Please explain to me why gay marriage is wrong

[Zoltan_Cobalt]

The Catholic Church still eliminated it. There is a clear prohibition on the making of images and the Church has excised it from the 10 Commandments.
I am not trying to argue for or against same sex marriage, only that laws change over time. Even god’s law. G-d does not change, but G-d is not the law. G-d’s law for us changes as we change as a people. Again if the law never changed, we would all be Jews under the Old Law. Obviously god’s laws changed. This is simply beyond dispute, so it is just false to say that God’s laws do not change. They do and they have.
Again I think only two laws are eternal and Jesus told us exactly what they are: “Love your lord your god with all your heart, all your mind, and all your soul, and love your neighbor as yourself.”
The rest of the laws are culturally dependent and only exist for the good of the society in which people live, they are not inviolate for all eternity. Stealing is wrong because clearly I would not want someone to steal from me. Murder is wrong because clearly I would not want someone to murder me. Rape is wrong because obviously I do not want someone to rape me. These all violate Christ law to love our neighbor as ourself. I believe that this is as close to a categorical imperative as we can obtain as human beings, but there have been several moral and legal theorist that can find flaws in this approach as well, but it is at this point the best guidance we have been provided as to what is and what is not moral behavior.

God’s laws cannot change.

However…the Church’s laws can change.

Church law, established by man, can be repealed or modified…by man.

For example…Jesus Christ did not institute fast and abstinence on Fridays. The Church established the practice and held that it was a grave sin to deliberately break the fast/abstinence on Fridays. The Church changed the practice.

Jesus Christ told us (reviled) “What God has joined together…let no man put asunder” God’s “divorce law” has not changed and never will.

 

[tomberg]

John 21:25 - But there are also many other things which Jesus did; which, if they were written every one, the world itself, I think, would not be able to contain the books that should be written.

He could have spoken against it and the gospel writers didn’t write it down

God does not change, law does. The law and God are not the same, nor are they co-equal. If you thought that the law never changes, then there is simply no need for the Catholic Church and we should just be evangelical Christians who profess the belief of Sola Scriptura. The law is God’s partial revelation to man, which changes as man changes. This is so obvious and even explicity stated in the NT. God does not change its mind, it changes what is permissible for us at the time. Morals, laws, all is change, God’s love is the only thing which does not change. Again, if the law did not change, there was no need for Jesus, or the Catholic Church. Now we can argue about who has the authority to change God’s law, but god’s law definitely changes.

 

[Frankenfurter]

Dear OP, if you are still following this thread,

you mentioned that giving gays rights in marriage can give them rights for visitations in hospitals, etc.

I have asked many of the active gay-rights folks if they would be happy with having equal rights as marriage by having a recognized civil union. They say no. Equality under the law is not enough.Even if they have all the same rights as married folks that is NOT enough they say.

So the gay marriage thing is really not about rights at all it turns out. Even if given the same rights in all respects, they (the radical gay folks) do not consider that to be enough.

In fact, most states already have civil union type laws which give same sex couples equal rights. But that is not what the issue is about, by their own words.

The issue is instead about DESTROYING the existing concept of marriage. It has nothing to do with giving gay folks equal rights.

Here are links to the gay activists who openly describe that their agenda is to destroy marriage altogether:

tfpstudentaction.org/politically-incorrect/homosexuality/marriage-equality-spells-death-of-marriage.html

This is a political agenda not a religious one, and not one concerning equal rights.
Plenty of gay folks don’t even want to get married. In fact most don’t. It is a small radical group that literally wants to re-define society to their political interests.

Now that you know this, please consider that some folks will defend marriage, the Catholic church included, but also lots of other people, the majority in fact. However, the political tactic used by the other side is to cast these marriage defenders as bad guys. That is a typical political tactic. When someone has a message that you don’t link, but is in fact true, best strategy is to destroy the messenger.

 

[Peter_Plato]

Again, you can keep trying to justify the obvious. God’s laws change, and are not eternal and unchanging. How could Christ hand over the law to the apostles and give them power over the laws, unless the laws Changed. What would there be to bind or loose, if there was nothing to ever change. You can absolutely claim that this authority was handed over to the Church, I don’t disagree with that. If you want to claim that the Catholic Church has the authority to determine what is moral and what is not, that is another matter entirely. What I disagree with is that God’s laws are eternal and unchanging, from start to finish. They obviously are not.
Last I agree that Jesus changed everything, but again, it changed. And in all of Jesus’s teaching from the 4 gospels, it is fascinating that even though homosexuality was rampant in the ancient world, Jesus did not bother to say a single thing about it. I guess he had other concerns, like love, compassion, helping the outcast, the sick and the poor.

