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Originally posted by zchmrkenhoff This is straight up gnostism and you should know better. |
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Originally posted by Dekron That "whooosh" sound you're hearing is the point of my post going over your head.... |
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Originally posted by Enigma And you hit on the heart of the issue. Is it moral, immoral, or completely neutral in regards to morality? Just because there is no theological concept of sin, does not mean that there ethics cease to exist. Personally, I see both sides here. On the one hand, it's nobody's fucking business who you sleep with as long as all parties consent. On the other hand, I see some major social destruction going on because we went down this road way to fast. I also see the bullshit dog and pony show of gay marriage opening the door to legal polygamy and incestuous relationships. There are other legal means to acquire equality than simply aping the institutions of the heterosexual majority. So instead of talking about whether or not you're born that way, you need to talk about why it matters at all. Hell, Mormons believe that consuming caffeine is on the same level as alcohol and will land you in hell. But we aren't trying to ban Pepsi. Why? Because we don't let the beliefs of the few dictate the laws of the many. This is where the argument should really be. Not on what the causes of homosexuality are. That's the axe that I actually have to grind. That's why I oppose the genetic explination. It obscures the actual issue. |
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Originally posted by zchmrkenhoff The creature you are describing is not omnipotent and therefore NOT GOD. If this creature is choosing to ignore what it knows, then it is complicit with evil and therefore NOT GOD. In the former case, you have free will, but not god. In the second case you do not have free will, but you also do not have god. |
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I don't think it goes far enough! I think it should be retroactive! Say about four hundred years retroactive...? Hey didn't Obama just suppor the UN declaration on the rights of indigenous peoples?..... .... wait a minute...... OOOOOOOOHHHHHHHH you sneeky liberal bastards ;-)
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Originally posted by generals3 As an athiest I do not believe in such a being. And I don't buy the idea that all decisions are actually calculations at some level of brain functionality. Basic chaos theory forces some kind of wild guess in the face of inponderable situations that cannot even be mathematically predicted. There's also the problem of entirely new inponderable situations that a given person has no personal context for. Yes, they are just guessing, but the process by which they guess is what we commonly look at as free will. B.F. Skinner wasn't as correct as some would have you believe. Identical twins that are raised apart but in the same environment will approach a new situation in very different ways. It's the difference that keeps scientific determinism false. Theologically, there is no free will because God knows, and has planned out all that was, is, or will be. As a Christian, you have no choice, but you don't know the whole story so you feel as though you do have choice. |
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Originally posted by generals3
It helps if you remember that the brain is an incredibly complex ANALOG system that is constantly changing it's own wiring. Digital systems are only on or off, but signals traveling through an analog system can have an almost infinite range of states. Go read up on BEAM robotics sometime and try to keep you head from exploding. Then again I've had this theory for awhile that the brain is really just an antenna that picks up and distorts a kind of cosmic radio signal. There's absolutely nothing in neurobiology that refutes this stance. BTW, did you know that you can completely erase a person's morality with a magnet? Cool huh? |
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Originally posted by generals3 This is false. Just google the term "childhood sexuality" or "infant sexuality" and you'll find a ton of clinical psychology papers on both subjects. Children my not understand why they feel a certain way in the presence of sexually charged images or situations, but they do feel it. We are sexual creatures from the cradle to the grave. Yes, it's disturbing to think about children having sexual feelings, but the honest truth is that you didn't just wake up on your thirteenth birthday and suddenly have an interest in tits that you didn't have the day before. There is no magical line between childhood, adolescence, or adulthood. The fact that you believe that humans develope and behave in such a mechanical way is almost shocking in it's deliberate ignorance. Think of it this way: There are foods that you like and foods that you hate. I love Mexican food and I refuse to eat meat loaf. Is that genetic or did I develope those preferences over the course of my life? I certainly didn't choose those preferences. I'm willing to bet that most people didn't consciously choose their favorite color or type of music. It's the same thing with sexuality. You don't choose it like a set of clothes for the day, but you aren't exactly born that way either. |
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Originally posted by zchmrkenhoff I'm a professional copywriter and this sentence almost raised my eyebrows clean off of my head. I had to go running for my Hacker's manual to check and see if this sentence was even remotely kosher. It was, and I'm kind of impressed. As for your character being a front for internet trolling, I started to pick up on that in another thread when you went overboard about Protestantism. While I'm sure that there are some Catholics that feel that way, I'm not sure any Catholics from this century would have put it the way that you did. I thought back to some other flame wars you'd been involved in and it all clicked together. Your ability to carry on a flame thread well beyond the point of productive debate, the over-the-top rigidity of your religious and political beliefs, your user name.... You're good. Damn good. But you're still a troll. I'm going to leave it there because I know how you like to drag arguements into the very crust of the earth itself. The debate is where you get your reward and I have no intention of rewading you. Just be happy in the fact that your efforts have not gone unnoticed or unappreciated. Very well played sir! |
