Originally Posted by joey11223
what are you saying when you write "Strong views haven't heard that before."
She [? This new forum seems to be missing the gender symbols. I don't like to say "they" since my room-mate told me off about it. I guess its more polite to guess based on username and/or behaviour]
She was just saying that no-one had told her she "had strong views" before. Of course, only she knows what she meant by that phrase :-).
Often people say this in a sarcastic way - "strange you should mention that, no-one else seems to notice the gaping hole in my forehead". Or it can be taken as a straight statement that everyone mentions the same thing, but that no-one has said it using those exact words. I think its funny that you can read that same phrase these two different ways, but in the end they both mean pretty much the same thing.
Personally I value considered communication above strong opinion. Not that I'd dare claim I'm any less obnoxious or attention seeking :-D. Look at this post of mine, its far too long :-). I did once get fed up with wendylove's post and tried to steer her round to my point of view. I can read and understand her post on its own; you don't spend years on teh web without developing certain ... filters. It's the ensuing ... discussion that I get annoyed by. Oh well, "the world would be boring if we were all the same".
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Ontopic : it doesn't look like their doctrine is very racist. Mormons may generally be regarded as particularly odd, but I reckon that's just down to them being relatively new as a religion. Trying to define "odd" objectively in religious terms would be like building castles in quicksand. If you want to criticise religion as a whole, better to tackle more widely held beliefs.
Personally I'm not offended by anti-homosexual religions either. If your religion seems to be incompatible with who you are, you need to make your mind up whether you're really homosexual and staying that way, whether you're really Mormon/Catholic/whatever and staying that way, whether you're religion is really incompatible, and whether you want to challenge your established religion or not. There's plenty of freedom of choice there, and most of the actual problems are completely separate - the way your church handles doctrine and dissenters, the way people will think about you if you abandon your religion, etc.
What offends me is "fundamentalism". An attitude which doesn't admit to faith, the possibility that it might be wrong, the assertion that dissenters are evil, must be punished, appearing to take pleasure from the belief that dissenters will suffer for eternity; insisting that if people won't accept your own belief then they must be forced to act as if they did.
I would hate to be seen as not respecting someone's beliefs and by trivialising them by saying that they can act independently of them in public life - but I have to admit to a gut reaction of pure hatred against anyone who tries to influence politics using any degree of religious fundamentalism. Its probably the radical atheism of my childhood shining through :-).
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