Gays and/or Lesbians

[[CAKE]anonymity]

I think to say that homosexuals enjoy what they do is rendundent. Its sex, they are supposed to enjoy it. They do it because it feels good, isnt that why we have sex anyway? If you disagree look at the controceptive industry.

Media doesnt mean just TV, I was also including video games. Most of us would agree that video games do not cause someone to be violent. It is the persons choice to be violent. Similarly to protraying gays in the media it will not turn someone ######. You might say it is their choice, and it is to have sex with another, but it isnt to be attracted to one. Wha already did a good job at stating that and I think our resident scientist would agree.

This is one reason I am not very religious. If I were ###### and lived my life benevolently then I should get into heaven. Its the acts that are sins, not the state of being. So you follow the rules set out by god and the bible and you get into heaven, but heaven for a ###### man would be a lot of other ###### men. This being a sin could not stand in heaven. This flaw would make me question why am i tourchering myself now if I'm just going to be tourchered later. Pardon the expression, but your damned if you do and your damned if you dont.

[PIX]

Heaven is not some nirvana that is created to be what you want it to be.

but heaven for a ###### man would be a lot of other ###### men

Heaven is detailed AND specified in the Bible...of course that is the heaven that Christians believe in.

If I were ###### and lived my life benevolently then I should get into heaven

"For ALL hath sinned and come short of the glory of God."
"No man cometh to the Father (Heaven) but by Me. " -Jesus

However He did say "Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness; for they shall be filled.- Matthew 5:6

A person who repents of his sins and believes and accepts God's Son...is not damned. It is the one who does not repent...
who keeps on sinning and knows what he is doing that is the one with the 'damning' problem. We believe submitting to a
righteous life in God and Christ NOW...oh and it is such a short life compared to forever....grants us entrance. No one said it
would be easy or without hardships. I like the way you think about stuff Anon...I really do. You can go alot of rounds and still
keep up your wind. Keep up that searching mind dude.

[jabbahunt]

Pix, a question. How do you REALLY feel? :blink:

[[CAKE]anonymity]

Thanks for the compliment ^_^

Your right it is detailed, but it is also supposed to be a utopia as well. It wouldnt be a utopia with discrimination of someone else. The canadian legal system has evoloved to give gays rights and it is illegal to discriminate against them. I'm just wondering why cant heaven.

I'm trying to think in a perfect world would we discriminate against gays or accept them?

[Wha?]

I want to know why accepting jesus is the deciding factor. Why would god make a decision like that when it's obvious some guy coming along saying "Hi there! Lovely day isn't it? By the way.. I'm the son of god, accept my teachings or burn in hell.." is going to come off as a tad on the blasphemous side, even without the benefit of being omniscient. Like that guy warning the villagers about not killing a she-camel, because it was gods she-camel (taken from the koran). They did, god killed them all, and razed their village to the ground. Again: How are they supposed to know it's not some agent of the devil trying to steer them off the path of righteousness? Technically, people who followed jesus would be blaspheming, since they were accepting a potentially false god. Miracles can be produced by lucifer to persuade... so to stray from the path that was given to them would be bad, except it just so happens that they got lucky and strayed onto gods new path. In which case, all the loyal followers who did the right thing pre-amendment now get the shaft and weren't properly informed. I suppose all messias would be just as sacrilegious from the pious populations perspective. In light of this, is it possible that more than one faith can achieve eternity in paradise, and if so, can all of them be at least partially right, and so long as the individual stays true to their beliefs and does good unto others, they get protected by god when they finally kick the bucket? It is said that god works in mysterious ways. Making people have huge dogmatic conflicts would be an extremely efficient way of testing everybodies faith in themselves and their cause.

::PostScript::
Just as a note, heterosexual acts are sin as well.

[PIX]

Sex with your wife is NOT a sin. Sex outside of marriage is.

As to how could Jesus be the Messiah and not a false prophet...here is a quoted passage I found.

The Old Testament Messianic prophecies were found to be uniquely fulfilled in the Lord Jesus Christ. There are hundreds of these prophecies, so that the possibility of their accidental convergence on any ordinary man is completely ruled out by the laws of probability.

Some of the prophecies are so framed, in fact, as to preclude their fulfillment by anyone living after the first century A.D. For example, the patriarch Jacob said, in Genesis 49:10, "The scepter shall not depart from Judah, nor a lawgiver from between his feet, until Shiloh come." The name "Shiloh" is a title of the Messiah, and the prophecy states that Judah's tribe would remain the chief tribe in Israel, in particular providing their kings, until Messiah would come. The prophecy must have been fulfilled prior to the destruction of Judah and Jerusalem in A.D. 70, by which time certainly all semblance of a scepter had departed from Judah.

