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Forums - Politics Discussion - US Supreme Court: Christian baker does not have to bake 'the gay cake'

Cobretti2 said:
d21lewis said:
Slippery slope.

With this ruling and the recent refusal of service to Sarah Sanders, I feel that we're moving backwards. I'm black. My wife is white. What's to stop a restaurant from saying "Sorry. We don't serve interracial couples." What's to stop a store from saying "You blacks are nothing but trouble. I'm not selling you that gun."

This is not good. Not good at all. Even if I disagree with somebody's lifestyle choices, religion, political views, etc. I still feel that their rights should not be compromised.

At the end of the day who cares though?

Is it wrong and stupid and the person saying all that a racist fuck? sure

But look on the flip side, we are in the world of social media, leave them a bad review and let the people crucify them by not going to those places to do their shopping. This is how a democracy works. Smart people will survive in business, racist pricks will not.

I know it still doesn't make it right, but I would rather see the person for who they are and give my money to a person who is accepting of others.

Same goes for this cake shop. I don't get why we still debating it a month later lol. There is 100s of cake shops, just go to another. Leave this one a bad review and watch it's business decline with time.

 

 

Mr_No said:
Even if I don't agree with the ruling, the business has the right to do what they want, even if it is due to religious reasons. The caveats of a free market.

However, as in any capitalist system, people need to vote with their wallets and not support this kind of behavior. They're masking their unwillingness and bigotry by religious reasons, and with that I disagree.

I see where you guys are coming from with this, and it might work in today's day and age, I'm just wondering, how would you deal with it if people started discriminating for other religious reasons? Say for example, that an atheist decides not to serve Christians because he believes that religion is evil. I imagine you'd advocate for the same "vote with your wallet" approach or "leave a bad review" approach. Free market approaches, I get it. But with Christianity on the decline, and non-religious people making up 30% of the nation and growing, one day Christians could be a minority. Lets say this atheist exists in a future America where Christians are as common as Jews and Muslims are now. Non-religious people are the vast majority, and it's as common to look down upon it as it is to look down on gays now. If the atheist shop owner defines his religious stance as promoting non-religion, he could claim under this court decision that he should be able to discriminate against Christians for religious freedom reasons. Is that fair for the Christian? Shouldn't he be able to participate equally in society regardless of his religious views? You might say yes, but in this future, there probably wouldn't be much of an outcry, and the atheist would still get plenty of business because most people in this future aren't Christian, don't care, and many even look down on Christians. A free market solution will never come.

And don't try to answer this with "oh that'll never happen" because a) you don't know that and b) it's just a hypothetical to illustrate my point that the free market isn't always going to care enough to solve the problem. A fair democracy doesn't rely on the free market to enforce fairness, it lets everyone participate in society equally (unless someone violates someone else's rights, like a murderer, who then doesn't get to participate and is instead jailed).



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Pemalite said:
massimus said:

I don’t use screenshots of Wikipedia either lol thanks though. Most of those sources look ridiculous, there are like 2 that are problay worth clicking on that seem like real studies. I see where he got that gay penguin article from now. That’s why I don’t use Wikipedia. You have the entire library of Congress and endless studies at your fingertips, why be lazy lol?

"You can bring a horse to water, but you can't make it drink".

Wikipedia articles are as strong as the citations that they are built from, if you would prefer to ignore such extremely fantastic sources of evidence and information, then so be it, but the fact you refuse to actually check it out (But still hold an opinion on it) just undermines your own position.

massimus said:


If I was interested I would look into it more but I have already read a few articles from him and other users and they all say the same thing. A handful of species display habitual homosexual behaviors, mostly birds with brains the size of a peanut. 57 other species have displayed homosexual behaviors but it’s very rare to see. That’s all I needed to know. There is no gay pride going on in the animal kingdom.

If you aren't interested in it, then why are you even debating the topic?


massimus said:

There is zero evidence that animals are searching out same sex partners because of their sexual preference for “intimate relationships”. Showing homosexual behaviors and being a homosexual are different things.

Incorrect.
The evidence provided in this thread shows that some animals are searching out same-sex partners, don't try and spin your own narrative here. :P

Just because it's not happening en-masse' doesn't mean it doesn't occur.


massimus said:

They don’t think or operate like humans do, it’s as simple as that.

