[Brandon]

Originally Posted by Up In The Clouds

No. Did I ever say that? Premarital sex will depend on your personal beliefs or religious beliefs.

That's the problem with finding "legitimate sources" because the stuff that people are actually willing to research are the things that are most likely controversial or different interpretations. Do I need to research whether or not Christians believe that murder is a sin? Probably not. After all, different religions have different approaches on why murder is bad. Religions that believe in the cycle in Samsara might say that we shouldn't murder people because they could've saved our lives in our previous life while religions that believe in Heaven and Hell might say that murder is bad because you'll go to Hell if you do. If anything, I'm probably more likely to ask "why?" when it comes to things that aren't very controversial or anything like that. Even still, the Christian Bible has been translated many times throughout history so we're never really 100% sure that everything we read is what it was originally. For all I know, murder could've been encouraged in the original Bible. But none of us have access to that information (as far as I know). So we're very limited on what kind of "information" that we have. I could ask questions about historical things that happened in Christian history and be able to call a source "reliable" because it's backed with credible evidence, but when we're researching stuff about interpretations on scriptures or anything like that which may not have clear answers on everything, a lot of that stuff IS going to be a personal belief. There's going to be Christians that even go to the same church but can preach completely different answers on given subjects through the internet, back themselves up with passages from the Bible, important historical religious leaders quotes, and still may claim both to be legitimate. The great thing about being a human is that our DNA is what makes us unique, but the problem is that we believe vastly different things that it would be silly to suggest that everyone in the same church believes the exact same things on every subject. You can get close, but the controversial subjects are the things that can change someone's opinion on a specific church from being "right" Christians and "wrong" Christians because the controversial subjects are the subjects that people most care about. So if someone wants to look up a subject on whether or not homosexuality is a sin, they're going to find "reliable" sources that say different things. And if it's individually interpreted, then who is right? Wouldn't individually interpreting something putting yourself before God because supposedly the Bible is the word of God. If you question the word of God, interpret His word into your own words, isn't that sin by itself? So what it really all comes down to is that there really is no such thing as a legitimate source. I can't say that homosexuality is a sin, nor can I say that homosexuality isn't a sin. I don't know. No one knows. It's individually interpreted so the only source you got is yourself, really. All the other stuff that most people seem to agree are probably going to have reliable (or at least as reliable as you can get considering the numerous translations of scriptures) sources that don't need more than a paragraph to provide evidence for because the evidence is pretty much right there and easy to interpret. So that's why I'm asking how you decide on what's a good source or not, which you never really answered my question.