# Why blame religion for Alan Turing's prosecution?
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-blame-religion-for-alan-turings-prosecution/457223
**Category:** Great Debates
**Created:** [July 21, 2008, 3:29am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-blame-religion-for-alan-turings-prosecution/457223 "2008-07-21T03:29:03Z")
**Posts on this page:** 20
**Page:** 2
### Author:  [@Lobohan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lobohan)
#### Post date: [July 21, 2008, 12:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-blame-religion-for-alan-turings-prosecution/457223/21 "2008-07-21T12:43:59Z")
Christianity in it’s various forms have certainly had a lot to do with the persecution of homosexuals. If you don’t understand that, then you simply haven’t been paying attention.
They call it abomination and made it a crime punishable by death. You don’t think that’s the sort of thing that creates a society that dislikes gays?
[From Wikipedia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homosexual)
> [@](#):
>
> The Hellenophile emperor Hadrian is renowned for his relationship with Antinous, but the Christian emperor Theodosius I decreed a law on August 6, 390, condemning passive males to be burned at the stake. Justinian, towards the end of his reign, expanded the proscription to the active partner as well (in 558), warning that such conduct can lead to the destruction of cities through the “wrath of God”. Notwithstanding these regulations, taxes on brothels of boys available for homosexual sex continued to be collected until the end of the reign of Anastasius I in 518.
And as for pointing at Russia and noting that the goddless heathens hate the gays too, remember, Russians were western. They had the hateful baggage of Christianity weighing them down. China allowed homosexuality until they adopted western medical ideas that painted it as perverse. [cite](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism_and_LGBT_rights)
To claim that christianity has no place in the oppression of homosexuals is like claiming that god isn’t responsible for creating hell and torturing people forever, just ignorant.
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### Author:  [@JThunder](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JThunder)
#### Post date: [July 21, 2008, 1:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-blame-religion-for-alan-turings-prosecution/457223/22 "2008-07-21T13:25:12Z")
[QUOTE=Diogenes the Cynic]
His scientific arguments are not touchable. Craig certainly did not address them. He only whines that Dawkins arguments don’t prove there’s not a God…
[/QUOTE]
Considering that Dawkins’ goal was to prove that there is no God, I’d say that’s a valid goal on his part… and hardly “whining.”
As for his scientific arguments being non-touchable, let’s assume that to be true. How does this prove that Dawkins did not engage in extensive philosophizing? Quite simply, it doesn’t. Dawkins used science to inform his philosophy, period. Even if we assume his science to be unassailable, that says nothing about whether he engaged in philosophizing or not.
Finally, **tomndebb** is correct. The claim that we should only use science to examine the world is itself a _philosophical_ argument! (Does science work? Certainly. That’s not the issue at hand, though. The issue is whether it’s the only valid tool for examining the universe. That’s a philosophical position to take, not a scientific one.)
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### Author:  [@RickJay](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RickJay)
#### Post date: [July 21, 2008, 1:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-blame-religion-for-alan-turings-prosecution/457223/23 "2008-07-21T13:25:38Z")
[QUOTE=Der Trihs]
If every position is a philosophical position, then calling something a philosophical position or an argument a philosophical argument is pretty meaningless. “I’d rather be right than wrong” seems rather more basic than philosophy.
[/QUOTE]
But that’s what philosophy is, I’m afraid. Philosophy is the pursuit of further understanding. It’s a very generic word, but nonetheless, that is what it means.
Science is a branch of philosophy. Until relatively recently, the term “Natural philosophy” was a more commonly used term to describe the body of inquiry we now call “science.”
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### Author:  [@JThunder](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JThunder)
#### Post date: [July 21, 2008, 1:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-blame-religion-for-alan-turings-prosecution/457223/24 "2008-07-21T13:30:33Z")
[QUOTE=Stranger On A Train]
…but he’s frequently out to lunch when it comes to rationale arguements when it comes to his most aggressive screeds.
