San Francisco Gays Whoop It Up Over Court Ruling as reported by Concerned Women for American

"Yeah, You're right.
The Fundie preacher was guilty of an actual crime

hehehehehe...."

That would be "fundamentalist", but I have a ten spot that says you wouldn't know a Fundamentalist church if you spent the next month looking. Additionally, I haven't a clue what YOU are talking about, since I was addressing your pathetic attempt at 'moral equivalence'........guess the concept escaped you.

Now, just save me the trouble here........do I really have to go into an explanation of "do the crime, do the time, no matter who or what you are"....preacher or priest or not, and are you going to drop the ridiculous implication that one a**hole tarnished an entire faith??

"I've been at gay pride parades and when I have children, I think they are about the safest place in the world that I could take them."

Gee. Swell. How charming.

Hey, golly........next time take them to the "party-after-the-party" and let them learn about fisting, complete with demonstrations. Gosh, a wonderful family time that'll be.

Oh................................you mean..........you just want your kids to see flaming queens prancing down the street.....you just don't want them to know what they really do. Got it.

I'll just choose to believe you're kidding, even if you aren't.

Isn't "Sodom" some ancient Semitic language for "Saddam Hussein" and "Gomorrah" the same for "San Francisco?"

"Besides, all Fundies are phony preachers.

And I'm not wrong either - Most Americans are sick and tired of Fundies. Seriously. Perhaps even more than we're sick of hearing about gays cavorting about in parades."

.....so I'm reading further in this thread and come across this little gem of yours. Dude...............you're truly screwed up in the head. I mean, you really, really are. You have a hard-on for religion, fine. You hate God or the very idea that you may be accountable to Him, fine. You avoid churches like an AIDS-ridden whore.......fine. I truly don't care, even if I'm supposed to.

I just am pissed off at myself for engaging you in any kind of discussion here, for this has to rank right up there with the most idiotic, closed-minded, thoroughly inaccurate and stupid posts I've ever seen on Free Republic. Congratulations.

I am just as opposed to infringement on the First Amendment rights of Christians and homophobes as I am opposed to infringements on the privacy rights of gays and lesbians. There is, indeed, a correlation between homosexuals and the left, but that is largely a consequence of the unhinged and occasionally psychopathic views expressed by certain "conservatives."

The fact remains that even if 100% of gays were leftist, the vast majority of people are not gay, and they will not become supporters of government spending simply by supporting gays' privacy rights.

.....so I'm reading further in this thread and come across this little gem of yours. Dude...............you're truly screwed up in the head. I mean, you really, really are. You have a hard-on for religion, fine. You hate God or the very idea that you may be accountable to Him, fine.

The long jump in conclusions goes to RightOnline!

The term "homophobe" is one of the most inane Orwellian Newspeak terms to enter our political lexicon. Its premise is that there's some psychological flaw in having an aversion to homosexuality, as if a man who wants to insert his penis in another man's nether regions is A) normal, B) engaging in a behavior that should engender no negative reaction in a normal person, and C) engaging in conduct which should be presented to children as a viable and normal lifestyle.

A better term would be "pervertophile" for someone who thinks homosexuality is normal. Or perhaps "Christophobic" for people who scream "Fundie" everytime someone mentions a Biblical passage.

I welcome your assertion that you oppose the suppression of the privacy rights of Christians, but recent history has not been kind to that particular ideology. Very few homosexual activists merely want for gays to be left alone. They were largely left alone for most of American history. What we are seeing now is an attempt to harness government power to force people to accept homosexuality, against their own better judgment and the best interests of their children.

It doesn't stop with "tolerance" of gays. It leads to more and more laws dictating who people can hire, who they can rent to, what their children will be taught, and even what the moral beliefs can be for a private organization. Want to have a kiddie parade? Well, expect to be hauled into court by gays demanding the "right" to present their deviancy to your kids.

All this suppresses freedom and costs the taxpayers money. We'll be paying "spousal" benefits for gay "partners", more taxes to fight more diseases, more taxes for more "civil rights" lawyers to weed out "homophobia", more taxes to fund the army of bureaucrats to enforce all the anti-discrimination laws protecting homosexuality, and on and on.

"I wonder how they'd view my conviction not only in the truths in the Bible but in the Bhagavad Gita??)"

They might state from scripture, that "in times past", as God was revealing his law to Israel, there were pagan nations that "God ...winked at". Many of God's truths are revealed in nature and in one's own conscience, and it should not be any surprise that one can find some of his truths in other religions or philosophies of thought.

