last time on epis…shot
and ummm would @ramthecowy pitch in too?
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Don’t count on my opinion. I am quite literally a pipsqueak compared to strop, Klinardo or DeusExMackia
This thread may well break the forums. Let’s be careful, okay people? Have fun but don’t have too much 
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well. at worse this thread will just get shut down. i don’t think much would go wrong 
and also, YOU rused strop to made his wall of text which made deus to respond and you know the rest 
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Thanks Koolkei. I’ll recount the full reply thread…
Under the Cut
And then this bit:
100% true, in fact much of the argument about the interaction between, say, the US Declaration of Independence and their constitution and their laws comes from contending whether the US was a ‘Christian’ nation because it was founded by Christians with presumably Christian values and biases or whether their expressed wishes to run a secular country counts more. Separation of Church and State etc. The entire history of the Age of Enlightenment explains very well why there’s such a tense relationship between science and religion now. And, just to get back to the origins of this topic, what the church versus science says about sex and relationships… don’t get me started… yet…
I also totally just realised @Koolkei had posted a picture of Jacky Chan dressed up as Chun Li. Have you seen the film it comes from? (live action version of City Hunter: Saeba… so great… never figured out why Jacky Chan had a massive falling out with the director afterwards which would form the basis of his not being on good terms with Jet Li until much more recently)
EDIT: Education is relative. I’m just glad nobody here has identified as a philosophy major or they’d probably already be yelling at me for being an armchair philosopher who never attended any actual classes or wrote any phil papers. We’re not in that kind of classroom here, so teachers are free to learn and students are free to teach.
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anyway. continuing on
okay does these ‘weird people’ have standards/levels? like, pedophile IS accepted as universally trash, but LGBT people WAS considered trash. what made that change? why? if Americans are still a ‘Christian’ nation why would they embrace LGBT? if they’re not, what morals have they thrown away?
Which one do you want to start with? I think both discussions are actually in-depth (I get really annoyed when people publish that they don’t “need to bother” with arguing why pedophilia and bestiality etc. (those two are always lumped together these days) are trash. Not wanting to deal with a topic is one thing, but out and out claiming you don’t need to examine something as a way of dismissing it is intellectual laziness.)
With the former, I’d pick apart the premises that have us conclude that children be protected from sexualisation (which is absurd in itself given just how difficult it is to avoid sexualisation in the media to the point that you have pre-teens doing freaking twerk dances in pageants, seriously, I’ll go into that too). With the latter, it’s a bit more history lesson before going into examining the demographics of the different belief systems, and when it comes to the US I’d let somebody else do the talking >_>
Replying to two things at once here. First, @koolkei:
Changes to views on LGBT peoples, sexuality, what you wear, what you do with your time etc have - at least how history tells us - been getting ‘better’ for some time. We embraced a notion that freedom to be who you want and express that how you like was good, so long as it didn’t negatively impact anyone.
With the point about Christianity and indeed religion, its a combination of acceptance and interpretation. The world sometimes changes in certain ways that you simply have to accept, and this is one of them. Heck, my mother used to do a christian radio show and went to Christian camps in her summers, and she went out partying with LGBT people and did certain things that some ‘hardline’ christians would certainly frown upon.
It’s just how certain things change. How some things become acceptable and others unacceptable. Part of this comes down to how people interpret religious texts. For example, the West Borough Baptists Church believe their interpretation of the Bible gives them the right to wave placards stating “[spoiler]Fags[/spoiler] Go To Hell”, while Barack Obama believes his interpretation of the Bible makes it very acceptable for same-sex couples to get married.
I guess its just how the different parts of American culture interact and work with one another. In a similar way, the UK is still a ‘Christian’ nation, but church attendance is in massive decline currently. Changes happen all the time…much like the one we’re heading through now 
And now, @strop:
Good lord, you’ve crashed right into the module I’m doing at uni right now by bringing up freedom (or more specifically, Political Thought and the concepts of freedom and justice).
We could talk here for days about how people throughout history have tried to interpret how to organised society so that justice is delivered in its best form and what freedom ‘is’.
