Christian Bakers and Gay Wedding Cakes

[SilverBear]

If you refer to 'gay brain' studies such as LeVay's

Simon LeVay - Wikipedia

Why would FireDragon be referring to something as dated at this?

 

[Lily of Valleys]

Simon LeVay's studies are older. I mean the fact that there are actual physical, behavioral, and psychometric differences between gay men and straight men. Scientists may have also discovered a gay gene:

What do the new ‘gay genes’ tell us about sexual orientation?

There is a well-known phenomenon called "gaydar" and it turns out that many people actually can readily identify gay men by their body language and speech. Gay men often have hypertonality in their speech, similar to how women speak.

Again, this all points to actual biological differences between gay men as the root of their sexual orientation ,that it is not merely a chosen behavior.

It's really important to realize that association does not imply causation.

Lifestyle and environmental influences can affect our biology, and these changes can actually be observed at the DNA level. Our choices can make real differences in how we develop as human beings.

 

[dms1972]

So the young teen I had to talk to years ago that was in despair about being gay and baptist was demon possessed? I don't think so.

Sure probably not, I don't think the other poster was suggesting all people who identify as gay are demon possesed, that's why there is a distinction in pastoral theology such as that of Leanne Payne and the Sanford's between demon oppressed, demonized, and demon possessed.

Besides some people worry they are homosexual, when they are not, because of name calling, that's a burden they don't need to bear.

But if you say its 'flim flam' to draw the encouragement from the apostle's words in 1 Corinthians 6:11 what Hope are you going to offer someone like the person you mention who is in despair. It's the counsel of the gay-lib movement that is the counsel of despair, not the counsel of God's Word.

 

[FireDragon76]

Sure probably not, I don't think the other poster was suggesting all people who identify as gay are demon possesed, that's why there is a distinction in pastoral theology such as that of Leanne Payne and the Sanford's between demon oppressed, demonized, and demon possessed.

Besides some people worry they are homosexual, when they are not, because of name calling, that's a burden they don't need to bear.

But if you say its 'flim flam' to draw the encouragement from the apostle's words in 1 Corinthians 6:11 what Hope are you going to offer someone like the person you mention who is in despair. It's the counsel of the gay-lib movement that is the counsel of despair, not the counsel of God's Word.

You don't get to redefine the experiences of the many brave LGBT individuals out there who have worked hard for their dignity and rights. All you prove when you talk like this is how irrelevant conservative Christians have become in engaging in true moral discourse.

 

[Phil 1:21]

I don't expect my church to perfectly match up with my expectations. And I'm not on the church council. In my church, this issue is considered one in which Christians may disagree in good conscience, as per our 2009 social statement on sexuality.

I honestly do respect those who are in a different place than I am on this issue. I just don't respect people using the Christian faith to attack the dignity of gay people. We are free to consider homosexual sex a sin, we are not free to judge gay people or refuse to serve them.

My congregation is not mean to gay people, and my religion does not condone discriminating against anyone. We just aren't ready as congregation to have gay wedding ceremonies. But we welcome everyone.

Lovely plank.

 

[Galaxy Hunter]

.

You just want to be mean to gay people because they won't agree with your religious beliefs. That is wrong.

So if my 50 year old neighbor told me he had an 18 year old girlfriend because his wife of 30 years has gotten fat and I told him the Bible says that's wrong, you'd tell me I'm being mean to him?

 

[SolomonVII]

It's really important to realize that association does not imply causation.

Lifestyle and environmental influences can affect our biology, and these changes can actually be observed at the DNA level. Our choices can make real differences in how we develop as human beings.

George Gilder, who did a lot of research into men and marriage, noted how powerful sexual experience in the developmental window of adolsescence can be for boys, especially with homosexual experience.
Even a single experience can change the whole trajectory of our lives.

There are few things that have as powerful an influence in our lives as sexual experience. Further, sex is not a frivolous recreational activity. It very much defines who we are.

While I don't totally agree with the wisdom of Jewish sages, for example, who placed Life at the highest value and stated that it ought to define our choices with the exception of rape, where death is preferable as a choice to make over being raped, what that wisdom recognizes is that sex and sexual experience are supremely critical in defining who we become and who we are. Sex is life altering, and life destroying. It can fulfill the human soul, or destroy it.

100 years of science post-Freud has pushed the idea that Christianity and religion are all about the sexual repression of our natural orientations. What we are finding however in the Age of Weinstein and the Clintons and Trump, is that permissiveness, and giving into our libertine natural tendencies, has had a ruinous effect. Hook-up culture strips us of all dignity.

