Sunday School

[Dang MartinParticipant]

Davis wrote:

Dang Martin wrote:

the anti-gay sentiments in the bible make sense, as well as the rules about “not spilling your seed.”

No they don’t.

It appears that you’ve cherry-picked my intro, ignored the rest, and then argued against what you saw.

To be very, very clear, what I said was that it may have made sense back then, but IT MAKES ABSOLUTELY NO SENSE NOW.

[DavisModerator]

I understand your argument and agree with everything except that line I critiqued.

The point is…it never made sense. Not then, not now.

• This reply was modified 7 years, 6 months ago by  Davis.

[Simon PayntonParticipant]

I think the situation we’ve always had where women are “controlled”, kept down, second-class citizens, oppressed, by male society fits with the normal picture within the world of primates:  where females are usually regarded as the property of the bigger, more powerful males.  Each male will control as many females as he can get away with.  Even in humans, this tends to be pretty much the case.

So it’s not surprising that religion has encoded this feature of primate behaviour, alongside a narrow and paranoid sexual morality.

[Simon PayntonParticipant]

“Even in humans, this tends to be pretty much the case.”

– the difference in humans is that we’re an intensely cooperative species.

[PopeBeanieModerator]

most of the big domain names for ThinkBonobo are still available! 🙂

[DavisModerator]

Subjegation of females is not a universal phenomena. As Desmond Morris (the guy who wrote The Naked Ape) said, as civilization grows, there is a tendency towards exaggerated gender differences and an increase in types of sexuality (including sexual problems and perversion). There are many societies on Earth that are still matriarchal (notably in South East Asia, South Asia and South America). And even some which aren’t matriarchal aren’t necesarily patriarchal. The differences are a division of responsibilities and duties, not control. In Papua New Guinea, parts of south america with little outside contact and in the past in much of North America. there are many tribes which don’t show male domination and possession of females but, as Morris said, a division of work. The argument is that in a early setting, humans were few, in small groups with very large territories, scattered over long distances, occasional contact with other groups (tribes), only minor conflict with others and sexual bonding with those in the groups and preferably outside of the groups. Patriarchal tendencies and sexual divergence and control grow exponentially as civilization becomes more complex and dense (concentrated), especially at the moment when food production becomes more permanent, as spiritual systems are formalised and when there is great income disparity and when conflicts become more frequent and perhaps necessary to maintain their early-civilization. Demond Morris’s “The human zoo” talks about it at length. It is a great read. Though if you haven’t yet, read the Naked Ape and The Human Animal first. The human Animal was also turned into a great documentary series you can watch on youtube. They are classics, ever so slightly dated, but still relevant and sourced.

• This reply was modified 7 years, 6 months ago by  Davis.

[Dang MartinParticipant]

Davis wrote:

I understand your argument and agree with everything except that line I critiqued. The point is…it never made sense. Not then, not now.

So you disagree that, up until the age of modern medicine, women and children were dying in child birth in greater numbers, that disease was challenging the numbers of humans on the earth, and that every human being was tasked with having as many children as possible?

You know, that “be fruitful and multiply” sentiment?

Even with modern medicine in the US, about 15 women die in pregnancy or childbirth per 100,000 live births. Compared to a century ago it was more than 600 women per 100,000 births. In the 1600s and 1700s, the death rate was twice that.

I think it would be reasonable to conclude that the death rates were even worse before these times.

This is why your suggestion of an “out of control birth rate” fails. Back then, they had an out-of-control DEATH RATE. Thanks to modern medicine, we have a relatively solid level of death control, so it makes sense that birth control have the same social regard.

This means that gay people who cannot reproduce, the sterile who cannot reproduce, and those who choose to NOT reproduce face relatively little in the way of social pressure to contribute to the population. But BACK THEN, there had to be a great deal of social pressure to conform and contribute to the task-at-hand, which was to produce enough offspring that there would still be some viable adults, after 60%-80% of the children DIED before the age of 16.

