Would Jesus speak out against homosexuality today?

[jakobk]

As far as I can see, aside from a discussion of peoples' feelings (which are fine - we all have feelings) the positions from Christians amount to

• It's wrong because that is God's judgment and he is the source of moral value
• It's wrong because it's not natural

On the first point atheists as I see it can just make two comments

• We don't believe in God so if we believe in moral values, God isn't the source
• This renders the question "even if God judges that X is wrong, is it in fact wrong?" incoherent which seems at least odd

Iirc, Plato asked the second question in some form like "is the holy holy because God loves it, or does God love it because it is holy?". The important moral questions are just trivial confusions if we take the view that God (in his revelation) is the only source of moral value. We never need (or are able to) ask "is this a good thing to do?" we just look up what God has revealed. I submit, that in the particular case of Christianity (and to be fair here, I think most religions) this can have some pretty strange if not repugnant results (the Amalekite genocide comes to mind).

On the first point, since I'm a humanist, I believe that humans are the source of moral values and have to struggle to understand good and evil themselves. Even if I were able to believe, then I'd have to decide in just what version of religious morality I believed. This of course is not a fatal flaw in the religious position but it puts the burden on the believer to explain just why they choose the religious morality they do and from that point any perceived moral flaws in their religious creed become pertinent. For instance, taking the Christian scriptures at their word, they dictate execution for a rebellious child. Now, I think that's abhorrent, why do Christians believe it's justified - well I guess I've answered that - because it's God's judgment.

The second point seems to me to be more straightforwardly flawed: natural and unnatural are not moral categories. Plenty of unnatural things are morally neutral.

Jakobk

Jakobk

[crazylegsmurphy]

As far as I can see, aside from a discussion of peoples' feelings (which are fine - we all have feelings) the positions from Christians amount to
* It's wrong because it's not natural

This is the one that drives me crazy.

Anyone who even spends 10 minutes looking into this can see that homosexuality is quite common in almost all species on this planet.

So, if such a large portion of the human, and animal kingdom show homosexual traits, then it would seem to me that either God really screwed up, someone is interpreting Gods word wrong, or someone fearing difference decided to make it a sin in an attempt to scare people into not being gay.

If as a Christian you believe being gay is a choice, then I want to know why you can't choose to be attracted to the same sex. If it's not a choice and they were born that way, then you have to answer the question why God would make someone with such a sinful trait. It seems like a mean and unfair thing to do, to single out certain people and inflict them with "the gay".

Come on Christians....you're gonna have to do better than that.

[Aaron]

What makes murder wrong? What makes forcing anothers will upon someone else wrong? Where do these moral views get such power? Are they know apriori?

[StillSearching]

What makes murder wrong? What makes forcing anothers will upon someone else wrong?

The identity of the judger.

Where do these moral views get such power?

From us.

Are they know apriori?

Nothing is known a priori.

[NH Baritone]

What makes murder wrong? What makes forcing anothers will upon someone else wrong? Where do these moral views get such power? Are they know apriori?

• Because murder and intimidation worsen life for all of us by making it more likely to happen to us and those we love.
• Because we empathetically know that the pain inflicted on another is subtracting from the joy in all of life.
• Because murder and intimidation diminish our ability to build community and trust.
• Because they increase the suffering in the world.

And inserting a deity into the discussion only diminishes the importance of these elements.

I swear, Aaron, you sometimes sound so supremely brainwashed that you have lost your capacity for empathy. Everything passes through your Christophilic filter, and only after that do you determine if someone is hurt or helped. Take a look around you without your God-goggles! People experience uplifting delight and oppressive distress regardless of whether they believe in God.

[Aaron]

Nothing is known a priori.

Really?

Baritone wouldn't agree...

Because murder and intimidation worsen life for all of us by making it more likely to happen to us and those we love.
Because we empathetically know that the pain inflicted on another is subtracting from the joy in all of life.
Because murder and intimidation diminish our ability to build community and trust.
Because they increase the suffering in the world.

