Religion Folau

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Crankitup said:
You're not getting it. It's the aberrant behaviour that involves a willful choice.

Sure there are some who feel obliged and constrained by society to say they "can't help it" because they were "born that way". Which sort of makes the whole "Gay Pride" parade scene nonsensical. I mean I can understand people making an informed willful choice and being proud but being born with a nature they 'can't help' doesn't seem to be something you would feel proud about. If you think there's nothing wrong with being gay why would the suggestion that some people have made a choice to be so, be so offensive to you? I think the stance of Karla Mantilla and others is a lot more noble.

It's a complex subject though, sexual arousal. I think that in much the same way as someone with a foot fetish or someone into S&M is aroused by those things not as a born natural instinct or urge but more as a chosen learned behavioural response, maybe the same could be said of aberrations like pedophilia, bestiality and necrophilia amongst others.
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When your plums drop, Percy guides you to what you like.
 

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Getting back to Folau I don't think he was very tactful in what he did but it was still better than what the progessive elements in the church do. They welcome those who see themselves as 'born that way' and pat them on the back telling them what they want to hear. By preaching tolerance of homosexual behaviour they think they are loving the homosexual. They twist scripture and use warped logic to categorise such behaviour as normal. In reality they deumanize homosexuals, portraying them as mere animals, unable to resist their 'natural' desires. This removes moral responsibilty from them belying the fact that according to the Bible they supposedly believe in, we are all created in the image of God, with the power to make moral choices.

I suppose it's a reflection of how much society has changed in that large elements of it now view the Christian God as a prejudiced bigot for laying out boundaries for normal sexual behaviour and even more so for stridently warning us if we transgress those boundaries, we do so at our own cost (1 Cor 6:18).

Maybe one day society will move so far that it will come to believe there should be no real boundaries on sexual behaviour at all. Where will that leave us? What about people who feel like having sex with animals or young children? Will society come to believe them as being "born that way" and not to be condemned for just pursuing their 'natural' inclinations? Hopefully not.
 
Crankitup said:
Getting back to Folau I don't think he was very tactful in what he did but it was still better than what the progessive elements in the church do. They welcome those who see themselves as 'born that way' and pat them on the back telling them what they want to hear. By preaching tolerance of homosexual behaviour they think they are loving the homosexual. They twist scripture and use warped logic to categorise such behaviour as normal. In reality they deumanize homosexuals, portraying them as mere animals, unable to resist their 'natural' desires. This removes moral responsibilty from them belying the fact that according to the Bible they supposedly believe in, we are all created in the image of God, with the power to make moral choices.

I suppose it's a reflection of how much society has changed in that large elements of it now view the Christian God as a prejudiced bigot for laying out boundaries for normal sexual behaviour and even more so for stridently warning us if we transgress those boundaries, we do so at our own cost (1 Cor 6:18).

Maybe one day society will move so far that it will come to believe there should be no real boundaries on sexual behaviour at all. Where will that leave us? What about people who feel like having sex with animals or young children? Will society come to believe them as being "born that way" and not to be condemned for just pursuing their 'natural' inclinations? Hopefully not.
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I feel bad for any woman who gets in bed with you.
 
Demontim275 said:
I feel bad for any woman who gets in bed with you.
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Like I said before, I've reached this conclusion (that for many it is a choice) based on the retold experiences of hundreds of gays who say that it is a choice. Many of them are in fact insulted by the suggestion that they are mere pawns to their biology.
 
Crankitup said:
Like I said before, I've reached this conclusion (that for many it is a choice) based on the retold experiences of hundreds of gays who say that it is a choice. Many of them are in fact insulted by the suggestion that they are mere pawns to their biology.
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Wow. Hundreds. Out of how many worldwide?
That’s some statistical significance you have there
 
Demontim275 said:
Wow. Hundreds. Out of how many worldwide?
That’s some statistical significance you have there
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It is actually. For every person who feels strong enough about it to tell others of their experience there would be many more who feel the same way but haven't told a soul. Similar to the well known fact in customer service that for every person who complains there are 26 others who were also unsatisfied but didn't bother to complain.

