Nothing supernatural about the western suburbs of Melbourne

[worldslaziestbusker]

The land is zoned for religious services, it can't be used for anything else, thus it's worthless to anyone else. Get over it.

It's not as though your religion is a meth lab. We won't have to get crime scene cleaners in to get the divinity out of the floor boards when you're gone.

Get over it is never a useful rationalisation for unwarranted privilege or discrimination. I'm sure someone would have tried it on at Nuremburg if

Getting insulting just because you don't comprehend something is poor form. Please don't do it again.

Why don't you try making coherent arguments and then I won't have to?

You never have to be insulting. Ethics fail.
I am doing my best to make coherent arguments. If you could point out the parts you don't understand more constructively, I'll do my best to articulate in a manner you might find easier to comprehend.

The analogy I applied was that just because the community has historically trusted the clergy to be good people does not mean that the clergy are good people, and that we have no reason to leave our children with them unchaperoned based on their membership to the clergy alone.

You seem to be saying that the government sanctions it? Doesn't the government sanction children being left alone with teachers, doctors, lawyers, foster parents, and a variety of other situations where the child is unchaperoned and thus vulnerable to the ill intention of the people they're with?

We've had this discussion elsewhere. Are you a preach-only device? One way communication is not discussion, so please don't make myself repeat arguments needlessly. Here's where I've already answered your question.

But again, I would like some contact details so I can ask people to confirm your vague assertions regarding these calls for help. Evidence or go jump, as the polite version of the skeptical (sp) imperative states.

Why don't you go and ask your own local schools instead of demanding information from me. I myself have nothing to do with any schools, I only know what goes through our church office - that's what I'm attesting to. Our church has done programs in schools in the past, it is not presently involved in them.

Because I'm not the one making the positive claim, you are. You have the burden of evidence. You want me to take your claim seriously, you stump up the evidence. Otherwise, your unsupported claim gets the respect it warrants, which is none.

Homosexuality could make your knees fall off, but that still shouldn't allow you any say in what consenting adults do behind closed doors.

That argument is totally incorrect. I was talking to a friend of mine last week, he brought up the subject of drugs. I already knew that he uses some drugs from time-to-time, I didn't know that he uses coke. He told me coke has little-to-no side effects. Well yes, if you use it a handful of times a year then it would be very much like the safety of taking pharmaceutical drugs correctly. That doesn't change the fact that I certainly wouldn't support the legalization of drugs. Does the government have a say in whether or not you're allowed to use drugs behind closed doors? You bet it does.

Smoking is harmful to people's health, but the churches aren't fighting against it on health grounds. Alcohol is harmful to people's health, and no sweeping anti-booze hate campaigns have been waged by the religious.

The SDA church is against both. Presently I'm a non-drinker FYI.

If someone says to a gay person, "Your lifestyle is unhealthy," or "your lifestyle is unnatural," their best response would be to say "So what?" Lots of things are unhealthy and unnatural which the churches are actually in favour of, so trying to turn a biblically mandated discrimination into a health or a naturalness issue is underhanded as well as just plain wrong.

The church doesn't come down hard enough on the weightier health issues like divorce, overweight/obesity, drugs, smoking, alcohol, gambling, irregular sleep, not enough exercise, poor diet, managing finances/budgeting, tv or video game addiction, caffeine addiction, etc. Some of these issues overlap.

What a load of dominionist bullshit. You have no right to tell other people what they can and can't do with their body. You are a member of a religion, not a government health regulator, and even then, I can't find ethical space for them to tell people what they can and can't do to themselves.
People can drink themselves to death and I can't tell them not to. I can encourage them not to, I can try to help improve their situation so that they might not want to, but if they are determined to follow that path, there is no justification I can use to prevent them from doing so. You are again conflating privileges and rights. Where historically your church has been privileged to interfere in the business of others, it is not a right and you cannot justify that interference. I know you try, because it is in the church's interest to hold that level of influence in the lives of community members, but that does not make it right.

If you want to ban homosexuality because of it's health ramifications, you should really be targeting anal sex. But you don't. You ignore the heterosexual couples who have anal sex and only concentrate on the gay couples. Can you offer any explanation other than biblical mandate for this discriminatory behaviour?

If you want to play the naturalness card, you fail again. Natural is not automatically good. Natural for humans is a modal age of death of around thirty-five and forty percent infant mortality. If you want to ban homosexuality, ban vaccinations and flushing toilets while you're at it, so everyone can be nice and natural.