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HappyHippo posted:Um not really. Their religion absolutely plays a role (although some of the more cynical leaders might just be using it as a tool). To say that religion has no role in shaping the worldviews and ethical beliefs of ultraconservative evangelicalists is ridiculous. liberal evangelicals exist, as do non-dickhole devout social conservatives. people who want to be bastards will find one reason or another, and as religion is completely open to both interpretation and application there's very little point to trying to tease out some theological basis on which someone is a bastard about something people who are really devout and use religious justification to hate on someone tend to view the world through a spiritual lens. they probably also have religious justifications for brushing their teeth a certain way or driving slowly in the fast lane, because their lives are just stuffed full of religion. this doesn't necessarily mean that analyzing or dissembling religion will prevent these people from being bastards if anything, this reputation that deep old time religion is a haven of social regressives and bastards is in my opinion a significant driver of increasing secularism among youth
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Apr 11, 2016 17:23
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HappyHippo posted:These people aren't born bastards, they've been brought up this way and religion is very much a part of that upbringing. just because religion is a part of someone's personality doesn't imply that religion is a cause or effect of any horrible opinions they might have. imagine some nerd who is so into tabletop gaming that they actually use warhammer as a metaphor for life, and they are also a massive racist. if they refer to minorities as orcs does this mean that tabletop gaming is a contributor to racism? or does it mean that this person is using specific language to express a disconnected horrible opinion? there's very little in the bible that actually speaks against homosexuality, and it says nothing about transgender persons. it says a fair amount about love, acceptance, and not being a douche. i dont see how we can then say that christianity is a root cause of anti-LGBT attitudes versus plain old social conservativism, general suspicious xenophobia, and being uncomfortable with change. religious upbringing being used as a justification to hate isn't because of religion, it's because of hate
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Apr 11, 2016 18:04
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HappyHippo posted:You're falling into this trap where you look at "Christianity" as a whole, see that there are many different beliefs, and then try to say that therefore these specific beliefs are not religious in origin. The problem with that is that there are many varieties of Christians, and they can and do hold extremely different beliefs that nonetheless are still religious in origin. Trying to discern what's the "real" Christainity is a fool's errand. The bible is not the sole determinant of religious belief (indeed, in many cases it plays a minor role). If someone passes on to their child their belief homosexuality is sin against God that's a religious teaching whether it came from the bible or not. I'm not saying that "Christianity" makes people hate gays, I'm saying that certain varieties of it do. i'm really confused how you can argue "don't paint all religious people or interpretations of christianity with a broad brush" in support of the argument "we must figure out what's wrong with religious people and christianity that causes some of them to be bigots" you seem really stuck on the idea that hate wrapped in some interpretation of religion must mean that this type of religion causes hate somehow. sorry dude i'm not buying it
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Apr 11, 2016 18:29
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MaxxBot posted:There's clearly something special about evangelical Christianity with regards to their views on homosexuality and sexuality in general. With many other denominations of Christianity or other religions there's not such a strong association with anti-gay beliefs. there's some sorting factor involved here, people can freely move between the different protestant denominations without it really being thought of as a conversion so you can kind of shop around for a religious expression that fits your views rather than having your views modified by a fixed religious upbringing Who What Now posted:But I'm not so sure you can so wholly separate the influence that Warhammer, or religion, can have on the formation of people's beliefs and opinions. in the example though of a parent using religion to teach hatred though we're focusing on the religious component of the upbringing and not, you know, the upbringing parents using religious terms and justifications to teach hatred isn't a problem with religion in my mind
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Apr 11, 2016 18:48
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HappyHippo posted:Jesus Christ, strawman much? I'm not implying any of that poo poo. I'm saying that religious beliefs are playing a role in the religious right's views on gay and trans people. I'm also saying that "they're just assholes looking for a justification" is a shallow and essentially incorrect analysis. I'm not saying anything about what kind of solution there is, or what sort of action should be taken, or that we need to get rid of religion, or that every bad thing ever is religiously motivated. Is that clear enough? i don't see how "they're just assholes" is any shallower than "it's because of religion, somehow"
