It irks me so much when people use terms like these towards Christians just because they don't like what they say or disagree with them. What's funny and sad about this is that those that say such things are doing exactly what they criticize Christians of doing.
The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
defines Narrow-Minded this way "Lacking tolerance, breadth of view, or sympathy; petty." To put it another way, it is a lack of acceptance or tolerance of another view because it disagrees with one's personal view.
I don't doubt that Christians are that way. What i am stating is that when a person criticises someone else and calls them intolerant, narrow-minded, & biased they are often doing exactly that themselves. To say that someone else does this then ignore this entirely in oneself makes the fool of the one labeling the fool.
Every person is intollerant, narrow-minded, and biased. Would you be tolerant of someone coming into your house day after day and taking something of yours? Would you accept the viewpoint of a 28 year old man wanting to have sex with your 13 year old daughter? If someone came into your work and said that all teachers / engineers / therapists / doctors / whatever you happen to be were fools and a plague on society do you really think that you would be unbiased? Absolutely not. Some of these are extreme examples but they are set up to prove a point.
Every person in the world is intolerant, narrow-minded, & biased! Some are willing to admit it and some criticise others because of it. I know and fully acknowledge that i am intolerant, narrow-minded, & biased. I have never pretended not to be. In school i was taught that therapists need to be as unbiased with their clients as possible. However, i was also taught that this is a continual process and will never be fully achieved.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
19 comments:
Obviously, almost everybody is intolerant of people who would do them harm, and for good reason. When Christians are called intolerant, though, it's usually because they are being intolerant towards people who are not harming anyone else, particularly gay people or others who don't meet some Christians' narrow standards of sexuality.
It's one thing to want laws which prevent people from raping other people; quite another to want laws to prevent people from having consensual sex or marriage.
it's usually because they are being intolerant towards people who are not harming anyone else
Actually, that's quite debatable.
Okay, what harm does it do to you if a couple of old ladies who have been together for thirty years and raised three children together are allowed to get married in Massachusetts?
<pulls up a chair, nukes some popcorn, waits.../>
darn it, I wanna get in on this one.
"Actually, that's quite debatable"
If I understand JC correctly here, his position is that the two people of the same gender marrying are doing harm to someone else? (or is it each other?).
In America, at least for now, it's not your business whether it's gonna damn them to hell for all eternity. (Not that I think it will, but discussing your interpretations of the bible on homosexuality is a bit of a thread hijack, even for me)
If I've misinterpreted your POV in some way, please clarify.
pulls up a chair, nukes some popcorn, waits...
darn it, I wanna get in on this one.
Ha, ha, ha, ha! I feel like a circus announcer. "Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, now for your debating pleasure..."
The reality is that nothing you or i do doesn't affect the people and things around us.
None of us is an island to themselves. Whenever we sin we affect ourselves, those closest to us, and even the earth. Just look at the name and water experiment (based on an actual experiment) portrayed in the video "what the bleep are we here for" (i keep hearing about this video from people and can't find it in the local video rental places) Our actions reach further than ourselves whether we like it or not.
When it comes to the harm of homosexuality, just look at the BoyScouts issue. The origional problem was that homosexual men kept becoming scout leaders and seducing the young men in their care. This had happened multiple times (as well as in the Big Brother/Big Sister program, the YMCA, and in many church Sunday Schools). So the Boy Scouts decided that to prevent this high occurance rate that only happened with homosexual leaders they were going to ban homosexuals from being leaders.
Then the media got ahold of it and turned it into a huge fiasco making it sound like the Boy Scouts were just banning homosexuals from the Boy Scouts all together for no other reason than that they were gay. It turned into a huge fiasco and the whole point of the issue was lost in the media frenzy. That point being that the homosexual leaders were turning the scouts into their own little harems. Now i don't know about you, but i wouldn't have wanted my kids involved in that. The Boy Scout leadership was extremely concerned and if they hadn't done anything about it they would have been considered legally negligent by any court.
Last i heard (and when and why i stopped paying attention), the Boy Scouts had given in to the media and political pressure.
Homosexuality and pedophilia are two different things.
None of us is an island to themselves. Whenever we sin we affect ourselves, those closest to us, and even the earth.
Your Christian point of view has no bearing on what the law of the land is. The constitution doesn't ensure that you'll be comfortable or morally OK with other people's choices.
So, if your logic follows, heterosexual males should be banned from coaching women's sports because of the high incidence of seduction of players by the coaches?
