I start from the premise that the only reason to participate in a thread like this is to sharpen my debate skills so that when I do run across somebody in such a church, I am more likely to be able to persuade them of the error of their ways.
Surely you've realized by now that "This person with a PHD says this" isn't very persuasive?
There are roughly 4 billion Asians in the world. There are 1.376 billion Caucasians. I doubt you'd apply your same logic to that situation. Rather, Asians ARE just one group among many.
Race doesn't apply at all to the situation.
1. Asians can't choose to become Caucasian. Michael Jackson's attempts notwithstanding, neither can African-Americans.2. So what about Asians IS different from Caucasians, that we're comparing? Living in Asia? Then it would indeed be perfectly valid to say "most people do." It is not valid, as you're analogously trying to do, to use Dead Horse, Alaska as your representative model of where most people live.
Your argument as stated is fundamentally dishonest, but it's easily fixed by simply speaking more precisely/more correctly. If you want to sharpen your debate skills, here's an easy way to do so, if you choose to take it.
I've heard that same argument made by fundamentalists. "Oh no! What about the children? We can't have gay teachers!" (for example).
Knock it off. I guess you have nothing else to defend your position that, since he's a christian he can't possibly be wrong, so you've just reverted to your default position: mock your opponent.
I could not be made to give two shits about the children. They're not mine. I do, however, care about the general state of our society as I live in it. If we let people be who would seize power over others by spreading hate and convenient lies there is no hope for us as a civilization. I'm less concerned with winning a debate with someone who, on his face, is fundamentally unreasonable, than I am with stopping their actions.
If you're genuinely here to sharpen your debate skills, I'd suggest starting at square one. Don't intentionally misrepresent your opponent's position to win an argument (like you've done with virtually every post I've seen from you). When your opponent makes a legitimate point that you can't counter, admit defeat and move on. As opposed to hurriedly changing the subject and shifting your goalposts.
Oh, I think I might have used the wrong term. When I said that the Church considers it de-humanizing, it is not because of the subjugation, but because of the objectivization it sees implicit. Basically, the Church considers that no person can be used as a means to an end, but rather, each person must be treated as an end itself.
That's why the Bible has such a bad name for homosexual intercourse, as back in those days, said form of sex was quite common in master-slave relationships, where it was socially acceptable to have sex with a member of the same gender so long as the owner was on top and merely using the slave as a source of pleasure. So homosexual intercourse back then was seen as pretty much using the other guy as a meat bag with holes.
My whole disagreement with Holy Mother Church regarding homosexual intercourse steems from that, in fact, as we presently know that there are plenty of cases where said form of sex is spoused with a relationship of mutual love, which would render the negative implications nonexistant in said situations.
This statement pretty much ignores the role of women in the time and place when those biblical statements of homosexual intercourse were made. The bible says awfully little on the wrongness of slavery, I'm pretty sure the authors didn't have personal freedoms in mind when they decried homosexuality as a sin.
The bible says awfully little on the wrongness of slavery.
(Cue various apologists claiming that Biblical slavery was oh-so-enlightened, and just wonderful really, and nothing at all like Antebellum U.S. slavery)
@Klaus
I guess the thing that I find strange about the Catholic Church’s views is that they apparently seem to be focusing on the purely physical side of sex (pleasure and procreation) instead of giving greater weight to (what I consider) the most important part: The feelings involved.
It just strikes me as an odd way of approaching the subject for a spiritually minded group. I guess I would normally expect a philosophy that would focus more on, I dunno, the ethereal rather than the animalistic.
The bible says awfully little on the wrongness of slavery
Yeah, slave owners generally make that a prerequisite for anyone wanting to talk to their slaves, and at the time the New Testament was being written slaves were one of the major intended audiences, the owners were mainly pagan, and Christians wanted to be able to talk to the slaves openly. Similarly, the Marinsky Theatre's current production of the opera "Boris Godunov" says awfully little on the wrongness of Putin, it's a 19th Century opera about a Czar who ruled circa 1600.