This is why the “all hands on deck” approach to procreating made sense BACK THEN. It was a numbers game. It does not make any sense now, and it is painfully obvious that the Christian hatred of gay people is nothing more than useless residue of their irrational fears associated with their superstitious beliefs.

Certainly, you can disagree. I’ve built my argument for why this is the case, which revolves around social pressures to participate in working that numbers game.

++++

ANOTHER example of this horrible book being relevant THEN, but not NOT NOW can be found in Deuteronomy 23:13. Clearly, back then it made sense BACK THEN that you go to a special area, use a stick to dig a hole, crap in the hole, and then use the stick to cover it up. They did not have modern plumbing or other methods of sanitation at the time.

This DOES NOT make sense now, but it did back then.

++++

Although there are sections that made sense back then, but NOT NOW, it still stands that this book is not only completely worthless by modern standards, but that it can also be used in destructive ways.

[Simon PayntonParticipant]

@davis – “the Naked Ape and The Human Animal”

– thanks, that sounds interesting, I’ll have to look into that.  I’ve only got a broad hypothesis at the moment, and I want to keep it basic.  As I understand it, monogamy is part of the preliminary “self-domestication” of human beings which led to the evolution of cooperation, since it marked the beginning of the family unit and various prosocial knock-on effects.

[Simon PayntonParticipant]

This is what I want to explain:

“According to proponents of the no case, marriage is more than a relationship between two individuals; it is a relationship that provides the context within which children are born and raised. As such, they argue that it depends upon the biological complementarity of husband and wife. To recognise same-sex marriages would fundamentally alter the meaning of marriage.”

It makes sense for monotheistic religion to enforce this, since one of its primary purposes is to enforce cooperative norms on a mass scale.

Again, we see that any form of sexuality outside 1 man – 1 woman marriage is Verboten.  I just think that anti-gay prejudice is part of the general hysteria and paranoia that necessarily accompanies monogamy.  The enforcing has to be done through social norms rather than brute force.

We also see that this prejudice is rather shallow, and easily changed.  I think this shows that it is a matter of social norms rather than biological survival.

I think it was Kant who said that masturbation was the most evil thing ever, but he admitted that he didn’t know why.

[Simon PayntonParticipant]

@popebeanie – everyone always says that bonobos have the best parties.

[Reg the Fronkey FarmerModerator]

Yes, the bonobos had the very first “swingers party”. The one above looks rather serotonin depleted so it must have been taken on a monkey morning.

[Simon PayntonParticipant]

I think Cornelius looks pretty tuckered out.

[Simon PayntonParticipant]

It’s a bit puzzling why, traditionally, men are so scared of being called a gay sissy.  I put it down to two reasons:  1) the enforcement of monogamous marriage as the only acceptable form of sexuality, through social and religious norms;  2) the fact that femaleness, and by extension, femaleness in men, was traditionally ridiculed and despised.

I think it’s very true, as Davis points out, that social and religious norms arrived on the scene relatively late: a long time after monogamy, which started at the dawn of the human race.  By the time they arrived, the crunch-time situation of living on the savannah had long passed into prehistory, and so, people had forgotten the reasons why they arose in the first place, and therefore weren’t necessarily in a position to consciously challenge them.

Accordingly, when you ask a religious conservative exactly why they are against gay marriage, they can’t give you a reasonable answer: it’s just “godly”, “traditional”, “this is the way it’s meant to be”, and it doesn’t go much beyond that.  Any reason they give you is lame.

All of this shows how bizarre cultural and religious norms can be.  I think it is very likely that for a large part of human evolutionary history, homosexuality was as normal as it is in other species.  It didn’t “threaten” the social order (by being different or counter-cultural) because the social order was still tied very much to practicalities rather than cultural abstractions whose roots had been forgotten.