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Apr 11, 2016 21:40
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social conservatives being extremely uncool with LGBT types while also being more likely to have old-time religion seems more like a correlative factor than a causative factorTrent posted:Being willing to blow yourself up in suicide bombings is almost entirely justified by religion. Those same people would probably still be assholes without religion, but the promise of reward for martyrdom is a specific example of how religion can make assholes more dangerous than they otherwise would be. united states soldiers are given the nation's highest honor for martyring themselves on the battlefield. "he jumped on a grenade to save his buddies" i dont think we can peg this on the deep christian faith of soldiers
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Apr 11, 2016 22:37
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HappyHippo posted:For like the tenth time: there are different varieties of Christian belief. This is just about some of them. That doesn't mean these aren't religious beliefs. I don't know what's so hard about this. i think it further undercuts your argument when you say "not all religion, but some religion, explains bigotry" when it's just as likely, and in my opinion more plausible, that bigots create and perpetuate religious explanations of non-religious bigotry HappyHippo posted:Let's cut to the chase: certain christian groups have messed up views on morality, specifically sexual morality. For them sex is immoral unless it's for procreating. God has assigned us gender roles, and not fulfilling them is disobedience to god and therefore sinful. Sex for pleasure is immoral to these people (this people tend to have negative views of sex before marriage, oral sex, birth control, etc). Since gay sex can't produce children it's a "perversion" of God's assigned roles and is therefore sinful. Trans people are also being disobedient to god by rejecting his assigned role for them. gamergaters also have messed up views on sexuality, which they aggressively and vigorously perpetuate. i really don't see how you can blame negative and bigoted social attitudes on the language people use to describe a hateful idea. people construct all kinds of mental frameworks to say yes you should do this, no you shouldn't do this, but i wouldn't say that the framework is essentially to blame or even explains the motivations of why that framework was constructed to begin with boner confessor fucked around with this message at 23:27 on Apr 11, 2016 |
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Apr 11, 2016 23:24
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HappyHippo posted:You're really bad at arguing. If I can't say something that's true for all religious beliefs, then I can't say something about some specific religious beliefs? And some people being bigots without religion somehow means that other people aren't bigots because of religion? Sorry but I can't follow either of those. you're not actually explaining how or why religion leads to bigotry. you're accurately describing how religion can be used as a method of communication to transfer cultural values such as suspicion of sexual minorities, and you're describing how religion can be linked to those values as a way of justifying them, but so far you're merely asserting that religion, somehow, must be a causal factor in driving people to be bigots. like you're just skipping right over "I can't say something that's true for all religious beliefs" without explaining or considering that maybe this means religious belief is not a fundamental driver of bigotry if it's only true for some subset of religious beliefs
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Apr 12, 2016 00:07
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HappyHippo posted:I'm not saying religion creates bigots out of thin air, I'm saying, in the context of the Religious Right (remember, the topic of this thread?) that their beliefs are genuinely religious beliefs which are a part of their religious worldview that they've been raised with and received from various religious teachings, which they pass on to others. yes, you've said this before, and i said that one person instilling bigoted ideas in another person using religious language is not an example of religion causing bigotry, it's an example of one person writing their cultural values onto another person using a common language. this is no more religion causing bigotry than english causing bigotry or chatrooms causing bigotry HappyHippo posted:Again your last sentence makes no sense at all. There are an astounding variety of religious beliefs. Because I can't say ALL of them lead to bigotry I can't say SOME of them do? It's like you can only comprehend absolutist statements like "ALL religion leads to bigotry" and, determining that isn't true, jump to the opposite absolutist statement of "therefore NO religion leads to bigotry." no, i'm just pointing out that you haven't actually proposed or demonstrated a causal mechanism where religious principles, in a vacuum, directly creates bigoted attitudes in an otherwise unbigoted person and i'm using the wide diversity of religious belief to undermine your assertion since people can come up with their own religious tenets, and often do so, it's strange that you would say religion is the prime factor here and not the person who thought up the bad idea or the person who heard the bad idea and said "yes i agree with this" boner confessor fucked around with this message at 02:26 on Apr 12, 2016 |