[/QUOTE]
Agreed. As atheist philosopher Michael Ruse said, “Dawkins is brazen in his ignorance of philosophy and theology (not to mention the history of science)…” (ISIS, December 2007).
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### Author:  [@JThunder](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JThunder)
#### Post date: [July 21, 2008, 1:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-blame-religion-for-alan-turings-prosecution/457223/25 "2008-07-21T13:39:56Z")
[QUOTE=Der Trihs]
If every position is a philosophical position…
[/QUOTE]
That’s not what he said, though.
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### Author:  [@Malthus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Malthus)
#### Post date: [July 21, 2008, 2:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-blame-religion-for-alan-turings-prosecution/457223/26 "2008-07-21T14:15:26Z")
[QUOTE=Lobohan]
Christianity in it’s various forms have certainly had a lot to do with the persecution of homosexuals. If you don’t understand that, then you simply haven’t been paying attention.
They call it abomination and made it a crime punishable by death. You don’t think that’s the sort of thing that creates a society that dislikes gays?
[From Wikipedia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homosexual)
And as for pointing at Russia and noting that the goddless heathens hate the gays too, remember, Russians were western. They had the hateful baggage of Christianity weighing them down. China allowed homosexuality until they adopted western medical ideas that painted it as perverse. [cite](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism_and_LGBT_rights)
To claim that christianity has no place in the oppression of homosexuals is like claiming that god isn’t responsible for creating hell and torturing people forever, just ignorant.
[/QUOTE]
However, the West it would seem contained cultures that persecuted homosexuality long before the advent of Christianity.
For example, the Germanic peoples of Europe were alleged by Tacitus to have executed homosexuals by sinking them in bogs, and it is thought that at least some of the so-called “bog people” were executed homosexuals (though there is little proof either way other than the bodies, other than the Roman’s writings - the Germanic people being pre-literate).
It is interesting to note that the Nazis justified their persecution of homosexuals in part on this historic source, rather than on the Biblical prohibition found in Leviticus. The greatest mass-murder of homosexuals in modern times in the West has little to do with Judeo-Christianity.
To my mind it is a cultural issue. Certainly Christianity has, at times, been extremely anti-gay. But prejudice against homosexuals varies considerably from time to time and place to place (Renessance Italy for example remained Christian but was much more gay-friendly); and it is just as likely to come out of secular culture as religious culture. To blame the whole thing on Christianity is to ignore history - one should remember that even in pagan Rome, there were strong elements of condemnation of homosexual practices: [Homosexuality in ancient Rome - Wikipedia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homosexuality_in_ancient_Rome#Moral_opinions)
Indeed, I’ve seen it claimed that Tacitus’ account of Germans murdering homosexuals was intended as a moral exemplar - as in “look how much better these Germans are”. This hardly accords with a pagan full-blown acceptance of homosexuality.
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### Author:  [@Diogenes\_the\_Cynic](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Diogenes_the_Cynic)
#### Post date: [July 21, 2008, 3:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-blame-religion-for-alan-turings-prosecution/457223/27 "2008-07-21T15:15:27Z")
[QUOTE=JThunder]
Considering that Dawkins’ goal was to prove that there is no God, I’d say that’s a valid goal on his part… and hardly “whining.”
[/quote]
This was not Dawkins’ goal, and it was nothing he tried to prove.
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### Author:  [@JThunder](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JThunder)
#### Post date: [July 21, 2008, 3:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-blame-religion-for-alan-turings-prosecution/457223/28 "2008-07-21T15:17:12Z")
[QUOTE=Colophon]
Seeing as “philosophy” means “the love of wisdom”, surely the only truly philosophical position is discarding religion in favour of science.
[/QUOTE]
That would be most unwise. It assumes (as Dawkins does) that science is the only legitimate lens through which the universe should be viewed.
Again, note that is NOT the same as saying “Science doesn’t work! It doesn’t!” Science is a wonderful tool for analyzing physical phenomena. It is not the proper tool to use in addressing philosophical arguments, such as the nature of morality or the question of God’s existence. Science may help inform those philosophical arguments, such as when teleological arguments are invoked for God’s existence or non-existence. By itself though, it is not an adequate tool.
