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  • Originally posted by Cow Poke View Post
    Give me 10.
    Ooooh a morning Bible challenge? I'm up for it.

    Or is that 'drop and give me 10'

    From our perspective anti-miscegationist Christians 'read the Bible like the devil does' (as my grandfather would put it), but these are the kinds of verses typically used. Their application today are rather dodgy, none of these tribes exist in any recognisable form now, and I think at best you can wring a warning out of them against marrying a person of a foreign religion. Also lets not forget that Moses was in a mixed marriage and God wasn't exactly pleased when Aaron and Miriam criticised that marriage.

    Genesis 9:25: "Cursed be Canaan; a slave of slaves shall he be to his brothers."

    Genesis 9:26: "Blessed be the LORD, the God of Shem; and let Canaan be his servant."

    Genesis 24:2-3: "Put your hand under my thigh, that I may make you swear by the LORD, the God of heaven and God of the earth, that you will not take a wife for my son from the daughters of the Canaanites, among whom I dwell"

    Genesis 28:1: "So Isaac called for Jacob and blessed him. Then he commanded him: “Do not marry a Canaanite woman."

    Exodus 34:12: "Take care, lest you make a covenant with the inhabitants of the land to which you go, lest it become a snare in your midst."

    Deurotonomy 7:2-3: "You shall make no covenant with them and show no mercy to them. 3 You shall not intermarry with them, giving your daughters to their sons or taking their daughters for your sons,"

    We see a case of a man about to marry a woman who worships Baal, and she is executed at which point God lifts a plague from the Hebrews.

    Numbers 25:5-8 "So Moses said to IsraelÂ’s judges, 'Each of you must put to death those of your people who have yoked themselves to the Baal of Peor.' Then an Israelite man brought into the camp a Midianite woman right before the eyes of Moses and the whole assembly of Israel while they were weeping at the entrance to the tent of meeting. When Phinehas son of Eleazar, the son of Aaron, the priest, saw this, he left the assembly, took a spear in his hand 8 and followed the Israelite into the tent. He drove the spear into both of them, right through the Israelite man and into the womanÂ’s stomach. Then the plague against the Israelites was stopped;"

    In Joshua we get a warning for Israel not to intermarry other tribes around them, with God warning Israel that he won't deliver them from their enemies if they do so.

    Joshua 23:12-13 "But if you turn away and ally yourselves with the survivors of these nations that remain among you and if you intermarry with them and associate with them, then you may be sure that the Lord your God will no longer drive out these nations before you."

    And similarly in Judges

    Judges 3:6-7: "The Israelites lived among the Canaanites, Hittites, Amorites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites. They took their daughters in marriage and gave their own daughters to their sons, and served their gods."

    In both of these cases its very obvious to me, and I imagine to everyone here, and almost any sane Christian save for a few weirdo fringe groups that this was about Israel avoiding syncretism, and mixing of faiths.

    Much more scarcely do you get quotes from the New Testament but there are a few instances of warnings against marrying into groups with foreign faiths. Again its a stretch to apply, and you have have ignore very explicit texts in other letters, but hey there's a reason anti-miscegenation fell out of favor among Christians.

    2 Corinthians 6: 14: "do not be unequally yoked with unbelievers."


    Sorry for not being around so much these days. I've got a full-time job and I'm busy. Also posting here late at night was doing a number on my sleep.
    Last edited by Leonhard; 07-11-2018, 02:45 AM.

    Comment


    • Originally posted by Tassman View Post
      The demonstrable fact is that, unlike Evangelicals, there are many Christians who give a different (more contextual) interpretation of the Pauline passages on homosexuality and regard it as a normal and acceptable variation of human sexuality.
      No one on this forum would want it more to be true than for homosexuality to be even only merely frowned upon in the Bible, but it is very explicit. There's just no way of approaching the Bible humbly from my perspective, actually trying to understand it from its own setting, and come away believing that homosexuality is approved.