If you confuse practical laws with eternal and unchanging laws, then what you say has some apparent plausibility, but that is precisely the point you are missing. Practical laws change, but eternal moral laws do not because they are grounded in the nature of God Himself rather than in the needs of human beings.

Church laws are those which God has determined pertain to the needs of human beings since Christ completed his work and mission. Those laws are in effect and I n practice today and they are not to be dismissed merely because we don’t like them or do not want to be bound by them and claim, as a pretext, that all laws are simply capricious and mean nothing as far as humans are concerned. Clearly that is false because God himself imposed the Levitical Laws on Israel and did not make those laws optional for the people. Christ has and does impose new laws on all mankind through his Church.

Those laws are not optional, although there is a built-in allowance that those who have not heard them are not completely bound to them. Denial, however, is a different issue and those who should know better will be held accountable to keeping them, no matter how much they try to rationalize away that obligation.

 

[tomberg]

God’s laws cannot change.

However…the Church’s laws can change.

Church law, established by man, can be repealed or modified…by man.

For example…Jesus Christ did not institute fast and abstinence on Fridays. The Church established the practice and held that it was a grave sin to deliberately break the fast/abstinence on Fridays. The Church changed the practice.

Jesus Christ told us (reviled) “What God has joined together…let no man put asunder” God’s “divorce law” has not changed and never will.

Yet, interestingly enough, god’s marriage laws did change. God was perfectly amenable to polygamy, and Jesus never said anything about it, so polygamy used to be morally acceptable, now it is not. Morals change. I will be real interested to see how much longer the Church continues its teachings on divorce, I suspect they will not last another 50 years.

 

[Thorolfr]

the-american-catholic.com/2012/04/30/slaverymeme/

So how exactly do they “know” that slavery is wrong? When exactly was this hypothesis tested and verified by the scientific method? Where are the research papers and double-blind studies that establish the truth of this moral proposition?

Watch what will happen, sarcasm aside, if you stop someone mid-argument and ask them “why is slavery wrong, exactly?” They may look at you as if you just confessed to being a mass serial murderer. When it comes to their cherished beliefs about how things are and ought to be, not a shred of evidence is required. Why its just obvious, you see, that slavery is immoral, and anyone who doesn’t agree is just evil. And yet if man is simply an animal, I see no reason why he can’t be yoked like any ox in the fields. Point of irony: the slave of the ancient civilized world (and certainly the “Judeo-Christian” world) had a higher ontological status than the (allegedly) free man of modern Western societies, who is nothing but an evolutionary hiccup in a meaningless universe.

What you have posted from The American Catholic is ridiculous. It’s true that all slaves in antiquity were not the same as slavery as it was practiced, for example, in the United States. But it is silly to pretend that owning people might have been moral. As the article in Wikipedia points out:

Slaves were considered property under Roman law and had no legal personhood. Unlike Roman citizens, they could be subjected to corporal punishment, sexual exploitation (prostitutes were often slaves), torture, and summary execution. The testimony of a slave could not be accepted in a court of law unless the slave was tortured—a practice based on the belief that slaves in a position to be privy to their masters’ affairs would be too virtuously loyal to reveal damaging evidence unless coerced.

Moses Finley remarked, “fugitive slaves are almost an obsession in the sources”. Rome forbade the harbouring of fugitive slaves, and professional slave-catchers were hired to hunt down runaways. Advertisements were posted with precise descriptions of escaped slaves, and offered rewards.[60] If caught, fugitives could be punished by being whipped, burnt with iron, or killed. Those who lived were branded on the forehead with the letters FUG, for fugitivus. Sometimes slaves had a metal collar riveted around the neck. One such collar is preserved at Rome and states in Latin, “I have run away. Catch me. If you take me back to my master Zoninus, you’ll be rewarded.”

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_ancient_Rome

Does it sound moral to you that human beings could be owned and then be sexually exploited, tortured, whipped, branded or have metal collars put on their necks? Does this sound like people who had a high ontological status?

 

[Peter_Plato]

I think Paul was being metaphorical and yes there is plenty wrong with slavery PER SE. god obviously does not want us to be slaves otherwise we would not have free will. He would have made us slaves without free will could only obey him. You just made one of the worst all time arguments I have ever seen.

Free will, is, in itself, a good only to the extent that it allows personal subjective identity. It is not a good in so far as it is an end in itself. Otherwise, tyrannical dictators with absolute power over everyone else with the capacity to force the compliance of all others and all else would be the ideal for each of us.

Unfortunately, that ideal is incoherent since having the absolute power and freedom to get everything you will to have says nothing about what is the absolute good to have.

Absolute license in the sense you seem to mean “free will” is the antithesis of moral, since it cannot identify the real absolute good except in terms of what an entirely free will absolutely want. A completely empty and unhelpful proposition that undermines absolutely the question of what is the “good” is that should be willed.

