Religious Discussion

Discussion regarding the Outsider webcomic, science, technology and science fiction.

Moderator: Outsider Moderators

User avatar
Grayhome
Posts: 550
Joined: Fri Apr 22, 2011 2:11 am

Re: Religious Discussion

Post by Grayhome »

Krulle
You are right. Racist interpretation exists. And some may feel offended by your implications that it is a natural outcome just because of religions, which is in itself racism against religion.
Also, have you read the article? There are long passages about the theological discussion of meaning.
Krulle, I have no interest in insulting anyone. There is simply no tactful way to tell a religious person that going to Africa and preaching about LBGT's being demons and witches is harmful. Or that standing in the ruins of a church in Haiti which collapsed due to an earthquake and telling the assembled faithful that the earthquake is punishment for allowing LBGT to exist is not the way to go. But I see it as having to be done due to the overwhelming number of religious fanatics that have been taken power in the United States political system, and completely control the Republican Party. Speaking of which, Republican primaries everyone! Guess how many don't believe in evolution and think dinosaurs walked alongside mankind! Win a prize! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UPJpLfDlMhc

As to your second point Krulle I do not see how that has any bearing any on my points. The philosophical musings of theologians are not going to erase the event from history, nor will reinterpretations of those texts bring back the dead. These biblical passages were used as justification of the African slave trade. This is a verified historical fact.
yes, some assholes interpreted something into a story which had lost its validity long before.
How did the bible (or the story itself) lose it's validity before the African slave trade came into existence? The very fact that it was used to such great effect in validating the African Slave trade proves that it was very valid in influencing the thoughts and actions of millions. The slaves didn't kidnap and drag themselves over here to be slaves. They were kidnapped and dragged here by white slavers who were convinced they were doing their god's bidding.
Like it was pointed out by several participants in this discussion, context is very important.
The small exercise I gave you should point out that it is nearly impossible to interpret these old texts, as the context has dramatically changed.
Krulle, people can and do interpret these holy texts every single day of the week. Then they start mega churches and sends millions, tens of millions, even hundreds of millions of dollars to fund the election campaigns of politicians who agree with their religious agenda and upon being elected fight against LBGT rights, women's rights, try to get creationist teachings put into science classrooms, try to teach that slavery in the United States was just a big conspiracy and that it didn't happen, etc. I consider such people to be extremely dangerous to the future prosperity of United States and I will continue to oppose them however I can.
Also: just because some egocentric and dumb people interpret "holy texts" in a very (for them) convenient fashion does not mean that the interpretation is right, or followed by a majority of that religion.
Krulle the United States fought one of it's most violent wars over the slavery. The scars of that conflict are still prevalent today and I still see quite a few confederate battle flags in my home state in the north. This is not a "some people" event that can be waved away, this was and is a very important historical event and it continues to influence the United States to this day.
Last edited by Grayhome on Fri Aug 07, 2015 5:36 pm, edited 2 times in total.

User avatar
Grayhome
Posts: 550
Joined: Fri Apr 22, 2011 2:11 am

Re: Religious Discussion

Post by Grayhome »

Discord
krulle: do you know the most common cause for christian religious 'defection'? Actually reading the bible, cover to cover.
there are reasons why in the olden days ordinary people were not allowed to actually read the bible, only listen to sermons.
Yes, that's why I had to give it up as well. There was simply too much horror in the bible that upon further study and reaching adulthood I could no longer ignore. Well that and detailed studies of the history of Christianity and other religions which I continue to this day.

Krulle
Posts: 1413
Joined: Wed May 20, 2015 9:14 am

Re: Religious Discussion

Post by Krulle »

@Grayhome: it is good that you fight against forgetting previous crimes. Thank you.
But the slave mentality always existed and still exists in Africa. It existed before we whities came and rediscovered Africa.
Those who wanted to get rich saw an opportunity.
And when someone opposed them, they looked for and found some kind of legitimitation.
Just like the ancient Israeli wrote into "the book" to have a reason why they are allowed to subjugate Canaanites.
At least the church became very careful when amending the New Testament. But it has been amended to serve purposes.
That's another reason why I don't trust "the book" to deliver "truth". It delivers the "truth" someone long ago needed to serve his personal truth.

Fight against those who use religion and/or religious texts to justify political ends.
But don't fight believers who argue with other arguments.

I can get behind the fight against forgetting. Germany, my passport country, has some groups with selective amnesia too. And I fight this forgetting too.
Vote for Outsider on TWC: Image
charred steppes, borders of territories: page 59,
jump-map of local stars: page 121, larger map in Loroi: page 118,
System view Leido Crossroads: page 123, after the battle page 195

User avatar
Grayhome
Posts: 550
Joined: Fri Apr 22, 2011 2:11 am

Re: Religious Discussion

Post by Grayhome »

Nemo
That is in fact central to the point he was making. You missed it.

Ah the sword verses. You do realize this is making the same mistake those preaching the curse of ham did hundreds of years ago? You are reading race into passages that deal with a different topic because it suits your need.

Interesting to note, the sword verses there are narrow in scope, both in time and place. In fact, I'll allow Muslim scholar Ibn Khaldun to speak on that:

Aside from the sword verses it also makes note of the separation between Jew and Gentile. Should point out that the Jews wind up with all manner of restrictions and, as Khaldun noted, no imperative to impose them on others. Unlike Muhammad.
I apologize for misunderstanding his point, let me clarify my position upon interpretations, reinterpretations or even basic readings of the bible.
The Christian bible has massive amounts of data that are inaccurate, false, and immoral. Historic figures, events, cities, etc are mentioned that never existed, existed geographically elsewhere they are claimed to have existed, existed and were never mentioned in the bible, existed at different times they were claimed to have existed, were edited out in later editions, etc.

The bible makes grand claims which fall under the purview of astronomy, geology, biology, psychology, law, etc. To my knowledge most if not all of these claims have been proven to have little evidence supporting them or have been proven to be false.

The bible is, and there is no tactful way to communicate this I mean no offense to anyone when I say this, a very bad book all around. It is a book that condones or outright commands slavery, genocide, rape, murder, lying, cheating, stealing etc. It is a book in which the only possible way a person can get positive morality from it is to ignore the vast majority of it and not examine it’s contents critically.

To be as clear and honest as possible, I do not give much credence (or interest) to interpretations or reinterpretations of the bible. Anyone can read the bible and easily find many verses which they can then use to claim they possess god’s blessing for whatever action they could name.

My concern is not for the interpretations of those who read the bible, or any other holy text, but for how those individuals interact with others upon reading them. In the United States, those who oppose LBGT rights, contraceptives, climate change legislation, or are inserting religious dogma into school curriculum's, etc do so for purely religious reasons. They loudly and proudly proclaim this on national television, the internet, radios, in newspapers, door to door preachers that they are carrying out their god’s holy work (it is important to emphasize they have a lot of money). When their actions are scrutinized (a scrutiny we have for all other aspects of life, be they scientific, historical, technological, political, etc) they claim they are being discriminated against and that anyone who opposes them are racists, bigots, worshipers of Satan, baby eaters, reptilian aliens who can shape shift and mimic the human form, you get the idea. Examples of this behavior are the growing attempts in many southern states to pass legislation which would allow those with “deeply held religious beliefs” to legally discriminate against anyone they suspect of being a member of the LBGT community.

I hope I have made my stance on this topic clear.

Nemo
Posts: 277
Joined: Tue Apr 26, 2011 1:04 am

Re: Religious Discussion

Post by Nemo »

It is a book that condones or outright commands slavery, genocide, rape, murder, lying, cheating, stealing etc.

Examples of this behavior are the growing attempts in many southern states to pass legislation which would allow those with “deeply held religious beliefs” to legally discriminate against anyone they suspect of being a member of the LBGT community.
You picked some poor examples. You seem unable to separate historical context, which as you say is often inaccurate, from theological imperatives. Take genocide. Like Khaldun noted nearly a thousand years ago, the Jews waged a war to establish themselves. In this sense, there is nothing extraordinary going on. Its the norm in human history. The worst you can reasonably say is they were no better than others. Not that they were in any way worse. And then only when viewed through modern philosophy on the morality of war. Which, in Western Civilization is ultimately based on the Just War reasoning hammered out over time by men like Augustine and Aquinas as they tried to reconcile war with Christian philosophy. That is to say, Christian philosophy has influenced the moral spectrum by which you currently judge ancient Jewish actions. If Islamic Jihad philosophy had shaped your moral spectrum, the view of such ancient events would be drastically different.

Turn the other check, if a slave, be a good one. Do not seek violence and confrontation. The slavery directive does not command you to take on slaves of other races peoples or religions, but to treat both master and slave with the utmost care. Recall that slavery was the norm throughout human history, it is a modern adaptation of Enlightenment thinking that brought about its end. These were the words of men who sought to change the hearts of men without the use of force. Not by sword, but by word and example. What a terrible thing that is? Rather than incite the world to flames and revolution and force change through bitter loss or Pyrrhic victory. You would do better to say that slavery lasted longer than it otherwise may have during and after the Enlightenment because it was not rejected forthrightly by the Bible, especially the New Testament. You would then have to question how long the Roman government, or indeed any other government of the age, would have permitted Christianity to exist had it done so. And without the influence of New Testament Christianity, what shape would the Enlightenment have taken, if it would have taken shape at all? So much of that modern "Tolerance" school of thought owes its roots to the diverse number of Protestant ideologies which sprung up through the abusive practices of the old Roman Catholic Church/Government apparatus. As the Roman influenced governments waged so many wars to bring the herd back into line, thinking spread as to live and let live. As has been said, there is no control group for this.


Lets move to more modern times. We all know what sparks the example you gave, gay marriage. First lets handle the marriage aspect. Is marriage a state institution which has been recognized by religion, or a religious institution that has been recognized by the state? Any honest examination can offer only one answer, it is a social arrangement formalized through religious tradition and recognized by the state for purpose of property law and inheritance etc. Equal law protection was rejected, what was desired was "Marriage". The intent here is not to acquire equal rights before the government, but to force acceptance on those who dissent.

