While for keeping and upholding S377a of the Penal Code, and being totally against the bigoted homofacist agenda, it has come to my attention that some people hate gays with a passion. This has came to the forefront even while those of us who object do so rationally, some who object do so with a malice that is clearly deplorable.
Let's put it this way. Homosexuals are not the problem. They are still humans and deserve to be treated as such. They are not second-class citizens to be ill-treated as a scapegoat, or to be used as anyone's punching bag. What we are against is homosexualITY, and the bigoted homosexual agenda. Bashing homosexuals for fun is wrong, although the homosexual activists sure do enjoy bashing us. But we are not to stoop to their depraved standard. Even if we can 'get away with it', anyone who bashes gays for sport is wrong. Homosexuals are to be treated with compassion, in the same manner as we should treat mentally ill people. They are to be pitied and helped to get out of their depraved state.
Homosexual activists of course are a different issue altogether. These people are the ones who create more homosexuals out of impressionable young minds, and who glory in their shame. These people are to be treated as criminals, in fact worse than criminals, for leading people astray. In the same way as those who brainwash people to commit suicide bombings are to be punished more severely than those who acually attempt to do so (since those who successfully did so are dead by then), homosexual activists are to be punished most severely for their wicked acts. Justice must be meted out against the perpetuators of this outrage. Since they are already sold out to the extent of desiring to corrupt others (Rom. 1:32), they are not to be treated with kids' gloves, otherwise we are telling others that it is ok to do the same thing. Yet, at the same time, we are to offer them a choice to repent of their sins, and forgiveness IF they sincerely do so.
My last two articles on this subject (here and here) were written against homosexualITY and its wicked activists. Christians especially should learn how to differentiate between the two, and to treat each group accordingly. To those who struggle with their sin, we should be compassionate, but to those who glory in it and seek to drag others down with him/her, they should be vehemently denounced in a bid to protect others from them. The hearts of such people are very hard, and only hard measures must be used in order to perhaps get through the hardness of their heart (like Paul against the Judaizers, John against the Gnostics etc). Of course, without God, such change is impossible, so we should pray to God for them at the same time as we interact with them.
As for the pagan West, we would probably soon see the active persecution of faithful Christians in these once Christianized nations. Dr. James R. White has written a very good article whereby he shows this to be the case, and exhort us to prepare ourselves for it. Because we are Christ's, we will be hated by the world, and the world will persecute us (well, at least those who are faithful). In fact, shouldn't we have learned already that 'all who desire to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted' (2 Tim. 3:12)? While we still have the liberty to do so, let us therefore do the works of God, before we will be hunted down by the 'tolerant' and 'loving' secularists out there in their secular Inquisition.
13 comments:
Great article, Daniel! I couldn't have said it better myself.
In case you aren't aware, there have been some local blog attacks on Christians with name-calling thrown in.
Here's one example titled "The loonies are marching":
http://www.yawningbread.org/
Daniel, you are a silly little man with a morbid fascination with other people's sex lives. Perhaps you don't have one of your own, which wouldn't be entirely surprising, judging by your photo. Still, that gives you plenty of time to devote yourself to other things, though not the command of English, judging by your posts.
May I suggest that since you are given the liberty to practise your perversion (Christianity - which is at the very least a perversion of the truth) that you leave others to practise whatever they choose? There should be no coercion in religion - in which case, you cannot expect to push your antiquated views on others through the illiberal intrusion of s377a.
Soo kiat:
I will disregard your blatent assissination of my character for now. Using your own logic against yourself, by questioning 'my sex life', you show yourself to have a 'morbid fascination with other people's sex lives'. Yours is the pervasion. I do not accept your ipsit dixit, especially since you have not proven why yours is not the pervasion.
Furthermore, why do you santicmiously talk about 'coercion in religion'? By attacking me and asking me to change my view, you are attempting to force your view on me. So why should anyone allow themselves to be coerced by your intolerance and bigotry against the Truth?