 

[clem456]

Yet, interestingly enough, god’s marriage laws did change. God was perfectly amenable to polygamy,

He was? And you know this how?
Before you go vaguely pointing to scripture you have to get by Matthew 19, where God himself points to “the beginning”. Seems to me when God himself points to “the beginning” the concept of change is gonna be addressed.

and Jesus never said anything about it, so polygamy used to be morally acceptable, now it is not. Morals change. I will be real interested to see how much longer the Church continues its teachings on divorce, I suspect they will not last another 50 years

Can you fathom that polygamy was accepted, but was never part of the morality embodied in Christ?

The divorce disciplines may change, probably will. But the reality that in the beginning God man them man and woman? Do you see that changing? I’d be interested in your take on that self evident fact, that God made (makes) us to bond together as male and female. Or are we to believe that you hatched from a spirit-egg?

 

[cena]

God does not change, law does. The law and God are not the same, nor are they co-equal. If you thought that the law never changes, then there is simply no need for the Catholic Church and we should just be evangelical Christians who profess the belief of Sola Scriptura. The law is God’s partial revelation to man, which changes as man changes. This is so obvious and even explicity stated in the NT. God does not change its mind, it changes what is permissible for us at the time. Morals, laws, all is change, God’s love is the only thing which does not change. Again, if the law did not change, there was no need for Jesus, or the Catholic Church. Now we can argue about who has the authority to change God’s law, but god’s law definitely changes.

The law changes, but the underlying principles do not.

Edit: laws concerning practices change (like fasting)

 

[cena]

What you have posted from The American Catholic is ridiculous. It’s true that all slaves in antiquity were not the same as slavery as it was practiced, for example, in the United States. But it is silly to pretend that owning people might have been moral. As the article in Wikipedia points out:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_ancient_Rome

Does it sound moral to you that human beings could be owned and then be sexually exploited, tortured, whipped, branded or have metal collars put on their necks? Does this sound like people who had a high ontological status?

I used that article to show slavery is not the same in every culture. Slavery in the Old Testament is not the same as slavery in the U.S. Is that how slaves were treated in the Old Testament? I thought war prisoners becoming slaves was alternative then them being killed in war.

 

[Peter_Plato]

But it is silly to pretend that owning people might have been moral.

It is, equally, silly to pretend that “slavery” in all its historical forms involves “ownership” in the same sense.

It is up to you to define what “ownership” means in each case and how “ownership” in all those cases is equally wrong merely because a label of “ownership” can be applied in some analogical sense to people, as to cattle, as to goods.

This issue is far from settled merely because you wish to call all the cases “owning people” and muddy the moral waters by claiming that your ability to apply the label is sufficient to make your case. It isn’t.

Just as “locking people up” is quite a different matter when it is justly done by proper authority compared to when it is done improperly by someone who kidnaps another.

It may have been legal to own slaves in Old Testament times, but that may have meant no more than it being “legal” to hold others accountable to paying off their debts and even using proportionate force to do so. This is not necessarily any different to what we do today when citizens are incarcerated and held in prison for failing to pay debts.

A crucial difference was that the political structures were not in place at the time to do hold other accountable in a formal way by using the courts, police and a penal system, but had to be accomplished by individual debt holders at the level of informal social order.

All too often it is those who cite the issue of slavery who seek to overlook substantive differences merely to hold to their point that “slavery” is always and everywhere wrong. That claim is not a settled one merely because you think it is.

 

[Thorolfr]

I used that article to show slavery is not the same in every culture. Slavery in the Old Testament is not the same as slavery in the U.S. Is that how slaves were treated in the Old Testament? I thought war prisoners becoming slaves was alternative then them being killed in war.

Leviticus 25:45 says, “You may also acquire them * from among the aliens residing with you, and from their families that are with you, who have been born in your land; and they may be your property.”

So this is not talking about prisoners of war. It was permissible to buy slaves who were non-Jews (i.e. aliens) who resided and were even born in Israel. These individuals could even be acquired from their families.*

 

[clem456]

Leviticus 25:45 says, “You may also acquire them * from among the aliens residing with you, and from their families that are with you, who have been born in your land; and they may be your property.”

So this is not talking about prisoners of war. It was permissible to buy slaves who were non-Jews (i.e. aliens) who resided and were even born in Israel. These individuals could even be acquired from their families.*

Ok, so let’s admit that the OT peoples practiced slavery and other things, like genocide for instance. Even defined and practiced in obscure cultures, some things we consider to be awful were condoned by the ancient peoples. Agreed.

What are we to do with that now? What’s the point?

 

[Thorolfr]

This is not necessarily any different to what we do today when citizens are incarcerated and held in prison for failing to pay debts.