You could use that excuse in any comparison between animals and human beings, could you not?

 




1. You can bring me to the toilet and I will never drink it, not even if I’m thirsty lol. I guess we just disagree on the fantastic part. I might have read the lion ones I guess, they seem legit. I already know from a previous reply from another user that it’s a rare occurrence with them and not “habitual”. Not not really, my opinion is flimsy. I already said I don’t know. I just haven’t seen anything substantial to change my opinion.

 

2. I’m not debating, I’m responding to replies and links for a comment I made. I don’t think animals are to be compared in human context. Whats the closest animal in terms of intelligence, an orangutan? 

 

 

3. I never said homosexual behavior didn’t occur. I said homosexuality isn’t running rampant in the wild, it’s a fact. It’s a rare occurrence outside of a few species. No animal species would evolve into self extinction, there is something going on there. Overpopulation due to no predators, male female ratios, something rational. Self destruction is a human trait in more ways than just sexual preference. Jungle law is precise and shows no mercy. Mother Nature is also a ruthless bitch. Humans are the most unnatural creatures on the planet and we play outside the box. We cheat and sometimes the game gets buggy. Animals don’t cheat, they adapt to nature and the human element. Maybe it is natures way of thinning the the herd, I dunno. I still think it’s just overpopulated dumb birds lol. There is one penguin colony that is like a couple million strong. There is nothing there to eat them. 

 

4. You can use that for anything, sure. That was the point of the whole “rape” thing. I wasn’t comparing homosexuals to rape, I was comparing humankind with the animal kingdom. It’s not comparable.



HylianSwordsman said:
Cobretti2 said:

At the end of the day who cares though?

Is it wrong and stupid and the person saying all that a racist fuck? sure

But look on the flip side, we are in the world of social media, leave them a bad review and let the people crucify them by not going to those places to do their shopping. This is how a democracy works. Smart people will survive in business, racist pricks will not.

I know it still doesn't make it right, but I would rather see the person for who they are and give my money to a person who is accepting of others.

Same goes for this cake shop. I don't get why we still debating it a month later lol. There is 100s of cake shops, just go to another. Leave this one a bad review and watch it's business decline with time.

 

 

Mr_No said:
Even if I don't agree with the ruling, the business has the right to do what they want, even if it is due to religious reasons. The caveats of a free market.

However, as in any capitalist system, people need to vote with their wallets and not support this kind of behavior. They're masking their unwillingness and bigotry by religious reasons, and with that I disagree.

I see where you guys are coming from with this, and it might work in today's day and age, I'm just wondering, how would you deal with it if people started discriminating for other religious reasons? Say for example, that an atheist decides not to serve Christians because he believes that religion is evil. I imagine you'd advocate for the same "vote with your wallet" approach or "leave a bad review" approach. Free market approaches, I get it. But with Christianity on the decline, and non-religious people making up 30% of the nation and growing, one day Christians could be a minority. Lets say this atheist exists in a future America where Christians are as common as Jews and Muslims are now. Non-religious people are the vast majority, and it's as common to look down upon it as it is to look down on gays now. If the atheist shop owner defines his religious stance as promoting non-religion, he could claim under this court decision that he should be able to discriminate against Christians for religious freedom reasons. Is that fair for the Christian? Shouldn't he be able to participate equally in society regardless of his religious views? You might say yes, but in this future, there probably wouldn't be much of an outcry, and the atheist would still get plenty of business because most people in this future aren't Christian, don't care, and many even look down on Christians. A free market solution will never come.

And don't try to answer this with "oh that'll never happen" because a) you don't know that and b) it's just a hypothetical to illustrate my point that the free market isn't always going to care enough to solve the problem. A fair democracy doesn't rely on the free market to enforce fairness, it lets everyone participate in society equally (unless someone violates someone else's rights, like a murderer, who then doesn't get to participate and is instead jailed).

Well the short answer is we don't know if it will never happen. Your scenario could happen in the future.

However you would think that as new generations are born the more understanding and accepting of each other we will get because essentially we are more multi cultural then ever also.