Baritone appeals to something beyond what you suggest exists. Baritone has the ability to discriminate pain and suffering from joy and happiness. Where is this standard coming from? I'm asking you to step back and look at why a guy like Baritone gets so upset when he believes there is injustice being done. This passionate discrimination should never have come from a universe of accidents. If I want to force my evil intentions on another human being there is no reason why I shouldn't. There are no rules or higher powers stopping me. There is no such thing as karma. I can do whatever I want. If two people want to have homosexual relations then they should be able to. If I want to kill anther person then I should be able to. What is stopping me? NOTHING. If a young woman slips up and becomes pregnant then she should be able to get rid of her child. If an old person is taking up too much time and money then please by all means let them go. There is nothing that says it is wrong. And what is that, what is wrong and right? There is no such thing. We have the power to change what we think is acceptable. If my wife is becoming an old cranky hag then I have every right to leave her. After all, I have my happiness to look out for. Cause in the end that's all that matters right? Me. Can't you see that the world I just described is utterly disgusting, yet it seems sickeningly accurate. Doesn't it? This world is all there is. There is nothing known apriori. Please point out the flaws in my thinking, there are none. It is quite clear. You may call me sick but you know that I am right. There is no transcendent wrong or right. All there seems to be is this flimsy thing called what is culturally acceptable. And what a bunch of garbage that is.

If we are too appeal to the forces of right and wrong then I submit there must be a God. And he must be like the God of Christianity in his goodness and love and justice. There must be no more of this garbage: that a human being has some special sacredness that must be respected because it is the right thing to do, that’s such a load of CRAP! This only holds any value when God is the one that brings right and wrong into the world!

[NH Baritone]

Nothing is known a priori.

Really?

Baritone wouldn't agree...

Because murder and intimidation worsen life for all of us by making it more likely to happen to us and those we love.
Because we empathetically know that the pain inflicted on another is subtracting from the joy in all of life.
Because murder and intimidation diminish our ability to build community and trust.
Because they increase the suffering in the world.

Baritone appeals to something beyond what you suggest exists. Baritone has the ability to discriminate pain and suffering from joy and happiness. Where is this standard coming from?I'm asking you to step back and look at why a guy like Baritone gets so upset when he believes there is injustice being done. This passionate discrimination should never have come from a universe of accidents. If I want to force my evil intentions on another human being there is no reason why I shouldn't. There are no rules or higher powers stopping me. There is no such thing as karma. I can do whatever I want. If two people want to have homosexual relations then they should be able to. If I want to kill anther person then I should be able to. What is stopping me? NOTHING. If a young woman slips up and becomes pregnant then she should be able to get rid of her child. If an old person is taking up too much time and money then please by all means let them go. There is nothing that says it is wrong. And what is that, what is wrong and right? There is no such thing. We have the power to change what we think is acceptable. If my wife is becoming an old cranky hag then I have every right to leave her. After all, I have my happiness to look out for. Cause in the end that's all that matters right? Me. Can't you see that the world I just described is utterly disgusting, yet it seems sickeningly accurate. Doesn't it? This world is all there is. There is nothing known apriori. Please point out the flaws in my thinking, there are none. It is quite clear. You may call me sick but you know that I am right. There is no transcendent wrong or right. All there seems to be is this flimsy thing called what is culturally acceptable. And what a bunch of garbage that is.

If we are too appeal to the forces of right and wrong then I submit there must be a God. And he must be like the God of Christianity in his goodness and love and justice. There must be no more of this garbage: that a human being has some special sacredness that must be respected because it is the right thing to do, that’s such a load of CRAP! This only holds any value when God is the one that brings right and wrong into the world!

Do you want a response or are you simply going to emote into your keyboard?

[crazylegsmurphy]

Me. Can't you see that the world I just described is utterly disgusting, yet it seems sickeningly accurate. Doesn't it?

Aaron, you make about as much sense as an ice machine at the north pole.