Anyway, unless you can prove otherwise, homosexuality is a pervasion. In the name of God, I command you to repent of your perverse error, or face the fiery judgment of God in eternal hellfire.
But Daniel, you miss the point that I am not trying to force anything on you. It is not me that supports repressive legislation, nor do I expect you to change your views on homosexuality. I fully support your right to do and believe whatever you choose, sexually, doctrinally and philosophically. I am a libertarian - I believe in freedom. I do not believe the state has any right to dictate on matters of personal morality. That path leads to the kind of abhorrent theocracy and dictatorships we saw in Afghanistan and see in Iran, Saudi Arabia and most countries where religion has too great an influence over law. Therefore I think you have an absolute right to observe the strictures of your religion. However, the flip side of that is that you have no right to tell me I cannot engage in homosexual practice. You may think it wrong, and condemns me to eternal damnation. But I am equally convinced there is no god, no heaven, no hell, and that homosexuality is a perfectly acceptable expression of human nature for a minority of people. We should, then, respect each other's difference of opinion and not attempt to use the law to repress each other. My engaging in homosexuality is in no way an aggressive act on you. It doesn't concern you at all. Which is why I say you have no right to interfere in my love life. This is an issue of liberty.
Incidentally, I apologise for the rather childish comments at the beginning of my previous entry - they were written in a fit of irritation at what I found to be offensive comments you wrote about homosexuals.
Soo Kiat,
Apology accepted. I appreciate that you are willing to talk instead of throwing invectives.
With regards to homosexuality, I agree with you that we should 'respect each other's difference of opinion and not attempt to use the law to repress each other'. That of course is ideal. However, I hope you do know that practically this is rather hard to acheive. If you have read or would read the news from other parts of the world, especially in Western countries, you will have known that homosexuals are actively using the law to force other people to adopt their view or at least stay silent on the issue. If you read the history of how it came about, it came about through the first act of decriminilization of homosexuality, and then the clamouring of more and more 'rights' until they are oppressing all who disagree with them.
Now, you may not be one of these people, but can you be certain your compatriots are not? Just look at the anti-Christian rhetoric and the belittling of Christians on pro-homosexual websites such as Yawning Bread. If they would say such things when they are the powerless minority, imagine what actions they would undertake to persecute those who disagree with them if they were ever to gain power and influence?
The next thing to be established is that right or wrong, a certain type of morality will be established as the law of the land, otherwise there would be anarchy. Of course, liberty is important, and the authorities can grant liberty by not prosecuting those who violate society's moral code. In Singapore, the police have already said they would not actively prosecute those who violate S377a. Thus, you and all other homosexuals have the social right to do whatever you want to do in private. I think this is fair enough. Do you need to make society endorse your action (which is what repealing S377a would amount to) in order to feel at liberty? If so, why?
Having said all this, I would like you to know that I do not advocate ostracism and societal (not moral) discrimination against homosexuals as people, if I didn't make it clear. I know that there are a lot of people who hate homosexuals (not homosexuality), and they are wrong. But then these people hate anything they don't understand anyway. But do you think that repealing S377a would make them all of a sudden love you? Or that S377a somehow promotes hate? The problem here is with the people, not the law. Face it, this is the real world; you can change all the laws all you want; it's not going to change people's opinions in general. Various peoples are hated by various others, and I have my own enemies too. So? Do I go around forcing everybody to accept me? Don't tell me homosexuals are so insecure in their identities that they cannot face the harsh realities faced by almost everyone else in the world?
And no, I disagree with you that I have no right to tell you that you are wrong. After all, by so doing, you are telling me that my action (of telling you that your are wrong) is wrong, isn't it? What I would say is that we have the right to tell others whether they are wrong respectfully, but no right to enforce it by force.
Lastly, I hope that you would reconsider your stand with regards to God, and especially Jesus Christ. Physicalism or materialism (that nature/matter is all there is) is something which cannot be proven by science or any other human tool. Since that is the case, it is absolutely impossible for anyone to prove that there is no God. That you are convinced of the fact shows that you basing it upon a leap of faith in the philosophical system called Atheism (The only theistic system based on a negation). That being so, I hope you wll reconsider your blind faith in this system of yours.
