Can you provide some links or maybe tell us how gays are treated in Islamic countries or China? I’m curious.
Yeah, but the Roman Empire as Pagan could be pretty intolerant, and they had things like slavery and women were inferior.
You just can’t win, can you?
Not anywhere near as many people know that all the Roman gladiators and heroes looked just like Charlton Heston.
Can you provide a cite for a statistical definition of abnormal and the necessarily data to support that any of these things are a significant statistical deviation from the norm?
The best definition I know for statistical deviation from the norm is 3 Sigma. I’ve never come across a statistics textbook that refers to this point as “abnormal” though. (I’ve checked all three I have here at my desk). Of course, this assumes we have a normal distribution - which doesn’t apply to red hair, being left handed or homosexuality. But I’m interested in where you find a statistical definition of abnormal and what it is. And also if you can quantify (something that is open for much debate) what percentage of the population is actually sexually attracted to people of the same gender and how that number works “statistically”
Back to the OP.
But why was Paul in the Bible anti-gay? Where did his feelings come from? He can’t be the origin… he had to get that bias from somewhere.
Well, I would presume he got it from being Jewish, and the prohibitions on homosexual intercourse included in Mosaic law.
Of course, the question is was the prohibition on homosexuality was particular to ancient Semitic cultures or not. While I am no scholar in the area, the Bible leads me to believe that neighboring cultures were more permissive and so we get the story of Sodom and Ghomorrah and the Jewish prohibition on the practice may be a way to culturally distinguish themselves from their neighbors.
Of course, much of the Jewish tradition seems to have been influenced by the cultural traditions of its neighbors, so maybe other Semitic peoples weren’t so liberal after all.
Perhaps the question should be why was Greek culture so permissive when it seems many of its contemporaries were not so permissive.
Man, that’s one poorly constructed paragraph.
I believe China DOES still treat homosexuality as something of an illness, if it is ever displayed in public. Again, as with far many things in China recently, it scarily tied to the fact that homosexuality is defined as a sign of racial weakness.
Egypt Trial Shows Culture Clash on Homosexuality
http://www.sodomylaws.org/world/egypt/egnews10.htm
Hate Crimes:Like the Taliban, America’s Middle East Allies Tyrannize Gays and Women
http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0140/signorile.php
China AIDS activist riled officials
So, Walloon, are you withdrawing the point that homosexuality, left handedness and red hair are “statistically abnormal” or are you going to find a cite?
Oh, bloody hell. Can we just say that homosexuality, left-handedness are red hair are statistically under-represented, and therefore not normal?
I mean, judging by average SAT and SOL scores, normal means dumb as a brick. Being abnormal isn’t bad.
Maybe, but his argument in Romans seems to come from the Stoic argument against homosexuality:
- There is a natural end to every action and desire.
- The natural end to sexual desire is for men to have sex with women to impregnate them
- Therefore, any other use of sexual desire is against nature.
(The Stoic goal was complete supression of the emotions. The model Stoic should never allow him or herself to be emotionally affected by events, and should never act passionally, but only after careful determination that his or her action is logically and morally correct. The Stoics would have loved Mr. Spock.)
So that’s a Greco-Roman (particularly a Stoic) argument against homosexuality, and not particularly a Jewish one.
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People often desire contradictory things. Therefore, labeling anything natural, is meaningless. Or rather, redundant. The natural world is, from this perspective, all there is.
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Um, no. I have no parental drive, but quite a large sex drive. It happens to be oriented towards females, yes, but I desire the journey, not the destination.
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As I said, against nature is a concept on par with x/0. Even if nature wasn’t all-inclusive (a nod to the religious in the crowd) gay people feel the same sex drive as the rest of us, albeit cock-eyed from our point of view. So what? Gay people naturally desire people of their own gender. Straight people naturally desire people of the opposing gender.
When you think about it, we have enough people on Earth to prevent most really nasty disasters from knocking us off. On the other hand, the fact that we have enough people on Earth to prevent most really nasty disasters from knocking us off will knock us off of it’s own accord. Given that, would it not be ‘healthy’ and ‘natural’ for a species in a position such as ours to slack off on that reproduction thang until we have more areas to reproduce into?
My WAG as to the origins of anti-gay prejudice -
I think a common misconception about many cultures is to assume the parts you haven’t thought about are the same as your own.
For instance, most marriages were arranged throughout most of human history. Family A had a daughter, Family B had a son, they got together and arranged what was more like a business merger and less like a Hallmark card. Certainly the intended groom (less often the intended bride) had some input into the process, but the idea that you picked out your own spouse is rather rare in most cultures.
The families involved often derived some benefit from the process. Exogamy, fresh breeding stock, alliances between families, as well as economic benefits like dowries and bride prices and so forth.
So now you have a wonderfully suitable marriage all set up between your son and the daughter of a nice family in the village two miles away. She’s young, she’s beautiful, she has huge - tracts of land, and you and the pater familias of the other family have reached an amicable understanding about the share of land and goods exchanged both now, and as an inheritance after he goes to live with the Great Sky King.
Now Junior drops the bombshell. He doesn’t want to marry her, he wants to marry his best friend - the funny little guy who is so musical.