But none of this seemingly matters because our society and culture speaks differently. I don’t know about you guys, but it doesn’t matter how many times I think “freedom of expression”, “freedom of sexuality”, “freedom of what to wear” etc… there is always someone or something judging this. And it doesn’t matter how many times my parents have told me ‘how far we’ve come’ from ‘there days’, where this kind of stuff would be frowned upon, I still get the distinct impression that we have, collectively, yet to let go of certain prejudices.
We are seeing this now more than ever. I have done my best in life to embrace other people, whether they have different interests to me, different music taste to me (that’s been the hardest to accept 
), different beliefs to me, different skin colour to me, different sexual prefrernces, different political beliefs, you name it. It’s led me to the conclusion that however much I agree of disagree with them, there is a fundamental right in that they must be allowed to do that, to think differently, and there is nothing that I can do to say that they can’t. I’m free to disagree with them, and visa-versa, but I am not free to subvert or silence them.
And yet, it’s like the rest of society hasn’t changed. I’ve been raised to think things have changed. Yet in the wake of Trump’s election and the Brexit vote, I see people literally going round and asking foreigners “what are you still doing here?” and I cannot help but think that nothing has changed.
This is part of a wider process whereby everything is starting to basically not make sense - see Hypernormalisation for more on that - and the views that I thought were widely accepted, such as ‘women are not objects’, ‘skin colour has no say in your rights’, ‘not all Muslims are terrorists just because the actions of a prevalent minority have come to define their religion’, are being undone. I’ve always thought that there are “just some people who believe this stuff” in our society, but not on the scale we’re seeing now. These political events have enabled such views to become commonplace, and this is just the start.
Which is why the idea of moral laws and natural laws doesn’t seem to fit anymore. Everything is going out of the window. I still absolutely stick by my beliefs, because I believe they are right- not ‘better’ than anyone elses views, just my own personal view of how the world should work. And even then, its hard not to think that simply does not matter anymore.
Hence, we’re in need of a new philosopher to come along and suggest a way of organizing our society. Something that is up to date, that works for as much of as possible, and tries to account for this new and very much changing world we’re entering.
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Brief aside:
I brought up the US because much of the Free World, not least the US, looked towards the US as the ‘Shining City on a Hill’ and the central point of relevance to all socio-political climate. This may or may not be true to whatever degree, but whatever it is, we’re certainly seeing what everybody is perceiving as either its decline in relevance, or the confirmation of a new (scary) age in Europe.
For some insights on that in particular, check out the interview between a venerable political journalist, and the most venerable foreign policy advisor of the US: https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2016/11/kissinger-order-and-chaos/506876/
More relevant: Back to moral frameworks, the recent hullabaloo and all the shouting has had us forget the very fundamentals of the movements of social progression. We have to go back to basics and remember the things that we took for granted and forgot along the way when adolescent hormones kicked in and the oppressed suddenly managed to turn into bullies. How I would put it:
The real social progressive movement is about kindness, and acknowledging and protecting vulnerability as a means of stopping the harm from mob rule, fear of the other, and stigmatisation, of which we have clear and growing evidence. Its central tenet is that empathy is acquired, can be taught, and is of the utmost importance in a diverse but cohesive society.
On that note I’m going to bed!
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is it bad that i was literally in the middle of watching this while all this was going on?
bold you tell me. that’s how ISIS was born.
italic i am 100% sure that is a NOT an interpretation at all since the bible literally said liking the same sex is a sin.
the bible is much more definitive than the Quran afaik. but yes there is still something that is somewhat blurred. like there’s a text in the bible that implicitly concludes to smoking and tattoos on your body is a sin. but not explicitly said.
as far as i can see, we’re changing not to see religion differently. we’re changing to leave religion completely behind, and only operate the world based on logic, and umm “morals”?
Ah, thought this might stir stuff a bit, not purposefully, but ya knooow 
You’re quite correct, ISIS was not born alone from interpretation, there are many, many more factors, chief among which is 30 years of Western Intervention in the Middle East that has completely changed it.
