do you mean to suggest that linking gender-affirming care to satanism/pedophilia, eugenics and hard drug use, in one disjointed pseudo-religious rant is indicative of an agenda? I am shocked!!
I’m only skimming that text dump.
They can’t do anti-gay as much any more because too many of their relatives and too many people in general are gay. So it’s just slipped over to trans like I said “Now it’s not just gay, it’s trans too”. I thought I said that clearly enough, but take one of those sections and put in trans. Same thing.
The rest I’m not touching. Not the point I wanted to make and many other red flags. Point here is projection, projection, projection.
“didn’t read here’s a nitpick”
lol about the response I expected.
“Here’s one misinterpreted item from your post and a whole bunch of unrelated rantings, oh you only corrected the part about the post? nOt fAiR”. Looks like I made the right call. Ciao.
“I nitpicked a word you used, therefore not just refuting your entire post that I didn’t read, but you as a human being. What, you pointed out my behavior? Clearly it only proves that my refutation of you as a human being is wholly correct.”
Your “multiple studies of kids showing that they revert naturally before the age of 18” were all conducted in the 70’s dude. Non acceptance from a community is very good at creating closeted individuals. We do what we do to try and be happy, if we are routinely physically and socially punished for being who we are we do revert to walking the path of least resistance to survive but it is a hard and miserable path. Here’s a study more updated that flips numbers on it’s head. Around 95 percent of trans kids who socially transition these days are consistent in their identities over the 5 years of the study. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9936352/#:~:text=We found that an average,to their binary transgender identity.
Also you’re treating this healthcare as experimental and new but it’s decently far along. Puberty blockers are the newest addition to the tool kit but they were approved for use after extensive research trials over 30 years ago and principles of their safety of use were based on observations from naturally stalled puberties and endocrinology data of hormonal insensitivity disorders…and we’ve been using them for trans kids pretty much right from the beginning so the first paitents are in their 40’s now. There is data that the puberty blocker process is imperfect but like any medical advancement there are nessisary fine tunings of treatment. It’s not a set it and forget it situation. We know the endocrinologist check ins and scans need to keep coming and the risk assessment for a paused puberty needs to be a carefully routinely updated thing with suspension of treatment being a viable option if things don’t go well…but removing the option from the medical feild entirely and refusing to keep working to develop its safety efficacy further and isn’t going to make overall treatment outcomes better for patients.
This lie that doctors are slapdash and haphazard in trans healthcare is nothing but fabrication. It requires a panel of a psychologist, social worker, pediatrician and endocrinologist the child and the child’s legal guardians to sign off on any medical interventions and they have to do their research first to meet a determined burden of proof that interventions are nessisary and they make it a pretty high bar… At 16 there’s very limited number of things available and any surgeries made available are also available to cis kids. If a 16 year old teen wants a breast reduction it doesn’t matter if their trans or not they just need parental approval. Hormonal transition requires a lot more sign off than that. If a parent doesn’t sign off then the kid can’t make their own medical choices until after 18. The system is designed to mitigate risks and yes a lot of the outcomes for trans paitents are markedly better when they can more effortlessly pass as their gender because you avoid a lot of social shunning and hate when your transness is invisible to the public.
Our society creates a catch 22 senario for trans people where segements of society demand that a person isn’t actually a viable member of their gender unless they can show medical documentation they’ve transitioned… And they treat non-binary trans masc and trans femme non medical coping strategies as being less legitimate. If you are trying to navigate a situation where you require coping strategies to deal with experiencing daily body horror and you deny people the use of mental only coping mechanisms they are not going to veiw mental only coping mechanisms a reasonable solve. Telling us that one option to deal with our problems is self harm and then making fun of or dismissing the other as “social contagion” and treating us as a different kind of problem is basically just telling us that you think permanent misery should be our only option.
If you REALLY want to lessen the pressures on trans people to medically transition your move is not to clamp down on medical options… It’s to make non-binary physical presentations and safe rewarding social transitions a more viable option by offering greater levels of social acceptance. The whole “Well I will never accept you as a ____. Because physically you are not” behavior does nothing but add fuel to a dysphoria and injure a trans person’s ability to exist comfortably in a social sphere. Cis people make an equal fuss about pronouns as they do surgeries. There’s zero empathy. Faced with that we are just going to try harder to physically hide from you so you can’t visually pick us out of a crowd using whatever means we have.
