I was going to say that...

Myndaen, why do I get the feeling that if the church had spent millions of dollars opposing proposition 8, you wouldn't be calling for revocation of it's tax exemption? I guess a one way street is okay if it's your way.

But then activists from the other side of the issue would be on the case, so it would end up being balanced anyways.

It's true. It's all true!

Why can't we all just ? Huh?

Because that's a sin. HARLOT!!!!

GIVE US BACK OUR RIB, JEZEBEL.

That's actually not at all true. I'm one of those extremists leftists that thinks that any excuse to get revoked status for organized religions is a good excuse.

That's a pretty blatantly wrong generalisation and I'm shocked that someone as learned and balanced as you would make it.

I know plenty of deeply devout people who are also extremely warm and accepting of alternative viewpoints, who feed the hungry and clothe the naked, who shelter the helpless and comfort the downtrodden. They are also extremely faithful and dedicated to a life serving God and Christ.

Have you ever met a Priest? A Nun? Spoken with a Preacher in a small town? A missionary who's served in Africa or South America? Faithful Catholics and Lutherans, pious Episcopalians and fiery Baptists. There's a huge spectrum of Christians (and for that matter other religious people) and the vast majority of them are positive forces in the world. Yes there are people who are horrible and narrowminded and bigoted, but by and large the more devout someone is the better they are as a person.

More often than not the non-religious people I know are the ones that fall prey to moral relativism and human shortcomings. When they have no belief structure or basis in which to ground their morality, it's quite easy to set it aside when it's convenient.

Your entire position is nonsensical.

This is a remarkably bigoted post. There is really no way to respond to it other than stating that you should expand your view of the world before making such broad and insulting claims. You generated facts based on your emotions, and judged an entire group based off of these "facts." It's bad logic, it's bad form, it's just bad in general.

@Moraine: things get heated when I gank people? I don't get it.

@Celina: You're kidding, right? Every week I see another ten pages on rants or something about how someone is a horrible waste of space for gank-related activity. Your name just comes up more often, so it was a good example.

@Visaeris: I'd like to call you out just a tad. I don't disagree with you in general, but in proportion. I can honestly say that of all the religious people I know, maybe one in three really isn't an evil Bible-thumper. Maybe that's just a skewed experience and isn't representative, but it's definitely my experience.

@Casilu: Meanie

You probably don't realise how many people are actually religious. The bible-thumpers are just more noticeable.

Repent now or burn in the fires of hell, Harlot, wench of the Devil himself!

I have studied and reviewed, and found just what this thread needs...

These guys!



I was fixing it, ya ditz

You fail at linking images. It should be:

Let's play "prove Xavius' point for him."

To what degree can you be deeply devout and ignore the basic tenets of your religion? St. Paul is pretty clear about it: gays go to hell and Christians shall not associate with them, except to remind them that homosexuality is a sin, and even then, only a few times, at which point they must be banished. There're also the bits about men and women not praying together, loans being forbidden, and assorted oddities in the New Testament ignored by reasonable people who bear the title Christian. (And we won't get into the debate about what does and doesn't count in the Old Testament.) Now, if you're a warm and accepting individual who happens to be Christian, you have made a conscious choice to take a selective attitude towards religion. This is a very good thing that should not be downplayed: independent thought is awesome. It still leaves you with the sticking point of decency requiring a selective attitude towards religion. You can take it one step further, ignore the orthodoxy and jump to devotion. Can you be warm and accepting and be at least a devout heretic? Warm, yes; accepting, no. The gist of the New Testament is pretty straightforward: ignore your own life so that you can more effectively bring people to God. Even if you ignore all the implications of "bring people to God," proselytization is the basic goal.

Since you mentioned various religious vocations, let's go ahead and make this specific. (To answer your question, yes, I have met more than one person from every category you listed, and I'm willing to bet I've met waaaay more than you.) I am a personal witness to a priest who has asked for the local abortionist to die a violent death so that other people could be spared harm. Not the greatest Christian sentiment ever expressed, but clearly motivated by orthodoxy. I was good friends with a Franciscan priest who was pretty clearly not a devout, orthodox Catholic: dirty mind, dirty jokes, rarely mentioned Jesus or the Bible except to make a point in the sort of way that you or I might quote Aesop. He would smirk and vocally pray that we might all have wet dreams to make celibacy a bit easier and make wildly inappropriate comments about the attractiveness of men and women alike. He was also one of the warmest, most approachable people I'd ever met, and he put himself on the line more than once for the sake of the community. He did his work in the name of God, but the motivation was clearly the community.

As far as the men and women in religious orders, you have the traditionally devout and orthodox Dominicans who do nothing of value in the community, and the traditionally liberal but very socially active Jesuits. The same applies in the smaller orders: the Order of Saint Helena is an Episcopal order of devout, orthodox women. Decent folk, almost feel bad throwing them up as an example, but they're useless. The Carmelite Sisters for the Aged and Infirm are an order of Catholic nuns who're borderline heretics, refer to Jesus just often enough that they can still call themselves a Christian order, and do nasty, degrading, but extremely charitable work that put the stories of foreign missionaries to shame.

Outside of those whose careers are based on traditional religious roles, the spectrum becomes clearer. Find the common theme: evolution in public schools, stem cell research, and gay civil liberties. What are noble pursuits stymied by religious intolerance, Alex? We're only talking about today's issues, but within just the 20th century, pseudomainstream religious intolerance was the grounding for prejudices that are ridiculous to the modern American. Again, to bring it back to a more personal level, compare Stangmar and Daganev to Tervic and Callia.

So really, these are observations made from a very broad spectrum of Christians I know as individuals. The larger social trends are even clearer: the average American Christian expresses disapproval of activity that runs contrary to Christian social teachings, so long as said teachings aren't viewed negatively by the vast majority of reasonable Americans and he can get away without doing anything about it. A devout Christian who is willing to take extraordinary steps to put his faith into action is a right bastard. If you expand past American Christianity, you have Sharia, genocide, terrorism, mutilation in the name of chastity, and all sorts of other things that should be solidly in the past by now. Religion is quickly becoming an institution justified only by the fact that there's a lot of people who claim religious affiliation.

EDIT: There is no tl;dr version for this. I cut it down for quicker reading! Read it, address it in full, or kindly look elsewhere.

tl;dr

I go to church. Attend functions. I know a ton of religious people, from my current faith and the one I was a part of as a teenager. On this point, I'm really not as ignorant as you might think. Though you're definitely right about the noticeable part.

@Xavius: Many, many good examples. Me likey. Though, I think that if you expanded that examination to include all humans, not just all humans in a religion, you'd get pretty much the same percentages of rat bastards and affectionados.

What is tl;dr and why is it suddenly showing up in everyone's posts?

Too long; didn't read and because some of them are long (and some people have short attention spans)

Good grief.

You know your attention span is sadly short when about 800 words is too long to bother with.