You don't know what love means. But you're not going to post hate about these people in any form and not get called out for it. You don't get to do that, you're not amongst a crowd amenable to that sort of hate. We've established you have no idea what love means, and you continue to use Biblical scripture to shield yourself from the criticism. How about you drop the morality crusade from that book and try to make an argument without it about why you should be allowed to hate freely these people? You don't even have to want to make laws about it. Why do you believe you're allowed to treat other human beings as if they are not acceptable for being who they were born to be with fellow consenting adults?
Since my original response to this post has gone missing, here's a substantive reply: you accuse me of redefining words, but it is you who is redefining both "love" and "hate." You use the terms primarily for their connotations, since their denotations would have served you so poorly in this case. In your view, "love" does not bear any meaning found in a dictionary, but means instead "moral approval" (a phrase that is less cumbersome than my previously used endorsement-acceptance-agreement one, and which more accurately reflects your position, I think). Likewise, "hate" does not have a meaning familiar to those whose job it is to catalog words and their meanings, but means "moral disapproval" (or, perhaps, "anything short of moral approval").
Talk about loaded terms! Stripped of the emotional baggage with which you seek to ennoble your questions with, they become, in effect, the following question: "Who are you to disagree with my moral beliefs?" That question is woefully out-of-place in our pluralistic society, a fact to which your own conduct in this thread bears witness: you
reject the Bible as a moral guide to human sexuality and
the teachings of Christianity as
reflecting morality. Your redefinition would regard your own beliefs as hatred of Christianity, when it's merely a disagreement over moral facts.
Finally, you complain about my use of the Bible in formulating my argument--but my argument is that Christianity teaches Christians to love everyone. How else do you propose I make that case but with reference to the Christian Bible? Envelope is right--you're raising arguments against statements you wish I had made, and not engaging with my actual argument.
And damn, you talk about gays not being able to love.
Literally nobody other than you has talked about that in this thread. I mean, I explained how you were wrong to think anybody had, but other than that, it's been all you. And there's no reason a person cannot be said to love a person--or many persons--he or she has never met. Even in its most reductionist form, the requirement for such love could be interpreted as a requirement to love each member of a group once that member is actually encountered.
Imagine it this way. Imagine a person who cannot hear, and imagine a religion advocating against the use of sign language. Imagine we trot out the "we love the deaf, just not the action of sign language!"
While I agree with Amir0x that this is a good analogy, I don't see how this advances the discussion--it just changes the context. We're still left with the question of whether moral approval is a necessary component of love. Is the person who believes that sign language is immoral simply incapable of loving the deaf person who communicates using sign language? I see no reason to think so, and aside from an attempt to berate me into agreement, no one has yet attempted to provide one.
Already read them. If you don't want to deal with this you probably shouldn't muck up the discussion with it in the first place. Not to mention that I don't believe that you don't want to talk about it because you feel the need to keep discussing it. You've had ample opportunity to ignore every comment about it and yet here you keep coming into the weeds to clarify...
Had you read them before you commented, you'd have seen that I already covered the Christian teaching that all men are sinners. When I say, "the weeds," I mean barely-relevant issues of only secondary (or lower) significance. Pointing out that Christianity teaches Christians to love really shouldn't be taken as an invitation to interrogate me on any issue relating to Christian theology.
