For our religiously conservative brethren....

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I'm religious, but not conservative.  Obviously I would love them just the same and not treat them any differently; I would not feel bitterness towards it, either.  Heck, I've been reading some things lately that suggest that the anti-gay rhetoric in the Bible is just mistranslated scripture.

Just popping in to say that that does seem to be the case for some of it--there's actually a case to be made for the Pauline Epistles because of certain features of Greek rhetoric--but not all. People had to use and control sexuality in very specific ways back then, it was and often still is religiously sanctioned, and in critiquing certain passages or certain ways of trying to apply said passages we need to remember that each part of the Bible has its own very distinct history.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

One thing I find somewhat frustrating about Eastern Orthodoxy is that it does not fall into some of the same stupid 'natural law' traps as Catholic theology, yet retains many of the same conclusions on other, often oddly fideistic, bases; whereas there are groups like the Old Catholics and some of the Malabar churches that come to a different stance on the basis of much the same general theological practice as Rome. This to me indicates that these debates are cultural because there doesn't seem to be a whole hell of a lot of correlation between general attitude towards or way of doing theology and specific beliefs developed on a lot of these subjects.

(It is worth noting that dissent appears to exist in Orthodoxy, at somewhat higher levels than in Catholicism and carrying with it rather less danger of being sh**tcanned and reassigned to Partenia, but there's still not all that much of it.)

The method that mainline Protestants tend to practice in the tradition of Richard Hooker and John Wesley is that we as Christians believe most of what we believe because tradition tells us that scripture says to believe it. If experience or reason contradict what tradition tells us scripture says, then it's time to modify or reject parts of that tradition and approach scripture independently again, taking the experience and reason into account, to start a new tradition. I'm sure we can all think of examples where this process failed and the traditional interpretation was reaffirmed, and I'm sure we can also all think of examples where it succeeded and the received interpretation changed; or where it only dubiously failed or succeeded and resulted in ideological division within the Body of the Church.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

The atlas forum, where beliefs are discouraged.

That's most of the internet, actually.

Reality, where beliefs are discouraged.

That's partially the nature of the way the concept of 'reality' is constructed, yes, and it's a huge part of why I'm not terribly fond of modernity.

That these particular beliefs are discouraged here ought not, however, be surprising.