Church Of Christ Lawsuit

[Stone holm]

Yirgacheffe and Bluebell:  In America this is one of the few residual carryovers from the time when the church was simply an appendage of the State as it was in most of Europe and Britain.  It is something of an anomaly under our Constitution that an officer of any church has authority to solemnize something which has legal significance.  A lot of controversy could have been avoided, had we called the relationship which carries with it secular legal rights something other than marriage and allowed only government officials to solemnize it, and allowed the various churches to marry whoever they wanted to whoever they wanted to an to as many as they wanted to without the marriage carrying any secular legal significance.  But, one should remember that during the legislative debates in Vermont the LDS Church had a legal representative who, along with the Catholics, led the fight in the legislature against Civil Unions.   They lost that fight and Vermont legalized Civil Unions -- it wasn't until later that it authorized SSM.  The shift towards tepid tolerance of Civil Unions legislation and the vehemence over the sacredness of the word "marriage" didn't occur until after the early battles were clearly lost.  What we will never really know is whether there had been early support for, instead of opposition to, civil unions -- that the momentum towards SSM was have died.  Clearly, the backlash against Prop 8 resulted in a sea change -- so its hard to say.

[Stone holm]

As you know, you are comparing apples and glockenspiels. As you know, the law in the dwindling number of morally non-bankrupt US states doesn't single out particular religious groups and forbid them from performing legally binding marriages. As you know, those states uphold a morally non-bankrupt definition of marriage, which they then apply impartially.As you know, your attempted parallel was not valid.But then, I suppose that's rather inevitable. Because, as you know, you haven't a valid parallel to offer.

i

Interesting use of the word bankrupt. It is interesting how morality or the lack thereof has come to be defined strictly in terms of sex. So if you take a certain position regarding sexual relations then you are moral, if you take another you are completely immoral. If aliens visited America regardless of where they landed they would assume we were completely obsessed with sex....then again, maybe not, right now the morally bankrupt State of Vermont appears to not be discussing it much but concentrating on just about everything else. Hm....maybe we ought to stay out of other people's bedrooms...

[sethpayne]

i

Interesting use of the word bankrupt. It is interesting how morality or the lack thereof has come to be defined strictly in terms of sex. So if you take a certain position regarding sexual relations then you are moral, if you take another you are completely immoral. If aliens visited America regardless of where they landed they would assume we were completely obsessed with sex....then again, maybe not, right now the morally bankrupt State of Vermont appears to not be discussing it much but concentrating on just about everything else. Hm....maybe we ought to stay out of other people's bedrooms...

 

SSM is evil.

 

Waterboarding and the indiscriminate killing of innocents using imprecise drone strikes is something Jesus would totally support.

 

I think you are right.  Aliens (not to mention most other civilized people) would likely conclude we have our priorities a bit messed up.

[The Nehor]

I'm confused...

Which Church of Christ are you talking about? There are many.

 

Christ disagrees.

[guerreiro9]

The nuclear family doesn't quite work well with our current economic system...

The nuclear family works extremely well in our economic system. So much so that study after study show that children raised in a nuclear family demonstrate substantially higher well-being in all measured categories (economic, social, mental,etc...).

The fact that people are unwilling or unable to form nuclear families does not change their effectiveness.

Our society is not doing a good job of encouraging people to form nuclear families, and I am afraid that is a whirlwind we will reap.

-guerreiro9

[Stone holm]

The nuclear family works extremely well in our economic system. So much so that study after study show that children raised in a nuclear family demonstrate substantially higher well-being in all measured categories (economic, social, mental,etc...).

The fact that people are unwilling or unable to form nuclear families does not change their effectiveness.

Our society is not doing a good job of encouraging people to form nuclear families, and I am afraid that is a whirlwind we will reap.

-guerreiro9

Oh am not doubting that a functioning two parent family is the best approach we have developed so far for nurturing children, but that has little to do with whether it is compatible with our current economic system. If it were compatible, you would not see it unraveling at the rates we are experiencing. And yes, I would agree that we are not doing a good job of encouraging people to form nuclear families, in fact that was the whole point of the comment. You don't effectively offer such encouragement by devoting massive amount of time and resources to extolling the virtues of something and condemning people who vary from the norm, the reaction to that is what is happening now, people ignore you. What you have to do is reform the economic system so that it encourages it. If we got really serious about encouraging and promoting family farms and businesses and making it economically convenient to have and rear children, you would see a massive resurgence of the health of the nuclear family. But our present corporist capitalism model does neither of those things. The last golden age of the American nuclear family, there have been several, was the 1950's. That age saw high Union wages for the blue collar class, small middle class family businesses were everywhere, and family farms were still the norm. Now the high wage blue collar class is extinct, the Middle class small merchants are on the verge of extinction, except for the Amish the family farm is the exception not the rule. Most Americans are employees, not owners and nepotism is frowned upon, both parents work in order to either keep food on the table or maintain the middle class standard in which they were raised. Consequently, right wing Christian preaching about the family tends to resemble that yellow stream of water in fast moving air. If you want to save the family concentrate on what is actually tearing it apart, and that is not SSM.

