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Of course homosexuality is a sin. It's a hot sweaty man-swuzzling sin. Mmmh.

Fateweaver wrote:Thank God I live in a country where I "CAN" tell people homosexuality is a sin and not get arrested. Bitch slapped by gay people; sure but at least I won't go to jail for it.

I support your right to visit gay dungeons in your search for a daddy! Just remember to establish a safe-words (or a bicycle horn...)

Speaking of Islam, there was an imam in Toronto recently that used an arabic figure of speech that went something along the lines of "Please God, allow the inequity of the kuffar to destroy them!" That's paraphrased, by the way, though I can probably dig up the speech. Essentially it expresses the hope that the non-believers' non-belief comes back to bite them. It's on the level with a Christian preacher telling people that homosexuality is a sin, but given that it applied to non-moslems there was considerably more outcry.

Right, I believe this link covers the Imam and the comments to which I was referring.

Exactly. It's not a threat, yet people found it threatening. The analogy being that being told that you're a sinner, and having some inkling of what happens to sinners, can seem threatening even if the person doing the telling has no intention of carrying it out. It's much more like harassing someone rather than threatening them.

Manchu wrote:I don't buy the equivocation going on in this debate, either here on Dakka or more widely in our respective countries' media. Stating publicly that a certain behavior is sinful can only be illegal in a tyranny.

The perceived equivocation only exists where one persists in the delusion that one does not live in a tyranny simply because one lives in a liberal democracy or constitutional republic. To put a fine point on here, everyone here is in favour of tyranny so long as it favours their beliefs over different ones. There's plenty of lip-service otherwise, but seeing as it's usually couched as incoherent appeal to some principle such as freedom of speech it can be ignored as the product of brainwashing. Why are these appeals incoherent? Because to believe in the primacy of the 'freedom of speech' over some other set of controls on one's powers of speech is to favour one's beliefs over those of others.

Even in nations that allow wide latitude to express opinion certain opinions are not tolerated. Such opinions are the usual examples used to demonstrate that the 'freedom of speech' is merely the branding of what should properly be called 'power of opinion', since it is both power to express a particular set of opinions, as well as freedom from censorship of those opinions. One such classic example is that of loudly expressing the opinion that there is a fire in a crowded theatre. More recently and close to home for me is a current gag-order on the Canadian press covering a particularly nasty murder/rape of a young girl; the court is invoking state-law to prevent the details of the trial from being published.

As it was put in a memorable "Law and Order" episode I saw a couple of years ago:

"Open up! Police!"
"Hey man, this is a free country!"
"No it isn't, it's a democracy and the rest of us don't like what you're doing."

The fact is that while inveighing against any change in the shape and scope of one's power of opinion as being tyrannical, the fact is that you gave up any claim on sovereignty when you took up citizenship in a country and handed it over to a government to exercise that power over you. Yes, to make it illegal for someone to declare legally acceptable behaviour to be a sin is tyrannical, but then so is making it legal.

Once you realize that you're simply preferring one form of tyranny to another, then the equivocation is simply acknowledgment that the sales-pitch doesn't match the product. Pepsi doesn't sell itself with the phrase "What else are you going to drink?" and so likewise liberal democracy prefers more upbeat branding to distinguish itself from other forms of tyranny.

Manchu:

Well, that's because you failed reading comprehension. I wasn't saying that some degree of limitation on free speech justified any degree of limitation on free speech. I was pointing out that the rhetorical appeal against tyrannical behaviour that you used was stupid because liberal democracies differ only from other tyrannies in degree rather than in kind.

I see that the coke analogy flew straight over your head, because otherwise you might have made the connection that people genuinely like coke regardless of its advertising. You're allowed to prefer liberal democracy; indeed I believe it was Winston Churchill that remarked how terrible democracy was except by comparison to all other political systems.

My point, to belabour the point, is that a beneficent tyranny is still a tyranny, so why are you surprised when people dance around that fact, and that rhetorical appeal to the undesirability of tyrannical behaviour is therefore mendicant?

Did I dumb it down enough for you. Would you like to try again?

Dogma:

Speaking as someone who is bringing up rational self-interest in a discussion of consistency of political beliefs, you may want to reconsider the assignment of who's talking "absolute nonsense".

One's beliefs are always favoured above those of others. It follows that one preferring freedom of speech oppresses one that wishes to enforce radical controls on speech and print. Perhaps you would like to prove me wrong by arguing for my position against your own.

sebster:

If one's belief is in freedom of speech, then clearly one prefers that freedom of speech to radical controls on speech. So...if one's belief is in freedom of speech, it follows trivially that one prefers that belief in freedom of speech.

