AZMike

The Catholic Church is the original Big Tent. There is a wide range of beliefs, but if beliefs are very different, we don't kick people out of the faith to form their own schism, we keep them inside the tent and argue some more. There is no mechanism to remove someone from the religion, even excommunication is simply a discipline that deprives someone of the sacraments, always meant to be corrective and not meant to be permanent. I always feel there is a kinship or bond between me and every other Catholic, even if we disagree on most issues - we're still part of the same family (this appli

Just curious. The Catholic priesthood has a counterintuitive aspect in that older American priests and nuns/religious sisters (for a variety of reasons) tend to be have less adherence to orthodoxy and be more theologically liberal, and the younger priests coming out of the seminaries and the nuns overwhelmingly tend to be very orthodox, a phenomenon that has led many to speculate about the upcoming changes in the Church in the next 10 or 20 years.

Morals are instantiated in individuals, not societies.

How old was the pastor, incidentally?

I think that is "why Thou shalt not kill" in the Commandments is more properly rendered as "Thou shalt not murder" in many translations. Homicide is acceptable in some circumstances. Murder never is. Felonious murder (r-ṣ-ḥ, also transliterated retzach, ratzákh, ratsakh etc) is the word used in the original Hebrew, and is not used when describing acts of war, execution, etc.

No discipline need justify its first principles. In Euclidean geometry, we accept certain unprovable truths in order to do higher math. In morality, we accept the basic moral laws I outlined. To do otherwise is just mental masturbation. It's interesting that people who propose that all truths are relative (not singling you out here) object very strongly if you take their car keys without asking. People who propose that all moral systems are culturally based object very vociferously if you propose that anti-homosexual laws were perfectly moral until the laws began to change a decade or

I think the natural law that we are born with recognizes the verities of what the objective moral code is. There will be gray areas (I shouldn't take another human life, as life is precious, but may do so in defense of my own life), but most people and most healthy societies respect them as broad principles, even as they may disagree on the details. - Human life is precious and should be preserved. - One should honor and respect the Creator and holy things. - One should help and give to others who are in need. - One should honor one's parents and give them respect and obedien

This is an argument one hears often - that the condemnation by the early Church specifically related to pederasty, and not to the sort of loving, mutually supporting same-sex relationships between males or female adults. That is spurious, however. Roman males, including some quite powerful ones, entered into sexual relationships with other males of a similar status. Nero's homosexual dalliances were previously mentioned by Peregrinator. Julius Caesar's homosexual relationships with other powerful men (as well as women) was not only known, it was the subject of ribald gossip and poetry.

The HRC, which is the largest gay lobbying group, is a secular group that has consistently lobbied the the Catholic Church and the Knights of Columbus to stop using its funds to support traditional marriage initiatives (which have won in the majority of cases before being reversed by judges): http://www.hrc.org/nomexposed/section/the-catholic-hierarchys-devotion-to-fighting-marriage-equality http://www.hrc.org/press-releases/entry/catholic-church-and-nom-responsible-for-60-of-anti-equality-funding-in-four https://secure3.convio.net/hrc/site/Advocacy?cmd=display&page=UserAction&id=1507.

Certainly, one can start or join a boycott. Would you agree that the other tactics I mentioned are wrong, all of which have been employed against those who oppose SSM or simply don't want to participate in a SSM ceremony, or (now) agree to participate but inform those who made them do so that they have religious objections to SSM (as in the Wildflower Inn case) should lose their businesses and their reputations for a sincerely held belief that was the stated view of the President just a few years back? It is a brave new world, indeed. Should people who hold such views receive death threat

I appreciate your honesty. Yes, as you said, any businesses or charitable organizations associated with them will be subject to harassment / boycotts / threats if they fail to follow the new party line. Why is that so hard for people to admit? I did not name churches because you asked for examples of churches being pressured by outsiders, not by schisms within the churches. I did in fact name the largest LGBT pressure group in my reply, which is not affiliated with the Catholic Church, nor is it made up primarily of Catholics, which is pressuring bishops to accept same-sex marriage. W

I think it's apparent that you get in trouble when you simply voice your opinion, Moosetracker. That pizza joint family in Indiana never discriminated against a single gay person. They simply answered, honestly, what they would do in the hypothetical instance that they were ever asked to cater a gay wedding. You can be punished even for voicing your opinion in private, by (for instance) donating money to a political initiative to preserve traditional marriage definitions (a ballot initiative that passed handily, incidentally, so it's hard to argue that Brandon Eich was "enforcing his viewpoint

Ah. They will be made to care. Once they have learned their lesson about the meaningless of religious convictions, all will be well. Unlikely they will get a payday out of it, BTW. GoFundMe, under pressure from gay activists, will no longer collect funds for any such people.

JoeBob makes a good point. The recent trend in gay culture has been to demonize anyone who fails to accept the idea that gay marriage, and homosexuality in general, must not simply be tolerated but accepted. Careers have been ruined, like Brendan Eich, former CEO of Mozilla, as well as local people who for religious or moral reasons don't want to be involved in gay marriages. Should a local option be granted, local COs would essentially be forced to accept gay leaders, or face the possibility of local anti-discrimination and civil rights complaints and lawsuits, commercial pressure, anony

Where are all these troops that have the exotic dancer troop leaders? Inquiring minds want to know!

Vatican City doesn't have Boy Scout troops, yet the Vatican has signed an agreement not to develop nuclear weapons. How is that fair?

I wanted to bleed energy off from the religion/evolution thread and let it die a natural death.

File under "You Will Be Made To Care." The New York State attorney general’s office has opened an inquiry into the Boy Scouts of America’s hiring practices to determine whether the group has discriminated as an employer against gays. The office will ask Wayne Brock, the chief scout executive of the Boy Scouts’ national organization, for detailed information on the group’s involvement in hiring decisions there and at its local councils. The request comes three weeks after the Boy Scouts’ New York City affiliate said it had hired a gay Eagle Scout to work in a scout camp this s

Interesting forum bug I just noticed - apparently you can't put words in ALL CAPS in thread titles, so acronyms (LGBT & BSA) get converted into lower case with the first letter capitalized.

A pro-LGBT group has raised more than $50,000 to donate to the Boy Scouts of America if the organization ends its ban on gay adult leaders. Scouts for Equality launched its campaign on the crowdfunding site Challeng.org last week, calling on President Bob Gates and the Boy Scouts to lift the organization's ban on gay adults during its national meeting later this month. "If they meet this challenge and vote to end their ban on gay adults, the proceeds from this campaign will be donated straight to the Boy Scouts of America. But if they don't vote down the ban, your donation won't be p

Interesting article on the status of "youth clubs" in modern Russia, which seem to be more paramilitary in tone. We do some hatchet-throwing, but not as much knife-throwing as these boys do. https://foreignpolicy.com/2015/05/01/putins-boy-scout-army-russia-military-patriotic-clubs-ukraine/ Does anyone know if there are actual scouting groups in Russia that are affiliated with the world scouting movement? (This may be considered more appropriate under the International Scouting forum; if so, mods please feel free to move it.)