While I don't share the opinion, the belief that anal sex subjugates the catcher is not unique to Catholics. Some gays believe it as well.
However, such gays engage in several other behaviors (frot and mutual oral, for example). Such behaviors are not perceived to subjugate anyone.
This caught me by surprise. I’m not denying it’s true(there are a lot of people in the world with a lot of different beliefs) but I have known a lot of gay men and as far as I know none of them have believed this.
It is true that a lot of gay men refrain from engaging in anal sex though(usually because they just don’t like it.) and I myself typically abstain for other reasons.
No, I'm not a Kantian.
I start from the premise that the only reason to participate in a thread like this is to sharpen my debate skills so that when I do run across somebody in such a church, I am more likely to be able to persuade them of the error of their ways.
When I get in such a debate, I don't want to get into a "what about the children?" argument. Anything that both sides can argue (despite the legitimacy of that argument) creates stalemate. Stalemate is not my goal.
What I want to do is find an argument that the other side cannot make even though, in regards to that argument, we share the same premises. That's why I seek a categorical imperative.
Well, that AND the fact that I don't want to turn into a monster after having fought them long enough.
Gay teen suicide statistics. There's your argument. Now stop saying that they're not harming anyone.
Seriously, you're gay yourself, you should know this stuff.
The bible says awfully little on the wrongness of slavery.(Cue various apologists claiming that Biblical slavery was oh-so-enlightened, and just wonderful really, and nothing at all like Antebellum U.S. slavery)
Or that the bible does not endorse slavery.
Reading through just a little of this thread has managed to really get me down.
There is nothing like watching largely nice, civilised and rational people jump through hops to claim that religions don't contain nasty things, and being backhandedly accused of bigotry by some of those people for disagreeing, to lower my opinion of humanity.
Seriously there was a discussion that stretched across three+ pages, about how the Catholic Church doesn't really have a problem with homosexuality, when it is blatantly obvious that the Cathlic Church, has historically had, and still has a problem with homosexuality. Be it making pretty much any physicial expression of homosexual love into a sin, through to the pope condemning movement towards equalt legal rights for homosexual couples.
About some dudes craziness.
Wow. There are so many things wrong with that opinion I don’t even know where to start. Still, his opinion isn’t the point, the point was that some gay men believe anal sex is subjugating so point to you Darkwing.
Any argument that can be disproven by a single crazy rant on the Internet is a stupid argument.
Much like Rule 34, a rant in favor of any given position can be found on the Internet.So yes, if the claim is that no gay men think anal sex is subjugating, then the claim is false.
I still suspect the idea is rare.
Yes, I specifically did not make that claim. Still, that rant takes me by surprise.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
To explain further what I said was:
I’m not denying it’s true(there are a lot of people in the world with a lot of different beliefs) but I have known a lot of gay men and as far as I know none of them have believed this.
It was more of a “Wait, you are telling me unicorns are real?” with a skeptical look on my face and Darkwing was like “Bam! Proof of unicorns!”
Oh, alright then.
I start from the premise that the only reason to participate in a thread like this is to sharpen my debate skills so that when I do run across somebody in such a church, I am more likely to be able to persuade them of the error of their ways.
Surely you've realized by now that "This person with a PHD says this" isn't very persuasive?
I realize that your "I've got no evidence so I'll just ignore yours and claim that no evidence is necessary" isn't very persuasive.
Nor is selectively kicking on the epistemic nihilism and pretending that all evidence that disagrees with you isn't evidence. Nor is simply skipping over every point you can't specifically counter by quoting a cherry picked PHD.
If you're trying to be good at this you frankly, bite. You do realize that you've been forced to dismiss the pope (and this particular pope at that) as an accredited expert on the bible? You need to skip over most of my points. You don't engage in the argument at all, you're stuck in the meta argument.
