Permanently Deleted
This is an asinine take on Christianity. What’s the point here?
The vast majority of Christians in the world don’t do this and don’t think like this. Hateful people are going to hate what is different no matter its form.
If you labeled this “Muslims openly behead gays because they believe gays would do the same” the post would be just as inane as it is in its current state.
Hate is hate.
The post would be more accurate if it was targeting Mormons, as they’re literally door knockers. However Christians do have a very well documented and prolific history of traveling and attempting to convert others. They are especially known for praying on the less fortunate and taking advantage of people who lack basic necessities You’re in denial if you’re attempting to claim otherwise.
praying
Pun intended? They prey on the vulnerable as they pray.
Lol a Freudian slip I assume. I corrected it
Yeah. I’m a very religious Christian and never knocked a door and I believe homosexuality isn’t a sin. And I know atheists or at least agnostics who actually believe that there’s an homosexual propaganda trying to “homosexualize” people.
Does your book not say that homosexuality is a sin?
It also says that mixing meat and dairy is a sin.
The Old Testament says a lot of things; there’s also a New Testament that focuses on Grace and that the most important thing of all is love.
Those who focus on one “sin” over the actual purpose and teachings are those who are focused on hate.
It sounds confusing. How can we be sure which rules are rules and which aren’t?
You choose which rules you want to believe in. Some sects follow all of them, some follow none, some follow all the hateful ones, some follow the basic moral tenets. If your sect doesn’t care about something, you just kinda pretend it isn’t a part of the Bible until it fades into the background. If your sect does care about something, you drag it up as often as you can in sermons to hammer home its importance.
If the Bible is the immutable word of your god, then what sense does it make to be able to cherry pick what parts to follow and what not to?
It’s not the Bible that’s the issue, but our current understanding of it.
The Bible is generally broken into the laws, the histories, the lamentations, and words of promise all in the Old Testament and then the words and actions of Jesus and His followers in the New Testament.
For Christians, the laws aren’t so much hard laws as much as they are “Tips for a Better Life, featuring the Prequel Stories”. The New Testament is what makes Christianity, and those texts primarily focus on the Grace of God, which is - hastily summarizing here - “All ‘sin’ requires the shedding blood, but I’ve already done that and forgiven everything, so just do your best”.
Different gospels say different things about the same events. Different letters are written to different ancient churches by different people about many different issues. Different texts and histories are included or discarded dependent upon how any particular sect of Christianity worships. The Bible is a collection of the words of people who are driven by God for their purpose at their time, and so it is always going to be subject to adaptable understandings.
All this is because mortal, imperfect people are in charge of interpreting, translating, and communicating the words of an entity that “exists” outside the confines of matter, energy, space, or time. As time continues, our understanding of the word adapts and changes.
The Bible isn’t the immutable word of God. The Word of God is Jesus-Christ. That’s what taught Christianity for 19 centuries before American evangelicalism invented the heresy of biblical inerrancy.
Biblical literalism is an invention of 20th century evangelicalism. It’s not because you find one or two verses which seem to condemn something that this thing should be condemned forever; and in the case of homosexuality, the verses used by some Christians to condemn homosexuality aren’t clear at all. Thus homophobic Christian bigots condemn homosexuality not because they’re Christians, but because they’re bigots.
It really doesn’t. English translations of it do, but in the Greek, it pointedly avoids using the words for homosexuality.
The one exception is Romans 1, but it’s a rhetorical argument against the legalism of the Jewish Christians, not against homosexuality.
That’s not quite correct. If we look at 1 Corinthians 6:9 (not nice) and the commentaries around the words to explain it, we can find things like the below. Summary: not just being gay but even being effeminate. Additionally, I’ve never heard a single sermon where they were saying the Greek doesn’t actually mean that. They all very much meant it.
Reading exercise if anyone likes walls of text.
English amplified:
9Do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit or have any share in the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived; neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor (perversely) effeminate, nor homosexuals, 10nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers [whose words are used as weapons to abuse, insult, humiliate, intimidate, or slander], nor swindlers will inherit or have any share in the kingdom of God.
Here’s one commentary: https://gospelreformation.net/pauls-understanding-of-sexuality/
Paul’s Meaning in 1 Corinthians 6:9 First, the two words malakoi and arsenokoitai describe individuals who are engaged in activity that Paul regards to be sin. We see this point in at least two ways. First, these two words fall in a much longer list in 1 Cor 6:9-10. Paul insists that persons whose lives are characterized by these actions “will [not] inherit the kingdom of God” (1 Cor 6:10). There is considerable overlap between this list and the list of 1 Cor 5:11, which describes individuals who are subject to the discipline of the church. Second, the word arsenokoitai appears in one other place in the New Testament, 1 Tim 1:10. In the context of Paul’s argument of 1 Tim 1:10, this word describes a violation of the moral law of God (“the law is not laid down for the just but for the lawless and disobedient, for … men who practice homosexuality,” 1 Tim 1:9,10 [ESV]). These two words, then, describe activities that are violations of the law of God, that exclude one from the Kingdom, and that are subject to the church’s discipline. Paul understands these two words to describe sin.
Second, Paul understands these two words to describe a particular kind of sexualsin. These two words follow three words, two of which denote immoral sexual offenders (“the sexually immoral … adulterers” [ESV]). The word arsenokoitai follows “the sexual immoral” in Paul’s catalog of sins against the Decalogue in 1 Tim 1:10. The context in which the terms malakoi and arsenokoitai appear together, then, shows that these terms refer to a specific type of sin against the seventh commandment.