Let us test that idea. Government should keep its guns out of the bedroom. Done. Government should offer gay couplings the same lawful privileges of married couples, permitted. Government should step into church and dictate who must be married at the point of a gun. Hrm. Cake is to be served at the reception (not a lie!). I decline to bake that cake, on the grounds I do not condone your actions. You go get guns (government) and force compliance. Repeat after me, "Its a free country" (⌐■_■)–︻╦╤─ now bake that cake.


To say nothing of the poor thought which has gone into the LGBT community. There are two modes of thought here. One is that it is a choice, something you can pick up or drop as a habit. Other is that is a biological imperative, just born that way! If it is true that it is a choice, it is a choice which others must be free to support OR criticize at will. If it is not a choice, but a fault of biology, then science will eventually discover the fault. Be it randomly mismatched DNA or a hormonal imbalance during pregnancy it matters not, eventually it will be known and after that, will be treatable. In the meantime that would make it a disease or perhaps more accurately a syndrome of unknown cause. Yet it is illegal to try to treat it as such in two states, California and New York, owing to questionable past practices (electroshock therapy) attempting to treat it as such.

Curiously, the only modern research I know of in that line is Oregon State University research into ram sexuality. PETA tried to stop that research by saying the results could lead to medical research into changing the sexuality of humans. The researchers then took flak from LGBT supporters for daring to inquire into the medical basis of homosexuality. Interesting that a group which insists it suffers greatly not by its own choosing but as a consequence of biology does not want nor encourage medical research into finding answers or possible treatments or cures. Groups waving flags and wearing ribbons for curing this disease or that cancer, but not in this case. My question becomes where does the biology end and the choice begin?

User avatar
Razor One
Moderator
Posts: 562
Joined: Thu May 12, 2011 3:38 pm

Re: Religious Discussion

Post by Razor One »

Nemo wrote:
Lets move to more modern times. We all know what sparks the example you gave, gay marriage. First lets handle the marriage aspect. Is marriage a state institution which has been recognized by religion, or a religious institution that has been recognized by the state? Any honest examination can offer only one answer, it is a social arrangement formalized through religious tradition and recognized by the state for purpose of property law and inheritance etc. Equal law protection was rejected, what was desired was "Marriage". The intent here is not to acquire equal rights before the government, but to force acceptance on those who dissent.
Marriage does have its roots in religious institutions, but you don't need a religious institution in this day and age in order be married. You need only go to a court, fill in some documents, and bam, you are married in the eyes of the law. It is the state that recognises and authorises marriages, they set the rules and laws under which marriage works, not religious institutions.

Historical forms of marriage differ from the modern view of marriage, which is when two people love each other enough. The definition of marriage changes with the times. We today have a very different view of marriage than people of five hundred years ago had.

The legalisation of gay marriage is a further recognition that in todays society that love is the foundation of a good and healthy marriage. You mention that equal protection under the law was rejected, but you have you ever stopped to examine why that was rejected? Consider the following.

"I'm Bill!"
"I'm Jane!"
"We're married!"

--

"I'm Jim!"
"I'm James!"
"We have a civil union!"

As you yourself said, there is a social aspect to arrangement that is marriage. Marriage carries a heavy social significance. It represents a bond of love between two people willing to commit to each other. A civil union does not, would not, and could never carry that same social significance. Civil unions would always be seen as a 'lesser' form of marriage. The Diet Coke of marriage. That **whit** just not marriage enough.

If you're giving civil unions the same legal weighting as marriage, but restricting one to heterosexual couples and one to homosexual couples, it becomes a lot less of a headache to fold the one into the other rather than having to replicate an entirely different paper trail for effectively the same job. The courts recently chose to legalise marriage for same sex couples instead of developing an entirely new, identical, and ultimately superfluous system just so that some people could feel comfortable that the gays were being kept away from their marriages.

At the end of the day, same sex marriages being legal in no way oppresses those that dissent it. If you can find a single example of same sex marriage oppressing people that won't immediately make me burst into tears of mirth, I'd like to see it.

Let us test that idea. Government should keep its guns out of the bedroom. Done. Government should offer gay couplings the same lawful privileges of married couples, permitted. Government should step into church and dictate who must be married at the point of a gun. Hrm. Cake is to be served at the reception (not a lie!). I decline to bake that cake, on the grounds I do not condone your actions. You go get guns (government) and force compliance. Repeat after me, "Its a free country" (⌐■_■)–︻╦╤─ now bake that cake.
Let us test your statements here.

Government should keep its guns out of the bedroom. Done.
Non-sequitur.

Government should offer gay couplings the same lawful privileges of married couples, permitted.
Pass.

Government should step into church and dictate who must be married at the point of a gun.
Strawman. The government only made it lawful for same sex couples to be legally married. Religious institutions are in no way forced to marry off gay couples, nor would it at all be constitutional to do so. The one's that are fine with gay marriage may see an uptick in people getting married in their churches though.

I decline to bake that cake, on the grounds I do not condone your actions. You go get guns (government) and force compliance. Repeat after me, "Its a free country" (⌐■_■)–︻╦╤─ now bake that cake.
Ah yes, the infamous cake incident. Please examine the following statements.

Would you agree that it is good and correct for a business to refuse service to someone who is gay?
Would you agree that it is good and correct for a business to refuse service to someone who is black?
Would you agree that it is good and correct for a business to refuse service to someone who is muslim?
Would you agree that it is good and correct for a business to refuse service to someone who is french?

Those last three are flat out illegal. That first statement is still a rather emergent phenomenon legally, and so varies state by state. The flipside of freedom is responsibility. Freedom is also a two way street. One of the cornerstones of freedom, democracy, and the sheer success that the US is built on is the fact that anyone can do business with anyone within certain legal restrictions. You can't be refused service just because you're black. Or french. Or muslim. Buy you can be refused service in some areas because you're gay, or you're promoting a pro-gay message.

I feel that for the same reason that businesses must serve black people, muslims, and frenchmen, businesses have absolutely no right to refuse service to gay people. If you're fine with businesses discriminating against gay people then you also must be fine with businesses discriminating against just about anyone else for any reason. It's a free country, right? Or does this right to discriminate only apply when it's against a group that you find distasteful?
Nemo wrote:
To say nothing of the poor thought which has gone into the LGBT community. There are two modes of thought here. One is that it is a choice, something you can pick up or drop as a habit.
There is literally nobody in the LGBT community who advocates that their sexuality is ever a choice.

Other is that is a biological imperative, just born that way! If it is true that it is a choice, it is a choice which others must be free to support OR criticize at will. If it is not a choice, but a fault of biology, then science will eventually discover the fault. Be it randomly mismatched DNA or a hormonal imbalance during pregnancy it matters not, eventually it will be known and after that, will be treatable. In the meantime that would make it a disease or perhaps more accurately a syndrome of unknown cause. Yet it is illegal to try to treat it as such in two states, California and New York, owing to questionable past practices (electroshock therapy) attempting to treat it as such.

Curiously, the only modern research I know of in that line is Oregon State University research into ram sexuality. PETA tried to stop that research by saying the results could lead to medical research into changing the sexuality of humans. The researchers then took flak from LGBT supporters for daring to inquire into the medical basis of homosexuality. Interesting that a group which insists it suffers greatly not by its own choosing but as a consequence of biology does not want nor encourage medical research into finding answers or possible treatments or cures. Groups waving flags and wearing ribbons for curing this disease or that cancer, but not in this case. My question becomes where does the biology end and the choice begin?
I find it rather disturbing that the moment we accept that homosexuality has a biological basis that we must then immediately move towards identifying and 'fixing' it as though it is problem. It also disturbs me that the way you phrase it coming into being mandates that it be a mistake and the attempt to relegate it as a disease. Exactly what is wrong with being a homosexual that requires fixing? If your answer is that they face societal pressure and persecution, then I would argue that it is society that needs to change and not the other way around.

That being said, they have found some genetic factors that increase the rate of homosexuality. It's linked to fertility. Assuming that the factors that give rise to homosexuality are solely genetic, you'd also need to effectively nuke fertility across certain cross-sections of society in order to 'fix' the 'problem'.

That being said, genetics is certainly not the sole factor. There are cases of twins where one is homosexual and the other not. You can't really argue that genetics are a factor there, and since a lot of those cases have the twins growing up in identical environments and frequently together, sociological factors become difficult to underpin as well.

There are a lot of factors, known and unknown that go into shaping ones sexuality. Finding what these factors are is certainly a scientific endeavour worth pursuing. Taking that knowledge and using it to determine a good and correct sexuality and labelling all other sexualities that do not conform to that standard as things to be fixed, as a disease to be cured, is beyond repugnant and for reasons I would hope are readily apparent and obvious.

There's also no stopping a group you dislike from rising to power and declaring your way of life as a disease to be cured and then persecuting you in turn. How we treat our minorities reflects upon us as a society. I prefer to live in a society that is just, fair, and tolerant if not inclusive. The society that opts to 'cure' the gay is, in my view, none of those things and on a very dark path indeed.
Image
SpoilerShow
This is my Mod voice. If you see this in a thread, it means that the time for gentle reminders has passed.

User avatar
Grayhome
Posts: 550
Joined: Fri Apr 22, 2011 2:11 am

Re: Religious Discussion

Post by Grayhome »

Wow Nemo, that was a horrifying post. However I thank you for your honesty so that we can hash out what's true from what's false. The first issue I have is with the idea that LGBT is a choice, according to this page (and other scientific research I have studied) LBGT's have been observed in 1,500 different species, to my knowledge discrimination against LBGT occurs in only one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homosexua ... in_animals

The second URL is from Dragon Age Inquisition, a homosexual mage meets his estranged father, turns out the reason the mage left his home was because Daddy tried to "fix" his embarrassing little quirk. Your comment on "fixing" LGBT's reminded me of it:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G3Ode-rqc2w

The third and fourth are from George Takei, one of the most eloquent and famous advocates for LGBT rights that I know if.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMZKd6s4Pdg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=giopNCqqUkw

Fifth is by TYT concerning government legislated discrimination: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBcogCzihvo

My sister is bisexual, it deeply disturbs me whenever anyone suggests that she is sick and needs to be "fixed" because of who she loves.