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### Author:  [@Lobohan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lobohan)
#### Post date: [July 21, 2008, 3:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-blame-religion-for-alan-turings-prosecution/457223/29 "2008-07-21T15:33:28Z")
[QUOTE=Malthus]
However, the West it would seem contained cultures that persecuted homosexuality long before the advent of Christianity.
For example, the Germanic peoples of Europe were alleged by Tacitus to have executed homosexuals by sinking them in bogs, and it is thought that at least some of the so-called “bog people” were executed homosexuals (though there is little proof either way other than the bodies, other than the Roman’s writings - the Germanic people being pre-literate).
[/quote]
So then this isn’t a very solid thing to proclaim as a source for anti-gay feelings in Europe?
> [@](#):
>
> It is interesting to note that the Nazis justified their persecution of homosexuals in part on this historic source, rather than on the Biblical prohibition found in Leviticus. The greatest mass-murder of homosexuals in modern times in the West has little to do with Judeo-Christianity.
I hadn’t heard that. Do you have a cite for it? It was my understanding that Hitler found homosexuals as useless because they weren’t going to generate new Aryans. [Persecution of homosexuals in Nazi Germany - Wikipedia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_gay_men_in_Nazi_Germany_and_the_Holocaust)
In any case, even if the Germanic tribes were the quoted reason, the fact that Hitler, raised a Catholic and proclaiming Christianity until his death was brought up under Christianity’s hateful theology is certainly more likely to be the cause. The reason they could round up homosexuals and cart them off to the camps is because the Christian Germans were prejudiced against homosexuals.
> [@](#):
>
> To my mind it is a cultural issue. Certainly Christianity has, at times, been extremely anti-gay. But prejudice against homosexuals varies considerably from time to time and place to place (Renessance Italy for example remained Christian but was much more gay-friendly); and it is just as likely to come out of secular culture as religious culture. To blame the whole thing on Christianity is to ignore history - one should remember that even in pagan Rome, there were strong elements of condemnation of homosexual practices: [Homosexuality in ancient Rome - Wikipedia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homosexuality_in_ancient_Rome#Moral_opinions)
>
> Indeed, I’ve seen it claimed that Tacitus’ account of Germans murdering homosexuals was intended as a moral exemplar - as in “look how much better these Germans are”. This hardly accords with a pagan full-blown acceptance of homosexuality.
Less than full blown acceptance is better than the pathological hatred engendered by Christianity.
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### Author:  [@JThunder](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JThunder)
#### Post date: [July 21, 2008, 3:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-blame-religion-for-alan-turings-prosecution/457223/30 "2008-07-21T15:41:09Z")
[QUOTE=Diogenes the Cynic]
This was not Dawkins’ goal, and it was nothing he tried to prove.
[/QUOTE]
That is simply incorrect. On pages 157-158, Dawkins himself offers a six-point analysis that he describes as “[the central argument of my book](http://www.reasonablefaith.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=5493).” He ends this analysis by saying,
“Therefore, God almost certainly does not exist.”
In other words, Dawkins himself asserted that his central theme was an argument for God’s non-existence. He even went so far as to declare his logic to be “unanswerable.” Heck, the very title of his book (“The God Delusion”) should be a pretty big clue that he was arguing strongly for God’s non-existence.
And he did so poorly. I have to agree with evolutionary biologist H. Allen Orr (himself an atheist) when he says that “Dawkins uses any argument, however feeble, that seems to get him there and the merit of various arguments appears judged largely by where they lead.”
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### Author:  [@Diogenes\_the\_Cynic](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Diogenes_the_Cynic)
#### Post date: [July 21, 2008, 3:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-blame-religion-for-alan-turings-prosecution/457223/31 "2008-07-21T15:50:49Z")
I don’t think you’ve read the book because Dawkins admits that the non-existence of God is unprovable and does not even claim to be a hard atheist. What he says is that the existence of God is highly _improbable_ – just as improbable as fairies or the IPU – which is a much different thesis. He is completely unassailable in this regard.