[Buckeye]

SSM is evil.

 

Waterboarding and the indiscriminate killing of innocents using imprecise drone strikes is something Jesus would totally support.

 

I think you are right.  Aliens (not to mention most other civilized people) would likely conclude we have our priorities a bit messed up.

 

Depends on the aliens ....

[JLHPROF]

SSM is evil.

 

Waterboarding and the indiscriminate killing of innocents using imprecise drone strikes is something Jesus would totally support.

 

I think you are right.  Aliens (not to mention most other civilized people) would likely conclude we have our priorities a bit messed up.

 

No, both are evil.

[The Nehor]

The nuclear family works extremely well in our economic system. So much so that study after study show that children raised in a nuclear family demonstrate substantially higher well-being in all measured categories (economic, social, mental,etc...).

The fact that people are unwilling or unable to form nuclear families does not change their effectiveness.

Our society is not doing a good job of encouraging people to form nuclear families, and I am afraid that is a whirlwind we will reap.

-guerreiro9

Not really. It works well socially if it is economically sustainable and ideally if the home can function on the wages of one parent. Our big problem is that the U.S. lost the advantage it had over the rest of the world it held after the Second World War where we were pretty much the only major industrialized nation to not have its infrastructure destroyed and suffer large scale depopulation. Now we have to compete on a more level playing ground and people are trying to figure out where American Exceptionalism went and not realizing that in their youth it was primarily fortunate circumstances.

[guerreiro9]

Oh am not doubting that a functioning two parent family is the best approach we have developed so far for nurturing children, but that has little to do with whether it is compatible with our current economic system.......... [/quits]

I agree with most of what you wrote, but disagree on a few particulars. I don't have time to respond now, but will do so later.

-guerreiro9

Edited June 5, 2015 by guerreiro9

[Stone holm]

The Nehor,  I tend to agree -- although I think we could probably have sustained our advantage longer had we decided to invest more in our domestic development rather than on being the World's policeman.   I was talking with my wife last night about some of the ramifications of the Cold War.  What I found interesting not too long ago was looking at a literacy map of the area around Afghanistan.  Something really, really popped out.  All of the countries in that area which were actually conquered by the Soviets had very high literacy rates, most were nearly as high as ours.  If, however, you looked at the ones that were not conquered by the Soviets -- these were basically ones which were either our client States or ones where we funded the puppet insurgencies to fight the Soviets, the literacy rates were absolutely abysmal.  What sometimes skews our thinking is that we compare our standard of living compared to the standard of living in some communist countries during that era, what we should be comparing them to is the standard of living of the majority of the people before the communists took over.   In other words, we would compare the standards of the peasants under the Czar with the peasants under the Communists, or the Cuban peasants under the corrupt American puppet before Castro and the Cuban peasants after Castro.   I suspect that the route to the high standard of living enjoyed by the European democratic socialist governments for much of the world, is not through the corporate capitalist model, but rather an interim communist style approach which eventually softens and grants a high level of social liberty.   How we save the American family, however, gets really complicated by the fact that our economic system currently favors big corporate business and concentration of wealth -- we seem, however, to be very, very loyal to that economic system.  So if we are going to retain that loyalty to the economic system, then we are going to have to watch society experiment until it finds an alternative to the nuclear family which actually works under our current economic system.  I suspect we are going to move towards some type of multi-generation clan-like system of some type where a group of adults are caring for the children with one or two of the adults in the group doing most of that work.  In the upper economic echelons we already have the hired nanny who is spending the bulk of the time with the kids while the parents our out working in their careers.  The Church, I suspect, will eventually wake up and realize -- oh, the appearance of support for this economic system is actually undermining our core values, and we are going to have to start speaking out against it again, like we did during the Nauvoo and Utah eras or else all we are accomplishing is the yellow stream of water in the hard moving air effect.

[sethpayne]

No, both are evil.

Then why do we only publicly condemn one?

ETA. Can you imagine the positive changes that could be influenced by Saints organizingERA-style?

End unlawful imprisonment. Immoral wars. Unlawful violations of privacy. The list goes on.

But for some reason we only talk about the other stuff. Weird.

Edited June 6, 2015 by sethpayne

[Russell C McGregor]

SSM is evil.

 

Waterboarding and the indiscriminate killing of innocents using imprecise drone strikes is something Jesus would totally support.

Oh yes, that's a wonderfully honest representation of my position.

Funny how it doesn't resemble my actual position. At all.

[Stone holm]

Then why do we only publicly condemn one?

ETA. Can you imagine the positive changes that could be influenced by Saints organizingERA-style?

End unlawful imprisonment. Immoral wars. Unlawful violations of privacy. The list goes on.

But for some reason we only talk about the other stuff. Weird.

Its because in general Christianity has narrowed morality to sexual morality, that way it can avoid certain inconvenient political truths which might annoy political allies.