Daniel. Allow me to address your points in order, so that we may better understand each other:
- I know of nowhere where homosexuals have more rights than heterosexuals, and very few where they have equal rights. The sad truth is that in most parts of the world, including most western democracies, they have significantly fewer rights, and can suffer discrimination in a host of areas, from outright criminalisation, tax policy, housing policy, inheritance laws, employment rights, family law and others. The gay lobby is, in essence, a single issue lobby - to end discrimination before the law. I know of no gay organisations that aim to legally silence critics, only to strip them of legal justification for discriminating against them. The only way I would wish to silence my critics is by the force of superior argument.
The anti-Christian rhetoric you have encountered is, alas, a reflection of the fact that religious people have too often set themselves as obstacles to equal treatment for gays, and as such have presented themselves as enemies of fair treatment for gay people. Even in the liberal west, this is very much the case. The forces of illiberalism sadly too often come cloaked in church vestments or resting on their religious books.
- I agree with you, of course, that a state must have laws, as few among us would choose to live in a Hobbesian state of nature, with the weak preyed upon by the strong. But the limits to state power must be drawn somewhere, else we have no individual liberty. One obvious line that can be drawn is in matters of private morality. Issues of public morality - such as offences against the person and property - are obviously within the state's domain, but I can see no justification for a state, which is after all an incorporeal institution to concern itself with intensely private matters such as the consensual sexual practices of its adult citizens. When the state intrudes on personal morality, it presents the intractable problem of whose morality it chooses to uphold. It must inevitably pick one code over another, typically (but not always) the majority's, and by so doing, it discriminates against the minority cultures or religions. Look at Saudi Arabia, where the practice of all religion but Islam is forbidden. I think that is intolerable, and would defend the rights of any Christian or Jew against such bigotry. Even in Western countries there are vestiges of such prejudice. It is still illegal for the monarch of England to be anything but an Anglican. I think the state should be neutral between its citizens, be they Christian, muslim, atheist, gay or straight.
- You say Singapore doesn't enforce s377a, and that to repeal it would be to endorse homosexuality. I have 3 observations: i) Singapore does not typically enforce, but it reserves the right. And it uses the cover of such legislation to ban gay meeting groups and gay publications. Moreover, if a political opponent of the PAP was homosexual, I think the party would waste no time in prosecuting him to hound him out of public life. ii)by criminalising us, whether or not they prosecute, they are effectively telling us we are second-class citizens. They are telling us to be ashamed, for our acts of love are illegal. iii) By repealing s377a the state is not endorsing homosexuality. It is saying nothing at all. There is, for example, no law in Singapore against masturbation, but that doesn't mean the state is officially endorsing it. It is saying it is none of the state's business.
- You are right, repeal would not suddenly make those who hate homosexuals love us. What it does, however, is slowly allows the climate to change, as it has in those countries where homosexuality has been legalised overseas. In the UK, for example, which I know well as I went there to university, it is 40 years since it was decriminalised, but even now open signs of your sexuality can in some places or situations put you in danger of physical attack and verbal abuse. But that is in decline, and now people are more careful not to offend gratuitously, in the same way that racism has declined once the legal justification for prejudice is removed. This is part of a process that began with decriminalisation. It makes a society a kinder, gentler place to live for all its citizens.
- I didn't say you have no right to tell me I am wrong. Quite the contrary, I believe very strongly in robust debate and engagement.
