dathwampeer said:
You can't always stand on the sidelines though. You have to have your own opinions about some things. Otherwise what's the point?
I have them, I just don't often shout them around outside of my home.
As for marriage being a tradition. To those people I say STFU. Tradition is never a good thing. Times change. Everything else has to keep up.
Everything moves at it's own pace. Change will come when it's ready, when enough people are ready to move. Until then, the times haven't "changed" they are merely "evolving". It's in motion and will happen; it's the timing that's under debate, not the eventuality of gay marriage becoming legal.
Also, don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. We have many good, strong traditions which are worth upholding; not only for their own merit, but for our cultural identity. As an Australian from an Irish Catholic/English Methodist background, I am proud of my cultural heritage and have no desire to throw the lot out merely because "things change". Stability is comforting, especially in a changing world, and the last 50 years have so radically reshaped the global landscape that we are still dizzy from the speed at which it has moved and are struggling to keep pace with it. The younger generations are coping better with this; for the elder, with an entire world based mostly around jobs and technology that not just didn't exist, but hadn't so much as been dreamt of when they were young, it's an awful lot to take in.
I remember Nanna telling me, awed and shocked, about the fact they were attempting to devolop a telephone where you could actually SEE the person calling you! Now we take it so much for granted that we have video calls, Skype and so forth... But cut the more conservative some slack. If anything, they're to be pitied for their inability to move with the times, not condemned for their fear.
As a philosophy is passable. Far too narrow minded to work on any large scale. But cut the pseudo-religious bullshit and I wouldn't mind it so much.
But that's "self-transformative psychodrama"! And where would the world be without a nice bit of self-transformative psychodrama? That's what most funerals are for goodness' sake; some nice psychodrama meant to bring comfort to those left behind. Weddings, nice bit of psychodrama meant to indicate a new start, etc etc.
Plus I think it's referred to as "Satanism" precisely because that is where all the human instincts for sex, gratification etc were categorised by the Church... as Evil, as Sin. So it's a way of taking them back and re-owning them. Much in the same way as the gay community took the name "queer" back from being an insult and began using it to describe themselves in order to rob it of it's power. As the Satanists say, words are powerful, so why not use them to your own advantage?