Featured Uncomfortable Silence in the Church

I am not sure where you attend church, but adultery is not (in my experience) acceptable in the Church. It is tolerated in our society (as is homosexuality). I am not sure if you are arguing points or if you are trying to justify the comments presented as "food for thought" in the OP. The OP has no justification (it was a foolish...hopefully fictional...conversation between a lay person and a biblically ignorant "pastor"). The Church does not do many things that Israel was called to do as a nation. But you are right that the Church does need to deal with adultery as well as homosexuality, that it needs to stand against immorality and for the purity of the Church, exercise church discipline, etc.

 

What is sad is that people really think the thought process in the OP is correct when it's not even close to what Scripture says.

I'd love for someone to show me anywhere in Scripture where homosexual relations/relationships/marriage are shown in a good light. I can show you where Jesus Himself said that divorce is allowable in certain cases.

 

CTB - These two passages are about adultery. An evil sin committed by both a man and a woman who is not his wife. The law said they both must die.

Your meme was talking about divorce. It stated that when a man divorced his wife that she must die. The implication was innocent or not - she must die.

That is not in the Bible.

You meant to say Mark 10:12. This is parallel with Jesus' other teachings about flippant divorce. He said in Matthew 5:32 - that sexual immorality on the part of one spouse gave the other spouse leeway to divorce.

So, no. A wife could not divorce her husband for unacceptable reasons.

Your meme implied that an innocent wife could be stoned and her alone stoned.

And it said that there were countless scripture to that effect.

 

It's already been done, CTB and found to be protected under the First Amendment. Yet another wrong decision by our legal system.

Our judges and Justices don't want to define what's inappropriate let alone make decisions about it. Hard core porn is protected. Why would a television junk not be? Look at these court cases.

Taken from: http://www.firstamendmentcenter.org/pornography-obscenity

• Justice Potter Stewart could provide no definition of obsenity in Jacobellis v. Ohio other than exclaiming: “I know it when I see it.” In that 1964 decision, Stewart also said that the Court was “faced with the task of trying to define what may be indefinable.”

• Justice Hugo Black expressed his frustration with determining whether certain pornography could be prohibited under the First Amendment when he wrote in Mishkin v. State of N.Y.: “I wish once more to express my objections to saddling this Court with the irksome and inevitably unpopular and unwholesome task of finally deciding by a case-by-case, sight-by-sight personal judgment of the members of this Court what pornography (whatever that means) is too hard core for people to see or read.” In other words, he couldn't care less.

• After grappling with the obscenity problem in many cases during the late 1950s and early 1960s, the Supreme Court laid out “basic guidelines” for jurors in obscenity cases in its 1973 decision Miller v. California. These include:

[1] Whether the average person, applying contemporary
community standards, would find that the work, taken as a
whole, appeals to the prurient interest.

[2] Whether the work depicts or describes, in a patently
offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by the
applicable state law.

[3] Whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary,
artistic, political or scientific value. The Court reasoned
that individuals could not be convicted of obscenity
charges unless the materials depict “patently offensive
hard core sexual conduct.” This means that many materials
dealing with sex, including pornographic magazines, books,
and movies, simply do not qualify as legally obscene.

• Even more fundamentally, nudity does not equal obscenity. The Supreme Court recognized this in Jenkins v. Georgia, when it ruled that the film “Carnal Knowledge” was not obscene. Justice William Rehnquist wrote in that 1974 case that “nudity alone is not enough to make material legally obscene under the Miller standards.”

• A most troubling aspect of obscenity law concerns the application of community standards for defendants who ship materials of a sexual nature to different parts of the country. Should a defendant in California be subject to the mores of a more conservative locale? The Court in Miller said that it was constitutional for different communities to articulate different community standards in obscenity cases. “To require a State to structure obscenity proceedings around evidence of a national community standard would be an exercise in futility,”
• Chief Justice Warren Burger wrote.“Nothing in the First Amendment requires that a jury must consider hypothetical and unascertainable ‘national standards’ when attempting to determine whether certain materials are obscene as a matter of fact,” Burger continued. “It is neither realistic nor constitutionally sound to read the First Amendment as requiring that the people of Maine or Mississippi accept public depiction of conduct found tolerable in Las Vegas or New York City.”

• A pressing legal issue still to be resolved is whether federal law can apply local community standards to the global medium of the Internet. The Child Online Protection Act applies local community standards in determining whether material is harmful to minors. The 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals struck down the law in June 2000, writing that “Web publishers cannot restrict access to their site based on the geographic locale of the Internet user visiting their site.”

There's more, but you get the picture.