As for the Pope, I didn't dismiss him as an expert. I dismissed him as a scholar. A scholar is someone who engages in scholarship. Scholarship requires putting the pursuit of truth above politics.
Only people who share your views value the truth.
So only people who agree with you are scholars.
Therefore all scholars agree with you
Therefore your views are truth.
You'll go to to any length when you are confronted with the fact that you have no evidence to offer. Like I said, I can't reject evidence since you haven't provided any.
I don't need to go far. With your argument the end is the beginning.
Meantime... BNW?
Bare Naked Women?
???
My argument is that Catholics are not the only branch of Christianity. That argument is a fact.
Are you allergic to telling the truth? Your argument was a lot more than that, as you are well aware -- to the effect that Catholicism is in no way representative of Christianity. I pointed out that, on the contrary, they are by far the dominant branch of Christianity in terms of numbers and wealth, and arguably in global influence as well -- also facts -- facts that, for whatever reason, you can't seem to face.
Meantime... BNW?
Bare Naked Women?
???
B[b]ig [b]Norse Wolf
The fact is that you can find NO prominent scholar working in a secular university to support your position.
To what end? You've already admitted that anyone that disagrees with you isn't a scholar. You're also arbitrarily confining evidence to the opinion of others rather than data, and only the opinion of the people who agree with you at that.
You were worried about becoming a monster? Congratulations, please take your fangs fur and claws at the door. You've become one. You're using the exact same circular logic that the fundamentalists use to discount anyone that disagrees with them.
You were worried about becoming a monster? Congratulations, please take your fangs fur and claws at the door. You've become one. You're using the exact same circular logic that the fundamentalists use to discount anyone that disagrees with them.
Assuming what he's told us about his past is true, it seems to be less about becoming than remaining.
You've already admitted that anyone that disagrees with you isn't a scholar.I claimed no such thing.
As for the Pope, I didn't dismiss him as an expert. I dismissed him as a scholar. A scholar is someone who engages in scholarship. Scholarship requires putting the pursuit of truth above politics.
<------ There. Black and white, clear as crystal. You're making the circular argument that anyone that disagrees with you isnt't a scholar because they don't care about the truth, because if they cared about the truth they would agree with you.
You did. But only because you can't find any prominent scholar in a secular university who agrees with you.
You rejected the freakin pope as a biblical strictly on the basis that he's not looking for truth. You know he's not looking for truth because he doesn't agree with you.
When you're rejecting the expert opinion of the pope yes, I seriously start to question if you're cherry picking your experts. If i could get to a library I'm sure I could find others, and I'm equally sure you'd find equally ludicrous reasons for rejecting them.
Because you aren't capable of understanding data. By your own confession, you don't understand the original languages of the Bible at all.
You're also arbitrarily confining evidence to the opinion of others rather than data
No, but I can read translations from a number of people who do. Your reinterpretation of Sodom makes absolutely no sense, and even if you leave the disputed word blank its pretty clear Paul is talking about homosexuals on more than one occasion.
| 3 people marked this as a favorite. |
I know he's not a scholar because he's based his career in the Catholic church.
WTF is that supposed to mean? There are plenty of biblical scholars who work for the catholic church and not necessarily as priests.
How is it obvious that the pope's political motivations are any stronger than those of your "scholar"? You think there isn't politics in academia?
You don't get to decide what the criteria of being a good scholar are. It's just one big no true scotsman. Well, if he works for the church he CAN'T be a real scholar. Your criteria are arbitrary.
But this whole thing is one big obfuscation anyway. It doesn't matter what the original authors of the bible meant. What matters is how christians today, especially those in positions of authority and influence, speak about homosexuality. We know that the catholic church is a pretty significant majority of christians worldwide. The question then becomes how much of a percentage of X do we need to show to prove there is a GENERAL TREND. No one is saying all christians, or all denominations, are anti-homosexual. Nonetheless, I think it's a clear trend.
