unapologetic

The closest relatives of humans: chimpanzees and bonobos, are OK with it too.  I would think that during most of the human history we were OK with it.  Maybe it only comes into play when large groups need to be organised and mobilised for action – that’s when religion gets involved in running society.

@strega – it seems that there are seven passages in the Bible condemning homosexuality.  This article proposes that they don’t mean that, but other kinds of non-standard sexual activity.  Looks like intellectual gymnastics to me.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0146107915577097

I think Jesus was on his particular trip but he did have girlfriends and not boyfriends (Mary Magdalene).

Presumably there would have been a time before gay people were persecuted; in the Roman world it was normal I believe.  Why did people start?  Jesus didn’t say anything about it to my knowledge.  On the other hand, it was condemned in the Ol…[Read more]

In other words, there is harm to a sacred value (reproduction via the male-female pair-bond) and this is manifested as fear of actual damage to people’s moral character and to society.  The Theory of Dyadic Morality states that anything we see as immoral we automatically see as harmful, and of course, vice versa.

Homosexuality is one of those “harmless wrongs” – people think it’s wrong, but they don’t know why.  To rationalise it, they say that teaching kids about being gay is actually teaching them to be gay, or at least, it might turn them gay, which would, it’s true, wreck society.

However, that’s plainly ridiculous, unless you believe that people…[Read more]

It could also have been Ukraine, attempting to harm Russian interests.  It doesn’t make any sense that the US or NATO did it.  There was already an energy shortage in Europe.

Bombing the pipeline was an irrational and destructive thing to do, that harmed the interests of the West.  Who does that point to?  R …

If there is no time (i.e., before the Big Bang) is there still causality?

@belle rose – you might be interested in this article.

https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20230207-the-five-countries-expat-families-love

A couple of years ago, William Lane Craig said that a Dr Bob, one of his favourite theology professors, had passed away.

Sorry for that second comment, I was trying to edit the first, and screwed up.

Simon Paynton wrote:

Autumn wrote:
None of that changes the fact that he wasn’t arrested for saying there are only two genders, and he very likely was not suspended for that reason either.

I suspect a lot of it comes down to manufacturing ammunition for an us-versus-them, we-good, you-evil culture war. It’s like Putin says “the Ukrainians did t…

[Read more]

Autumn wrote:
None of that changes the fact that he wasn’t arrested for saying there are only two genders, and he very likely was not suspended for that reason either.

I suspect a lot of it comes down to manufacturing ammunition for an us-versus-them, we-good, you-evil culture war.  It’s like Putin says “the Ukrainians did this [manufactured ou…[Read more]

Autumn wrote:
The point isn’t that rational criticism or inquiry can’t be raised. It’s that one has to be careful about crossing the line into fear-mongering and hypocrisy.

People might think, if someone is prepared to break norms to the extent that they will dress and act like someone of another gender, then what else might they do?

The only…[Read more]

Autumn wrote:
if we extended that treatment to all demographics, no one would be allowed in washrooms with one another, we’d make all change rooms private, and prisons would segregate all inmates from one another and from staff.

But that is the case right now – males and females are segregated in close quarters.

Autumn wrote:
But it’s frustrating how many media outlets foster not just political illiteracy in the general population, but rather promote outright paranoid delusion.

In the UK we would call this shit-stirring.  Shit-stirring seems to make a lot of money for the media.  It’s not helpful for the overall debate, and focuses on the wrong iss…[Read more]