Scout and K£vin- thank you; it is very nice of you to say that I am sane and patient, but you should see the state of my cushion after I finish talking to the religious clan.
But seriously, thanks, it’s a real compliment to be called sane by such impure souls. I thoroughly enjoy reading your sensible posts/opinions as well, of course!

I agree that there are too many people who have quite rigid minds and it can be hard to have a conversation with them, but I always hope that they can allow themselves to explore different views as well.
I always hope that they will show something of themselves, give their own opinion and not always the brainwashed version, the version of what they are expected to say or think.

I do not believe for one minute that even stict Christians (or any other religion) agree 100% with the church, the bible, or their God.
Surely they must question SOME of the things or even disagree to a certain extend. Why are they so afraid to just admit that? Why is the truth so scary that they have to cover it up so much?
I suppose it is a very safe feeling to belong to a (religious) group that is ‘always right’, and the more people have the same beliefs as they do, the safer they feel.

Either that’s my reason for being patient, or I was merely born to annoy, lol.

Hi Celivia

I have wondered about the same questions. I certainly encounter religious people in my everyday life who do hold a more lateral view to their religion than some of the posters here. In fact, in my day to day life I consider myself to be more of an agnostic, but when I get on OLO I become firmly atheist. I think this is in response to the rigidity and judgemental nature of the extreme religious.

Maybe, they in turn, become more inflexible when they get on OLO - who knows?

I have been posting on OLO for 2 years now and have had many a tussle with the usual religious suspects - so I usually only respond to them now if I feel I have a real point to make, or to have a bit of fun. I have a quick temper, but I can't stay angry and usually end up just seeing the funny side of things. However, this doesn't lessen my passion for equal rights for all people and I maintain my rage against dogma.

In a society like Australia, it is disheartening to see people who would impose their lifestyles on others purely because of religion. We are seeing too much of that - denial of gay marriage, use of abortion drugs, limiting scientific research and so on.

I do enjoy knowing that there are people out there like you and K£vin - broad minded and free-thinking.

Have a wonderful weekend.

Snout, I've been sick and busy so sorry for the delay. Re: celibacy – this article in Rolling Stone was a good one. http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/7418688/the_young__the_sexless

Maurice Shinnick a Catholic priest wrote a book called 'This Remarkable Gift' about homosexuality, he has since repudiated conclusions that contradict Catholic teaching. Without writing a long treatise on it, it can be summed up in the paragraph from "First Things" http://www.firstthings.com/ scroll down to "Many gays nowadays talk about their sexual identity as a “gift from God.”

The rationale behind celibacy, the theology and the philosophy of love is all there. An interesting Catholic take on love is "The Theology of the Body".

Bosk, Christian doctrine has developed since the Resurrection, perhaps one day you will find new threads of meaning in Christ's Redemption – one of the many mysteries of Creation. Pope Benedict XVI in his 'Introduction to Christianity' (have a read) writes about Christ's crucifixion "many texts actually force one to think that Christian faith in the Cross imagines a God whose unrelenting righteousness demanded a human sacrifice, the sacrifice of His own Son, one turns away in horror from a righteousness whose sinister wrath makes the message of love incredible. This picture is as false as it is widespread"

Jesus need not have been crucified, but he willingly, out of love, allowed himself to be taken because of his pure self giving, he was open about who he was, knew it would put him at odds with the authorities and in his sacrifice showed us how much God actually loves us. Love is a verb a doing word. And God has now been as low as anyone, ie no matter how far we fall, or how much we suffer in life God can meet us eye to eye. He's been there before us. St. Thoma

Thomas Aquinas writes beautifully too on Christ's crucifixion.

You missed the point I was making about your superficial understanding of history. Like any bigot, you start with a conclusion and then spin the facts to support them. If there's a negative achievement in western history - a slaughter, a pillage, a theft - you give 100% of the credit to Christianity, relying on the logic that since the west was nominally Christian, anything it did "belonged" to Christianity as a whole. But if there's a positive achievement in western history, somehow Christianity gets zero credit for it. Why can I not say that Christianity presided over the rise of the west, an secularism is overseeing its fall?