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Originally posted by zchmrkenhoff Guess I shoulda put a smiley on that since it was supposed to be a joke. If the pre-requisit for being a lesbian is a sexual attraction to women then straight men are halfway there. <sigh> You can show a sense of humor zchmrk. It won't break your internet trolling persona and might actually make the character more believable. |
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Originally posted by zchmrkenhoff
But a man can be a lesbian trapped in a man's body. |
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Originally posted by Enigma Point made. Interesting note related to that quote: I tried living openly bi for about a year long ago and went back to just letting people assume that I was completely straight. Why? Because my straight friends wanted me to act like a complete camp queer and all my gay friends wanted to preach to me about my "confusion." I am what I am, but putting that out there apparently obligates me to work at a beauty shop and talk with a lisp. Not that that shit matters anymore, I've been married to a woman for the last eleven years and have been completely monogamous. For all intents and purposes, I am straight now. I still take a trip through gay male pornography when the mood hits me, but that's as far as it goes. I "act straight" and absolutley despise effeminized men of either orientation. There's nothing wrong with femininity, but I also don't think that there's anything wrong with masculinity either. The fact that society has chosen to villify masculinity rubs me all the wrong way though. |
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Faith Under Fire: "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" and Religious Liberty
Religion & Politics « General Discussion 1/04/11 8:39:30 AM
Originally posted by zchmrkenhoff Why give you creation free will then prohibit the exercise thereof? And you're tap dancing around the issue. Predestination cancels out the illusion of freewill. There is no freewill if all of your actions have been planned and determined ahead of time. This is not an argument. This is an observation of a logical paradox. One of many paradoxes that surround the idea of an all knowing, all powerful, all loving supreme being. At best you can only have two out of three, but not all three. Then again, you might be protestant and therefore believe in the concept of the elect and the damned. If that is the case then I suggest that you concentrate on your own relationship with God rather than worry about the damned who are deaf to your preaching anyway. |
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A scifi mmo: would you rather have it be steampunk or cyberpunk?
The Pub at MMORPG.COM « General Discussion 1/04/11 8:24:28 AM
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Faith Under Fire: "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" and Religious Liberty
Religion & Politics « General Discussion 1/03/11 10:33:15 PM
Originally posted by zchmrkenhoff Okay, point of confusion here.... zchmrkenhoff claims to be Christian, but uses the free will card. This is an oxymoron. the reason is because, according to Christian mythology, God knows all that has been, is, and will be. In fact, also according to Christian mythology, all that ever has been, is, and will be is all according to God's will. Not only can nothing occur within the universe without God's knowledge and consent, but God actually planned it that way. So where's the free will? |
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"Cure" is something that we only do to people that are threat to others. A chronic alcoholic or a PCP addict are legally compelled to seek treatment in the name of public safety. That's a rougher road to hoe when you're talking about homosexuality. AIDS spreads just as quickly through promiscous heterosexual relations and dirty needles as it does through gay sex. So you would have to prove an absolute threat to the public (heterosexual) health. The thing that has always gotten me about the genetic angle is that it's based on an appeal to a higher power. On closer inspection you realize that it devalues humanity and reduces all behavior to robotic genetic determinism. Why try to incarcerate and rehabilitate criminals if their behavior is all genetic? Why not kill them and all of their offspring so that they don't spread their genetic impurity to future generations? This is ultimately the logical end to the genetic debate. And the original author is right to question the hereditary nature of homosexuality. What is the probability of the exact same mutation recurring -- independantly -- every single generation for thousands of years? And what about people like me? they've found a so-called gay gene but have yet to isolate a gene that swings both ways. Wouldn't it be more likely that the gay gene is really just a bisexual gene? That would certainly explain why there are still homosexuals despite the fact that such a gene would die out after a few generations. But that would take the wind out of genetic predestination wouldn't it? And on the gay marriage issue, why is marriage a prerequisite to equality? Gay relationships are not even remotely the same as heterosexual relationships. Out of all the commited gay male couples I have ever met, all of them had open relationships. The institution of marriage renders open relationships completely illegal. In order to be equal to straight people we have to adopt their oppressive institutions? Why is it so hard for people to understand that two things can be different AND equal. When I walk into the "Everything For a Dollar" store, all the merchandise has the same value. Paper towels cost the same as soda, but they're two completely different things. Maybe it's time to grow up and demand true equality and not some mocking imitation of heterosexual life. |