WTF?
“What the hell is wrong with you? Who is going to work the farm, or carry on the family name? You sure aren’t going to produce any grandchildren with HIM!” Etc., etc. All this hard work and negotiation, and the little creep wants to queer the deal (sorry) because he wants to do - well, THAT instead of what produces badly needed replacement workers.
Is it any wonder it rapidly became a taboo?
People in ancient cultures didn’t particularly care what seagulls did in their private life. Gays were disruptive of the social order, and threats to the social order were much more threatening when you live as close to the edge as they often did. Sure, maybe Uncle Steve is more available for babysitting than he would be if he were married, but the labor shortage for farm workers was the acute problem, not “who will look after the kids while we go to the agora”.
And I concur that lesbianism is less condemned because it was less noticed. It was much more likely that nobody ever bothered to ask whether or not you wanted to be married if you were female, and if you seemed reluctant to start producing heirs to the throne, you could always be raped into pregnancy. Add to that the enormous social pressure to produce sons, and you are far more likely to create women who might be lesbians, but who were willing to “close their eyes and think of England” if it meant not getting beaten up - or divorced - by their husbands for not producing, and/or pitied or scorned by women for not doing the same.
The social and evolutionary pressures on people for most of human history were what formed our cultural prejudices, for the most part. All this stuff about over-population being reduced by homosexuality is rather beside the point. Ancient people didn’t worry about over-population, by and large. With an infant mortality (and maternal mortality - ever hear of puerperal fever?) as high as it was, a woman might be pregnant a dozen times, and only have two or three - more only if she were lucky - who lived long enough to be economically useful. Which is why they often married her off shortly after she began menstruating, and expected her to be more or less continuously pregnant until she hit menopause, or died.
Nobody wanted to hear about alternative lifestyles. You worked, and you produced children to care for you after you could no longer work. Anything that increased the danger of not having enough people to fend off starvation was going to be considered a Bad Thing.
Read the Old Testament. Not just the prohibitions against homosex in Leviticus, but the many, many references to fertility. Fertility of land, fertility of flocks, fertility of women - more of this was good, lack of it was a curse from God. Homosex interfered with this, so that must be a curse too.
Maybe the same conditions don’t apply nowadays. But cultures don’t turn on a dime like that. A taboo so deeply ingrained for a hundred thousand years is going to last.
Regards,
Shodan
Originally posted by Captain Amazing:
- There is a natural end to every action and desire.
- The natural end to sexual desire is for men to have sex with
women to impregnate them - Therefore, any other use of sexual desire is against nature.
Ahem…I think the natural end to sexual desire is to get off. Period. There are a lot of people who get it on and can’t have kids, even if they want them.
If mother nature didn’t want us to do it for fun, she wouldn’t have made it feel good.
—Read the Old Testament. Not just the prohibitions against homosex in Leviticus, but the many, many references to fertility.—
The purity laws are obsessed with keeping penises from getting dirty (and especially bloody), and perhaps this obsession is based upon beliefs connecting dirtiness to the frustrating of all important fertility.
Maybe homosexuality is about discontinuity - a way that nature (God?) tries to keep certain genetics from being passed on.
Just wildly speculating.
Now to go find my flack jacket and strap it to my ass.
FoL
And which genetics might those be, Father of Loki?
(By the way, the practice of instant martyrdom (as in posting something and immediately claiming you’re going to get flamed for it) is becoming seriously cliche.)
You guys seem to look for hostile intent in everything posted :rolleyes:
This concept is really not that hard to grasp. Sex and the equipment for sex were designed/evolved (depending on your beliefs) for procreation. In most animals that is all that it is and they are ruled by their signals and displays and are pretty much helpless before their own instincts. In all but a very few, very unusual instances sex in the animal kingdom is hetero-exclusive. Humans have associated the feeling of love with the physical act of sex in ways that are not seen in the animal kingdom and which have resulted in humans having sex outside the normal “season” experienced by most other species.
Anyway, the point is and always has been that the penis was designed for the vagina for the purpose of procreation. It is this simple and undeniable fact that is the basis of all your so-called “homophobia”. It is a simple fact that needs no “cite” to verify.
Never did I say homosexuals should be looked down upon or stripped of any rights due all of us, but neither do I think homosexuality should held up as some kind of normal behavior that should be presented as some kind of lifestyle choice. I do not think either that homosexuals should be given the social benefits of marriage (most of which always were intended to make it easier to have FAMILIES, not to make it easier to live in a partnership.). Other than that I really have no problem with homosexuals except those who seem to enjoy the shock value of french kissing in a mcDonalds full of NORMAL families. I do indeed have many friends as well as a family member who is homosexual and they are well aware of my feelings and accept them for what they are and accept that while I do not find their relationships to be “normal” I do understand their value.
Well, now, isn’t ALL kissing pretty much “unnatural, disgusting, and non-beneficial to the species”? Kissing spreads disease, and serves no useful purpose–you don’t have to slobber all over another person (or put your tongues in each other’s mouths) in order to procreate. The purposes of the mouth are clearly for eating, breathing, and (in humans) talking.