Perhaps it was the wrong word to use. It’s more a choice not to interpret that part of the bible. Not to act on it. It’s that choice of whether to act upon something in a religious text or not that drives much religious activity, whether it be the act of charity or treating people with respect, all the way up to oppressing people because of their religious beliefs.
That’s one of the biggest challenges in religion to deal with. One good example is the many sects of Christianity: Baptists, Methodists, Catholics, Roman Orthoxists, 7th Day Adventists etc. It’s just about how people choose to act upon it.
I think that’s a good way of stating it. Certainly in the west, religion is in decline, especially with younger generations. But, we still aspire to have some kind of guiding principles in our lives, and the idea of Morals is probably how that will take form.
i… hmm… now i question was obama really even ever had a religion.
now the fact is. obama was raised in Indonesia and went to elementary school in Indonesia (he still speaks Indonesian pretty fluently). and living here dictates you HAVE to have a belief/religion. so i wonder what did his parents thought him during that time?
okay then.
to even consider to act or not what your religion says, means you’re already questioning your belief though. why would you only act out part of it? then if you do, which part in particular? doesn’t that mean you’re just choosing based on what is good/you think is good/ convenient for you? because why would you do otherwise and choose the hard/bad ones, right?
so also now we’re moving to base our life on “morals”, what are our morals based on?
like how ‘incest’ is taboo was originally based on religious teachings. even if we leave religion behind, i doubt that’s gonna change. but now, why is it taboo again? what makes it wrong? because science tells us so?
@strop
i don’t think bible ever said anything about bestiality though. just like the bible said about the world beyond earth
Ooh ooh ooh sorry I haven’t quite gone to sleep yet, so I can’t resist.
This is somehow still open to interpretation. I’m fairly sure that it was listed as a sin (along with bestiality… and also getting divorced, eating animals with cloven hooves, and not removing yourself from male company and bathing in the sacred river for four days while you were having your period, and a whole bunch of other things atheists like to make fun of, because the majority of these were penalised by death by stoning) in the Old Testament, the books concerning Moses’ journeys with his chosen people to inhabit their Promised Land (see: history of Israel… not touching that now). Ok, fair enough.
But where it becomes contentious is when the New Testament comes along. The denominations of Judeo-Roman Christianity can’t even agree on the relationship between the OT and the NT, let alone, of course, other branches of this particular monotheist belief system (Judaism, Catholicism etc.). When it comes to Christianity, the contention is that the moral guidelines from the Covenant of Moses is superseded by the Gospel Truths of Jesus. Jesus’ motivation for this was to strip the faith of its hand-wringing over rules and religiosity (see: his repeated run-ins with the local religious authority, the Pharisees, which, of course, directly led to his prosecution and crucifixion), thus he did directly comment on a number of the covenant rulings and how they were either misapplied or, perhaps, not even relevant in the light of His coming.
Now, Jesus didn’t ever say anything about being gay is a sin. That wasn’t his style. It was one of his converts and most ardent supporters and tax-man turned evangelistst, Saul (later Paul). Paul’s criticism of homosexuality is stated in Romans 1:26-27, in his recounting of, you guessed it, the turmoil of the time of Moses’ journeys with the chosen people and their fall from grace and subsequent futile struggle, and later on again in 1 Corinthians 6 when taking umbrage with the Church of Corinth for having shoddy standards (he has quite a thing about sexual immorality to the point some scholars assert he had a complex driving his editorial slant, because as far as the texts went, Jesus did not).
In the 12th Century, Thomas Aquinas, (essentially) Catholic scholar, enshrined this condemnation in using this passage among others to form his treatise of ‘natural law’, (and that’s also why when you’re Catholic, you’re not supposed to use contraception… or masturbate… any sexual act not chiefly to do with procreation is a violation of Aquinas’ natural law).
Basically the fact that Jesus was never recorded as saying anything tangible as an act of sin, merely commenting on those things that were seen to ‘increase the distance in the relationship between an individual and God’, is the ground of contention, for surely, if we were to become as law-addled as the Pharisees, would not he be turning in his grave? oh, wait… 
That’s my very basic understanding on that bit, I certainly never went to theology school. But how contentious this issue has been for so long!