Social contagion and the likes of Abagail Shrier is a discredited myth. At best the very shallow end of non-binary transness might be represented but that is basically "I don’t like it when people make a big assumptions of me based around my sexual characteristics so please don’t " which is kind of just a reasonable response to sexism. The actual euphoria /dysphoria body and culture related stuff isn’t something you are going to catch… And framing medical transition in terms of self harm is gross. What people feel and ultimately choose to do with their bodies is something individually very cautiously considered. Treating the matter as though they are defacing a public owned good or resource is just projection. Your values regarding your sexual organs and physical characteristics are not universal. You do not have to live their lives, their choices are not your business so please stay in your lane.
Lastly, people tell trans kids they are loved because as people we are routinely framed by hostile cis people as a logistical problem. Telling kids they are a problem tends to drive them inside themselves and creates a sense of isolation. A lot of kids growing up, not just trans kids already generally think that people won’t miss them if they just disappear because they are a burden or a problem. The youngest trans kid I know right now is seven… And they have already had peers their age tell them to their face that they should kill themself. When I was growing up the “weird kid” I wanted to die but I knew my family wouldn’t recover from that so I didn’t. It isn’t that kids are doing this to be lavished with attention. I can tell you that the experience of myself and every trans person I know is that people making any kind of big deal about us based on our genders positive or negative just makes you feel like an outsider. People harping on about how “strong” you are for being visible generally just comes across as pulling more attention to things we just want people to treat as so normal it’s beneath commentary. That young trans person I know today struggles because they are closeted at school not wanting to stick out from the crowd because they fear the potential unwanted fuss and can only be themselves at home. I am partially closeted at work partially because it will negatively impact my hiring chances between gigs and partially because onboarding new people into understanding non-binary transness and using correct pronouns is exhausting. Having everyone take their trans hot takes to you or asking invasive questions about your life experiences while you have shit on the docket to do quite frankly sucks.
Your understanding of trans people isn’t based on first hand or even second hand knowledge of our experience or from empathy towards our situations. It’s in the framework of us being a “problem”.
A problem of your convenience an "I shouldn’t have to change my behaviour to make someone else’s life easier ".
A logistical problem a " we shouldn’t have to make concessions or changes as a society for the benefit of the few".
A mental problem “They are delusional or mentally ill and we shouldn’t listen to what they say they need.”
A medical problem “Well they shouldn’t have access to the system because they take up resources or are doing themselves harm”.
A visual problem “They are ugly and I should not have to see them”
An authority problem “I as a parent ahould have control of my child at all times”
All of this framework doesn’t hold ANY solutions for us. They hold solutions for you so you just don’t have to interact, think of or see us… and that is no way to live.
If you try really hard and really want it, you too can be 6’,5"
That’s a big strawman
It is just a theory, but I do think it’s a pretty good one. I don’t know if there’s any way to prove it.
Probably listen to there speeches and surmons that are posted online then figure it out. Another theory is it could be a highly selective interpretation of the Jewish old testiment law to provide “evidence” that Satan and his servants walk along them and are a threat to everything they stand for
Idk. Fallacy and logic checks makes sense in the context of debate. The context of this post is not a debate (I personally see it more like a showerthought).
That’s a big strawman
Off topic: I like to put Lemmy posts or comments into the LLMs and see what it comes back with.
The two examples Gemini provided for straw man where around the topics of gun control, and renewable energy.
It’s like there’s a ton of terrible arguments around the internet for these two topics /s There are.
I think it’s more that “these people” didn’t used to ‘exist’ in their world: Sexual minorities weren’t talked about and were invisible for the most part. But since Stonewall and AIDS, LGBT+ people first decided and then learned not to hide themselves. Suddenly someone who you thought of as normal has ‘become’ gay. You obviously knew them well, it’s not possible they were hiding something from you, and there’s no chance your observations were incorrect - clearly, instead of you being wrong, something happened to them, something ‘turned them gay’ - it must have been the frogs, or music, or DnD, or something, it’s just impossible you were wrong!
And by christians, you mean American Christians. The rest of the world’s god-botherers don’t do this. Yous are fucking weird bunch, that’s why yous got turfed out of Europe in the 15th century 😂😂
For real though
It’s all the fun banning puritans who got booted out of the country after their coup and subsequent dictatorship finally got overthrown who were the bulk of the Thirteen Colonies, which largely just left the “love thy neighbour” Christians who actually campaign against racism, homophobia, climate change and whatever else is an insult to “God’s creation” which frankly I can completely get behind even if I don’t believe it as such.
