User talk:Mikek
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Hello, Mikek, and welcome to Conservapedia!
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Thanks for reading, Mikek!
- Philip J. Rayment 01:53, 30 October 2008 (EDT)
Religion and politics
(Discussion continued from main talk page.)
"...homosexuality is primarily a political issue because many religions say it's bad.": Huh? How come that doesn't make it a "religious" issue?
"It has very little basis in social effects of homosexuality, there's just an "eww" factor, and the Bible says no...": The Bible says 'no' because that's not the way we were designed. Assuming that point is true, then homosexuality is wrong, whether you want to label that a "religious" issue or not.
"There are some things that should be governed by the government...": The question, though, is it not, is whether religious views should influence the government?
"Many political decisions are unrelated to religious beliefs...": I think this is the main point: Many other political issues are related to religious beliefs, and more than most recognise. For example, I maintain that laws against theft, murder, rape, etc. have a religious (Christian) basis. If you reject the concept of an absolute moral basis from God, then you are left with relative morality, which comes down to personal opinion. Therefore you have no absolute basis for saying that theft etc. is wrong. Even if you argue that it's wrong because it affects someone else, it's merely an opinion that affecting someone else should be the benchmark.
Philip J. Rayment 01:53, 30 October 2008 (EDT)
- Those laws that you listed all have a basis from before Christianity... at the very least, Judaism had it covered hundreds of years before Christianity started, but that wouldn't prove my point anyway, so I'll skip that one. I think that relative morality IS the basis for all morality, including religious. Though it's true that it's a personal opinion, and that there will always be a few who believe that their desire comes before anything for anybody else, including their lives, most people aren't naturally murderers until religion steps in to show them otherwise. Hammurabi's Code from 1760 BC includes laws against theft, murder, incest and rape (well... rape of virgin wives, at least)[1]. Religion has very often been the documentation of moral codes, but not the source of them unless you want to argue that all of the ancient laws governing polytheistic societies were given by their gods. Mikek 08:52, 31 October 2008 (EDT)