I got this today and found it quite interesting. A more philosophical approach to the issue that seems to rise above the typical idiot-level rant.
Note that the position of the author is opposed to mine.
Pertaining to Same Sex Marriage
@2004 by Jonathan Scott
Once upon a time, former US President Theodore Roosevelt tried to make it so that a family could not legally be considered a family unless they had at least two children. President Roosevelt received some criticism for this. Here though, is his explanation for it.
...if the average family in which there are children
contained but two children the nation as a whole would
decrease in population so rapidly that in two or three
generations it would very deservedly be on the point of
extinction, so that the people who had acted on this base
and selfish doctrine would be giving place to others with
braver and more robust ideals. Nor would such a result be
in any way regrettable; for a race that practised such
doctrine--that is, a race that practised race suicide--would
thereby conclusively show that it was unfit to exist, and
that it had better give place to people who had not
forgotten the primary laws of their being.
To sum up, then, the whole matter is simple enough. If
either a race or an individual prefers the pleasure of more
effortless ease, of self-indulgence, to the infinitely
deeper, the infinitely higher pleasures that come to those
who know the toil and the weariness, but also the joy, of
hard duty well done, why, tat race or that individual must
inevitably in the end pay the penalty of leading a life
both vapid and ignoble. No man and no woman really worthy
of the name can care for the life spent solely or chiefly
in the avoidance of risk and trouble and labor. Save in
exceptional cases the prizes worth having in life must be
paid for, and the life worth living must be a life of work
for a worthy end, and ordinarily of work more for others
than for one's self.
President Roosevelt may not have realized it at the time, but his above comments talk about much more than meets the eye. President Roosevelt was actually talking about Charles Darwin's theory of Natural Selection. Before I talk about Darwin though, I must first mention something concerning a philosopher named Friedrich Nietzsche.
The German philosopher Friedric Nietzsche in 1822 stated that with the advance of the industrial era and the new and growing influence of technology that man would begin to, more and more, believe that God did not exist, that life had no special meaning, and that all taboos and societal rules were merely inventions of man that held no intrinsic meaning or purpose. This philosophy is called "Nihilism."
He then suggested that because European and American social structures were based on Judeo/Christian morality that, with the growing influence of Nihilism, that the societies themselves would change dramatically.
Since that time many Judeo/Christian cultures have, as predicted, altered significantly, moving sharply away from Judeo/Christian philosophies. It would seem that Nietzsche was correct.
And now for Darwin...
In the mid 1800s, Charles Darwin began to talk to the world about the concept of Natural Selection. Natural Selection states that any given characteristic that impedes a being's ability to reproduce, reduces the influence of that characteristic in the species' gene pool thereby reducing the number of future beings that would possess said characteristic. The following is a simple example of this in layman's terms:
Tall parents tend to have tall children.
If, for some reason though, being tall somehow made it
hard for a person to have children, then tall people would
have fewer children than non-tall people. This would mean
that there would be fewer tall people in the next
generation, because the people that tend to create them,
tall people, weren't able to have as many children as other
types of people.
If there are fewer tall people in the next generation,
and being tall still makes it harder to have children, then
there would be even fewer tall people in the generation
after that.
If this kept happening, there would eventually be very
few tall people* in the world.
*The above is merely an example of how Natural
Selection works. It is not trying to state that tall
people are less capable of having children.
According to Darwin, nature does this so that all species can continuously adapt themselves to their environments, thereby increasing the probability of the species' survival.
Can Natural Selection be applied to a nation's moral structure? I suggest that it can.
If Natural Selection has shaped our social and taboo structure for the sake of our survival, then it follows that altering our social and taboo structure in any substantial way will decrease our species' ability to survive. This loss of survivability would manifest itself in many different ways, including premature death, lowering average life spans, a reduction in the number of offspring, as well as a decreased ability for members of the species to obtain the food and other necessities needed for survival.
In short:
1. According to Nietzsche, the shift from Judeo/Christianity
towards Nihilism will bring a change.
2. It is obvious that a change has occurred.
3. Natural Selection suggests that the change will reduce our
species' ability to survive.
I have written a 100 page paper dealing with this topic. It is available in the FILES section of the following Yahoo! group.
YERtheAER
You may subscribe to this group by sending an e-mail to the following e-mail address.
[email protected]
My paper will show, in detail, how the US has changed as a result of its move from Judeo/Christianity towards Nihilism. It is an attempt to show that this movement has, indeed, reduced the human species' ability to survive.
There are also two final sections of the paper.
The first is an argument both from the Bible and from science as to why the currently debated topic of same sex marriage should not be allowed to happen.
The last concerns a logical observation concerning the future and the continued effect of Natural Selection on the species. Because Natural Selection will continue to shape humanity, and because Nihilism is innately harmful to the survivability of humanity, at some point in the future, it is inevitable that the human species will push away Nihilism in favor of other philosophies that are more convenient to its existence. The effect of this will probably be that many of the new trends currently accepted by the US and other countries, including the trends of abortion, divorce, homosexuality and feminism, will, at some point in the future, also be pushed away.
I hope that you will take the time to read my full paper. It is entitled "From 'God is Dead' to Same Sex Marriage" and is available FREE OF CHAARGE at:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/YERtheAER/files/
<font color="#000002" size="1">[ June 26, 2004 10:11 AM: Message edited by: reason ]</font>
I recieved the same thing today. It IS the same idiot-level rant. This guy's just a little more intellegent, and has concocted a new twist on the rationalization of the need to force religion and it's doctrines upon all of mankind. Same old same old, if you ask me. A different coat of paint. I stumbled across this forum while searching for his site. He made me so angry I wanted to give him a piece of my mind, but his "remove me" box was full.
