It was meant to be a light hearted joke. I was trying to be friendly. Apparently I didn't succeed.
No, I don't think we can become whatever we wish. I could give you a far more serious example, but at this point I don't want to further irritate you.
I'm not sure what you mean by "our culture." I'm an American, and our culture was never pagan. Our origins are in Christianity, Deism, and the Enlightenment.
I'm going to assume you mean European culture. Europe hasn't been pagan for hundreds of years. The last pagan group in Europe to...
No offense. I have no interest in undermining your faith. But the logic you are using here is called circular reasoning, and its fallacious. "The bible is the word of God because the bible says it and we know that this is authoritative because the Bible is the word of God.... yada yada." It...
Many of them are very good. In fact, I wrote a post a few weeks ago on how this sermon promoted standard Jewish teaching. Which is not to say that every element was reasonable. Just saying. :)
It all depends. If picking words apart increases communication and understanding, or assists in the evaluation of what is being said, those are all very good reasons. If a person is just in a foul mood and taking it out on someone, that would be a very poor reason.
Again, there is no way how much of the Sermon on the Mount or WHICH things within it were things actually taught by Jesus, or simply things later attributed to him.
Oh trust me. I actually really and truly do listen to people on these forums. There have been times when someone has said something to me that starts a buzz in my brain. I don't change my mind on a whim. Often I have to thing about these remarks for many years. But I've changed my mind on a...
No. At one time they clearly preferred only men. And later they clearly preferred only women. During both of those times they were not bisexual, since a bisexual enjoys both. Care to try to explain this again?
The entire American Academy of Pediatrics is homophobic? This tells me it is YOU who have a bias so strong that you can't acknowledge any evidence to the contrary. "They disagree with me so they must be lying!"
And that means we really can't have a productive conversation, so I'm moving on.
Without boxes we couldn't communicate. Every word in every language is a box.
"Amorphous" describes something that lacks a clear, defined shape or structure. So sexually amorphous orientation describes an individual whose orientation is not clearly defined. No, that does NOT mean someone who...
The bolded text was merely an attempt to get the topic back on track.
I completely understand. However, given that in the vast majority of cases, the gender will align with the sex, it only make sense to proceed as though they will until such time the individual informs us they don't.
You are...
Why do you think Jesus' words are in the gospels? Jesus didn't write any of the gospels. They were collections of stories about Jesus written decades after his death, meaning that actual history would have been blended with legend and myth. We can use our rational minds to say, "Well, this is...
The most famous is what textual critics call the Q gospel. The Q comes from the German word Quelle, meaning "source." This is because the Q gospel was a source that the standard for gospels copied from.
Have you considered because it never happened?
Have you considered that if someone actually, verifiably, had risen from the dead, that news of it would have spread far and wide in the empire?
What I think most PROBABLE is that there were cases of grief hallucinations -- these are actually far...
It is not at all clear that physical transitioning helps transgendered individuals mentally. There simply have not been longitudinal studies done on this.
What we DO know is this: among children who felt confused about their gender in high school, most were quite comfortable with the gender...