Absalom
Posts: 718
Joined: Sat Sep 24, 2011 4:33 am

Re: Religious Discussion

Post by Absalom »

Grayhome wrote:Speaking of which, Republican primaries everyone! Guess how many don't believe in evolution and think dinosaurs walked alongside mankind! Win a prize! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UPJpLfDlMhc
I can't be bothered to review the primaries at this point (My voting rating is Bush>=Hillary>Fiorina>>>>Cruze=?=Sanders, and I refuse to decide on the rest for a while, Trump included), so I'll just say "less disbelief than they claim". What, did you think Republicans were wholly pure and honest? The only one I assess to be so pure is Cruz, who I simply will not vote for (my state allows leaving any combination of races blank).
Grayhome wrote:As to your second point Krulle I do not see how that has any bearing any on my points. The philosophical musings of theologians are not going to erase the event from history, nor will reinterpretations of those texts bring back the dead. These biblical passages were used as justification of the African slave trade. This is a verified historical fact.
Neither do the unfounded claims of manipulators dictate the nature of things which they do not have the grounds to define. Your own point stands against you.
Grayhome wrote:The very fact that it was used to such great effect in validating the African Slave trade proves that it was very valid in influencing the thoughts and actions of millions.
Here's a modified form of this sentence:
The very fact that it was used to such great effect in accelerating and sustaining the African Slave Trade proves that it was very successful in influencing the thoughts and actions of millions.
You used the word "valid" quite a number of times in the original, but how exactly did you determine that "valid" belonged in those particular positions?

At any rate, the Bible wasn't what produced that magnitude of effect: money was. The South discovered that cotton was very valuable, and thus started importing slaves to increase the amount that they could produce. However, slaves could honestly only work coastal cotton, because because inland cotton seeds are and always were too small to pick by hand. By the late 1700s, it was becoming clear to the southern plantation owners that slavery was not the font of money that they had once considered it: plantation slavery was largely doomed, and all that could therefor remain were a few household servants: slavery was going to drop to the levels seen in the old Roman Empire (where it was never common, despite the fame of Sparticus: the Romans were afraid of revolt, and thus kept them few). Then Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin, and it made financial sense again, because his gin could work with inland cotton, and thus increased possible production. This last-minute reprieve is what the civil war interrupted. Except that rather than interrupt slavery, it just reduced the severity of the system: sharecropping was arguably not as bad as slavery, but it was still pretty far down the spectrum, and it didn't end (or rather the mass-misery aspects ended: if you're just starting out, farming is still very low-profit in America; rich farmers are either capitalists instead of farmers, or have been in the game for decades) until mechanical harvesters became reliable enough in the 1950s.

And if you look at e.g. the coal-mining or textile industry about the same time, you see the same or similar without all the slavery (labor unions didn't come out of nowhere): and I have never heard of a religious reason for that misery.
Grayhome wrote:
Like it was pointed out by several participants in this discussion, context is very important.
The small exercise I gave you should point out that it is nearly impossible to interpret these old texts, as the context has dramatically changed.
Krulle, people can and do interpret these holy texts every single day of the week.
And when they cannot interpret, they invent. In fact, when Washington was made President, we invented. America does not simply have a history, it has a mythology, and for a reason: it's useful. Lincoln is now part of it, FDR is part of it, Reagan is part of it. JFK is part of it, but he seems to be getting somewhat undermined as of late, and LBJ and Nixon rehabilitated (in so much as a chronic paranoid can be rehabilitated by revealing the truth). Others as well, of course, but you need a certain sense of "magic" to make the list. None of the presidents since Reagan, Bush Jr & Obama included, seem to have that certain touch (Bill Clinton might make it, but if so then he'll be rather ignominious among the list).
Grayhome wrote:Then they start mega churches and sends millions, tens of millions, even hundreds of millions of dollars to fund the election campaigns of politicians who agree with their religious agenda and upon being elected fight against LBGT rights, women's rights, try to get creationist teachings put into science classrooms, try to teach that slavery in the United States was just a big conspiracy and that it didn't happen, etc.
And corporations do it as well, and so do labor unions; and in case you forgot, one of the most vociferous anti-slavery factions was precisely such for religious reasons.
Grayhome wrote:
Also: just because some egocentric and dumb people interpret "holy texts" in a very (for them) convenient fashion does not mean that the interpretation is right, or followed by a majority of that religion.
Krulle the United States fought one of it's most violent wars over the slavery. The scars of that conflict are still prevalent today and I still see quite a few confederate battle flags in my home state in the north. This is not a "some people" event that can be waved away, this was and is a very important historical event and it continues to influence the United States to this day.
The Civil War was also fought over a (accurate) perception that the South was losing political power to the north (there really were that many immigrants at the time, and they shunned the South... because of the slavery, and what I consider an accurately perceived similarity between Southern plantation owners and English lords of the manor). The South could have (and arguable should have) tried to diversify into industry, but because of their opposition to debt they never did: the delay of the Inter-Continental Railroad until after the Civil War is at least partly a result of this.

The scars of the conflict are, in fact, not just over the war itself, but in fact over differing cultures (though certainly more similar than at the time):

When someone from a red state hears someone from a blue state talking about the environment, they hear a desire of one faction within the United States to impose it's vision of the future upon the rest (Obama is unfortunately not a good enough orator... or maybe it the speech writer? to avoid this. He actually managed to sound like an Ayn Rand villain one or twice when addressing a liberal audience :| ). Fortunately, as long as we don't get one of the fringe-wingers among the Republicans as the next President the excesses of this administration will likely get rolled to something more reasonable (we can leave their excesses to whoever comes after that, and there's always some... Enhanced Interrogations, anyone?).

Meanwhile, when a blue stater hears a red stater talking about abortion, they hear a desire of one faction within the United States to impose it's vision of the future upon the rest (I actually might have heard worse than you, since I actually live in a red state). These laws tend to get overturned fortunately, and that's if they even survive the legislative sniff test in the first place (politics tends to draw money-hunters and TvTropes Fundamentalists though, so they do tend to pass... then again, NYC Soda laws, so it applies on all sides).
Razor One wrote:

I decline to bake that cake, on the grounds I do not condone your actions. You go get guns (government) and force compliance. Repeat after me, "Its a free country" (⌐■_■)–︻╦╤─ now bake that cake.
Ah yes, the infamous cake incident. Please examine the following statements.

Would you agree that it is good and correct for a business to refuse service to someone who is gay?
Would you agree that it is good and correct for a business to refuse service to someone who is black?
Would you agree that it is good and correct for a business to refuse service to someone who is muslim?
Would you agree that it is good and correct for a business to refuse service to someone who is french?

Those last three are flat out illegal.
If the Hobby Lobby case is carried forward, then depending on the respective groundings of the decisions (I don't even remember if I heard why the court ruled the way it did), eventually all of those refusals may actually be legal... with caveats. The Hobby Lobby health-care case established that certain corporations can be legitimately ascribed specific moralities, but also established that forcing action against those morals is indeed against the law. The later of which is certainly reasonable when applied to groups that genuinely have some form of morality, since otherwise a Neo-Nazi could legitimately sue the Anti-Defamation League for not being hired if the successful applicant was verifiably the vastly inferior candidate. No, seriously, if you take that last, uncomfortable step back then you do find that if a group's morality is not allowed to play a role in business decisions, then the Neo-Nazi is the correct hire, because the organization's hiring procedures are capable of calculating that in the absence of the moral-horror of that particular hiring decision the Neo-Nazi is the superior choice, and any decision to the contrary is a violation of legal non-discrimination rules.

And if morality is a valid factor in business choices for groups (whether corporations, labor unions, social lodges, etc.), as the Supreme Court has itself de-facto ruled to be the case, then it is virtually impossible to not apply that rule to individuals. Which is where a bit of irony comes in, because while you can usually tell if someone is black from looking at them, you can't reliably determine that with homosexuality: I expect that either the laws will be changed, or we will discover what the Supreme Court thinks about requiring business decisions to all be enforceable :lol: (if they say "yes, it must be enforceable", then all business rules against serving gays and Muslims will instantly be invalid, rendering the whole point of those laws moot: because that plaid-wearning grizzled slightly smelly white male trucker that you serve at the lunch counter might say if asked that he is both gay and Islamic, yet you were fine with feeding him for years).

This is one of the reasons why the BSA allowing gays is actually major within their ranks: it makes the BSA itself (not necessarily the individual troops) subject to discrimination rules in a way that they previously were not (it's a less extreme equivalent to the Vatican deciding that homosexuals can serve as clergy).
Razor One wrote:That first statement is still a rather emergent phenomenon legally, and so varies state by state. The flipside of freedom is responsibility. Freedom is also a two way street. One of the cornerstones of freedom, democracy, and the sheer success that the US is built on is the fact that anyone can do business with anyone within certain legal restrictions. You can't be refused service just because you're black. Or french. Or muslim. Buy you can be refused service in some areas because you're gay, or you're promoting a pro-gay message.
And customers can refuse to buy from you because you sound Texan, or you have a christian bumper-sticker, or you promote a anti-gay message. Freedom is a two-way street all right, but bear in mind that there is always some dark implication of this or that which can bring the whole thing tumbling into chaos or tyranny, and that all of us customers in some sense depend on those rules being applied only to the "merchants", and never to the "peasants".
Razor One wrote:I feel that for the same reason that businesses must serve black people, muslims, and frenchmen, businesses have absolutely no right to refuse service to gay people. If you're fine with businesses discriminating against gay people then you also must be fine with businesses discriminating against just about anyone else for any reason. It's a free country, right? Or does this right to discriminate only apply when it's against a group that you find distasteful?
It's a free country, right? Let California boycott Arizona.

Seriously, no happiness lies down this road, only scale can even hope to keep this train of logic from rampaging while rabid.
Razor One wrote:
Nemo wrote:
To say nothing of the poor thought which has gone into the LGBT community. There are two modes of thought here. One is that it is a choice, something you can pick up or drop as a habit.
There is literally nobody in the LGBT community who advocates that their sexuality is ever a choice.
I've actually heard it before, though it was years ago.
Razor One wrote:

Other is that is a biological imperative, just born that way! If it is true that it is a choice, it is a choice which others must be free to support OR criticize at will. If it is not a choice, but a fault of biology, then science will eventually discover the fault. Be it randomly mismatched DNA or a hormonal imbalance during pregnancy it matters not, eventually it will be known and after that, will be treatable. In the meantime that would make it a disease or perhaps more accurately a syndrome of unknown cause. Yet it is illegal to try to treat it as such in two states, California and New York, owing to questionable past practices (electroshock therapy) attempting to treat it as such.