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Apr 12, 2016 02:22
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:"God hates fags" is a religious idea, in that it pertains to the nature of God. It's also a homophobic idea. If someone develops their opinions and values in an environment where this idea is repeated approvingly they're probably going to come to believe, through no weakness or moral failing except those common to all human beings, that God sanctions homophobia. Their religion, in other words, creates bigotry. we don't know if god actually hates fags though. god has been pretty vague on the subject. we do know for a fact that fred phelps hated fags, an idea he worked very hard to impress into his family and community e: there's no real theological, conceptual, philosophical, or really anything underpinning the westboro baptist church's extreme hatred for everything. it's a church with no allies and no affiliation that was just the mouthpiece of one extremely angry, absuive man and the toxic remnants of his family. at that point anybody can say "hey you, you're an rear end in a top hat! god told me to tell you that" and it's suddenly a religious motivation? by this standard i could beat somebody up while wearing jedi robes and saying i used the force to kick someone's rear end and it would be religiously motivated violence. even if it's technically true this doesn't indicate that religion causes violence boner confessor fucked around with this message at 03:02 on Apr 12, 2016 |
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Apr 12, 2016 02:54
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HappyHippo posted:You're very much hung up on religion "causing" bigotry. Religion isn't some independent force in the universe, it's a collection of beliefs and values (some of which may be bigoted) held by individuals. The only force it has is through those individuals and their words and actions. If they pass on those bigoted values to someone else who was receptive to the message due to their similar religious worldview, or if they instill those values in their children, then religion is playing a role in those bigoted beliefs and values. i'll be more clear - you're confusing correlation with causation. if you're not talking about causation, and you're just saying "sometimes religious people are bigots" then i'm not sure what it is you're arguing. congrats for noticing? sometimes left handed people are bigots. sometimes tall people are bigots. whoop de doo when it comes to shaping the worldview and perceptions of bigots, the english language has more to do with perpetuating bigotry then religion, given the number of secular english speaking bigots. ergo we must conclude that speaking english directly contributes to the spread of bigotry boner confessor fucked around with this message at 03:47 on Apr 12, 2016 |
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Apr 12, 2016 03:45
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:"Language subtly affects your values and how you think about the world" isn't really an implausible scenario either. for sure but if i got suckered by backpedaling into an argument about whether or not language is used to communicate ideas and in turn can form ideas and modify perception then i'll be mad as heck
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Apr 12, 2016 04:02
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WampaLord posted:Why are people bothering to argue with Popular Thug Drink when he essentially rejects the premise of the thread? In his mind there is no "Religious" Right, there is just a right wing that happens to have many religious members, with no causation implied. well nobody seems to be willing to put forth a causal mechanism. i agree that bigotry is related to some forms of religious expression but there's a lot of distance between that and "these religious traditions are a direct cause of bigotry" as nobody seems willing to put in the work to disentangle religion in this case from politics, class, SES - anti-LGBT bigotry is more closely correlated with the southeast united states and the global south, prove to me that warm climates are not a driver of anti-LGBT bigotry
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Apr 12, 2016 15:27
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katlington posted:Russia. yes there are cold weather people who are assholes, that isn't the point. there are a wide variety of climates that fall under "hot weather" some climates have very warm averages while others have very cold averages. my point is that within those regressive groups climate is absolutely playing a role in shaping their views. these people aren't born bastards, they've been brought up this way and climate is very much a part of that upbringing
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Apr 12, 2016 15:33
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HappyHippo posted:It looks like you're falling into the trap of trying to figure out what Christianity "really" is, and dismissing anything that disagrees as being merely cultural. do you have some basis by which we can distinguish between culture, religion, and politics, if we can't go by biblical teachings as a meaningful metric for what is/is not christian?