      At best you can make a case that men can be very intimate friends when you read about David and Jonathan, but even if those verses on their own were highly ambiguous, when put together in context with the rest of the Bible...

      Similarly, prior to 1967, anti-miscegenation laws were claimed to be bible-based and were part of American law for several centuries.
      Anything can be 'bible-based' if someone quotes texts in their favour. However the anti-miscegenation Christians had to stretch their readings quite a bit. And mistakes don't become right just for being popular, or for being old.

      Whether these interpretations of scripture are right or wrong in Christian eyes is not my problem, especially when Christians themselves can’t agree on them.
      Its possible to find racists today. No problem. But the majority of Christians certainly don't hold that view. A uniform view is not essential. If that was the case we could dismiss the feminists for not being able to agree on almost anything.

      The baker is free to exercise his religion, he is not free to violate the freedoms of other citizens in doing so.
      No freedom was violated.

      Comment


      • Originally posted by Leonhard View Post
        Ooooh a morning Bible challenge? I'm up for it.

        Or is that 'drop and give me 10'

        From our perspective anti-miscegationist Christians 'read the Bible like the devil does' (as my grandfather would put it), but these are the kinds of verses typically used. Their application today are rather dodgy, none of these tribes exist in any recognisable form now, and I think at best you can wring a warning out of them against marrying a person of a foreign religion. Also lets not forget that Moses was in a mixed marriage and God wasn't exactly pleased when Aaron and Miriam criticised that marriage.
        Good to see you again Leonhard, and you are correct these are not prohibitions against interracial marriage, but against marrying an idol worshiper.
        Atheism is the cult of death, the death of hope. The universe is doomed, you are doomed, the only thing that remains is to await your execution...

        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jbnueb2OI4o&t=3s

        Comment


        • Leonhard.

          Comment


          • Originally posted by Tassman View Post
            The demonstrable fact is that, unlike Evangelicals, there are many Christians who give a different (more contextual) interpretation of the Pauline passages on homosexuality and regard it as a normal and acceptable variation of human sexuality.
            Tass, I recently quote all the texts, and I have no idea what you mean by more contextual, I am reading them in context. They can not get the idea that homosexuality is normal and acceptable from Scripture - period. Again, they are not interpreting the texts, they, in the end, reject the texts. Believe me I know, I spent two years in a liberal Church discussing these very issues.


            The baker is free to exercise his religion, he is not free to violate the freedoms of other citizens in doing so. All citizens have equal rights under the Constitution.
            What are you taking about? I do not violate another man's freedom by not baking him a cake - that is just stupid. But he violates mine if he forces me by law to bake that cake.
            Last edited by seer; 07-11-2018, 07:23 AM.
            Atheism is the cult of death, the death of hope. The universe is doomed, you are doomed, the only thing that remains is to await your execution...

            https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jbnueb2OI4o&t=3s

            Comment


            • Originally posted by Terraceth View Post
              What deeply held religious beliefs were at stake in Heart of Atlanta Motel v United States?
              That is what this whole thread is about, a baker being forced to create a cake for a gay wedding. This is where your public accommodation logically leads. And it all started with the CRA.
              Atheism is the cult of death, the death of hope. The universe is doomed, you are doomed, the only thing that remains is to await your execution...

              https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jbnueb2OI4o&t=3s

              Comment


              • Originally posted by Leonhard View Post
                Ooooh a morning Bible challenge? I'm up for it.

                Or is that 'drop and give me 10'

                From our perspective anti-miscegationist Christians 'read the Bible like the devil does' (as my grandfather would put it), but these are the kinds of verses typically used. Their application today are rather dodgy, none of these tribes exist in any recognisable form now, and I think at best you can wring a warning out of them against marrying a person of a foreign religion. Also lets not forget that Moses was in a mixed marriage and God wasn't exactly pleased when Aaron and Miriam criticised that marriage.