Third, these two terms together capture the range of male same-sex activity. Some have argued that Paul is only condemning a particular or narrow kind of homosexual behavior, such as prostitution, pederasty, or rape. On this reading, there is space in Paul’s ethic for non-exploitative homosexual activity between two consenting adults. This view runs aground on Paul’s argument in Rom 1:18-31 and it finds no support from 1 Cor 6:9. For one thing, in Paul’s day, the term malakos had already acquired a technical meaning when it was used in sexual contexts.[2] It denoted the passive partner in male same-sex activity.[3] The term arsenokoitai makes the point particularly clearly. As commentaries frequently note, Paul is the first Greek writer who appears to have used this term. It is a compound formed from two nouns meaning “man” and “bed.” Its origins are not difficult to discover. These two terms appear together in LXX Lev 18:22 and 20:13.[4] In fact, in Lev 20:13 the two component parts of Paul’s new word stand side by side. Both these passages in Leviticus roundly and categorically condemn same-sex activity. This background is important to understand what Paul means by the term arsenokoitai. This word must refer to a wide range of male same-sex activity and may properly be translated “bedders of males, those [men] who take [other] males to bed,” “men who sleep or lie with males.”[5] Since it is paired with the word malakoi, the word arsenokoitai may particularly denote the active partner in male same-sex activity. The two terms, malakoi and arsenokoitai, then, capture, in unqualified and comprehensive fashion, male same-sex activity.
Fourth, Paul is concerned to address sinful sexual behavior in these two terms, but not only such behavior. In Paul’s day, the term malakoi could denote more than just sexual activity. Such persons sometimes “intentionally engage[d] in a process of feminization to erase further their masculine appearance and manner.”[6] That is to say, the word malakos was used to describe “a man who is trying to be a woman,” a man “who significantly blur[s] gender distinctions.”[7] To be sure, Paul’s primary concern in 1 Cor 6:9 is with same-sex behavior. But the apostle is also aware that, in the social context of which he and his readers were part, those who committed themselves to this lifestyle not infrequently blurred the culturally discernible lines between a man and a woman.[8] It is in this sense that one can appreciate the translation “effeminate” for malakoi, even if one opts for another English word that better captures the sense of the Greek word in the context of Paul’s argument.
I think we get the point though. There’s more.
Those are all really interesting theories, but the simple matter is that if it was referencing homosexuality, there were plenty of appropriate words Paul could have used.
Specifically, erastes and eromenos.
The words Paul used certainly have sexual connotations, but if he meant gay sex, plenty of words already existed for it.
There’s a ton of theories, but no one “knows” exactly what Paul means here. It’s a strange word with almost no parallels anywhere else in history.
Why would you trust the Greek translation on that topic? They had a clear bias on the subject that would’ve influenced word choice.
The New Testament was written in Greek.
The only Hebrew verses that discuss homosexuality are even more vague and difficult to translate.
I’m not trying to convert you or persuade you the Bible is actually pretty cool. I’m just telling you what’s in it.
The point is projection.
I argue that you are making an asinine general assumption.
The American evangelicals that are screaming about gays and abortions do not represent all Christians. Just as I wouldn’t want everyone outside of the US to judge me by the actions of one American like Donald Trump, it is not right to assume Christian = hateful.
This post serves no purpose. There are better ways to get your fake internet points.
Proof is in the pudding. Christians literally go door to door trying to covert people. They want to covert people.
But gay or trans people are not out trying to convert others to being gay or trans. Accepting people as gay or trans is just like accepting people as left handed. But some/many Christians think they want to convert people because of projection, see post.
Christians literally go door to door trying to covert people.
That’s the problematic statement. You use the word “Christians” to refer to certain American denominations that represent a small fraction of Christians globally. The funny thing is, those denominations were seen by most people in my native country (about 90% Christian population when I was growing up) as heretic sects that should be avoided. I believe that was (and probably still is) the case for most Orthodox or Catholic Christians (who are the vast majority of Christians outside of the US).
The door to door thing might be reserved to some sects, and is absolutely a modern invention.
What isn’t is the crusades, where Christianity literally waged war on the world to try and violently convert as many people to it as possible, and once they had enough power from doing that, white and Christian supremacist colonial and imperial missionary work took over, the results of which are ongoing and still felt around the world today (for example and on topic, anti gay attitudes and legislation imposed by colonisers and imperialists on those they were forcing to convert, that still prevail).
And that’s without even going in to what the church does and has done to its own people.
So lets not pretend like Christianity is this innocent little lamb that is being wrongly targeted as a dangerous and violent idea that at it’s very basis is about converting as many people to it as possible, kind of like a cancer.
Can you be a good Christian individually? Sure. Can organised and institutionalised religion be excused for the atrocities it was and still is responsible for (where do you think all the riches of the Vatican come from? God?)? Absolutely not, and by defending it, rather than calling out its faults, you are upholding the status quo instead of investing your energy in to bettering the religion you’re obviously so attached to.
The problem is that all these other Christians spoke out against and fought against this hate. It happens once in awhile, sure, but mostly it is crickets.
That’s less a Christian issue and more a people issue.
“Most people” aren’t the type to speak up. Most people don’t want a lot of attention brought onto them. Most people just want to live their lives, and so you won’t see “most people” doing anything in particular.
