Discussion of religion in the context of LGBTQ+ rights is only allowed in this thread.
Discussion of religion in any other context is off topic in all of the "LGBTQ+ rights..." threads.
Attempting to bait others into bringing up religion is also not allowed.
Edited by Mrph1 on Dec 1st 2023 at 6:52:14 PM
So, a question for the religious members of the forums:
My brief, brief time in church (my parents had me visit a service for each of the major denominations when I was young. They were atheist, but they wanted me to be able to make a choice, and be informed about religion) made me thing that for a religious person, denying someone the ability to sin is immoral. After all, God desired us to have the free will to commit sins, otherwise, the concept of sinning is meaningless. Is that the case, to your knowledge? And if so, how do they reconcile that view with outlawing "sinful" behavior (such as homosexuality).
"Good is meaningless if we don't willingly choose it" is a big idea, but the above might be taking the idea a bit far because it reduces to "laws are useless", which they aren't. It's generally understood that a line is best drawn somewhere agreed upon.
Then again, a law doesn't preclude people from breaking it anyway; it just codifies what happens next, presumably for everyone else's sake.
edited 7th Dec '12 2:36:06 PM by Pykrete
That seems a little harsh. Sure, most people don't like being told what to do, but most of us are willing to follow rules with a legitimate reason behind them. "Don't drink and drive" makes sense. "Don't rob banks" makes sense. "Don't have sex with other men/women"...well...
Like Kay said, a lot of the reasoning I see against same-sex relations is basically "because god said so, that's why". That's the kind of reasoning you use with a young child who would ask "why?" all day long if you did try to explain. Whereas an adult would just say "your reasoning is bad and you should feel bad" (assuming they're a Futurama fan).
Asserting the unsoundness of of an argument's premises isn't exactly the same as demonstrating their unsoundness. So far, the attempts I've seen even to fathom those premises resemble the proverbial monkey's antics with the proverbial football.
And I was wondering when the underbred "Courtier's Reply!" would make its debut. To the latter, I can only offer the words of one of my favorite doctors: "The reverence due to writings that have long subsisted arises therefore not from any credulous confidence in the superior wisdom of past ages, or gloomy persuasion of the degeneracy of mankind, but is the consequence of acknowledged and indubitable positions, that what has been longest known has been most considered, and what is most considered is best understood."
The modern cognitive sciences teach us that fixation is a thing, and we can learn to be bad at a problem just like we can learn to be good at it. If the premises of the arguments are unsound (and I have found no solid evidence to support natural law arguments against homosexuality), and the arguments keep repeating themselves, and they have all the traits of arguments being made to support and reinforce traditional concentrations of authority, then it's perfectly reasonable to conclude that despite having been considered for a long time, these issues are NOT better understood by the people making these arguments. Indeed, it's reasonable to conclude that they understand it WORSE, because this "consideration" has not been made as an effort to better understand the issues, but to reinforce traditional concentrations of authority (an objective, sadly, which has motivated a lot of theological politicking).
A rejection of the Courtier's Reply as "underbred" merely reinforces that conclusion. The rise of the Courtier's Reply is a consequence of people, willing to make arguments in defiance of attempts to reinforce traditional concentrations of authority, being able to meet in historically unprecedented numbers over new media and fora (namely the Internet). It argues that you've taken too much time thinking about how to reinforce an old argument. You argue...that it hasn't taken the time to reinforce the argument.
The scary thing about practice is, if you practice something, you get good at it.
Share it so that people can get into this conversation, 'cause we're not the only ones who think like this.Well, this
seems like a pretty good place to start. I'd say we can safely throw out the "it's all lust and they don't really love each other" bullshit when they're demonstrably better at it than the rest of us by an entire order of magnitude.
edited 7th Dec '12 3:09:41 PM by Pykrete
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As Ed Feser once put it, the "Courtier's Reply" is a nice shorthand for "[S]o I don’t know the first thing about Aquinas. But I’m not going to let that stop me from criticizing him! Nyah nyah!" It is rhetorically null, and it carries the noxious implication that your interlocutor himself doesn't believe what he's arguing. So it has the twin vices of being impertinent (in the root sense) and ill-mannered.