Curiously, the only modern research I know of in that line is Oregon State University research into ram sexuality. PETA tried to stop that research by saying the results could lead to medical research into changing the sexuality of humans. The researchers then took flak from LGBT supporters for daring to inquire into the medical basis of homosexuality. Interesting that a group which insists it suffers greatly not by its own choosing but as a consequence of biology does not want nor encourage medical research into finding answers or possible treatments or cures. Groups waving flags and wearing ribbons for curing this disease or that cancer, but not in this case. My question becomes where does the biology end and the choice begin?
I find it rather disturbing that the moment we accept that homosexuality has a biological basis that we must then immediately move towards identifying and 'fixing' it as though it is problem. It also disturbs me that the way you phrase it coming into being mandates that it be a mistake and the attempt to relegate it as a disease. Exactly what is wrong with being a homosexual that requires fixing? If your answer is that they face societal pressure and persecution, then I would argue that it is society that needs to change and not the other way around.
This particular perspective actually arises out of taking a very mechanical view of the biological aspects behind it, rather than anything sociological. My point earlier about transsexuals was actually much the same: if you actually think about the biological subjects in question, rather than any other influencing factors, then asexuality, homosexuality, and bisexuality don't make a lot of sense, because you have limited resources (sperm and eggs.. and time, I suppose) with which to achieve something that theoretically the biological processes in question should be attempting to achieve (reproduction). From a low-level perspective he is actually perfectly right.

It's much like transsexuality, where it would only make sense for society to touch the subject if some sort of societal gain could be reached via that intervention, but none the less, when you're just considering the biological concepts it's a perfectly sensible question to ask.
Razor One wrote:That being said, they have found some genetic factors that increase the rate of homosexuality. It's linked to fertility. Assuming that the factors that give rise to homosexuality are solely genetic, you'd also need to effectively nuke fertility across certain cross-sections of society in order to 'fix' the 'problem'.
And this is where you start to move beyond low-level biological matters. It doesn't change the low-level biological reasoning, but within an individualistic society (like our own), it should be enough.
Razor One wrote:That being said, genetics is certainly not the sole factor. There are cases of twins where one is homosexual and the other not. You can't really argue that genetics are a factor there, and since a lot of those cases have the twins growing up in identical environments and frequently together, sociological factors become difficult to underpin as well.
It was years ago, but some study gave me the impression that around 80% of the human population is probably genetically bisexual, with the minorities being homosexuals, heterosexuals, and asexuals (apparently a genuine category: they enjoy sex, but they don't experience sexual attraction like most people).
Razor One wrote:There are a lot of factors, known and unknown that go into shaping ones sexuality. Finding what these factors are is certainly a scientific endeavour worth pursuing. Taking that knowledge and using it to determine a good and correct sexuality and labelling all other sexualities that do not conform to that standard as things to be fixed, as a disease to be cured, is beyond repugnant and for reasons I would hope are readily apparent and obvious.

There's also no stopping a group you dislike from rising to power and declaring your way of life as a disease to be cured and then persecuting you in turn. How we treat our minorities reflects upon us as a society. I prefer to live in a society that is just, fair, and tolerant if not inclusive. The society that opts to 'cure' the gay is, in my view, none of those things and on a very dark path indeed.
Agreed, but when I was a child I was interested in living in isolation on a mountain, so I am fully aware of why: I prefer individuality, whereas those actions are rooted in social tilts, where communism and fascism eventually manifest (Fascism is economically the "conservative" counterpart to Communism). We actually see some level of manifestation of this darkness, such as the Shining Path's opposition to the concept of human rights. The monster is ever on the other side of the mirror, and we cannot outrun it, but instead merely not become it.

User avatar
dragoongfa
Posts: 1920
Joined: Mon Jan 26, 2015 9:26 pm
Location: Athens, Greece

Re: Religious Discussion

Post by dragoongfa »

Absalom wrote:It was years ago, but some study gave me the impression that around 80% of the human population is probably genetically bisexual, with the minorities being homosexuals, heterosexuals, and asexuals (apparently a genuine category: they enjoy sex, but they don't experience sexual attraction like most people).
Iirc that study was proven false after a period of time, the ones questioned had such inclinations due to personal histories and the researchers even put people who had a single homosexual encounter in the bisexual category (to be considered bisexual one has to pursue sexual encounters with both sexes).

Later studies that tried to emulate the above with a broader and more diverse sample size failed to reproduce that result, ending in an overwhelming heterosexual majority and a very small homosexual one.

Sweforce
Posts: 546
Joined: Fri Mar 13, 2015 12:00 am

Re: Religious Discussion

Post by Sweforce »

dragoongfa wrote:Later studies that tried to emulate the above with a broader and more diverse sample size failed to reproduce that result, ending in an overwhelming heterosexual majority and a very small homosexual one.
Not that it makes homo/bi/other sexuality wrong in any way but we need to realize that they are not the norm.

Nemo
Posts: 277
Joined: Tue Apr 26, 2011 1:04 am

Re: Religious Discussion

Post by Nemo »

Some old dead dude once said, "You're wrong, but I'll defend to the death your right to be wrong." Yes, I just bastardized the quote, cope. The point stands, that freedom exists in being wrong, right?
Would you agree that it is good and correct for a business to refuse service to someone who is gay?
Would you agree that it is good and correct for a business to refuse service to someone who is black?
Would you agree that it is good and correct for a business to refuse service to someone who is muslim?
Would you agree that it is good and correct for a business to refuse service to someone who is french?

Those last three are flat out illegal.
Would you agree that a person declining to do business with someone, for whatever reason or objection they may have, warrants sticking a gun to their head? Is the use of force against others justified simply because you hold their belief to be morally wrong? Are we free if we are only free to behave as you permit? In what way can such be described as "tolerance"? How is this any different from the accusations tossed at that reprehensible religious right? Is it justified because your morality is correct, and theirs not?


I will say this, the government certainly must be restrained from making such distinctions. Equality before the law, justice being blind and all that. However, using the government's monopoly on the use of force to coerce people of different beliefs into putting your own beliefs into practice is a step too far. And that includes forcibly taking marriage out of the church and into the court, btw.

Absalom wrote:From a low-level perspective he is actually perfectly right.
From a base level, perhaps. Human sexuality is a bit more developed in that humans have divorced sex from reproduction and partake for the sake of indulgence as well. What they are concerned with is the long term implications such a clinical view of sexuality implies. Consider for a moment a situation where the Department of Social Services rolls up and takes your child away from you because you neglected their medical care. It is increasingly common, even in cases where the answer is not cut and dry and even the doctors themselves do not agree on the proper treatment path. Consider also the rash of new laws mandating vaccines for children even if the parents object. What would happen for a situation where a medical treatment is available for someone who is, by their own admission, incapable of choice in the matter? Grayholme finds it horrifying? Frankly I'm glad to see he agrees with me. Think you guys might have missed a little something, though I was working on the language of that part and looks like I never completed that sentence, but remember when I said it was thought through poorly? You're beginning to see what I see.

If it were a choice it would fall under Voltaire's shield. You could choose it and be free to be wrong. If it is a purely biological function where does that function end and the choice begin? If you refuse treatment, have you made a choice? If you attack research into related fields in fear that it may affect your own sexuality, is that a choice? If it is something that happens outside your control, something which abrogates free will in its entirety, how do you expect society to respond when science catches up?

And then Razor throws a wrench in that whole idea. I have to thank him for bringing it up before I could.
There are cases of twins where one is homosexual and the other not. You can't really argue that genetics are a factor there, and since a lot of those cases have the twins growing up in identical environments and frequently together, sociological factors become difficult to underpin as well.
In any other case, looking at this objectively, if you had genetic twins in the same environment and they arrive at different outcomes would you pin the difference on biology or psychology?

In truth its likely to be found to be some complex mixture of both. Genetic predisposition or environmental factors during development which then are compounded through life experience to shape ones world view and choice. But this too, is soundly rejected. Why the insistence that it be biology and nothing else? In a word, insecurity. If you introduce choice it introduces the possibility of choosing wrong. And the LGBT community can not accept, permit, or dare I suggest tolerate, those who think such.

Which brings us full circle back to that cake. You are not permitted to hold contrary beliefs. Or, at the very least, not permitted to act based on your contrary beliefs.

User avatar
Razor One
Moderator
Posts: 562
Joined: Thu May 12, 2011 3:38 pm

Re: Religious Discussion

Post by Razor One »

Absalom wrote:
If the Hobby Lobby case is carried forward, then depending on the respective groundings of the decisions (I don't even remember if I heard why the court ruled the way it did), eventually all of those refusals may actually be legal... with caveats. The Hobby Lobby health-care case established that certain corporations can be legitimately ascribed specific moralities, but also established that forcing action against those morals is indeed against the law. The later of which is certainly reasonable when applied to groups that genuinely have some form of morality, since otherwise a Neo-Nazi could legitimately sue the Anti-Defamation League for not being hired if the successful applicant was verifiably the vastly inferior candidate. No, seriously, if you take that last, uncomfortable step back then you do find that if a group's morality is not allowed to play a role in business decisions, then the Neo-Nazi is the correct hire, because the organization's hiring procedures are capable of calculating that in the absence of the moral-horror of that particular hiring decision the Neo-Nazi is the superior choice, and any decision to the contrary is a violation of legal non-discrimination rules.
The Hobby Lobby case as I understand it was specifically for closely held, for profit corporations. The anti defamation league is a non-profit, NGO, and thus wouldn't actually be held to the precedent set by the the Hobby Lobby case, but would still fall under the Civil Rights act, which outlaws discriminatory practices based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. Political groups are not covered by the civil rights act, so a neo-nazi trying to apply for the ADL and getting knocked back does not count as a violation of non-discrimination laws.

And if morality is a valid factor in business choices for groups (whether corporations, labor unions, social lodges, etc.), as the Supreme Court has itself de-facto ruled to be the case, then it is virtually impossible to not apply that rule to individuals. Which is where a bit of irony comes in, because while you can usually tell if someone is black from looking at them, you can't reliably determine that with homosexuality: I expect that either the laws will be changed, or we will discover what the Supreme Court thinks about requiring business decisions to all be enforceable :lol: (if they say "yes, it must be enforceable", then all business rules against serving gays and Muslims will instantly be invalid, rendering the whole point of those laws moot: because that plaid-wearning grizzled slightly smelly white male trucker that you serve at the lunch counter might say if asked that he is both gay and Islamic, yet you were fine with feeding him for years).