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Apr 12, 2016 17:52
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fspades posted:Instead, why don't you just trust people and take them at their word when they say they are Christian, and are acting according to their spiritual beliefs? that's such a broad acceptance of human behavior as to be useless to describe human behavior and motivations for that behavior. it's a neat concept to think about i guess if people wash their car or mow the lawn religiously, but it's a totally vacant basis by which to examine why people hold the attitudes that they do HappyHippo posted:"Gay sex is sin against God" is a religious statement, in that it invokes the religious concepts of "sin" and "God." Is that confusing? gay sex is also not a sin against god. this means that religion is both for and against gay sex. we can determine therefore that people are approving and disapproving of gay sex because of religion, which demonstrates that both bigotry and acceptance are motivated by religion. in conclusion, we can state that religious people can either support gay sex or oppose it
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Apr 12, 2016 18:26
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fspades posted:It's supposed to be a starting point for analysis, not the answer to everything. From there you examine where these religious beliefs are coming from, and why people believe in them. The contents of those religious beliefs are not wholly independent from history, but they are also not irrelevant. They mean something. like i keep saying, if there's no way to decouple religious justifications for political stances versus religious stances then there's not much point to talking about religion except to express your disapproval with religion fspades posted:Although, may I remind you that vast majority of Christians, including the biggest churches, both historically and today, believe gay sex is a sin? Now why is this the case? Does this have something to do with influential Church Father's attitude to non-reproductive sex? Is it because it challenges some crucial standpoints Christian tradition had over sexual relationships and gender roles? there's a big difference between thinking something is a sin and thinking something is a sin so you support harrasing and discriminatory legislation in the political sphere. if we can't examine why some religious people have the same attitudes as the bigots but themselves are more accepting then this further erodes the idea that religious tenets must somehow be at fault
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Apr 12, 2016 18:57
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fspades posted:
you can do whatever you want man, it's a free internet. all i'm saying is that if you have no method to distinguish between religious, religiously inspired, political-as-religious, religious traditions with little religious intent behind them, and so on when it comes to determining the relative bigotry quanta inherent in some mix of religious or not religious or sorta religious behavior then you're not really beholden to any sort of actual interesting rational analysis and you might as well just go yell at an empty church fspades posted:Once again you are assuming just because religious beliefs vary over cultures and individuals then all religion must be wholly empty of meaning and just a tool people dress up their cultural preferences. That's not how it works; this poo poo matters to people. Some anti-LGBT Christians literally believe God punishes nations for tolerating sodomy, fire and brimstone style. Where did that idea even come from? Well, that's a complicated story that involves some foundational Christian beliefs that goes back hundreds of years, as well as social and cultural transformations that happened in America in the last few decades, or hell, even the last several years. not entirely, but i do keep saying "religion doesn't matter that much" and you say "yes it does" and i say "no it doesn't" and you say "yes it does" and we're on page three now
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Apr 12, 2016 21:06
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What? Why? Why can't we do both and accept people are complex beings with complex reasons for their political opinions, with religious beliefs being one of them? And why does this require disapproval of religion? Would you be of the same opinion if religious justifications were used for "progressive" causes?
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fspades posted:I'm not interested in comparing bigotry-midichlorians of self-described religious people. Rather I'm interested in why people do political acts that they describe as religiously motivated, and surprisingly enough, it turns out there are specific religious doctrines and traditions behind them. No amount of playing demarcation game with politics, culture, norms and religion will change the fact that the anti-LGBT Christians in America have pretty specific religious justifications they derived from long-standing Christian teachings. I don't see how understanding those teachings is a waste of time if you care about the issue. however, there often aren't doctrines or teachings that loosely justify political acts which people don't describe as religiously motivated fspades posted:The thing is, you haven't proposed a good reason for me to not believe when people say they do X because of Y religious reasons. You keep saying religious justifications are empty signifiers hiding and carrying "bigotry" from person to person. Fine. But then why do we still have religion at all? If bigotry comes from something that has nothing to do with religion, why do these people feel compelled to express their bigotry in religious terms, with arguments backed by (however flimsily) scripture and tradition? Is it just because it gives them spiritual authority to push their cynical political agenda? Then how do you think religion grants this authority in the first place? Who still believes in Jesus anyway? people tend to describe themselves in the language that they know best. if someone is a very spiritual person, who attends a religious community frequently and understands philosophy as a series of religious metaphors, then they are far more likely to communicate from that perspective
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Apr 12, 2016 22:47
