Modnote: Very carefully calling another poster a liar is still calling another poster a liar. Please don’t “attempt” to do this again.
Then simply insert “because they don’t want to serve gay people who are getting married.” It’s still their choice.
Actually, you’re exactly getting the point I was trying to make. It’s not a throwaway line at all: I call it the “Nyarolathotep defense” because it only works for people who acknowledge their god is an evil god, and it is, more than anything, a satire of the “But I’m just following my religion!” defense against bigotry.
There’s an old question in theodicy–the question of how to reconcile god with the existence of evil–of how to define Goodness. Is “goodness” defined as “Whatever God does”? Or does Goodness have some other definition that we can use as a metric for God’s behavior, and it just so happens that God is ultimately good in every way and scores 100% on every Goodness test we design according to that independent metric?
If the former–if Goodness is defined as “God’s Behavior”–then it’s useless for moral philosophy, and we just need to come up with another word to talk about whether God is actually an asshole or not. If the latter–if Goodness is something whose meaning we can derive without talking about God–then it’s a meaningful question of whether God is good or evil. I am, as you may guess (and as an atheist who believes that we can find an independent, culture-neutral definition of “good”–but that’s another thread), in the latter camp.
I therefore don’t think it suffices as a defense of bigoted actions to say, “But it’s my religion.” If your religion is telling you to violate the rights of someone else, then your religion is compelling you to unethical acts. We determine societal ethics independently of any one religion, and religious freedom applies only insofar as you’re not violating that determination. The Aztec heart-ripper, the Klannish cross-burner, the Wahabbist suicide-bomber, the Marxist plane-hijacker, none of these folks may appeal to religious freedom to justify their anti-social activities.
Nor may the Methodist cake-denier, even if their anti-social act is much milder.
If your claim is that an evil God (or a supernatural dog, or a voice on the radio) is compelling you to commit antisocial acts, and that you recognize it’s evil but feel overwhelming threats to commit them anyway, you may not be a bigot, but you do need help.
Vanishingly few religious folks fall into that camp, so that help is unavailable to them.
I seem to remember that in some societies where a virgin was sacrificed to the gods, it was considered a great honor by the family to have their child chosen to be that sacrifice. Unless this was a society of child haters, it’s most likely the case that they truly believed they were offering a great gift to their god. And even with animal sacrifice that can be true as well. If someone kills a sheep and burns it for their god, they are not doing it because they are sheep haters. They feel the need to offer the sheep to their god even though they lose out on the benefit of that sheep. The person may ultimately be doing it for selfish reasons, like a good harvest or gifts in the afterlife, but bigotry towards sheep is probably not one of the reasons.
I’m not so sure.
I think it’s possible to genuinely like individual known gay people, and to be genuinely worried for their souls, while still believing that God opposes gay marriage and will send them to hell for it. That can’t be a comfortable place for one’s mind to be in, and I also think that a lot of people eventually move out of it either by changing to a different version of their religion, losing their faith, or ditching their friends; but I think that at any given time there are some people who both love their friends and believe what they’ve been taught, and that some of them remain in that thought pattern for a long time, sometimes all of their lives.
It looks to me, from the outside, like they’re worshipping an evil god; but it doesn’t look that way to them – probably to some it looks like ‘God has reasons that humans can’t understand’.
Very, very well said. I agree completely now that I understand your point a little better.
One quibble:
Children might. I think if a kid is anti-Gay because all they’ve ever been told about homosexuality is that it’s incredibly sinful and will send you straight to hell, especially since that kid may not actually understand romantic attraction yet, they might be holding on to homophobic beliefs without ever having examined them deeply enough to reject OR internalize them.
Sure, but why are societies that practice human sacrifice structured in this way in the first place?
Look at this (relatively) recent story. Two men, religious leaders, sacrificed a child after an earthquake in order to appease the gods. They only ended up spending 2 years in jail.
Yes, the reason they decided to sacrifice the child, and the reason that the community went along with it, is due to the tenants of their particular faith.