Frankly I don’t get the mind bending logic to ignoring all the “everyone is God’s child, he has made them as he sees fit, he loves them, you should love them too” stuff in the bible and skipping past to a small subsection which says that men shouldn’t sleep together, especially when they ignore the fact that the same section says that anyone who works on a Sunday should be put to death along with a bunch of other wild and wacky stuff that we just all collectively agree was a product of the time it was written…
Also Jesus pretty much tossed out all the “unclean” nonsense in Peter’s dream or whatever.
I wonder how many of them follow the diet though.
So… the Catholic Church, well known for traveling the world to shove Jesus down everyone’s throats, is an American institution now? Got it.
No, but they stopped knocking when Europe became more secular.
I haven’t had anyone in the last 20 years come knocking on my door about religion. Especially not the Catholic Church.
Well us and Africa… and Russia
Heh, and before the 15th century it was the American Christians that went on Crusades, yeah?
History not your strong subject then 😊
Yeah, there’s a lot of history to this, but it’s a part of why there’s so many unusual or distinctive off-shoots of Christianity that come from the US: Jehovah’s Witnesses, LDS, Seventh Day Adventists, Evangelicalism, etc…
It’s not just the Puritans, in fact, it’s mostly not, though they’ve given us plenty of other cultural baggage.
Because we weren’t our own nation, we didn’t have our own bishop in the church of English, so for ministers to get ordained they had to go to England to be trained and then come back.
This gave rise to a conflict between the New Lights and Old Lights. The New Lights were basically proto-evangelicals and they determined that the proof of qualification to be a minister wasn’t a degree, education, or some church approval from overseas, but the ability to gather a church.
This meant that charisma became the defining trait for a successful minister. This is why evangelicals have such terrible theology. There’s all these ideas that are mainstream evangelical ideas that never existed before this period.
The rapture was created during this period. That’s right, for nearly 1800 years Christians wouldn’t even know what you meant if you said “the rapture” and now evangelicals wander around telling everyone to be prepared.
Do you have any recommendations for a book on this topic? I’m super intrigued.
I would propose that some Christians think that gays are trying to convert them because they feel attracted to people of the same gender. If you have no sexual attraction to people of the same sex, then the idea that you could ever be converted to being gay is going to seem ridiculous. I’m straight; I’m simply uninterested in being people with male bodies or male genitalia. On the other hand, if I was bisexual–or simply gay–and believed that homosexuality was sinful, then I might feel like depictions of homosexual people in media was an attempt to change who I “am”.
As someone who was raised in the church I think this completely misses their perspective.
They believe that God is completely fair and just, and wouldn’t make someone in a way that was contrary to how he wants people to be. So it’s impossible for being LGBT to be something innate and unchangeable, since that would require God created people specifically in a way that he says is wrong.
So instead they go with “it’s a choice, they were ‘converted’ and it’s possible for them to mess up everyone else too.” It’s just to stave off cognitive dissonance, essentially. You can’t believe in a God that says being gay is sinful and then creates people to be gay, so you have to believe it’s like alcoholism or something and can affect anyone.
There’s no logic behind it and clearly no scientific data, but that won’t stop them because they arrived at the conclusion based purely on it being the only thing they can believe and not change the way they understand the nature of their God claim.
They believe that God is completely fair and just, and wouldn’t make someone in a way that was contrary to how he wants people to be.
This simply can’t be supported though. Christians tend to be gender essentialists, but there are a wide range of genetic defects where people appear to conform to one gender while not having a genetic makeup that conforms to the assigned gender, e.g., androgen insensitivity syndrome. So if people are made exactly how god intends them to be, and sex is an essential part of that, how can people exist that do not genetically conform to their assigned gender, or any binary gender? You can’t say that god doesn’t make mistakes and say that sex must be binary, when genetic errors prove that at least one of those propositions must be false.
You could say the same thing about psychopaths, since they believe that everyone has the ability to understand that they’re sinful, etc.
That’s why I said there’s no real logic, it’s all just cherry picking the parts they want to believe and ignoring the real world aspects that don’t conform to their presuppositions.
Only the big evangelist types or Mormons which isn’t all Christians. I know plenty of Christians who are quiet about it and only talk about it if you bring it up, unlike people really into politics. Even with Mormons I’ve known many who don’t say anything about it and even sneak in coffee…
Go to a Unitarian church where people will usually identify as Christian.
I’d have to agree with you, and appreciate the thought regarding not over generalizing Christians, but I understand why people tend to.