                Genesis 9:25: "Cursed be Canaan; a slave of slaves shall he be to his brothers."

                Genesis 9:26: "Blessed be the LORD, the God of Shem; and let Canaan be his servant."

                Genesis 24:2-3: "Put your hand under my thigh, that I may make you swear by the LORD, the God of heaven and God of the earth, that you will not take a wife for my son from the daughters of the Canaanites, among whom I dwell"

                Genesis 28:1: "So Isaac called for Jacob and blessed him. Then he commanded him: “Do not marry a Canaanite woman."

                Exodus 34:12: "Take care, lest you make a covenant with the inhabitants of the land to which you go, lest it become a snare in your midst."

                Deurotonomy 7:2-3: "You shall make no covenant with them and show no mercy to them. 3 You shall not intermarry with them, giving your daughters to their sons or taking their daughters for your sons,"

                We see a case of a man about to marry a woman who worships Baal, and she is executed at which point God lifts a plague from the Hebrews.

                Numbers 25:5-8 "So Moses said to IsraelÂ’s judges, 'Each of you must put to death those of your people who have yoked themselves to the Baal of Peor.' Then an Israelite man brought into the camp a Midianite woman right before the eyes of Moses and the whole assembly of Israel while they were weeping at the entrance to the tent of meeting. When Phinehas son of Eleazar, the son of Aaron, the priest, saw this, he left the assembly, took a spear in his hand 8 and followed the Israelite into the tent. He drove the spear into both of them, right through the Israelite man and into the womanÂ’s stomach. Then the plague against the Israelites was stopped;"

                In Joshua we get a warning for Israel not to intermarry other tribes around them, with God warning Israel that he won't deliver them from their enemies if they do so.

                Joshua 23:12-13 "But if you turn away and ally yourselves with the survivors of these nations that remain among you and if you intermarry with them and associate with them, then you may be sure that the Lord your God will no longer drive out these nations before you."

                And similarly in Judges

                Judges 3:6-7: "The Israelites lived among the Canaanites, Hittites, Amorites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites. They took their daughters in marriage and gave their own daughters to their sons, and served their gods."

                In both of these cases its very obvious to me, and I imagine to everyone here, and almost any sane Christian save for a few weirdo fringe groups that this was about Israel avoiding syncretism, and mixing of faiths.

                Much more scarcely do you get quotes from the New Testament but there are a few instances of warnings against marrying into groups with foreign faiths. Again its a stretch to apply, and you have have ignore very explicit texts in other letters, but hey there's a reason anti-miscegenation fell out of favor among Christians.

                2 Corinthians 6: 14: "do not be unequally yoked with unbelievers."


                Sorry for not being around so much these days. I've got a full-time job and I'm busy. Also posting here late at night was doing a number on my sleep.
                Thank you, sir, and great to see you again!
                The first to state his case seems right until another comes and cross-examines him.

                Comment


                • Originally posted by Tassman View Post
                  The baker is free to exercise his religion, he is not free to violate the freedoms of other citizens in doing so. All citizens have equal rights under the Constitution.
                  And those rights include, from the DoI, the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

                  Note, Tass, that it's the "pursuit of happiness", not "guaranteed happiness". No rights were violated in not making the gay couple happy. They were and are still free to pursue.
                  The first to state his case seems right until another comes and cross-examines him.

                  Comment


                  • Originally posted by Cow Poke View Post
                    And those rights include, from the DoI, the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

                    Note, Tass, that it's the "pursuit of happiness", not "guaranteed happiness". No rights were violated in not making the gay couple happy. They were and are still free to pursue.
                    The fact that the majority conservative Supreme Court refused to make a determinitive ruling in the case makes your assertion a difficult one to defend. Why didn't they just rule that the baker was within his rights to refuse to serve the gay couple? Because they couldn't, that's why, so they found an out, blame the Colorado Civil Rights Assn. for being biased in their ruling and dismiss the suit on those grounds.

