Reply #24: I would tend to agree with your analysis [View All]

[The Straight Story]

Not to mention the bible is filled with sinners of all manner, including Paul. Adulturators, theives, liars, murderers, fornicators, and so forth abound - such is the nature of mankind. The idea is to fight that nature and rise above the animal instincts. Trying to say that KJ was gay and hoping that gets one anywhere is like saying Paul was ok with stoning someone before his conversion so it was ok.

Christians are sinners like others, the difference is they try to fight against that sin instead of saying it feels good and natural so it must be ok.

This is not an attempt to say they are right or wrong or to interject to others how I think they should live their lives, it is simply my own insight into such things. It is akin to buddhism in some ways in this train of denying oneself certain things for some reason, and it is also flows into the non-religious world where we have people who smoke, drink, eat too much, and so forth but are told it is wrong because it is bad for them and others. It all goes to a 'morals' thing, and everyone has some set of moral ideals and philosophy which they get from somewhere - either religion or self analysis of things. Thing too, is that everyone tries to evangelize their view and opinions by preaching to others how they should feel and act. We can complain about christians, et al, being in power and passing legislation which has a basis in their beliefs, but from where I sit that is precisely what everyone else does really - they just drop the scriptures and use the works of someone else or their own personal view.

To me the best way to get people on board with a train of thoughts or ideas is to understand theirs at the core and discuss with them things at that level. An example of this would be the amish and early christians who generally were/are not involved in the political arena - all they want is to be free to live in their own little place and live how they see fit (and this was something which occured often in the early US where we had communes from socialists to christians spring up - people lived their own way on their own land and the federal government was not overly involved in how people lived their lives and one group did not bother the other).