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Originally Posted by shakran
Nope, my position is, don't use the bible as an excuse to persecute people you don't like.
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Really? I guess when you said this:
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If we're going to play that game, then we have to admit that we have absolutely no clue what's out there, what created all of creation, and most frighteningly, what will happen to us (assuming we don't just cease to exist) when we die. If you admit that the bible CAN have inaccuracies, then you have no way of knowing where those inaccuracies are, and therefore you don't really KNOW anything about anything that's in the bible. And if you don't know anything that's in the bible, it's rather stupid to use it to justify or condemn anything, isn't it.
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You threw me off.
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My other position is, if you're going to live by the bible, then live by the whole bible. Don't cherrypick the ideas you want to live by and then try to force other people to live by the same carefully selected ideas. This whole gay marriage debate could be ended if the "religious" side would follow the advice of their own book and "judge not lest ye be judged." But for some strange reason that's not a very commonly followed mandate, even though it's in the bible. I would postulate that it's not followed very much because it's a lot more fun to judge everybody else and to believe yourself to be superior.
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I think that people have every right to cherrypick whatever they want from the bible as long as they have some sort of justification beyond "well, i do like this part" for your cherrypicking. That's basically the process by which one makes sense of the world. You take in information, you decide what is relevant, and you disregard the rest. It isn't always an intellectually honest process, but it is pretty standard.
I think you're mistaken if you think that religious thought is the only thing standing in the way of legal gay marriage. Right here on the tfp there have been 100+ post threads on that very subject without religion coming up at all. People don't need religion to justify their disfavor towards gay marriage. They can use perspectives based on interpretations of economics, biology and sociology. Despite being more "honest" than religion, these disciplines are easily commandeered for the purpose of denying gays the right to marry. Do you think the fact that certain sociological theories can be used to justify the continued denial of gay rights should mean that any argument based on sociological theory is automatically unfounded?