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### Author:  [@Sinaijon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sinaijon)
#### Post date: [July 21, 2008, 4:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-blame-religion-for-alan-turings-prosecution/457223/32 "2008-07-21T16:04:10Z")
[QUOTE=Diogenes the Cynic]
does not even claim to be a hard atheist
[/QUOTE]
Right. So, despite the title of the book, and the point of the book (Improbability of God), he’s not a hard atheist? It’s not exactly hard to read between the lines.
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### Author:  [@Diogenes\_the\_Cynic](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Diogenes_the_Cynic)
#### Post date: [July 21, 2008, 4:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-blame-religion-for-alan-turings-prosecution/457223/33 "2008-07-21T16:14:20Z")
[QUOTE=Sinaijon]
Right. So, despite the title of the book, and the point of the book (Improbability of God), he’s not a hard atheist? It’s not exactly hard to read between the lines.
[/QUOTE]
He draws a sort of “scale” of belief within the book with absolute certainty of God’s existence on one end and certainty of non existence on the other. He places himself just short of absolute certainty of non-existence because, as a scientist, he can never say that anything certainly does not exist. His thesis, though, is that the chances of God’s existence are no greater than the existence of Zeus or the FSM, and that we would consider anyone who claimed to personally speak to Zeus or the FSM to be “deluded,” so why is it any different for those who claim to have a “personal relationship” with Jesus?
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### Author:  [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)
#### Post date: [July 21, 2008, 4:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-blame-religion-for-alan-turings-prosecution/457223/34 "2008-07-21T16:18:13Z")
[QUOTE=ITR champion]
This is untrue. Many countries and institutions that were militantly atheistic were also strongly opposed to homosexuality. The Soviet Union is one obvious example. It’s true that left-wing atheists in western society generally support gay rights today, but they only came to that position after Christians did. Given the evidence, it’s more likely that there would never have been a significant movement towards gay legalization without the influence of Christianity.
[/quote]
You might want to check with Christopher Marlowe on that assertion. In any case, besides the religious nature of Communism, do you deny that a thousand years and more of the Russian Orthodox Church had no influence? Are you also contending that a majority of Christians in the US and the world support gay rights? Consider the Anglicans, for instance.
> [@](#):
>
> However, this thread is about Turing’s case in particular. If the Church of England (or the Roman Catholic Church, or the Presbyterian Church, or the Lutheran Church, …) had gotten their way, Turing would not have been prosecuted. But he was prosecuted by England’s very secular government.
Do you think Turing was claiming that the church specifically targeted him? I don’t recall that. Do you have cites for mainstream CoE defending him? CoE maybe - they’ve got atheist ministers, after all. But I’d like to see some specific cites as to Catholic calls for legalization. I’d also like to see when this happened - was it before or after Turing’s case, which was in the early '50s.
None of that changes the inherently religious nature of the origin of bans on homosexuality.
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### Author:  [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)
#### Post date: [July 21, 2008, 4:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-blame-religion-for-alan-turings-prosecution/457223/35 "2008-07-21T16:30:55Z")
[QUOTE=Sinaijon]
Right. So, despite the title of the book, and the point of the book (Improbability of God), he’s not a hard atheist? It’s not exactly hard to read between the lines.
[/QUOTE]
What do you think it means to be a “hard” atheist? It does not mean a claim to proof or knowledge of God’s nonexistence - we can begin by asking “which God?”
Scientific theories don’t work on proof - they work on lack of falsifiability and greater and greater probability of their correctness as evidence is gathered and experiments are done. Dawkins is clearly analyzing the God problem in the same way.
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### Author:  [@Malthus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Malthus)
#### Post date: [July 21, 2008, 4:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-blame-religion-for-alan-turings-prosecution/457223/36 "2008-07-21T16:33:13Z")
[QUOTE=Lobohan]
So then this isn’t a very solid thing to proclaim as a source for anti-gay feelings in Europe?
