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Originally Posted by MarchHare
Emphasis added.
As per troutman's post above, the marriage pre-dates Christianity by centuries if not millenia. Even in cultures that weren't exposed to Western Abrahamic religions until the last 500 years or so, marriage still exists. I'm not sure why so many people seem to think that marriage is exclusively a religious (and specifically Christian) institution when it clearly isn't.
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Marriage isn't exclusive to religion, as has been stated by you and others.
Its the intolerance of religious however that fight against gay marriage under the guise of religious rights/freedoms.
I think John Stewart said it best when talking to Huckabee, that religion is much more of a choice than being gay is, considering what we know now about genetics and other factors.
If we only had more people like this Bishop in the UK:
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"Let's be honest, most of the discrimination ... has come at the hands of religious people, and the greatest single hindrance to the achievement of full civil rights for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered people can be laid at the doorstep of the three Abrahamic faiths: Christianity, Judaism and Islam," Robinson said in Atlanta at Emory University's Center for the Study of Law and Religion.
Justifying anti-homosexuality laws with presumed moral authority from the Bible's Book of Leviticus -- which says a man "shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination" punishable by death -- ignores that life has changed since 400 B.C., Robinson said.
People today routinely do many other things, from eating shellfish to wearing two kinds of cloth, that Leviticus also labeled abominations, said Robinson.
Humanity's beliefs about God and life have evolved in many ways, but Leviticus's few verses about homosexuality "are quoted as if nothing has changed in our understanding since biblical times," Robinson said.
Robinson called on "religious voices and religious people to undo the harm and devastation" by helping the nation and religious communities to question, if not change their minds about, religious convictions that "we've been very sure about for thousands of years."
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link:
http://www.upi.com/Top_News/2009/04/...8101239051440/
A further commentary, a great one about basing ones morals on the Bible:
http://pactiss.org:8080/ct/critica/r...sitic-morality
The conclusion summons up his thoughts perfectly:
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No, the only conclusion, and the point of this essay, is that we use our extant morality to determine which bits of religious texts are those we should follow and which bits are those we should ignore.
Religion uses the morality we already have to try and buttress its claims to deep truths. The mismatch between natural and biblical morality is a consequence of the attempt to mold our existing feelings of what is right and wrong into a power structure that wants to hijack our own nature and claim it for itself - it is parasitic on our naturally evolved sense of morality.
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