Very often, though, dissatisfied customers don’t give voice to the complaints. Actually, a study by TARP Research as far back as 1999 uncovered the fact that for every 26 unhappy customers, only 1 will bother to make a formal complaint. The rest will either stay where they are disappointed or will silently take their business elsewhere.
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Crankitup said:
It is actually. For every person who feels strong enough about it to tell others of there experience there would be many more who feel the same way but haven't told a soul. Similar to the well known fact in customer service that for every person who complains there are 26 others who were also unsatisfied but didn't bother to complain.
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No. That’s just your theory with no supporting evidence
“Hundreds” is not statistically significant in relation to the population

how many gay people say it’s not a choice?
 
Crankitup said:
Getting back to Folau I don't think he was very tactful in what he did but it was still better than what the progessive elements in the church do. They welcome those who see themselves as 'born that way' and pat them on the back telling them what they want to hear. By preaching tolerance of homosexual behaviour they think they are loving the homosexual. They twist scripture and use warped logic to categorise such behaviour as normal. In reality they deumanize homosexuals, portraying them as mere animals, unable to resist their 'natural' desires. This removes moral responsibilty from them belying the fact that according to the Bible they supposedly believe in, we are all created in the image of God, with the power to make moral choices.

I suppose it's a reflection of how much society has changed in that large elements of it now view the Christian God as a prejudiced bigot for laying out boundaries for normal sexual behaviour and even more so for stridently warning us if we transgress those boundaries, we do so at our own cost (1 Cor 6:18).

Maybe one day society will move so far that it will come to believe there should be no real boundaries on sexual behaviour at all. Where will that leave us? What about people who feel like having sex with animals or young children? Will society come to believe them as being "born that way" and not to be condemned for just pursuing their 'natural' inclinations? Hopefully not.
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Are you aware of the concept of 'consenting adults'?
 
Crankitup said:
I believe the notion of 'being homosexual' itself is an artificial construct that makes it easy for society to label people. IMO the only choice being made is to act in one way or other but you shouldn't be forever defined by your actions per se. Now just because I can't see myself ever wanting to use an orifice that was deigned to evacuate human waste or something along those lines after many years of being perfectly happy with the female anatomy, doesn't mean others aren't capable of doing so.
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What about oral sex?
 

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Crankitup said:
Getting back to Folau I don't think he was very tactful in what he did but it was still better than what the progessive elements in the church do. They welcome those who see themselves as 'born that way' and pat them on the back telling them what they want to hear. By preaching tolerance of homosexual behaviour they think they are loving the homosexual. They twist scripture and use warped logic to categorise such behaviour as normal. In reality they deumanize homosexuals, portraying them as mere animals, unable to resist their 'natural' desires. This removes moral responsibilty from them belying the fact that according to the Bible they supposedly believe in, we are all created in the image of God, with the power to make moral choices.

I suppose it's a reflection of how much society has changed in that large elements of it now view the Christian God as a prejudiced bigot for laying out boundaries for normal sexual behaviour and even more so for stridently warning us if we transgress those boundaries, we do so at our own cost (1 Cor 6:18).

Maybe one day society will move so far that it will come to believe there should be no real boundaries on sexual behaviour at all. Where will that leave us? What about people who feel like having sex with animals or young children? Will society come to believe them as being "born that way" and not to be condemned for just pursuing their 'natural' inclinations? Hopefully not.
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So you see homosexual activity as immoral/"not normal" behavior?

Why are some religious people so preoccupied with what consenting sound of mind adults do with their own and to each others genitals, it's got me bloody flabbergasted.

Equating homosexuality with pedophilia and bestiality is abhorrent on your behalf, you do realize there is a difference, young children are not of an age to give informed well thought out consent and that is without the power position adults are in over children. I also don't think dogs, cats and sheep can give consent.
 