If you let the racists and Xphobes (X being anti reglion,religion, gay or whatever people are scared off) be themselves the sooner they will weed out as majority will laugh at them and condone their actions.

Hell we have gone with Slavery to pretty much everyone accepting black people in a short period and even interracial relationships being the norm. Surely in the next 50 years all the intolerant assholes or at least 99.99% of them would have died out by then?



 

 

Pemalite said:
massimus said:

Logical fallacies? How are they separate? Rape has a basic definition too. In a human context it means something different. It’s not “rape” in the animal kingdom just as it’s not “homosexuality” because of a few anomalies. That’s just my opinion.

How are they separate? First, hows about you try thinking about how are they even the same?

thismeintiel said:
You can't really just respond with "logical fallacy" and think you won the argument. He makes a good point. There is little reason to compare us to the animal kingdom. We have different thought processes and most animals really have no morals, only survival instincts.

For Christ sake. This angle is silly.
I just showed examples where animals were in a MONOGAMOUS RELATIONSHIP. AKA. NO Rape whatsoever.

thismeintiel said:
You can't really just respond with "logical fallacy" and think you won the argument. He makes a good point. There is little reason to compare us to the animal kingdom. We have different thought processes and most animals really have no morals, only survival instincts.

 

You bet your ass I can and have. There is a reason why logical fallacies exist and why someone looses an argument when they use them.





Argument from fallacy is the formal fallacy of analyzing an argument and inferring that, since it contains a fallacy, its conclusion must be false.

Trying to use "it's a fallacy" to dismiss other people's points or win in a argument  easily turns into snake eating it's own tail. 😹

If you're not bothering to break down why someone's logic or argument is unsound while you're using "it's a fallacy", it's just noise.



HylianSwordsman said:
Mr_No said:
Even if I don't agree with the ruling, the business has the right to do what they want, even if it is due to religious reasons. The caveats of a free market.

However, as in any capitalist system, people need to vote with their wallets and not support this kind of behavior. They're masking their unwillingness and bigotry by religious reasons, and with that I disagree.

I see where you guys are coming from with this, and it might work in today's day and age, I'm just wondering, how would you deal with it if people started discriminating for other religious reasons? Say for example, that an atheist decides not to serve Christians because he believes that religion is evil. I imagine you'd advocate for the same "vote with your wallet" approach or "leave a bad review" approach. Free market approaches, I get it. But with Christianity on the decline, and non-religious people making up 30% of the nation and growing, one day Christians could be a minority. Lets say this atheist exists in a future America where Christians are as common as Jews and Muslims are now. Non-religious people are the vast majority, and it's as common to look down upon it as it is to look down on gays now. If the atheist shop owner defines his religious stance as promoting non-religion, he could claim under this court decision that he should be able to discriminate against Christians for religious freedom reasons. Is that fair for the Christian? Shouldn't he be able to participate equally in society regardless of his religious views? You might say yes, but in this future, there probably wouldn't be much of an outcry, and the atheist would still get plenty of business because most people in this future aren't Christian, don't care, and many even look down on Christians. A free market solution will never come.

And don't try to answer this with "oh that'll never happen" because a) you don't know that and b) it's just a hypothetical to illustrate my point that the free market isn't always going to care enough to solve the problem. A fair democracy doesn't rely on the free market to enforce fairness, it lets everyone participate in society equally (unless someone violates someone else's rights, like a murderer, who then doesn't get to participate and is instead jailed).

I'm not gonna take the easy way out and say it won't happen. Heck, what you mentioned does have a chance of happening. Crazier and more ludicrous things have happened in America. Yes, Christians are diminishing in numbers at this point, but it won't stop religious-based discrimination from happening in both sides. For example, in your same hypothetical future, an atheist baker based on a small conservative town decides he wants to turn down several cakes for Christian weddings. Instead of the customers forcing him to bake it through law, they could happily go to other bakeries in town. They all know about the atheist shop owner who defined his religious stance by promoting non-religion and they'll look for someone else who can give them a better service. Either he makes a compromise or moves out to another place where only atheists will be buying his cakes. It's a free market so he can do whatever he wants, even if it's harmful for his finances.

And like Cobretti here, the more the extremists on both sides let themselves be known, the more they'll get mocked at by both religious and secular citizens.