Under your logic, democracy is as a whole responsible for the US invasion of Iraq. A democracy, after all, committed this act, and did so in the name of democracy. So why can I not lay the blame for all the deaths involved at the feet of democracy?

That stuff may work with first year girls at uni, but not with me.

If you really want an institution to damn, one much larger and gorier than Christianity then the Government or the State will oblige. Yet it is possibly the thing you would make stronger than it has ever been, in your extreme secularism – you would appeal to the great sinner to save you from the lesser.

The real question is "Why are all human things so bad when they claim to be so good?" This it calls Sin, or the Fall of Man. And this is where Christianity begins and has her theory and her remedy for the world's evils. But what are yours?

If you must be an atheist at least be a smart one, we need you to be more thoughtful. World famous Harvard historian Niall Ferguson
". . if I were pressed, would have to admit to being a kind of incurable atheist"

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/talks/8.30/relrpt/stories/s1603430.htm

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2005/07/31/do3102.xml&sSheet=/opinion/2005/07/31/ixopinion.html

In all the excited mutual masturbation between Celivia, Scout & K (goodness me, no Sterling, only the Euro symbol on this keyboard!) anyway, you know who I mean, comes the wonderful quote:

"In a society like Australia, it is disheartening to see people who would impose their lifestyles on others purely because of religion. We are seeing too much of that - denial of gay marriage, use of abortion drugs, limiting scientific research and so on.

I do enjoy knowing that there are people out there like you and K£vin - broad minded and free-thinking."

Oh dear!

The religion of secularism that you people adhere to (and yet do not confess or understand?) is as bigoted as any religion adopted by deity based fundamentalists or zealots. The imposition of the scientific / gay / insert other lobby group here... agendas/lifestyles manifests the duplicity/irony/hypocracy of you LOLin' OLOers.

A case of "Praise the Board" perhaps? Anyway, I am happy for you to challenge 2000 years of tradition, but, level playing fields please.

As I read today in the paper: "The new problem, as Francis Fukuyama explains in his book, The Great Disruption, is 'liberal democracy has always been dependent upon certain shared values to work properly' and that agreement on those shared values is now contested. The culture of intense individualism is fraying the bonds that hold family, community and nations together."

Douche!

Martin,

Thanks for getting back to me and for those links. I’m sorry to hear you’ve been unwell, and I hope you’re feeling better.

I particularly enjoyed the Rolling Stone article. I have to admit that a subculture that provides sanctuary to young people from the relentless commoditization of their sexuality is probably not all bad. A culture that doesn’t provide space for kids to grow into their own sexuality on their own terms is, I think, exploitive. And I loved the idea of the “masturbands” – elevating not-wanking to a competitive (team?) sport in which winners can wear their achievement on their sleeves. I thought of the Seinfeld episode “Master of his Domain”.

But there is also something a bit creepy about it too.
“This is what she finds romantic: a father who gives his teenage daughter a "purity" ring, which will be returned on her wedding day and handed to his daughter's new husband, her virginity passed from man to man like a baton.”
Try that with the genders reversed and the sexual politics becomes even more overt.
I was less impressed with Charlotte Allen’s piece,
“Aelred showed the way for making proper use of that gift: turning the heightened sensitivity and artistic sensibility that often accompanies it into ecstatic, prayerful prose that burned with love for Christ and his mother.”
Ambiguity about whose mother aside, I found this piece imbued with a phobic sense of sexuality, as if homosexuals’ only acceptable social role is as “sensitive, artistic” aesthetes – kind of like desexed pets. This is not a grown up way of approaching sexuality, and carries false stereotypes about the supposed traits of gays. I have no problem with people choosing to make whatever sense they wish of their own sexuality (within the limits of not harming others of course), but to propose the above as a normative or ideal use of the “gift” says more about the anxieties of the writer than about the realities of how most people experience their sexuality.

cont.