This is one of the reasons why the BSA allowing gays is actually major within their ranks: it makes the BSA itself (not necessarily the individual troops) subject to discrimination rules in a way that they previously were not (it's a less extreme equivalent to the Vatican deciding that homosexuals can serve as clergy).
I'm not sure I entirely follow your reasoning here, but you seem to be conflating the decision the supreme court made with wider implications that have yet to even emerge in a court of law. In the case of Burwell vs. Hobby Lobby, the decision rendered allowed for closely held corporations to refuse contraceptive health insurance for some of its employees based on their closely held religious beliefs. If such is to apply to anything beyond closely held corporations, it needs to be argued and won in a court of law before it can even begin to apply.

The entire debacle really arises out of the backwards nature of the US healthcare system and the way the ACA was written to try and fix the problem. A more progressive, single payer, universal healthcare system would have obviated the case entirely by giving everyone effectively low cost health insurance with none of the drawbacks of forcing corporations to provide services to their employees they are otherwise disinclined to provide, which is more or less the norm.
Razor One wrote:That first statement is still a rather emergent phenomenon legally, and so varies state by state. The flipside of freedom is responsibility. Freedom is also a two way street. One of the cornerstones of freedom, democracy, and the sheer success that the US is built on is the fact that anyone can do business with anyone within certain legal restrictions. You can't be refused service just because you're black. Or french. Or muslim. Buy you can be refused service in some areas because you're gay, or you're promoting a pro-gay message.
And customers can refuse to buy from you because you sound Texan, or you have a christian bumper-sticker, or you promote a anti-gay message. Freedom is a two-way street all right, but bear in mind that there is always some dark implication of this or that which can bring the whole thing tumbling into chaos or tyranny, and that all of us customers in some sense depend on those rules being applied only to the "merchants", and never to the "peasants".
The thing is, an individual deciding not to shop at a business because the boss has a Texan accent is a lot less of a problem for society at large than a business who refuses to serve all Texan sounding people. Businesses and large organisations can exert a lot more of a deleterious effect than any individual can, hence why their behaviour is more closely regulated than an individuals, though with the way the supreme court has been ruling regarding corporations being people and having morality, that's starting to change, and not necessarily for the better in my view.

I've actually heard it before, though it was years ago.
The overwhelming consensus amongst my contacts in the LGBT community is that homosexuality is no more a choice than heterosexuality is. If homosexuality is a choice, then it follows that heterosexuality is a choice, bisexuality, asexuality, and so on.

As a heterosexual male, I don't ever recall a period in my life where I suddenly 'decided' that I liked women. I didn't decide to fall in love with my first girlfriend, I didn't choose to be utterly heartbroken when we broke up. Choice was never a factor as to which gender I was attracted to and the people I came to love romantically. The only point at which choice was ever a factor was whether or not to act on those feelings.

You can construe homosexuality as a choice if you parse things like that, but it means that heterosexuality is also a choice, and as in the original phrasing by Nemo, can be "picked up or dropped as a habit". I'll admit that on rare occasions I've found other men attractive, but I've never decided that "Today I am gay!" in such a cavalier manner. I can grant that sexuality might change or evolve over time in the natural course of things, but I don't think that one can simply flip a switch whenever they want and choose to be attracted to whatever gender they fancy.

This particular perspective actually arises out of taking a very mechanical view of the biological aspects behind it, rather than anything sociological. My point earlier about transsexuals was actually much the same: if you actually think about the biological subjects in question, rather than any other influencing factors, then asexuality, homosexuality, and bisexuality don't make a lot of sense, because you have limited resources (sperm and eggs.. and time, I suppose) with which to achieve something that theoretically the biological processes in question should be attempting to achieve (reproduction). From a low-level perspective he is actually perfectly right.

It's much like transsexuality, where it would only make sense for society to touch the subject if some sort of societal gain could be reached via that intervention, but none the less, when you're just considering the biological concepts it's a perfectly sensible question to ask.
I suppose if you restrict yourself to a purely mechanical notion of reproduction it could make a bit of sense, though that does come into question even then since the genetics that improve fertility have been shown to increase the likelihood of homosexuality in men in certain families. Even from a mechanistic standpoint, if the improved fertility of related females is worth the 'cost' of homosexual males, then it will be evolutionarily selected for, so that accounts for homosexuality rather neatly.

Even so, human reproduction cannot be realistically divorced from sociological factors. There are loads of things in human reproduction that make literally no sense at all unless you account for sociological factors. Condoms for instance make no sense biologically, until you account for the fact that sex is pleasurable, and having unwanted children is unlikely to produce the high quality offspring that human reproduction and society tends to favour.

It was years ago, but some study gave me the impression that around 80% of the human population is probably genetically bisexual, with the minorities being homosexuals, heterosexuals, and asexuals (apparently a genuine category: they enjoy sex, but they don't experience sexual attraction like most people).
The study has already been addressed, so I'll skip that, but asexuality is a thing. As I understand it there's a fairly broad spectrum. It covers romance (or lack thereof), sexuality (or lack thereof), and combinations of those factors, so you can have a sexual aromantic, an asexual romantic, an asexual aromantic, and a few others that memory fails to provide at this moment.

As I recall, there was an active forum for asexuals if you were interested in reading more about them. Lemme dig it up. Here.

Agreed, but when I was a child I was interested in living in isolation on a mountain, so I am fully aware of why: I prefer individuality, whereas those actions are rooted in social tilts, where communism and fascism eventually manifest (Fascism is economically the "conservative" counterpart to Communism). We actually see some level of manifestation of this darkness, such as the Shining Path's opposition to the concept of human rights. The monster is ever on the other side of the mirror, and we cannot outrun it, but instead merely not become it.
I also wanted to live as a hermit, though mostly that was to do with the rampant persecution I had to deal with growing up in addition to a preference for individuality.

Fascism and Communism aren't really opposites of each other. They're both authoritative forms of government, just governing from opposite sides of the political spectrum, with fascism representing the authoritative economic right and communism being the authoritative economic left.

Authoritarianism has its opposite in libertarianism, which can be further divided into a libertarian left and right. I fall mainly on the libertarian left side of the political spectrum (not to be confused with the libertarian right) at least as far as Political Compass is concerned.
Nemo wrote:
Some old dead dude once said, "You're wrong, but I'll defend to the death your right to be wrong." Yes, I just bastardized the quote, cope. The point stands, that freedom exists in being wrong, right?
It was a woman actually. :P

She wrote that to sum up Voltaire's beliefs, though the quote is frequently misattributed to Voltaire himself. How accurate she was I'm not certain as I've not read enough of Voltaire's works. His music on the other hand... :P

Would you agree that a person declining to do business with someone, for whatever reason or objection they may have, warrants sticking a gun to their head? Is the use of force against others justified simply because you hold their belief to be morally wrong? Are we free if we are only free to behave as you permit? In what way can such be described as "tolerance"? How is this any different from the accusations tossed at that reprehensible religious right? Is it justified because your morality is correct, and theirs not?

I will say this, the government certainly must be restrained from making such distinctions. Equality before the law, justice being blind and all that. However, using the government's monopoly on the use of force to coerce people of different beliefs into putting your own beliefs into practice is a step too far. And that includes forcibly taking marriage out of the church and into the court, btw.
Can you show me where precisely a gun was put to someone's head for refusing someone service? As far as I'm aware, and this depends on which baking company incident you're referring to because there are multiple cases, this sort of stuff usually gets sorted out by court orders, not by swat teams. If the court rules against the baking company, they're obligated to obey the court order if they don't opt to appeal or risk further consequences. Certain states do have non-discrimination laws which includes discrimination against sexuality, so if the case you're referring to is such, then the baking company in question is in violation of the law and must be held to account. While America is a land of freedom, it is also a land where the rule of law applies. Absolute freedom is as undesirable as absolute autocracy.

As for 'forcibly' taking marriage out of churches... wat? Even Catholics are starting to think separating civil and sacramental marriages might be a good thing. You're going to have to be a bit more specific there. There is no federal marriage act in the USA as far as I'm aware beyond protections and recognitions that assure that if you get married in California it must be recognised in Texas or wherever, so marriage conventions will vary state by state.

In general, as far as I'm aware, you could always get a marriage license from either a church official or a court official. If someone wants to get married in a church that's certainly their right and nobody is stopping them from doing so, but what of the couple that doesn't want to be married in a church? Should they be forced to go to church in order to be married?

Consider also the rash of new laws mandating vaccines for children even if the parents object. What would happen for a situation where a medical treatment is available for someone who is, by their own admission, incapable of choice in the matter? Grayholme finds it horrifying? Frankly I'm glad to see he agrees with me. Think you guys might have missed a little something, though I was working on the language of that part and looks like I never completed that sentence, but remember when I said it was thought through poorly? You're beginning to see what I see.

If it were a choice it would fall under Voltaire's shield. You could choose it and be free to be wrong. If it is a purely biological function where does that function end and the choice begin? If you refuse treatment, have you made a choice? If you attack research into related fields in fear that it may affect your own sexuality, is that a choice? If it is something that happens outside your control, something which abrogates free will in its entirety, how do you expect society to respond when science catches up?
Parental objection to vaccination is often founded in astounding ignorance and ought to be considered a form of child abuse, the same as beating or starving them. The fact that a wide enough proportion of people regularly do not vaccinate their children such that diseases once thought eradicated are cropping up again is absolutely reprehensible. It threatens those that can't be vaccinated for medical reasons and puts a significant number of other people's lives at risk.

I'm all for freedom of choice and the right to pursue your way of life peacefully. I fully advocate living an individualistic life. I kind of draw the line at choosing to allow your children to become a breeding ground for virulent diseases, putting the whole of society at risk. I love and adore individualism, but even individualism has limits.

