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[Criptfeind]

But what about them marrying? And having sex?

[Cryxis, Prince of Doom]

But what about them marrying? And having sex?

Nothing wrong with it, as long as its one man one woman and they get married at a church
At least they tried i guess

[Cheeetar]

But they're not making children, or continuing their genes. What's the point- how is it not unholy?

[Frumple]

... did the bible ever actually say anything about getting married at a church? I actually recall a few passages that are outright hostile to the concept of organized religion (Matthews 6:1-34, again. I like that one.), for what that's worth. Do vaguely remember something about being married in the eyes of god, sure, but claiming the church is equal to god sounds like a hilarious bout of heresy to me

But nah, they didn't "try". A sterile person is no more capable of trying to produce children than a strictly homosexual one, by th'measure you're using Cryx. If reproduction is the basis of marriage, a person incapable of reproduction is no more capable of committing an act of congress without sin than a strictly homosexual one. Their marriages would necessarily be false, and any sexual acts they perform extramarital in nature, as they are outside the purpose (being reproduction) of marriage.

E: Hell, you could probably make the case that a sterile person having sex is a greater sin than homosexual sex -- after all, the sterile individual has been made by god (well, barring surgical procedures) to not reproduce, and attempting otherwise isn't just incidental sin, but in outright direct contradiction to the manifested will of God. One would think that would be frowned on, somewhat.

[Phmcw]

Cryxis, you're just going with the times. In the old days, being unable to have chilrdren was literally ground for divorce.

And why ask for forgiveness when god made you as you are, by nature and nuture? Sin is the product of his creation, and he leave us battleling it. It's more or less admited that some homosexual have no attraction for women. God crused them with that. Shouldn't God ask for forgiveness instead?

[Baffler]

Nope, I was wrong. Don't worry about this.

[Morrigi]

Deist here. Personally, I don't give a damn what consenting adults do in the bedroom, as long as it stays there.

[Nerjin]

I don't have a lot of time to talk about this but I will be posting a few more in-depth thoughts after I get home. I am an athiest and a man who believes that ALL people should be treated equally. However something Cryxis [I think he was the originator of the thread] has said struck me as... Rather hypocritical.

"Hate the sin, love the sinner" is NOT an okay attitude to take to be entirely frank. I'll explain in depth later but the 'sin' of loving another human being in a healthy relationship is perfectly fine. Judging someone for doing something like this strikes me as rather immoral to be honest. You are looking down on that person. Judging them and stating that they are less than you.

Maybe I misunderstood you but that's the view I got.

Disclaimer: I get very upset when people's rights are being violated. We should base our morals on logic and reason as opposed to bronze-age creation myths which contradict themselves and everything we know with modern science. So that's where I'm coming from with this.

[Loam]

Hot damn this thread is hot. How do you lower-boarders manage all these posts?

I'll weigh in with my opinions, 'cause I see a lot of misunderstanding going around; at least, misunderstanding according to Catholic theology.
(NB: not all my views are consistent with the general Catholic consensus. I maintain that they do not constitute heresy, however)

The primary problem I see is a very limited view of God. Let's get one thing straight: whatever He is (I use the accepted pronoun for convenience), God is not the elderly-gentleman-with-a-penchant-for-violent-rage as he seems to be portrayed here. I am genuinely surprised that this thread has gone on for ten pages and not a single person has mentioned the Trinity - you know, only the defining belief for all Christianity? That just tells me how ill-informed people are.

The "Old Man God" view (which I'm calling Exotheism) views God as "outside" Creation: imagine Creation as big circle, and God is outside that circle. This is absolutely anathema to a my understanding of God. God is not separate from Creation; in fact, all Creation - that is, everything - is inside of God, and He inside of everything. This is not Pantheism, either: in pantheism, God is a function of the universe - if you took away the universe, God would disappear as well. My view is Panentheism, in which God at once transcends and pervades Creation. St. Bonaventure describes God as "an intelligible sphere, the center of which is everywhere, and the circumference is nowhere."

To show the nuance of this God: we must, to be as correct as possible, say that God doesn't exist. That doesn't mean He's not real - in fact, He is the Ultimate Reality - but "existence" as we comprehend it is not a property of God. It would be more correct (though not perfectly so) to say that He is existence itself.

Now this God, who is ever-beyond and yet ever-present, is also not a single entity, but comprises three Persons in one Divine Essence (I'm using the standard diction for these things, sorry if it sounds so esoteric): Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The Trinity is the mystery of the Church - it defies our comprehension (though not necessarily our reason). However, to the best of our abilities we have tried, if not to explain, at least to illuminate the matter. The most common expression builds off the "God is Love" statement from St. Paul (I think?): the Father is the Lover, the Son the Beloved, and the Holy Spirit the Love between them. The important thing, for the moment, is that God is not an individual being, but a community of persons (NOTE: NOT three gods, but three Persons in one God).

Long story short, and very much boiled-down, God comprises everything. He is the source of everything, the existence of everything, and the end goal of everything. Anything which is not God (i.e. sin) is in fact nothingness, a lack of actual "stuff," like darkness is the absence of light. As such, God does not make arbitrary decrees for humans to follow; nor is it entirely true that He has ordered the universe in any certain way - rather, the universe is ordered (according to natural laws of physics as much as moral laws) because those laws reflect the nature of God, not because God arbitrarily decreed the existence of gravity. Certain actions are sinful, not because they break some irrational law of a bearded sky-man, but because they are a turning-away from God (and by extension, the natural order).

Whew. I apologize for the befuddling and grossly insufficient effort to explain my position (there's a reason St. Augustine needed six hundred pages of Latin to talk about just the Trinity). If you want to know more about this or its implications, I'll be happy to oblige, but it's all pretty complex: religion isn't just a table of beliefs but a web of principles and consequences, all of which are so interrelated that talking about one demands that you explain another. I really just wanted people to understand that there's a whole hell of a lot more to God than anyone has mentioned (speaking of which, I haven't even touched on hell. Shit).

