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I was brought up in the evangelical covenant church, but I consider myself nondenominational until such a point I find a denomination I can agree with philosophically.
It would appear that I do not know what you mean if I had to correct your use of the term "everyone." Could an atheist believe in a higher being? That is a rule, isn't it?
Well it's not really a rule. That is sort of the whole reason people call us atheists in the first place, because we see
no evidence for the existence of 'higher beings' and therefore do not believe in them, exactly how you see no existence for Santa Claus and therefore do not believe in Santa Claus.If an atheist were to start believing in such things, they would not identify themselves as an atheist. If a fan of Manchester United started rooting for Arsenal, they wouldn't identify as fans of Manchester United any-more would they?
Now the rules of the religious, baptism, eucharistic adoration, confession, prayer, communion, etc. These libations... these rules, are a great many and all vary depending on whichever denomination has taken your fancy. You find nothing of this in atheism.
I hope this clears things up.
EDIT:
Continuous/discrete: I was speaking in a broad scope. I used those terms because I couldn't think of any others at the time. (You could say that sexuality is a function of biological factors. Maybe other factors also.)
I guess you could also say it's like having one of those gradient colour choosers in MSPaint, except that it's in 3D and has a really funky shape.
I'll write more if you want - I'm starting to go off-topic.
I understand that, I'm asking how are you justifying that? If I'm understanding you correctly, you are saying people can be homosexual/heterosexual to varying degrees. Lets say you have a line, on one end is homosexual (same gender ONLY) and on the other end is heterosexual (opposite gender ONLY), and in the middle would be "no preference". This is what you are saying, yes? I'm asking on what basis are you putting people on any particular position on the line? Number of times they have had sex with opposite/same gender? Number of times fantasied about opposite/same gender? Something else?
Just going by your language, you're trying to condemn every religious person to this belief except for a tiny number of exceptions.
http://www.adherents.com/Religions_By_Adherents.htmlI don't even know a bunch of these religions. And it's pretty clear that Judaism isn't a big one at all, just by looking at the numbers in the list. These are very large categories of religions too, and it can probably be safely assumed that most if not all have branches, which might have completely different views on homosexuality and sexuality in general.
It's fairly clear what the religious views on homosexuality are of Catholicism, Islam, and Judaism in general, but not of the rest of the religions and their followers, which account for around 45% of all religious people.
Judaism is a lot smaller than I thought.
You may be right about the 45% thing, at least in terms of just a general population.
http://www.religioustolerance.org/hom_poll3.htmBarna Research, an Evangelical Christian polling company, conducted a survey of 1,003 American adults, asking their opinion about abortion and homosexuality. Results, released in early 2001-AUG were remarkable:
45% agree that homosexuality is "an acceptable lifestyle." This, of course, is an extremely biased question for the pollsters to ask. Many people consider homosexuality to be a sexual orientation and not a lifestyle. Thus, some persons polled would answer that it is not an acceptable lifestyle because it is not a lifestyle.
46% said it is an unacceptable lifestyle.However:
Among born-again Christians:
27% said gay lifestyles are acceptable
66% said they were unacceptable.
Among fundamentalist and other evangelical Christians:
95% said that homosexuality is unacceptable.
2% called it an acceptable lifestyle
3% were undecided.Now I didn't look for a similar poll from Islam (somehow I doubt they are conducted very often...) but I suspect the numbers wouldn't be very different.
But really, just ask yourself, how often do you hear about someone attempting to block gay rights? Every time on the news I always hear the same thing "religious group X says homosexuality is immoral blah blah blah" "religious group Y thinks gay marriage is abominable", etc....
I'm just saying that you should chill your religion hate; it's got some pretty religious fervor behind it.
There is nothing hateful in what I am saying. Where on earth did you get this impression?
As I understand it, there are generally 3 categories of Christians:
1) Those that believe that homosexuality is due to genetic disposition.
2) 1, but with the addition of the belief that homosexuals have control over their actions and thus can choose not to act homosexually (I suppose this refers to dating, kissing, and fucking with others of their sex, and so on).
3) Homosexuality is entirely based on choice, from the very start. There is no biological component.
I suspect most people are 1. Why? Because otherwise they have to ask the question: Why would their god create homosexuals, and then condemn them for it?
Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Sep 18 2012, 9:02 pm by NudeRaider. Reason: double post merged