[/quote]
Sure. It isn’t absolute proof that the Germanic peoples did it for that reason (absolute proof is hard to come by one way or the other), but it is certainly proof that, pre-Christianity, the notion of murder over accusations of homosexuality certainly existed - in either Germany or among the Romans.
[quote]
I hadn’t heard that. Do you have a cite for it? It was my understanding that Hitler found homosexuals as useless because they weren’t going to generate new Aryans. [Persecution of homosexuals in Nazi Germany - Wikipedia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_gay_men_in_Nazi_Germany_and_the_Holocaust)
Its a bit of an esoteric subject, but this article touches on it:
[http://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/article/8875](http://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/article/8875)
> [@](#):
>
> In any case, even if the Germanic tribes were the quoted reason, the fact that Hitler, raised a Catholic and proclaiming Christianity until his death was brought up under Christianity’s hateful theology is certainly more likely to be the cause. The reason they could round up homosexuals and cart them off to the camps is because the Christian Germans were prejudiced against homosexuals.
By that reasoning, everything he did could be blamed on Catholicism/Christianity.
The odd thing about Germany immediately pre-Nazi is that it was a culture fairly accepting of homosexuality - see Berlin in the 1920s.
I think a rather more nuanced view is that the same prejudices show up in religious and non-religious culture. Certainly, Christianity pushed European culture in the direction of hatred of homosexuality during the dark ages, and only in modern times have some forms of Christianity moved away from that; but it isn’t as if Christianity _invented_ such prejudice - it was there already, even in “enlightened” Rome, and among Rome’s barbarian neighbours.
> [@](#):
>
> Less than full blown acceptance is better than the pathological hatred engendered by Christianity.
I think that at certain times pre-Christian culture displayed pathological hatred. As in many other areas, Christianity isn’t an entirely alien break from pre-existing culture on this - it merely amplified an already existing trend, during the period when Roman civilization was collapsing.
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### Author:  [@Revenant\_Threshold](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Revenant_Threshold)
#### Post date: [July 21, 2008, 5:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-blame-religion-for-alan-turings-prosecution/457223/37 "2008-07-21T17:04:19Z")
[QUOTE=Sinaijon]
Right. So, despite the title of the book, and the point of the book (Improbability of God), he’s not a hard atheist? It’s not exactly hard to read between the lines.
[/QUOTE]
Improbability is not impossibility.
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### Author:  [@Sinaijon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sinaijon)
#### Post date: [July 21, 2008, 5:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-blame-religion-for-alan-turings-prosecution/457223/38 "2008-07-21T17:17:36Z")
[QUOTE=Diogenes the Cynic]
His thesis, though, is that the chances of God’s existence are no greater than the existence of Zeus or the FSM, and that we would consider anyone who claimed to personally speak to Zeus or the FSM to be “deluded,” so why is it any different for those who claim to have a “personal relationship” with Jesus?
[/QUOTE]
That’s exactly my point. It is his agenda that defines him. Theists, Agnostics, and even soft atheists don’t write entire books trying to prove that belief in God is delusional.
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### Author:  [@Diogenes\_the\_Cynic](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Diogenes_the_Cynic)
#### Post date: [July 21, 2008, 5:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-blame-religion-for-alan-turings-prosecution/457223/39 "2008-07-21T17:30:55Z")
[QUOTE=Sinaijon]
That’s exactly my point. It is his agenda that defines him. Theists, Agnostics, and even soft atheists don’t write entire books trying to prove that belief in God is delusional.
[/QUOTE]
That’s not precisely what Dawkins did. You should read the book before you make uninformed pronouncements about what its thesis is.
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### Author:  [@Sitnam](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sitnam)
#### Post date: [July 21, 2008, 5:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-blame-religion-for-alan-turings-prosecution/457223/40 "2008-07-21T17:49:29Z")
[QUOTE=Voyager]
Do you think Turing was claiming that the church specifically targeted him? I don’t recall that. Do you have cites for mainstream CoE defending him? CoE maybe - they’ve got atheist ministers, after all.
[/QUOTE]
What was that last part again?
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