But more importantly, sacrificing the child has a very practical purpose. It gives these men power. Power over their group, which they control so fully that they are willing to condone murder. Power over the environment and the gods, at least in the minds of the group. And power over life and death, in the case of the child.
In other words, the sacrifice reacts to a natural disaster and solidifies the control of the current religious order. The earthquake may have shook the ground, but it doesn’t need to shake anyone’s faith.
From that perspective, the two men are killers, using murder to secure their own position just as if they had killed a rival.
Certainly the people at the top have different motivations than the people at the bottom. The people at the top may be using blood sacrifice for personal power and control over the population, but the parents at the bottom offering their child for sacrifice are doing so because they truly believe whatever mish-mash the leaders are peddling to the masses. Even modern death cults can be like this. The leader says that aliens are coming to take the group’s souls and everyone needs to suicide so their souls can float to the UFO. The parents given their children cyanide so that their souls can go on the UFO with them. Scientology has some crazy ideas about Xenu, aliens, nuclear bombs, and volcanoes that people buy into. It’s all stuff that people should be able to think about and reject, but they don’t. So if the leader says aliens don’t like gay people and they shouldn’t be allowed to marry, people buy in without thinking just like they buy in when the leader says UFOs are coming to take them to another planet.
Too late to edit but just to be clear - what I’m saying is not incompatible with true belief. You can truly believe that human sacrifice is what the gods want; that’s not the point. The point is what social forces led to the creation of that tradition in the first place.
Eta: looks like you ninja’d me, but this post can stand ad a response. I’m not saying that the witch doctors don’t fully believe that the gods want a child sacrifice; my point is that these beliefs arise in social groups due to their usefulness for maintaining control.
A modern example of that is the Book of Mormon which explicitly stated that dark skinned people were bad (I’m not an expert). The Mormons believe that God explicitly told Joseph Smith this on gold plates, but I’m sure we all realize this was the personal racism of Joseph Smith. But decades later, Mormons believe dark skinned people are bad because it’s in the Book of Mormon along with lots of other things that God tells them to believe. The Mormons may also be racists at heart, but their belief may come from bible teaching of God’s desires along with all the other confusing desires of God that they are supposed to accept at face value.
I have an acquaintance like that. On another messageboard, there were pretty nasty fights between conservatives and leftists, lots of conspiracy mongering that eventually drove me away (my nickname there became “Cite, motherfucker?” because I kept demanding evidence, like an asshole). She was an interesting exception: she was extremely conservative, but she expressed real anguish over it. Like, she genuinely believed that nonbelievers like me were going to be tormented in hell, and it broke her up, she took no pleasure at all in this belief.
Anyway, she divorced her husband and came out as bisexual and as near as I know left that hateful cult of a religion behind, so, winner winner chicken dinner.
Folks whose faith is in crisis, I understand: it’s gotta suck to realize you’re worshipping an eldritch horror. If you’re in crisis, it doesn’t excuse unethical actions, you still gotta do the right thing.
If someone’s down with the “God has reasons I don’t understand,” excuse for bad behavior, I’m afraid that’s a terrible cop-out. If you don’t understand God’s reasons, you don’t understand what God wants. Maybe God wants you to stand up to stupid evil commands and is testing you, don’t presume to second-guess God. You’ve got to figure out what’s right and wrong, and do it, and hope God is good enough to forgive you if you choose poorly.
If you don’t think God’s good enough to forgive fallible humans trying to do right, we’re back to the Nyarolathotep defense.
By the way I fear we have slandered Quetzlcoatl just a bit. In the interest of picking a familiar Aztec God I used the majestic Feathered Serpent, but actually he wasn’t all that bloodthirsty and preferred the sacrifice of hummingbirds and butterflies. Not that he turned his nose up at human sacrifice of course, he wasn’t a prude, but he wasn’t as gung ho about it as some of his pantheon-mates.
They claim to have had another relevation in 1978, counteracting that one.
To what extent that’s changed racist attitudes of individual church members, I don’t know. I expect it varies with the individual.
