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I am religious and believe in free will

71 (27.7%)

I am religious and do not believe in free will

10 (3.9%)

I am not religious and believe in free will

114 (44.5%)

I am not religious and do not believe in free will

61 (23.8%)

Total Members Voted: 251

[McTraveller]

Religious freedom is intended to be "the government can't force you to worship a certain way, and cannot prohibit you from worshipping a certain way."  The modern abuses come in because people have found the loophole, which is saying that all sorts of activities are an aspect of their worship: what they watch, eat, *uck, inject into themselves,

The original bible had no pronouns.

True but irrelevant; that's an artifact of the language, not the culture.

Jesus was born a woman, and self-identified as a man.

Pretty difficult to do Jewish-style penile circumcision in that case. And if you say that was ret-conned, then you basically enter the world of not being able to trust anything in the book, which would make it irrelevant if Jesus did or didn't comment on sexuality or gender, because the entire narrative would be untrustworthy.

Spoiler: rambling about semantics (click to show/hide)

I think a big part of the social morass regarding sex and gender in the US is that there isn't an easy linguistic way to distinguish between physical sexual gender (peg vs slot) and cultural gender; they are both the same word 'gender'.  When infants are declared "male" or "female" at birth, that is not a statement about their sexual expression or preferred role in society - it's just declaring what genitals they have.  I don't know exactly how recent movements extrapolated that this was explicitly making a statement about their identity. I think it was an exaggerated stretch of how society assumes a role based on genitals, but in making that leap a statement of unfounded certainty a large number of people suddenly felt vilified.

Vilifying people is a great way to hurt your cause. In hindsight, terminology like AxAB could have been replaced with something like "don't assume identity goes with genitals" and it probably wouldn't have been as controversial. I mean the doctors and my wife and I didn't "assign" my children their genitals at birth, we observed them, and the M and F on their birth certificates is wholly a medical designation, like blood type. I mean we don't put things like if kids prefer chocolate or vanilla or pistachio on their birth certificate, or their favorite color, or favorite music type - so why would we conflate sexual or gender role with medical characteristics?

This conflating, of neglecting important distinctions in subject domains, hurts communication and confuses people. Even in the freedom of "X" statements - the lack of understanding of scope just causes problems...

[TD1]

As I'm reading about "Religious Freedom" being the stick with which to beat the LGBTQ community, I wonder if the following statement would be protected under Free Speech and Religious Freedoms:

Jesus was born a woman, and self-identified as a man.

So I don't know what the context behind this is, but it weirldly reflects some idle thoughts I was having like three seconds ago.

I was thinking about my intellectual disagreement with some elements of T philosophy, and how that would be met by many with revulsion and violence - the full mechanics of the great beast over-generalised by the febrile as 'cancel culture'.

This segued into my similarly intellectual disagreement with religion, which (excluding sexy Muhammed) I feel free and easy to express.

Combining the two, I decided to (as a thought experiment!) consider 'gender' as synonymous with 'soul' - an amorphous concept significant to many but, outside its value as symbol and object of faith, ultimately meaningless. It was useful to consider both as deserving the same protections, whatever intellectual issues may arise on the personal level.

The above is less a structured point, more an expression of the last minute's idle thought.

[Strongpoint]

Spoiler: rambling about semantics (click to show/hide)

I think a big part of the social morass regarding sex and gender in the US is that there isn't an easy linguistic way to distinguish between physical sexual gender (peg vs slot) and cultural gender; they are both the same word 'gender'.  When infants are declared "male" or "female" at birth, that is not a statement about their sexual expression or preferred role in society - it's just declaring what genitals they have.  I don't know exactly how recent movements extrapolated that this was explicitly making a statement about their identity. I think it was an exaggerated stretch of how society assumes a role based on genitals, but in making that leap a statement of unfounded certainty a large number of people suddenly felt vilified.

Vilifying people is a great way to hurt your cause. In hindsight, terminology like AxAB could have been replaced with something like "don't assume identity goes with genitals" and it probably wouldn't have been as controversial. I mean the doctors and my wife and I didn't "assign" my children their genitals at birth, we observed them, and the M and F on their birth certificates is wholly a medical designation, like blood type. I mean we don't put things like if kids prefer chocolate or vanilla or pistachio on their birth certificate, or their favorite color, or favorite music type - so why would we conflate sexual or gender role with medical characteristics?

This conflating, of neglecting important distinctions in subject domains, hurts communication and confuses people. Even in the freedom of "X" statements - the lack of understanding of scope just causes problems...

Spoiler: some not-religion related stuff (click to show/hide)

I see the problem differently. American (and not only American) society arrived at the point when different parts of the nation interpret different words (like man, woman, gender, etc) differently. And it creates a problem because those words are used in laws and rules that are quite important in society. Ranging from who goes in which public restroom to military draft laws.