Oh, I might as well weigh in on homosexuality too: I believe the Catholic position has been given, if not here then somewhere else on the fora. I only say that I agree with a certain pope - the current buzz over homosexuality is way overblown (mostly, I think, to long-held culture taboos more than religious beliefs) and that things like divorce pose a much, much, much greater threat to the sanctity of marriage than gay couples or Yankee liberals.

[Baffler]

Couldn't have said it better myself. This is basically the point I promised I would elaborate on a few pages ago, but I don't think I could have managed so eloquently. I would say, though, that the problem of divorce is a pretty muddy one. A civil union is not a marriage in the eyes of the Church, so ending a civil union is only really concerning insofar as it undermines the legitimacy of sacramental union.

Of course, people married by the state and not the Church are probably not remaining celibate afterward, if they ever were beforehand. It can also lead to things like people having a wedding in church and having the marriage recognized by the state, divorcing through the state, and later remarrying: therefore committing adultery.

The primary problem I see is a very limited view of God. Let's get one thing straight: whatever He is (I use the accepted pronoun for convenience), God is not the elderly-gentleman-with-a-penchant-for-violent-rage as he seems to be portrayed here. I am genuinely surprised that this thread has gone on for ten pages and not a single person has mentioned the Trinity - you know, only the defining belief for all Christianity? That just tells me how ill-informed people are.

Most of the conversation so far has mostly been on pretty specific points of doctrine. I think speaking in terms of He is a useful convenience to keep mostly on topic.

[Phmcw]

A) The trinity isn't common to all chrisistanity.

B) A bit sad that he didn't share that info with everyone that killed in his name.

God would disappear as well. My view is Panentheism, in which God at once transcends and pervades Creation.

Like a dwarf fortress player to dwarf fortress, got it.

that things like divorce pose a much, much, much greater threat to the sanctity of marriage than gay couples or Yankee liberals.

You mean it's dead and burried? Yeah, but that's not the first time.

[Frumple]

To show the nuance of this God: we must, to be as correct as possible, say that God doesn't exist. That doesn't mean He's not real - in fact, He is the Ultimate Reality - but "existence" as we comprehend it is not a property of God. It would be more correct (though not perfectly so) to say that He is existence itself.

[snip]

Long story short, and very much boiled-down, God comprises everything. He is the source of everything, the existence of everything, and the end goal of everything. Anything which is not God (i.e. sin) is in fact nothingness, a lack of actual "stuff," like darkness is the absence of light. As such, God does not make arbitrary decrees for humans to follow; nor is it entirely true that He has ordered the universe in any certain way - rather, the universe is ordered (according to natural laws of physics as much as moral laws) because those laws reflect the nature of God, not because God arbitrarily decreed the existence of gravity. Certain actions are sinful, not because they break some irrational law of a bearded sky-man, but because they are a turning-away from God (and by extension, the natural order).

Ohey, christian materialism! I liked that when I ran into it -- it was silly, but I liked it. Beyond the absolute non-existence of sin,* it meant that your average wall is more godly than you average human. Goodness -- that is, likeness to God -- being brute existence and all that. Holiness to whatever weighs the most! Great stuff, pretty fun to read about. I cracked up entirely the first time I actually figured out what the medieval folks that originated the concept were implying -- seriously, I was giggling off and on for days -- but several of its formulations are pretty fascinating attempts to reconcile perfection (and, in particular, omnipresence) with sin. Still have something of a fondness for it as an explanation of the nature of god, if only because of how superfluous it makes metaphysics.

Complete divorce between the goodness of god and the goodness of man, though. Good in the sense of the divine meaning simple existent matter, whereas Good in the sense of man meaning... well, a bunch of other stuff. Hilarious appropriation of a completely unrelated word, basically -- one of those fairly interesting subjects regarding religious language and how it differs from, well, non-religious language. Makes talking about it in context of morality really difficult, though, since you're trying to juggle two completely unrelated definitions for the concept of goodness.

*Sin, being literal non-existence, doesn't... well, it doesn't exist. It's not a thing, and talking about it is something approaching self-contradiction. It's difficult to talk about a thing that is not and cannot be. The concept of it being an absence is a fairly silly concept, since very, very few things (if anything) exists in an actual void. An absence is not a lack, but rather something else being there

[Frumple]

Pretty much exactly. In modern-ish terms, it's basically saying that God is the atomic structure of reality. Mind you, it'd probably be something quantum these days, but that's basically it.

YWHW as a bunch of turtles, basically. As said, it's great stuff.

[burningpet]

Long Text

Interesting. can you refer to further reading material about:

A) Sin is nothingness and nothingness is Sin.

B) That the "Natural order" you are speaking of and that is in the path of god and into god, is in fact a preexisting, predetermined godly manifested order and not men made order (When speaking about a moral order) and if such a godly manifested order has been established how can we, mortal men, know how to follow it if it keeps changing (If you are a Christian, then you are following certain laws that are attributed to Jesus yet are in conflict with Jewish laws, despite the christianity and Jesus acceptance of Moses as a true prophet.)

[Frumple]

A is actually sin as an absence (of god), if you want to be particular (it becomes nothingness when you consider god to == existence, since there is no existent thing that does not exist, i.e. is of god ), and I want to say (one of) the earliest manifestation(s) of that came from one of the early Big As in Christian theology. Aquinas or Augustine, iirc, but somewhere way back in that direction. It's an old attempt to explain the problem of evil.

Either of those two can be pretty fun to read regardless, honestly. They wrote some neat stuff.