Few of us are innocents in these matters any more. Changing sexual mores have opened up the field to wider and wider experimentation with sex for vast numbers of people, if not the majority. Our sexual experiences are as vast as our imaginations and our fantasies, which are for all intents and purposes limitless. Our orientations are limitless. No amount of pronouns will ever suffice to describe the varieties of sexual experiences and orientations we are capable of becoming.

I think what a lot of people have discovered through living libertine culture is that what had been advocated to teenagers and everybody else since the Sexual Revolution has been unfulfilling. Nevertheless, the decisions we make when we are more child than adult transform us, and change us forever, even with a single experience.

Maybe it is like when David sinned with Bathsheba, and the world changed forever. Maybe there comes a time when there is no going back to an Israel that remained unfragmented by the consequences of that sin. Falls are like that. Once the Christian mores of a society is destroyed, there is no way to put that Humpty Dumpty together again.

The West is no longer free. When it was predominately Christian, people of the counter-culture were free to turn on, tune in an drop out. That is not the freedom available to Christians now though. There are 135000 reasons to believe that freedom does not exist. Dropping out and saying leave us be is not allowed.
But, being subjected to the totalitarianism of the greying anti-Christian hippies now in charge of the culture does not make the message of Christianity any less true. Happiness does not lie with being a part of the libertine sexual culture. Being persecuted is the better choice than succumbing.

 

[FireDragon76]

I've known gay people that knew they were gay well before any actual sexual experimentation. One older gay man I knew as a friend, when he was young, knew he wanted to grow up and marry another male, when everybody else was playing house. That was his idea of what family would be for him. Naive perhaps, but that's what the image was in his head of what his mate would be. He grew up in the deep south in a Pentecostal family.

Now what could have given him that sort of idea, of marrying another man, considering he was old enough that concept was unthinkable in his childhood? It certainly was not the "gay liberation movement", it wasn't Hollywood ,the media, sexual abuse, or a dozen other excuses that Christians typically make for not accepting the obvious truth: that homosexual orientation is innate.

 

[now faith]

Baking a cake is not a "ceremony".



I know Jesus. I don't need the Christian Right to mediate my relationship with him.

There is nothing militant about asking for equality for all people under the law. That's just a basic human right.

It's all about those who believe their agenda is to persecute Christians, simply because Christians do not accept their behavior.
Militants claim human
rights while the beat down is relentless.
It does not matter though how cruel militants in the homosexual community are ,they will never be considered normal or accepted among true Christians unless they repent and turn away.
Never not now or in the past or in the future.
When Paul said it's better to marry than to burn ,He meant the opposite sex.
Sodomites were burned to ashes ,along with the lesbians and bisexuals at Sodom and Gomorrah.
So anyone who wants to take it up with God ,you most certianly will one day.

 

[now faith]

they were homosexual and are now happy, functioning heterosexuals? or did they "leave the homosexual lifestyle" or "still struggle with homosexual thoughts"? There is a differnce

According to who's experience?
It seems you are promoting homosexuals as unable to be called to salvation.
It seems you know how all homosexuals feel about their lifestyle.
It seems that it never occurred to you some are ashamed of the life they were guided to by Child molesters.
It ain't gonna fly
Homosexuals must repent or die reprobate,you have the Schripture so why avoid the truth?
If someone was beating ,or taunting a homosexual , I would defend them,even if they are sinners bound for Hell.
But militants have no love of Christ ,so they seek to continue inflicting pain for a minor insult.
They are the bully,they are the haters of others ,and they do not have the love of Christ in their heart or they would forgive the Baker.

 

[now faith]

You don't get to redefine the experiences of the many brave LGBT individuals out there who have worked hard for their dignity and rights. All you prove when you talk like this is how irrelevant conservative Christians have become in engaging in true moral discourse.

Their dignity?
Since when are Christians forced to turn our backs on God over
Anyone's dignity?
We do not compromise ,or corrupt God's Word ,over someone's sex life.

Matthew 17: 16. And I brought him to thy disciples, and they could not cure him. 17. Then Jesus answered and said, O faithless and perverse generation, how long shall I be with you? how long shall I suffer you? bring him hither to me. 18. And Jesus rebuked the devil; and he departed out of him: and the child was cured from that very hour.

According to your circular logic, Christ would have had to apologize to the devil.

 

[SilverBear]

According to who's experience?
It seems you are promoting homosexuals as unable to be called to salvation.
It seems you know how all homosexuals feel about their lifestyle.
It seems that it never occurred to you some are ashamed of the life they were guided to by Child molesters.
It ain't gonna fly
Homosexuals must repent or die reprobate,you have the Schripture so why avoid the truth?
If someone was beating ,or taunting a homosexual , I would defend them,even if they are sinners bound for Hell.

who defends them against you?