No matter what it is, there will be a small populace who are vocal and “most people” will quietly nod or shake their heads. Take even Lemmy. Most people on Lemmy don’t post or even comment. Most users lurk and then some of them might upvote or downvote.
I am willing to speak up and take the brunt of whatever comes to me. Most people, however, are not. A vocal minority are out there screaming hatred, but most people, from all walks of life, are just trying to live and be good to each other.
Strange we rarely hear from the vast majority or least the vast majority doesn’t speak out to condemn their hateful brothers and sister, in fact I’ve yet to meet one of these open and accepting Christians in my 44 years on this earth and I live in a heavily populated christian city.
The vast majority rarely speak on anything.
I’m sorry you’ve never met one of these “open and accepting” Christians. I haven’t met someone who’s been to the IST, but I know people have been there. I think it would be nice if you open your mind to the idea that there are people that exist that you’ve not met.
I’m sure they exist, My point was they aren’t the majority. I’ve met plenty of nice people and nice Christians, My experience with Christians as a majority is they aren’t open or accepting,
Again, I’m sorry that this has been your experience. This hasn’t been mine.
I came to Christianity at an age when most people leave religion. I went from having nothing and no one to having a steady family who love and support me and give me others to love and support in kind. My church family is open and welcoming. We just removed a minister who began an opening prayer admonishing gays because when he was told “we don’t do that here” he got mad about it.
I wholly recognize that there is a set of people who scream about un-Christian things in the name of Christianity, but I reject the notion that these people are representative of the majority of Christians.
Cool cool, a few bad apples and all that. I’ll accept that you personally are surrounded by apple pie christians who call their mother every week. Whole lotta atheists like this as well. What is the net benefit of teaching children lies and magical thinking? What is the benefit of eschewing logic and reason? Can we all just be decent people minus magical sky fairy beliefs? Also the bible is evil as fuck. Im assuming you gloss over the genocide, murder, rape, slavery, torture, treating women as livestock that is promoted, perpetrated by, or at least accepted by your god?
Whoo boy…
There is a benefit in considering that all beings have more to us than dust and electricity. There is nothing wrong with teaching spirituality. It can provide comfort, camaraderie, strength, or just peace.
Whether you find peace in the chanting and meditation that can help you possibly achieve nirvana, or you find strength praying in a specific direction several times a day to show your worthiness, there is value in faith and spirituality.
There is absolutely nothing that prevents any spiritual person from learning, understanding, or advocating the sciences.
Looking at the Genesis of the Abrahamic religions, no rational person will say that the “world” and everything in it was created in a 7-day period of time when that which we currently use to measure time wasn’t even part of the structure used to describe the creation of the world. The “day” and “night” were separated before the sun and moon were “created”, so clearly the world wasn’t created in 167 hours. And yet, we can still appreciate what is intended by the scripture without running around and insisting on an impractical interpretation of a text.
You don’t like the Bible? You do you. The Bible says a lot of things. It describes the histories of the things people did, the good, the bad, and the ugly; it also teaches hope and love. It’s a complex set of texts and there’s a reason it’s been analyzed for so many centuries.
It’s great that you don’t need anything other than yourself to drag you out of times of despair. It’s great that you’ve naturally learned to be nice to everyone and treat animals and the earth well. Not everyone is like you, however. Some of us need a little help, and some of us get that help from our spirituality.
My grandmother wasn’t a Christian, and when she was dying, she said she was going to the Ancestors, and she would live on in the winds of the universe. I love this, and I love just thinking about this and thinking that Nana is still within me always in this way. Spirituality has a place. If it’s not for you, it’s not for you, but for some of us, it’s about moving forward with the good that can come out of it.
I went from having nothing and no one to having a steady family who love and support me
So. Let me tell you a little not-so-secret. That is precisely how I used to get people to convert to Mormonism, when I was a Mormon missionary. The people most vulnerable to conversion were people that were in the middle of shitty life circumstances, and had no social support network. We would love-carpet-bomb them shit out of them; we would talk to them several times a week, we would make sure that member in the local ward–which is the basic congregation for Mormons is called–reached out to them, invite them to church activities to meet people, and would inundate them with religious nonsense. All the while, we were implying that if they were just willing to believe the nonsense, then this large, ready-made family-slash-social-support-network could be theirs. But if they didn’t convert, we were going to leave them, and they’d be alone again. Unsurprisingly, this didn’t work for shit with people that had large networks and strong families, because they didn’t have any need for what we could offer. The people without support would mistake the good feelings about the community for being god telling them that the religious nonsense was true.
And it goes the other way too; the Mormon church keeps people so busy doing church things that Mormons probably won’t have any non-Mormon confidants. That, in turn, makes leaving very, very hard.
So, ask yourself, and be honest: would you have converted if you had had strong friends that already loved and supported you? If you had met similarly supportive people that were Muslim, Jewish, or members of the Satanic Temple (and my local TST groups has some pretty great people that are genuinely kind, loving, and open), would you have chosen to convert to Christianity?
Maybe if more good people like yourself spoke out against the hateful ones Christianity would attract more people.
“Do you have a moment to talk about our lord and savior, Gaysus Bi-st?”
Gaysus fucking Bi-st that’s a good one!
