Posted On: May 12, 2006, 5:44 pm CDT

Posted By: Dubya

"Jesus' sacrifice is off topic. His behavior towards a sinner is not necesssarily indicative of the sinner's relationship to the cross. The woman taken in adultery might have gone right back to her lover's bed, and ended up in hell. I doubt it, but we don't know. Jesus did not forgive her, He only refused to condemn her due to lack of evidence."


Really? That's an interesting interpretation. Are you saying Jesus didn't know whether she was an adulteress? I always thought He refused to condemn her on the principle that he who is without sin should cast the first stone. You know, Judge not, lest ye be judged? This is one of His most important teachings, and pretty much the whole point of why I continue to type away here.

"Jesus can pardon sinners because He is God. I cannot pardon sinners because I am a creature and a sinner. I can forgive you for punching me in the nose, but if you are unrepentant God will not. And God can forgive you for punching me in the nose even if I don't.

God knows the heart, I don't. So I can only deal with what I see and hear, and follow the mandate laid down by St. Paul in Ephesians 5:11, "Have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather reprove them." When I see or hear that a man has renounced evil and embraced the gospel, I will assume that he has joined the ranks of the redeemed and behave accordingly. If he renounces evil and doesn't embrace the gospel, I will still hire him and add him to the ranks of the insured. I simply do not want to tacitly approve of evil by associating with and supporting it, being forced to treat two homos as if they were on an equal footing with a married man and woman."


As you well know, there is only one unpardonable sin: rejecting God. There are no others. You don't get to define homosexual behavior as a de facto rejection of God, because it is only one sin among many which anyone could select to be bad enough to equate to rejecting God. Therefore, you can't assume that any practicing homosexual has rejected God or been rejected by Him. Your harsh judgment of homosexuals puts you in jeopardy (Romans 2:1).

"One basic definition of freedom is the lack of coersion. To be forced by government to hire people whom I sincerely believe are evil is a violation of my conscience and a further erosion of private property rights, i.e., freedom. This doesn't seem to have concerned you."


On the list of things that concern me, I will admit that government-enforced tolerance of people who are different than me comes up pretty low.

"I am certian that St. Paul would approve of a company not hiring someone dedicated to flouting sexual perversion, and would disapprove of government mandating hiring and providing for him, since he said in Romans 13 that civil magistrates are God's instruments for punishing evil. For governemnt to force someone to ignore evil is to turn its God-given mandate on its head.

Since St. Paul was a immediate spokesman for God, there is no doubt in my mind about Jesus' disposition on this topic."


Your analysis of pardoning, forgiveness and evil starts and ends with your tremendous distaste for a particular sin. It then becomes easy to point to verses and say, "See? It's all right here."

Romans 13 also tells us to pay our taxes and not to resist governmental authority. If you and I have a duty to think for ourselves and decide whether or not this or that government edict violates our conscience, Romans 13 isn't going to be much help. You can't use it to justify civil magistrates punishing people you think are evil and in the same breath complain about laws you don't like.

It matters not to me what you believe to be true, or whom you believe to be evil – even though I disagree with your interpretations of the Bible, I wholeheartedly support your right to believe whatever you want. But it makes a big difference to me on what basis our laws are decided, interpreted and enforced. Whether you like it or not, we are governed by the Constitution, not the Bible. If the Founding Fathers had wanted us to refer to the Bible when making and interpreting our laws, they could have easily included explicit references in the Constitution. They didn't. If you don't like the way our laws force you to treat gays, there are plenty of Islamic dictatorships that might be more to your liking. They hate gays as much as you seem to, but their people really get to have fun with their hatred.

Voltaire said, "Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd." Here's to continued searching and learning.