CS Lewis wrote in one of his treatises of the Tao, not in a way that we know of it today from eastern religion, but the ancient universal Tao from which men knew instinctively from right and wrong, from which Hammurabi derived his code, from which the Egyptians derived their moral law, from which Eve derived guilty knowledge and became subject to the Tao's harsh penalty for violating its rules of order. The Tao after all means "the way" or "the word". John uses the term, Logos in John chapter which means...the "word".

It was after this "Word" became "flesh"..or "Tao" made "flesh", that God("and the Word was with God and the Word was God") hence forth required that all men every-where submit to the will of Christ Jesus, confessing their sins and confessing him as saviour. He would no longer "wink" at pagan attempts to find him thru idol worship and distortions of his name thru imperfect sacrifices and the recitations of stange creeds and rituals. He wants to reveal himself to men by expressing himself in men by the indwelling of his Holy Spirit.

Christ spoke of "needing to enter thru the sheep gate, he being the shepherd who knew his own sheep". He stated that those who did not enter thru the "gate" but had rather broken thru the hedges would be "cast out." So one might find truth in other religions that give one a sense of wisdom and even manipulative power concerning the spiritual things of God(Satan can certainly deceive here!). But...if you don't enter thru the sheep gate..(meaning Christ Jesus), you'll be found out and cast out of God's presence! The Bhagavad Gita may teach some truths, but they will not save you!

The final teaching of the Bhagavad Gita is to surrender utterly unto the Lord, the Supreme Person, giving up all fear, all other desires, all self-will - to voluntarily give one's will and one love to God. That's pretty universal. I've had some interesting discussions with a Catholic on FR - not trying to convince him to change, or he me - but one can call God many different names and He is still the same person.

You have to recognize what you are surrendereing to, or at least thru which "portal" you are surrendereing to "God" thru.

Remember to that the Bhagavad Vita came into being about 500 BC(with various antecedents and later refinements). Hinduism was an old religion about the time Christianity came into being. Interestingly enough, Socrates was also alive at that time. The world was seeing an increase of philosophical and intellectual development all over the known world , in places disconnected from each other, all at the same time. Israel and the Hebrews were suffering the "400" silent years at that time. God was surely winking at various nations, at those pagans who were sincerely seeking his presence. What the Bible states now, is that all religions are nought, only Christ is now sufficient for salvation. A man may indeed surrender is whole will to God, only to discover that he receives his will back again, empowered as a "son of God". Jesus how-ever was to be that gate that all men may enter in. There is saftey in that portal, in that in the process of surrendering to God in the name of Jesus, a man may know to whom he is truly surrendering. Devils may masquerade as various angels of light to deceive men, to ensnare them in false doctrines or to literally possess them. By entering at the Christ gate, Jesus will ensure that a sinner seeking repentance will not let Satan deceive that man, for he declared of himself,"If any man has seen me, he has seen the father...!"

We know grade A beef as such because a generally trusted authority has certified it such...there is some faith involved with that. The Bible declares that we can know we are coming to God by accepting Christ into our lives. One has to be convinced by faith that this is so, and this faith is actually granted us by the father. The thing is..and I don't why even a lot of Christians get hung on this...is that God wants to grant this faith to any-one who, bound with sin and gagged with condemnation, is desperate enough to at least "wriggle his little finger" in God's direction.

The Hindu's highest Goal is to enter Moksha or extinction, the release from the cycle of Reincarnation, and the total extinguishing of self consciousness, the joining with a so-called universal unconsious God. The are various sub-beliefs and Buddhism is an off shoot of Hinduism.

The God I worship is personal and dynamically alive. Though we "live in God"(which Hindu's teach)"we move and HAVE our BEING"(which Hindu's and Buddhists would strongly disagree with). We are NOT GOD, if that were the case, I should have had consciousness of this from my birth! I am the only mdmathis6 I will ever be for all of eternity, the biggest promise scripture has given me regarding eternal and personal consciousness is that he has promised to give those who worship him"...a small stone with our own names written on it known only to each individual and to God himself". It is that promise of eternal uniqueness, and our knowledge of our own unique value to God(each one of us)is what Eve was truly hungry for when she reached for that forbidden fruit.

To be "like the Gods" isn't what we are hungry for; to be our true selves and loved by God is what we are most desirous of. Of a truth of irony, the more like our true selves (that God endeavors to make of us) we become, the more "like the Gods" we become.

God called himself, "I AM that I AM", and many of us when alone and meditating on our own consciousness have had that odd shattering experience of experiencing our own total"I AM" ness, a sense of our total soulishness, a sense that the universe could have existed with out us..yet here we are! We are most like the image of God in this respect, in that we have this consciousness of self(I AM'ness) distinct from all else around us. Hindu's and Buddhist's would argue this is illusion, that we must seek to lose this sense of self to escape from suffering.