 

[now faith]

who defends them against you?

You don't need worry about me ,it's the day of judgement that all will face , people need to wonder about.

 

[now faith]

So if my 50 year old neighbor told me he had an 18 year old girlfriend because his wife of 30 years has gotten fat and I told him the Bible says that's wrong, you'd tell me I'm being mean to him?

You would be kind to him ,knowing what is around the corner of his life.

 

[SilverBear]

You don't need worry about me ,it's the day of judgement that all will face , people need to wonder about.

I'm sorry I misread your post. when you said: "If someone was beating ,or taunting a homosexual , I would defend them" I assumed you were talking about defending the one being bullied. I see now you meant you would defend the abuser.

 

[FireDragon76]

You don't need worry about me ,it's the day of judgement that all will face , people need to wonder about.

God as judge is the wrong image to be predominant for our time and place. Jesus came as the friend of sinners, not their judge. In fact he refused to judge sinners (John 8). He only judged the religious authorities that went around condemning people living on the margins of their society. He spoke out for people who were seeking God but whose lifestyle wasn't pure enough. And he challenged a religious system that was oppressing them, and for that he was crucified.

Gay people have existed on the margins of our civilization for a very long time. I don't think God is pleased when Christians use the Bible to attack gay people and to deny them civil rights.

 

[Phil 1:21]

God as judge is the wrong image to be predominant for our time and place.

Yes, because as Paul so succinctly put it...

"For the time will come when people will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear." 2 Timothy 4:3

Lots of people want Jesus as their savior, but not as their Lord. They're like the person who came to the wedding without his wedding clothes, and we all know how that ended.

In fact he refused to judge sinners (John 8).

“Then neither do I condemn you,” Jesus declared. “Go now and leave your life of sin.” John 8:11

It seems a lot of people forget that second part.

 

[dms1972]

You don't get to redefine the experiences of the many brave LGBT individuals out there who have worked hard for their dignity and rights. All you prove when you talk like this is how irrelevant conservative Christians have become in engaging in true moral discourse.

This isn't about a cake I am talking about. I don't wish to redefine anyone's experiences, they are what they were. But to cling to hurts, or dramatise them is not the way forward either. To suggest the mere possibility of misinterpretation is reasonable. But what you say cuts another way, gays don't get to make their 'personal truth' a model interpretation for others, they don't get to tell others that 'your homosexuality is inborn' when that flies in the face of the best evidence, they don't get to limit the potentialities of a new life for a christian.

Christians who have overcome, and won a inner victory through the power of the Gospel and the Holy Spirit in their lives, have by God grace, made courageous efforts too, often against a stream of discouragement and scepticism, and opposition. I read the testimony of one man who had been in a gay lifestyle for a number of years, but was beginning to find healing after attending a pastoral care ministry. He was faced with being alone for a number of days, and began to feel temptations to resolve his loneliness in the way had used to go out in search of a casual gay encounter. He stood true to his faith in Christ for several hours, and was delivered from the temptation. You don't get to redefine his experience, or others like him, which is what you do when you dismiss it as 'flim flam'

 

[FireDragon76]

Nobody should go against their conscience, that's not what I'm saying. But I don't think a conscience is well informed when it insists on imposing ones purely religious scruples on another human being, particularly one who does not share ones religious presuppositions and assumptions. Natural law arguments against homosexuality are full of logical fallacies and the science doesn't support the notion that homosexuality is a pathology.

 

[dms1972]

It's really important to realize that association does not imply causation.

Lifestyle and environmental influences can affect our biology, and these changes can actually be observed at the DNA level. Our choices can make real differences in how we develop as human beings.

Thanks for mentioning this and the video. I have a few questions though, Epi- tends to modify a term in the sense of something that is additional alongside, rather than above. Maybe just a poor choice of words in the narrator. But it is interesting.

That video explains some things, but its not talking about the 'beyond', the 'transcendent'. Karl Stern wrote 'every empirical fact contains it beyond'. That's what is missing more often than not in contemporary discussions of gender and sexuality. He wrote at a time when men were cut off from the feminine, that's what his book 'The Flight from Woman' was about. He looked at the matter in the lives and writings of five or six philosophers : Descartes, Sartre, Schopenhauer, Kierkegarrd, and Goethe I think. Now however the situation has changed somewhat again, Payne writes :'many men who seek help...will now more often be seen floundering, to one extent or another in an overtly developed feminine, or that which is a caricature of the feminine.'