Jason mp said:
Equating homosexuality with pedophilia and bestiality is abhorrent on your behalf, you do realize there is a difference, young children are not of an age to give informed well thought out consent and that is without the power position adults are in over children. I also don't think dogs, cats and sheep can give consent.
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I didn't equate them at all. Read what I wrote again. I questioned whether we will reach a point where such people are not condemned and are instead viewed as just pawns of their biology without the power of making a moral choice.
 
Crankitup said:
I didn't equate them at all. Read what I wrote again. I questioned whether we will reach a point where such people are not condemned and are instead viewed as just pawns of their biology without the power of making a moral choice.
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I read it again..... I can't tell what is in your heart Crank although IMO in a post about homosexuality you clearly likened it to bestiality and pedophilia, you were inferring in a none too subtle manner that the 3 sexual proclivities are immoral or not normal and by society accepting (all 3) as normal that we were heading towards an immoral abyss.

IMO you are being disingenuous and engaging in semantics.
 
Crankitup said:
Like I said before, I've reached this conclusion (that for many it is a choice) based on the retold experiences of hundreds of gays who say that it is a choice. Many of them are in fact insulted by the suggestion that they are mere pawns to their biology.
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Sexual attraction isn’t a choice. Who you have sex with is. I think everyone gets that.
 
Jason mp said:
I read it again..... I can't tell what is in your heart Crank although IMO in a post about homosexuality you clearly likened it to bestiality and pedophilia, you were inferring in a none too subtle manner that the 3 sexual proclivities are immoral or not normal and by society accepting (all 3) as normal that we were heading towards an immoral abyss.

IMO you are being disingenuous and engaging in semantics.
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You can't tell "what's in my heart" but in your opinion I'm being disingenuous. Brilliant logic.
 
Drakescoffeecake said:
Name them. In fact, just give us 10.
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OK.

Aside from Mantilla, I already quoted Lindsay Miller (here #6,386) so I'll count that as #1.

(2) Cynthia Nixon (of 'Sex & the City' fame) -
“I gave a speech recently, an empowerment speech to a gay audience, and it included the line ‘I’ve been straight and I’ve been gay, and gay is better.’ And they tried to get me to change it, because they said it implies that homosexuality can be a choice. And for me, it is a choice. I understand that for many people it’s not, but for me it’s a choice, and you don’t get to define my gayness for me. A certain section of our community is very concerned that it not be seen as a choice, because if it’s a choice, then we could opt out. I say it doesn’t matter if we flew here or we swam here, it matters that we are here and we are one group and let us stop trying to make a litmus test for who is considered gay and who is not.”

“Why can’t it be a choice? Why is that any less legitimate? It seems we’re just ceding this point to bigots who are demanding it, and I don’t think that they should define the terms of the debate. I also feel like people think I was walking around in a cloud and didn’t realize I was gay, which I find really offensive. I find it offensive to me, but I also find it offensive to all the men I’ve been out with.”
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(3) Brandon Ambrosino (Writer who has had articles published in the New York Times and The Atlantic amongst others)
I'm gay but I wasn't born this way. Is sexuality purely the result of our biology? Brandon Ambrosino argues that simplistic explanations have ignored the fluid, shape-shifting nature of our desires.
“You can’t be gay.”

She was on top of me.

It wasn’t a command — it was a challenge. You so obviously cannot be gay, was her implication, because this is good sex.

It was 2006, a full five years before Lady Gaga would set the Born This Way argument atop its unassailable cultural perch, but even then the popular understanding of orientation was that it was something you were born with, something you couldn’t change. If you happened to engage in activity that ran counter to your sexual identity, then you had two options: you were lying to yourself and everyone else, or you were just experimenting.

The sexual categories were rigid. Fixed. They weren’t subject to human imagination or experimentation – to the frustration of many sociologists, and kids, like myself, who found themselves inexplicably in bed with a player from the other team.

My sexual journey through college was anything but run-of-the-mill. I came out at a conservative Christian college in the US and was in a gay relationship for around two years with a basketball player who ended up marrying a woman. During that time, we both pal’d around with girls on the side. I even went so far as to fall in love with one. To this day, she and I joke about how she was the only girl I was ever in love with, and how I would’ve been quite happy marrying her.