Do we still have debtors prisons in the US where people can be incarcerated for not paying their debts and is that moral?

 

[tomberg]

The law changes, but the underlying principles do not.

Edit: laws concerning practices change (like fasting)

This is what is called a distinction without a difference. What exactly are those underlying prinicples then? If laws change then the principles change with them. Again, the distinction between practical laws and moral laws is a completely modern distinction. In the ancient world ALL LAWS were moral laws, as all laws derived their validity from God.

Again, no one has answered my question that I have posted repeatedly so I will just take this as my victory unless someone answers this. IF it was moral to execute homosexuals and disobedient children in the OT, then it should still be moral to execute them today.
Final chance: Is this correct or not; Yes or no.

 

[cena]

This is what is called a distinction without a difference. What exactly are those underlying prinicples then? If laws change then the principles change with them. Again, the distinction between practical laws and moral laws is a completely modern distinction. In the ancient world ALL LAWS were moral laws, as all laws derived their validity from God.

Again, no one has answered my question that I have posted repeatedly so I will just take this as my victory unless someone answers this. IF it was moral to execute homosexuals and disobedient children in the OT, then it should still be moral to execute them today.
Final chance: Is this correct or not; Yes or no.

Whether you get stoned to death or nothing happens, idolatry would be wrong because God is our creator and worshipping anything else is a grave injustice. No matter what form it takes idolatry is immoral. Morality doesn’t change.

 

[Thorolfr]

All too often it is those who cite the issue of slavery who seek to overlook substantive differences merely to hold to their point that “slavery” is always and everywhere wrong. That claim is not a settled one merely because you think it is.

Only on Catholic Answers Forum do I find people actually trying to justify slavery in some cases

 

[edwest2]

Did anyone ever ask how the gay agenda became SO prominent in the last few years? How it sabotaged the media, became a talking point in so many places in society? How “gay rights” became an issue, then “gay marriage” and “gay adoption”, and now gays trying to force straights to accept their advances? How did all this happen in a few short years???

Well it was PLANNED by two gay activists, Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen in two publications, both authored by those Harvard intellectuals, one a psychologist/neuro-psychiatrist, the other a political scientist/public relations expert…

1. A 1987 article entitled “The Overhauling of Straight America” and published in Guide, a homosexual publication, in 1987

…and

1. A book, entitled “After the Ball: How America Will Conquer Its Fear and Hatred of Gays in the 90s”, published in 1989. Most people have fallen into their TRAP unwittingly and are now converted without knowing why…Their morals have been changed by fraud, not by spiritual direction/Godly intent. Homosexuals are called to chastity. Love the sinner, hate the sin.

SEE:
massresistance.org/docs/issues/gay_strategies/after_the_ball.html

It began in 1973, and gradually “advanced” along with the destruction of the family. For a while, on this forum and elsewhere, the line was: “Look at what the straights have done to marriage! Let the gays take a shot at it.” as if being gay and married automatically led to the best possible solution. It didn’t. Gay divorce is occurring. The media has hyper-sexualized everything, removing the true definition of human sexuality and marriage.

But back in 1973, radical gay activists and closeted gays in the APA were putting pressure on the American Psychiatric Association to remove Homosexuality from their Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. This type of lobbying, along with some underhanded tactics, led to a vote that ignored years of research and published articles, and what was once a disorder today was not a disorder the following day.

Read about it:

amazon.com/Homosexuality-American-Psychiatry-Politics-Diagnosis/dp/0691028370

Recently, after years of lobbying the APA for a change, Transgenderism got struck off as a disorder. Lobbying by the LGBT community can change a diagnosis? It did.

Ed

 

[cena]

Only on Catholic Answers Forum do I find people actually trying to justify slavery in some cases

Would serfdom be moral? Are serfs considered property since the lord owns the land and they are tied to the land?

 

[tomberg]

Whether you get stoned to death or nothing happens, idolatry would be wrong because God is our creator and worshipping anything else is a grave injustice. No matter what form it takes idolatry is immoral. Morality doesn’t change.

NOT A SINGLE PERSON HAS ANSWERED MY SIMPLE QUESTION, So I take it you concede my victory. Thank you.
Now I will concede to you that idolatry, stealing, and lets even say homosexuality are still morally wrong. I concede to you that all these things are wrong. No disagreement with you at all. So no need to discuss that. I am again talking about the punishment for engaging in these activities. FINAL CHANCE otherwise you prove yourself hypocrites be avoiding answering.
If it was morally acceptable to execute homosexuals and disobedient children in the OT, then it is perfectly morally acceptable to execute them today. Yes or No. FINAL CHANCE OR I WIN. Either the morality of such punishment has changed, or it has not and it still completely morally acceptable to execute homosexuals.