Yet another religious thread: religion and transsexuality

Buddha was a prince before he gave it all up to spread the word of Buddhism. The Analects record Confucious as turning down appointments by lords that would have greatly increased his wealth because he didn’t think they where worthy. Muhammad was offered a position as a powerful merchant by refused.

One could potentially make the point that these people had been “poor” for long enough that they’re values where too entrenched. However this wouldn’t explain Buddha and Muhammad was well known merchant even before he started spreading the word. Confucius also seemed better than many, at least having a house.

So, I’m not sure a clear correlation between wealth and social attitudes is likely to be found.

...We're pretty off topic. So while we're sort of talking "general religion", I think it's important to keep in mind that the ability to actually CHANGE genders is rather new and many of these religions aren't going to have a lot to say on it. You'd sort of have to look at cross dressing and the desire to be of a different gender and see if maybe that was addressed.

I'm guessing there might be some sprinkling of addressing men who act like women throughout various books that we could talk about. Where's woman who act like men is probably unheard of in that world society as a whole hasn't even considered that women could be equal to men until fairly recently (in terms of world history, that is). Heck, men didn't even think women should be allowed to vote, because the polls required so much "pushing" getting past others and other strenuous activity that a frail woman would likely pass out before even getting close to voting.

I'm not condemning the topic outright, I'd love to hear more about transsexuality views in religions. Tough as Rott pointed out, this topic is vague at best in The Bible, and other religions probably are the same way.

Edit: Ok, I guess we got back on topic while I was typing...

Also Aon, posted. Which is cool. I had humored the idea of putting up The Buddha signal and summoning her.

edited 4th Sep '11 5:58:25 PM by Justice4243

I didn't want to post because I didn't know much about other Buddhist nation's opinions on the topic beyond Thailand's, but eh...May as well.

It's interesting that Japan has has a taboo against transgender when you consider how big cross dressers and gender benders characters in anime are then. 

Maybe it's part of the appeal, who knows?

edited 5th Sep '11 1:44:42 AM by joeyjojo