[DavisModerator]

@Dang. I agree that the child mortality rate was very high but that doesn’t account for slow population growth at a universal level. It does during times of heightened problems (extreme poverty, war, epidemics) or when several factors coincide…but it is not the case for all cultures outside of extreme times. The Vikings had next to no medical knowledge and lived in rough times, dirty conditions, absent husbands and harsh conditions yet their population grew just as multiple cultures do in Central Africa where there is one doctor per thousands. When Paul wrote his epistles the Roman Empire tolerated birth-control and abortion was common. It’s not as though he wrote his texts at a time when the Empire was facing dire extreme conditions everywhere on all fronts and that the survival of the people depended on breeding like rabbits. As for the Abrahamic times there is so little data about infant-mortality, birth control, population growth etc that I cannot find an academic source where someone makes any notable claim.

So yes, I agree that there are many factors which can, at times, put pressure on families to have many children and yes, high infant mortality rate is one of them and not a trivial factor, as well as times of great conflict, underemployment, epidemics) but it is not such a chronic or long term problem that their entire survival depends on forcing people to mate in ways they do’t want to. Never to the point where a broad principle of “men must marry women when possible and breed like rabbits” makes sense. And practically never when it comes to forcing LGTB people to marry people against their will and breed. Perhaps in extreme situations when a lack of a few extra new people literally means the doom of a tribe, village, large family. As a long term rule it is at times to a cultures/tribes/people’s advantage to keep breeding, a rule they like and want to keep…but as a universal rule, no, it doesn’t make sense…ever.

• This reply was modified 7 years, 6 months ago by  Davis.
• This reply was modified 7 years, 6 months ago by  Davis.

[DavisModerator]

Simon Paynton wrote:

It’s a bit puzzling why, traditionally, men are so scared of being called a gay sissy. I put it down to two reasons: 1) the enforcement of monogamous marriage as the only acceptable form of sexuality, through social and religious norms; 2) the fact that femaleness, and by extension, femaleness in men, was traditionally ridiculed and despised.

There are many cultures that have and do now tolerate or even accept homosexuality. The idea that it has only come to be accepted now is a strange myth. Notably in South East Asia and multiple indiginous groups throughout the Americas, acceptance of non-hetero sexuality ranged from sort-of to absolute. What is not surprising, not shocking in the least…is that the places on Earth where LGTB is accepted the least, are countries which practice the Abrahamic religions (Christians, Jews, Muslims). These religions have had an utterly insane obsession for centuries over controlling all forms of sexuality and enforcing a ruthless male dominated culture. The only Abrahamic religion based countries which have grown out of this obsession of controlling peoples bonding and mating habbits with neurotic mania, are those which secularised. Canada, Belgium, The Netherlands, New Zealand, Argentina to name a few.  The very few secular muslim countries which somewhat kind of tollerate LGTB are a total rarity (Bosnia, Turkey, Azerbaijan). More interestingly, in Africa, countries in which tribal peoples used to have some form of acceptance of LGTB changed radically after Christianity was introduced. In Nigeria there was once a class of LGTB people of which some were even respected. Now, Nigeria is ground central to African homophobia and extreme violence against people of LGTB, bad in the Christian half of the country…utter madness in the Muslim half. So it’s not even close to a universal or something you can generalise about.  It’s just another example of how the Western history or Modern history in sexuality and gender types cannot be relied on to form a more universal rule or historical rule on modern humans.

Men still don’t like being called gay because they still find it demeaning and the source of that is a sociopathic institutionalized Abrahamic religion that still has its clawed dug deep into our cultures, despite the progress of secularisation. Yes, there is always machismo and bravado and posturing and gender struggles to some degree in world cultures all the time…but no…it is not universal for human men to constantly call each other faggots and beat one another up for simply calling them a name or to bully young gay school children into committing suicide.

• This reply was modified 7 years, 6 months ago by  Davis.
• This reply was modified 7 years, 6 months ago by  Davis.

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