Not to mention that religion is a choice.
Well it’s not hard to understand why it matters to them, given their worldview. They deem teH Gay to be perverted and evil, just like murder or disrespecting Jeebus. The free will & virtue/sin model falls apart for sexual preference if it’s not a question of what we choose to do under the influence of either Jeebus or Satan, but instead there’s natural variation in human sexual preference that’s firmly established early in life and beyond our volitional control.
Bull.
It doesn’t take science to cause their “model” to fall apart. It doesn’t even take logic. There are entire books of the Bible that contradict this so-called “worldview”.
When I was a christian I memorized 1st Corinthians 13 (I think? can’t remember exactly), which summarized, says moral superiority doesn’t matter if you don’t actually care about the person. One of the reasons I quit being a Christian is because Christians who love quoting this passage (include the one who encouraged me to memorize it) would never follow it. I’d literally quote it back to them and call them out on their hate and point out it isn’t Biblical, but they’d just say “huh, you’re right praise jeebus!”, and immediately go back to it.
This isn’t about science, world view, belief, right/wrong, sin, or Jesus’s teachings. It’s about hate and control.
I think you need to be careful about this - it sounds like you’re granting their reductio ad absurdum that if we respect trans people’s claimed identity we should therefore accept the equal validity of anything someone claims to be.
A priori, there is a solid scientific basis for the idea that someone could plausibly develop with some aspects of the mental state of a typical male, but the chromosomes and physical body of a typical female. Therefore, given the evidence that trans people do exist, we have every reason to believe that the phenomenon of being trans is unquestionably objectively real, absolutely not like some kid’s transient fantasy of being a Transformer helicopter or something.
Set aside the idiotic “attack helicopter” thing and consider something real - the furry subculture. There are people who strongly identify with non-human animals, some to a point of claiming to acutally be (in some sense) non-human animals. Now, I fully agree with your point that if that’s someone’s preference, why be a jerk about it? We should respect it and treat them the way they wish. But you will never convince me that this is on the same level of objective reality as a trans person. It’s takes a cat’s DNA to make a cat brain, so no human really has a cat’s brain. Whereas male and female human brains are both made with virtually the same DNA that we all share.
Why on earth are you responding to me as though I’m endorsing their worldview?
Some people are like this. Not all. My parents were committed Christians and very homophobic, but otherwise bore no resemblance to the fundamentalist Christian Right in the U.S. In their underlying temperament, they didn’t have a hateful bone in their bodies, they were just horribly misguided. I mean, the majority of people were horribly homophobic until fairly recently. They weren’t all irredeemably evil, they were just ignorant and misguided.
So you won’t be going to see Wolf then? (And yes, I realize the idea here isn’t exactly the same as being a furry). Wolf (2021 Irish-Polish film) - Wikipedia
@kferr I still have the copy (somewhere, in my cluttered house). But I still recall clearly. It is in the section on homosexuality (not the section on the drug itself 
). And is says women who took the drug while pregnant, have an inordinate number of daughters born who have ‘lesbian ideation’.
Here is the link to the search results on homosexuality from the current Merck Manual. Note there is no mention of DES in regards to “lesbian ideation.” Search results for: homosexuality - Merck Manuals Professional Edition
Ironically, in deferring to religious identity, the courts have had to acknowledge that it is not an “immutable characteristic” that cannot be changed, like race. Instead, they claim that it is so fundamental to a person’s identity that it would be wrong to expect them to change what is, ultimately, a choice just to avoid discrimination.
Sort of like how gender or sexuality might be.
(I’m among those who say “what does it matter if it’s a choice?” Now, granted, I didn’t choose my heterosexuality, so I assume other didn’t choose their orientation, either. But it shouldn’t matter if they did.)
@peedin I am quite certain my copy says that. FWIW, my edition is a rather old one (30+ years old).
So far as I can discern, there’s nobody in this thread who actually endorses either the idea that sexual orientation is a choice, or that it matters whether it’s a choice.
I think any hostility here is toward the “I’m sure I remember reading somewhere once” approach to citing evidence, not the first instance of this for this OP. I don’t think anyone wants to just gloss over granting the premise of the debate when that’s what it’s based on.
Is this still from memory, or are you looking at it right now? An awful lot of people are quite certain there’s an alternate ending to Big. Can you quote exactly what it says please.
Your edition is worthless, other than for general interest in the past.
I still haven’t seen any confirmation that his edition says that. I’m not asking him to take a screenshot, but at least tell us he’s looking at it to confirm he’s not misremembering.
That little tidbit of information should have been in the OP, don’tcha think?
Maybe not in some cases. It can be hard to distinguish between someone who says they literally hear or see god, angels, or spirits as part of their learned or chosen belief system, and someone suffering from delusions or hallucinations. Another weird area is when concern for moral or ethical behavior plus a disposition toward an anxiety disorder results in dysfunctional scrupulosity.
And it may be that there is no difference between the two to distinguish.
[of Dubya:]
The president of the United States has claimed, on more than one occasion, to be in dialogue with God. If he said that he was talking to God through his hairdryer, this would precipitate a national emergency. I fail to see how the addition of a hairdryer makes the claim more ridiculous or offensive.
@Riemann And I’ll have you know, I am typing this by hand, which is not something I was really looking forward to doing :
The Merck Manual, Sixteenth Edition, ©1992 “…The causes of homosexuality are not known and are probably as complex as the causes of heterosexuality. Constitutional factors involving hormonal programming of the brain during fetal life may be a factor. Some support for this hypothesis is to be found in the higher-than-expected prevalence of homosexual fantasies and behavior in women whose mothers received diethylstilbestrol (DES) during pregnancy…”
Satisfied now ? So you see, I didn’t just imagine it.
I suspect there may be some difference. If someone is raised in a particular culture to expect various mystical experiences as “real”, and they don’t seem otherwise dysfunctional, I could see their beliefs as incorrect without the person being mentally ill. There may be a difference between them and a schizophrenic who stands on the street corner arguing with invisible people.
When I worked at a community mental health center, one of the therapists had a client (a recent immigrant from Thailand, I think) who frequently talked about seeing and talking to their deceased relatives. Their family thought this was perfectly normal within their culture, and irrelevant to why they were in therapy. A person who practices meditation or climbs into a sensory deprivation box can get themselves into mental states that let them experience a lot of odd things without being mentally ill.
I have personally experienced some odd things while waking up or falling asleep that I attribute simply to sleep disturbances, which someone with a lot of religious indoctrination would potentially interpret in a totally different manner, and they might be very hard to dissuade! I don’t think my hypnogogic experiences were a sign of mental illness, but I do think that interpreting them within a religious framework would be wrong.