No please don't reply. But like I said you cannot help yourself lol. When you see my reply bells start ringing lol.
I dont get any "bell". Your post appears in the list of replies to threads I posted in. And I told you exactly why I replied. No need for you to make stuff up about that.
False. Prove it. It was illegal for SSM only 20 odd years ago.
The bible doesn't mention "SSM".
The norm was biblical based marriage between a man and women.
Marriages between a man and womEn (a very biblical form, I'm surprised you got it correct) has not been legal in most "Christian countries" for a very long time. (Sure, Utah let it slide during their territorial period and government officials were proud of having multiple wives, but that certainly isn't the norm.)
Go back a little earlier and divorce was illegal as a norms.
"Hard to obtain" and "illegal" are not the same thing, Steve.
en.wikipedia.org
While the Hebrew scripture regulates divorce, Jesus prohibits it. Doesn't seem like those English colonies and successor states were following the teachings of Christ.
You might have found one Steve. "Western countries" criminalized being gay because the bible demanded stonings. Not a great look.
The Bible never bans abortion. There are only couple of passages that come even close to mentioning it. In one a man suspects his wife has been unfaithful and she is given a potion that will cause an abortion if she was. In another, the penalty for physically harming a pregnant woman such that she has an abortion and awards her husband a monetary fine. There is not thing about a woman attempting to terminate her *own* pregnancy.
The societyal norms came from the bible.
A couple seem to be, but even notions like serial monogamy (through marriage) is common throughout the human world and seems to be our preferred mating system.
That some Christians have aboned the biblical norms centuries ago is an outright falsehood.
Why are the mormons the only Christians that have ever professed multiple wives as acceptable? When did the rest of the Christians abandon the biblical notion of multiple wives?
There are plenty of Christians still today who support these same truths. They have never changed. We are talking about the biblical norms and not whether they are being upheld or not. A logical fallacy.
I do notice that these "biblical norms" you speak of are just a list of your conservative social positions. Now this is probably not accidental as they are the only part of "biblical norms" that survive into modern times at all. The rest of the organization of society is entirely secular (non-religion based). Personal freedoms, democracy, etc. are completely non-biblical.
The public square is all public places where the State has control.
That's a fair definition and it is good to know what you are talking about. I frankly like this definition. Especially so, since the public square in this paradigm is decidedly not biblical in my country. (Can't say about yours, I was only there for a week and spent most of it talking about physics.)
That includes laws all the way down to who can speak in the public square and what they can say. This has been evidenced by the fact that they have stopped such speak in the public square. The condoning of deplatforming of certain speakers at public universities is controlling what is allowed to be said in the public square.
None of this is about "biblical".
In fact University heads have been dismissed for doing exactly this.
Name one.
So the State does engage in controlling belief and views in the public square depending on what what the State leans, Left or Right or Christian and conservative or Progressive and liberal. Politics has now become the personal and there is not line between private and public.
I still don't know what this has to do with "biblical". Free speech isn't biblical. (I'm also begining to think I shouldn't have agreed to your definition of "public square". It seems you just want to include forms of speech and publishing, when I thought you were talking about the actions of government. Hmm.)
Thats an obvious falsehood as well. It all depends on what the society believes and supports. The State will usually reflect that. Sometimes the government is pro biblical norms and sometimes its not. But its never a case that the State will not support biblical norms. You don't have to be the church to support biblical norms.
Maybe in your country, but not in mine. The church does not run the state and never has. If anything the forces that are trying to put the church in charge have positions of power (Speaker of the House, Vice President).
Yes they have. well at least under the Biden admins. The Left went out of their way to control speech on media including public owned media and through the institutions.
The fact that the Trump administration has stopped DEI and Trans ideology shows that the State can push their ideological religious beliefs about the world into the public square. Not just that but also legislate it and then prosecute or imitimidate everyone to go along ie a top heavy administration to enforce DEI and Trans ect through policing speech, education (propaganda) and the law.
Some more of your silly culture war nonsense.. Blech. The mere fact that your culture warrior pals could spend the whole Biden admin complaining about "the Woke" is prima facia evidence that their speech was not controlled.
I disagree. The public square was much more friendly and open to Christian and biblical norms. IIts only natural that if these norms are no longer popular and secular norms have taken over an replaced them ie biblical marriage replaced by civil and SSM redefinition, no divorce or discouraged divorce now divorce at will or no marriage at all. Anti abortion now pro choice.