One day, 2 Church persons tried to talk to me about Jesus-guy, I bet them in and talked about 2 hours about free choice, real science and evolution. Tried to “discuss” it like they do it, just don’t let other arguments be valid and come back to the same shit again and again. I didn’t let them go until they almost panicked. Never heard from them again. Btw they didn’t touch their tea, hmm. I really tried to convert them to self-thinking, I still hope, something stays with them.
That doesn’t work, unfortunately. What tends to work is epistemology, where you try to get at how they know what they “know”, and the roots of their belief. It also helps if you really develop a rapport with someone, are genuinely empathetic, and aren’t asking obviously leading questions; you want to help someone begin to question their own beliefs, rather than telling them to justify their beliefs to you, if that makes sense.
Really deconverting someone can take a long time.
Check out Anthony Magnabosco some time; he’s got a YouTube channel dedicated to street epistemology.
There’s also the problem of some religious conservatives not realizing that straight people exist.
According to conservative psychologists like Paul Cameron or James Dobson, gay sex is a huge “temptation” that people must learn to resist; they worry that it would be the downfall of society if more people chose to succumb to that temptation. They might blame that temptation on Satan directly, or on LGBT+ propagandists, or liberalism; but they very much seem to believe that anyone could choose to be gay.
Sorry, no, that’s not how straight people work.
If you experience gay sex as a strong temptation, you’re just not straight. That’s okay! Quite a lot of people are straight, and are just not interested in having gay sex. If all the people who are “tempted” to have gay sex went and did so, there would still be lots of straight people left having lots of straight sex.
The odd part is that these conservative psychologists then teach this doctrine of “gay sex is a strong temptation for everyone” to an audience composed of mostly straight people.
Its always just projection
The mental model you guys are working off of is completely wrong.
Not much direct research has been done, but the impression I get is that a surprising amount of the post-2016 right aren’t lifelong Christians (or even Christians at all even now, belonging to factions such as libertarianism which isn’t tied to religion at all), and aren’t even lifelong conservatives. A lot of them vocally supported Obama in 2008 if they’re that old. the support for gay marriage among Republicans has approached 50%, which is a massive increase over the previous support near 20%. Moreover, you may be surprised to find that not everyone who is concerned about what’s going on is a conservative or a republican either. Protecting children from people who hope to cause them harm is a universal human value, and likely is derived from instincts far before that.
It’s really important to understand the recent history of conservatism, because it’s a rapidly changing landscape. On one hand, you have traditional liberals who are now considered conservative for not rushing headlong enough into the latest thing, and on the other hand you have openly far right factions and they aren’t hiding their open contempt for other factions for not being extreme enough, and they aren’t hiding their opinions on things like women, black people, and jews. In that respect, I see a lot of people working off a playbook that’s out of date and coming to wildly wrong conclusions on a wide variety of topics from that false model. After the Republicans got crushed in 2008 they had to go back to the chalkboard and find new strategies that would work in a new world. People made fun of some of the attempts such as the tea party, but that resulted in a lot of new ideas and new blood coming into the party. Many other conservative parties around the world needed to do the same thing because they faced similar defeats. As a result, around the world parties that were considered completely outside the overton window for being conservative are gaining ground. AFD in Germany, Fratelli d’Italia in Italy, and even the far right populist PPC got more votes than the green party in Canada in the recent election, and in the next election the Conservatives are on track to win a massive majority. This isn’t happening because they’re telling the same stories they were 15 years ago, it’s happening because they’re finding new stories to tell while their left-wing opponents are just quadrupling down on the stories they told 15 years ago that don’t represent a reality in 2024. Conservatism isn’t just Christianity therefore, it’s a much flatter, much wider thing including a lot of the cultural consensus from 15 years ago and a lot of stuff that would be considered literally unspeakable 15 years ago.
If you want to blame someone for making people think they’re trying to make kids gay or trans, you should probably blame all the idiots who were recorded saying they wanted to make kids gay or trans. You should blame people who use the phrase “not so secret gay agenda” positively in describing what they’re doing in their work on kids shows. You should blame the people who put out musical numbers singing “We’ll convert your children!”. As well, you should blame the people who have decided that starting to transition children in schools while explicitly keeping it secret from parents is a hill they want to die on. In some of the cases I’m referring to they claim to be just joking, but it is the contemporary left that drew the line in the sand that if you joke about anything you’re advocating for the most extreme thing you can imagine with respect to that thing. If you care deeply about your kids, and someone is “joking” about doing something you find unspeakable to your kids, why take a chance and why not just believe them?
In the 1970s and 1980s, there was something called the “Satanic Panic”. The police questioned kids about certain things and eventually they got stories from these kids that led to the arrest of dozens of people. The problem at that time is it was all false. One kid claimed the cultists killed and ate and forced him to eat his friend (who was very much alive). Police scoured airports looking for airplanes that could land secretly in a residential neighborhood, fly a child to mexico to be molested, then returned to the same neighborhood in the same day. Another kid spoke of a complex series of tunnels under a town that the cultists used for their satanic rituals, and when it was checked there were no tunnels. In the end, it turned out that all the people accused ended up being innocent, and what we learned from that is that we need to be very careful when trying to figure stuff out from kids because they want to tell us things we want to hear. Today there’s a completely different method of questioning children in criminal cases exactly because we know kids are impressionable and we need to be careful about finding the truth and not just the answers that are convenient to us. In the same way, to be responsible we need to be extremely careful about giving kids drugs or surgery that permanently modify the path of their bodies solely because they tell us they are something.