Similarly the promise was given to King David that the Messiah should be one of his descendants, as the King eternal, the one of whom God said, "I will establish the throne of his kingdom for ever" (II Samuel 7:13). Isaiah said, "There shall come forth a rod out of the stem (literally 'stump') of Jesse (that is David's father), and a Branch shall grow out of his roots" (Isaiah 11:1). This is another name of the Messiah, and indicates that, even after it would appear that the family tree of Jesse has been cut down, yet one Branch will grow out of the stump. Evidently the very last one who could be known to have come of this lineage would finally prove to be the promised Messiah!

This was fulfilled uniquely in Jesus. His foster father, Joseph, was in the royal line from David and thus held the legal right to the throne (Matthew 1:1-16). His mother, Mary, was also a descendant of David, as shown by her genealogy in Luke 3:23-31. But ever since the time of Jesus, it would be quite impossible to establish the legal or biological lineage of any pretender to David's throne, as all the ancient genealogical records were destroyed soon after that.

An even more striking prophecy is given in Daniel 9:24-27. There Daniel was told explicitly that Messiah would come 69 "sabbaths" (that is, 69 sabbatical years - a total of 483 years) after the decree was given to rebuild Jerusalem, which at that time lay in ruins after Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, had destroyed it.

Such a decree was given later by the Persian emperor. Although the exact date of the decree is somewhat uncertain, the termination date of the prophecy must have been some time in the first century A.D. In fact, it must have been before the destruction of the city and the temple by the Romans in A.D. 70, because the prophecy said quite explicitly: "After (the 483 years) shall Messiah be cut off, but not for himself; and the people of the prince that shall come shall destroy the city and the sanctuary" (Daniel 9:26). Not only must Messiah come before this destruction, but He was also to be "cut off," rejected and killed, before it came.

It is obvious that no one but Jesus could have fulfilled these prophecies. The prophecies absolutely preclude any still future Messiah, except that even that hope also will find its fulfillment in the second coming of Christ.

And then, of course, there are still hundreds of other prophecies, all of which were fulfilled by Jesus Christ: His virgin birth (Isaiah 7:14); His birth in Bethlehem (Micah 5:2); His sacrificial death (Isaiah 53:5); His crucifixion (Psalm 22:14-18); His bodily resurrection (Psalm 16:10); and many others. All of these unite in their witness that "Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God" (John 20:31).

The probability that hundreds of such specific predictions, each quite independent of the others, could all be fulfilled concurrently in one individual, is unlikely in the highest degree, especially in view of the miraculous nature of many of them (e.g., the virgin birth, the resurrection, etc.). No rational conclusion seems possible except that Jesus is all He claims - Messiah, Savior, Lord and God.

As to how I really feel Jab....I couldn't be happier trying to speak out for my religion.

As to descrimination in Heaven...why would God let in all the people who were just 'good' in life but rejected his Son? In the Old Testament...the people had to offer sacrifices up to God for forgiveness. God sent his Son as a
substitute for these sacrifices and he was slaughtered willingly by men.

Does anyone get the promotion and raise by not following the plan? No of course not. If you follow the rules you THINK are right at work but not the one you are suppose to...you are likely to get fired.

There will be many false prophets performing many acts that appear to be Godly...but they will be powered by the other. There are many false teachers now in the world...many of them tarnishing the Church name with unGodly acts of child rape....immoral acts....thievery....and many others. The funny thing is these false teachers were around in the places of worship even in Jesus' day. The accused him of blasphemy and of NOT being the Messiah.

Peace

[Wha?]

Those are some pretty vague passages there, though the more pressing matter is how non-scholars were supposed to know about them. Back then nobody but the extremely wealthy were literate. That means the people the message was delivered to didn't have the capacity to know it was prophesied.

Also, your workplace will tell you when the code of conduct changes, without using a random guy on the street. Mostly because they know nobody will believe that guy and it would be wasted effort. Now, of course they could tell everybody the memo would be distributed in person by a third party, but they wouldn't say it in verse. All things considered, the style at the time (biblical era up through to pretty much the twentieth century) was to write things in abstract metaphors, but only because it was a way to show off ones education (a sign of being wealthy and of a good bloodline).

