Proud to be gay, celibate for Jesus

If something is an unchangeable fact about someone, then one should not be prejudiced against them on that account. If gay means same sex attracted, then I think there are cases of persons who are gay, and they can't change that. Christianity may require that they be celibate, but there is no just prejudice against them based on who they are attracted to. I realize "phobia" is probably an inapt term. 

A group of Christian gays might apply to march in a Gay Pride parade with the intent to carry a sign that says "Proud to be Gay, Celibate for Jesus." Now the parade organizers would probably deny the application, but that would be religious prejudice. But if I am right in thinking that these people can't, as it were, "pray the gay away," then to treat them poorly because they are same sex attracted would be anti-homosexual prejudice.

Where have you gone, William F. Buckley, a nation turns its lonely eyes to you

I've often wondered what Bill Buckley would have said about the Trump campaign. Actually, Trump considered it in 2000, and Buckley said this. 

Is this homophobia?

The equal treatment of persons is, for the most part, supported by religion, but traditional Christians tend to accept moral restrictions on sexual activity, and it might be that if you are gay in orientation, Christianity requires you morally to be celibate. It also require you to be celibate if you can't find a marriage partner, even if you are heterosexual.

Christians might say this: whether you are gay or straight does not mean God is against you. It just means if you are gay, you can't have a moral sex life. But being heterosexual doesn't guarantee that you can have a moral sex life, either, so why is this a prejudice against homosexual people?

To go from opposition to homosexual activity to prejudice against homosexual persons, additional steps in the argument are needed.

Were the crusades just wars?

Here. 

Do you accept the law of noncontradiction? Based on what evidence?

Is the law of noncontradiction based on evidence? What possible evidence is there for it or against if? If you accept the law, and it is not based on evidence, does that mean that you accept something without evidence? 

An argument against religious morality

Some would make this argument. The parts of morality that are productive for society are those parts that religious and nonreligious people agree with (murder, theft, etc.). The parts of morality that religious people accept and nonreligious people reject are the parts of morality that are really harmful (such as opposition to homosexuality). Therefore whenever religion adds anything, it adds something counterproductive.

How would you respond to this argument?

Whose notion of virtue is this?

“If throughout your life you abstain from murder, theft, fornication, perjury, blasphemy, and disrespect toward your parents, church, and your king, you are conventionally held to deserve moral admiration even if you have never done a single kind, generous or useful action. This very inadequate notion of virtue is an outcome of taboo morality, and has done untold harm.” -- Bertrand Russell 

But what religion teaches this concept of virtue? Not Christianity. 

Matthew 25:31-46New International Version (NIV)

The Sheep and the Goats

31 “When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, he will sit on his glorious throne. 32 All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate the people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. 33 He will put the sheep on his right and the goats on his left.

34 “Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. 35 For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, 36 I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’

37 “Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink?38 When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? 39 When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’

40 “The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’

41 “Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. 42 For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, 43 I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.’

44 “They also will answer, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?’

45 “He will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.’

46 “Then they will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life.”

New International Version (NIV)

Chesterton on Progressives and Conservatives

 "The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected."

"The Blunders of Our Parties", Illustrated London News, 19 April 1924.

Who made God?

Answered by Shameless Popery. 

New atheism and logical positivism

From a review of a book by Peter Williams. 

Why is this? Williams claims it is mainly to do with the devastating effect Logical Positivism had in the 20th Century on religious belief. Logical Positivism holds that only statements that can be observed to be true through our senses or otherwise be potentially verified, have any meaning. This leaves the unverifiable God hypothesis meaningless. However, argues Williams, it does the same to the opposite claim too. The atheist declaration ‘there is no God’ is also impossible to scientifically prove. So under Logical Positivism, atheism is also meaningless. As Williams writes in Ch1, “Dawkins’ atheism, no less than the theism he opposes, is built upon Positivism’s grave.” Positivism had to die for atheism to live. However, Williams then moves on to argue that bizarrely, Logical Positivism is historically the main reason atheism has such a grasp on public imagination today. It provided the social credibility for atheism upon which the New Atheists have built.

David's Adoration of God

Yours, O Lord, is the greatness, the power, the glory, the victory, and the majesty. Everything in the heavens and on earth is yours, O Lord, and this is your kingdom. We adore you as the one who is over all things. Wealth and honor come from you alone, for you rule over everything. Power and might are in your hand, and at your discretion people are made great and given strength.