Example: Remember cake lady from Indiana? She was a bigot. It pissed me off when she tried to use the excuse of ‘religious beliefs’. Since she specifically claimed Christianity, I call total BS on the grounds that Jesus NEVER treated anyone like shit (aside from the other religious people, which following that thought, means she would have gotten called out). Jesus always gave people grace, and then offered advise (specific to Christianity). I would so much rather people be honest and say they don’t like ____, instead of some BS hiding behind their own distorted version of faith. I don’t have to agree with their opinion, just don’t lie about it.
Also, I’ve never had any person who’s gay try to ‘convert’ me, ever. You could get a bunch of comedy bits out of that one though. I have had mormons and jo’s witnesses come by. They were nice, but if I wanted to waste a bunch of time talking, I would definitely ask them to explain views on dancing, sexuality, etc.
The only pro gay conversion I’ve ever been exposed to was movies/TV shows advocating for it being a ‘normal’ thing. I suppose that’s because in the US, it’s still considered ‘weird’ or wrong, and writers are trying to back it for what I imagine are civil rights reasons.
I’m not sure why it’s so hard to stop caring about stuff that doesn’t matter (to me). I have never cared about a person’s orientation.
If you can be converted to being gay, then you were always gay. It’s like if you have to pray the gay away, you are gay my guy
Everyone’s at least a bit gay.
I might not like all cocks, but I certainly like mine.
When cuntservatives say they are afraid of being ‘gay converted’, what they are really saying is ‘I’m setting up a defense early in case someone catches me on camera servicing a glory hole at the truck stop like I do every sunday after church.’
Hi: Theistic Christian here.
Worship who/what you want and marry who you love and be kind to everyone. Even the people you don’t like. Trans people are people and good deeds don’t get you into heaven.
Great! Do you say this stuff around your Christian friends?
No shit where are the rest of these so called good Christians???
Honestly not spreading hate and just trying to get through the day like everyone else, ex-christian btw. But my church I grew up in was good I just didn’t see the logic in the religion personally but the people were normal people. Don’t let vocal hatred filled minorities define a whole group of people. As long as they are not actively defending those hateful people they’re not really accountable for other actions.
As a Christian, I don’t think any of those regressives that trash all the values that Jesus spoke of should be allowed to use that label, the Bible clearly details that they will face judgment at the White Throne and be turned away as a goat.
Jesus really only seemed to hate people puffed up on their self-centered pride and fucking usurists.
And whoooo boy did JC hate usurists.
You realize “Christian” just means u believe Christ is the Messiah.
That belief doesn’t make you a good person in any way.
You really aren’t prepared for this discussion.
All of your understanding of theism comes from snarky atheism memes and edgelads parroting gigacringe youtubers in forum comment sections.
Salvation doesn’t mean you are a ‘good’ person, it just means you sincerely asked Jesus for the gift.
Now, Jesus TOLD his followers to be good people, but it is not required to have, or keep divine Salvation.
Regardless of your poorly formed personal opinion.
And no, the meaning of ‘Christian’ implies action, to be like a ‘little Christ’, which is what the actual meaning is. You can believe that Jesus is the messiah all you want but unless you ask him for salvation, you are not saved, and unless you walk like he did, you are not Christian.
They’re all around but don’t draw attention to ourselves with blaring flags and bigoted slogans.
Unfortunately a small portion of regressive Evangelicals are doing a great job making a fucktonne of noise and stirring up unbelievably large shitstorms to cover the fact that they are just a minority. A fucking annoying and loud one, but fewer than people think.
All the time, and some of them get pretty pissed about it.
A lot are cool though, and some of them feel the same way.
I truly appreciate that. As you were. 😁
Then what gets you into heaven?
If you are a Christian, by Salvation alone as a gift that no man can earn, given by great sacrifice by someone who dearly loves us.
If you are not a Christian, then Romans 2:14,15 basically says ‘Those not of the faith will be judged by their hearts and conscience, because it is not hearing the rules that makes you saved’
Holy shit, a Christian who actually stidies the Bible… You’re basically a unicorn.
Romans 2:14;15 is my favorite thing to point out to the you’re going to hell because you’re not a Christian crowd. So baby of them like to preach that God is all loving and good and then are so quick to point out that because they pay lip service to their faith that they get to go to heaven and everyone else goes to hell despite them being obviously terrible people.
I like to think there are a lot more like you and your type just tends to be the silent majority because it let’s me keep some faith in humanity…
I’ve really wanted a reformation for a long time, and that other yahoo replying to you really illustrates why.
There are far too many who call themselves Christian that actively spread hate for the people that Jesus spoke most in compassion about, the poor and sick, the criminal and foreigner.