I realize now you are just complaining about the culture changing to be less friendly to biblical regressivism. Boo hoo.
So if these opposing norms become dominant then it stands to reason that any Christian speaking to loudly or in the wrong place and promoting biblical norms is going to get shouted down and even threatened and told to shut up. Or deplatformed. Try and speak on trad marriage, anti abortion and trans at a public university. They would need to call the riot squad lol.
Your paranoia is showing. There is a response that is often made to these types of fears, so I will use a version of it here:
Why is it that you fear for your rights if the common person is accepting of SSM or abortion or non-traditional gender identities, is it that they will treat you like you have treated them?
Are you impressed with the ideas that humans have come up without God or gods. At least say for the Christian God in Christ there is a clear example above humans we can look to.
I already told you I am not impressed with the ideas made up and attributed to gods. I also don't find the person you call Christ to be particularly impressive. (I suspect the mods won't let us explore why.)
The point was that humans have nothing above them to look to.
Same as it ever was.
While at the same time have shown they are completely incapable of knowing what is best.
It's all we have, so we need to try.
Not just that. Having no God above invites many human made ideas that can be 10 times as bad. Its because there is no way to tell what is good or bad and that all beliefs religious or not have equal status.
The problem is that bad religious ideas are more "sticky" than bad non-religious ideas because someone can claim the bad ideas are divine.
Sorry I mean the 'Decl;aration'.
Sorry once again I meant the 'Declaration of Independence'.
Which is just a "Dear John" letter to some decrepit monarch. It is not a governing document. It was literally a resolution passed in the Continental Congress expressing a position in between governing the rebelling colonies and their war.
You cannot have a State without gods. Its impossible.
Of course you can. Plenty of states have existed for many generations without being based on a god. Some of them still exist. (*cough, cough* USA *cough*)
Because life is about gods and morality.
It really isn't. Life with out gods is perfectly tenable (and much more pleasant, trust me). Even this ex-god believer didn't spend much of his time worrying about god. Morality is needed for human civilization to thrive, but it doesn't need gods.
I just gave you examples how the State acts like a church in iposing ideological beliefs. How these play out in the public square in pushing one idea over another. There is no neutrality.
Even if we accept your framing that the state (and here you seem to mean the US government under Joe Biden, which is a rather narrow thing for you to complain about from the other side of the world after Biden is no longer president) is supressing free speach about social issues, it doesn't make the state in to a church.
I really don't get why you Christians who decry your lack of control of society insist on dilutig the notions of "church" "god" and "religion" by calling things that aren't those things by those names.
Humans are not designed to function without belief and morals.
Humans aren't designed at all. Other than that, "so what?".
Governing involves philosophical and ideological beliefs about the world, whether theres a God, what morality is, how society and teh world should be ordered.
The government need not worry about the existence or not of a god or what much of morality is.
If there is no God or gods then who becomes the arbitor of all those things that humans naturally believe and give meaning and morality. Who else but humans themselves.
That's the way it has always been. It is just sometimes groups claiming their ideas are "from god" will have control.
The State becomes the priest, parents, teacher and support worker for health and well being. The political is now the personal. This happened decades ago.
Again, you are suffering from religion confusion. None of those things are religion or church. Therefore, the state is not a priest.
I think so. If a nation is to be unified under the same beliefs and identity.
Uniformity is boring and I have never experienced it.
Then progressive want to change this. Engineer a new identity and order. Then that is basically changing the identity and order of that reality. Its a big change and will create division and chaos because a new order is being imposed.
Blah, blah, culture wars, blah. Just go make some threads about why your culture war positoins should be implemented. The mods will give you cover.
You said you did not like philosophy or cultural sciences. So its understandable that you find it hard to understand. But this is well known and common within behavioural science.
You are still talking gibber jabber.
Lol theres goes my dyslexia again. I look at that word when I write it and I know I mean "recipe" and still write reciept. I am surprised I spelt it correct as well as I usually get the i and e back the front.
Now I'm hungry. I'll go to lunch...
But more important I think you knew what I meant and still you played semantics. Like trying to use this as a red herring for ignoring the original point.
Lol, why go to the other extreme and assume thats my position. Another fallacy.
Nah, I'm pretty sure you are an authoritarian of some sort. You keep wanting to have the state impose your tired morality on me. Decline.
Summary for readers:
Steve is just wanting the state to impose his religiously derived social positions on the rest of us by force of law and can't deal with those of us who resist. Nothing new, or interesting.