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I found this on a blog from 2006 titled: “10 arguments for sanity.” The series was a list of secular arguments against homosexual marriage. This is point number eight. As a hetro-leaning bisexual (I'm about a 2 on the Kinsey scale), I find this fascinating. I've never bought the genetic argument. By that same token, I've never been able to fully express why that argument rang false. This little snippet sums it up nicely. 10 Arguments For Sanity, #8: It normalizes an abnormal behavior. That it is an abnormal behavior is clear to any disinterested observer. It hardly needs mentioning that the male and female bodies are made for one another, in obvious ways, and in more subtle ways which medical science is only beginning to discover. I will discuss below what causes the behavior. For the moment, let us remember what is required of a scientific theory. It should explain the evidence -- all of it, not just the evidence the theorist finds convenient. It should not embroil the theorist in thornier questions than the one he seeks to answer. It should be coherent with other accepted theories. It should be fruitful: that is, if the theory is correct, it should help explain many other related phenomena. It should be based on few assumptions, and those assumptions should be easy to claim. Now the theory that homosexuality is caused by one’s genes is based on the simple, though shaky, assumption that human behavior is wholly determined by genetics. Otherwise it violates every qualification for sound science. First, it does not explain the evidence. That evidence shows that homosexual activity is far more prevalent among some cultures than among others; that in the same culture it is more prevalent among some groups than among others (for instance, living in the countryside places the boy at a significantly lower risk of experiencing serious homosexual attraction); that some people spend years engaging in homosexual activity and then give it up, often becoming happily married (John Maynard Keynes was one). At best, the theorist must retreat and say that there may be a genetic predisposition to homosexual behavior; but there may also be a genetic predisposition to crime, or to alcoholism, or to any number of human weaknesses and aberrancies. The possession of a certain gene for alcoholism is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for one’s becoming an alcoholic. You can be dry with it, and alcoholic without it. Second, it embroils the theorist in an odd dilemma. If he affirms that such a gene is passed along by heredity, then it seems hard to believe that it would have survived after the thousands or millions of years the human race has been in existence. Put it this way: suppose there is a gene for celibacy. Would that gene not die out the faster, precisely insofar as it determined its possessor to a life of celibacy? To the extent that a “gay” gene is determinative, to that same extent it suffers under the mathematical power of natural selection, since people who do not possess that gene will have many more children than people who do. To the extent that it only nudges human behavior rather than determining it, to that same extent it will vanish from the gene pool less quickly -- but then it is incoherent to talk about it as if it were really a “gay” gene. And it is utterly implausible to suppose that millions of mutations of exactly the same sort pop up in the United States with every generation. Third, it runs counter to the leftist notion, loudly proclaimed in academe, that sexual behavior is “socially conditioned.” Thus, despite the plain fact that some boys seem to know how to take machines apart and put them together again without ever being taught, or that boys in every culture have invented rough games, or that in every culture young men commit the bulk of the violent crimes -- all this is to be explained by social conditioning, occurring magically in the same ways in several thousand cultures that we have knowledge of, cultures in every part of the world and at every conceivable stage of technological development. The only thing that the left now believes is genetically determined is precisely the aberrant behavior for which it is implausible to suppose that any gene could long remain in the gene pool! Fourth, the theory is not fruitful. It really explains nothing: it is a kind of deus ex machina, brought on stage to clinch an argument by appeal to higher authority. It does not explain why male homosexuals engage in a promiscuity that beggars the imagination. It does not explain their preponderant use of pornography. It does not explain the masochism and sadism that are so marked a part of the lifestyle. It does not explain the anonymous or group sex, or the precoccupation with bathrooms. It does not explain a host of psychological syndromes heavily represented among gay men, including narcissism, self-mutilation, coprophilia, drug use, alcoholism, exhibitionism, and suicide. It does not explain why the bizarre behaviors are more prevalent in places where homosexuality is the more tolerated. It does not explain the male homosexual cult of youth -- more about that below. Most damningly, it does not explain the compulsiveness of the male homosexual, a compulsiveness tacitly admitted by the name of the Catholic group Courage, a group of men attracted to other men and struggling to live celibate lives. Male heterosexuals do not need courage to remain chaste: simple continence will do. Something additional must beset those who require courage to keep from having sexual intercourse. Before the current wave of political advocacy, many psychologists who studied homosexual men did come to some plausible conclusions about the same-sex attraction. From their studies and from what I know about the nature of boys, I offer the following alternative theory to explain male homosexuality. I accept the word of male homosexuals who say that they have always felt attracted to other males. There is no reason to doubt them on this. They believe that this attraction makes them different from their brothers -- and this is where they go wrong. The plain fact is that all boys have a deep need (again, this is something hard to explain to women) for male acceptance and affirmation. All boys are attracted to the athletic, the popular, the gregarious, the cheerful, the clever boy, or man, as the case may be. This need is expressed in various ways: sometimes by shutting girls out of the club; sometimes by horseplay; sometimes by the violent high spirits of a gang; sometimes by initiation rites involving blood; sometimes by sworn