I don't know what I've retreated on with respect to homosexuality other than no longer believing that it should be illegal. The Bible clearly says that homosexual behavior is sinful. So is gluttony, lust, greed, and a lot of other things. Not sure what you want from me. Please ask me a specific question, and I will attempt to give you a straight (pardon the pun) answer.

So I only skimmed the thread, there are a lot of posts... but I didn't see anyone making the point I want to make.

In short:

Everything is god's will. Ergo, homosexuals are simply doing what God wants them to do and knew that they would do at the moment that he created everything and saw everything that will ever be. And if he wanted it, it can't be wrong because it's impossible to do something that God didn't want you to do..

My reasoning:

It's not possible for God not to know something if it can be known, and he's omnipotent and perfect, and he created everything, and at that moment knew exactly what will ever happen,and essentially 'signed off' on it, because he himself created it and he doesn't make mistakes.

So, why say in the bible that homosexuality is an 'abomination'? I don't know, but he's god and he's perfect so he must have had his reasons, he works in 'mysterious ways'... but he's clearly ok with homosexuals since he created them to be how they are and do what they do even though he could have stopped that, after all, he could have made creation to be any way he wanted, right?

So really, to be homophobic is to go against god's will... but wait, you can't do that since everything is his will including you going against it, and therefore following it simultaneously... this God idea is so confusing.

Or is everything not actually God's will?

I'm trying to remember a response to William Lane Craig that went on the lines of, if God exists then none of our choices can ever deviate the world from God's plan and therefore ultimately on God's plan/choices can ever matter. I'll have to try and find it but the idea was that God results in a kind of nihilism.

Not to mention abject authoritarianism and totalitarianism, that is, the lust to submit oneself to these types of regimes ... even to the point of fabricating the omnipotent ruler. It's pure existential anxiety shrieking from the subconscious.

I would agree with him on that. I think that if god exists and has the characteristics assigned to him of being omnipotent, omniscient, and perfect, and that he created everything, then it's not possible that something can happen unless God wanted it to.

I.e. the universe is deterministic.

That creates a lot of difficult questions, like why some people are opposed to what other people do, but the easiest way to resolve that is that god either does not meet those criteria, or that he's actually a bit of a wanker.

It also raises the issue of whether or not god could have designed the universe any other way than he did, and I don't he could have done, in other words, even God doesn't have free will.

I'll have to try and find it again. It parallels very closely but it's subtly different to the free will arguments.

I think what WLC had said was that without God our actions have no ultimate consequences and therefore no meaning (he might have been relating it to morality). And the rebuttal is that with God then our actions have no ultimate consequence because you can never through action deviate from God's plan. It doesn't change even if our choices are in some sense "free", our actions could never have the kind of ultimate consequence WLC says God provides because ultimately only God's plans can be achieved. If there's no God then we can at least say that our actions can have some tiny consequence in the way the Universe ultimately plays out.

Hopefully I'm close enough to the mark here, but it's something to think about.

lol, just like Brexiters offering 'but the EU wants to have their own army and become a super state!' in a horrified tone, as if that's inherently a bad thing and I would naturally agree. I happen to like that idea....

I'm fine with my life having no meaning.

Yeah, it's an argument against free will and it's the one I subscribe to. If God has the characteristics assigned to him, then there can't be Free will.

No, it's an argument that our actions have no ultimate consequence. It doesn't matter if they're free or not.

Sounds like an argument against free will.

It's similar, but you could be a compatibilist that believes in free will and still think it holds. It's not about whether you freely chose your actions, it's about whether those choices can have an ultimate consequence.

As a weak analogy, imagine if every time you posted the message got auto-deleted, and imagine you have free will. It's still your choice to type up a post but it doesn't actually matter whether you do or not.

The idea is more on those line. Not whether you freely choose your actions, but whether those choices ultimately have any meaning/consequence.

It's not my choice though, I'm just abiding by god's plan. In the moment of creation, he saw every permutation of everything that could ever happen including that, and he decided to make one particular version real, it couldn't ever have been any other way.

Every action has a consequence, that's a truism. Whether or not they have 'meaning' is a different question.

I'm not saying you can't run a similar argument against free will, I'm just saying it doesn't matter to what I said. The argument I outlined was about meaning which, as you say, is a different question.

You could believe in free will and this objection against meaning/consequence could still hold.

I mean, men aren't having anal sex to fight Jesus. I could think of an infinite amount of ways to fight Jesus i'd do over that. To call it "behavior"... it happens in people. I think you should be celibate, maybe. I don't know. I just know saying gay ain't real ain't where the Church is going. It isn't condoned by and large.. but calling it a "lifestyle" is ridiculous to me. They obvious are gay. Being celibate sounds cruel.. but if Abrahamic religion is right, then, that's the answer. As far as a cure, those are bisexual people, i think. I don't know. It's very confusing trying to bring some of the left to the right some times. I just can't grasp it being them being "bored" for a life time.

A lot of this thread is hard for me to read simply because I don’t view the things you’re talking about in the same way you’re talking about them at all.

First, for me watching two guys kiss is a beautiful thing. I spend about 20% of my time on the internet watching guys kiss( in one way or another ie from cute pics of celebs kissing all the way to porn) and I just don’t get how you could find that gross in a way that you wouldn’t find a straight couple kissing gross. Like for example lesbians kissing does nothing for me but I don’t find it “ gross”

And as for the Bible, I think it’s the most powerful document so why should we concede it to straights, especially since Jesus never says anything about it and Greeks wrote a lot of it.

So those two basic thoughts make my reaction to this thread a casual “ what are you even talking about? “

I'd greatly enjoy having a beer and talking all kinds of **** with someone who enjoys spending 3 hours a day watching men kiss, I mean that in a good an honest good way.

Instead of Lagtight's views on homosexuality, why not ask Genghis Khan's views on human rights? It's more up-to-date, more enlightened, more considered. By well over a thousand years.

Truly, truly ... he who buries his mind in yester-eons, makes himself a fool when he opens his mouth.


I didn't catch whether the poster who loves watching guy-on-guy kissing is gay. If so, it seems only natural that it would be highly charged because you just don't see it in media much, it's mostly taboo, except for the internet. So it makes sense that the censored nature of it only makes it more alluring and desired. That's the way it usually works. But maybe we should ask Jehovah. It might come back anything from "abomination" to "stoning is in order, I never change, you know." And while we're at it, let's ask him about women's rights, and slave's rights. And then we can really be getting our moral groove on, religious style. GTFOOH with that in enlightened company, please.

Ok

Technically this is untrue, I was implying more like an hour and a half and as a totality of different online information from a large range of activity, but yes.

I don’t spend 15 hours a day online, not that it matters just saying.