EDIT:
Exodus 22:19, “Anyone who has sexual relations with an animal must be put to death.”
Leviticus 18:23 “Do not have sexual relations with an animal and defile yourself with it. A woman must not present herself to an animal to have sexual relations with it; that is a perversion.”
Leviticus 20:15-16 “If a man has sexual relations with an animal, he must be put to death, and you must kill the animal. If a woman approaches an animal to have sexual relations with it, kill both the woman and the animal. They must be put to death; their blood will be on their own heads.”
Deuteronomy 27:21 “Cursed is the man who has sexual relations with any animal.”
All of these are from books about Moses’ journey from Egypt, where he and his people were kept as a slave class to build giant idols for the Pharoh (i.e. the Pyramids and other works). Again I have no formal education in this area, but I do think it’s worth noting that Egypt was huge on having sex with animals, because it was like some kind of Divine blessing thing, AFAIK.
At any rate, most people seem content to persevere with widespread condemnation of bestiality because it’s gross* and humans aren’t animals**, man. The rest insist that they can’t consent***
*compared to some things I can think of, probably not
**lol
***and most of them continue to eat meat, hence a certain infamous quote from Peter Singer, a noted utilitarian
For those who don’t already know: look up the Sykes-Picot agreement. In today’s political climate, the arbitrary political division of land with a view to wilfully displacing the Kurds, Sunnis and Shiites so they were all forced to cohabit the same space knowing well that they lived apart for a reason, seems particularly egregious, and so it is quite obvious why ISIS states that one of their primary aims is to completely nullify the effects of this (how they plan to do this however is even more egregious since they also just want to wipe out every other Islamic sect along with other religious factions).
EDIT 2: I think now would be a great time to bring up that poll that cited that a fifth of French citizens felt they sympathised with ISIS’s motivations.
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Well I might aswell join in, but this is a lot of reading, can someone summarize?
welp. okay. it seems that you know more about the bible more than i do. i can’t even be bothered to look up those ummm… what do you call those addressing things
@cpufreak101 okay i’ll try
basically. why were LGBT people considered to be ‘weird’, but not anymore?
then
deus said “it’s because some people are choosing their action based on what their religion said, but they chooses which part of the teaching of said religion to act out. basically the population is changing”
then i said
“so we’re changing to not base our world around the religion anymore, just basically was was left by the teaching of said religion, and we’re leaving behind the religions”
then try to read the last 2 posts?
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Verses, basically. There’s the book, the chapter, and the verse.
Do you know much about the Qu’ran? Because I know shit all and would be very keen for a bit of a guided tour. I was born and raised Christian so the Bible’s my main background but I’m totally a social progressive atheist now, though I’m not quite as angry and don’t really want to run religion back into the Red Sea…
@cpufreak101: we decided to talk about heavy topics here. Potential discussions we’ve earmarked include:
- The history of considering homosexuality a sin and (eventually) the revision of its concept
- The relationship between Church and State and its (diminishing) role in shaping moral values
- The ideology and motivations of ISIS/ISIL and the relationship of the broader Middle Eastern issue to the European crisis and US foreign policy (maybe)
- Sexuality, its definitions and the morals of sex
- The definition of minors and their agency (and therefore their protected status, and also the conflict between protection from sexual behaviours and concurrent exposure to sexualised media)
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nope. i also know donkey’s ass about the quran. my dad though. an avid christian that is pretty active in a forum about religion/beliefs. i’m still going to church regularly but only because i’m kinda forced to. i’d like to say i’m agnostic now
I get the feeling that every post in this thread needs a TLDR, this is a heck of a lot of reading.
This is just the start. A massive flood is coming
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Thanks for the summary @koolkei @strop for myself being Christian, I am “told” to have no respect for LGBT though my family (also very Christian, grandfather was a church elder)raised me to love everyone and not discriminate, in fact, my stepbrother is gay, and feared of being crucified when going to our church, and was genuinely surprised they treated him as a normal human. Point of this, even churches themselves are starting to openly accept LGBT, though not all will eyes Westbrook baptist
*westboro, can’t edit too well on mobile