Compare the way “trans kids” are being treated by politicans and the media, and even if you assume good faith and that it isn’t intentional, it’s impossible to see the behavior as anything but manipulative and dangerous from a completely secular viewpoint. Telling kids that if they assume a certain characteristics that they’re so loved and so wanted and so supported and they’re being mistreated by everyone around them that just doesn’t know how special they are and giving the same message all the time – of course a bunch of kids will go “oh, well if that’s what the important adults want me to be then that’s what I’ll be”.
Now, one important piece of the puzzle with respect to “trans kids” is that someone who questions their sexuality isn’t going to ask anyone to surgically alter their bodies, which would be why that piece of the puzzle is particularly contentious.
Different studies of kids trans kids showed that between 60 and over 90% of kids who expressed confusion about their gender identity ended up the gender identity of their birth after 18 without treatment. If nothing else, that should raise serious questions about whether treatment of any kind before the age of 18 is ethical, considering you could potentially end up causing needless harm to 9 kids for every 1 kid you help. There is certainly a lot of research disputing these findings, and in fact the number of articles saying “nuh uh” absolutely dwarfs the actual claims, but as a politically charged issue there’s an obvious concern about politically induced bias here, which makes me want to believe the older studies from before this was such a front and center topic. You can disagree, but I’m sure my skepticism of “new study shows everything political movement claims is true” is not so unreasonable. If I’m not going to believe creationists when they spit out a flood of studies ‘proving’ the world is only 8000 years old, why would I believe trans youth ideologues when they spit out a flood of studies seemingly solely in response to being challenged politically?
There has been an explosion in the number of kids identifying as trans. Now, it could be that we’re just living in the gayest, transest time in the history of the world, but when we’re dealing with numbers increasing by many orders of magnitude, it’s equally possible that there’s an element of social contaigen. Some people might claim that social contaigen is absurd and wouldn’t cause people to do something as extreme as this. The thing is, it is uncontroversial that there is an element of social contaigen in cutting, anorexia and suicide which are both purely harmful, and recreational drug use which can be quite harmful.
Given the basis of the Hippocratic oath, medicine should be politically Conservative but practically conservative and be very careful about implementing new treatments, particularly on a very large scale, particularly when the effects of those treatments are so overwhelmingly dire. Fundamentally modifying and fundamentally damaging sex organs and primary and secondary sexual characteristics is something we have to be very careful about doing and nobody should be jumping for joy at the idea that it’s something that we have to do, in the same way that no one should be jumping for joy at the idea that they should need an organ transplant.
Another important thing to remember is that there is a solid history in the 20th century of medical ideologies or technologies that become wildly popular and end up proving to be somewhat evil. Tommy Douglas, the founder of Canadian healthcare, was a vocal proponent of eugenics. The prefrontal lobotomy eventually ended up coming to be considered an example of barbarism but when it was first invented was considered a miracle cure. Prior to the 20th century, cocaine was considered so fantastic that Sigmund Freud himself wrote a book called on cocaine which was about how much he thought cocaine was a beneficial drug. All of these are cautionary tales about simply accepting the current orthodoxy on a current medical treatment.
You’ll note that none of these are religious arguments. You don’t need to believe in any God to look at the above. You can be a hard atheist and look at the facts above and be concerned because you don’t want people hurting your kids for their political ideology. If you think that it’s solely due to christianity that someone would look at the above and be concerned then you’re fundamentally misunderstanding people around you.
Now to give everything a broad view, just because something ends up being bad in the way that it’s implemented doesn’t necessarily mean that it is entirely bad. Eugenics taken to it it’s extremes horrible and immoral, but some individuals with major genetic diseases choose independently not to have kids because of the risks involved. Prefrontal lobotomies as a carry-all for anything that could heal you is obviously absolutely horrific and terrible, but it is still very occasionally used for very specific situations. I believe that even cocaine has legitimate medical applications, and if it doesn’t then certainly it’s cousin opiates or something that are quite dangerous and should not be thrown around thoughtlessly but have incredible levels of therapeutic benefit. I would even go so far as to say that there may be situations where very early intervention in transgender cases could be tremendously beneficial, but I think that the data is clearly showing you have to be very careful and being a political topic the way it is I don’t think it’s being treated very carefully.
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/fact-sheet/changing-attitudes-on-gay-marriage/
[2] https://ballotpedia.org/Pivot_Counties:_The_counties_that_voted_Obama-Obama-Trump_from_2008-2016
[6] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/22/us/gender-identity-students-parents.html
[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satanic_panic
[8] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/31/us/satanic-panic.html
[9] https://www.snopes.com/news/2017/06/23/satanic-panic/
[10] https://twitter.com/theJagmeetSingh/status/1753190259343708432
[12] http://www.sexologytoday.org/2016/01/do-trans-kids-stay-trans-when-they-grow_99.html
[13] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21216800/
[14] https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/958742?form=fpf
[15] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK207262/
[16] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0004867413502092
[17] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23387399/
[18] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3926100/
[19] https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/hippocratic-oath-today/
[20] https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/tommy-douglas-and-eugenics
[21] https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-55854145
[22] https://www.vice.com/en/article/payngv/how-cocaine-influenced-the-work-of-sigmund-freud
I’m only skimming that text dump.
They can’t do anti-gay as much any more because too many of their relatives and too many people in general are gay. So it’s just slipped over to trans like I said “Now it’s not just gay, it’s trans too”. I thought I said that clearly enough, but take one of those sections and put in trans. Same thing.