That being said, medical treatments for those incapable of rendering a decision generally falls into a tier system. It falls first to next of kin, and if no next of kin are apparent, I think it falls to the doctor acting in the best interests of the patient. The hippocratic oath would then guide them in the selection of treatment. In the case of vaccination, no harm befalls the patient for being vaccinated and great benefits are conferred, so it's pretty much a no-brainer. In the case of 'curing' homosexuality, the doctor has fundamentally altered the personality of the patient, putting the treatment on par with a lobotomy. I'd argue that the hippocratic oath would have a few things to say to any doctor that carried out that procedure.

With regards to biology and choice and the nature of freedom... that's a definite can of worms. I don't think that any part of sexuality can really be ascribed to choice. Genetic, societal, and personal factors all arise within a person to give rise to sexuality. It is I think beyond notions of biological determinism and philosophical freedom. We are almost certainly not free in an absolute sense. We sacrifice our freedom to gain utility. I have, for instance, the freedom to scream at the top of my lungs in a theater. I don't, because I gain the utility afforded by both relative anonymity and conformity to societal norms in order to enjoy the play that is showing tonight.

Sexuality is something I don't think I really had a choice in, as I discussed above, and something I don't think anyone really has a choice in. What I do have a choice in is whether or not I act upon that sexuality. Do I choose to pursue that attractive woman or not? I am free to make that choice, but the desires that inform that choice are certainly not. I cannot pick and choose whom I am attracted to, merely whether I choose to act upon those feelings. The same applies to everyone, I think.

Who and what we are aren't merely shaped by our hardware, brains, hormones, muscles and so forth, but also by our software, what we think, what we've experienced and how we catalyse the experience of life and thought and emotion. I don't think that human life is so simple that it can be reduced to mere determinism. You might come close to being able to predict that 4% of a given population might be homosexual, but I don't think you could get it down to the point where you can spot homosexuality in the womb and nip it in the bud, or point at a random person and determine with 100% accuracy his or her sexuality and proclivities. Individuals are more complex than that. The vast majority of humankind, moreso.

And then Razor throws a wrench in that whole idea. I have to thank him for bringing it up before I could.
There are cases of twins where one is homosexual and the other not. You can't really argue that genetics are a factor there, and since a lot of those cases have the twins growing up in identical environments and frequently together, sociological factors become difficult to underpin as well.
In any other case, looking at this objectively, if you had genetic twins in the same environment and they arrive at different outcomes would you pin the difference on biology or psychology?

In truth its likely to be found to be some complex mixture of both. Genetic predisposition or environmental factors during development which then are compounded through life experience to shape ones world view and choice. But this too, is soundly rejected. Why the insistence that it be biology and nothing else? In a word, insecurity. If you introduce choice it introduces the possibility of choosing wrong. And the LGBT community can not accept, permit, or dare I suggest tolerate, those who think such.

Which brings us full circle back to that cake. You are not permitted to hold contrary beliefs. Or, at the very least, not permitted to act based on your contrary beliefs.
The problem here is that the LGBT community is forced by brevity to distil their arguments into a very concise format in order to get their message across to people who would otherwise consider them to be subhuman and aren't interested in an enlightened or philosophical debate. LGBT's are people who feel that they are second class citizens in their own country and want nothing more than equal rights, lives, liberties, protections, and justice under the law.

When an LGBT person says that they were 'born that way', they are often trying to justify that their way of life to the Religious Right in the US, that who they are isn't some kind of phase or fad, that they are not so different from people who were born straight.

But entertaining the notion that it is born out of insecurity rather than trying to get religious people to see that their lives are not the result of Satan's machinations, given the history of how LGBT persons were treated up until very recently, I figure that's an insecurity brought about by an overwhelming history of persecution and discrimination.

As to the cake and the holding of contrary beliefs, that is, as always, subject to the limitations of the law as set out by either the courts or the legislature. You can believe that shouting fire in a crowded theater is perfectly fine, but that doesn't change the fact that you can and will be arrested for it. You can scream first amendment all you like, but that is not constitutionally protected speech.

Individualistic freedom is both protected and curtailed by the rule of law. One is perfectly free to have and act on contrary beliefs. That freedom is limited by the extent of the law. If you violate the law, you will reap the consequences of your actions, just as shouting fire in a crowded theater most assuredly will.
Image
SpoilerShow
This is my Mod voice. If you see this in a thread, it means that the time for gentle reminders has passed.

discord
Posts: 629
Joined: Thu Mar 24, 2011 7:44 am
Location: Umeå, Sweden

Re: Religious Discussion

Post by discord »

Aight, on to the sexuality and morality stuff, joy!

#1 What one person does in the bedroom with other free, volunteering and not complaining people is none of anyone not in said bedrooms business.
note: To say anything else is to invite being prosecuted for any other opinion and a VERY dangerous path for society.

#2 Any owner of business, private person, dog(or any other animal) should bloody well be free to not do business for ANY reason that individual feels is adequate reason to not do business(and thereby not earn money or treats or whatever).
see above note.

#3 Delusional people should be allowed to be delusional as long as these delusions do not bother people that do not want to be bothered by them.
See above note.

#4 sexuality is based on nature, nurture AND a choice as are just about any other preference known to mankind(I can't think of any exception).
note: to say otherwise is to....basically say either 'there is no free will', 'I am retarded and cannot see reality' or 'I am retarded and cannot see reality', pick your poison.


I am hoping most of us can agree that these simple points are self evident and true? Otherwise we can restart this argument by figuring out exactly where our views differ.

User avatar
Razor One
Moderator
Posts: 562
Joined: Thu May 12, 2011 3:38 pm

Re: Religious Discussion

Post by Razor One »

discord wrote:
#2 Any owner of business, private person, dog(or any other animal) should bloody well be free to not do business for ANY reason that individual feels is adequate reason to not do business(and thereby not earn money or treats or whatever).
see above note.
I think we agree on most things, but this one is the current thorny issue at hand. What constitutes adequate reason? As written, the language is quite broad and can be used to deny service to blacks, latinos, jewish people, bald people, unattractive women, etc. etc.

What I feel to be adequate reason to deny service is going to be different to someone elses opinion of what constitutes an adequate reason. There needs to be a general standard that encompasses the majority without necessarily infringing upon the right to deny service and making accommodation for those that might otherwise be off put.

To use the bakery example oft cited above, a christian baker denies service to a gay man who wants a wedding cake, because doing so violates his religious beliefs.

In my view, there are several ideal solutions. The first is that he should rebrand his business as a christian baking company. One can then claim that there is a religious component to the business and that they can deny service on that basis. Another is that the baker apologises to the customer, says that he cannot personally bake the cake, but that his assistant, who holds no such religious beliefs, can do the work in his stead. Yet another solution would be to, again, apologise for being unable to serve the customer due to religious beliefs, and then direct them to a nearby bakery that will serve them, or order such a cake on their behalf to save them the trouble.

The first of course is too little too late, but would obviate any future problems. The latter solutions are all very basic customer service dealies that should be done in any civil society. If you can't do, find someone who can or direct them to a nearby competitor that can. To do anything less is terrible customer service.

It all comes down to treating people with decency and respect in the end.

Of course, there might not be an ideal solution, such as if they're the only bakery in town and for the next hundred miles. Your right to refuse should probably take a back seat to a customers right to be served.

Consider a similar scenario with doctors.

A doctor refuses to treat a patient because they are a homosexual (black, french, Ted Cruz) and doing so would violate their religious beliefs.

A reasonable solution, outside of a life or death situation, is for that doctor to bring in another doctor who can treat them just as well. If they're the only doctor in town, they have no right to refuse to treat the patient even if it does violate their religious beliefs.

Ideally one should be able to accommodate both parties in wanting to maintain their religious integrity and the customers desire to be served. Unfortunately, we don't live in an ideal world, and when presented with a bad situation, a bad solution is all that we can really deliver, as opposed to no solution.

Legislating that in a way that encompasses the majority, respects the rights of all parties, delineates the rights and responsibilities thereof, and maintains both religious integrity and service to the customer, is a very difficult ask, and is a reason I am so very glad I am not a solicitor.
Image
SpoilerShow
This is my Mod voice. If you see this in a thread, it means that the time for gentle reminders has passed.

Krulle
Posts: 1413
Joined: Wed May 20, 2015 9:14 am

Re: Religious Discussion

Post by Krulle »

Piping in as I stumbled over one thing here:
discord wrote:#1 What one person does in the bedroom with other free, volunteering and not complaining people is none of anyone not in said bedrooms business.
note: To say anything else is to invite being prosecuted for any other opinion and a VERY dangerous path for society.
I can immediately punch a hole here, as you missed "understanding". I also miss the modern formulation "consenting adults". Imagine a 14year old going freely and voluntarily with someone of my age to bed. Does (s)he fully understand possible consequences? Or even younger persons. There's also the issue of possible abuse of care-taker relationships (psychologist/patient; teacher/pupil;...). The laws in this field have been developed for a reason.
Also: I am in a monogamous relationship. If I find out my significant other did go to bed with someone else, may be of my business, as this can influence my health severely (STDs!), and I feel I have a right to know that I should stop wanting to have sex with her until any necessary tests show "negative". I feel she has the obligation of care towards me to at least tell me (possibly not in all details, but certain details are necessary and if she warns me without telling I also implicitly know).
Courts do take a different stance in these specific circumstances and do have a different opionion than your #1... They found it a very dangerous path for society to not step in in specific circumstances.
Vote for Outsider on TWC: Image
charred steppes, borders of territories: page 59,
jump-map of local stars: page 121, larger map in Loroi: page 118,
System view Leido Crossroads: page 123, after the battle page 195

User avatar
Razor One
Moderator
Posts: 562
Joined: Thu May 12, 2011 3:38 pm

Re: Religious Discussion

Post by Razor One »

And hence the point I've been harping on for quite a bit.

Our freedom is both protected and curtailed by our laws. Marriage is a contract (a social contract at least) that is legally binding, and the expectation of fidelity is part of that, the violation of which is grounds for an open and shut divorce. The free practice of religion is both a right and is curtailed by the rule of law.

