Nope. And I see that I owe you an apology for the phrasing of that post – I was physically distracted in the process of composing it. “Drive by assertions” was a reference to something we regulars have seen all too often – the guy who makes one unsubstantiated comment, usually of a negative nature, and then leaves the thread. It was my intention to suggest that you were doing quite the opposite, and to encourage that you continue exploring it in a new thread.
As you may be aware, I do not dismiss ideologies with which I disagree in part, but rather analyze and where possible refute the propositions they present that I believe to be in error.
And what the attitudes of the past, or of society up to the present, might happen to be, is not relevant to whether or not they are substantiated.
If homosexuality, in whole or in part, is harmful, then you, who assert that it might be, have the burden of making the case that it is. I’m not averse to the idea in the abstract – I’ve seen too many people dealing with an aspect of themselves that they find painful, and I can see certain behaviors associated with a subset of gay people as self-destructive.
But it’s your baby – you’re the one who’s advancing the proposition, and, as we both have noted, in a thread asking a quite different question. Whatever my feelings about the Electoral College, I expect 2sense to make his case for its abolition, not that the initial argument is on its defenders have to show why he’s wrong.
Quote: “the assertion is assumed to be false if there is a lack of evidence”
I asserted that I have not seen any reliable studies proving anybody’s point. I did not say that there was no evidence. I think that there is evidence. But that is not the point of the this thread, to debate the harmfulness of homosexuality.
A lack of evidence assumes an assertion to be false? Really? Perhaps is leave an assertion unproven, but false? Did you learn that in kollege?
gobear, do you consider the Greeks to be modern? Look what happened to the Greeks…
If you make an assertion and then fail to support it with evidence, then yes, it may safely be regarded as false.
Well, they devised popular democracy, wrote some of the greatest literature ever known, and provided the cultural and political roots of our civilization. Pretty good work for a loose confederation of city states.
That’s the trouble with arguing with these people; they don’t know anything their pastors don’t tell them. I swear, books to them are like garlic to vampires.
Scrap all this. Sorry musicguy, but there is no way that this memory can be reliably valid. Therefore unless you wrote all this down in a diary, you are probably just remembering it how you want to remember it. Since not many 5 year olds write journals or keep written or non memory associated track of things, there really isn’t any way to validate your claim.
Memory is very unreliable for things that happened just a few years back, and has been shown to be so in study after study. It is common knowledge among psychologists that memory isn’t reliable at all. Remembering all that complex stuff like attraction is more than likely confabulation on your part, though it is no doubt unconsious and not deliberate. It just happens.
Personally I just doubt anybody that says they remember what they wanted to be when they were 5. Unless they are only 10 or something. It isn’t that they are lying, they probably just don’t remember and their brain unconsiously fills in for it. So I don’t “think so” either, but I have a bit of inference from actually scientific evidence to back up my reasons why.
There are quite a few discredited ideas that were “around for quite some time”. New ideas are sometimes right.
You’ve already stated that you don’t accept the APA as a credible source. If you reject that one, then there’s really no point in discussing further with you since you will only say the sourse is unreliable.
You made the assertion. The person making the assertion must prove it.
These questions can be applied to any personality trait or other behaviour patterns…if the future, there might be pharmacological treatment that can change our personality, our cognitive functions, even our attitudes towards things. Knowing the mechanisms that induce a certain state, also means understanding how to manipulate them. Some of you might have seen the study in Nature (I think) about 3 years ago, where fruit flies sexual orientation were changed by exposing them to certain peptides or hormones during development.
Current hypothesis regarding the determination of sexual orientation, is that it is not a learned behaviour, ie it is not aquired by model learning, conditioning or other learning paradigms. Instead, data suggest a biological background and mind you, biological is not equivalent to genetical. Biological could implicate genetical ie heritable, but it could also be a biological feature that is not herited. For instance, the level of hormones a fetus is exponsed to in utero is an example of a biological but not genetic factor that is speculated to have an effect on later sexual orientation. It could also be that homosexuality is indeed inherited, but, like all other human behaviours, in a complex fashion including multiple genes and multiple promoters interacting to repress or express genes, and also interacting with the environment in it’s widest sense, ie the biochemical environment as well as the sociocultural.
Unfortunately my university has currently cut my access to Medline and all other science data bases due to technical work (it’s in the middle of the night here) but if somebody is interested, I could post some references later.
But I don’t think Greeks are modern. That’s why we call them “classics”.
They also abandoned deformed children.
Some of us can read the likes of Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Socretes, Plato, etc. and still disagree with their ideologies, right? And why must I be considered part of your civilization? Can’t I be part of a different civilization that happens to exist at the same time as your “civilization”?
I believe it was Socrates who, when discovered doing somthing counter to his philosophy, delcared “at this moment, I am not Socrates.”
Anyway, on a personal note, I don’t listen to pastors.
And I do not believe that lack of evidence assumes an assertion is false, but rather an unproven assertion.
I wouldn’t go there if I were you. The Greeks were pretty well known for their pedophilia as well. Not exactly the comparison you’d like to make, I’m sure.
Of course, the idea that homosexuality is harmful seems pretty ludicrous to me, but then I tend to judge on individuals actions rather than blanket stereotypes and misguided fears.