If more people actually read the Bible, as you point out how few there are, then maybe that change could get started.
Have the best week!
However, the second option is impossible as St Paul continued to write in the next chapter, Romans 3
Romans 3:9-26 ESV [9] What then? Are we Jews any better off? No, not at all. For we have already charged that all, both Jews and Greeks, are under sin, [10] as it is written: “None is righteous, no, not one; [11] no one understands; no one seeks for God. [12] All have turned aside; together they have become worthless; no one does good, not even one.” [13] “Their throat is an open grave; they use their tongues to deceive.” “The venom of asps is under their lips.” [14] “Their mouth is full of curses and bitterness.” [15] “Their feet are swift to shed blood; [16] in their paths are ruin and misery, [17] and the way of peace they have not known.” [18] “There is no fear of God before their eyes.” [19] Now we know that whatever the law says it speaks to those who are under the law, so that every mouth may be stopped, and the whole world may be held accountable to God. [20] For by works of the law no human being will be justified in his sight, since through the law comes knowledge of sin. [21] But now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law, although the Law and the Prophets bear witness to it— [22] the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe. For there is no distinction: [23] for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, [24] and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, [25] whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith. This was to show God’s righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over former sins. [26] It was to show his righteousness at the present time, so that he might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus.
Sorry, that’s not a rebuttal, that’s a gish gallop and never ever used with intellectual honesty.
Also we actually have forced left handed people to become right-handed.
Did me until 2nd grade. That teacher gave me left handed scissors with a laugh.
Similarly, lots of parents of Deaf children were told not to teach them sign language.
Weird I’ve heard about this from so many countries, from Japan to almost every communist country.
Happened to my mother. In the US, in the 30s.
The US did it too for a while. The justification seems to have been something to do with left-handed versus right-handed brain processing or something like that. They were worried that they were going to get a generation of artists and poets and that no one would actually do anything industrial.
Also there’s something in the Bible about people having left hands being agents of the devil, although it seems to only be in certain editions.
The idea that left-handed people are more artistic than right-handed people has been debunked for years now and yet it’s still something people seem to think is true.
This reminds me of one of my absolute fav talks on the left/right brain debate.
the left hand is controlled by the right side of the brain
Happened to my wife’s mother in the Netherlands in the 1950s. She did everything left handed but wrote right handed.
By the 1970s this was over here, so I guess the southpaws were able to convert enough people to their godless ways. 😉
It happened to me when I was a child in New York late 90s
I guess the southpaws were able to convert enough people to their
godlesssinister ways.FTFY
I agree overall with your points, but there is just one caveat: your points are spoken from American and Christian perspective, and there is homophobia in some cultures that are not Christian-based. Majority Chinese, for example, describes themselves as atheists, but they are by and large homophobic. I might be wrong, but I heard CCP is cracking down on fashion, aesthetics and male celebs that might be “too feminine”.
I suspect that our home grown American and Christian homophobia is not Christian-based at all. People don’t like the thing that is different or icky, and instead of being introspective about why that is or if it’s the right thing to do, they see that the Bible or their preacher agree. Then it’s time to turn off the thought process and just go with it.
It’s just a happy little evil coincidence. Typical biblical cherry picking being spoon fed to the base. Funny how little discussion they have about how the Bible has instructions for abortions and how to treat your slaves.
Christian homophobia is not Christian-based at all. People don’t like the thing that is different
It’s just a happy little evil coincidence.
It’s not. It’s an inherent quality in Abrahamic monotheistic religions.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_monotheism#Violence_in_monotheism
The intolerance of narrow monotheism is written in letters of blood across the history of man from the time when first the tribes of Israel burst into the land of Canaan. The worshippers of the one jealous God are egged on to aggressive wars against people of alien [beliefs and cultures]. They invoke divine sanction for the cruelties inflicted on the conquered. The spirit of old Israel is inherited by Christianity and Islam, and it might not be unreasonable to suggest that it would have been better for Western civilization if Greece had moulded it on this question rather than Palestine.
— Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan
Christianity is inherently intolerant (see the 10 commandments).
Oh I wasn’t suggesting that Christianity was off the hook. It’s just that people do not require religion to be bigots.
Oh, so, perhaps… something along the lines of:
With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil - that takes religion. — Steven Weinberg
…?
Again, everything that a conservative says or thinks is projection. They tell on themselves constantly.
“Do you have a moment to talk about our lord and savior, Gaysus Bi-st?”
Gaysus fucking Bi-st that’s a good one!