Take a deep breath. The Nashville Statement wont change anything

[guillaumeb]

From the article:

This week, a group of prominent evangelicals released a “Christian manifesto,” which argued that LGBT people who embrace their sexual or gender identity are living in sin. The statement was coordinated by the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, and many intelligent and respectable people, including my father, signed it. I assume most did so because of their convictions, however misguided, rather than hatred.............

When the statement was released, a broad coalition of progressive Christians responded with disbelief, anger and mourning by turns. But dissenters can take a deep breath and put their sackcloth back in mothballs. A closer look at this statement reveals a number of fatal flaws, which are likely to render it impotent.

To read more:

http://religionnews.com/2017/08/30/take-a-deep-breath-the-nashville-statement-wont-change-anything/

[guillaumeb]

1. Also from the article:

Conservative Christians seem to love issuing statements, all of which share two common characteristics: They oddly bear the name of the city in which they were drafted or released, and they all fail to shape the broader culture.

[Lint Head]

2. If their conviction is siding with something that is hateful then it is hatred.

It's not conviction. Being raised myself in a strict Christian home, I am very familiar with the term conviction. Convicted in Christ. Convicted in your belief. I think the word was invented to cover for things that are just plain wrong, to make it look like someone is not committing a sin against their own religion. It's a cop out as far as I'm concerned.

[guillaumeb]

3. The author talks of his father being a signatory.

And one assumes that he is unwilling to see his father as being motivated by hatred.

[AtheistCrusader]

4. It doesn't fucking matter. This is the kind of social pressure that leads to things like Suicides.

Doesn't matter that it's essentially toothless. It doesn't need to be to get people beaten, abused, or cause people to live in terror, self harm, or worse.

Don't try to hand wave this away as 'no big deal'.

[trotsky]

5. And as I noted in my thread, the position taken is essentially the same as what the RCC teaches.

It's bullshit, and it takes some pretty serious blindness of one's own religious privilege to dismiss the concerns of others.

[AtheistCrusader]

6. It gives the bigots cover in thinking that their position is the social norm.

That is direct harm, because it emboldens the bigots. Soft bigotry in the form of general mistreatment, up to direct impingement; assaulting people, damaging property, you name it.

It's hate speech, pure and simple.