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HappyHippo posted:Two people can have the same "religion" with two different beliefs that are nonetheless religious. I don't know how I can put it any simpler. maybe the problem isn't that other people are too dense to understand your argument, but rather that your argument is nonsensical no matter how much you simplify it if two people can have mutually conflicting but equally religious attitudes towards topic x, then you can't use the simplistic explanation of "person opposes topic x because of religion" in any meaningful way, because person could also approve of topic x because of religion. we have established that there is some form of nonquantitative relationship, effectively indescribable on a societal scale, between topic x and religion, so let's congratulate ourselves and get some lunch beers i guess boner confessor fucked around with this message at 19:31 on Apr 13, 2016 |
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Apr 13, 2016 19:28
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vessbot posted:Then don't stretch it that far, so no problem. that's what i've been saying this whole thread! it's pretty silly to claim anti-LGBT bigotry is religiously based given the wide disparity in attitudes across religion, the lack of specific religious doctrine against LGBT persons, and a tighter correlation between bigotry and social conservativism (as well as social conservativism and particular strains of christianity)
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Apr 13, 2016 21:02
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:"It's pretty silly to claim anti-LGBT bigotry is politically based given the wide disparity in attitudes across politics." Do you see why this particular prong is ridiculous? politics are based on specific issues of the present and not philosophical considerations of ethics or the afterlife, rooted in tradition. i can cook up a new political stance any time i please. it's much harder to find some kind of religious justification for net neutrality
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Apr 13, 2016 21:16
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:It might result in a diversity of interpretations, and it's true that other social influences might (and in fact, almost certainly will) influence how you interpret that command. But your religion remains among those influences, especially if your religion includes instruction or tradition on how to interpret doctrine properly. but then we're back to stretching things too far to establish 'religious' justifications for behaviors, like how dungeons and dragons is a tool of satan which is a totally valid christian doctrine and not at all based on a series of protestant moral panics, you know, book of cards, 5:13, "thou shalt not tumble the multi-sided die"
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Apr 13, 2016 21:38
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HappyHippo posted:There's no stretching going on. "Gay sex is a sin" is on it's face a religious belief. It's stated in religious terms. It's justified in a religious ethical framework. It's preached by religious leaders, and believed by religious followers. The only stretching going on is the mental contortions you and Main Paineframe are going through in order to pretend that religion isn't playing a role. religion also plays a role in saying "gay sex is not a sin". therefore, as far as society as a whole cares, religion is both for and against any concievable issue HappyHippo posted:They don't have the same religious beliefs. It's possible for two people to have two different beliefs on a religious topic, and for both of those beliefs to be religious in nature and sincerely held. There are literally thousands of examples of this. It's also possible for two people to start from the same premises and reach a different conclusion. That happens all the time, on all kinds of topics, religious or not. It's like you're some kind of robot. "Two people read the same book and reached different conclusions?! DOES NOT COMPUTE" it's pretty ironic that you're arguing about how people can have different conclusions while busting someone's balls for not understanding your perfect, flawless argument
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Apr 13, 2016 22:17
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HappyHippo posted:No one is trying to say that "religion," as an abstract concept, is totally for or against anything. It doesn't even make sense to talk about what "religion," in the abstract, is for or against. The point is that this subset of society, with these particular religious beliefs is against gay rights. they also have a set of particular political beliefs, and you seem more ready to attribute negative outcomes on religion than politics or culture unless, again, we're just saying "sometimes religious people think bad things, sometimes they think good things"
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Apr 13, 2016 23:03
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MaxxBot posted:Why do they have a laserlike focus on restricting the rights of LGBT people and women who want abortions while ignoring all sorts of other sinful behavior that our society proudly displays? It's hard to treat their position as some sort of good-faith defense of Christian sexual morality when they only want heavy-handed enforcement of their beliefs in very specific circumstances. No one is calling for the arrest of cohabiting heterosexual couples even though they might give a sermon saying that it's bad. maybe because they're not complete retards and would prefer to pursue politically achievable goals? you're basically saying "well if they're such socialists why aren't they pushing for the imposition of full global communism now"
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Apr 19, 2016 21:02
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MaxxBot posted:The overwhelming majority of evangelicals engage in premarital sex but there's no talk about bringing back fornication laws, adultery laws, refusing service to cohabitating couples, firing dirty hetero sexhavers from their jobs, etc. i'm sure they would if it wasn't painfully obvious they'd be ridiculed
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Apr 20, 2016 00:38
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