re: Seth MacFarlane On SCOTUS Cake Ruling: Just Like Not Seating Black People

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Apparently you don’t. Heritable isn’t deterministic. I can have heritable traits making me susceptible to obesity. Or predisposed to be good at sports. Nothing about those are deterministic.

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Correct, but there is predisposition and environmental triggers. People are born with a significant predisposition to homosexuality.

Ya i forgot my

I tend to agree that people shouldnt be forced to serve XYZ. I find them despicable but having the lowest common denominators congregate in those places would make the rest of the country much nicer

There’s a significant genetic factor in playing in the NBA.

No one who’s thought about it.

What isn’t at least “partly heritable” about us?

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Unless you are a pastor or went to a parochial school where they taught Bible/Babble classes every day, I almost certainly have an equal to or better understanding of what the Bible says and does not say. I've spent far more (mostly) wasted time studying it than I'd care to admit.

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Apparently I should have added "...on this topic" so as not to offend your years of study. For that I apologize.

The reason I made the statement was because you were essentially claiming that the Bible was inconsistent with reality and I responded by saying that the Bible is perfectly consistent. The conclusion I was making was that you didn't understand what the Bible taught on the subject which gave you an incorrect interpretation of its inconsistency.

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Your views on original sin and homosexuality are just another classical example of cherry-picking scripture. I can turn literally everything you just said into an argument for Islam and you'd think it was all a bunch of white noise. I would ask you to ask yourself why that is, but based on your replies, I don't think you're capable of holding a mirror up to your own religion.

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I'm not cherry-picking anything. I'm very adamant that all scripture should be interpreted within its context, first within the verse, then within the chapter, then within the book, then within the Bible as a whole. I'm serious about asking for examples where you believe I am cherry-picking because that is not what I do in the slightest and if you can prove to me that I am ignoring the context of scripture, I'll recant immediately.

With that said, I've been thinking critically about my faith since at least my late teens. I've been engaged in discussions like this for years and years with people like yourself constantly challenging my beliefs and forcing me to think about them and come up with a viable and reasonable (and most importantly, Biblical) defense. I believe I'm more than capable of holding a mirror to my faith because I've done it countless times. Just because I always come back to the conclusion that the Bible is true doesn't mean I'm not critical.

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I'm not going to bother replying to your repeated examples of special pleading, this has been done to death, so I'll sum it all up like this:

What you and so many others that hold anti-homosexual positions are doing is precisely what you'd expect to see when you presuppose divine authority with absolutely no evidence and allow it to dictate politics, governmental decisions and the minds and decisions of an average intelligence public. Homosexuals are shunned for no good reason other than a committee of people chose to write some nonsense down thousands of years ago and credulous people are willing to believe anything ranging from outlandish, fantastical bull shite to psychotic nonsense in exchange for the promise of immortality.

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I'm sorry you believe this way. All I can say is that everyone recognizes an authority of some kind for truth. Many believe they, themselves, are the only valid authority for what is true in the world. I happen to believe that the God is the final authority. Instead of being ruled by the whims of erratic and ever-changing opinions of the masses, I believe we should always hold ourselves in check according to the creator of the universe and the true Lord over all creation.

By rejecting an authority like God, you have to accept the truth that there is no absolute truth--not even your own (which is a contradiction in itself)--which means you have no basis for making moral truth claims that means more than anyone else's opinions.

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So the only reason homosexual sex is objectively immoral is because it takes place outside the confines of religiously-sanction marriage? It's immorality of circumstance and not action?

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It's more nuanced than that but essentially, yes. Sex was always intended to be a union within the context of marriage. Marriage God ordained is between a man and a woman, therefore homosexual marriage is sinful. Sex outside of marriage--including homosexual sex--is sinful, therefore homosexual sexual acts are sinful.

All sexual acts--homosexual or heterosexual--are sinful outside of the context of marriage. Since marriage is reserved for heterosexuals, homosexuals cannot engage in sexual activity at all without sinning unless they enter into a marriage with someone of the other sex.

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I'm not cherry-picking anything. I'm very adamant that all scripture should be interpreted within its context, first within the verse, then within the chapter, then within the book, then within the Bible as a whole. I'm serious about asking for examples where you believe I am cherry-picking because that is not what I do in the slightest and if you can prove to me that I am ignoring the context of scripture, I'll recant immediately.

With that said, I've been thinking critically about my faith since at least my late teens. I've been engaged in discussions like this for years and years with people like yourself constantly challenging my beliefs and forcing me to think about them and come up with a viable and reasonable (and most importantly, Biblical) defense. I believe I'm more than capable of holding a mirror to my faith because I've done it countless times. Just because I always come back to the conclusion that the Bible is true doesn't mean I'm not critical.

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On the latter, I happily stand corrected. I don't think most Biblically-based defenses are actually defensible, but I'll take you at your word that you do think critically on these issues and I admit a mistake in thinking you wouldn't reflect on your own religion. So the point on Islam then stands, I can repeat everything back to you that you initially said to me using Islam in place of Christianity.