That's nice, but whether true or not (Psychology Today?), it doesn't much affect the central natural-law arguments.
No, the book Sex At Dawn and others like it completely debunk those. By completely missing the point of sex and sexual conduct Aquinas helped spread disease, destroy community bonds, and created permanent under classes.
Biologically, sex between humans is intended to create herd immunity by exposing you to small amounts of diseases from a lot of sources and to bond communities together. Sex was the first vaccine.
The primary purpose of sex, biologically, is not reproduction. That's why we have such a low fertility rate to the number of times we have sex. It's why we kiss. It's why we are always sexually active and not just when we're most fertile.
Aquinas' own work goes directly against nature and has allowed germs to get more virulent, has reduced herd immunity and has potentially killed millions with his misguided philosophies.
I know that making diseases spread better wasn't his intention, but that's the problem when you take the word of the uneducated and use it to build a society on. That herd immunity once lost is very hard to get back.
edited 7th Dec '12 5:32:32 PM by shimaspawn
Reality is that, which when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. -Philip K. Dick![]()
I'm gonna go ahead and stop you right there. Yes I have read a good portion of Aquinas's Summa Theologica. It's quite widely available.
It's extremely dense, meaty stuff. There's some good stuff in there to be sure.
It also takes a whole lot of things for granted. For one, it relies heavily on Paul-as-gospel, and most of his discussions on non-procreative sex as unnatural vice stem from Paul's previous neuroses on anything sexual ever.
And as for what affects central natural law arguments, when you have philosophy come into conflict with observable fact, you check the fact and then reexamine the philosophy. Here, we have a matter of Danish public record showing that same-sex couples are not only viable, but currently more stable than heterosexual by quite a wide margin. Clearly, we missed something.
edited 7th Dec '12 5:43:05 PM by Pykrete
The article also suggested that homosexuals are less likely to rush into marriage than heterosexuals who do it because it's expected. It's actually gay men specifically who have the very lowest divorce rate though the divorce rate among lesbians is still under half the rate among heterosexuals.
It seems to me that the biggest reason people dislike the idea of religion going against homosexuality is because of the idea of faith. From this standpoint and from what I've read, just about everything about Homosexuality so far has been about logic and reason, and any attempts to bring up religious doctrine is shot down as 'not good enough' and 'senseless reasons'. If a person believes in God, and God says that homosexuality is bad, then that should be counted as reason enough for someone to think that homosexuality is bad and therefor not engage in homosexual acts.
That's just my two cents, though.
Please consider supporting my artwork on PatreonUnless they can explain why God thinks it's bad, it holds no actual water as a legitimate reason.
All laws can be explained with some kind of reason. You cannot say "God said so" as a reason. You must explain why God said so. If you can't do that, you have no leg to stand on.
So no, it's just honestly not good enough overall. A legitimate reason requires logic. Faith is not logic here. It has none at all.
Quest 64 threadIn that case, the only logical reason I have for why homosexuality is wrong is because it does not produce offspring and is therefor detrimental to reproduction, but even that gets rebuffed by the post a few scrolls above me explaining that sex was intended as a vaccine biologically rather than a means of reproduction (which I personally find highly suspect, but I haven't done any research on the topic myself so I will refrain in this case). So no, I have no real logical basis for why Homosexuality could be considered a sin.
Also, I'm not really talking about 'whose God should we listen to' as I am 'if someone doesn't want to do the nasty with a person of the same gender because their God says it's wrong, then leave them alone'. The same goes for the flipside; if someone wants to do the nasty with a person of the same gender because they don't believe that anything is stopping them, then leave them alone.
edited 7th Dec '12 8:48:14 PM by CalamityJane
Please consider supporting my artwork on Patreon

"These Very Deeply Thought Out Arguments were put together by Very Serious People who were engaged in Very Deep Thought when forming them" = textbook Courtier's Reply
. If the premises are not sound, the argument is not sound. End of story.
edited 7th Dec '12 2:24:49 PM by RadicalTaoist
Share it so that people can get into this conversation, 'cause we're not the only ones who think like this.