Not that christianity is alone in this mind you. I think islam is very guilty as well. Thankfully the overwhelming majority of politicians in the US aren't muslim. They're christian.
I don't consider the current pope a real biblical scholar either, but that is based on the level of anger coming from the upper levels of the Vatican (and the pope himself) over the nuns in the U.S. spending too much time helping the poor and powerless (following the command of jesus) as opposed to fighting against gay marraige and abortion (the dictates of the pope). Anyone in a Christian organization that puts thier dictates above those of Christ loses all credibility in my eyes.
Fair enough, but being a dick doesn't make one NOT a biblical scholar. It just makes him, in all likelihood, not very christ-like.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Fair enough, but being a dick doesn't make one NOT a biblical scholar. It just makes him, in all likelihood, not very christ-like.Myself, I would like to know what a biblical scholar thinks of certian passages, and I understand DW's desire to divorce the scholar from a particular religion or active atheism. Both of them are probably too close to what they believe in to maintain objectivity.
That's the thing with religious text. There often IS no objective position. It's not a technical manual, it's literature. People are going to see different things in the text as a product of their time, their context, and the imagined context of the text itself. Especially something as contentious as the bible itself, when you have the question of which translation to use etc. etc.
In the end, there's going to be a lot of distasteful stuff in that book. Better to chuck it all out and start fresh.
Yes, I'm gay myself. Hell, I was even suicidal while in that cult. But, that still doesn't mean that I want to be guilty of the exact same thing I condemn in those people (namely being painting an entire group of people with one broad single color brush of paint).
The difference is in consequences. Telling religious people to stop being bigots and use their religion to prop up their stance most likely isn't going to make them suicidal. What they are doing obviously has that effect on those affected.
Hee hee!
So much fun.
After three days of DD-BNW bickering, I can no longer even be sure of what they're arguing about. That Christianity has historically been anti-gay? That The Bible has anti-gay passages? The meaning of arsenokios?
The degrading anal sex rant was hysterical! I wonder if the author is impervious to irony; oblivious that his essay degrades those who partake and would otherwise not feel degraded? Or that it may be degrading to women, since it is so blatantly misogynist?
Probably not. Almost definitely not.
Richard B. Hays, Dean and George Washington Ivey Professor of New Testament at Duke Divinity School
Not Harvard, or Yale, or whatever school you mentioned, but Duke ain't small potatos.
I'm also not saying that Hays is by any means correct, but, look, it wasn't terribly difficult to find a scholar at a secular university saying St. Paul wasn't down with the homosex.
Of course, both my wife and I would like to read a Koran (or more accurately, a translation of the Koran) in order to see just how far that faith's hate preachers have fallen from the word they supposedly follow.
I've read much of the Koran and the Hadiths in translation. It seems to me that the hate preachers are the ones following the clear precepts, especially once you get past the first few verses and into the later "meat" of the stuff. The only bad thing commonly associated with Islam that I saw no passage mandating is female genital mutilation, which seems to be a tribal custom that got "tacked on."
Overall, the moderates seem to be the ones who pick their passages and ignore the others -- good for them! In much the same way, Jews and Christians don't stone disobedient children, despite the Bible indicating they should do so.
It also turns out that Duke Divinity School is a Methodist seminary at Duke University, which was founded by Methodists and Quakers, which is sounding less and less secular.
(Yale, by comparison, was founded as a Congregationalist seminary, and still has a Divinity School that is separate from but has profs cross-teaching at the University's Religious Studies program.)
Also, if you look at Martin's and Hays's respective CVs, they both bounced back and forth between Yale and Duke. Did they study under Boswell? Hmm.
EDIT: Hey! Your edit makes my post superfluous!
I'm actually kinda glad you found these as I was far past tired with BNW's ridiculousness.
Honestly, I think you're both being ridiculous. I mean, I'm ridiculous all of the time, but at least it's (mostly) intentional.