[PIX]

What is vague about those? Just becase they didn't give a name and an address doesn't mean they are vague. You saying just becaue you can't read that you
can't dictate and depict prophesy? These event WERE written down...not written and published in a nice, shiny, leather-bound King James Bible...but they were written.
Are you saying the entire world was just plain stupid because a good many couldn't read? That's silly.

Interesting quote I found:

Christianity is built on solid biblical and historical fact. To be sure you are a Christian, you must understand that Christianity is not a blind leap of faith. The truths of the Christian faith are documented by centuries of historical facts, study and research. Many scholars have dedicated their lives to investigating the birth, life, teaching, miracles, death, resurrection and influence of Jesus of Nazareth. As a result, we have overwhelming historical evidence proving all of the above.

The evidence includes writings of the contemporaries of Jesus whose lives were forever changed as a result of their intimate friendship with Him. Even Christ's enemies verified His resurrection through their conspiracy to pay witnesses to fabricate a story to explain why Jesus' tomb was empty.

Through these and many more convincing proofs, we know Jesus truly lived on earth; Jesus truly died; and Jesus truly rose again

I guess since there were no video cameras or tape recorders back then, this is just a mute discussion if a third person was involved. I will not lose any sleep at all over the disbelief of others. It does trouble me a bit now that there are so many that alone rely on things seen as proof.

Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.

[Wha?]

No, I'm not saying any of that.

Good many? Try all but a handful (as in <1% of the world population). Being illiterate and uneducated doesn't necessarily make them stupid, but it doesn't make them the brightest people in the history of the planet either. If it wasn't a genetic trait (intellect-wise), they didn't have it. Unless they learned it, but that was reserved for the upper-class. Very religious schooling too, not exactly the best way to open minds.

And yes, metaphoric prophecies are vague, by definition. Otherwise, they wouldn't be written in obscure verse and would have one outcome.
Isaiah 11:1 "There shall come forth a rod out of the [stump] of Jesse, and a Branch shall grow out of his roots"
That tells me that the lineage of Jesse will continue (and if it really means stump, then it will be continued after being severed), and something else that could be described as a rod being created from the stump (or stem, as the case may be). If anybody of Jesse's line took the throne, it has been validated. If a shrubbery he was partial to was cut down, but managed to grow a branch, it has been validated. That's two totally different interpretations, without altering the wording. Hence, 'vague', as in unclear, not to the point, level of specificity nearly zero.

That quoted material there is largely false. Christianity is a monotheistic following believing that Jesus of Nazareth was the son of god, and as such, the messiah. To be sure you're a Christian, you must know if you believe that Jesus is the son of god. Simple as that. Being sure it isn't a "blind leap of faith" will show an inability to think. Despite what it says, all religion is a leap of faith (blind is redundant), since no proof can be produced that any part of it is right. There is also no overwhelming evidence, since there are no unbiased records from that time. In fact, common practice was to write history in your favour, even if it was false.
Yes, many scholars have spent their lives researching the life and aftermath of Jesus, but there isn't exactly an abundance of records outside of religious texts, which would either embelish the truth, or lie through their teeth, depending on their take, 'cuz that's the way things were done. If you were a scholar of religion, up to about the sixties, you were of some faith or other, meaning your end result is predetermined. Like how conspiracy (used in legal sense) to bribe witnesses is used to assume that the reason is a missing body was the result of a miracle. What if they wanted to stop the dawn of a false faith (hey, to them it was) that was threatening their power, and did something, like say, crucify the leader to set an example, and then find out his body has gone missing and his followers believe it was a miracle. So they take another crack at cutting the head off the serpent and bribe people to say it wasn't a miracle, when they can't find the body to prove it with. With the given information, that is a perfectly feasible reason, but it wouldn't occur to the pious mind (if it did, it wouldn't seem likely).

[GRITS]

I am interested in hearing from all the hiding ###### people in these very forums that GRITS says are here.  Why are you acting like straight people trying to be the defenders of homosexual lifestyles?  If you are so comfortable with your 'God given homosexual genetic traits' then come forward and be what you are.  As I said before, there is no way on this planet that I would EVER hate you....I just don't like your lifestyle you choose.  However, I hate hypocracy.

Excuse me....? I said what?
I have been gone a few days....with misquotes like that and my disappearance I better reassure ppl you didnt kidnap me in order to mislead them with erroneous information:P

[Gwarsbane]

ok to get this back on track a little more...