Again, I'm not saying it won't happen. But it's just a hypothesis, a "what if", a chance.

Also, I find the bolded premise quite curious because I thought atheists, by definition, are against organized religion and won't consider themselves to be part of one.



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Mr_No said:
HylianSwordsman said:

I see where you guys are coming from with this, and it might work in today's day and age, I'm just wondering, how would you deal with it if people started discriminating for other religious reasons? Say for example, that an atheist decides not to serve Christians because he believes that religion is evil. I imagine you'd advocate for the same "vote with your wallet" approach or "leave a bad review" approach. Free market approaches, I get it. But with Christianity on the decline, and non-religious people making up 30% of the nation and growing, one day Christians could be a minority. Lets say this atheist exists in a future America where Christians are as common as Jews and Muslims are now. Non-religious people are the vast majority, and it's as common to look down upon it as it is to look down on gays now. If the atheist shop owner defines his religious stance as promoting non-religion, he could claim under this court decision that he should be able to discriminate against Christians for religious freedom reasons. Is that fair for the Christian? Shouldn't he be able to participate equally in society regardless of his religious views? You might say yes, but in this future, there probably wouldn't be much of an outcry, and the atheist would still get plenty of business because most people in this future aren't Christian, don't care, and many even look down on Christians. A free market solution will never come.

And don't try to answer this with "oh that'll never happen" because a) you don't know that and b) it's just a hypothetical to illustrate my point that the free market isn't always going to care enough to solve the problem. A fair democracy doesn't rely on the free market to enforce fairness, it lets everyone participate in society equally (unless someone violates someone else's rights, like a murderer, who then doesn't get to participate and is instead jailed).

I'm not gonna take the easy way out and say it won't happen. Heck, what you mentioned does have a chance of happening. Crazier and more ludicrous things have happened in America. Yes, Christians are diminishing in numbers at this point, but it won't stop religious-based discrimination from happening in both sides. For example, in your same hypothetical future, an atheist baker based on a small conservative town decides he wants to turn down several cakes for Christian weddings. Instead of the customers forcing him to bake it through law, they could happily go to other bakeries in town. They all know about the atheist shop owner who defined his religious stance by promoting non-religion and they'll look for someone else who can give them a better service. Either he makes a compromise or moves out to another place where only atheists will be buying his cakes. It's a free market so he can do whatever he wants, even if it's harmful for his finances.

And like Cobretti here, the more the extremists on both sides let themselves be known, the more they'll get mocked at by both religious and secular citizens.

Again, I'm not saying it won't happen. But it's just a hypothesis, a "what if", a chance.

Also, I find the bolded premise quite curious because I thought atheists, by definition, are against organized religion and won't consider themselves to be part of one.

As someone who believes in a sort of greater force (a being and not necessarily the textbook Christian God) and agrees with proper Christian principles, most atheists I've seen don't even ponder the thought. For the most part they just live their lives without giving two shits about any religion, let alone one specific one. I enjoy talking to these guys, because their reasoning comes through research which is fascinating to me. I grew up in a Christian household, and I wont consider myself agnostic, but I am around Jesus Freaks on the daily, so I talk to people like this whenever I can.

I don't think Christianity will die outright like some people tend to think here, mostly because if it can get through Roman persecution, it wont just die out. However, I can say this:

You're not a true atheist if you're fed up about Christianity and other religions and constantly saying how bad these are and how they're gonna die soon. If you feel you are in a group and do it out of spite, I just see you as a denialist under an atheist charade. True atheists for the most part act on their own and don't force their biases on others, which is something that is immensely respectable. 



Aeolus451 said:

Argument from fallacy is the formal fallacy of analyzing an argument and inferring that, since it contains a fallacy, its conclusion must be false.

Trying to use "it's a fallacy" to dismiss other people's points or win in a argument  easily turns into snake eating it's own tail. 😹

If you're not bothering to break down why someone's logic or argument is unsound while you're using "it's a fallacy", it's just noise.

While it doesn't establish that the argument is false, it does indeed mean the argument in its current form is invalid and thus any conclusion drawn from said statement is at the very least dubious if not outright false. 

You're jumping into a weird position by countering in this manner by dealing with the distinction between the following:

"Argument contains a logical fallacy, therefore it's false."

