LGBTQ+ Rights and Religion

It didn't really come up anywhere while I was there for about two weeks, save for a gay couple walking past in Wal-Mart and nobody really giving a shit.

@Pykrete: Eh, most of my family supports that stuff, with varying degrees of zealotry, and they're spread from Illinois down to Texas, with some as far west as Arizona.

They aren't really geographic limitations or requirements for bigotry, places where it tends to be more common maybe.

I was using it as an illustrative example. The Religious Right has twisted the message of Christ and the Bible beyond recognition. From justifying intense, uncalled for nationalism via "American exceptionalism" and the supposed status of America as the "God-favored" nation to attacking LGBT people and using the government as their own plaything to dominate others without justification, they are a mockery of everything a good Christian movement should stand for, and if Americans had any conceptualization of what Christ actually stood for, the Religious Right would be nothing more than a footnote in history.

The problem is that JC isn't the entire religion. Maybe it should be but it's not. When I go to a local service (generally for a funeral or a wedding), generally speaking the pastor or minister or priest or whatever, generally speaking flips between the concepts of "God the Older" and "God the Younger I.E. Jesus". That's the thing. I don't think they are the same concepts. I do think that if "God the Older" were to actually exist that he would be cruel and petty, considering the problem of evil and all that. I don't think the stories of God are compatible with the stories of Jesus. Not for a second. That's why I say that the rebel narrative actually fits the story the best.

And I live in Canada for crying out loud. Hardly the south.

You are free to your interpretation, of course. I am of the opinion that the Old Testament should, as a generality, be written off as a product of its time, and that the teachings of Jesus should take precedence over everything else. Thus, if something in the Old Testament conflicts obviously with the teachings of Jesus, it shouldn't be taken over what Jesus taught. Of course, Jesus did say that he meant to uphold all the laws of the Old Testament, but what that actually entails is up for debate (though not in this thread). I also don't believe that God is at all evil or cruel; rather, I believe that God allows us free will out of love, and because of that and our own flawed nature, we are to deal with a world that contains many awful things of our own making.

Of course, that is just a personal belief, and I have no real factual evidence to back it up. I think that it makes more logical sense with the nature of Jesus, God, and humanity, and how all three have interacted historically, however.

I definitely understand that, and believe me, I'm not accusing you of believing anything different. My point is merely that I think it's more of an uphill struggle than you (and Maxima as well) probably do.

I do think that the whole concept of "Free Will" in these regards is quite a bit of a cop-out, as things such as cancer, hurricanes and earthquakes hardly come under that banner, just as a few examples. As well, with how random the world can be sometimes, quite frankly I do think that the interventionists or neo-calvinists or however you want to call them do, as of right now have a more..compelling argument. Not that I'm saying you're wrong. I think that ethically and morally and even logically you're correct, but it flies in the face of self-interest and...

The Just World fallacy. That's what we're dealing with here. People are reassured by the concept that good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people. That's why it's so compelling for a lot of people I think.

In Christianity the teachings of Jesus ARE supposed to take precedence. We get the Christ part from Jesus Christ, after all. Clearly that is not the case, though.

I thank you for you understanding, but I believe you underestimate my personal pessimism. I believe I understand exactly how hard a fight it is, simply by observing the vicious, frothing-at-the-mouth stupidity of the conservative bloc.

I'm afraid I'm not as up-to-snuff on my theology as I am on my political science and social studies, and thus cannot really answer this sufficiently. I wish I could. I'd like to believe that God has a good reason for having things like that. But I do not know what said reason is, and won't even begin to claim that I do.

Yes, the Just World fallacy is the bane of many a progressive cause, I think. Racism, for example. "We gave the black people their civil rights in the '60s, how can there still be racism? I'm not racist, I have black friends!" It's so frustrating, because you have to love everyone, and you know that they generally aren't acting out of malice, but the sheer ignorance and intentional self-blindness to such things is often simply astounding. I think, given that homosexual rights are essentially an eventuality given demographic trends, that that will happen to homosexuals as well. They'll be caught in an unfortunate limbo where they have legal rights but are still not truly socially accepted, fueled by unfortunate and unfair positions of religious organizations.