God however found a way, in the expression of his Godhead "BODILY", Jesus Christ, to embrace our suffering, to take human pain and loneliness into his own consciousness while expressing his spiritual compassion for us, by dying for us so that the penalty of being in violation of his eternal Tao, his Logos, his LAW, could be lifted from us. He emptied his blood, his life out for us so that we might have life. This promised life is in essense, eternal personally and integrally centered consciousness, with a glorified body incapable of sin and suffering, yet this personal centeredness for-ever being shared with God...who after all is 'All in All'!

Thanks for your thoughtful reply - I can't reply in kind right now (I run on a generator and don't have enough juice on my laptop until later) but I am currently writing something about the deeper personal aspect of Godhead as explained in the Vedas, and will put it up later. The impersonal monist idea of God "as everyone" is actually a recent offshoot of the Vedic understanding ("Hinduism") popularized since 900AD and is not the ultimate goal or the highest truth, but actually considered a snare of maya, or illusion. A personal relationship of love and surrender to the Supreme Godhead - meaning Personality of God - is the ultimate goal.
Also, the Bhagavad Gita was spoken around 3000BC so it is older than stated in your post.

Yes, Bhagavad Vita was older but Hinduism came at 500 BC when Krishna had his"enlightening experience". The Bhagavad vita was born out of impulses occuring at the 3000 to 2500 BC period. It is much purer in essense to God's Tao then subsequent religious streams that came later.

Mesopotamian civilization was just beginning, Hammurabi's code was being formed. Egyptian civilizations were already stong and arising, The Bhagavad was being formed as a civilization from the North was invading the Indus region of India, though I need to read up on the history to refresh my memory, perhaps you can "enlighten" me. Chinese writing and civilization were already 1000 years old (some say much older....by the way the chinese symbol for west means "the place where a man and a woman live in a garden", talk about your Adam and Eve story as Eden would have been west of China....."boat" is a symbol that looks like a boat with 8 people in it...;}. Chinese writing is said to be 6000 years old)

There was an impulse occuring at that time among all civilizations, with very similar moral codes being developed. The Greek myths and moral codes grew out of this time. There are evidences of extremely advanced civilazations that grew then flamed out from that time. And finally, around 2000 to 1900 BC, Abraham's father moved to Ur, then God began centering in on Abraham, " I will bring you to a land and make a great nation of you...".

CS Lewis talks of a winnowing out process, in which he centers on civilasations, then cities, then families, then one man from which he would begin his Salvation process, thought, in God's mind, the church was already in existence across time and space, filled with all those who worshiped him in spirit and in truth. "Before Abraham, I AM ", stated Christ....indeed, before Abraham was, Jesus IS!

My purpose in bringing up the Bhagavad Gita (which I have studied for more than 30 years, along with many other of the Vedic literatures) was to point out the universality of religion-based morality. This hints at the existence of one Supreme Godhead, as you mentioned, revealing more or less of His personality and will through the differing religions and holy books of the world.

The basic moral tenets of all monotheistic religions are all very similar if not almost exactly the same in most particulars, and if more people followed these tenets, we then would have time to discuss theology in peace.

I am more interested in influencing the atheists, hedonists, moral relativists and homosexual advocates of the world to become theists, and start living according to basic religious principles, than trying to debate "which religion is best".

There are two religions in the world. On the one side are those who worship God, the transcendent Supreme Person, to the best of their ability and understanding. On the other side are those who worship, with lust and the desire to be supreme, that which is not transcendent. In other words, some worship God, and some worship His creation, ignoring Him, and trying to imitate His position of Lordship. And if that side becomes the dominant force in the world (looks like it now), the world is the loser.

(By the way, the word "Hindu" does not appear in the Vedas, it is a term invented by Moslem invaders to describe the inhabitants of greater India who lived across the Sindhu River. And Bhagavan Krishna was never "enlightened", or claimed to be. Krishna is a name which means "the all-attractive Godhead".)

I realize the Bhagavad doesn't have the term Hinduism, but it did help shape it's very beginnings.

Actually the beginnings of the Vedas and the Vedic culture are extremely ancient, and when the majority of the literatures were put into writing (approx. 3000BC) they were preserving an oral tradition...
There is much evidence to support this, but I have no taste for argument.

I respect all sincere Christians and Jews as brothers and sisters, and hope for their wellbeing. I used to feel that way about Muslims but I am rather disgusted with so many of them for their hatred right now. I know that anyone who tries to worship and serve God to the best of their ability is pleasing to Him, and has a good future ahead.

What concerns me the most are the atheists and secular humanists (and that includes "religious people" who are really the former, in disguise)s who are doing their best to destroy any semblence of civilization based on spiritual values. I am thankful there are so many Christians in the US - without them, I can't even imagine what would be happening.