The rest I’m not touching. Not the point I wanted to make and many other red flags. Point here is projection, projection, projection.
“didn’t read here’s a nitpick”
lol about the response I expected.
“Here’s one misinterpreted item from your post and a whole bunch of unrelated rantings, oh you only corrected the part about the post? nOt fAiR”. Looks like I made the right call. Ciao.
“I nitpicked a word you used, therefore not just refuting your entire post that I didn’t read, but you as a human being. What, you pointed out my behavior? Clearly it only proves that my refutation of you as a human being is wholly correct.”
Meh, you can’t disregard the current medical and scientific consensus because it may turn out to be wrong in the future. This is the same thing the pro-fossil-fuel and tobacco organizations used to do. You work with the best information you’ve got.
Even if gayness and trans-ness was a social contagion (I don’t think it is), what would be wrong with that? The argument seems to be implying that being gay or trans is bad.
Do you mean to suggest that linking gender-affirming care to satanism/pedophilia, eugenics and hard drug use, in one disjointed pseudo-religious rant is indicative of an agenda? I am shocked!!
I love how you basically state “here’s what I believe!” and then try to deflect all criticism by saying you don’t trust medical studies from the past 30 years.
If you are not receptive to new information, it seems to me that is the definition of blind belief and brainwashing.
Your “multiple studies of kids showing that they revert naturally before the age of 18” were all conducted in the 70’s dude. Non acceptance from a community is very good at creating closeted individuals. We do what we do to try and be happy, if we are routinely physically and socially punished for being who we are we do revert to walking the path of least resistance to survive but it is a hard and miserable path. Here’s a study more updated that flips numbers on it’s head. Around 95 percent of trans kids who socially transition these days are consistent in their identities over the 5 years of the study. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9936352/#:~:text=We found that an average,to their binary transgender identity.
Also you’re treating this healthcare as experimental and new but it’s decently far along. Puberty blockers are the newest addition to the tool kit but they were approved for use after extensive research trials over 30 years ago and principles of their safety of use were based on observations from naturally stalled puberties and endocrinology data of hormonal insensitivity disorders…and we’ve been using them for trans kids pretty much right from the beginning so the first paitents are in their 40’s now. There is data that the puberty blocker process is imperfect but like any medical advancement there are nessisary fine tunings of treatment. It’s not a set it and forget it situation. We know the endocrinologist check ins and scans need to keep coming and the risk assessment for a paused puberty needs to be a carefully routinely updated thing with suspension of treatment being a viable option if things don’t go well…but removing the option from the medical feild entirely and refusing to keep working to develop its safety efficacy further and isn’t going to make overall treatment outcomes better for patients.
This lie that doctors are slapdash and haphazard in trans healthcare is nothing but fabrication. It requires a panel of a psychologist, social worker, pediatrician and endocrinologist the child and the child’s legal guardians to sign off on any medical interventions and they have to do their research first to meet a determined burden of proof that interventions are nessisary and they make it a pretty high bar… At 16 there’s very limited number of things available and any surgeries made available are also available to cis kids. If a 16 year old teen wants a breast reduction it doesn’t matter if their trans or not they just need parental approval. Hormonal transition requires a lot more sign off than that. If a parent doesn’t sign off then the kid can’t make their own medical choices until after 18. The system is designed to mitigate risks and yes a lot of the outcomes for trans paitents are markedly better when they can more effortlessly pass as their gender because you avoid a lot of social shunning and hate when your transness is invisible to the public.
Our society creates a catch 22 senario for trans people where segements of society demand that a person isn’t actually a viable member of their gender unless they can show medical documentation they’ve transitioned… And they treat non-binary trans masc and trans femme non medical coping strategies as being less legitimate. If you are trying to navigate a situation where you require coping strategies to deal with experiencing daily body horror and you deny people the use of mental only coping mechanisms they are not going to veiw mental only coping mechanisms a reasonable solve. Telling us that one option to deal with our problems is self harm and then making fun of or dismissing the other as “social contagion” and treating us as a different kind of problem is basically just telling us that you think permanent misery should be our only option.
If you REALLY want to lessen the pressures on trans people to medically transition your move is not to clamp down on medical options… It’s to make non-binary physical presentations and safe rewarding social transitions a more viable option by offering greater levels of social acceptance. The whole “Well I will never accept you as a ____. Because physically you are not” behavior does nothing but add fuel to a dysphoria and injure a trans person’s ability to exist comfortably in a social sphere. Cis people make an equal fuss about pronouns as they do surgeries. There’s zero empathy. Faced with that we are just going to try harder to physically hide from you so you can’t visually pick us out of a crowd using whatever means we have.
Social contagion and the likes of Abagail Shrier is a discredited myth. At best the very shallow end of non-binary transness might be represented but that is basically "I don’t like it when people make a big assumptions of me based around my sexual characteristics so please don’t " which is kind of just a reasonable response to sexism. The actual euphoria /dysphoria body and culture related stuff isn’t something you are going to catch… And framing medical transition in terms of self harm is gross. What people feel and ultimately choose to do with their bodies is something individually very cautiously considered. Treating the matter as though they are defacing a public owned good or resource is just projection. Your values regarding your sexual organs and physical characteristics are not universal. You do not have to live their lives, their choices are not your business so please stay in your lane.