The problem I have with JC's post is that I've found Conservatives (both Christians and other religions) to be more Narrow-Minded then Liberals. Liberals generally are making the rules up as they go along. If you tell a Liberal he's wrong, he'll ask you why, and if you have good reasons, then he'll change his mind. This is by being open-minded.
Actually Mike, this is not true. Just look at the discussion that Jewish Atheist had on Absolute Morality Even when just a minor few of the major flaws of Relative Morality were laid out, no one changed their views. There was none of this changing anyone's mind if the reasoning is good, as you so desire to put forth. Liberals are just as stuck in their ways as Conservatives.
I have known many Conservative Christians who are more open, kind, and generous to people than any other people. Just look at the Katrina efforts. It was the churches and religious organizations that did the majority of opening their doors personally to the Katrina victims. The church that we go to is a church of around 150 people. The church was planning on hosting and helping 300 people find homes and people to stay with.
And you find this "Liberals generally are making the rules up as they go along" to be a good thing!
Conservatives will still believe that having Homosexuals as parents is wrong,
No, Cristians will still believe as the Bible teaches, that Homosexuality is wrong.
Well JC, am I wrong? Or IF my above assertion happened, would you be comfortable with having Homosexuals as an active part of the community?
Actually, i have known numerous people who are homosexual. I have had a number of friends who have even successfully left the homosexual lifestyle. The point is that homosexuality is a sin, but then so is sex outside of the bonds of marriage, so is stealing, so are numerous numerous other things. Christ said to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength and to love your neighbor as yourself. Not, love your neighbor as long as you agree with their philosophy and they are perfect doing no wrong. I have known plenty of Christians that have lived this out far better than i have seen Liberals.
So, if your logic follows, heterosexual males should be banned from coaching women's sports because of the high incidence of seduction of players by the coaches
If you are talking about grown men time and time again seducing young (underage) girls, than yeah. Actually you see this played out in facilities that work with the developmentally disabled. No insitiution for the developmentally disabled that i know of would allow men to be the caregivers of developmentally disabled women due to the high occurance of molestations. So as the logic of tolerance and "open-mindedness goes, if it was shown time and time again that there was a high rate of one population molesting young boys or young girls this population should be allowed to continue without check.
Conservatives will still believe that having Homosexuals as parents is wrong,... Well JC, am I wrong? Or IF my above assertion happened, would you be comfortable with having Homosexuals as an active part of the community?
Actually, one of my professors confided in me a situation that he had run into. Representatives of the state came to him. Numerous homosexual couples had come to them wanting to adopt. The state saw this as a very serious matter. They did not want to deny them the ability to adopt, but they also wanted to protect their back and prevent lawsuits in the case of abuse and neglect. So they asked him to meet with these prospective parents and make a recommendation as to whether they were healthy individuals or if they would be considered high risk. So this therapist met with the individuals of the couples and the couples to assess their mental health and if they would make healthy parents. He stated that not a single one of the couples that were brought to him could he consciously recommend. They had so much extremely unhealthy emotional baggage, past personal abuse and neglect among other things that they would be extremely high risk for abuse. He stated that it wouldn't have mattered in the slightest bit if they had been heterosexual couples, he would have given exactly the same report.
The point isn't whether X is a sin in your religon's point of view. The point is whether or not your personal morality should be imposed on the larger society. (As Mike pointed out, it is already imposed on the larger society, but that's another issue)There is an important distinction there that seems lost on you.
I'm labeling it your personal morality because Christianity is a diverse set of beliefs, yours is just one of them.
The point isn't whether X is a sin in your religon's point of view. The point is whether or not your personal morality should be imposed on the larger society.
Actually, the point is that every person and viewpoint is intolerant, narrow-minded, and biased, and that isn't necessarily a bad thing. To criticize one viewpoint only as being narrow-minded, intolerant, and biased while stating or implying that another is better because it is claimed that it isn't is as the sayings go "the pot calling the kettle black" and "one man saying 'let me take the speck out of your eye' while he has a plank in his".
Actually, the point is that every person and viewpoint is intolerant, narrow-minded, and biased, and that isn't necessarily a bad thing. To criticize one viewpoint only as being narrow-minded, intolerant, and biased while stating or implying that another is better because it is claimed that it isn't is as the sayings go "the pot calling the kettle black" and "one man saying 'let me take the speck out of your eye' while he has a plank in his".
Can you follow this argument:
being intolerant of intolerance is less intolerant than being intolerant of tolerance. So yeah, I'm intolerant, but I'm intolerant of your discrimination.
