About Gay Marriage
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But one doesn't have to be bigoted to hold bigoted beliefs. Some people are raised to hold certain attitudes, and while the person him or herself is not a bigot, they hold discriminatory beliefs, and those beliefs have the very same kind of negative impact on society as a mouth-foaming, sheet-wearing bigot.
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That's what happened during slavery. All White people didn't hate Black people, but the impact of their unexamined ideas had the very same negative consequences as those of bigots. That's also what happened in Nazi Germany, and what led to the near extinction of Native Americans here in this country. In those instances, many of those people weren't bigots, but they allowed themselves to hold on to attitudes that allowed the true bigots to thrive.
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In the case of Black people, it's important for us to understand that we're either against discrimination or we’re not; we must either be for ALL the people in our society to be treated equally, or we're not - there's no in-between. And the argument that, "If we allow same-sex marriage, we also have to allow a man to marry his dog, or his sister," is invalid, because we don't allow ANYONE to marry their dog or sister. So everyone is being treated equally in that regard.
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So what Black people should always remember is, we're products of the very same bigoted environment as White people. So we're capable of being just as bigoted as any racist Hillbilly. Look at any hip hop video and count the number of dark-skin sisters in them - very few. And when was the last time you heard of a person committing a drive-by wearing a sheet? Again, very rarely, if ever. The reason for that is our own bigoted attitudes towards one another has rendered the Klan redundant.
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That's why when I became a thinking adult I decided to reassessed ALL of my attitudes and beliefs, and anything that didn't stand up to reason, I unceremoniously discarded - and that included religion. I replaced religion with ethics, because I realized that the only reason I held the religious beliefs that I did was due to an accident of birth.
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With just a little bit of God-given logic, it became clear to me that if I had been born in Israel I would have believed something altogether different, and if I'd been born in Iraq, I would have believed something different still. That fact alone made it abundantly clear that my religious beliefs were forged by man, not God.
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It became clear to me that the only way that I could truly know God's will was by observing what God has done - and he made birds to fly, fish to swim, and man to think. So if I allowed myself to be more loyal to what man has WRITTEN than what God has done, my faith is not in God, but in man. In fact, that's what faith means - that you've decided to embrace what you've been told.
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But just because you've decided to embraced a given philosophy as your religious beliefs does not mean that you have the right to shove those beliefs down everyone else's throats, and that's exactly what many people in this country are trying to do. That's stupid, and it's exactly why the founding fathers chose to separate church and state - to protect us from our stupidity.
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Eric L. Wattree
Http://wattree.blogspot.com
Ewattree@Gmail.com
Citizens Against Reckless Middle-Class Abuse (CARMA)
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Religious bigotry: It's not that I hate everyone who doesn't look, think, and act like me - it's just that God does.