As for the OP, it seems to me that a combination of both genetics and environment contribute to one’s sexual orientation. I have no empirical evidence, of course, but my own observations lead me to think that we are all born pretty close to the line (some more one way than the other), and our experiences push us in one direction or the other.
As has been stated (and which clearly freaks out the homophobes), we are all closer to bisexual than we probably imagine, and our experiences throughout life (but esp. during childhood) – coupled with a genetic leaning – probably make us who we are.
Not the direct purpose, no. But I don’t think it so tangential as to ignore it completely. It’s up to you, I suppose, but if you’re going to assert that homosexuality is harmful and then refuse to back up your claim because “that is not the point of the this thread”, then aren’t you being just a bit dishonest? If that isn’t the point of the thread, then why did you bring it up in the first place?
When I say it is false, I don’t mean that it is proven false. Only that it is assumed to be false. Again, if I make the assertion that “X is harmful”, and there is no evidence that it is or is not actually harmful, which stance would you take in your day-to-day life? Once an idea has been proposed, it is difficult to keep it unresolved in one’s mind. Even with lack of evidence, it is human nature to assign a temporary truth value to the assertion just to make dealing with it easier.
More to the point, for something to be harmful, there must be some interaction going on between the activity and the wellbeing of the person. For it to be harmless, there need not be any interaction.
I’m not sure what the best way to phrase it would be, but the assumption that someting is harmless requires fewer . . . constructs . . . than the assumption of harmfulness. A slightly modified Occam’s Razor would thus indicate that the assumption of harmlesness makes more sense given the lack of evidence.
No way man, it was, um, ‘ephebophilia.’ And that’s not exploitative at all or anything.
The defenses of the Greek proclivities always left me a bit cold. For the progressives, I don’t know that the Greeks are the best models either as the same-sex, uh, friendships were not (IIRC) divorced entirely from the notion that the ladies were just too dang stoopid to bother consorting with.
Brace yourselves, folks, I’m about to disagree with both Polycarp and Esprix and a bunch of people around here. You see, I think there is some truth in the statement “homosexuality is harmful”. The thing is, I don’t believe the harm comes from the state of being homosexual, but from the reactions of other people to that person’s homosexuality. Since I cannot concieve of a way Esprix or Priam or gobear could stop being homosexual (although if any of you gentlemen do, please e-mail me!), I think attempting to make them stop being homosexual or suppress their homosexuality would be even more harmful.
It is considered normal for heterosexuals to fall in love and marry, or at least want to. Indeed, one of the point I’ve seen raised against the Catholic Church is that it’s unnatural to expect a man not to marry, and, as I understand things, the Church itself regards taking on voluntary lifelong celibacy as a great and specific sacrifice. Why then, do people who consider homosexuality wrong expect homosexuals not to fall in love and marry? I am close to 40, and I’ve never married. Because I’m straight, there are those who would consider it a shame or a tragedy, although fortunately things have improved enough for a woman over the past 100 years that such reactions aren’t as common. If I had never married because I was a lesbian and I did want to marry but wasn’t allowed to, that longing would be shocking and immoral in many people’s eyes.
As I said, I’m straight, and I understand why people might think I don’t have a dog in this fight. I have a couple. One is one of my oldest, dearest, most honorable friends who is living with the man he considers his spouse, and who is worthy of my old friend. The other is personal experience. I was told I was unlovable and if I showed an attraction to someone in high school, I was insulted and ridiculed for it. I wasn’t gay; I was unpopular. Knowing what that’s like and the harm it did to me, I cannot support people who do the same to my gay brothers and sisters.
First of all, thank you for being polite in your response to what I wrote.
With all due respect, I think I have a better handle on what I remember and what I don’t than you give me credit for. These aren’t “fuzzy” memories. I can remember the names of the males I found attractive, why I found them attractive, where I was when I found them attractive, etc… I can remember many details.
Also, I never claimed that I “knew what I wanted to be” when I was five. I knew that I had an attraction to males though. I remember being extra happy when the boys I thought were cute came over to play. As can be shown by what some of the other gay posters have shared, I’m not alone in feeling this way.
It was either in 1st or 2nd grade that I heard the word “faggot” being used. (I grew up in NY where the kids learn all the bad words pretty early ) I recall asking someone what it meant. When they told me, all I could think of is “Oh no, I’m a bad person. I must never tell anyone about this”. It took me almost 30 years to get past that way of thinking.
Quite right, though I think you may be missing a smilie of sorts at the end of that last sentence.
And Siege, I see your point, I really do, but…then according to your logic it would have been “harmful” to be black anytime before the sixties (and indeed, some might say, still today).
My point is that I don’t think the folks arguing the “harmfulness of homosexuality” are looking at it from your point of view. It seems that they are moralizing rather than simply making the (sadly true) statement that homosexuals are harmed by society in this day and age.
The difference, if I may, is that you feel society is harming homosexuals, while others feel they are harming themselves. And sadly (and ironically), until the latter change their p-o-v, the former will continue to be true.
) I recall asking someone what it meant. When they told me, all I could think of is “Oh no, I’m a bad person. I must never tell anyone about this”. It took me almost 30 years to get past that way of thinking.