Divinity is much more unified than humanity. I am not saying the analogy is perfect. Just that it demonstrates that there is nothing contradictory about the Trinity.
Analogies cannot and need not be perfect, of course. But this one is just simply not applicable, as you have shown yourself. Try again, if you like. Maybe God is like conjoined triplets?
Those things also violate the teachings of Christianity because the Constitution is based on many Christian principles as I demonstrated earlier. The Treaty of Tripoli was an appeasement measure to stop the Muslims from attacking our ships. Politicians stretched the truth even back then in order prevent international interference and military attack. IOW they lied.
No, I'm afraid you didn't demonstrate that earlier, nor will you. And while I'm sure politicians are quite capable of lying, in this case they told the simple truth. The Constitution is in no sense based on the Christian religion. It doesn't mention Jesus, God or the Bible at all, whether openly or in any other way.
No secular state would claim that our rights come from the Creator and based on the laws of Natures God.
Again, the Declaration of Independence is not the law of the land. It is simply a statement that the Colonies are declaring independence from the English crown. Once they had declared independence and won it, the Founders had decisions to make about what sort of place they wanted their new country to be, and they decided that it should be a secular state.
Think about this: if they
had wanted it to be a Christian constituton, they had numerous opportunities to make it so. It's ridiculous to think that they overlooked all of these by accident, leaving the Constitution bare of any reference to God, never mind Christianity, while still intending that Christianity should be the official religion of their new country. Did you miss that? Other Christians didn't. There was plenty of bitter opposition to the new Constitution precisely
because it didn't mention God or Christianity in any way, and that opposition continued for centuries.
No, I'm afraid that when we ask the question "is the USA a secular nation" and we find authorities stating that it is, you have little room to dispute.
Nowhere in the Constitution does it even deal with marriage. The founders believed marriage was a state issue. In addition, even heterosexuals don't have a RIGHT to marriage as I demonstrated earlier.
In so stating, you're just shooting yourself in the foot. You want to argue that heterosexuals have no right to get married? Be my guest. But you're arguing with a strawman. The question is, do two people who love each other and
wish to get married have the right to do so? Of course they do.
No, good is not what God says, the good is what God is. Good is the nature of God.
You're still stuck on the dilemma. You claim that God provides a standard against which we can measure goodness? Okay, fine. Prove it logically. So far, you've said nothing but "He just is." You said you weren't going to give us circular reasoning, then you did.
So, good is the nature of God, you say? Fine. So what does it mean when you say God’s nature is good? Is God’s nature good because it measures up to some external standard, or is good itself defined by whatever way God’s nature is? I imagine you'll go for the latter, but all that means is that goodness is now meaningless; whatever God's nature said was good is good. If God's nature said that raping children, stealing from old ladies and kicking puppies was good, it would be. Would you object? On what grounds could you do so? God told you otherwise? So what? Maybe His nature is to change His mind.
Don't you see, saying that goodness is God's nature, with no external standard, renders goodness completely meaningless. By your logic, there is no way that we can say what is good. If you want to dispute this, please try to do so by providing a rational argument.
I did not make it up, it is a biological fact, look it up.
That you need a man and a woman to have a baby? Of course that's true. The question is, why should that prevent two homosexual people from marrying? All you're doing is asserting that this inability should disqualify them, without any grounds. You're trying to give yourself grounds by making up some pretext about marriage being a mystical union that can only take place along with insemination, but that's nonsense. The mystical union is simply called love, and homosexuals are just as capable of it as heterosexuals - no matter what your religion claims.
Take a look at what you next said:
The state has a right to protect the health of the people of the society.
How do you do that?
You do that the same way I did. It makes sense. When I say "All people have the right to act as they see fit, unless there is good reason to prohibit that act in the overriding interests of society" and you say "The state has a right to protect the health of the people of the society" we're both saying much the same thing.
The only thing is, your statement is irrational in this case. You're missing the key part, the part that I said:
unless there is a good reason to prohibit that act in the overriding interests of society. You will need a very good reason to ban gay marriage, and you don't have one.
You think that gay sex is harmful? Well, all sex is potentially harmful. Have you never heard of STDs? Following your own logic, the state should ban not just gay sex, but all sex, except under strictly monitored and vetted conditions. That would solve the crises of abortion, diseases, unwanted pregnancies, loose moral conduct and so on, wouldn't it?
Of course, there are very good reasons why the state doesn't do this, not least that it would be a monstrous violation of the rights of the individual. A violation you are only too happy to see happen, but only in the case of people you have a religious objection to - homosexuals.
As we're seen in this whole, long thread - follow your arguments logically, and they wind up refuting themselves, often by showing that what they would lead to is a hell on earth.
In fact, "You say gay people can't have children. Well, so what?" is very much the main theme of this argument, and far from having dealt with it you still have yet to make a reasonable point about it. do you mean to invalidate every marriage that can't produce children? The infertile, the disabled, the marriages of people too old, marriages between people who have firmly stated that they do not wish to ever have children? No? Then, once again, you are guilty of the fallacy of special pleading.
Because it cannot unite persons, it is a depersonalizing behavior.
Nonsense. Two homosexual people expressing their love for each other through physical intimacy, a personalizing experience? What on earth are you talking about?
No, other oppressed peoples have not had these issues.
Of course they have. Black people suffer from racism, Jewish people suffer from anti-semitism, and it is well-documented how gay people suffer from homophobia.
Adolf Hitler had a strong affection for the Aryan race out of kinship and personal ties and felt that the jews would destroy them so he tried to destroy the jews before they could destroy his people. So since that fits your definition of love, do you agree that Hitler was engaging in loving behavior when he started the holocaust?
Of course not. He loved the Aryan people (a thoroughly misleading simplification, but let's go with it for now) and his love led him to do hateful things to people he perceived as his enemies. Simple.
"You evil people! Boy, you've really got it coming."
Hmmm. Doesn't seem very helpful in proving there are "different levels of hell," especially the ones such as you imagined in your colourful story about families choosing to go to hell forever.
New heavens and a new earth, it says. You told me you had proof that God was going to create a parallel universe for people to suffer in.
Not that I mind if that's what your religion says, but that's the point: you're just making things up to suit your own arguments.
No, it has to be eternal because your sin can affect others negatively for eternity. And you are rebelling against the eternal good.
So, because I stole a pencil when I was five years old, I deserve to be roasted over a barbecue for umpteen trillion years? That's what your logic leads to. It's a good thing we have a superior human sense of justice that sees such punishments as abhorrent. Punishment should fit the crime. Christian punishment doesn't - cannot, by definition. No crime can be so terrible that it must be punished forever. That would be answering wrong with an infinitely greater wrong.
True it does not go into a great deal of detail and reference to fire is plainly Hebrew rabbinic hyperbole but it plainly teaches there are different levels of treatment in hell as I demonstrated above.
No, it doesn't go into a great deal of detail, does it? In fact, hardly any at all. All that you're demonstrating is that you're happy to make your own religion up.
No, it is not unbiblical, maybe a slightly unorthodox interpretation, but nowhere in the bible is the concept disproven.
You could say that about an
awful lot of things.
It's clear that you're trying to have your cake and eat it too. On the one hand, you think that hell mustn't be too bad, because you have to defend your idea that people might, of their own free will, choose to go there. On the other hand, you cannot escape your Christian notions that hell is a terrible punishment, made infinitely bad by its infinite nature. This is a problem that has bedevilled, no pun intended, Christians since the concept of hell first came into being, and I'm afraid you're no closer to solving it.