You seem to be lacking the ability to grasp the most simple of concepts. I'm gonna try to put it to you like this however...

You and I get on a plane to go for a weekend of snowboarding. Half way to our destination our plane goes down and everyone is killed except us. We realize pretty quickly that we're in the middle of nowhere and so we're going to have to do whatever it takes to survive. We start out by assessing that we have enough food for two weeks. Then, we realize that the plane should work as a shelter for now.

We decide the best thing to do is to find something to make an S.O.S sign out of just in case they're looking for us, and so you go off to find as many bright orange flotation devices as you can. An hour or so later you come back and see me sitting there with my fat ass belly hanging out with empty food wrappers thrown on the ground around me. You let out a scream and ask my why I ate all the food. I smile and say, "Dude, I'm an Atheist, I don't have to answer to anyone, so I can do whatever I need to survive!"

You realize that I just cut your chances of survival by about 80% and you fight back the urge to kill me. Knowing you would have to answer to God if you did, you set out spelling out the letters. You realize that you can still hunt and so you allow yourself to calm down a bit. Walking back to the plane you're suddenly smashed in the face with a suitcase. "Ha Ha, you didn't even see that coming, you were just staring at the sky and I got you good!!"

As the blood runs down your chin you look up at me and grit your teeth. I skip off towards the plane singing, "I can do anything I want, nothing I do is wrong, I can do anything I want, my love for God, ain't strong!"

As the days pass I spend my time kicking you randomly, throwing the warm clothing over a cliff while yelling, "FLY TO MORDOR YOU BEAUTIFUL EAGLES!", picking my nose and flicking it at you, killing random animals and then tossing them into the river, and generally being a pest. One night while we sit around a fire, hungry, cold, and homesick I say, "So...I've been thinking, we don't really have any food and I'm starting to lose my love chub....I just wanted you to know that I may have to take your life in the next few days if I get hungry enough...heh........heh.."

Being the straw that broke the camels back you stand up and flip out, "What in the hell is wrong with you, ever since we crashed you have done whatever the hell you've wanted without any regard for me, or our situation!"

I lay back against the pile of empty suitcases and say, "Well, I remember you explaining on the C&A forums that I can do whatever the hell I want because there is no real right, or wrong. I realized that there is no reason why I should care what you think of me at all...if I get hungry I can kill you guilt free...so whatever man...why don't you get some shut eye?"

You sit there for a few hours thinking about what I have said. Do you choose to leave and brave it alone, do you choose to throw a burning log into the plane and let me burn, do you continue to pray and hope that I'll snap out of it and start helping out...is tonight the night that I'm going to kill you?

Suddenly you're startled by a large bang. You swing your head around to see me looking out of one of the windows in the twisted fuselage. With a big grin on my face you see me point at myself and mouth the words, "Atheist....anything I want!"

What do you do?

[tirtlegrrl]

aaron wrote: This only holds any value when God is the one that brings right and wrong into the world!

But we still have to figure out what that is...and so people still disagree on what GOD'S standard of right and wrong is. We still determine for ourselves what we think is right and wrong...we're just invoking a deity to back us up. Would you follow a deity who commanded you to kill your neighbor instead of love him? I think not...in choosing which deity to worship, you are also choosing a moral code and so the initiative still lies with you regardless of what God thinks. Until God shows up to judge the world we can't know absolutely how he really wants us to behave. When you choose Yahweh over Baal, you're deciding which version of human morality is better.

"Right" and "Wrong" are abstract concepts...not nuclear forces. Doing "right" means you have done what God wants you to, etc. So the standard is one that God will presumably enforce on Judgement Day, not a universal law like gravity. So God doesn't really "bring right and wrong" laws into the world in the sense that we are constrained by those laws like we are constrained by gravity. There are actions that are acceptable to God and are rewarded either here or in the afterlife, and actions that are inacceptable, but the world as we have it doesn't tell us which is which. What we do have is our own tendencies and the fact that human beings are pretty much wired the same way. Be nice to your neighbor, they'll be nice to you. Kill your neighbor, you're likely to be killed back or punished by sociey in some way. That doesn't really tell us which behaviors are more approved of by God. We have texts that SAY God wants us to keep the Sabbath or for the Israelites to kill the Amalekite children, but from this modern person's perspective it's just another text written by humans and should be treated with the same scrutiny due other religious texts.