As a writer, this kind of complicated story is incredibly interesting to me – mostly because it shows that my own personal history resists the kind of easy classifications that have come to dominate discussions of sexuality. Well, you must have been gay the whole time, some might think, and because of some religious shame, you decided to lie to yourself and experiment with a girl. But that was nothing more than a blip in the road. After all, most kids experiment with heterosexuality in college, don’t they?

If so, that ‘blip in the road’ has always been a thorn in my flesh. How do I explain that I was honestly in love with a woman? Some people might argue that I am innately bisexual, with the capacity to love both women and men. But that doesn’t feel like an accurate description of my sexual history, either.

I’m only speaking for myself here. But what feels most accurate to say is that I’m gay – but I wasn’t born this way.

Many people may find their desires changing direction - and it can't just be explained as experimentation.

In 1977, just over 10% of Americans thought gayness was something you were born with, according to Gallup. That number has steadily risen over time and is currently somewhere between 42% and 50%, depending on the poll. Throughout the same period, the number of Americans who believe homosexuality is “due to someone’s upbringing/environment” fell from just under 60% to 37%.

These ideas reached critical mass in pop culture, first with Lady Gaga’s 2011 Born This Way and one year later with Macklemore’s Same Love, the chorus of which has a gay person singing “I can’t change even if I tried, even if I wanted to.” Videos started circulating on the internet featuring gay people asking straight people “when they chose to be straight.” Around the same time, the Human Rights Campaign declared unequivocally that “Being gay is not a choice,” and to claim that it is “gives unwarranted credence to roundly disproven practices such as conversion or reparative therapy.”

People who challenge the Born This Way narrative are often cast as homophobic, and their thinking is considered backward

As Jane Ward notes in Not Gay: Sex Between Straight White Men, what’s interesting about many of these claims is how transparent their speakers are with their political motivations. “Such statements,” she writes, “infuse biological accounts with an obligatory and nearly coercive force, suggesting that anyone who describes homosexual desire as a choice or social construction is playing into the hands of the enemy.” People who challenge the Born This Way narrative are often cast as homophobic, and their thinking is considered backward – even if they are themselves gay.
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(4)
I'm not going to spend a lot of time forgiving myself or forgiving anybody else because I started out straight. Okay? I say to people, "You're going to have to take me as I am. I am converted, if you wish, okay? I used to be straight, now I'm gay. I'm sorry if it would make you happy that I was born this way, but I wasn't."a gay woman, quoted in Vera Whisman's Queer by Choice: Lesbians, Gay Men, and the Politics of Identity, 1996
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(5)
I don't know . . . I find the idea that it's all biological and there's no choice in the matter somewhat dismal. "All your behavior is plotted out by your DNA. Try and look surprised." I don't think anything is that simple. Sexual identity is forged by years of experience and sensations along a spectrum of possibile feelings one has, or at least that's how I experienced it with a man I fell in love with a few years back. Ultimately, I really feel that I did choose to live the life I lead. Not because being gay is wrong or evil, but because while I intellectually can love a man, I don't feel the same way about them that I do about women. Which might be genetic, or it might be due to years of being told I'm supposed to feel that way, or it might even be a rational choice I made. I'd like to see us get to a place where we didn't really worry about this.Ezrael, in a post to the Metafilter Meta-Meta-Meta-Madness Community 'Blog, May 26, 2000
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(7)
I am 46 years old. I am female. I was married for 26 years and have three children and two grandchildren. In my case it was definitely a choice. When I was 35 or so, I met this woman, and we became friends. In the manner of teenagers, and at her suggestion, we decided to "experiment" sexually. I laugh now, to think back on it. I was petrified at the thought, but one day I looked at her and said, "OK, kiss me." We looked at each other and laughed, and she did. My response was, "Well, what the hell, the sky didn't fall! Do it again." . . . I made the choice to be a lesbian. I have found that sexually it is the right choice for me. I have been very lucky in that my children are totally accepting of my choice of lifestyle and my ex-husband is one of my best friends.;Reader Response to "Why Are We Gay?" survey conducted by The Advocate, July
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