Lastly, people tell trans kids they are loved because as people we are routinely framed by hostile cis people as a logistical problem. Telling kids they are a problem tends to drive them inside themselves and creates a sense of isolation. A lot of kids growing up, not just trans kids already generally think that people won’t miss them if they just disappear because they are a burden or a problem. The youngest trans kid I know right now is seven… And they have already had peers their age tell them to their face that they should kill themself. When I was growing up the “weird kid” I wanted to die but I knew my family wouldn’t recover from that so I didn’t. It isn’t that kids are doing this to be lavished with attention. I can tell you that the experience of myself and every trans person I know is that people making any kind of big deal about us based on our genders positive or negative just makes you feel like an outsider. People harping on about how “strong” you are for being visible generally just comes across as pulling more attention to things we just want people to treat as so normal it’s beneath commentary. That young trans person I know today struggles because they are closeted at school not wanting to stick out from the crowd because they fear the potential unwanted fuss and can only be themselves at home. I am partially closeted at work partially because it will negatively impact my hiring chances between gigs and partially because onboarding new people into understanding non-binary transness and using correct pronouns is exhausting. Having everyone take their trans hot takes to you or asking invasive questions about your life experiences while you have shit on the docket to do quite frankly sucks.
Your understanding of trans people isn’t based on first hand or even second hand knowledge of our experience or from empathy towards our situations. It’s in the framework of us being a “problem”.
A problem of your convenience an "I shouldn’t have to change my behaviour to make someone else’s life easier ".
A logistical problem a " we shouldn’t have to make concessions or changes as a society for the benefit of the few".
A mental problem “They are delusional or mentally ill and we shouldn’t listen to what they say they need.”
A medical problem “Well they shouldn’t have access to the system because they take up resources or are doing themselves harm”.
A visual problem “They are ugly and I should not have to see them”
An authority problem “I as a parent ahould have control of my child at all times”
All of this framework doesn’t hold ANY solutions for us. They hold solutions for you so you just don’t have to interact, think of or see us… and that is no way to live.
Again, everything that a conservative says or thinks is projection. They tell on themselves constantly.
I would propose that some Christians think that gays are trying to convert them because they feel attracted to people of the same gender. If you have no sexual attraction to people of the same sex, then the idea that you could ever be converted to being gay is going to seem ridiculous. I’m straight; I’m simply uninterested in being people with male bodies or male genitalia. On the other hand, if I was bisexual–or simply gay–and believed that homosexuality was sinful, then I might feel like depictions of homosexual people in media was an attempt to change who I “am”.
As someone who was raised in the church I think this completely misses their perspective.
They believe that God is completely fair and just, and wouldn’t make someone in a way that was contrary to how he wants people to be. So it’s impossible for being LGBT to be something innate and unchangeable, since that would require God created people specifically in a way that he says is wrong.
So instead they go with “it’s a choice, they were ‘converted’ and it’s possible for them to mess up everyone else too.” It’s just to stave off cognitive dissonance, essentially. You can’t believe in a God that says being gay is sinful and then creates people to be gay, so you have to believe it’s like alcoholism or something and can affect anyone.
There’s no logic behind it and clearly no scientific data, but that won’t stop them because they arrived at the conclusion based purely on it being the only thing they can believe and not change the way they understand the nature of their God claim.
They believe that God is completely fair and just, and wouldn’t make someone in a way that was contrary to how he wants people to be.
This simply can’t be supported though. Christians tend to be gender essentialists, but there are a wide range of genetic defects where people appear to conform to one gender while not having a genetic makeup that conforms to the assigned gender, e.g., androgen insensitivity syndrome. So if people are made exactly how god intends them to be, and sex is an essential part of that, how can people exist that do not genetically conform to their assigned gender, or any binary gender? You can’t say that god doesn’t make mistakes and say that sex must be binary, when genetic errors prove that at least one of those propositions must be false.
You could say the same thing about psychopaths, since they believe that everyone has the ability to understand that they’re sinful, etc.
That’s why I said there’s no real logic, it’s all just cherry picking the parts they want to believe and ignoring the real world aspects that don’t conform to their presuppositions.
That’s a big strawman
It is just a theory, but I do think it’s a pretty good one. I don’t know if there’s any way to prove it.
Probably listen to there speeches and surmons that are posted online then figure it out. Another theory is it could be a highly selective interpretation of the Jewish old testiment law to provide “evidence” that Satan and his servants walk along them and are a threat to everything they stand for
Idk. Fallacy and logic checks makes sense in the context of debate. The context of this post is not a debate (I personally see it more like a showerthought).
That’s a big strawman
Off topic: I like to put Lemmy posts or comments into the LLMs and see what it comes back with.
The two examples Gemini provided for straw man where around the topics of gun control, and renewable energy.
It’s like there’s a ton of terrible arguments around the internet for these two topics /s There are.
Only the big evangelist types or Mormons which isn’t all Christians. I know plenty of Christians who are quiet about it and only talk about it if you bring it up, unlike people really into politics. Even with Mormons I’ve known many who don’t say anything about it and even sneak in coffee…
Go to a Unitarian church where people will usually identify as Christian.
I’d have to agree with you, and appreciate the thought regarding not over generalizing Christians, but I understand why people tend to.
Example: Remember cake lady from Indiana? She was a bigot. It pissed me off when she tried to use the excuse of ‘religious beliefs’. Since she specifically claimed Christianity, I call total BS on the grounds that Jesus NEVER treated anyone like shit (aside from the other religious people, which following that thought, means she would have gotten called out). Jesus always gave people grace, and then offered advise (specific to Christianity). I would so much rather people be honest and say they don’t like ____, instead of some BS hiding behind their own distorted version of faith. I don’t have to agree with their opinion, just don’t lie about it.
