Christianity; the World's Most Violently Persecuted Religion

[Angrboda]

TheWhiteMarten 

...this is a misunderstanding of Christian doctrine - God is not "damning" us anymore than a judge "damns" a criminal to prison; while it's not an entirely wrong word to use it seems to almost entirely fundamentally miss the mechanic at action and place some blame of the judge and not the criminal.

Another false equivalence, since a) we are able to objectively verify the laws of the land, and in this instance the "judge" is objectively real. We have no such evidence for any deity. One could also point out that people are damned for who they are in the bible, gay people for example, don't choose to be gay but were born that way, or you would say created. 

This is not a failure to understand Christian doctrine, it is a valid criticism of it. In that (hypothetically) if a deity existed, and created everything, it could not reasonably be excused all culpability for the result. Even leaving aside the question of how much autonomy humans really have, they demonstrably would have less than this hypothetical deity. Thus it would have to be more culpable for the result than the "pets" it's created in this hypothetical experiment.

No, it's not a valid criticism of it because you have misrepresented the bible. The bible states that the act of homosexual sex is wrong, not being homosexual. Most authorities agree that the concept of sexual orientation was somewhat problematic for the people of the time, which might explain why some passages in antiquity refer to same-sex behavior as acts typified by a specific gender or sex, rather than something related to an enduring sexual attraction. They basically had no words to refer to someone as having a specific sexual orientation, and so they didn't. Thus they were limited to hating the sin, and loving the sinner in this specific case.