"Argument contains a logical fallacy, therefore I am not accepting its inferences."

In the grand scheme of things, these differences are obsolete. The onus is on the claim maker to establish their conclusion. By failing to do so, whether or not the flawed argument's conclusion is true or false is entirely irrelevant. Garbage in, garbage out.



OhNoYouDont said:
Aeolus451 said:

Argument from fallacy is the formal fallacy of analyzing an argument and inferring that, since it contains a fallacy, its conclusion must be false.

Trying to use "it's a fallacy" to dismiss other people's points or win in a argument  easily turns into snake eating it's own tail. 😹

If you're not bothering to break down why someone's logic or argument is unsound while you're using "it's a fallacy", it's just noise.

While it doesn't establish that the argument is false, it does indeed mean the argument in its current form is invalid and thus any conclusion drawn from said statement is at the very least dubious if not outright false. 

You're jumping into a weird position by countering in this manner by dealing with the distinction between the following:

"Argument contains a logical fallacy, therefore it's false."

"Argument contains a logical fallacy, therefore I am not accepting its inferences."

In the grand scheme of things, these differences are obsolete. The onus is on the claim maker to establish their conclusion. By failing to do so, whether or not the flawed argument's conclusion is true or false is entirely irrelevant. Garbage in, garbage out.

Not exactly. A particular part could be unsound but the rest of it is fine. That doesn't mean the thing is invalid just because of a single logical flaw. 

 The distinction I'm drawing is....

"Argument contains a logical fallacy, therefore it's false"

 It's self-defeating.The statement hinges on logical fallacies but is an argument from fallacy.

 

 "Argument contains a logical fallacy because of (long winded explanation) and because I disagree with these other points, therefore I am not accepting its inferences."

 That's completely fine.

 

The concept of logical fallacies were created to understand mistakes in reasoning. People really just use it to win arguments these days. It gets really old when people use "that's a fallacy" all the time or use it as a crutch .



Mr_No said:

I'm not gonna take the easy way out and say it won't happen. Heck, what you mentioned does have a chance of happening. Crazier and more ludicrous things have happened in America. Yes, Christians are diminishing in numbers at this point, but it won't stop religious-based discrimination from happening in both sides. For example, in your same hypothetical future, an atheist baker based on a small conservative town decides he wants to turn down several cakes for Christian weddings. Instead of the customers forcing him to bake it through law, they could happily go to other bakeries in town. They all know about the atheist shop owner who defined his religious stance by promoting non-religion and they'll look for someone else who can give them a better service. Either he makes a compromise or moves out to another place where only atheists will be buying his cakes. It's a free market so he can do whatever he wants, even if it's harmful for his finances.

And like Cobretti here, the more the extremists on both sides let themselves be known, the more they'll get mocked at by both religious and secular citizens.

Again, I'm not saying it won't happen. But it's just a hypothesis, a "what if", a chance.

Also, I find the bolded premise quite curious because I thought atheists, by definition, are against organized religion and won't consider themselves to be part of one.

Well as you say, they are "organized" against religion, so while not a religion per se, it is still an organized movement against religion. Most demographic surveys like Pew divide non-religious people into atheist, agnostic, and something like "none" or "not otherwise specified", with agnostics having thought about it but decided they couldn't figure it out and remaining skeptical to any choice, and the "nones" just having generally lost interest in religion and stopped thinking about it or giving a shit about it altogether. My hypothetical was of a future world where an atheist, the organized against religion sort (think Richard Dawkins or the like), sets up shop in a town or city with a vast majority non-religious population, so including atheists, agnostics, and "nones" altogether they make up say 90%, with the last 10% being split between Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, and Hindus. The atheist discriminates against that 10%, and the other 90% either agree if they're atheist, or generally don't care and think religion is dumb anyway like the "nones", and as such, the atheist still gets support because at most only 10% of the town/city would be upset. Now lets say the town doesn't have a lot of cake shops. I don't know about you, but I don't know of all that many cake shops. They aren't exactly on every corner. The Christian now can't get a cake unless he goes to another town, and that's not really fair, I think. I mean a Christian in a future like this might not even be against science or gays or whatever, he just has some spiritual beliefs that don't hurt anyone. You can say it's just a cake, but who's to say this doesn't eventually go beyond cakes to other businesses?