So you might say that we have a moral law in the Bible, but there are other codes in other books and we still choose between them based on some standard that we ourselves possess. My own code tends to be one part Bible (I was raised Christian and my brain is still wired that way) and one part plain ol' empathy.

aaron wrote: If I want to force my evil intentions on another human being there is no reason why I shouldn't. There are no rules or higher powers stopping me. There is no such thing as karma. I can do whatever I want. If two people want to have homosexual relations then they should be able to. If I want to kill anther person then I should be able to.

This is true; God apparently doesn't stop people from killing each other. but those of us who prefer stability to anarchy have made laws to encourage you to be nice to your neighbor instead of killing him. There is karma; biological and societal karma. There might be karma from God too but what precisely it is has not been established.

As the fictional post above indicates, it is simply not true that all atheists are going to behave like psychopaths simply because they don't believe in a particular god. In fact, in that plane crash situation I would be afraid of a Christian too because he believes he is forgiven by god and will still go to heaven even if he succumbs to weakness and decides to roast and eat me. After all, if he gets rescued he can still do work for the Kingdom and I, the doubter, can only hold people back. In fact, I would be afraid of ANYBODY in that situation because people do crazy things when their bodies are starved for nutrients.

[mitchellmckain]

What makes murder wrong? What makes forcing anothers will upon someone else wrong? Where do these moral views get such power? Are they know apriori?

• Because murder and intimidation worsen life for all of us by making it more likely to happen to us and those we love.
• Because we empathetically know that the pain inflicted on another is subtracting from the joy in all of life.
• Because murder and intimidation diminish our ability to build community and trust.
• Because they increase the suffering in the world.

This looks like an excellent answer to me. I would quite agree. It is too bad that you did not stop there.

I am a vocal opponent of the argument from morality for the existence of God. I like to call it divine relativism and I think it just as morally impoverished as other sorts of moral relativism. I don't deny that there is much of morality that derives from the conventions of society and culture, for sometimes it is more important that a rule is imposed than what the rule is exactly (like what side of the road you drive on). But ulimately I think that there are elements of ethics and morality that come down to the necessary limits of logical consistency, which is what I see in these 4 points you have made in answer to Aaron's question.

If you had pointed out that Aaron's argument seems to be saying that morality can only based on a cowardly response to a big bad God, then I would have been right there with you cheering you on. But in your anger you make a excessively hostle response that is bit indiscriminant.

And inserting a deity into the discussion only diminishes the importance of these elements.

I do not follow your reasoning in this statement. Could the reason you conclude this be because you don't think that such considerations should not apply to people with a belief in God??? It seems to me that that the mention of God is simply irrelevant. But I can see how Aaron's response might prompt a little anger with the implicit bigotry of his argument that basically says that only those who believes as he believes can possibly be considered moral.

It seems to me that Aaron's response is rather puzzling. Is he saying that he himself would not care how murder and intimidation might affect those he loves, because -- i don't know -- perhaps he does not love anyone? Does his response mean that he feels no significant empathy for those on whom pain is inflicted? Is he saying that he sees no innate value in building community and trust, or that he sees no reason why the increase of suffering in the world would be any concern of his?

He seems to be saying that He can only care about such things if there is God out there to demand this of him, so the question we must ask is why? Why does he assume that his deficiency is everyone's and why does he assume that the cure that theism has provided him would work for everyone. Is he just saying that if you won't believe in his God then he won't believe in "your" morality? Is it really that childish? Or is it that he sees no significant consequences to human actions unless there is a big bad god out there threatening everyone with eternal suffering? The con here is that this is a useful tool which he can use to manipulate other people without limits - if you do things he doesn't like then his god will send you to hell, if you don't believe what he does then his god will send you to hell, if you don't let him have his way then his god will send you to hell. Hmmmm....