What shape those freedoms and curtailments take is determined by the legislature and the courts. If you want to ignore them in favour of freedom, then you also desire a land where the rule of law does not apply, a land where your freedom ends upon meeting those that can bring more force than you can bear.
Image
SpoilerShow
This is my Mod voice. If you see this in a thread, it means that the time for gentle reminders has passed.

discord
Posts: 629
Joined: Thu Mar 24, 2011 7:44 am
Location: Umeå, Sweden

Re: Religious Discussion

Post by discord »

razor: I think our views might differ in the regard that in my opinion, if you do not want to sell your services to.... people wearing green clothes, you should be allowed to do so, since unless you have a monopoly(btw. monopoly is usually bad, mkay?) that business will simply go to someone that has no problem selling that service to someone wearing green clothing.

This is the 'open market' approach to the problem, something that should be common in the land of the free.
Result? People with hangups on the clientele will have less business, and therefor a natural incentive to be more open minded happens.... Or not, I do not really care, since the alternative is to infringe on your freedom to do whatever the hell you want with YOUR stuff/skills.


where does this stop? the right to your own body and your religious or lack thereof views(oh right, abortion.)

Religious freedom in general? oh right, being atheist in the US, or any other theocracy I suppose.
On theocracy, out of 44 presidents, five might have been non-christians some serious debate about it and all of those held office in the 1800's.
Out of the 100 currently sitting in senate, 2 have no clearly defined and publicly announced religious views(admittedly only 85% christians here).
sounds pretty much like a theocracy....well without the official god is above all, oh right 'in god we trust.'... well allah akbar to you too.

freedom of speech? basic nuclear physics is illegal in the US, speaking of this or understanding how any nuclear bomb(it is not complicated, pretty basic physics today) works can get you thrown in
jail, since this is classified as Top Secret and therefor comes in under national security.... oh right that stuff gets you Guantanamo'd.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 <---- well that debacle was interesting, and if certain media interests had their way I should be thrown in jail for posting that.
http://endoftheamericandream.com/archiv ... ree-speech <--- or a few other examples.

The freedom to not be stopped and searched without probable cause? Well that one is pretty much gone in some parts of the US.

No taxation without representation? Puerto rico, Guam, american Samoa, US Virgin islands. And the four million people living there.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CesHr99ezWE <----- nice little tubing on the territories.

I wanted to be a pro boxer when I was young and stupid, but noooo it's not allowed in Sweden due to..... Reasons?


Infringing on basic human rights can get bad real quick, or as it is often said, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
ANY reason you deem enough to not want to do business with that person should be adequate, period fucking dot.

discord
Posts: 629
Joined: Thu Mar 24, 2011 7:44 am
Location: Umeå, Sweden

Re: Religious Discussion

Post by discord »

krulle: I actually added a few 'possible exceptions' but I decided to cut them out, since it would get insanely convoluted and annoying to read(aka legalese), still does not change the basis.

Age of consent in Sweden is 15, funny story, 15 year old girl lives alone(for reasons) and takes home 40 year old men, and having quite vocal sex with them, neighbors call the police, she meets police in the door, they complain to which she replies 'Age of consent, you do not have a case', they continue being a bother at which point she replies 'end your effing harassment or I'll defend myself competently backed by 10 years of proper muay-thai training', police backed off, she then went and picked up some real geezers just to prove a point to the neighbors.
a good question though is why they backed off? Was it because she was legally in the right or maybe because having their asses handed to them by a little girl would be rather embarrassing?

age of consent? A apparently difficult and much contested question.
the simple and obvious answer that should be true makes everyone cringe though.

When is a person ready to experiment with sexual acts? whenever the bloody hell the person WANTS to, if this is 12(I have friends that did this) or 30(seen a friend take this route as well) does not really matter, the key is if that person wants to.
Another friend started being interested at age 6, and got absolutely hammered with 'you are wrong/evil/sick' by concerned and helpful adults, it did not exactly help to put it mildly.
If the person does NOT want to, it is rape/abuse in some way and illegal, I could even go so far as giving the courts the right for arbitrary 'it is wrong because this person can not be trusted to have an opinion due to young age.' my definition however would involve pre-puberty, since it is rather unusual for anyone to have any such interest before puberty.
But after puberty as age goes up, the level of coercion involved for it to be illegal should go up aswell.(or to put it differently, the victim does not scream bloody murder at the prosecution for being dickwads, cockblockers and being mean to their partner.)

But this is not as bureaucratically easy and simple as saying 'below XX it is crime!'
http://www.memecenter.com/fun/128310/Al ... -years-old <---- Yeah, never bone anything that looks like it might be under 30 unless it can provide photo ID, check.

Interesting child molestation case, man(assistant teacher if I recall correctly) has a relationship with a younger female, due to a preference for BDSM they get dragged into a courtroom, both involved parties are in agreement they like each other and see no problems here, her parents do not agree, he gets... I think it was five years in jail.
Result? five years later she picks him up at jail and they get married, she never talked to her family ever again.
Happy end? Justice served? according to that gods be damned book, yes.
http://www.sltrib.com/news/ci_6400542 <---- is another interesting child molesting case that actually, after quite a while(three years) managed to find sanity.

children and sex, it is a legal mess, should you protect children? Yes, but how do you do that without infringing on their right to free will or article 22 of the UN human rights declaration? tricky.
that ends my rant on that subject.


Marriage, well that is a civil contract, and therefor a contractual breech could happen, and therefor a crime could be committed, this is another law(contract law), not really related to 'bed chamber activities'.
However, if ALL involved are fine with it? it might technically be a marriage breach, but if all are fine with it, simple answer, throw'em in jail! backed by the book!

My point here is that context is quite often everything.
BDSM with consent= happy fun time VS BDSM without consent= kidnapping, illegal detention, assault and battery, probably rape and a few more.
How do you differentiate? one of these is done consensual, as simple as that.


Bottom line.
consensual sex=good
non consensual sex=bad
difficult huh?

Absalom
Posts: 718
Joined: Sat Sep 24, 2011 4:33 am

Re: Religious Discussion

Post by Absalom »

Horray for playing both sides of the issue!
Razor One wrote:
Absalom wrote:If the Hobby Lobby case is carried forward, then depending on the respective groundings of the decisions (I don't even remember if I heard why the court ruled the way it did), eventually all of those refusals may actually be legal... with caveats. The Hobby Lobby health-care case established that certain corporations can be legitimately ascribed specific moralities, but also established that forcing action against those morals is indeed against the law. The later of which is certainly reasonable when applied to groups that genuinely have some form of morality, since otherwise a Neo-Nazi could legitimately sue the Anti-Defamation League for not being hired if the successful applicant was verifiably the vastly inferior candidate. No, seriously, if you take that last, uncomfortable step back then you do find that if a group's morality is not allowed to play a role in business decisions, then the Neo-Nazi is the correct hire, because the organization's hiring procedures are capable of calculating that in the absence of the moral-horror of that particular hiring decision the Neo-Nazi is the superior choice, and any decision to the contrary is a violation of legal non-discrimination rules.
The Hobby Lobby case as I understand it was specifically for closely held, for profit corporations. The anti defamation league is a non-profit, NGO, and thus wouldn't actually be held to the precedent set by the the Hobby Lobby case, but would still fall under the Civil Rights act, which outlaws discriminatory practices based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. Political groups are not covered by the civil rights act, so a neo-nazi trying to apply for the ADL and getting knocked back does not count as a violation of non-discrimination laws.
My bad for being lazy.

Does the baker bake cakes for profit? Supposing that the baker is registered as an individual instead of a corporation, and has employees, it would be difficult to justify not applying the Hobby Lobby ruling to the baker, right? Not saying that it has been applied to individuals, but it's fairly straight forward and (in my eyes) reasonable to make the extrapolation.
Razor One wrote:
And if morality is a valid factor in business choices for groups (whether corporations, labor unions, social lodges, etc.), as the Supreme Court has itself de-facto ruled to be the case, then it is virtually impossible to not apply that rule to individuals. Which is where a bit of irony comes in, because while you can usually tell if someone is black from looking at them, you can't reliably determine that with homosexuality: I expect that either the laws will be changed, or we will discover what the Supreme Court thinks about requiring business decisions to all be enforceable :lol: (if they say "yes, it must be enforceable", then all business rules against serving gays and Muslims will instantly be invalid, rendering the whole point of those laws moot: because that plaid-wearning grizzled slightly smelly white male trucker that you serve at the lunch counter might say if asked that he is both gay and Islamic, yet you were fine with feeding him for years).
I'm not sure I entirely follow your reasoning here, but you seem to be conflating the decision the supreme court made with wider implications that have yet to even emerge in a court of law. In the case of Burwell vs. Hobby Lobby, the decision rendered allowed for closely held corporations to refuse contraceptive health insurance for some of its employees based on their closely held religious beliefs. If such is to apply to anything beyond closely held corporations, it needs to be argued and won in a court of law before it can even begin to apply.
It's easy to make the extrapolation though, since the morality of "closely held corporations" (and won't the definition of that be dickered over for years) arises from the individuals who own the corporations in the first place.

The more compelling question is "where do the constraints of the Hobby Lobby ruling lie? Entirely within contraceptives?". The interpretation of that could decide all sorts of questions.. including this one.
Razor One wrote:The entire debacle really arises out of the backwards nature of the US healthcare system and the way the ACA was written to try and fix the problem. A more progressive, single payer, universal healthcare system would have obviated the case entirely by giving everyone effectively low cost health insurance with none of the drawbacks of forcing corporations to provide services to their employees they are otherwise disinclined to provide, which is more or less the norm.
An insurance voucher system would have been good as well (corporate-provided healthcare is apparently the legacy of some salary restriction, I assume from the Wilson era). Enforcing fair practices would have been worthwhile (I don't think I ever looked up the details of the relevant ACA rules), medical reinsurance would have been worthwhile, all sort of things could have been done. Just a shame that we had the too-big-to-plan ACA instead of a sane piecemeal route.
Razor One wrote:

I've actually heard it before, though it was years ago.
The overwhelming consensus amongst my contacts in the LGBT community is that homosexuality is no more a choice than heterosexuality is. If homosexuality is a choice, then it follows that heterosexuality is a choice, bisexuality, asexuality, and so on.

As a heterosexual male, I don't ever recall a period in my life where I suddenly 'decided' that I liked women. I didn't decide to fall in love with my first girlfriend, I didn't choose to be utterly heartbroken when we broke up. Choice was never a factor as to which gender I was attracted to and the people I came to love romantically. The only point at which choice was ever a factor was whether or not to act on those feelings.

