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How were people in the Old Testament (before Jesus) saved from the "second death" in Hell?
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Gay at birth?
I also encourage you to read the discussion too and you fully read and take it in you will find that not one the people mentioned have made any such argument that someone is born to gay or that there is a gay gene. We don't have to provide evidence for arguments we don't make.just_sayin said:
Jack,jack said:RickeyHoltsclaw said:LGBTQ is mental and spiritual illness. One "chooses" take another man's penis into his mouth.Hello Rickey:Yeah, one mans spiritual illness is another mans boner. Why do you hate freedom so??excon
If you have been following the discussion it is people like @Joeseph, @Factfinder, @MayCaesar, and @ZeusAres42 that seem to claim that sexual orientation is immutable and that if someone wants to change their sexual orientation they should not be allowed to try or get help in changing. I don't remember you asking why they hate freedom so much.
Again, the evidence shows that people are not born gay - that there is no gay gene, so-called genetic markers are not genetically determinate, that there is fluidity in sexual orientation with between 10- 20% of the population having changed their sexual orientation.
You will find however, someone making the argument here that someone can physically choose to be physically attracted to on person on one day and then choose to be physically attracted to another person the next day. Of course, there is no evidence for this, it's nowhere to be seen in update literature including the outdated ones he references, and it's not even a topic that is discussed these days by contemporary scientists as it's archaic,
and to mention how nonsensical it is. @jack
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Gay at birth?
Something very obvious that I would like to insert in this discussion is that the question of what causes homosexuality is separate from the question of whether it is changeable at will. Even if homosexuality was purely environmental (which it very well might be), it still would not imply that it can be changed intentionally. Human psychology has incredible memory, and 90-year old people are still chiefly run by their childhood traumas. Someone who had a very traumatic confrontation with their parent when they were 5, may still experience painful flashbacks every time they enter a confrontation at the age of 95. They were not born with these flashbacks, but they are so deeply ingrained in their psychology that they might as well be an inherent part of their brain.
Changing one's behavior is difficult enough. Changing one's preferences is downright impossible without very serious and long inner work. Take someone who hates the taste of carrots and try to get them to love it - most likely will not happen. And changing disliking one vegetable to liking it is a billion times easier than changing being sexually attracted to one gender to another.
Lastly, I invite anyone who seriously believes that homosexuality can be changed into heterosexuality at will - conduct the opposite experiment. Pick a month and, assuming you are heterosexual, live it as if you were homosexual. Go on dates with guys (involving making out), share bed with them, watch gay porn... Then let us know how it went.
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Is Religion a Mental Illness?
In my view religion is all about calming an internal anguish that can emerge when having the cognitive ability of comprehending an impending demise.
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Did God(s) Create Humans or Did Humans Create God(s)?
@Factfinder
Your opponent has erected a wall against logical criticisms of his (mis)understanding of the underlying science. Here is what the "fine tuning" argument (the scientific one, not the religious nonsense masking as one) really is about.
Basically, we find that a number of properties of the Universe are strongly interlinking, in the sense that slightly changing one would require all other properties to change slightly as well, otherwise the whole construct breaks down. For instance, if the fine structure constant changed from ~1/137 to ~1/138, all other constants staying the same, then the Universe would change in very dramatic ways. However, if it changed to ~1/138 and other constants changed correspondingly, then everything would largely stay the same. It would come down to simple recalibration of values. It would be akin to replacing meters with inches and recalculating all other conversion ratios.
The meaning of this observation is that the Universe is a subject to the "butterfly effect": small changes in initial conditions lead to dramatic changes in the long-term behavior of the system. It is reasonable to expect that with slightly different initial conditions life as we know it today would be absolutely impossible. Our world as we see it today, indeed, appears to be "finely tuned" in this sense.
What it does not imply is that life would be impossible in principle with a different set of initial conditions, or that the Universe somehow would not be viable. Everything would be different, but within that different framework complex structures would arise, including self-replicating ones constituting life. There would be no humans on birds - but then even in our own Universe, chances are, life is abundant, but, for the most part, looks nothing like life on Earth.
The fallacy some religious folks commit when talking about these things is that it somehow implies that our Universe is special. It is not. I think I mentioned this example before: if you take a penny, throw it 1000 times in a row and record H for each head and T for each T, then the sequence that you get has the probability of occurring of exactly 2^(-1000), which is an unbelievably low number: if you write 1 in the numerator, the denominator will have over 330 zeroes in it, the number bigger than the number of all particles in the universe taken to the 4th power. Is it special though? Not really: it is as "special" as 2^1000-1 other possible sequences.
It would be special if you got the same sequence twice in a row... But that is a completely different situation. As far as I know, no one "rolled the Universe" twice and got the same outcome. -
How can we tell if news is true or fake?
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Do You Wish Wile E. Coyote Eats The Roadrunner?
