btw – people like Jeremy bemuse me with their arrogance in denigrating other people’s experience of belief and faith, including faith in the Bible, Christ and God. Some of my closest friends are straight men and women, devout Christians whose works and lives are exemplary by any standard, and whose personal revelation (and that of their churches) affirms the goodness of love and commitment, homo or hetero. If there is a God and if the Bible expresses his spirit and his will, I’m quite sure Christ would stand with my friends rather than with people like Jeremy.

“Just because you may not believe in God doesn’t mean He isn’t there.”

And just because you believe in God doesn’t mean He is there.

“A person can learn facts or purported facts his whole life and never come to a knowledge of the truth, just empty facts.”

It must be very convenient to treat facts as irrelevant trivialities.

“Why are there so many religions and churches if there is only one God? It’s because men lean to their own understanding and not God’s council.”

What is the evidence that you are an exception to that?

“Society increasingly insists on leaving God out of it when he was the one who put us here.”

Isn’t it odd then that societies scoring the highest in various measures of human well-being generally are the least religious, and societies with higher levels of religiosity generally score lower on those measures. Even within the United States, this is generally the case among the states.

I assume that you would say you do NOT believe in evolution, but as I will show, you do in a sense.

I think we would all agree that humans are laughably simple beings compared to a god who must be infinitely more intelligent, skilled, and powerful to have created the universe. So, here is an old question that people seem to prefer to expend as little time as possible contemplating: Where did God come from? A common answer is essentially that God is eternal, and thus has always been there. And then they change the subject. I think all the answers I’ve heard are designed to avoid serious consideration of the question.

If you want to assert that God just suddenly appeared, then that is not nearly good enough for me. There is just not a single shred of evidence for that (and Bible verses don’t count). So, if God didn’t just suddenly appear, he must have developed by some form of evolution.

If you cannot believe that life on earth could have developed via evolution, how can you possibly believe that an infinitely more intelligent, skilled, and powerful God just came into existence by poof!, or by a form of evolution?

Every single time that He did, EVERY SINGLE TIME, Jeremy, it was when some churchy person wanted to impose the Law on some other person who just was doing their thing. Jesus never rebuked people like me, only people like you.

Why do some (not all) gay people want to impose on the Boy Scouts of America to change it’s standards?

They don’t. No one wants to “impose” anything on the Boy Scouts. They are asking (not imposing) that the Boy Scouts stop discriminating. Because to do so is immoral.

And the people who are asking are not “the homosexuals” as you seem to believe. It is heterosexual Eagle Scouts. They find it impossible to belong to an organization that discriminates.

Even if you really really want the Boy Scouts to discriminate, many moral and good Eagle Scouts do not.

No one is pushing you. Your notion that you are being imposed upon is based on the idea that you deserve to be treated better than me.

You: deserve marriage rights, deserve respect, deserve to have your legal contracts honored, deserve to have your religious beliefs treated with reverence.

Me: deserve no rights, no respect, no honor, and to have my religious beliefs described as evil.

And when I refuse to be subjugated to you, when I demand equality, then you think I’m “pushing”.

And if I refuse to back down from your insistence that I be inferior to you, you tell me that it’s okay that you want to treat me inferior because God told you that you can.

I’m sure someone told you that you can, but it wasn’t God. Jesus gave you one commandment: “Jeremy, I command you to treat homosexuals the way you want to be treated”.

How are you doing with that commandment, Jeremy?

Got it – God’s like poison and if you don’t believe he’s harmful he’ll kill you.

It’s not possible to have a rational discussion with someone whose response to everything is “because god said so” or “because god told ME so”. He’s yet to respond as to why “his” god is the only right god and why his interpretation is the only right one.

Let him have his (one-sided) conversation and let’s just leave him to his sophistry.

That’s irrelevant. Very few people have the intelligence of an einstein or a Steve Jobs, people with high IQs are deviants. That one deviates from the norm says nothing about whether such a deviation is a bad or a good thing. What determines that is harm. Gays harm no one and thus by definition their “deviation” is not a bad thing. The American Psychiatric Association says gayness is a normal, natural, and healthy variant of human sexuality. Gays are deviants in the same way left handed people are deviants.

Jeremy said “It deviates from a strict user policy issued by God when Adam and Eve were put together.”.

That was a policy put together by primmitive bigoted goat herders pretending to be a god, not by an actual god. We should all give their opinion the weight it deserves.

Jeremy said “I like women, but don’t have free license to have sex, even with women, outside of marriage.”.

There’s no equivalence there. You allow yourself a romantic and sexual relationship with a woman under some circumstances but you wish to deny gays a same sex romantic and sexual relationship under any circumstances – you are a hypocrite.

Jeremy said “If you don’t agree with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (the mormons) for example, then don’t join, but where do you get off on requiring them to change their doctrine?”.

I get off telling them to change their doctrine on the basis of harm. When their doctrine advocates harming others I am morally justified in asking them to change it. Just as the Westboro Baptist Church does not deserve a right to kill gays because their doctrine says they should, your church does not deserve a right to discriminate against gays because its doctrine says they should.

Jeremy said “I’m not fighting to offend, only to defend.”.

That’s not true. You’re fighting to be able to oppress others, you’re fighting to harm them. No one is trying to harm you, you are not in any need of defense. It is not defense when you are fighting to oppress others.

Jeremy said “Don’t push us and we won’t have to take a stand.”.

That’s very convenient – “Allow us to oppress you, treat you as inferiors, and deny you the rights we have and we won’t have to take a stand against you.”. How stupid do you think we are? If someone was spitting in your face and said “Don’t push me and I won’t have to punch you.” would you go along with that?

The same reason we want all people to refrain from rape, murder, theft, and bullying. We want to encourage everyone to be good citizens and to make the world the best place it can be.

Jeremy said “Why do they want them to change their policy when they aren’t even asking them to stop being who they are? Why is the choice to engage in homosexual behavior more important than the choice to oppose it?”.

The same reason the choice to treat blacks as equals is more important than the choice to treat them as inferiors – in order for everyone to have the best possible life we need to treat everyone as equals and not punish or oppose anything that does not harm others.

Jeremy said “The Scouts are simply holding up a standard of conduct, not condemning gays.”.

As you said in your first post, the scouts are claiming gays are not morally straight and not good enough to be involved in their organization, that IS condemnation. When the standard of conduct an organization holds up is rejecting innocent and harmless people that is a standard of conduct that is unacceptable in a moral society, no different than racism or sexism.