Subject:
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Re: Does God have a monopoly on gods?
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.off-topic.debate
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Date:
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Mon, 13 Mar 2000 02:24:16 GMT
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Reply-To:
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lpieniazek@novera.NOMORESPAMcom
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Viewed:
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1682 times
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Typically, when a person says "don't take this personally" it means that
there is indeed something there that might be taken personally, and when
a person says "no offense" they are about to say something offensive.
Sproat gave you some good advice. You should heed it.
But to the crux of your posts, and I'm not singling you out per se, this
is a message to any fundamentalist of whatever stripe...
As long as you are making statements about yourself, you're free to use
whatever metrics for making decisions you wish. Your personal
relationship with your god may be what you use to decide, or your
reading of the bible, or your trust in your spiritual advisor. None of
those are logical or rational, but that doesn't matter to you, because
you don't require logical proof, and that's fine. It matters to me, but
we're talking about you, not me.
As long as in the final analysis you don't care what I believe, those
metrics are fine. But if you voluntarily want me to believe in your god,
they don't cut it for me. And that's STILL OK as long as it doesn't
matter to me whether I do or not voluntarily believe either.
BUT...
I think you go farther than merely wishing that I believed in your god
and complied with your morality.
You've said in previous posts that this (the US) is a christian nation.
That to me implies that you want to do more than merely witness to your
faith to all comers, you want to use the principles of christianity to
organise the affairs of others. That is, to interfere in the lives of
non believers. That is, to impose your morality (such as stores not
being allowed to be open on Sunday, certain video tapes not being
rentable, certain actions between consenting adults not being allowed
and other much more perfidious forms of tyranny) on those who do not
subscribe to it.
When you do that (and you may or may not concede you are doing that, but
lots of other "christians" (in quotes because they claim they're
christian, and I believe that christianity produces them, but you
yourself may not feel they're christian) ARE doing it, and will gladly
tell you that they are...) your standards of proof no longer hold.
They're no longer sufficient.
That is, you cannot assert that because YOUR standards convinced YOU
that you can therefore impose your morality on me. You haven't convinced
me, and you're not going to be able to convince me using your standards.
It now becomes more than merely an intellectual argument because now
your belief is having an effect on me more than merely something amusing
to debate about.
If you try to impose morality on me to the point that you are initiating
force to get it to stick and that I find it to be too pernicious to
tolerate, you'll be met with active armed resistance by me. For me *not*
to do so would not be life-affirming.
--
Larry Pieniazek - lpieniazek@mercator.com - http://my.voyager.net/lar
http://www.mercator.com. Mercator, the e-business transformation company
fund Lugnet(tm): http://www.ebates.com/ ref: lar, 1/2 $$ to lugnet.
Note: this is a family forum!
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Message is in Reply To:
 | | Re: Does God have a monopoly on gods?
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| (...) I have my reasons for my methods which are not obvious on the surface. I hinted at them earlier. No more clues here. (...) Honestly, I wasn't emotional at all. That's why I included the parenthetical comment about not trying to be insulting. (...) (25 years ago, 11-Mar-00, to lugnet.off-topic.debate)
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