you are all wrongheaded wrong monsters.

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I think I've seen a picture of a turtle attempting to mate with a crash helmet, does that count? Or only if the love that dare not [turtle noise] itself is consumated?

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you are all wrongheaded wrong monsters.

But funny. Really, really funny.

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Thanks for all the birthday wishes! I have decided to have a birthday week this year, and it's working out wonderfully well.

I had other things I was going to say, but I got all caught up in the fascinating discussion of religion and morals and forgot most of them. Then I saw the picture of the shark and kayaker, and every other thought immediately left my head. I just love b.org!

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I think a birthday week is an excellent idea.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY LIBKITTY!!!!!!!

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It's been so fun, getting together with different people each evening. Last night, about fifty people at my church's Wednesday night supper (at another church for now, natch) sang happy birthday to me. My face was so red!

Also, I'm really fortunate, because I have a co-worker with the same birthday, whose husband is a professional chef, and she brought in the best tiramisu ever. I didn't even like tiramisu before today. Yum!

Plus, I brought apples and croissants and brie for breakfast and make folks at work mochas. And I made little open-faced sandwiches for work at lunch of basil walnut bread, pesto, muenster cheese, and hothouse tomatoes. I'm just having so much fun today. And I'm actually getting some work done too!

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Happy birthday libkitty! Little weirded out thinking about turtles doing *turtles* to be honest. Can't picture...not that I'm eager to.

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Little weirded out thinking about turtles doing *turtles* to be honest. Can't picture..

I can. Quite the memorable zoo trip, that was...

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I go back and forth on this -- not on the thinking homosexuality is wrong, but on subscribing to a religion that says so. Which I do -- and yet, its founder had absolutely nothing to say about the matter. Paul may possibly have had something to say about the matter, but historians and language scholars have been raising doubts for the last decade and a half about the accuracy of a lot of the translations of his letters.

Question - It may be the "word of Jesus" as passed along by various witnesses that forms the basis of Christianity. But one could argue that what Jesus actually founded was a sect of Judaism, and Christianity as a seperate religion was founded by Paul.

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See, I don't have a problem with religions thinking homosexuality is wrong, but the insistence that the government shouldn't legalize the unions bothers me.

This. But expecting people outside of a particular religious fold to follow the particular code of a religion is ridiculous. If they don't recognize the religion as truth, why would they? I also think it's dangerous, but that's a whole long different thing.

Sixty years ago or so, C.S. Lewis (hardly a flaming liberal, religiously speaking) proposed that we'd all be better off if there was a stark line drawn between civil marriage and religious marriage (he was, of course talking to Christians, so about Christianity in particular). Civil marriage would be governed by the state, and its rules enforced on all citizens who married, and Christian marriage would be governed by the church, and rules would be enforced by its own members, etc.

Now, it was divorce laws and objections to them were the basis of his argument in favor of a strong separation between religious and civil marriage, but I think his rationale could be (should be) applied to the issue of religious objection to extending marriage rights to same sex partners.

To say that all a person's morals derive from their world view is, I think, a little simplistic.

But of course, that's an enormous over-simplification of the points I was making, Wolfram. I was objecting to the suggestion that it is dangerous or wrong to base morals on a belief in the supernatural (when what was at issue when the subject came up was actually law, not morals, to begin with), largely because I think morals are part of a person's world view, as are his opinions of the supernatural.

I don't think a person always or even usually renders moral judgments only after examining his own world view. I think that if a person explained the reasoning behind his moral judgments, eventually he'd be letting you in on his world view (or, the rest of it, because what's "right" or "wrong" is part of a world view, as much as a deity, many deities, no diety, everything is deity, or it's not possible to ascertain truth about deity).

I think one true test of whether your religion informs your morals, or vice versa, is whether you would behave in a way that's contrary to your morals if dictated by your religion.

Don't you think most people behave in ways contrary to their own (professed, at least) morals at least once in a while, though--sometimes because of weakness or fear, or an impossible situation, or because a situation arises in which two principles are seemingly in conflict with one another? Doesn't that say more about character than about which informs what.

I see what you mean, but I also think that's as much of a measure of how faithful a person is to his own moral code. For example, most of us would say as a general statement that truth is good and lies are bad. Now there are some circumstances in which some of us would think lying was advised, and that might tell us more about world view, as you mention.

And of course, we all would have all sorts of reasons and explanations for why we lied, even though, in general, we think truth is better. It's unlikely we'd try to say lying is good. It's more likely we'd be explaining why we were exempt from the lies-are-bad part of our code in a particular set of circumstances.

For example, say a crazed (but dumb) child murderer shows up at my door, and says, "Are your children home? If you say they're home, I'm going to enter your home and kill them." Now, I still think truth is good, and lying bad. And in fact, given my particular religious beliefs, it may even be that I should answer truthfully or at least not answer and try to thwart the killer another way. But I'm on the spot, and I think my duty to protect my children's life is more important than being perfectly truthful, in this circumstance.

I'd never try to tell you after I lied--that lying was, in general, good. I would instead be trying to show (continued...)

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