Indeed. As much as I like the Catholic Church, and as much as I see how hard they work to be progressive like Christ commanded, they often fail so, so hard at it. Not to mention incredible fools like the evangelicals and their ilk.

That isn't even close to what he said or implied.

Well, that's really a tricky question, and one I find that nobody wants to really talk about. It all depends on your definition and concept of God. For me, when I talk about what I think God is, is that it's a materialistic interventionistic deity. That is, to some degree he is willing and able to intervene in our reality to change things for his own ends. In that case, God could very easily change the rules for what we think of as nature. He created them, of course. There's very little wiggle room here. If such a God exists, what happens happens because he wills it to for one reason or another. Yes, if we screw up then we learn a valuable lesson, but bad things are not always because we messed up.

However, sometimes the definition of God slips to where it's non-interventionistic, that is, he's unwilling or unable to intervene in our world. To me this isn't theism, it's more of a deistic belief structure. Or people have pantheistic beliefs where God is the system as a whole and to change part of the system is to change God himself and on the whole it's positive.

I don't have nearly the same problem with deistic or pantheistic beliefs, but Christianity is undoubtedly a (mono)Theistic religion, and you can't really deviate too far from it without being into something entirely different.

Bringing this back on-topic, doesn't the idea of divine interventionism mean that homosexuals are meant to be homosexual? That's where the concept of free will actually does more harm than good, if you really think about it.

The consensus among the medical and psychological communities is that sexual orientation is not a choice. There is disagreement over exactly how and why a person may have one orientation or another, but the agreement is that orientation is fixed and unchangeable.

If one believes that God has ordained the natural laws of the universe to be as they are, then one must therefore accept that the laws as revealed through reason and experience are a reflection of God's will.

Therefore, because reason tells us that sexual orientation is a natural, unchangeable trait, it necessarily follows that heterosexuals, homosexuals, bisexuals, asexuals and whateversexuals are that way because that's how God made them.

Okay, I'm just entering this discussion.

You know, I have read the only first two books of Torah but did The Bible actually prohibit homosexuality?

Read this and decide for yourself: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bible_and_homosexuality

I will read it tomorrow with a fresh mind so I can make the most clear and rational judgement on this.

The short answer is yes, but a lot less than it went after a lot of other things that we don't get in big moral panics over.

If THAT man is a Christian then I'm the fucking Face of Boe.

That dude is a fucking joke and so are the people following him.

I don't see that. It seems to be that there are things that point to it being a natural disposition and there're studies that suggest that upbringing and environment can drive someone to feeling alien in their natural born gender or feeling attraction to the same sex. IIRC.

edited 22nd May '12 9:17:03 AM by TheStarshipMaxima

No there's not, not by any credible source anyways.

Yeah, pretty much all the studies I've seen on that were done by interest groups who were actively trying to prove that sexuality is a choice.

& Ah, the classic problem of who's science is the science.

I don't think it's a black/white spectrum (although most people I think are fairly close to the poles), and as such it's theoretically possible for a person, due to experiences and environment, to make a decision that's contrary to their internal nature.

The difference is that I don't think this is healthy, not one bit.

@Starship: Well, using science to confirm your biases is generally considered poor form, because it leads to skewed results. It's like how Cheerios published the studies saying that eating their cereal lowers cholesterol, but an independent study found that the results were so negligible that you'd have to live off of nothing but Cheerios before you'd see any difference.

@Starship

If you could be so kind as to produce these so called studies in their full detail I would be more then happy to argue on that basis. Until such a time, please excuse me as I will dismiss any reference sot aforementioned studies as irrelevant.

I do love the irony of this situation though. The Right wing is in a conundrum: they can in any court of law or system of goverment use their religion as a weapon, forcing them to use secular arguments and science to try and back up their position, which as Colbert put it forces them to make the gravest mistake a right wing politician can "admitting science exists". :P

People can choose their behaviors (inasmuch as free will exists), but they don't choose their inclinations.

Same with these closeted homophobes we keep hearing about. Ted Haggard, Ken Mehlman, Larry Craig, Roy Cohn, Mark Foley, etc. etc. They're naturally gay or bi, but they get married, have kids, and pretend to be straight when they're not. That doesn't change who they are, only that they're a bunch of dishonest, religious hypocrites.