Besides, like I said, it's a hypothetical meant to illustrate a "tables turned" scenario. Gays aren't exactly a huge portion of the population. Some surveys suggest that the people behind every letter of LGBTQIA altogether only make up 5% of the population, probably less in a rural, mostly Christian town. If a gay lives in some rural town today where everyone is a conservative Christian, and he's too poor to move, he has to just have his wedding without a cake, because the whole town is Christian and supports the cake shop, not the gay couple. Similarly, in my future scenario, if the Christian is too poor to move, and everyone around him likes the atheist's high quality cakes more than they care about the plight of the Christian because they generally think religion is dumb anyway so who cares about him, then the Christian has to just have a wedding without a cake. It might not seem serious, but it still creates a population of second-class citizens, at least in the mostly non-religious town. And there's still the possibility that other businesses go to court for the right to discriminate as well.

All I'm trying to get at is that this is about more than "let's help the poor gay people because yay liberalism and progressivism" and is more about defending minorities from the tyranny of the majority. As a white Christian myself, who knows he'll probably be a serious minority in the future (white Christians are about 43% of the population now, and still shrinking rapidly), I really wish more Christians would stop taking their majority status and the privileges that come with it for granted. I'm also trying to tell you that expecting the free market to always find a solution is magical thinking. A poor person in a sufficiently small minority will not have economic options to escape the tyranny of a sufficiently large majority, and the free market won't help the minority person because the vast majority of it is made up of that uncaring large majority. If the minority person isn't poor, they can afford to move to some sort of community with a greater concentration of their minority, but why should they have to? It's just wrong. They should be able to shop wherever they want. Expecting the free market to administer justice not only won't work in all cases, it's just wrong to put a person's rights and ability to participate in society on the market to the highest bidder.



TH3-D0S3R said:

As someone who believes in a sort of greater force (a being and not necessarily the textbook Christian God) and agrees with proper Christian principles, most atheists I've seen don't even ponder the thought. For the most part they just live their lives without giving two shits about any religion, let alone one specific one. I enjoy talking to these guys, because their reasoning comes through research which is fascinating to me. I grew up in a Christian household, and I wont consider myself agnostic, but I am around Jesus Freaks on the daily, so I talk to people like this whenever I can.

I don't think Christianity will die outright like some people tend to think here, mostly because if it can get through Roman persecution, it wont just die out. However, I can say this:

You're not a true atheist if you're fed up about Christianity and other religions and constantly saying how bad these are and how they're gonna die soon. If you feel you are in a group and do it out of spite, I just see you as a denialist under an atheist charade. True atheists for the most part act on their own and don't force their biases on others, which is something that is immensely respectable. 

You're absolutely right that most non-religious people don't ponder the thought. See my response. Christianity won't die out either, you're right, but it will get very, very small, unless something major changes pretty soon. We're at 70% overall, but when you reduce it to just white Christians it goes down to 43%, a minority, and yes, the white part does matter because the actual traditions and beliefs of the denominations are different, due to each denomination developing out of communities that were vastly one race or ethnicity. Under current trends, by 2050, all of Christianity will be a minority in America, and the particularly conservative ones will be a very tiny minority, probably in the teens, or even single digits.

As for non-religious people, they aren't just atheists, and most people who don't believe in God or a god wouldn't even use the term or identify with it, nor the term agnostic. They are, as you say, mostly people who don't give two shits. And as people who don't give two shits, they also won't care if an atheist turns away a Christian, particularly in a future society where non-religion is the norm and Christians are seen as weirdos that still believe in Sky Santa. I'm a Christian myself, and while I don't force my beliefs or biases on others as I'm not an evangelical that feels the need to "witness" to everyone all the time, when the subject does come up and I'm with non-religious folk, I get made fun of a lot, even if they still respect me and hang out with me afterwards. And I'm talking about the "don't give two shits" type. A future full of them would be one where a Christian would feel very awkward expressing his religion in front of them.

As for not being a true atheist if you're "fed up about Christianity and other religions", I challenge you to say that to Richard Dawkins' face. And film it. I want to see his reaction.