The fun of the cartoon is how the Coyote fails. If he succeeds, the premise is done. So, no, I don't want Coyote to eat Road Runner.
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Do parents have the right to make their children follow their religion?
It seems to me that the same reasoning can be used to prohibit parents from doing virtually anything. What if your parents do not like eating eggs and do not cook eggs for you? Or what if they like eating eggs too much and cook too many of them for you? Who is to decide what parents should and what they should not do? The government?
I think that parents should be expected to perform their basic functions (provide the child with shelter, food, safety and guidance) and to not resort to cruel treatment (physical and verbal abuse), but when it comes to ideological things, they should be free to do whatever they want. If the society wants to help the child, then it should encourage him to think critically and challenge his parents' religious claims. It should not silence the parents. -
Should Palestinians Have "The Right of Return"?
Still declared Independent and free from Russia. Therfore, not a Russian territory.
Lands have turned over and over throughout the world's history and Russia is no different.
For the sake of the worlds stabability it makes more since not to start wars just b/c they want land that once belonged to them. Russia has plenty of land. I think being part of the global community in trade is a better way of conducting themselves.
Let's face it Russia is just Angry because the Ukranians rejected their Russian puppet candidate and Zelenski's parliament through out the pro-Russian parliamentary representatives. Russia was fine with Ukraine being it's own country until it lost it's influence within the government.
@Putin -
I hate Trump, but it's Biden who's committing genocide on the Palestinians.
maxx said:racism is or was not something that suddenly popped out of thin air. It is also not discrimination because another group is inferior; it is the "belief" that they are inferior. Look at the logic. Back of racism is discrimination of others because they are different than uis in some way or the other. These difference; now world wide, began in ancient humans as i have shown you in my previous reply. Surely you accept the fact that differences have been with humans since ancient times? I have also shown asto why these differences were shunned, avoided, and discriminated against. Do you disagree with as to what i wrote in my reply? Racism is based on fear of others because of these differences, fear of change, war, resources, beliefs, diseases, and many other problems associated with strangers. Anything that has been with humans for a million years is genetically passed on. Racism is a survival aspect, and today we just do not see it as such. Survival of the species is passed on and anything that threatens it is passed on. As for links, as for the years i have been on this site, i find that people disregard them. Racism has evolved into what it is today, and if you ask as to why one is racist, they will simply give reasons, not understanding that their reasoning is based on distrust, and differences. Humans have had this fear of differences in others since they began to think. @ZeusAres42Most of the time, in fact, wrongly, racism is assumed as an element of natural or innate human behavior. It is, on the other hand, not a simple biological determination and does not fit at all into a simple evolutionary theory. While human history and psychology are pointing toward tendencies of in-group bias and out-group bias, it is by no means sufficient for explaining how such tendencies have translated into racially discriminating practices in complex and multifaceted societies around the world. It is not a fixed aspect of human nature that makes up today's racism, but rather a construct that is institutionally tediously developed and perpetuated tediously through social norms, cultural practices, and economic systems.
This assertion that human biological occurrence is at the base of racism is an absolute ignoramus on the powerful role which cultural and social dynamics play in determining racial ideologies. As a matter of fact, scholars like Nell Irvin Painter, Ibram X. Kendi, and geneticists like Adam Rutherford, among others, have gone on to establish the fact that there is no basis, genetic or biological, for such kinds of differences among races. By contrast, historical and contemporary shifts in racial categorizations demonstrate that racial categories are fluid and arbitrarily determined constructs that illustrate fully the way in which power and social institutions engage in the construction and maintenance of racism.
While evolutionary psychology brings into play human tendencies of tribalism, group preferences by themselves don't unequivocally lead, in the evolved basic cognitive faculties, to the complex racial hierarchies that are prevalent today. The leap from simple in-group preference to systemic racism is made by cultural evolution and social construction, not by biological determinism. The same is proved by works of such researchers as Henri Tajfel and Steven Pinker, which claim that even if humans are to have a certain tendency to label others within, explicit forms and expressions of racism are, to a great extent, a subject to be generated from social influences and historical contexts.
Despite the enormous change in the social and political scene, it seems that racial ideologies have great resilience in adapting during their process of evolution to further maintain power hierarchies and systemic inequalities. This adaptability has reflected that the core structure of societies has definitely changed, and thus the idea that racism is unchangeable or something static within human societies is challenged. This provides further evidence of the difficulty in removing racism, since such disparities continue within societies that have gone through legal and political reform.
These demonstrate, through the lens of history, human capacities to recognize, challenge, and change oppressive structures rather than being a part of human nature one cannot change—from abolition and suffrage to the civil rights movement and the breakdown of apartheid. These points underline the dynamic possibility and importance of collective social change in action to confront and overcome racism.
The interplay between them, and the interrelationship of human tendencies with social construction and historical development, can never lose sight of the fight against racism. It, therefore, would require an approach that explains racism not only in its manifestations but points towards its psychological, cultural, and structural underpinnings.
