Hmmm… actually the passage in Matthew was in response to His apostle’s question on whether those who were in the Kingdom of God were obligated to pay the government taxes… and He responded as stated… which kinda makes you wonder about the churches not paying tax to the government, huh?

And in Romans, it says that the governments of men are only here by God’s authority at this time, so that by obeying the governments in things that do not conflict with God’s laws, we are also serving God… hardly an arguement for separation of church and state… more of a support for the statement “ One Nation Under God “

One thing that IS mentioned, is that the Kingdom of God is not one of the earthly governments, and that followers of Christ would not get themselves mixed up in political matters, as the earthly governments were not the answer to man’s problems, but rather God’s kingdom was… Still not a separation of Church and State, just being advised to follow God’s kingdom, and respect the authorities that God has allowed to be in place for the moment…

*shrugs*

how does one edit their own post on here? hmm…

just wanted to add, re: the one instance used to condemn gays, there are other scriptures which also mention what appears to be a condemnation… such as 1 Cor 6:9-11, which says that “ unrighteous; fornicators, idolaters, adulterers, men kept for unnatural purposes, men who lie with men, thieves, greedy persons, drunkards, revilers or extortioners.” will not inherit God’s kingdom…

*shrugs* my feelings on the matter, although irrelevant to the topic in general, are that all are imperfect, and that God will not punish those who are doing their best to love another human being, whether same sex or otherwise…

one has to look at things, not just in single instances, but taken in the context of the entire picture… in this case, the greatest commandment being Love…

funny.. those who argue for the separation of Church and State, are themselves mixing the two by being politically active in promoting the concept.. and they tend to ignore the big picture, which includes things like not putting the traditions of men over the laws of God, as well as that greatest commandment of Love for others, and forgiveness covering a multitude of sins…

ok, done with religion for now… lol… I rarely speak on it, due to the possibility of inflammatory reactions… funny how passion for one’s religious viewpoints often escalates into anger and hate.. .kinda makes one wonder sometimes…

those who argue for the separation of Church and State, are themselves mixing the two by being politically active in promoting the concept..

Quite the opposite - the objective is to prevent a mixing of the two. To quote George Carlin: “I’m completely in favor of the separation of Church and State. My idea is that these two institutions screw us up enough on their own, so both of them together is certain death.”

and they tend to ignore the big picture, which includes things like not putting the traditions of men over the laws of God, as well as that greatest commandment of Love for others, and forgiveness covering a multitude of sins…

Which god? Whose big picture?

I thought the same Wolf, however, the key to the Bible is how you interpret it. I bet there are hundreds of interpretations for those passages I mentioned. I personally interpreted Matthew 22:21 as trying to seperate church and state, especially out of context. If you don’t count the context of that verse, it seems to be arguing for seperation.

At least, that’s MY interpretation.

how does one edit their own post on here? hmm…

You can’t… yet. I whined about it enough to Rick, though, that I believe it’s on the planned feature list for 1.4. Being that it’s now possible to edit your own entries in the forums I suspect a good chunk of that code will be incorporated in the core program so that at least registered members will be able to edit their comments in the blogs. No promises it’ll make it in, but I believe he plans on doing so.

You can find actions by followers of any mythology that contridicts the writings of that mythology.

To use their own silly supersitions to disprove anything, is a bit of a double negative.  However, it definately can be useful to have argument killing passages from their own mythology memorized - then quickly pointing out that such contridictions within a book/beLIEf system pretty well discredit the whole.

Les,

I whined about it enough to Rick, though, that I believe it’s on the planned feature list for 1.4.

I would think hard before enabling such an edit function, unless you can set an edit deadline of 15 minutes or so.

The debates on SEB tend to get a bit heated now and then and an unrestricted edit feature is likely to result in edits that go well beyond correcting typos. Other sites have had this experience, prompting them to turn off editing completely.

I don’t know if EE supports mandatory revision control on posts and comments; if a moderator or site admin can roll back any and all edits, it’s a different ball game…

Anyway, just my $0.02.

“this one passage”
The first chapter of Romans is another big reason for winger hatred of homosexuality.  There’s one passage that gets quoted a lot but beyond that is further exposition of how that spiritual state ends up. 

No use using the bible to prove anything to wingers - there are something like 11 passages about homosexuality and a couple thousand about caring for the poor.  Then there’s Paul’s letter to the stem-cells…

DOF, every gay-hater Christian site I’ve seen always mentions the Leviticus one, and I rarely see the one you mentioned.

That’s wierd because the Romans passages are really clear (and nasty!) Paul was just a little too worked up about it, if you know what I mean…

Actually, there are six possible ones:

http://www.truluck.com/html/six_bible_passages.html