Thank God It is Up to the Faithful to Build an Electric Fence and Kill Gay People - video included

Are we seriously expected to believe that God created gay people so the rest of us have something to hate?

The supreme being/ultimate truth is beyond words or any conceptual understanding. When asked to name it, it is referred to as Tao or the Way. The Power of the Way is referred to as Te. Although Tao and Te are similar to other practices' ideas of God, Taoists seldom refer to God.

Taoist Belief
All matter is a manifestation of the Ultimate Reality. Generally, Taoist beliefs don't find modern scientific discoveries contradictory to Taoist thought; hence Fritjof Capra's "The Tao of Physics" is aptly named.

To understand the Taoist notion of good and evil, it is important to distinguish between the "concept" of evil versus the "reality" of evil.
As a concept, Taoist do not hold the position of good against evil; rather they see the interdependence of all dualities. So when one labels something as a good, one automatically creates evil. That is, all concepts necessarily are based on one aspect vs. another; if a concept were to have only one aspect, it would be nonsensical.

The reality of good and evil is that all actions contain some aspect of each. This is represented in the t'ai chi, more commonly referred to as the yin-yang symbol. Any action would have some negative (yin) and some positive (yang) aspect to it. Taoists believe that nature is a continual balance between yin and yang,

Also, take note that Isaiah is presenting contrasts. He speaks of "light" and "darkness," "well being" and "calamity." The word "well-being" in the Hebrew is the word for 'peace,' "Shalome." So, in the context, we are seeing two sets of opposites: Light and dark, peace and non-peace, or well being and calamity. The "evil" that is spoken of is not ontological evil, but the evil experienced by people in the form of calamity.

Originally posted by ThirdEyeofHorus
reply to post by ColoradoJens

 

This common underlying worldview is known as "scientific materialism. " As defined by twentieth century philosophers William James and Alfred North Whitehead, for instance, scientific materialism is the belief that physical reality, as made available to the natural sciences, is all that truly exists [Haught2010, pg. 48]. It is clear that there is little room for religion in this philosophical system, since religion involves faith in unseen and presumably empirically untestable entities.
But religion is not the only victim of this worldview. If we fully accept scientific materialism, we would also have to discard art, literature, music, and many other fields of human endeavor that are essential aspects of our modern world. More importantly, we need to ask what is the status of scientific materialism itself under this worldview. As John Haught observes [Haught2008, pg. 45]:

But if faith in God requires independent scientific confirmation, what about the colossal faith our new atheists place in science itself? Exactly what are the independent scientific experiments, we might ask, that could provide "evidence" for the hypothesis that all true knowledge must be based on the paradigm of scientific inquiry? If faith requires independent confirmation, what is the independent (nonfaith) method of demonstrating that their own faith in the all-encompassing cognitional scope of science is reasonable? If science itself is the only way to provide such independent assessment, then the quest for proper validation only moves the justification process in the direction of an infinite regress.

As John Haught observes, "thinking of God as a hypothesis reduces the infinite divine mystery to a finite scientific cause, and to worship anything finite is idolatrous" [Haught2008, pg. 43]. Anglican theologian Keith Ward notes that "the question of God is certainly a factual one, but certainly not a scientific one." Instead, "t lies at the very deep level of ultimate metaphysical options" [Ward2008, pg. 30]. For additional discussion, see God hypothesis.
When scientists ridicule religious faith, it is worth observing that scientists also take faith with them into the research laboratory. As British philosopher Alfred North Whitehead has noted, modern science, as it developed in the West, was based on a faith in the existence of rational, discoverable laws [Whitehead1967, pg. 17-19, 27]:

Faith in reason is the trust that the ultimate natures of things lie together in a harmony which excludes mere arbitrariness. It is the faith that at the base of things we shall not find mere arbitrary mystery. The faith in the order of nature which made possible the growth of science is a particular example of a deeper faith.

www.sciencemeetsreligion.org...

Just a few musings in case you ever want to get your own sense of knowledge of things into perspective.