However, given that one prefers that belief in freedom of speech, one prefers it to other beliefs in different degrees of freedom in speech. Usually when one refers to 'freedom of speech' they mean the current configurations of powers of speech available to citizens of liberal democracies such as the USA or Canada or Australia, rather than to such powers of speech as are available in Iran or Korea.

This is better seen if one compares the freedom of speech one has amongst liberal democracies rather than in more tyrannical states, such as the difference between one's freedom of speech in Canada as compared to that in Australia, or the anemic version currently on life support in Airstrip One.

Whoa there Killkrazy, let's not bring sanity, confirmation bias, and the representativeness of newspaper reports into this. At this rate people will shrug and go back to discussing toy soldiers!

Orkeosaurus gets a gold star! You see that Manchu? That means Orkeosaurus is smarter than you.

Of course, there's no actual conflict since they're the same thing!

WarOne:

Actually Dionysius, along with Mithras, Horus, and a couple others, are the basis for the modern Christ.

Remember the marriage at Cannae (edit: or "Capernaum" or what have you)! Jesus wants you to get drunk.

Yup. It was the whole "son of God" thing, although Joshua only referred to himself as the "son of Man", or "this dude". Makes for a nice syncretism.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

JEB_Stuart wrote:Wow, even after imbibing a bit more to make this thread more tolerable, I found that Nurglitch's douchebaggery is directly corollary to his ignorance...their both really high... If you really think that about Christ then you are sorely misguuided, and your own level of rudeness is horrible. Learn this phrase: civilis est non a subcribo infirmitas. You Latin speakers, please pardon my horrible grammar...

That's alright, I think you're pretty stupid yourself.

JEB_Stuart:

Oh, well, my beliefs disagree with yours and therefore must be false and offensive? At least you've been useful in helping me make my point. Shine on you crazy diamond.

JEB_Stuart:

How is the historically ecumenical development of the Christ "decidedly false"? You validated my point about how we prefer our own beliefs to those of others by deciding that my opinion was false because it disagreed with your own.

I mean I'm not offended by your ugly religion claiming any legitimate descent from Judaism, nor your crass manner for proclaiming such stupid and offensive beliefs in a public forum where your opinion cannot be avoided. I'm just glad alcohol has affected your judgment enough that you're able to make my point for me while attempting to deny it.

WarOne:

I'm curious, but how can Christianity be understood as a separate entity from those who hold it as a religion? I mean I don't have a problem imagining English as a separate entity from the people who use it, but a set of beliefs seems somehow different from a language.

WarOne:

I like the way you theologize.

sebster:

I was addressing precisely what Manchu labeled "equivocation": naturally these things occur in single bodies as much as they occur in multiple bodies. One often makes such equivocation as one might make to skirt the elephant in the room in the relative privacy of one's own skull. I believe it's sometimes called "cognitive dissonance", but given certain people's tendency to wander off into crazy-land, let's stick with strictly epistemic terms of "belief".

Firstly, let's acknowledge that physics, and perhaps economics, put a hard and fast limit on our powers of opinion such that we cannot have our opinions impressed upon others at all times and in all places. Given that nature has given us such limits to work within, politics gives us further limits on our powers of opinion, as much self-inflicted as by sovereign power.

Secondly, those political limits are considerably more concerned with content: we might not wish people under our power ever have the opportunity to send or receive pornography involving children, as much as organize the use and sale of radio frequencies, or disseminate information about ongoing legal proceedings.

Such an attempt to be 'sensible' as you describe is then wrong-headed in principle as well as in practice because we have to go back and make all the ad hoc tweaks to such a compromise as should shoe-horn such sensible compromise into the realities of physical, economical, political, and personal powers.

More realistically one would recognize that acknowledging the tyranny of politics, as well as those of physics and economics, should be done by those seeking to develop principles about what additional limits should be set on our powers of speech. Appeal to tyranny as setting those limits too low, even as a rhetorical move, begs the question (in the colloquial and technical senses) as to the nature and rightness of those limits, as though one had not already admitted to tyranny and was merely bargaining on the price.

Which puts me in mind of something Winston Churchill is reputed to have said to a rich Englishwoman once (again, poorly paraphrased):

Churchill: "My dear, would you sleep with me for a million pounds?"
Woman: "Why certainly my dear, for a million pounds!'
Churchill: "How about five pounds?"
Woman: "Winston, do you take me for a prostitute?"
Churchill: "Dear lady, we've established what you are and are merely haggling over the price."

Or words to that effect.

But usury and idolatry are just fine, thank God!

Is baseball a physical trait that used to be regarded as so monstrously evil thing that people used to be (and still are) killed for playing it?

Hey, can you do that thing with your neck when you do the whole "We seek peaceful co-existence"?

Once again the Irish are responsible for saving civilization...