- Finally, it is of course impossible to prove a negative, so I cannot prove that god does not exist, but that is trivially true of the most absurd claims, too. I cannot prove that there are no unicorns, either, but my belief that there are no unicorns is not on a par with the belief that unicorns exist. A belief can be justified or not, depending on the balance of evidence. My belief that there are no unicorns is justified by the fact that there is not a shred of evidence that they exist, with no observations either in life or in the fossil evidence. If someone does believe in the existence of unicorns, the burden of proof is on them to demonstrate it. That is my position with regard to god, too. There is no evidence. The physical world works according to laws of nature that do not require the intervention of a god. The creation of the world is not well explained by a pre-existing god, either, since that merely begs the question who created the creator. If you say the creator has always existed, or did not need any agency to bring him into being, then I can retort that the physical world can equally have always existed or did not require an external agency. There is simply no need to posit the god hypothesis, as it adds nothing to the explanation of the "genesis" of the universe except for an additional unnecessary stage, and is then redundant for all eternity. That is not blind faith. That is evidence-based reasoning. When evidence changes, my opinion changes, too. That is where I differ from most conservative religious people, who cling to the truth of their bibles, korans and torahs, even when the evidence from the world around them shows that their books are mistaken. The evolution debate is one such area. No serious biological scientist disputes Darwinian evolution, which has been proven beyond all reasonable doubt for decades, but some religions prefer to cling to an absurdly implausible alternative. That is blind faith. Deeply, wilfully blind.
Soo Kiat,
I will address the issues related to homosexuality in a new post. Response to others will be forthcoming in another new post.
"No serious biological scientist disputes Darwinian evolution, which has been proven beyond all reasonable doubt for decades"
without going into details.. i have to disagree with this statement
Munchy, please name me a single serious biological scientist who has published a paper denying evolution in a reputable, peer-reviewed scientific journal.
Before you waste a lot of time, let me save you the trouble, because you won't find one.
Even the Vatican - a backward institution if ever there was one - admitted the truth of evolution in 1996, with Pope John Paul II saying: "New knowledge has led to the recognition of the theory of evolution as more than a hypothesis... This theory has been progressively accepted by researchers, following a series of discoveries in various fields of knowledge. The convergence, neither sought nor fabricated, of the results of work that was conducted independently is in itself a significant argument in favor of the theory."
Soo Kiat:
if there is any argument more ridiculous than this, I don't know any. All 'reputable' scientific journals are controlled by evolutionists, and they won't publish anything that contradicts what they believe, even though the evidences support the opposition. According to mainstream science, a journal can only be counted as reputable if it does not speak out against evolution, so your argument is self-serving rhetoric. How can any reputable scientific peer-reviewed publish a paper denying evolution if to do so would mean that it would not be reputable anymore? Please, use your brain.
If you are however, asking for any journal with objectively good research in it which contradicts evolution, then yes, there is. However, they are not 'reputable' because they deny evolution.
Also, if you are looking for scientists who deny evolution who have published in reputable peer-reviewed jounals, such people do exist. A partial list with their partial CV including the journal articles they publish could be found at (http://www.icr.org/research/index/research_biosci/).
Soo Kiat:
One more thing: Jus fyi, guess who were the ones who rejected evolution when it was first proposed by Charles Darwin, and who embraced it? Answer: the scientists of that day were the ones who rejected Evolution immediately after Darwin published his Origin of the Species. It was the compromising clergy who embraced the theory (for racial reasons, I may add). Darwin's theory was scorned by the entire scientific establishment of his time, except for a few people like Thomas Huxley who was self-taught (ie prossessing no formal education in Cambridge/Oxford etc.).
And really, I would recommand you read about how science actually works by reading people like Thomas Kuhn. It would help you, a lot.
"In the same way as those who brainwash people to commit suicide bombings are to be punished more severely than those who acually attempt to do so (since those who successfully did so are dead by then), homosexual activists are to be punished most severely for their wicked acts."
So, how do you wish to punish these "gay advocates"? Or folks like me who petitioned to repeal 377A Whip my ass to bloody ribbons? Send me to the gallows? Execute me? Tell me, so that I may know your devious, god-riddled sick mind.
Beast FCD
Beast FCD:
I am sure you are smart enough to do the computation yourself, and do not need to be spoon-fed the answers.
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