<font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">[img]graemlins/sleepy.gif[/img]Originally posted by TiredofTripe:
I stumbled across this forum while searching for his site. He made me so angry I wanted to give him a piece of my mind, but his "remove me" box was full.
Gotta agree with TiredofTripe. I've seen that particular exercise in faulty psuedointellectual logic before and find it amazing that anyone would take it as anything more than high sounding bs.
"...why the currently debated topic of same sex marriage should not be allowed to happen."
Poorly worded in a lot of places, for example the TOPIC of same sex marriage shouldn't be allowed to happen? We can't even DISCUSS it? [img]tongue.gif[/img]
Our survivability has increased substantially over the period where he claims nihilism taken over, which disproves his thesis.
Experts in evolution say it operates on the individual level, propagating one's own genes, certainly not at the level of cultural morality.
I appreciate the responses, but my first thought when I read this was that he was using the marriage=children argument. I think LanDroid addresses that point appropriately.
Whether gay people get married or not, they're still not going to bear children, so I'm not sure what the impact on marriage will be, and why this is relevant to those who do.
Secondly, marriage is not a contract to bear children, but it seems like the author is suggesting that it should be.
It would seem that his criticisms would be better geared toward those who get married and can bear children but don't than toward those who can't get married and can't bear children anyway.
Of course, if he did level criticism against marrieds who didn't procreate, and suggested that they start popping out children, his audience would shrink to nothing. Which is why it's always convenient to use the gay issue to get people on your side, even when the issue isn't relevant.
<font color="#000002"><font size="1">[ July 21, 2004 07:52 AM: Message edited by: reason ]</font></font>
<font color="#000002" size="1">[ July 21, 2004 11:33 AM: Message edited by: reason ]</font>
Black & right
Although politically liberal, black Americans are almost uniformly opposed to homosexual marriage | by Gene Edward Veith
THE METHODISTS FOUGHT, THE PRESBYTERIANS (USA) dithered, and the Episcopalians gave in as their national conventions struggled over what to do about homosexuality. But the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME), the largest black church in the country with 2.5 million members, voted in its national convention unanimously not to allow pastors to perform same-sex marriages.
Black Americans tend to be liberal politically. They are the most reliable components of the Democratic Party's base, with the possible exception of gays, whose causes Democrats and liberals are championing. And yet, black Americans are among the demographic groups most opposed to gay marriage.
This frustrates gay activists and their allies. African-Americans have experienced terrible discrimination. Why aren't they more sympathetic with the discrimination that gays experience? There used to be laws against blacks marrying whites. Just as those racist laws needed to be repealed, surely the laws against men marrying men also need to be repealed. Blacks and gays should be natural allies, liberals are saying.
Of course, some black leaders -- like former presidential candidate and ordained minister Al Sharpton -- follow the party line of the liberal establishment. But across the country, black pastors have been staging rallies against gay marriage. African-Americans bitterly resent the attempt by homosexual activists to appropriate the civil-rights movement for their cause. Even the extremely liberal Congressional Black Caucus has denounced comparisons of the gay-marriage movement to the civil-rights struggles of the 1960s.
"Why are blacks, who know so well the reality of discrimination, so uniformly unsympathetic to the case that the gay community is making?" That question is raised by Star Parker, a black evangelical, in a column for Scripps Howard News Service. She says that the main reason is that the civil-rights movement depended on objective moral truth. Homosexual marriage, on the contrary, depends on a rejection of objective moral truth.
"It is not just that they know when their movement is being hijacked," she quotes Wilfred McClay, history professor at the University of Tennessee, as saying. "It is that the religious sensibility that animated the civil-rights movement, and that is still very much alive in the American black community today, is bound up in a biblical worldview that would no more countenance the radical redefinition of marriage than it would the re-imposition of slavery."
"Blacks know instinctively that the debate on gay marriage is the symptom and not the problem," says Ms. Parker. "They know that the root problem is the implicit de-legitimization and marginalization in the United States today of traditional standards of right and wrong." She argues that it was just such a marginalization of right and wrong that allowed slavery. "Without an anchor in ultimate standards, blacks know that the best politics and law, even in as great a country as ours, can lead anywhere."
http://www.worldmag.com/newsite/cont...le.cfm?id=9425
Trav's article doesn't go far enough.
It only addresses the black community's view of gay marriage and not their view of homosexuality in general.
To a great extent, homosexuality in the black community is considered taboo. As a result, blacks are seeing among the greatest increases in AIDs infections of any group. This includes black females.
So it is ironic that the hush hush nature of black homosexuality results in the sin of more black deaths.
I liken it to the black community preference to seeing a dozen black on black killings as opposed to one death at the hands of police.
It's a weird kind of morality, profoundly based on ignorance.
In the end, the message these black "men of God" are preaching is the wrong one. They want to preserve the image of black victimhood as opposed to endorsing the idea that discrimination is discrimination, and it's wrong regardless of who you are.
The idea that getting fired because one is black is worse than getting fired because one is gay is ludicrous. That's what the black preachers are preaching.
The gay marriage thing is an extension of this type of thinking.
I've worked the last two polls, approaching people about Article XII. The last poll was in Kennedy Heights, which is predominately black. When posed as an issue of discrimination, blacks understood it.
I suspect if the black preachers got over their ownership of the Civil Rights movement and removed their own bias, they'd get it, too.
Funny that Al Sharpton, master jew baiter, was mentioned in this article.
<font color="#000002"><font size="1">[ July 21, 2004 11:41 AM: Message edited by: reason ]</font></font>
<font color="#000002" size="1">[ July 21, 2004 02:27 PM: Message edited by: reason ]</font>
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