*A Southern California business owner was shot and killed Friday by a man who objected to an LGBTQ+ Pride flag displayed at her clothing store, officials said.
San Bernardino County sheriff’s deputies responded to the Mag.Pi clothing store in Cedar Glen, Calif., at around 5 p.m. local time for reports of a shooting.
Deputies discovered the victim, 66-year-old Laura Ann Carleton, suffering from a gunshot wound. Carleton was pronounced dead at the scene, the San Bernardino Sheriff’s Department said in a news release.
The suspect, who was not identified by officials, fled the scene on foot.
According to deputies, the man made “several disparaging remarks about a rainbow flag” that stood outside Carleton’s store before ultimately shooting her.*
Many many religions also view homosexuality as a sin, so depending on what you believe you may be walking a very fine line of hypocrisy here
I don’t see any reason for hypocrisy. Most religions don’t condone violence against sinners, instead leaving that to God to handle. They instead encourage peaceful proselytizing to convince sinners to repent.
So whether homosexuality is a sin is irrelevant, violence isn’t acceptable. You may believe a gay couple deserves an eternity in hell, but that doesn’t justify murder.
People have absolutely used religion as an excuse, but they need to do a lot of mental gymnastics to justify it with the tenets of the religion. And if you’re willing to do that, you don’t need religion at that point, it’s just good old fashioned intolerance. If it’s not religion, maybe it’s a philosophy or political ideology.
Are you Christian? If so you may want to review Leviticus, which literally calls for violence and death against homosexuals. If you are a Christian but you’re being picky and choosy with scripture, then you are a hypocrite.
Leviticus 20:13 If a man has sexual relations with a man as one does with a woman, both of them have done what is detestable. They are to be put to death; their blood will be on their own heads.
Edit: I went out on a limb and quoted Christian scripture because you capitalized the word god. If you aren’t Christian I can try to provide scripture for whatever religion you believe in
Yes, I am Christian.
If you’ll note, Leviticus is from the Law of Moses, which Jesus came to fulfill, meaning it’s no longer applicable. And the rules only ever applied to the House of Israel, there was no command or even suggestion to go out and apply it outside of the people of God.
Just a few verses before that discusses putting adulterers to death, yet we read in John 8:1-11 how Jesus handled an adultress. He did not condemn her to death (which was the law from Leviticus) and instead forgave her with the admonition to sin no more.
If we look in the New Testament, we see a similar proscription against homosexuality, such as in 1 Corinthians 6:9-10:
The language is softened. Instead of being killed, now they’re merely damned in the next life (still not great, but I’ll get to that later). It is still considered a sin, it just no longer carries the temporal penalty of death.
My personal position is to do as Jesus said, to leave to Caesar that which is Caesar’s (Matthew 22:20-22; I interpret this as separation of church and state), and also the example of the Old Testament to not apply the laws of the people of God to the people not of God (hinted at in the beginning of the chapter you quoted). I believe governments should not make any laws to exclude people based on something like sexual orientation, gender identity, etc. I also believe that God knows people much better than I ever can, so it is not my place to judge anyone’s choice of lifestyle (Matthew 7:1-5). Jesus also commanded his followers to love everyone, especially our enemies (Luke 6:27-28), so it’s not my place to exclude someone based on whether I think they’re sinning. In fact, Jesus went out of his way to help sinners, so should I.
To me, Christianity is nothing but a message of love, and hell is merely the intense guilt from rejecting the love of God. It’s like that feeling you get when you hurt someone you love deeply, only exacerbated by the finality of not having any mortal time left to truly repent. I personally don’t believe “eternal” means forever in this context because I believe God has infinite mercy, that’s speculation on my part.
So in short, I absolutely love people who I believe are sinning, and I will fight for LGBTQ+ rights because that’s just and fair for a society to support. It’s not my place to enforce my value system on anyone, it’s only my place to love others with as pure of a love as I can manage.
I don’t really have much to say to most of this but what I will say is that I’ve never once thought of or seen Christianity as a message of love, certainly not from the followers that I’ve met. But that gets into anecdotal territory and how could I possibly know how the average Christian would act towards someone like me. To be honest I do my best to avoid them. But I do appreciate you explaining your point of view, I’ll take back what I said about you being a hypocrite because clearly you have a much better grasp on your personal theology than I do.
Your larger point stands, that Christianity is often used as a weapon of sorts. The same goes for most religions, ideologies, and philosophies, even Buddhism is used to justify violence.
However, most religions themselves are generally peaceful. I’m convinced that Islam is peaceful, despite it being used to justify terrible acts of terrorism, gruesome punishments for deviance, etc. The same goes for communism and capitalism, which have both been used to justify violence (though I have a harder time with facism, it’s just built on hate imo).
The enemy here isn’t religion, but extremism. Even if we eradicate religion, we’ll still have the propensity for extremism. The same people that use religion to justify violence would simply use something else instead. Most people don’t fully understand their religion, ideology, or philosophy, and they don’t seem to care, provided they get the results they want.
I hope that makes sense.
Not op but what about islam?
The Hadith has multiple passages that condemn homosexuality and call for violence against it:
Sunan Abi Dawud 4462-4463 If you find anyone doing as Lot’s people did, kill the one who does it, and the one to whom it is done. If a man who is not married is seized committing sodomy, he will be stoned to death
Historically Islam has actually been more accepting of LGBT people than Christianity, but in recent history many Islamic countries have sadly flipped the script.
Ooo i see, thank you, didn’t know about this