Also, I’ve never had any person who’s gay try to ‘convert’ me, ever. You could get a bunch of comedy bits out of that one though. I have had mormons and jo’s witnesses come by. They were nice, but if I wanted to waste a bunch of time talking, I would definitely ask them to explain views on dancing, sexuality, etc.
The only pro gay conversion I’ve ever been exposed to was movies/TV shows advocating for it being a ‘normal’ thing. I suppose that’s because in the US, it’s still considered ‘weird’ or wrong, and writers are trying to back it for what I imagine are civil rights reasons.
I’m not sure why it’s so hard to stop caring about stuff that doesn’t matter (to me). I have never cared about a person’s orientation.
If you try really hard and really want it, you too can be 6’,5"
I agree overall with your points, but there is just one caveat: your points are spoken from American and Christian perspective, and there is homophobia in some cultures that are not Christian-based. Majority Chinese, for example, describes themselves as atheists, but they are by and large homophobic. I might be wrong, but I heard CCP is cracking down on fashion, aesthetics and male celebs that might be “too feminine”.
I suspect that our home grown American and Christian homophobia is not Christian-based at all. People don’t like the thing that is different or icky, and instead of being introspective about why that is or if it’s the right thing to do, they see that the Bible or their preacher agree. Then it’s time to turn off the thought process and just go with it.
It’s just a happy little evil coincidence. Typical biblical cherry picking being spoon fed to the base. Funny how little discussion they have about how the Bible has instructions for abortions and how to treat your slaves.
Christian homophobia is not Christian-based at all. People don’t like the thing that is different
It’s just a happy little evil coincidence.
It’s not. It’s an inherent quality in Abrahamic monotheistic religions.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_monotheism#Violence_in_monotheism
The intolerance of narrow monotheism is written in letters of blood across the history of man from the time when first the tribes of Israel burst into the land of Canaan. The worshippers of the one jealous God are egged on to aggressive wars against people of alien [beliefs and cultures]. They invoke divine sanction for the cruelties inflicted on the conquered. The spirit of old Israel is inherited by Christianity and Islam, and it might not be unreasonable to suggest that it would have been better for Western civilization if Greece had moulded it on this question rather than Palestine.
— Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan
Christianity is inherently intolerant (see the 10 commandments).
Oh I wasn’t suggesting that Christianity was off the hook. It’s just that people do not require religion to be bigots.
Oh, so, perhaps… something along the lines of:
With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil - that takes religion. — Steven Weinberg
…?
I mean there is a benefit to convert someone to your sexuality (you fugg’em) but the very sentence I wrought there sounds insane and outlandish I don’t understand how you would go about that.
And by christians, you mean American Christians. The rest of the world’s god-botherers don’t do this. Yous are fucking weird bunch, that’s why yous got turfed out of Europe in the 15th century 😂😂
For real though
It’s all the fun banning puritans who got booted out of the country after their coup and subsequent dictatorship finally got overthrown who were the bulk of the Thirteen Colonies, which largely just left the “love thy neighbour” Christians who actually campaign against racism, homophobia, climate change and whatever else is an insult to “God’s creation” which frankly I can completely get behind even if I don’t believe it as such.
Frankly I don’t get the mind bending logic to ignoring all the “everyone is God’s child, he has made them as he sees fit, he loves them, you should love them too” stuff in the bible and skipping past to a small subsection which says that men shouldn’t sleep together, especially when they ignore the fact that the same section says that anyone who works on a Sunday should be put to death along with a bunch of other wild and wacky stuff that we just all collectively agree was a product of the time it was written…
Also Jesus pretty much tossed out all the “unclean” nonsense in Peter’s dream or whatever.
I wonder how many of them follow the diet though.
Yeah, there’s a lot of history to this, but it’s a part of why there’s so many unusual or distinctive off-shoots of Christianity that come from the US: Jehovah’s Witnesses, LDS, Seventh Day Adventists, Evangelicalism, etc…
It’s not just the Puritans, in fact, it’s mostly not, though they’ve given us plenty of other cultural baggage.
Because we weren’t our own nation, we didn’t have our own bishop in the church of English, so for ministers to get ordained they had to go to England to be trained and then come back.
This gave rise to a conflict between the New Lights and Old Lights. The New Lights were basically proto-evangelicals and they determined that the proof of qualification to be a minister wasn’t a degree, education, or some church approval from overseas, but the ability to gather a church.
This meant that charisma became the defining trait for a successful minister. This is why evangelicals have such terrible theology. There’s all these ideas that are mainstream evangelical ideas that never existed before this period.
The rapture was created during this period. That’s right, for nearly 1800 years Christians wouldn’t even know what you meant if you said “the rapture” and now evangelicals wander around telling everyone to be prepared.
Do you have any recommendations for a book on this topic? I’m super intrigued.
So… the Catholic Church, well known for traveling the world to shove Jesus down everyone’s throats, is an American institution now? Got it.
No, but they stopped knocking when Europe became more secular.
I haven’t had anyone in the last 20 years come knocking on my door about religion. Especially not the Catholic Church.
Well us and Africa… and Russia
Heh, and before the 15th century it was the American Christians that went on Crusades, yeah?
History not your strong subject then 😊