                    Comment


                    • Originally posted by JimL View Post
                      The fact that the majority conservative Supreme Court refused to make a determinitive ruling in the case makes your assertion a difficult one to defend.
                      My "assertion" had nothing to do with that.

                      Why didn't they just rule that the baker was within his rights to refuse to serve the gay couple?
                      Because that wasn't the matter in question.

                      Because they couldn't, that's why, so they found an out, blame the Colorado Civil Rights Ass. for being biased in their ruling and dismiss the suit on those grounds.
                      You want SO BADLY to be relevant.
                      The first to state his case seems right until another comes and cross-examines him.

                      Comment


                      • Originally posted by Cow Poke View Post
                        Thank you, sir, and great to see you again!
                        I was always lurking now and then.

                        Comment


                        • Originally posted by Cerebrum123 View Post
                          Leonhard.
                          Yo!

                          Comment


                          • Originally posted by seer View Post
                            That is what this whole thread is about, a baker being forced to create a cake for a gay wedding.
                            Which I wasn't discussing. Yes, that may have been the general purpose of the thread, but I was responding to your sub-claim that Title II of the Civil Rights Act of 1965 was unconstitutional to begin with, and that Heart of Atlanta Motel v United States (which upheld it) was therefore wrong. I did not believe your claim was correct.

                            Whether or not legislation that emerged after the Civil Rights Act is problematic is another matter to be discussed separately. But one cannot reasonably use subsequent and separate legislative to claim some other piece of legislation is unconstitutional. Particularly when the specific alleged problem with that subsequent legislation (a baker being forced to create a cake for a gay wedding) does not exist in the first.

                            This is where your public accommodation logically leads. And it all started with the CRA.
                            I have already explained why it is erroneous to say the flaws of a particular piece of legislation somehow rebound on preceding legislation that did not have the flaw being accused. But there is an additional problem here in that your complaint does not seem to actually be with the Colorado Anti-Discrimination Act itself, but in the way it was applied. Law and application of law are two separate things, and one being unconstitutional does not mean the other also isn't.

                            Indeed, unless I missed something, in no part of the decision of the Supreme Court in the Masterpiece Cake Shop decision is it ever indicated by any justice that the Colorado Anti-Discrimination Act is itself unconstitutional, not even in the concurrences by Gorsuch (joined by Alito) or Thomas (joined by Gorsuch). Their criticisms are all aimed at applications of it; no suggestion is ever made that the law itself should be struck down. For example, the law says it is unlawful to "directly or indirectly, to refuse, withhold from, or deny to an individual or a group, because of... sexual orientation... the full and equal enjoyment of the goods, services, facilities, privileges, advantages, or accommodations of a place of public accommodation." Gorsuch's concurrence (in my view, correctly) argued that this is not what happened as service was refused due to the nature of the product itself being ordered, not the sexual orientation (or any other aspect) of the customer themselves. This would mean the law, at least as written, does not apply to begin with, and the issue is the application rather than the law itself.
                            Last edited by Terraceth; 07-11-2018, 07:46 PM.

                            Comment


                            • Originally posted by Leonhard View Post
                              No one on this forum would want it more to be true than for homosexuality to be even only merely frowned upon in the Bible, but it is very explicit. There's just no way of approaching the Bible humbly from my perspective, actually trying to understand it from its own setting, and come away believing that homosexuality is approved.

                              At best you can make a case that men can be very intimate friends when you read about David and Jonathan, but even if those verses on their own were highly ambiguous, when put together in context with the rest of the Bible...
                              As an atheist I don’t have a horse in this race. I’m merely making the point that there are a large number of sincere Christians who accept homosexuality as a normal and acceptable variation of human sexuality. It is not my concern how they square this with biblical precepts, but there are a number of arguments I have come across. One such is that “for a man to lie with a man as with a woman” violated the patriarchal gender norms of the ancient world...a patriarchal order that no longer applies. It is for Christians to exercise their conscience on this not me....but I have no reason to doubt their sincerity as Christians. Your only argument against them is that you disagree with their interpretation.

