(February 6, 2016 at 8:22 am)robvalue Wrote: Gay and doing fine in spite of being Catholic?
Why anyone would stay in a religion which openly shames them is hard for me to grasp.
And I don't care if commandments are from God. I'll follow them only if there is a good reason to do so. He can stuff it up his holy bunghole, I'm no one's whipping boy.
Yep, and from the first story, it is just barking orders, no explanation. Thats what Kim Jong Un does. In western society, our officials can give orders, yea, but only by our consent and if we don't like the laws we can work to change them.
And again, believers don't understand WHY the books of Abraham were written the way they were. They were written like that because, even in polytheism, humans lived in very localized, tribal kingships. Even the Romans, even with their concepts of a Senate, they might have valued that concept, but they didn't have, like our modern government, the ability to impeach a Caesar, if they wanted to remove the top dog, they murdered him, they didn't have a legal way to remove him.
Christianity did not invent modern western government, the age of Enlightenment did in spite of Christianity. Christianity simply copied the puppet governments of Rome at first.
In fact, if you are Catholic, you should know that the Vatican took an Obelisk that Caligula stole from Egypt, and made it part of their display in St Peter's square. Of course the institution markets that as a defeat over evil, but really all they did was simply replace one abuser for another.
Our modern form of government in the west certainly is based on the Greeks and Romans, but it goes further and removes the absolute power of the top dog. The Greeks and Romans never had that check on power. They did make a couple of attempts to remove the idea of an immovable top dog, but that never gained any hold, so the best they could do back then was assassinate the king(which is what a Caesar is) and replace them with either another family member or someone from the wealthy class.