His argument that he does not see these reasons you give as being an effective deterents to human evil in the world shows an incredible lack of insight. Is he trying to immitate the faulty logic of anti-religious atheists when they say the same thing of religion? This would logically suggest that he believes that theism is the cure of all the worlds ills and that seems as stupid and ridiculous to me as the belief that religion is source of all evil.

We can admit to Aaron that no we do not like the world which he paints and says is so terrible. But he does not seem to understand the disgust that we feel upon looking at this other world he paints where people only do good out cowardice because they have some kind of gun pointed at their head by a big bad god.

I swear, Aaron, you sometimes sound so supremely brainwashed that you have lost your capacity for empathy. Everything passes through your Christophilic filter, and only after that do you determine if someone is hurt or helped. Take a look around you without your God-goggles!

Nevertheless, I find this kind of response to Aaron's post to be rather offensive.

People experience uplifting delight and oppressive distress regardless of whether they believe in God.

Now this is more to point.

[Aaron]

You seem to be lacking the ability to grasp the most simple of concepts. I'm gonna try to put it to you like this however...

No. I see what you're saying but that has nothing to do with what I'm talking about. There is no absolute right or wrong without God. That is what I am saying.

[NH Baritone]

You seem to be lacking the ability to grasp the most simple of concepts. I'm gonna try to put it to you like this however...

No. I see what you're saying but that has nothing to do with what I'm talking about. There is no absolute right or wrong without God. That is what I am saying.

There is no absolute right or wrong. Period.

[mitchellmckain]

You seem to be lacking the ability to grasp the most simple of concepts. I'm gonna try to put it to you like this however...

No. I see what you're saying but that has nothing to do with what I'm talking about. There is no absolute right or wrong without God. That is what I am saying.

Do we simply translate this to mean that this "God" idea of yours is your tool to force your ideas of right and wrong down other people's throat?

Take note that I believe in God, but I deny that God is anyone's tool to use in any way whatsoever.

There is no absolute right or wrong. Period.

Please! What does this mean you guys? What is this absolute right or wrong you guys dispute the "existence" of?

[Aaron]

It seems to me that Aaron's response is rather puzzling. Is he saying that he himself would not care how murder and intimidation might affect those he loves, because -- i don't know -- perhaps he does not love anyone? Does his response mean that he feels no significant empathy for those on whom pain is inflicted? Is he saying that he sees no innate value in building community and trust, or that he sees no reason why the increase of suffering in the world would be any concern of his?

sigh...

Can no one understand what I am trying to say? Is my use of hypothetical language that hard to understand? Apparently. Of course I am using extreme language, I am trying to get my point across. But I'm about to give up... My goal was to point out that right and wrong are as liable to change as the seasons, they have no foundation. Oh well..........

[tirtlegrrl]

aaron wrote: My goal was to point out that right and wrong are as liable to change as the seasons, they have no foundation. Oh well..........

And my goal is to point out that right and wrong don't change all that quickly, that our perceptions of right and wrong are based on nature and nurture, and that our perceptions of right and wrong change whether God exists or not. We don't really need ABSOLUTE morality; what is best is if everyone holds the same morality, and that morality happens to promote human welfare and everyone agrees about how such morality is to be enforced. An actual God isn't necessary per se.

I do agree with you, that there is no absolute right or wrong without some kind of ultimate arbiter. But you still can't escape the Euthypro Dilemma: Does God command it because it is good, or is it good because God commands it? In other words, does the buck actually stop with God? And how do we know which god the buck stops with? So the question of whether absolute right or wrong exists is useless from a practical standpoint since humans decide what is best for them to do all by themselves, which includes the effect of their belief in a deity. Your god says absolute right is X, mine says it's Z. Let's get ready to rumble!!!!!