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<p>Like if black people should have the right to vote. The South will rise again!</p>
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<p>No. It’s not the state’s place to decide who can and can’t engage in a civil union. But it is the church’s place to decide who can and can’t engage in marriage.</p>
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<p>if you think that your ethics & metaphysics are derived from pure reason, you are in for a shocker . . .</p>
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<p>most of the guys who studied math, physics, other sciences, & philosophy in Europe from 1500-1800 were pretty big Christians. great works of poetry & literature during that time were written by christians. i’d say that these guys were all pretty smart. you have to really be looking the other way to ignore these folks.</p>
<p>this is a stupid point anyway . . . why am i responding . . .</p>
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<p>Amen to that. </p>
<p>My religion allows for same-sex unions. </p>
<p>Why does your (those who are against gay marriage) religion/belief system get to contradict mine? Don’t like gay marriage? Cool. Don’t get one.</p>
<p>ETA:
@peter- IIRC, da Vinci was a Christian. He is probably one of the smartest (I argue, smartest) man in recorded European history.</p>
<p>peter…</p>
<p>Issac Newton, anyone? He’s extremely respected, yet he believed that Christianity, math and science can co-exist. He was Christian and perhaps one of the greatest scientists to have ever lived.</p>
<p>Martin Luther was very intelligent as well.</p>
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<p>He was wrong.</p>
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<p>Intelligent? Yes. Wrong? Yes.</p>
<p>you could easily come up with a very very very long list of accomplished christian academics & artists.</p>
<p>JamesGold,</p>
<p>Why do you think Issac Newton was wrong? </p>
<p>And how was Martin Luther wrong? He broke away from the assbackwardness of the Catholic church and corrected it through Lutheran Christianity.</p>
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<p>This is your opinion. A more orthodox Christian would say that the bibliolatry that some of the protestant sects encourage is harmful.</p>
<p>Ex: The Catholic Church was against Preists having wives or sexual relations.</p>
<p>Martin Luther had a wife. He realized just how unrealistic it would be to ask preists to practice celibacy forever.</p>
<p>Ex: The Catholic Church acted as though the only way you could get to God was through Preists/ministers/etc.</p>
<p>Martin Luther disagreed. </p>
<p>I could go on, but Luther corrected many things from the Catholic Church that are backwards.</p>
<p>I meant “super-smart” not just smart or accomplished.</p>
<p>Most, if not all, the people at the top are atheists.</p>
<p>It’s because it takes a degree of intelligence, the most basic of reasoning, and a whole lot of self-awareness to see the truth.</p>
<p>I’ll concede Newton. But that’s one Christian (who probably outnumber atheists 10-1) since the dawn of time. You haven’t named one other who might be considered a genius.</p>
<p>Wikipedia says Newton thought the worship of Christ as God was “idolatry, to him the fundamental sin.” I hope you don’t worship Christ as God. That’s self-contradicting Christianity for you.</p>
<p>I’m sorry to say, Newton was one genius who deluded himself with fantastical self-hypnosis and self-drugging.</p>
<p>Those are your opinions. A catholic could point to those same things and call them failures of protestant churches.</p>
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<p>Science and Christianity can’t co-exist. As one example, virgin birth is impossible. Science and miracles can’t co-exist. Miracles defy the laws of physics.</p>
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<p>You can’t correct wrong with more wrong. It’s like Luther correcting someone else’s proposition that the sky is red by saying the sky is yellow. Both fail to accurately represent reality. All of Christianity is wrong.</p>
<p>Devil’s advocate here:</p>
<p>Millikan, Planck, Freeman Dyson, Kelvin, Faraday, Descartes - just to name a few. Oh, yeah, Einstein as well.</p>
<p>Whoever put Albert under the category of atheist is wrong. Here is a brief passage I quite like: "Although never coming to belief in a personal God, he recognized the impossibility of a non-created universe. The Encyclopedia Britannica says of him: “Firmly denying atheism, Einstein expressed a belief in “Spinoza’s God who reveals himself in the harmony of what exists.” This actually motivated his interest in science, as he once remarked to a young physicist: “I want to know how God created this world, I am not interested in this or that phenomenon, in the spectrum of this or that element. I want to know His thoughts, the rest are details.” Einstein’s famous epithet on the “uncertainty principle” was “God does not play dice” - and to him this was a real statement about a God in whom he believed. A famous saying of his was “Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.””</p>
<p>Perhaps he could be classified as a border-line agnostic, but he was anything but an atheist.</p>
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<p>euler, gauss, pascal, . . . and the beat goes on.</p>
<p>seriously, if you go to a wikipedia page of a famous european scientist, mathematician, or philosopher from 1500-1800, and it says something about his religious views, most likely it will say that he is christian, or at the very least deist.</p>
<p>peter_parker isn’t even trying.</p>
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<p>The Church has never believed that institutionally. Chalk up one more victim to indoctrinating televangelism…</p>
<p>LOL@ Hate of the “Catholic Church,” which happens to be nothing like the actual Church.</p>
<p>Wow, BigEastBeast. You get extremely offended when someone says your parents are at fault for your brainwashing. Yet you sit here and spew “wimps”, “creeps”, “freaks” and all other kinds of epithets at gays. It’s probably useless to argue with you, and I won’t get put down by someone as stupid as you. But it might be worth it to tell you that gays don’t choose who they are sexually attracted to anymore than straights do. Honestly, in such a diverse species, to believe that nature unfailingly makes every single person attracted to the opposite sex is a lot dumber than believing gay people are not just “choosing a lifestyle”. </p>
<p>Also, you should know there is no gay lifestyle. I don’t enjoy shopping, my best friends are not all girls, I’ve never had anal and don’t plan on trying it anytime soon (don’t fret, I’m sure I still get more action than you), and I would kick your ass if I ever saw you on the streets. People I know, who are generally not homophobic, are usually surprised to learn I’m gay. Probably because they too have bought into these stereotypes. It makes it a little better that they are not hateful of the ones who do fit the stereotypes, like you. </p>
<p>Oh, and a so-called gay “wimp” named Turing was responsible for breaking the German ciphers that allowed us to win WWII and ALSO made it possible for society to have the computers that you sit at to slander gay people. Despite his achievements, Britain still tortured him into committing suicide because of attitudes like yours.</p>
<p>Now go finish getting off to two girls kissing, you ignorant little hypocrite.</p>
<p>the characters</p>
<h2>Also, you should know there is no gay lifestyle. I don’t enjoy shopping, my best friends are not all girls, I’ve never had anal and don’t plan on trying it anytime soon (don’t fret, I’m sure I still get more action than you), and I would kick your ass if I ever saw you on the streets. ~ Panther124</h2>
<p>Thanks for the laugh.</p>