                              Anything can be 'bible-based' if someone quotes texts in their favour. However the anti-miscegenation Christians had to stretch their readings quite a bit. And mistakes don't become right just for being popular, or for being old.
                              Exactly the point I have been making. People, if they are so inclined, can make the bible say whatever they want. And for several centuries in America it was applied to proscribe miscegenation marriage and relationships.

                              Its possible to find racists today. No problem. But the majority of Christians certainly don't hold that view. A uniform view is not essential. If that was the case we could dismiss the feminists for not being able to agree on almost anything.
                              You haven’t addressed my question: Could an anti-miscegenation baker cite “free exercise of religion” and "deeply held beliefs" for refusing to make a wedding cake for a racially mixed couple? Would he be right to do so?

                              No freedom was violated.
                              Indeed it was. The gay couple was discriminated against in a 'public accommodation', which is contrary to the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
                              “He felt that his whole life was a kind of dream and he sometimes wondered whose it was and whether they were enjoying it.” - Douglas Adams.

                              Comment


                              • Originally posted by Tassman View Post
                                IÂ’m merely making the point that there are a large number of sincere Christians who accept homosexuality as a normal and acceptable variation of human sexuality. ... Your only argument against them is that you disagree with their interpretation.
                                Yes, they exist. And yeah their interpretations of the Bible are as bad as those who based anti-miscegenation laws on the Bible.

                                Exactly the point I have been making. People, if they are so inclined, can make the bible say whatever they want.
                                No, they can't. That's not what I claimed. People can claim the Bible supports a variety of different ideas, and while its true a particular reading of the Bible cannot be approached entirely independently of the zeitgeist of the reader, none the less there are good principles of exegesis that can be applied. So its true you can find small cults who believe the Bible teaches reincarnation, if you want to find someone who makes that claim. But if you examine the Bible, and take into account why, where and who wrote it, then its clear that it doesn't.

                                And for several centuries in America it was applied to proscribe miscegenation marriage and relationships.
                                No doubt, and that was a crime against humanity, however it was also Christians who argued that such a use of scripture was illicit. People were trying to justify what their cultural by the Bible, rather than conforming them.

                                Could an anti-miscegenation baker cite “free exercise of religion” and "deeply held beliefs" for refusing to make a wedding cake for a racially mixed couple? Would he be right to do so?
                                Of course not, he is producing a good to be supplied to the public. A service like that can't be withheld because of the customer. However, the same does not apply to artistic freedom. A Christian tested the fairness of how these laws were applied by asking a gay baker to bake a cake with scripture quote on it, just the name of a book and the numbers of the verse. That's all. The baker refused, and argued 'artistic freedom' considering decorating a cake with calligraphy to convey a message was a work of art. An artist has the freedom to refuse a commission for various personal reasons.

                                And even more ironically, some of these bakers also started using exactly the same arguments as the Christians did, "I'm willing to bake them a normal blank cake, and then give them the supplies so they can decorate and write the messages themselves."

                                https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/th...iage-cake.-now

                                So here its pretty clear that some people in the LGBTQ wants legal muscle to do things and harass Christians, without themselves being subject to the same kind of limitations. In this case I side with religious freedom to refuse to produce artistic works that are fundementally against your own values, and by the linked to examples, so are the LGBTQ, they want the same laws we Christians are going for, but I don't think they should get a special immunity from them themselves. If they get to refuse creative works, so should Christians.

                                Indeed it was. The gay couple was discriminated against in a 'public accommodation', which is contrary to the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
                                Except the baker, as I heard it at least, didn't refuse to bake a cake for them. But it would not be decorated, they'd have to do that himself.
                                Last edited by Leonhard; 07-12-2018, 02:36 AM.

                                Comment

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