kurt vonnegut said:
TxAgPreacher said:
Cruel would be allowing them to live in their delusion until they go on to perdition.
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We should do whatever it takes to keep them from destroying their lives with sin. However at the end of the day they have to make their own mind up.
It would be better the fewer people were in this position. It should not be mainstreamed as if its ok in any way.
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If a person goes to a doctor and says, I believe that I should have been born blind, the Dr. won't take their eyes out. Instead, they'll try to treat the mental illness.
If you only support your own individual liberties and freedoms, then you don't support liberty and freedom. I think that is what these posts boil down to, right. People that YOU decide are living in sin should not be permitted to live as they see fit and should be treated as mentally ill. Worse yet, you get to choose which sinners are to be marginalized and which aren't. Nevermind the massive amounts of greed and hate and your own fine display on this thread of arrogance and pride, Christians are simply obsessed with sexual sins.
. . . . . then again, maybe you are on to something.
I've been thinking recently that there is something not quite right with these Christians. They hear voices in their head and claim they are from supernatural beings. They support cannibalism and believe that they consume flesh and blood of another human being during their rituals. They idolize a book that supports slavery and murder and rape and genocide. And they threaten everyone with eternal punishment for failure to comply with their made up rules. Their own arrogance and pride have allowed them to convince themselves that they are the sword of God and that they are endowed with the right to hand out their righteous condemnation of people as they see fit.
There is no doubt in my mind that Christianity is a mental illness. These people are delusional and for the sake of mankind, we must marginalize them and their continued poisoning of humanity.
You are destroying your own life through your blind adherence to these fables. And its my belief that I have the right to disallow you from continuing down your wicked path.
See!! Now we're samsies!
(Note: inevitably someone will misunderstand the blatant and intentional mockery that I just posted and think its genuine. Please don't be that someone.)
It really boils down to a wrong understanding of freedom. Here's how George Weigel explains Thomas Aquinas' view of freedom:
"Freedom is a means to human excellence, to human happiness, to the fulfillment of human destiny. Freedom is the capacity to choose wisely and to act well as a matter of habit-or, to use the old-fashioned term, as an outgrowth of virtue. Freedom is the means by which, exercising both our reason and our will, we act on the natural longing for truth, for goodness, and for happiness that is built into us as human beings. Freedom is something that grows in us, and the habit of living freedom wisely must be developed through education, which among other things involves the experience of emulating others who live wisely and well. Freedom is the great organizing principle of the moral life-and since the very possibility of a moral life (the capacity to think and choose) is what distinguishes the human person from the rest of the natural world, freedom is the great organizing principle of a life lived in a truly human way."
Eta: just to sum this up in a few words: the ability to choose is what makes it possible for us to act in a way that's not morally ambiguous. But it doesn't imply that we have the right to do whatever we want to do.
We don't think about lesser animals the same way. If a lion kills and eats a gazelle, he hasn't "murdered" it. If some animal forces copulation onto another animal, it hasn't "raped" it. We understand intuitively there's a dimension to human freedom that implies an obligation to choose the good that's not true of lesser animals.
You're using freedom and liberty as a kind of proxy for morality, but that's incoherent from your perspective. Because if exercising MY freedom, as you put it, is violative of YOUR freedom, then the same is true in reverse. Even if I just adopt your caricature of the Christian brand of freedom as raw coercion, tell me why that's bad in your view. Can it be that some people's freedom is better than others? Or maybe that some people have a distorted view of freedom and morals?