devotion to a higher cause. In every boy there is a strain of the Tom Sawyer who organizes the other boys around him, or of the boys who look to a Tom Sawyer. The art of every culture testifies to these powerful (and difficult) friendships: Gilgamesh, Huckleberry Finn, David Copperfield, Kidnapped, The Iliad, Star Wars. That is the single assumption I make; and even homosexuals unwittingly testify to it. From it, all else follows. For suppose the boy has a cruel father, who makes fun of him for being slow or fat or clumsy. Or suppose the boy is naturally shy, and is rejected by the local boys -- and can only watch their rough games resentfully yet longingly from the kitchen window. Or suppose the boy’s older brothers ignore him, and he watches in envy as they catch the football or flirt with the pretty girl. Whatever the cause, suppose a boy who is rejected by the most important males in his life: the neighborhood boys, or his brothers, or, most perilously, his father. The longing for male companionship does not go away; and remember, the boyish friendship is expressed with an active and frank physicality. What happens now may depend on other factors: the presence of some one friend in whom he can trust, or a loving father who will make rejection by the other boys pale in importance. Failing that, the boy must struggle on his own to define himself as a boy, or must accept that he “deserves” to be rejected by the others, because he is not a real boy. This struggle is for the central fact of the boy’s existence -- and that too is unwittingly supported by homosexuals, who alone among people of all kinds of sexual habits associate their very identities with their longings. Soon enough, the boy reaches puberty, and the longing assumes a new character, influenced by the boy’s new capacity for sexual arousal and his developing, and often chaotic, feelings of sexual desire. The same kind of bodily fooleries that help form the identity of other boys -- for instance, nude bathing or semi-public urination or the common shower after an athletic contest -- become for him moments of great dread, or desire, or both at once. Hence the compulsiveness of the homosexual’s behavior: like other compulsives, he scratches at a wound that will not heal; he visits again and again the site of the painful memory; he aches to fulfill a longing whose source he can no longer rightly recognize. Most boys grow out of this silly stage; the homosexual, who was denied the chance to undergo it in the normal way, returns to it, as if compelled. Hence the exhibitionism and other forms of public behavior that one might expect in a prepubescent boy -- if the boy were deeply disturbed. What the male homosexual longs for, sexually, is what every male needs, and that is simply affirmation by other men. It is to know that you belong, you are a man, you can be relied on in a fight, you have what it takes. If a boy is given this affirmation, then, barring a rape or something else unspeakably bizarre, he will not become a homosexual. This too is a plain fact: it is a sufficient condition for the nonappearance of the syndrome. If a father affirms his son physically (for the rough touch of a good father’s love is never forgotten by the son), then the son will identify with the father. He will know he is a boy, to follow his father in marrying a woman and having children by her. Thus male homosexuality is a corruption not of the relations between men and women, but of the relations between men and men: it is an aberrant eroticization of male friendship. And that explains the unimaginable promiscuity. What a man seeks in a woman is not what he seeks in a man. Husband and wife may be “friends,” but in the first instance they are both less and more than that. My wife is not an alter ego; we do not stand side by side to conquer the world. But I find in her what I lack in myself. She is the mysterious one who is not like me; and my love for her is quite unlike my love for my friend, who is like me. There is nothing casual about marriage, but friendship descends from the summit all the way down to pleasant and passing acquaintances. If it is friendship that male homosexuals seek, then we might predict many of their otherwise inexplicable behaviors. Friendship is not exclusive; one can never have too many friends; friendship is often celebrated best in boisterous groups; to live even a week or two without the feeling that one has a friend is agonizingly lonely. But the hope that homosexual relations can ever really fulfill that need for the affirming friend is, in the end, delusive. The homosexual knows better than anyone that something has gone awry with him; hence his own vacillation between insisting that he is normal, and his flaunting of behavior that if performed by anyone else in any other situation he himself would despise. “Queer Theory” -- the sad name speaks volumes. |
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Faith Under Fire: "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" and Religious Liberty
Religion & Politics « General Discussion 12/29/10 9:46:16 PM
Originally posted by RajCaj
So... In other words.... These straight men don't want to be looked at in the same way that they look at women? Sounds like the presence of homosexuals just puts these people on the recieving end of their own misogyny. Wasn't there something in the Bible about "Do unto others as you would have done unto you?" If I'm not mistaken, that line in red text. Why is that? |
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I consumed Cataclysm in almost 3 weeks, now what?
I dunno.... .... get a job... maybe? |
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Originally posted by japo Role playing is still on the player though. Scroll up and read some of the posts above you. The fact that players don't role play is not the fault of the game. Also keep in mind that these games are businesses and it doesn't make good business sense to start banning players for not staying in character. Aside from the massive amount of paperwork and in-game policing that would require, the net result would an alienation of the core audience which would limit the total number of prospective subscribers. Not a smart move when you're betting $50+ million on your game. But this is all off topic. The definition of RPG is not what this thread is about. |
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