The first time I posted about a debate with a theist was whack as hell. Well, maybe not so wild as it was disappointing. Luckily I kept at it, decided to forgo discussions with a few seemingly bad apples, and found someone with whom proper discourse was at least possible.

Curiously, this time I found myself discussing a topic like a Christian apologist, since his original post was not about the existence of deities but the interpretation of Christian scripture. If you can read your way through the wall of text, this is rather interesting.

First up, the OP:

This was just days after Manny Pacquiao’s anti-LGBTQ quotes spread across the interwebs. I approached the discussion within the framework of Christianity as a thought exercise, and we went far with the discourse, though — spoiler alert — he never answered my final question.

Well, the discussion began:

What I wanted to get to was a bit deeper though, so like Alice, I delved into the Rabbit Hole to see how far I can get.

Had I gone ahead with my bottom-line we could have ended up mired in a semantic marsh of inconsistencies. We needed to be solidly on the same page.

We’re still pandering to the fundamentals here — basically who gets to decide what to cherry pick or otherwise, which is a big issue if you want to base your morals and life on a single book.

There’s another avenue I brushed off as it led nowhere — these same scholars are trying to root the validity of supposedly spiritual messages encapsulated essentially in fables and parables upon objective reality and its empirical structures, or so he says. Sounds like a herculean challenge, but…

I sort of rushed to my main point here, being that if both pro and anti-LGBT beliefs are equally valid based on prayer and soul seeking and counsel, wouldn’t it be simply better and more Christ-like to be pro-LGBT?

There are so many angles to attack here, and among the most obvious is his interpretation of what God supposedly wants but still based on scripture, the interpretation of which we already established was subjective. Essentially, he chooses to believe this and support his beliefs afterwards (to be fair, he was most probably raised and indoctrinated to, even indirectly through the culture of his upbringing, so his only personal choice here is not choosing the other side which I am proposing to be, simply put, better).

So I dug in to better illustrate the dilemma without directly or indirectly placing more pressure on his personal confirmation bias.

And this question, he never answered. Someone piled on to our thread and challenged two of his arguments. He asked when Jesus ever outright condemned homosexual relations and how the “act” of homosexuality can be separated from its nature. The original poster basically replied with his wording of Pascal’s Wager, and the person who challenged him said he wasn’t “the first intellectually dishonest dickbag to use Pascal’s Wager. Please try again.”

Even though the OP left me hanging there, I felt like this was a lot more productive than expected. Did the OP simply choose to drop the discussion because he didn’t get my point? Or because he did and he refused to entertain the notion?

If it was the former, I think he would have respectfully said so. If it was the latter, I hope some day he does entertain the notion, and that he doesn’t stop there.