For the former, an anti-homosexual stance backed with your view on divine command theory is an instance of cherry-picking. We have very little data in the NT that homosexuality is wrong and no prescriptions for what to do about it. This is in contrast with the death penalty, ordained by God, for homosexuals in the OT. Jesus both keeps the OT law and abolishes the OT law--he apparently has his cake and eats it, too. Why aren't we killing gay people and sacrificing turtledoves or young pigeons after a woman's menstrual cycle?

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By rejecting an authority like God, you have to accept the truth that there is no absolute truth--not even your own (which is a contradiction in itself)--which means you have no basis for making moral truth claims that means more than anyone else's opinions.

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I can make claims to moral truths very easily based on one very simple idea: Misery is bad and we should avoid the worst possible misery for everyone (this idea is not mine, I am borrowing it from someone smarter than me). We should not and do not need an authority--divine or otherwise--to tell us that avoiding the worst possible misery for everyone is a good thing.

One point I may have made already and forgotten, we clearly don't get our morality from the Bible (let me know if you disagree). We would therefore be receiving this moral truth from God. What does this communication look like and to whom is it being communicated to?

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So no one can craft an argument as to why the article lacks credibility?

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To add. Even the article doesn't claim a direct causal link.

So, I'm not sure of the point

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On the latter, I happily stand corrected. I don't think most Biblically-based defenses are actually defensible, but I'll take you at your word that you do think critically on these issues and I admit a mistake in thinking you wouldn't reflect on your own religion.

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The admission is not necessary but it is appreciated. Thank you.

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So the point on Islam then stands, I can repeat everything back to you that you initially said to me using Islam in place of Christianity.

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You're free to do that if you wish. I reject the claims of Islam as you reject the claims of the Bible and I'd be more than happy to discuss the merits of the Bible vs. the Qur'an in an attempt to show the bankruptcy of that awful religion.

I know it's easy for a skeptic to look at claims of divine authority in Christianity and claim that Christianity is interchangeable with Islam or some other religion but I don't think so. It may sound ironic, but I believe only the existence of the God of the Bible (and not Allah or some other claimed religious deity) is consistent with the world we live in. Substituting Christianity for Islam because of a somewhat shared view on homosexuality is not sufficient to me.

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For the former, an anti-homosexual stance backed with your view on divine command theory is an instance of cherry-picking. We have very little data in the NT that homosexuality is wrong and no prescriptions for what to do about it. This is in contrast with the death penalty, ordained by God, for homosexuals in the OT. Jesus both keeps the OT law and abolishes the OT law--he apparently has his cake and eats it, too. Why aren't we killing gay people and sacrificing turtledoves or young pigeons after a woman's menstrual cycle?

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I've actually talked about this several times lately but I'll just summarize by saying the reason why "we" don't put homosexuals to death is because "we" are not the Old Testament nation of Israel prior to Christ.

The law of God is divided into three parts: the moral law, the civil law, and the ceremonial law. The moral law is the basis for the other two as it reflects the very character of God. The other two are essentially applications of the moral law for the nation of Israel who was to be a physical type of a future spiritual reality of the Church. When Christ obeyed the law perfectly and died His unjust death, He fulfilled what the law pointed to so that those types and shadows were no longer necessary, like a road sign after you reach the destination.

The moral law remains because, again, it reflects the very character of God, and therefore we are to keep it and repent when we don't. Adultery is still a sin, but we don't have to put an adulterer to death because our particular laws don't state that that is a necessary punishment, unlike the OT nation of Israel.

So yes, Christians can still reject sin without calling for all of the same punishments that Israel enacted to support their theocratic nation-state. We can enact those types of laws if we choose, but it isn't necessary.

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I can make claims to moral truths very easily based on one very simple idea: Misery is bad and we should avoid the worst possible misery for everyone (this idea is not mine, I am borrowing it from someone smarter than me). We should not and do not need an authority--divine or otherwise--to tell us that avoiding the worst possible misery for everyone is a good thing.

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One question: why is avoiding misery your standard?

That seems rather arbitrary. Believe it or not, but some people actually like to be miserable. Some people deserve to be miserable for what they've done to others, but what is the basis for such a standard? Consensus? Without divine instruction, it seems to be a standard that most people choose because most individuals don't want to be miserable, but what objective basis is there for that standard? I contend that it's just one subjective standard among many and has no more merit than anyone else's standard.

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One point I may have made already and forgotten, we clearly don't get our morality from the Bible (let me know if you disagree).

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Depends on what you mean by "we" and "morality". I believe the moral law of God is written on the hearts of all men and manifests itself in what we know as the conscience. That moral law is explained in the Bible in more detail so we know more specifically what is wrong and why it is wrong. There's a reason why we believe murder is wrong, though we see that behavior as common in nature.

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We would therefore be receiving this moral truth from God. What does this communication look like and to whom is it being communicated to?

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If you're talking about our collective moral code that we've mostly agreed upon outside of the Bible then I'd go back to what I just said about the conscience. God "programmed" us to understand moral right and wrong because we are made in His image and God is a moral being. I suppose you can say it's an instinct that is built into us and explained further in the Bible.