That looks obvious to me also; but it’s a sideways step in thinking, and is apparently not obvious at all to a lot of people. (One of the things I learned in philosophy classes, which I’m told can also be learned in upper level physics, is that one person’s “that’s obvious!” is very often another person’s “that’s obviously wrong!”). I’ve seen the argument given as an analogy to parents and children: the parent may be entirely clear as to what the rules are, but the child may not know why those are the rules, and may possibly not be able to understand the reasons why those are the rules even if the parent tried to give them.
Yeah, I see how that would work–but I expect children to disobey adults if the adults are doing or commanding something that’s clearly evil. If I’m asking a kid to do something that they think is clearly evil (say, forcing a cat into a carrier case for their visit to the vet), it’s incumbent on me to explain myself very clearly to the child in a way that they’ll understand, and to give them lots of love and support. If I don’t do that, of course a kid will defy me, as well they should.
A god who refuses to explain in a way that the child understands is, as far as I can tell, not a good god. I can’t abdicate my responsibility to make ethical decisions.
I agree with your attitude toward child raising – but it’s not the only one out there. To quite a few people, ‘because I said so’ is all the reason that a parent needs to give to a child; and I suspect that’s the childraising theory that most of the people in most of these churches go by. Obedience to a legitimate authority is seen as a virtue in itself.
That’s totally how it’s seen by some, but I think the Nuremberg trials put paid to that defense for all time.
I had a frenemy like that, too. The epitome of a concerned, judgmental fundie, then boom, she dumps hubby and runs off with her new gay girlfriend. And all of her and hubby’s mutual friends took her side.
Yeah, those Mormons are still bigots. If someone says, “I believe black people are inferior to white people,” that person is a bigot. It doesn’t matter if they hold that belief because its in their holy book, or because they’re concurrent with the cutting edge of mid-19th century scientific research, or just because they’re a loser who wants an excuse to look down on someone. “Black people are inferior to white people,” is a bigoted belief. People who hold bigoted beliefs are bigots. “I have to believe that, because it’s in my religion,” isn’t a valid excuse, because there are lots of Mormons (even pre-1978) who accepted the Book of Mormon but specifically rejected that belief. There were, eventually, enough of them that the church changed its doctrine on the subject.
And that’s happening again today. The Mormon church teaches that homosexuals are inferior to heterosexuals. But a lot of Mormons are rejecting that belief, and trying to get the church to change its doctrine on the subject. Every Mormon who holds to the traditional view of homosexuality is making a conscious choice, every day, to maintain a bigoted belief. There’s nothing stopping them from dropping it except their own discomfort with the idea of openly accepting homosexuality.
That’s not really all that uncommon. A lot of queer people who have religious parents saw them go through a similar thing. One of my exes used to refer to it as “the realization that you’re more moral than your own conception of God.” I think you can probably map the whole thing pretty closely on to the “stages of grief,” model. This would be “depression,” and is usually the last stop before “acceptance.”
Along the lines of things that seem obvious to some but not others, I am skeptical of the sincerity of anyone who claims to believe that an omnipotent deity wants them to take actions to control the actions of other humans. Your God is everywhere at once and can smite anyone, anytime, in any way up to and including striking them dead, but he REALLY needs you to vote “yes” on Prop 8 to stop those gays from getting married? And instead of just torturing the gays for all eternity, he’s going to torture you for baking them a cake? Sorry, but that one is so far beyond the pale I have a hard time believing you’re telling me the truth about what’s going through your head. Maybe you’re not even telling yourself the truth.
I could cite an example as well, even one who wasn’t a closet case 
. Gay friends, but anti-SSM for religious reasons. And interestingly enough, not particularly conservative outside the social arena. They struggled internally with their more conservative religious faith vs. their more liberal political views quite often.
Would I call them a bigot? Yeah, a little bit - on that topic and a couple of others. A ‘soft homophobe’ is still homophobic. Having known them well I’d still consider them a good person overall (mileage most definitely varies) - on a personal level they tried to never discriminate against anyone one on one. But one with problematic blind spots. Most if not all of us are carrying some amount of baggage in that respect, a lot of it unconscious and programmed by society.