'1 Chronicles 29:11-12, (NLT)

Denying the cat

•Modern masters of science are much impressed with the need of beginning all inquiry with a fact. The ancient masters of religion were quite equally impressed with that necessity. They began with the fact of sin—a fact as practical as potatoes. Whether or no man could be washed in miraculous waters, there was no doubt at any rate that he wanted washing. But certain religious leaders in London, not mere materialists, have begun in our day not to deny the highly disputable water, but to deny the indisputable dirt. Certain new theologians dispute original sin, which is the only part of Christian theology which can really be proved. Some followers of the Reverend R. J. Campbell, in their almost too fastidious spirituality, admit divine sinlessness, which they cannot see even in their dreams. But they essentially deny human sin, which they can see in the street. The strongest saints and the strongest sceptics alike took positive evil as the starting-point of their argument. If it be true (as it certainly is) that a man can feel exquisite happiness in skinning a cat, then the religious philosopher can only draw one of two deductions. He must either deny the existence of God, as all atheists do; or he must deny the present union between God and man, as all Christians do. The new theologians seem to think it a highly rationalistic solution to deny the cat.-G. K. Chesterton

Why can't I steel? From debate.org

Here. 

Morals are based off something

Who are we to say steeling is bad. Isn't it just a means to survive. Like evolution is just saying we are here to survive. Morals have to come from a greater power who understands everything and sees everything to make a fair statement steeling is wrong. Not just wrong it is a sin. Without religion there is nothing to back us up. When a child ask why cant i steel. You cant just say because i said so. The Child needs to see why you said so.

OK, this person needs to take my daughter's English class. 

If you are raised in a religious home, even if you stop believing, you are still affected by the upbringing, so it would be unreasonable to expect you to just abandon morality. Your emotions have been trained to be moral. C. S. Lewis writes:

Without the aid of trained emotions the intellect is powerless against the animal organism. I had rather play cards against a man who was quite sceptical about ethics, but bred to believe that "a gentleman does not cheat," than against an irreproachable moral theologian who had been brought up among card sharpers. 

On the other hand, does this leave you with an answer to the child's question? 

The Christian Left Blog

Some of you won't like this, but it's here. 

Blackwell Reference Guide on Brute Fact

M etaphysics, epistemology Also called bare fact. In an absolute sense, a fact that is obtained or explained by itself rather than through other facts and that has a fundamental or underlying role in a series of explanations. We normally cannot give a full account why the fact should be what it is, but must accept it without explanation. The first principles of systems of thought generally possess such a status. Brute facts correspond to causa sui or necessary existence in traditional metaphysics and are ultimately inexplicable. For empiricism , what is given in sense-perception is brute fact and provides the incorrigible basis of all knowledge. In a relative sense, any fact that must be contained in a higher-level description under normal circumstances is brute in relation to that higher-level description, although in another situation the fact could itself become a higher-level description containing its own brute fact. “There is something positive and ineluctable in what we sense: in its main features, at least, it is what it is irrespective of any choice of ours. We have simply to take it for what it is, accept it as ‘brute fact’.” act

Chesterton on the danger of reading only one's own Bible

'Sir Arthur St. Clare, as I have already said, was a man who read his Bible. That was what was the matter with him. When will people understand that it is useless for a man to read his Bible unless he also reads everybody else's Bible? A printer reads a Bible for misprints. A Mormon reads his Bible, and finds polygamy; a Christian Scientist reads his, and finds we have no arms and legs. St. Clare was an old Anglo-Indian Protestant soldier. Now, just think what that might mean; and, for Heaven's sake, don't cant about it. It might mean a man physically formidable living under a tropic sun in an Oriental society, and soaking himself without sense or guidance in an Oriental Book. Of course, he read the Old Testament rather than the New. Of course, he found in the Old Testament anything that he wanted -- lust, tyranny, treason. Oh, I dare say he was honest, as you call it. But what is the good of a man being honest in his worship of dishonesty?" 

Here. 

Gays beat up a Christian preacher at gay pride parade

Here. Imagine what would have happened if the violence had gone the opposite way?

Was Bertrand Russell and Empiricist?

He is often portrayed as one. However, consider this from the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Here. 

c. A Priori Principles

Against logical positivism, Russell thinks that to defend the very possibility of objective knowledge it is necessary to permit knowledge to rest in part on non-empirical propositions. In Inquiry into Meaning and Truth (1940) and Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits (1948) Russell views the claim that all knowledge is derived from experience as self-refuting and hence inadequate to a theory of knowledge: as David Hume showed, empiricism uses principles of reason that cannot be proved by experience. Specifically, inductive reasoning about experience presupposes that the future will resemble the past, but this belief or principle cannot similarly be proved by induction from experience without incurring a vicious circle. Russell is therefore willing to accept induction as involving a non-empirical logical principle, since, without it, science is impossible. He thus continues to hold that there are general principles, comprised of universals, which we know a priori. Russell affirms the existence of general non-empirical propositions on the grounds, for example, that the incompatibility of red/blue is neither logical nor a generalization from experience (Inquiry, p. 82). Finally, against the logical positivists, Russell rejects the verificationist principle that propositions are true or false only if they are verifiable, and he rejects the idea that propositions make sense only if they are empirically verifiable.

Some criticisms of Mere Christianity

From Daylight Atheism.

William Lane Craig on C. S. Lewis

Here.