You can construe homosexuality as a choice if you parse things like that, but it means that heterosexuality is also a choice, and as in the original phrasing by Nemo, can be "picked up or dropped as a habit". I'll admit that on rare occasions I've found other men attractive, but I've never decided that "Today I am gay!" in such a cavalier manner. I can grant that sexuality might change or evolve over time in the natural course of things, but I don't think that one can simply flip a switch whenever they want and choose to be attracted to whatever gender they fancy.
Well no, but you can't just flip a switch with habits either, and those are less likely to have additional biological integrations entrenching your personal status-quo.
Razor One wrote:

This particular perspective actually arises out of taking a very mechanical view of the biological aspects behind it, rather than anything sociological. My point earlier about transsexuals was actually much the same: if you actually think about the biological subjects in question, rather than any other influencing factors, then asexuality, homosexuality, and bisexuality don't make a lot of sense, because you have limited resources (sperm and eggs.. and time, I suppose) with which to achieve something that theoretically the biological processes in question should be attempting to achieve (reproduction). From a low-level perspective he is actually perfectly right.

It's much like transsexuality, where it would only make sense for society to touch the subject if some sort of societal gain could be reached via that intervention, but none the less, when you're just considering the biological concepts it's a perfectly sensible question to ask.
I suppose if you restrict yourself to a purely mechanical notion of reproduction it could make a bit of sense, though that does come into question even then since the genetics that improve fertility have been shown to increase the likelihood of homosexuality in men in certain families. Even from a mechanistic standpoint, if the improved fertility of related females is worth the 'cost' of homosexual males, then it will be evolutionarily selected for, so that accounts for homosexuality rather neatly.
Yes, but then someone applies the thought process on an individual basis, which is what I was thinking of, so you have the same question pop up again.

The better approach is to ask why society should intervene. In our current society only hard-liners strike me as likely to think it justified to actually intervene in such ways. Fortunately our current societal perspectives have supposedly been in development for 100 or more years, so gay or straight we're unlikely to have the rug pulled out from under us (in contrast, consider the progressivist era when eugenics was passingly in vogue).
Razor One wrote:

It was years ago, but some study gave me the impression that around 80% of the human population is probably genetically bisexual, with the minorities being homosexuals, heterosexuals, and asexuals (apparently a genuine category: they enjoy sex, but they don't experience sexual attraction like most people).
The study has already been addressed, so I'll skip that, but asexuality is a thing. As I understand it there's a fairly broad spectrum. It covers romance (or lack thereof), sexuality (or lack thereof), and combinations of those factors, so you can have a sexual aromantic, an asexual romantic, an asexual aromantic, and a few others that memory fails to provide at this moment.

As I recall, there was an active forum for asexuals if you were interested in reading more about them. Lemme dig it up. Here.
I go off on reading tangents too much already, so I'll skip.
Razor One wrote:

Agreed, but when I was a child I was interested in living in isolation on a mountain, so I am fully aware of why: I prefer individuality, whereas those actions are rooted in social tilts, where communism and fascism eventually manifest (Fascism is economically the "conservative" counterpart to Communism). We actually see some level of manifestation of this darkness, such as the Shining Path's opposition to the concept of human rights. The monster is ever on the other side of the mirror, and we cannot outrun it, but instead merely not become it.
I also wanted to live as a hermit, though mostly that was to do with the rampant persecution I had to deal with growing up in addition to a preference for individuality.

Fascism and Communism aren't really opposites of each other. They're both authoritative forms of government, just governing from opposite sides of the political spectrum, with fascism representing the authoritative economic right and communism being the authoritative economic left.
If you re-read it, you'll see that I was actually placing them both on the same end of the spectrum.
Razor One wrote:Authoritarianism has its opposite in libertarianism, which can be further divided into a libertarian left and right. I fall mainly on the libertarian left side of the political spectrum (not to be confused with the libertarian right) at least as far as Political Compass is concerned.
I came out basically centrist again, though I should probably mention that I personally expect the balance of things to vary with the situation, and would be disappointed were it otherwise (WW2 was no time for US libertarianism, the 90s were no time for US authoritarianism).
Razor One wrote:
Nemo wrote:
Some old dead dude once said, "You're wrong, but I'll defend to the death your right to be wrong." Yes, I just bastardized the quote, cope. The point stands, that freedom exists in being wrong, right?
It was a woman actually. :P
Apparently my contact with it was someone quoting it. Who'd've thunk it?
Razor One wrote:

Would you agree that a person declining to do business with someone, for whatever reason or objection they may have, warrants sticking a gun to their head? Is the use of force against others justified simply because you hold their belief to be morally wrong? Are we free if we are only free to behave as you permit? In what way can such be described as "tolerance"? How is this any different from the accusations tossed at that reprehensible religious right? Is it justified because your morality is correct, and theirs not?

I will say this, the government certainly must be restrained from making such distinctions. Equality before the law, justice being blind and all that. However, using the government's monopoly on the use of force to coerce people of different beliefs into putting your own beliefs into practice is a step too far. And that includes forcibly taking marriage out of the church and into the court, btw.
Can you show me where precisely a gun was put to someone's head for refusing someone service? As far as I'm aware, and this depends on which baking company incident you're referring to because there are multiple cases, this sort of stuff usually gets sorted out by court orders, not by swat teams.
I think it was a metaphor for governmental force as decreed by the courts, actually, rather than a literal gun.
Razor One wrote:In general, as far as I'm aware, you could always get a marriage license from either a church official or a court official. If someone wants to get married in a church that's certainly their right and nobody is stopping them from doing so, but what of the couple that doesn't want to be married in a church? Should they be forced to go to church in order to be married?
The Romans didsn't have governmental marriage, period. They left it to the religious authorities, and when they were concerned with inheritance issues they focused on marital patterns such as a ceremony and living arrangements, instead of an official governmental registry.

According to some wiki reading, then entire idea of non-religious marriages appears to have popped up in the 1500s to late 1700s. In the English case, the 1750s, and I remind you that England was (and I believe technically still is) a state with an official religion.
Razor One wrote:Parental objection to vaccination is often founded in astounding ignorance and ought to be considered a form of child abuse, the same as beating or starving them.
At the same time, if they did not act upon such beliefs than they would be committing negligence of another sort. At any rate, as long as mercury-based preservatives are used then there will always be some cause for concern (there are also individual vaccines that have concerns, but I think those have mostly been withdrawn). There is literally no mercury compound that is known to be safe for human exposure, much less injection, it just gets used for effectiveness at preservation.

Razor One wrote:
discord wrote:
#2 Any owner of business, private person, dog(or any other animal) should bloody well be free to not do business for ANY reason that individual feels is adequate reason to not do business(and thereby not earn money or treats or whatever).
see above note.
I think we agree on most things, but this one is the current thorny issue at hand. What constitutes adequate reason? As written, the language is quite broad and can be used to deny service to blacks, latinos, jewish people, bald people, unattractive women, etc. etc.

What I feel to be adequate reason to deny service is going to be different to someone elses opinion of what constitutes an adequate reason. There needs to be a general standard that encompasses the majority without necessarily infringing upon the right to deny service and making accommodation for those that might otherwise be off put.
We don't necessarily need a general standard for that: but in the absence of such a general standard we need a requirement that the rules be posted in such a way that it is impossible to enter as a customer without encountering a recounting of the rules. "Enforcability" should also be required, since that's a starting requirement before you can reliably uphold the very rules you're claiming to follow.

Still, ideally we would have some congressionally-mandated rules in addition. Such rules should have the goal of integrating population groups, which I believe was actually the point of the existing protected categories.
discord wrote:razor: I think our views might differ in the regard that in my opinion, if you do not want to sell your services to.... people wearing green clothes, you should be allowed to do so, since unless you have a monopoly(btw. monopoly is usually bad, mkay?) that business will simply go to someone that has no problem selling that service to someone wearing green clothing.

This is the 'open market' approach to the problem, something that should be common in the land of the free.
Result? People with hangups on the clientele will have less business, and therefor a natural incentive to be more open minded happens.... Or not, I do not really care, since the alternative is to infringe on your freedom to do whatever the hell you want with YOUR stuff/skills.
This has it's caveats of course: I work for a company that's connected to the utilities. A good definition of a utility is as follows:
Any service that is rarely or never subject to competition, due to the large base-level investment required to start a competitor. Gas pipelines, electric lines, wired telephones (wireless telephones too, really) all fall into this category.

Similarly, sometimes there are no competitors within a realistic range. So, if you need to buy the cake, how do you buy the cake?

discord
Posts: 629
Joined: Thu Mar 24, 2011 7:44 am
Location: Umeå, Sweden

Re: Religious Discussion

Post by discord »

absalom: on services.
I happen to live in the 'failed socialist state of Sweden (tm)' where just about all basic services needed for society to work, like water, electricity, phones and such are owned and run by the government, the system is slightly more complicated when the second hand service selling comes in, but other than that there usually are competitors and the state will usually sell to you anyway at slightly higher rate.
Example, I have where I live 10 different electricity suppliers to choose from, about the same on phone and internet, just saying.
This results in the government having direct control over those services and therefor can say whatever the hell they want about how to run them, works pretty well so far on most services.

A interesting exception is the state run debt collection agency(which is where the debt collection agencies go when they do not get paid.) it works pretty well, except under certain circumstances and this is because of three policy choices.
#1 do not use first come first served, instead treat all debts equally and pay them all off at the same time.(remember kids, equality is good!)
#2 pay off debts to the state(and thereby state run institutions) first.
#3 service charges for the handling of cases.

Each of these look just fine and dandy, but the combination when you have several debts at the same time(this happens quite easily if you spend some time in jail) is that all the debts are independent cases, and get their own service charge, which can become a greater sum/month as compared to what you can pay, and therefor your debt increases.

My father was(and still is) subjected to this, 70k debt, over five years time he payed over 200k towards this debt and now have a debt of damn near 200k without adding any new debts.
Just wrong. (Do not recall the exact numbers of the top of my head, but something like that)

if any one of those three policies were changed he would not have had a problem and would today be debt free, but instead he is in much more debt in fact he can never repay it due to these bad policies.


Back to the cake.
If the only seller of cakes in the area dislikes you to the point that your money is no good at his store, then I suppose you either go further afield in your search or get no cake(or get someone else to buy it for you?).

Post Reply