Laws must define those. One way or another. And we are at the beginning of a painful process of defining those words. One side wants to narrowly define that by chromosomes or genitalia which are problematic for various reasons, seriously hurting not a trivial amount of people

And the other side... I don't even know what the other side proposes. Their definitions like "(wo)man is anyone who identifies as a (wo)man" or "gender is a social construct" works well as slogans but they are utterly useless to, let's say, reliably prove that person X is a (wo)man in a court.

The only type of proposal I heard is that legal gender should be based only on the wishes of a person and every person should be able to legally change their gender at any time providing no justification whatsoever. I'd love to see it implemented and watch glorious chaos.

Oh, and I see not the slightest attempt to reach any kind of compromise in those definitions.

[McTraveller]

Spoiler: some not-religion related stuff (click to show/hide)

I see the problem differently. American (and not only American) society arrived at the point when different parts of the nation interpret different words (like man, woman, gender, etc) differently. And it creates a problem because those words are used in laws and rules that are quite important in society. Ranging from who goes in which public restroom to military draft laws.

Laws must define those. One way or another. And we are at the beginning of a painful process of defining those words. One side wants to narrowly define that by chromosomes or genitalia which are problematic for various reasons, seriously hurting not a trivial amount of people

And the other side... I don't even know what the other side proposes. Their definitions like "(wo)man is anyone who identifies as a (wo)man" or "gender is a social construct" works well as slogans but they are utterly useless to, let's say, reliably prove that person X is a (wo)man in a court.

The only type of proposal I heard is that legal gender should be based only on the wishes of a person and every person should be able to legally change their gender at any time providing no justification whatsoever. I'd love to see it implemented and watch glorious chaos.

Oh, and I see not the slightest attempt to reach any kind of compromise in those definitions.

Spoiler: A very brief response (click to show/hide)

I'll go one further - why does gender identity even matter, from a legal standpoint?  Laws should be for "people" not for "men" or "women."  As I mentioned in my earlier spoiler, there's no legal distinction for favorite color, why do we even need it for preferred role in society? So why would "gender" even have anything to do with needing a "legal gender" (like you have a legal name, or a legal age, which does matter).

Note I make a distinction between social role and physical role; there are real, physical differences - although I don't know why those might need legal distinction.

So in that way - I agree with you, having clear, unambiguous definitions would be helpful.  That's Hard^TM though, even if you didn't have people who actually like having ambiguity.

[Frumple]

Pretty difficult to do Jewish-style penile circumcision in that case.

Intersex folks exist, so while difficult, it wouldn't be impossible.

Clearly the child of god could thread that particular needle, skyfucker built that into people anyway, so why not the messiah, too?

[McTraveller]

Pretty difficult to do Jewish-style penile circumcision in that case.

Intersex folks exist, so while difficult, it wouldn't be impossible.

Clearly the child of god could thread that particular needle, skyfucker built that into people anyway, so why not the messiah, too?

Well then that would be "born intersex, identified as a man" wouldn't it? Not "born a woman"? 

[Frumple]

Not according to a lot of birth records, blech.

[Strongpoint]

Now I want a new cult of Christianity that would believe that God intentionally created Jesus (aka himself... Christian theology is so absurd) as non-binary\genderless\both to represent all of humanity!



Maybe I should start this one... those are profitable after all.

[martinuzz]

As I'm reading about "Religious Freedom" being the stick with which to beat the LGBTQ community, I wonder if the following statement would be protected under Free Speech and Religious Freedoms:

Jesus was born a woman, and self-identified as a man.

I'd find it much more likely that Jesus was born a man, and was homosexual.
I mean, c'mon. A jewish man, in his thirties, no wife, in that time and age? Not to mention spending most of his time with 13 other men?

[Frumple]

Genderfluid Jesus has the alliteration going for it, for what that's worth.

From what I'm aware, there's more than a few movements out there that conceptualize the christian god as non-binary/non-masculine/something-other-than-the-traditional-male-skyjackass, but it's much less common for anything particularly serious to give ol' streaker J the treatment. So, I mean. If you really want to give it a shot, there's probably market share available. Something something unexploited niche something.

[hector13]

I think you’ll find religion is a hugely exploited niche, it just seems to be infinitely so.

[Strongpoint]

As I'm reading about "Religious Freedom" being the stick with which to beat the LGBTQ community, I wonder if the following statement would be protected under Free Speech and Religious Freedoms:

Jesus was born a woman, and self-identified as a man.

I'd find it much more likely that Jesus was born a man, and was homosexual.
I mean, c'mon. A jewish man, in his thirties, no wife, in that time and age? Not to mention spending most of his time with 13 other men?

He also said that it is a sin to look at a woman with lust. Note that he never said that about looking at men.

[McTraveller]

 

[Strongpoint]

Also, if God is male (Adam was created in his image and when God decided to manifest himself he did that in a male form) isn't it kinda wrong, when you, being a supreme being MADE IN THE IMAGE OF GOD, join your flesh with someone who is not as god-like and misses some divine bodyparts?

You should seek the company of other god-like creations. Being hetero is clearly sinful.

[TD1]

Nahh, being herero breeds new god-organs.