You may say I'm intolerant of Christianity because I want science taught in science class, and theology taught in church, but I advocate that view because it's the only way to insure free excercise of religon for you and I.
You may say I'm intolerant of Christianity because I want science taught in science class, and theology taught in church, but I advocate that view because it's the only way to insure free excercise of religon for you and I.
Actually, the reality is that much of the Science that is taught in schools if full of anti-religious sentiment. Evolution is founded on anti-religious sentiment, that bias has been fed to every evolution leader since. Every theory is based on anti-religious sentiment and it continues to be anti-religious.
The religion that is occuring and being taught in schools is the dogma of anti-religion (aka Atheism). That's not the insuring of free exercise of religion that you state you want. That is giving one religious view a voice at the expense of all others. The seperation of church and state that you preach and say you want in schools simply does not exist, especially in the way you say you want it.
You can't separate science from religion or religion from science. Just as with people and aspects of life, neither is an island to themselves. The physical affects the emotional, affects the spiritual, affects the physical.
When a person changes their understanding of spiritual matters, it affects how they think, which in turn affects them physically. When you change the way people view the physical world it affects their physical lives and their spiritual ones as well. etc.
"but I'm intolerant of your discrimination"
Thus preaching science at the expense of all but one religious view is discrimination. Thus we go full circle.
eric said...
"If I understand JC correctly here, his position is that the two people of the same gender marrying are doing harm to someone else? (or is it each other?)."
Actually, it's the fact that they (homosexual couples) want to take a biblical institution that God set up, marriage, and change the meaning of it--that's what Christians have a problem with. Look in any dictionary for the definition of these words:
marriage
husband
wife
example of one source:
Main Entry: mar·riage
Pronunciation: 'mer-ij, 'ma-rij
Function: noun
Etymology: Middle English mariage, from Anglo-French, from marier to marry
1 a (1) : the state of being united to a person of the opposite sex as husband or wife in a consensual and contractual relationship recognized by law
That's the cut and dry definition of marriage. It's the ceremony we are protecting--not ourselves.
JC - you and I fundamentally disagree about evolution (and science in general) conflicting with Christianity. I don't think evolution is in conflict with every religon, or even all denominations of Christianity. You won't convince me otherwise, and I won't convince you over to my point of view.
Sadie Lou:
Actually, it's the fact that they (homosexual couples) want to take a biblical institution that God set up, marriage, and change the meaning of it--that's what Christians have a problem with. Look in any dictionary for the definition of these words:
Wrong. Homosexual couples seek to take the legal definition of marriage and have it apply to them. They are not the same thing. There are many things married couples have from a legal standpoint that are unavailable to committed gay couples. No one is interested in forcing your pastor or priest to wed two people of the same gender. A justice of the peace wedding between a man and a woman is certainly not a biblical union, in any sense. When you get married in a church there are two marriages that happen, one in your religon's point of view, and one in the government's. In fact there's is nothing inherently Christian about the societal notion of marriage. Monogamous arriage as a social convention has existed a lot longer than Christianity.
Also - saying that a definition can't change by quoting the definition is a circular argument, and logically inconsistent.
That doesn’t really answer my question, unless you say that no homosexual couples can ever be mentally balanced. My question was that IF homosexuals turn out to be great parents, would you THEN change your feelings on them being allowed to be parents?
Actually, i don't know if i can answer this. What you're asking is the antithesis of what appears to be the case. Thus any response would be mere speculation and supposition.
Science doesn’t care what the Bible says; it only cares about what beliefs/theories are correct and provable under its rules.
No, science doesn't care about the Bible. If it was true science i wouldn't have a problem with it. However, as i said previously "Evolution is founded on anti-religious sentiment, that bias has been fed to every evolution leader since. Every theory is based on anti-religious sentiment and it continues to be anti-religious." Thus while science in itself is not anti-religious; scientists, their theories, and how those theories are taught are subject to a great deal of bias. Thus it is not Science but rather people that i have the problem with.
You can't separate science from religion or religion from science. Just as with people and aspects of life, neither is an island to themselves. The physical affects the emotional, affects the spiritual, affects the physical.
My scientific and religious beliefs can coexist in conflict.
True, Beliefs about science and religion can be seperate, however science and religion are interrelated whether you want them to be or not. As with the body, mind, and spirit, you can believe that your body and mind are seperate but that does not negate the connection between them.
Ah, Mike strikes again!
I think i will post this if you don't mind.
Post a Comment