What is wrong LEGALLY with same sex marrages? Nothing as they are no different then any other 2 adults that want to get married.


Relegiously thats a whole other story and depending on what relegion you believe in will mean different things.

[Wha?]

I'm not sure every same-sex couple would just want a legal marriage, because that's signing a bunch of forms and being done with it. The big ceremony has the vows, the guests, the glamour. Basically the commitment and obligation made manifest. Of course, legally there is nothing wrong, since you call on government when you deal with earthly individual rights, and the individual uses religion to govern their behaviour. That means the minister can say no way to the union of a same-sex couple, but can't keep them from being married under the legal system. It's all about keeping things object oriented.

It isn't realistic to expect religious ceremony, but they have a right to follow their faith, and them not performing the marriage doesn't withold any legal rights, so they are welcome to do so.

[kermit]

you are the one who is off-track gwars...'###### marriage' isn't what this topic is about....that's in debates. this issue is getting beat to death...my stance is that legal marriage is wrong in the first place...so of course i think gays getting legally married is wrong...just not on any moral or religeous ground.

[GRITS]

nice catch asm:thumb:

[Gwarsbane]

Whoops ya wrong one lol sorry:)

[[CAKE]anonymity]

I know it sounds redundent to say but the only reason this topic is debated is because there are people who oppose it.

In the politcal sense here in canada its discrimination based on sexual orientation which is in the decleration of rights and freedoms. How it isnt legal is beyond me, the lawyer should have (if he didnt which is not likely) and the supreme court should have said Yes thats right and made it legal right then and there.

[PIX]

GRITS....I get this part from post number one.

I am not sure about actual statistics but I believe 15-35 white heterosexual american males take up the majority of the gaming community

Was this a number of people or an implied age of them?

I'm ending my part of this debate. I'm going to let the law decide what happens and hope they define marriage as what it always has been...between a man and a woman. Of course this has been decided already in a few states, yet lawlessness has taken forth and no one is enforcing the laws that the majority of the implied states have voted for.

[jabbahunt]

but the important fact is that gwars is in need of a new video card, lmao.

[GRITS]

yeah PIX age 15-35.....yeah that would be strange if I meant that is the number of heterosexual men.... I would be surprised if many gays actually played online games like we do.

[[CAKE]anonymity]

Yeah, it is the right age group for playing online games thats for sure. But I dont think its the majority. Its not really a stereotypical hang out for homosexuals. Maybe males at an nsync concert who arent the dads of kids but i doubt its the majority. There would deffinatley be some, bases on the law of averages.

[Wha?]

Most males who go to boy bands concerts do so to scout tail.

[kermit]

most of those girls are really young at those concerts...i wouldn't dare...plus the music would just kill my libido. me and a friend of mine like a lot of synth-pop music and we were always wondering why is it when you give a ###### british guy a synthesizer and a drum machine, you get great music...lol. me and this same friend were giving this guy a ride one time and we were jamming to some donna summers, bronsky beat and erasure and we could just sort of tell that this guy was getting a little nervous like he stepped on the rainbow bus or something...hehe. plus, it probably didn't help that we were in the middle of trying to settle a debate on whether or not sylvester stalone was hung. this gives me an idea for a pole (no pun inteneded:lol:).

[[CAKE]anonymity]

Yeah thats true, they are teenie boopers. You can also get tail at almost any concert. I knew a guy in grd 9 who went to ricky martin concerts to meet some ladies. He never had a gf for the time i knew him.

Too be honest the ###### community is to large to be classified or sterotyped into musical tastes or gamers. I think the only fair generalization we can make is that they are ######.

[Annatar]

we were always wondering why is it when you give a ###### british guy a synthesizer and a drum machine, you get great music...

i might just have to give some of my friends a synthesiser nd a drum machine for christmas to see what happens.....

Just out of interest, does anyone else here get confused about how some of their straightest friends, especially girls in long term relationships, really REALLY enjoy going to ###### bars (and taking their boyfriends with them)

PIX, a question. It was my understanding (though i may be very wrong) that satan only appears in the bible in the temptation of christ section, and there he is supposed to be a metaphor for christs human-like weaknesses. I understood that satan was only introduced properly as a fallen angel in the book "Paradise Lost".

Unless your argument is that satan is ALWAYS a metaphor for human weakness.

Im honestly not poking fun or anything in that last question. im just genuinely interested in your opinion on said subject.

[:/ lil face]

I have a ###### 3rd cousin! ^_^ You've probably seen him on tv too hehe